Are the Democrats Sleepwalking to Disaster?

Joe Biden has been an excellent president, but is also, I fear, the candidate least able to defeat Donald Trump. Other Democrats need to enter the race.

In decades (perhaps even centuries) to come, historians will focus on the 2024 presidential election much as they have on the election of 1860. They will understand, as too few Americans do today, that it will stand as a hinge point in American history.

My expectation—make that, my fear—is that they will focus most intensely on this question: Why were so many Democrats sleepwalking while the nation clearly teetered on the brink of authoritarian rule?

That question can (and must) be posed in a more specific way. With the prospect of a Donald Trump victory looming large, with polling showing that even Democratic base voters give Trump a higher approval rating than they accord President Biden, why did Democrats opt to run their weakest candidate—Biden—against Trump? Even as poll after poll showed Trump leading Biden in swing states, even as the electorate identified Biden’s presidency primarily with inflation and the high cost of living, even as Democratic House and Senate candidates were polling above Biden in swing states and nationally, even as Democratic governors had generally high approval ratings, why, oh why did the Democrats fail to run a serious primary opponent to Biden in the spring of 2024?

Well, we know why. Given the cards he was dealt (a two-year congressional majority that teetered on a razor’s edge), Biden did extremely well. He managed to get through Congress landmark legislation on rebuilding America’s industrial base, on mitigating the climate crisis, on restoring the nation’s sagging infrastructure, all while putting himself on the line for and with American workers as no president had ever done before. By most metrics, he’s been an excellent president, not just committed to restoring the country’s long-vanished mass prosperity but actually doing something about it.

And yet, that hasn’t made him the favorite in an election that will almost surely pit him against a candidate who poses the greatest threat to American democracy of anyone in our country’s long history. With each new poll, the popular discontent with the state of the nation—more particularly, the state of its economy; most particularly, the cost of living—rises ever higher, even despite the declines in the price of gas and some other essentials. And in each new poll, the doubts about Biden’s age remain constant.

Those discontents and those doubts are connected. Biden is no longer able, save in the rarest of instances, to make a forceful defense of his very real economic achievements. That’s more than a problem of inadequate delivery, however. The other problem is that he’s been highlighting the wrong achievements.

As Stan Greenberg’s polling for Democracy Corps has clearly documented, the number one issue for Americans—and for the constituencies that make up the Democratic base (young people, Blacks, Latinos, single women)—is the high price of food, shelter, and other necessities. A gap of nearly 30 percentage points separates this concern from the various (according to which group’s sample we look at) second-ranking concerns, be they crime, the climate, or other very real problems.

The full article can be read at The American Prospect .

‘This Is Grim,’ One Democratic Pollster Says

The predictive power of horse-race polling a year from the presidential election is weak at best. The Biden campaign can take some comfort in that. But what recent surveys do reveal is that the coalition that put Joe Biden in the White House in the first place is nowhere near as strong as it was four years ago.

These danger signs include fraying support among core constituencies, including young voters, Black voters and Hispanic voters, and the decline, if not the erasure, of traditional Democratic advantages in representing the interests of the middle class and speaking for the average voter.

Any of these on their own might not be cause for alarm, but taken together, they present a dangerous situation for Biden.

From Nov. 5 through Nov. 11, Democracy Corps, a Democratic advisory group founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, surveyed 2,500 voters in presidential and Senate battleground states as well as competitive House districts.

In an email, Greenberg summarized the results: “This is grim.” The study, he said, found that collectively, voters in the Democratic base of “Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, Gen Z, millennials, unmarried and college women give Trump higher approval ratings than Biden.”

The full article can be read at The New York Times.

Bidenomics Is a Political Bust for Biden

On the perils of running a feel-good tour of America when the country is down in the dumps.

To hear President Biden tell it, everything is going great. G.D.P. is up, the deficit is down. Semiconductors are being made in the U.S.A. again. Bridges and tunnels and roads are being fixed. There’s even, unlikely as it sounds, a manufacturing boom. During an appearance on Wednesday in Pueblo, Colorado, Biden touted all he’s done for that corner of southeastern Colorado. The event was held at a wind-turbine factory, where eight hundred and fifty new jobs had been created courtesy of his signature Inflation Reduction Act. Funding from his beloved infrastructure bill had brought in a new water pipeline to serve fifty thousand people and affordable high-speed Internet for local Native American communities. In theory, this was an official Presidential appearance; in practice, it had the feel of a campaign rally as Biden mocked Republicans for voting against all these good works—and then claiming credit for them anyway. Lauren Boebert, the district’s far-right representative, he said, is “one of the leaders of this extreme maga movement,” who called the Inflation Reduction Act a “massive failure.” “You all know you’re part of a massive failure?” he asked sarcastically, to laughs and cheers.

