From “Pennsylvania, the crucial battleground in America’s election” at The Economist:

“On july 21st Matt Roan, chair of the Cumberland County Democratic Committee, hosted a meeting with volunteers. The event took a turn when Mr Roan stopped to read a statement from Joe Biden announcing his departure from the presidential race. “There was this sort of sense of sadness—and then immediate hope,” Mr Roan recalls in his office, which overlooks the Pennsylvania state capitol. The activist speaks highly of Mr Biden but acknowledged that “things were not looking good” at the time. The rise of Kamala Harris attracted a surge of volunteers to a county that favoured Donald Trump by around 18 points in 2016 but only 11 points in 2020. If such improvements hold there and in other areas like it, Ms Harris would probably win the state and the presidency.

Both campaigns see Pennsylvania as a fulcrum of the 2024 election, and for good reason. The Economist’s forecast model suggests that the state—with its 19 electoral-college votes, the most of any swing state—is the tipping-point in 27% of the model’s updated simulations, meaning it decides the election more often than any other state. Mr Trump wins only 7% of the time when he loses the Keystone State. Indeed, he narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2016, and then he lost by 80,000 votes out of nearly 7m cast in his unsuccessful re-election bid four years later.

….The messaging war is a study in contrasts. Ms Harris seeks to define herself in uplifting ads while warning in others about Mr Trump’s effect on the economy, reproductive rights and American democracy. As one of the most famous people in human history, Mr Trump doesn’t spend time introducing himself to voters. His ads and rhetoric relentlessly seek to paint Ms Harris as an out-of-touch leftist responsible for inflation and migrant crime. Such fear campaigns have found success before in presidential elections, but J.J. Abbott, a Pennsylvania Democratic strategist, argues that “there may be some limitations on how much these dark, brutal ads on those issues may work” this time, citing similar unsuccessful efforts mounted by Republicans in recent statewide races.

Mr Trump has also drawn attention to Ms Harris’s past opposition to natural-gas fracking, an important industry in western Pennsylvania, which she now supports. The issue may be top of mind in those energy-producing regions but elsewhere voters often express indifference. “It is not a slam dunk for any politician…to think that Pennsylvania is monolithically in support of further energy exploration,” says Stephen Bloom, vice-president of the Commonwealth Foundation, a centre-right think-tank. “No one has ever said the word fracking to me” while campaigning, says Stella Sexton, vice-chair of the Lancaster County Democratic Committee. She says she hears more about the cost of living and reproductive rights.

For many years a blue state that also elected moderate Republicans, Pennsylvania voted about three points to the right of the country in 2016 and 2020. Since 2008, the percentage of voters registered as Democrats has declined while the share of Republicans has grown. Republican registrations outpaced Democratic ones this year until Ms Harris entered the race (see charts). Democrats argue that some of the Republican gains have been offset by a rise in left-leaning independents.

Harris supporters are particularly proud of their ground game. The campaign has over 350 staffers across 50 offices in Pennsylvania, 16 of which are located in rural areas that Mr Trump won by double digits four years ago. The idea is to chip away at support in heavily Republican areas even when Ms Harris doesn’t have a chance to win outright. “They’re play-acting at trying to do better in the rural counties,” argues Mark Harris, a Republican strategist. “This will once again be an extraordinarily divided election between densely populated suburbs versus exurban and rural communities.”

Republican efforts appear more scattered, with a constellation of groups working on turnout efforts. Postal voting is a priority. In 2020 Mr Trump actively discouraged mail-in voting but has since shifted his rhetoric, albeit inconsistently, in the hope of cutting down the Democrats’ advantage.

If Mr Trump wins Pennsylvania, it will show that he put together a coalition of low-propensity white working-class voters and religious voters, says Ryan Shafik, a Republican strategist, and would probably also have attracted “a good amount of newer minority voters”. Ms Harris will have to reassemble Mr Biden’s coalition built on strength among urban and minority voters, as well as continuing to make inroads into the state’s suburbs. Her current lead in Pennsylvania, according to a polling average maintained by FiveThirtyEight, a data-journalism outfit, is less than two percentage points. For all the money pouring in, the race remains a virtual tie.”

An excerpt from “Pride, shame and understanding why the white working class vote supports Trump,” an interview with Arlie Rothschild, author of “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right” at wbur.org: “In her new book, author and sociologist Arlie Hochschild goes to the heart of Appalachia in Eastern Kentucky to share stories of people facing poverty, the loss of jobs and the rise of the opioid epidemic….”Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right” explores what led to their allegiance to former President Donald Trump. Hochschild says she wrote the book to help Democrats understand how Republicans see things….“Not because you agree with them — you never will — but because it’s really important. It’s nearly half of the country. It’s grown ever more consequential with the upcoming elections,” she says. “We haven’t been listening to what’s been happening to the white working class. It’s been sinking both absolutely and relatively, and it’s turned away from the Democratic Party and to the Republican Party. We need to know how to talk to these people.” Godchild adds “Deep story is what the world feels like to you. It’s not a matter of what you believe in, your moral precepts. It’s not cognitive. It’s just how it feels and it’s told by a story.”….“That a man is standing in a long line leading up to the American dream, which is on the other side of a mountain.  And he feels his feet are tired. He, one guy said, ‘I haven’t had a raise in a decade.’ And he’s been patient, feels about himself he’s a good person. But he’s kind of stalled. He’s stalled. And he’s looking at the guy ahead of him, not the people behind….“Suddenly, there are line cutters. Well, who are they? What right do they have? And who are the line cutters in this right wing team story? They are women. They are Blacks. They are immigrants. They are refugees They are overpaid, as they see it, public officials. Even the lame and oil-soaked Louisiana pelican, it kind of limps ahead. ‘Oh, these environmentalists.’” Read on here.

