They Don’t Want Trump OR Biden. Here’s How They Still Can Elect Biden.

Our new survey of these voters shows how the president can still win their support.

President Biden and Donald Trump have now each won enough delegates to ensure their respective presidential nominations. Yet we are facing an election in which an unprecedented share of voters desperately wish that the two major parties don’t nominate these leaders.

We’ve had such “dual haters” before. In 2016, when Hillary Clinton faced Donald Trump, they comprised 18 percent of the voters and they played a pivotal role in putting Trump in the White House. They gave Trump an over 20-point margin in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

This year, the “dual haters” are 23 percent of the electorate, and they will not be easy voters for Biden to win. Right now, he is losing them by 8 points in a two-way contest and by 10 in the multicandidate field.

These numbers come from a survey of 2,500 potential voters in battleground states that Democracy Corps and PSG Consulting conducted at the end of 2023, which included 500 over- samples of Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians at the end of the year. Our survey used the thermometer scale used by the University of Michigan’s National Election Studies, asking voters to give “warm” and “cool” ratings on a 100-degree thermometer.

The most important finding was the share of these “dual haters” who are potential swing voters. Fully 45 percent are independents; 51 percent are moderates. Only 4 percent are “very conservative.” And a 55 percent majority say they’ll vote for independent candidates, led by Robert F. Kennedy. In a simulated race against Biden, 57 percent said they’d choose Nikki Haley.

This is a group of voters that could break for Biden.

The full article can be read at The American Prospect.

The Political Perils of Democrats’ Rose-Colored Glasses

Paul Krugman’s (and many Democrats’) beliefs about the economy and crime miss the reality that Americans still experience.

I am a big fan of almost everything Paul Krugman writes, and I cheered his warnings that America didn’t need to be pushed into recession to cool inflation and his proposed policies to get it to a “soft landing.”

But I worry now that both Krugman and President Biden will conclude that the success of the administration’s macroeconomic policies was also a success with ordinary Americans. It wasn’t, if you looked at how much they struggled financially in this inflationary era. Their rating the economy as “poor” was not a dystopian view shaped by conservative media and politicians.

It turns out that Krugman makes the same case against MAGA Republicans on immigration and crime. He is wrong there, too. And looking at the reality will put Democrats in a much better position to address the top issues in this election.

The full article can be read at The American Prospect.

Joe Biden will have to dump the elite if he wants to beat Trump

Donald Trump is connecting with ordinary Americans, but the president can beat him if he ignores the blinkered Washington consensus

Donald Trump locked up the Republican nomination last week, and President Biden’s campaign faces an uphill struggle to defeat him. He needs to rediscover “blue-collar Joe” and break out of the elite bubble.

Trump is running an effective campaign that has deepened support among working-class voters in the primaries and the general election. He has shown he understands how angry people are about spiking prices, elites growing richer, rising violent crime and a flood of refugees.

Biden’s approval rating, meanwhile, is stuck below 40 per cent. Two thirds of Americans still believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. While many problems contribute to this, the share of those polled choosing inflation and the cost of living as the cause of this dissatisfaction is about 30 per cent higher than that for the next problem. Inflation concentrates the mind.

Yet the White House, pundits and progressive commentators are all trapped in the same elite bubble that keeps them from seeing what is happening to most Americans.

The full article can be read at The Times.

President Biden’s Speech to Black Americans Won’t Bring Them Home—Yet

Is it time for Biden to be Biden?

President Joe Biden spoke directly to Black Americans Monday at the Mother Emanuel AME Church, in Charleston, South Carolina. It was the site where a white supremacist massacred nine worshipers during Bible study, and where President Obama, at the memorial service for those who died, sang “Amazing Grace.” What better place for the president to effectively launch his re-election campaign to win back Black voters, who are so central to the Democrats’ base. And what better place to learn why Biden will likely still be losing ground with Black, Hispanic, and younger voters.

Fortunately, the president added some asides that could become part of a very different message and get heard in the Black community and the Democratic base.

On Monday, the president welded the “poison” of “white supremacy” to the violent MAGA Republicans who threaten our democracy, the “insurrectionists waving Confederate flags inside the halls of Congress.” He called on voters to reject their “cramped view of America,” and to rally around his vision, where “we [can] all do well.” America is “not perfect,” Biden said, but it is “a nation continuously striving to be a more perfect union.”

And then he laid out his main strategy for re-election. I kept “my commitment to you,” and “I’ve done my best to honor your trust.”

The full article can be read at The American Prospect.