The speech was the latest in Biden’s nationwide “Bidenomics” tour. Since June, in dozens of appearances, he has trotted out variations on the celebratory message that his Administration has, against the odds, managed to revive the economy after the disruptions of the pandemic. “Bidenomics” banners festoon his appearances—they were hung on stage at the Colorado factory—and the slogan appears on the White House’s Web site when Biden’s speeches are live-streamed. “Folks, things are changing,” Biden proclaimed in Colorado. He concluded his pep talk with a vow: “We’re moving, folks. We are moving, and no one’s going to stop us.”

But there’s a problem. Bidenomics, at least as a political slogan, is a bust. The concept grew out of a classic Washington lament: We’ve done so much—if only the voters knew about it, surely we’d get credit. The experiment, however, has not worked.

The full article can be read at The New Yorker.

Democrats Don’t Have to Settle for Battling to a Draw

With stakes so high, challenging our Democratic establishment ‘extremists’ and cultural elites is a start.

The election results surprised many pundits and Republicans, but not those who were following the surveys conducted by Democracy Corps and the articles I wrote for the Prospect. They showed the Democrats with a small lead in the generic House vote in September. That slipped to a tie and 2-point deficit with October’s likely voters. With 107 million votes counted, Democrats are losing the House by a 3-point margin. The surveys showed the potential for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians to disappoint those looking for an engaged base.

The very low turnout of African Americans and Hispanics was not surprising and likely cost us a greater Senate majority (one that might have been willing to get rid of the filibuster) and House control.

Many were relieved that Democrats defied history. I was angry.

We are at a moment where Democrats have a policy offer that makes lives appreciably better. Republicans just decry inflation and Democrats. They plant powerful cultural bombs that leave Democrats badly damaged on crime, the border, and love of country.

I was angry because in this campaign the White House was just cheerleading over a “strong economy,” and some leaders gave this message: Re-elect us because we accomplished so much. Instead, they could have shown sympathy on income and the cost of living, pushed back against corporate power, neutralized the crime issue, and grown their numbers.

Over 70 percent of eligible voters do not have a four-year degree, my measure of working-class. And in this midterm election, they were 61 percent of the voters. Over 80 percent of the Black and Hispanic voters were working-class, though that is usually closer to 70 percent in our campaign surveys.

And those voters were mad as hell about the economy. Two-thirds rated it “negatively” in my survey for Democracy Corps and PSG Consulting with 2,000 pre-election and Election Day voters. Two-thirds of voters said the country was on the wrong track. They were also mad as hell about the billions in campaign spending that corrupted politics. They are conscious that the biggest corporations, high-tech companies, and billionaires use their money and lobbyists to rig the game against working people.

They are mad as hell because they really haven’t seen a pay raise in two decades, which is even more true for African Americans and Hispanics. Their frustration was heightened by two decades of spiking growth in incomes and wealth for the top 1 percent and spiking spending on political campaigns.

The economy was the top issue for voters in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022, of course. This year, maddening inflation stole away any marginal gain in wages. Everywhere in the world, working people are on a desperate edge, and the top issue is the cost of living and what governments are doing to help them.

And in this election, it was the top issue by far for the Democrats’ diverse working-class base of African Americans, Hispanics, millennials, and unmarried women.

Do you think they heard anything from the national Democrats that would have stirred them to get out to vote?

The full article can be read at The American Prospect.

How Democrats Mishandled Crime

The most effective issue for Republicans in this midterm is a result of Democratic elites failing to understand what their diverse base of working-class voters wants.

Democratic candidates faced a barrage of ads on crime starting in September and early October, a barrage aided by Fox News dramatically increasing its crime reporting.

And it worked. It stalled and reversed the momentum Democrats had gained with the Supreme Court decision on abortion, the January 6th hearings, the Justice Department search of Mar-a-Lago, and Democrats passing the Inflation Reduction Act.

The 2022 midterms will be remembered as a toxic campaign, but an effective one in labeling Democrats as “pro-crime.” When voters in our survey were asked what they feared the most if Democrats win full control of the government, 56 percent rushed to choose “crime and homelessness out of control in cities and police coming under attack,” followed by 43 percent who chose “the southern border being open to immigrants.” Those two outpointed voters’ worries about Congress banning abortion nationally and women losing “equal rights.”

While Democrats were still competitive in the congressional ballot throughout the fall, they trailed Republicans by 13 points on which party would do better on crime. A quarter of Democrats in October said Republicans would do a better job. That included a quarter of Blacks and a stunning half of Hispanics and Asian Americans.

So, I was asked repeatedly by colleagues and campaigning Democrats, “What should we be saying on crime and when I’m attacked for ‘defunding the police’?” To be honest, Democrats were in such terrible shape on crime at this late point, I said, speak as little as possible or mumble. Nothing they’ve said up until now was reassuring and helpful.

Obviously, they should respond if attacked, demonstrating respect for the police and rejecting defunding. But they should move as quickly as possible to change the subject, preferably to the cost of living, where Democrats have a real policy offer and pose a real electoral choice.

But Democrats cannot change the subject for long.

The full article can be read at The American Prospect.