Insights from “Tim Ryan talks need for Democrats to appeal to working class, young male voters,” an interview conducted by Joe St. George at scrippsnews.com: “With debates and conventions now over in 2024, the fight for voters is intensifying….That is especially true in the Midwest….Tim Ryan, a past Democratic presidential candidate, represented Ohio in Congress for 20 years and joined “The Race: Weekend” to discuss the need of Democrats to appeal to working-class voters in the Midwest….“I think they started the process, but I think there is a lot more work to do,” Ryan told Scripps News….“The base is rallied, that’s the first step,” Ryan added….“The next step has got to be a direct appeal to working-class people, whether they are White or Black or Brown,” Ryan said….“It’s jobs, it’s jobs, it’s wages, it’s pensions, it’s all the bread-and-butter stuff,” Ryan said….“I think you have to have an energy plan, a moderate down-the-middle energy plan,” Ryan added….The next big political event is the vice presidential debate on Oct. 1….Ryan is one of only a handful of people who has debated JD Vance in the past. Vance defeated Ryan in the Ohio senate race in 2022….“I would hang Project 2025 right around his neck,” Ryan said….As far as Ohio’s Senate race, Ryan says Sen. Sherrod Brown is getting the national resources to get across the finish line that he believes he did not receive in his campaign in 2022….“Sherrod Brown has a brand and a record,” Ryan said of Brown’s campaign….“I think it’s a coin toss right now,” Ryan said….“I think the Democratic brand has been damaged in many places in this country,” Ryan said. “I think it’s right in line with what you are seeing with young boys and young men, there is a real desperation out there.”….“We have to speak to them directly and say we have their hopes and dreams in our agenda,” Ryan added….“It’s a national crisis with young boys and men,” Ryan said.”

In “The Democrats face one major hurdle: working-class voters,” Michel Sean Winters writes at The National Catholic Reporter, “Hurdles remain, actually one hurdle: working-class voters. Let’s start with Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Back in 2008, when I was still writing for America magazine, I called attention to Luzerne County in a post on the morrow of President Barack Obama’s historic victory, noting that Obama had carried the northeastern Pennsylvania county with 54% of the vote, up from John Kerry’s 51% in 2004. Hazleton, a city in Luzerne County, had passed an anti-immigrant ordinance in 2006. The town’s mayor, Lou Barletta, would become one of the faces of the Tea Party movement when he won a seat in Congress in 2010, defeating longtime Democratic Rep. Paul Kanjorski….Luzerne has changed and Hazleton is now a majority minority city, with Latinos constituting more than 60% of the population. The growth of the Latino vote, however, has not translated into Democratic wins….According to Politico, former President Donald Trump improved his vote totals in 2020 significantly in both Allentown and Reading, towns that are heavily Latino but which also lean more Democratic….Democrats have a problem with working-class voters. Jason Willick wrote about the “diploma divide” in The Washington Post last year and Doug Sosnik analyzed it in The New York Times. “The confluence of rising globalization, technological developments and the offshoring of many working-class jobs led to a sorting of economic fortunes, a widening gap in the average real wealth between households led by college graduates compared with the rest of the population, whose levels are near all-time lows,” Sosnik wrote. He also noted that in the seven battleground states “education levels are near the national average — not proportionately highly educated nor toward the bottom of attainment.”….Democrats, especially Harris, need to show that they care about these working-class voters and have some policy ideas that will help them. During the DNC, a friend with a long background working with organized labor and the Catholic Church, sent me a note.

Winters continues, “Working-class voters remember when they were called “deplorables” by the Democratic nominee in 2016, just as they remember her husband signing NAFTA, which shipped many jobs overseas. It confirmed what they suspected: that cultural elites really do look down on them. It is difficult to overstate the sense of betrayal and hostility lifelong Democrats felt by the end of the Clinton family’s leadership of the party….Latest CNN polls show that a surprisingly large number of people report they could yet change their mind. That is Harris’ biggest opportunity: These voters know everything there is to know about Trump. They continue to report that they think he would do a better job on the economy than Harris would. Her entry to them is the question: Who do you think cares about people like you? But then she has to show that she actually cares, that she wants to listen to working-class voters, not only talk to them or about them. Hillary Clinton thought the election was about her breaking the glass ceiling, and look how that turned out. Harris needs to convince voters she wants to help them break whatever glass ceilings they face. That is how to rebuild the famous “blue wall” of Democratic states along the Great Lakes, a wall that came crashing down in 2016….In addition to the debate, where Harris can continue to define herself for voters, she should seek an opportunity for a “Sister Souljah” moment. In 1992, appearing at a meeting of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, candidate Bill Clinton criticized a rap singer for expressing extremist views. The views were repugnant, but what Clinton was saying is that he was willing to challenge a part of his base, that he was not too beholden to any special interest, that he was capable of self-criticism. Harris needs to have such a moment. It could be about apologists for Hamas or extremist views on gender or climate activists who attack the artistic patrimony of humankind. The target doesn’t matter. What matters is Harris demonstrating she is unafraid to challenge those who are generally on her side of the partisan divide….The Democrats can win this election, keep the White House, retake the House of Representatives and possibly even hold on to the Senate. In the weeks ahead, we’ll look at those down ballot races too. But the feel-good vibes coming out of the Democratic convention are running into the strong headwinds of culturally conservative working-class voters. If Harris can make inroads with them, she’ll win handily. If she can’t, she may still win, but it will be by a whisker. And she could lose.”

One of the many variables affecting the 2024 election is the plethora of ballot measures to protect abortion rights on state ballots, which I wrote about at New York.

After many months of signature-gathering on petitions and lots of maneuvering in state courts, ballot measures to expand or protect abortion rights have been certified for general-election ballots in ten states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota. Two (in Maryland and New York) were referred by legislators and confirm rights already protected by statutes, while eight were citizen referred. This is more impressive than you may think: Only 17 states allow citizen-referred constitutional amendments, and after this year, fully 14 states whose legislatures enacted abortion bans will have voted on abortion ballot measures seeking to overturn them. Pro-choice advocates have won all seven ballot fights (four in the deep-red states of Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and Ohio and another in the battleground state of Michigan) since the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade; there is a significant chance the winning streak could expand to 17 in November, in an astonishing confirmation of the breadth and depth of support for abortion rights.

We don’t have significant public polling in some states, but everywhere (including in the deep-red states of Missouri and South Dakota), advocates for expanding or defending abortion rights seem to have an advantage. It’s telling that one of the few signs of hope for the anti-abortion cause is in Florida, and that’s only because the state has a 60 percent supermajority requirement for constitutional ballot initiatives. Meanwhile, an abortion-rights victory is all but assured in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, and Nevada. In Montana, it’s worth noting that voters rejected a 2022 ballot measure to restrict abortions.

There are some complications to this generally bright picture for abortion rights. In Nebraska, anti-abortion voters succeeded in certifying for the ballot a competing initiative that would constitutionally ban abortion after the first trimester; the standard is technically less draconian than the state’s current 12-week ban but would set back abortion rights and is clearly designed to confuse voters. If that initiative and the primary measure restoring the Roe viability standard both pass, the one that gathers the most votes will be implemented. In South Dakota, a legal effort failed to keep the abortion-rights initiative off the ballot, but courts are allowing a trial over the anti-abortion movement’s complaints, which could in theory make an enacted amendment unenforceable.

In New York, the decision to nestle abortion-rights protections into a broader equal-rights constitutional amendment could be backfiring, as Politico explains:

“An issue that should have been as easy a win in New York as it has been for Democrats across the nation is now at risk of backfiring because of how they chose to craft the amendment.

“The pushback from the right has relied heavily on anti-trans rhetoric, a line of attack that internal polling shows has proven persuasive to voters in battleground House districts, three people who have reviewed the data told POLITICO. They were granted anonymity to discuss the inside information.

“Without a well-funded campaign to defend and bolster the equality amendment, deep blue New York could reject a referendum in support of abortion rights — with dire national political implications for Democrats.”

It’s still hard to imagine New York voting against an equal-rights amendment, but it may be more difficult than expected.

If all ten pro-choice ballot initiatives succeed, there will be 18 states in which constitutions (either by explicit provision or state supreme court interpretations) prevent legislatures from banning abortion and another seven blue states where passage of a ban is extremely unlikely. That’s half the states, which leaves a lot of work to be done to reverse the damage wrought by the U.S. Supreme Court but a lot of work accomplished as well.

The following article, “US Working Class ‘Overwhelmingly to the Left’ of the Rich on Economic Policy: Survey – The new research, said one union leader, provides Democrats with a “clear roadmap to winning back” working-class voters,” by Jake Johnson, is cross-posted from commondreams.org:

Polling results released Monday show that working-class voters in the United States are broadly more supportive of major progressive agenda items than those in the middle and upper classes, offering Democratic political candidates what one union leader called a “clear roadmap to winning back voters we’ve lost to a GOP that’s growing more extreme by the day.”

The survey of over 5,000 registered U.S. voters was conducted last August by HIT Strategies and Working Families Power (WFP), a sibling organization of the Working Families Party.

The poll found that a majority of working-class voters either somewhat or totally support a national jobs guarantee (69%), a “public healthcare program like Medicare for All” (64%), a crackdown on rent-gouging landlords (74%), and tuition-free public colleges and universities (63%), landing them “overwhelmingly to the left” of higher-income segments of the population.

Upper- and middle-class respondents were far less likely to support the above policy proposals. Just 39% of upper-class voters surveyed, for instance, said they completely or somewhat support “a nationwide jobs guarantee” that would provide “stable, good-paying work for everyone who needs it.”

WFP found that the “differences between classes are much smaller on social and cultural questions compared to economic fairness questions, and they do not uniformly point to a working class that is more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes.”

The poll results, said WFP, call into question the belief that “the greater social and cultural conservatism of the working class explains the working class’ drift away from the Democrats and towards the GOP.”

“The working class is not a monolithic group that wears a hard hat and hangs out in diners.”

Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said the new survey results underscore that “the working class is not a monolithic group that wears a hard hat and hangs out in diners.”

“It’s a multiracial, multigenerational group that isn’t confined to a single geography, and it includes a tremendous diversity of views,” said Mitchell, suggesting that Democrats learn from the results to defeat former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, in November.

“We need our strategy and messaging to reflect that reality,” he said. “That’s how we defeat Trump’s MAGA movement and win back working-class voters.”

The new report identifies seven “clusters” within the U.S. working class that it labels as Next Gen Left, Mainstream Liberals, Tuned Out Persuadables, Anti-Woke Traditionalists, Secure Suburban Moderates, Diverse Disaffected Conservatives, and Core MAGA—and the survey data shows “large differences” between them that help explain disparate voting behaviors. For example, just 30% of the Next Gen Left cluster—which is disproportionately young and strongly progressive—are homeowners compared to 75% of the Core MAGA cluster, which has what WFP described as “down-the-line right-wing views.”

The survey results were released in the heat of an election campaign that has seen the GOP—spearheaded by Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—cast itself as “the party of working-class people.” Democrats, whose 2024 White House ticket is backed by major U.S. unions, have lost support from working-class voters in recent years while making gains among more affluent segments of the population.

WFP said that its findings “do not contradict the widespread belief that support for Democrats is stronger among middle- and upper-class voters than it is among working-class voters,” but they do “strongly call into question the explanation most commonly advanced for those political alignments, namely that the working class is simply more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes.”

“Our study shows that the most salient differences in worldview between classes revolve around questions of class, distribution, and economic fairness, where the working class is well to the left of the middle and upper classes, and regression analysis strongly suggests that the further left a voter is on these questions of class, distribution, and economic fairness, the less likely they were to have supported Donald Trump in 2020,” said WFP.

The new analysis was accompanied by what the Working Families Party described as a “practical handbook to winning the working class,” which makes up roughly 63% of the U.S. electorate.

Messaging that resonated most strongly across segments of the working class, according to the handbook, emphasized class conflict and the “need to elect Democrats who will fight for working people to keep the money they earn by cracking down on price-gouging at the grocery store, making wealthy tax cheats pay their fair share, and lowering the costs of prescription drugs.”

Derrick Osobase, vice president of Communications Workers of American District 6, said in a statement Monday that Democrats must embrace and act on the new findings if they hope to reverse their recent losses among the nation’s working class.

“During a time of record high corporate profits,” said Osobase, “Democrats need to show working-class voters that we have their backs and will fight for an economy that works for all of us.”

“A new report commissioned by a labor-backed group is examining a problem many Democrats might rather ignore: the exodus of working-class voters from the party they used to call home,” Alex Seitz-Wald explains in “Democrats have been losing working-class voters. Here’s one playbook to win them back” at nbcnews.com. “Republicans under former President Donald Trump have been making inroads in the working class, including among Black and Hispanic voters, while Democrats have been gaining suburban moderates and highly educated professionals that used to vote Republican,” Alex Seitz-Wald explains in “Democrats have been losing working-class voters. Here’s one playbook to win them back” ate nbcnews.com. “Some voices on the left have downplayed the significance or even denied the loss of working class voters, but the data is increasinglyclear and signs of realignment are everywhere….“I’ve watched as MAGA flags have encroached into my community, which used to be a solid deep-blue working-class suburb of New York made of ethnic whites and people of color,” said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, a labor-backed group that aims to organize a multiracial working-class coalition. “Republicans are making inroads into the working class, and it’s not just white working class people.”….A nonprofit offshoot of Working Families embarked on an extensive research project last year to try to take an honest accounting of Democrats’ problems with working-class voters and find effective messages for the Democratic presidential campaign and others. The group shared its findings exclusively with NBC News….“We take the right wing and Republican Party seriously when they say they want to be the party of the working class,” Mitchell said. “And as much as Democrats are interested in organizing working-class people, and we don’t deny their sincerity, we wanted to start with a grounded place that provides the most accurate picture.”….The effort started with an attempt to better understand the working class of the 21st century by creating a more nuanced definition of the demographic and breaking it down into seven values-based typologies.

“Those categories,” Seitz-Wald continues, “were based on a battery of 40 questions put to more than 5,000 participants in surveys conducted with HIT Strategies, a Democratic research firm….The conclusions, laid out in a 60-page research report and accompanying 23-page political handbook, was shared for the first time this week in a virtual meeting with 160 representatives of left-leaning organizations and labor unions….The result is a novel approach to analyze the working class, which the report says represents about 63% of the electorate….“The working class represents a gigantic share of the electorate. Yet ideological differences within the working class are almost never explored in any systematic way,” the report states….The report sorted people into seven subtypes, each of roughly equal size, arranged on the ideological spectrum from “Next Gen Left” to “Core MAGA,” but the research is especially interested in the four groups in the middle that it says are “cross-pressured,” with values that are best represented in both parties….Those groups include “Tuned Out Persuadables,” “Anti Woke Traditionalists,” “Diverse Disaffected Conservatives” and “Secure Suburbans.”….The cohorts may look different demographically, but more importantly, they’re sorted by their feelings about economic, social and cultural issues. The key to reaching these cross-pressured sections of the working class, according to the report, is differentdepending on what messages resonate with each subgroup….For instance, the research found that populist economic messages about taking on corporations and “big money” in politics are generally popular across the working class, while less effective messages included focusing on the Biden-Harris administration’s work on climate and infrastructure or on Harris’ potential to make history as the first woman president….If nothing else, Mitchell hopes the research will push Democrats to take seriously the erosion with working class voters and to move beyond one-size-fits all stereotypes when thinking about how to talk to working-class voters.”

In “Harris can end the Trump-Vance culture wars. Here’s how,’ Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. writes: “Now that she has routed Donald Trump on the debate stage, Vice President Kamala Harris needs to take the next step and reinforce her campaign’s most powerful theme: That it’s time to end the cultural and ideological warfare — much of it phony, some of it rooted in prejudice — that keeps our nation from solving its most important problems….Despite her standing as the incumbent vice president, Harris has transformed herself into the candidate who represents change by speaking to a reality most Americans sense in their bones. Although Trump has been out of office for nearly four years, his angry and pessimistic spirit still dominates the country’s public life. As long as Trump lurks, every controversy will be turned into a culture war, elections will be defined around who hates whom, and actual problems will be left to fester….Fighting over gender, ideology, sexual identity or religion won’t change that. What would make a difference is uniting behind practical steps to achieve a better balance between work and family life, between the economy and community needs….The fight over abortion will not go away, but opponents of abortion ought to be sympathetic to more help for women who bring children into the world….What’s clear is that Americans across our divides agree we need to do more to help parents and kids. During the debate, Harris rightly but briefly mentioned the child tax credit and helping young families afford a home. I wish she had talked more about her agenda on leave, child care, elder care and adequate pay for those who work in the care economy….Doing so in the coming weeks will be a clear answer to critics who say she’s short on policy. She’s not (especially compared with Trump), but more detail on these and other ideas to strengthen the country’s families can only help her with the voters she needs.”

At The Washington Monthly, Robert J. Shapiro argues that “even though it’s already Labor Day, there’s still time for her campaign to pay attention to a major issue that concerns millions of voters and offer them a response that would underscore her pledge to chart a more prosperous future for middle-class Americans, what she calls “an opportunity economy…..The big issue is the fading prospect of upward mobility for Americans without college degrees. One way to help people raise their incomes is by offering free retraining for higher-paying jobs….The fading prospects for upward mobility have made millions of Americans feel aggrieved and resentful. Donald Trump has used his own sense of personal grievance and resentment to channel their disappointment—to his benefit….The Harris-Walz campaign can turn the tables on this vital issue by giving average Americans a reason to feel optimistic about their futures. The campaign has promised to mandate paid family leave and sick leave, limit price hikes by large corporations in certain circumstances, reduce medical debt and subsidize first-time home buyers….That’s fine as far as it goes. But people still have to live on what they earn. In this economy, the way most people increase their incomes is to become more productive….While few of them have time or money to go to college now, the government could easily afford to give them free access to evening and weekend retraining courses at public community colleges as a pathway to revive their prospects for upward mobility….Community colleges today charge about $450 per course, so retraining would cost about $4,050 for a would-be plumber, $3,150 for those aspiring to be entry-level computer programmers, and $3,600 for a student electricians program. Using these three examples, the average retraining program would cost about $3,600. A new nationwide retraining program could waive those costs since the point is to restore upward mobility for millions who couldn’t afford to lay out $3,600, regardless of the potential benefits….Those costs would be de minimis for taxpayers. If we assume that 500,000 low earners would sign on each year for two-year programs of evening and weekend classes, the government could cover annual tuition costs for 1 million people each year for $2 billion annually. That’s equivalent to two-tenths of 1 percent of all non-defense discretionary federal spending….That’s a very small price to create a new path to upward mobility for millions of aggrieved Americans and get millions of those voters to take a new look at Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.”

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

Democrats are enjoying the afterglow of a successful debate by their candidate against Trump. Harris’s game plan of goading Trump into irrelevant and defensive tangents worked as intended. She was the “winner” of the debate to the extent these designations still have any meaning.

But the race is still exceedingly tight….and seems likely to remain so. And there’s another part of her game plan—or what should be her game plan—that does not appear to be working out so well.

I refer to the need to boost support among the working class, which remains a serious weak spot for the Democrats and Harris. The latest New York Times/Siena poll has Harris trailing Trump among working-class (noncollege) voters by 17 points. That’s identical to Biden’s working-class deficit in the last NYT poll before he dropped out and way worse than Biden’s deficit among these voters in 2020—a mere 4 points.

More detailed NYT results reveal that Harris, relative to Biden in 2020, is doing 10 points worse among white working-class voters and 18 points worse among nonwhite working-class voters. The latter is despite considerable improvement for Harris among this demographic since Biden dropped out.

There’s no sugarcoating it—this is a serious problem for the Democrats. College-educated America may be delighted with candidate Harris but working-class America clearly is not. And there are a lot more working-class than college-educated Americans. Remember that they will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all seven key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average.

The NYT data demonstrate how far apart the viewpoints of working-class and college-educated America are today. Consider the following class gaps in perception:

1. Biden’s net job approval (approval minus disapproval) is -34 among working-class voters but +8 among college-educated voters (class gap = 42 points).

2. Trump’s net favorability among working-class voters is +10; among college voters it’s -29 (class gap = 39 points). Harris’ favorability is -16 among the working class but +16 among the college-educated (class gap = 32 points).

3. While both working-class and college-educated voters have negative views about the state of the economy (only fair or poor), working-class voters are far more negative. Their net rating (excellent or good minus only fair or poor) is -67 compared to –35 among the college-educated (class gap = 32 points).

4. When asked which candidate could do a better job handling the issue they care about the most, working-class voters prefer Trump over Harris by 20 points while college voters prefer Harris over Trump by 15 points (class gap = 35 points).

5. The same question was asked about handling the economy specifically. Working-class voters think Trump would do a better job by 27 points; college-educated voters prefer Harris by 9 points (class gap = 36 points).

6. On handling immigration, working-class voters prefer Trump by 24 points while college voters prefer Harris by 11 points (class gap = 35 points).

7. And on democracy, working-class voters think Trump would do a better job handling the issue by 9 points, while college-educated voters overwhelmingly prefer Harris by 28 points (class gap = 37 points).

8. The poll asked separately for Trump and Harris whether they would be a safe or risky choice for the country. Working-class voters’ net assessment (safe minus risky) for Trump is +5 while for college grads it is -33 (class gap = 38 points). For Harris, her net safe/risky among the working class is -21 compared to +16 among college graduates (class gap = 37 points).

9. Finally, voters were asked whether the next president should represent a major change or minor change (or no change at all) from Biden. Almost all voters wanted at least some change but working-class voters were far more likely to want major change. Working-class voters’ net change preference (major minus minor change) was +46 but among college voters it was just +1 (class gap = 45 points).

These are rather daunting figures but of course they don’t mean Harris can’t win. Her performance among college-educated voters is very strong and that is keeping her afloat right now in this exceedingly tight right race. Perhaps her debate performance will improve her standing among working-class voters, which could pull her out of her current danger zone.

But there are clearly reasons for concern. Besides the data noted above, polling right after the debate found that Harris did little to improve voter confidence in her ability to handle the all-important issue of the economy. A CNN flash poll among debate-watchers found that before the debate voters trusted Trump over Harris on the economy by 16 points and after the debate they favored Trump by….20  points. Furthermore, if you look at the cross-tabs, working-class voters before the debate favored Trump over Harris to handle the economy by 29 points, an advantage for Trump which increased slightly to 32 points after the debate. Not exactly what the Harris campaign had in mind.

So, as the Harris campaign basks in a post-debate wave of favorable coverage and perhaps even a bump in the polls, they would do well to remember that working-class Americans can contain their enthusiasm. The Democratic Achilles’ heel remains and could still deliver a second term for Trump.

There’s really not much drama going on in Congress lately, but a manufactured crisis could shut down the federal government right in the middle of the general election season, as I explained at New York:

Kicking cans down the road is an essential skill in Congress, particularly when partisan control of the government is divided, as it is now. Routine decisions like keeping the federal government operating must await posturing over essential laws each party wants to enact but does not have the power to impose. And that’s why there seems to be a perpetual threat of a government shutdown — which is what happens if either house of Congress or the president refuses to sign off on spending authority — and why Washington typically lurches along from stopgap spending deal to stopgap spending deal.

The most recent stopgap spending deal expires on September 30, the last day of Fiscal Year 2024. There’s been some back-and-forth about the length of the next stopgap based on changing calculations of which party is likely to be in the ascendancy after the November election. But this normal bit of maneuvering suddenly turned fraught as Donald Trump bigfooted his way into the discussion on Truth Social not long before he debated Kamala Harris:

“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO “STUFF” VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN — CLOSE IT DOWN!!!”

The backstory is that in April, when Speaker Mike Johnson was feeling some heat from the House Freedom Caucus over allegedly “caving” to Democrats in the last stopgap spending fight, the Louisianan scurried down to Mar-a-Lago to huddle with the Boss. Johnson announced he would do Trump’s bidding by introducing a bill to outlaw noncitizen voting, the phantom menace that is one of Trump’s favorite stolen-election fables. Those of us who understood that noncitizen voting (of which there is no actual evidence beyond a handful of votes among hundreds of millions) is already illegal shrugged it off as a MAGA red-meat treat.

But Johnson forged ahead with a House vote to approve the so-called SAVE Act. After the Senate ignored it, he included it in the first draft of his new stopgap bill. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, figured it would be dropped when negotiations got serious. But then Trump made his latest intervention and then, worse yet, Johnson couldn’t get the votes to pass his stopgap and get the ping-pong game with Democrats going (many right-wing House members won’t vote for any stopgap spending bill, and others are demanding big domestic spending cuts that don’t pass the smell test). So Johnson is back to square one, as the New York Times reports:

“Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday abruptly canceled a vote on his initial plan to avert a government shutdown, as opposition to the six-month stopgap funding measure piled up in both parties.

“It was a bruising setback for Mr. Johnson coming only a few weeks before a Sept. 30 deadline Congress faces to fund the government or face a shutdown.”

So now what? In the intense heat of an election year in which both the House and the White House are poised between the two parties, the leader of the GOP ticket has ordered Johnson to hold his breath until he turns blue — or more to the point, until the government is shut down — unless something happens that is as likely as Johnson suddenly coming out for abortion rights. Indeed, far from ramming the deeply offensive and impractical SAVE Act down the throats of Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, he can’t even get the stopgap spending measure that includes it out of his own chamber. In the past, Democrats have loaned him a few votes to help him out of a jam, but they won’t do it unless he drops the SAVE Act. And if he drops the SAVE Act, Trump’s friends in the House will happily drop him the first chance they get (maybe right away, or maybe after the election). On the other hand, if he obeys Trump and refuses to move any spending bill, there’s a good chance a few Republicans will defect and back a Democratic measure to avoid an unusually pointless and politically damaging government shutdown. That, too, would expose Johnson as feckless and disposable.

Ever since Johnson succeeded Kevin McCarthy, Washington observers have alternated between treating him as some sort of backwoods parliamentary genius who fools people with his apparent befuddlement and as a Mr. Magoo who stumbles forward blindly and survives by luck and the fact that House Republicans have no better prospects for wielding the gavel. We’ll soon see which Mike Johnson emerges from the current morass. Another major incident of GOP fecklessness and disarray could help Democrats flip the House, but it’s a shame people may not be able to do their jobs in the interim.

The power of celebrity endorsements of presidential candidates is often overstated in our entertainment-crazed culture, and no one has invented a credible metric for gauging their impact. But Kamala Harris should nonetheless be very happy about racking up strong statements of support from two super-stars.

“The link Taylor Swift shared to vote.gov after announcing her support for Vice President Kamala Harris and encouraging others to register to vote had nearly 406,000 people click on it—emphasizing the impact the billionaire pop star’s endorsement could have on the election. In the 24-hour period Swift’s Instagram story linking to vote.gov was live, there were a total of 405,999 visitors referred to the site from her custom link, Rachel Davis, a spokesperson for the General Services Administration, told Forbes in a statement Thursday,” Molly Bohannon reports at Forbes. Further, “Swift endorsed Harris after Tuesday’s debate between the vice president and former President Donald Trump, telling her 284 million followers on Instagram that Harris “fights for the rights and causes I believe [in].”

No telling how many of those visitors to vote.gov actually registered to vote, or how many were already going to vote for Harris anyway. But there can be no doubt that Swift has wide influence, particularly with young women in rural America. The Trump campaign must be livid about it. There may be more bad news for them to come, since Swift will surely be asked for follow-up comments.

The second superstar endorsement just came from Linda Ronstadt, who is one of the most admired and respected Americans of Mexican heritage. According to Daniel Gonzales of azcentral.com, “About 2 million Latinos in Arizona are of Mexican origin…. What’s more, Latinos of Mexican origin make up more than 25% of the state’s total population.”

Walter Einenkel reports at Daily Kos: “Legendary musician Linda Ronstadt is not at all happy that Donald Trump is holding a rally at a venue that carries her name in Tucson, Arizona. The “You’re No Good” singer released a statement on Wednesday endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, while wiping the floor with Trump.”

Einenkel adds, “The bad news for the MAGA movement is that the list of legendary artists who can’t stand even a tangential association with Trump is legion. The list of musicians who have demanded he cease from using their music reads like a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame docket.”

With Ed Kilgore’s cautionary flags about attaching too much importance to the election consequences of the Harris-Trump presidential debate in mind, there are a few more articles about it worth checking out. At The Hill, for example, Juliann Ventura writes, “Former GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie warned Vice President Harris against challenging former President Trump to another debate following Tuesday’s showdown….“Nothing great can happen for her in a second debate,” the former New Jersey governor said on The View Wednesday. “She’ll either do as well as she did this time… or he could do better.” However, Ventura explains that “The Harris campaign quickly challenged Trump to another debate after Tuesday night’s matchup wrapped up, as pundits largely agreed that she had the stronger performance….Trump has declined to accept the challenge, however, arguing that it’s Harris who lost, comparing her to a prize fighter demanding a rematch….“She needed to show those undecided voters that she belonged on that stage, and last night she showed that she belongs on the stage,” Christie said. “That’s why — look, I saw her campaign put out a challenge for a second debate right after the debate. Please stop. Don’t do it!” Withdrawing a challenge is a bad look. But Harris is now in position to set tough conditions.

If you want more numbers, Nathaniel Rakich has them in his caveat-rich article, “Early polls say Harris won the presidential debate“at abcnews.go.com, and writes: “As of 1 p.m. Eastern, 538 has collected three national polls and one swing-state poll that were conducted since the debate.* In all of them, more people who watched the debate said Harris won the debate than said Trump did. On average, 57 percent of debate watchers nationally said Harris turned in the better performance; only 34 percent said Trump did….CNN/SSRS also conducted a poll of the same respondents before the debate, allowing us to compare what they thought about the candidates before the event with what they thought about the candidates after it. And according to their poll, Harris’s net favorability rating among debate watchers rose from -11 percentage points (39 percent favorable, 50 percent unfavorable) before the debate to +1 point (45 percent favorable, 44 percent unfavorable) after it. Trump’s net favorability rating, however, barely changed (from -11 points to -12 points).” Rakich adds that, “even if Harris does rise in the polls after the debate, those gains could be fleeting. CNN polling also found that Americans thought former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton turned in the best performance in all three of her debates with Trump in 2016, and she rose in national polls after the first two of them (although other factors, such as the “Access Hollywood” tape, likely factored into that as well). But, of course, the race tightened in the final days and Clinton went on to lose that election.”

At Brookings, Elaine Kamarck and William A. Galston explain why “The presidential debate accomplished more for Harris than it did for Trump” and write: “Kamala Harris faced three key challenges. First, 37% to 42% of voters in some swing states knew virtually nothing about her except that she serves as Joe Biden’s vice president. Filling in this gap, or at least beginning to, was job one. From the very first minutes of the debate, it was clear that she knew she had to define herself and that she did—as a child of the middle class who, in contrast to Trump, was not given $400 million to start a business. In addition, she repeatedly came back to her experience as a prosecutor….Second, Harris has shifted her position on many important issues—health care (Medicare for All), climate change (fracking), and immigration (decriminalizing border crossings), among others—since she ran for the nomination in 2020. This left people wondering, what kind of Democrat is she—a classic California progressive or the next generation of the Clinton, Obama, and Biden-style center-left? She had to persuade voters that the new version of Kamala Harris is the one they will get if she is elected….Here her performance was more mixed. She explained her shift on fracking but didn’t give as clean and crisp an answer as she could have on other issues where Trump has accused her of flip-flopping. However, she defended the Biden administration and her participation in the bipartisan immigration legislation that Trump killed, she let the audience know that both she and Tim Walz are gun owners who have no intention of taking away people’s guns, and she pushed back against the charge that she was weak on crime by emphasizing her experience and record as a prosecutor who put criminals behind bars….   Third, as is the case with every candidate who hasn’t previously occupied the presidency, Harris had to convince swing voters that she has what it takes to serve effectively as the nation’s chief executive and commander-in-chief. Simply put, they needed to be able to see her as big enough to be president, a barrier that some previous candidates, such as Michael Dukakis in 1988, failed to cross….Harris passed this test easily. She never got flustered, she made her points concisely and quickly, and she spoke with confidence about traditionally “male” issues like war, defense, crime, and foreign policy.”

In my usual role of discouraging irrational exuberance (or if you prefer, offering a buzzkill), I issued a warning at New York about the need to cool jets despite the outcome of the September 10 debate:

It’s hard to recall a presidential-candidate debate so intensely anticipated as the September 10 encounter between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who are locked in a very close race as early voting commences. Now that it’s over, with Harris by near-universal assent being adjudged the winner, many excited Democrats are expecting this “consequential” debate to produce a tangible, perhaps even decisive, advantage for their candidate (particularly since the win was capped with the long-awaited Taylor Swift endorsement of Harris). They should cool their jets.

For one thing, it will take the more reliable pollsters days or even weeks to go into the field and assess the effect, if any, of this event on a contest that’s not just a face-off between candidates but a battle between two deeply rooted and evenly matched party coalitions. Yes, Harris won the CNN “snap poll” of debate viewers: 63 percent thought she won, and 37 percent said Trump won (the latter number showing the reluctance of Trump fans even the most obvious setback for their hero). That’s nearly as large as the margin (67 percent to 33 percent) by which Trump defeated Biden in the CNN snap poll following the June 27 debate. That debate ultimately drove the sitting president of the United States right out of his own reelection campaign. Shouldn’t Harris’ debate win have similarly dramatic consequences?

In a word: no. It’s hard to remember this now, but the June 27 debate did not have any sort of immediate dramatic effect on the Trump-Biden polls. The day of the debate Trump led Biden by a hair (0.2 percent) in the FiveThirtyEight national polling averages; on July 14 he led by a slightly thicker hair (1.9 percent). The debate chased Biden from the race not because he was losing so badly, but because it exacerbated a well-known and central candidate weakness that would make further losses down the road likely and recovery all but impossible. And this calamity occurred just early enough that there was time for Democrats to take drastic but essential action.

Nothing like this is going to happen to Trump. For one thing, his debate performance against Harris, while intermittently shocking, wasn’t at all out of character; his failure was a matter of degree. For another, to the extent there are Republican fears about Trump’s fitness for office or electability, they were crushed many months ago when the former president routed 11 primary opponents. Everyone still in the GOP has bent the knee to the warrior king, he’s overcome far bigger problems in the past, and it’s too late to do anything about it anyway, even if Republicans had a replacement candidate with Harris’s qualifications.

The debate will likely do two important things for Harris. First, it should revive the enthusiasm and sense of momentum that has characterized her candidacy since its launch. This isn’t just a matter of “vibes” but is instead an impetus for previously tuned-out Democratic-leaning voters to reengage with this election, which could have a big impact on turnout. Second, it will address the concerns of many Kamala-curious swing voters about her suitability to serve as president and reflect mainstream values and policy inclinations. That will remain a work in progress given her inherently tricky but essential strategy of offering unhappy voters a change from the status quo even as she remains a heartbeat from the presidency.

This represents very good news for the Democratic ticket, but Team Harris should manage expectations, much as Barack Obama and others did during the DNC when so many excited supporters wanted to believe the wave of “joy” would sweep away all obstacles. She didn’t get a convention bounce and may not get a debate bounce, which means this could remain a dead-even race in which Donald Trump will retain advantages (probably in the Electoral College, possibly in popular support that is stronger than the polls can capture) no matter how foolish or deranged he looked on the stage in Philadelphia.