Race War

Will Trump’s use of bigotry to rally anxious white voters end with his term of office?

The presidential campaign of 2020 ended in a race war between the Democratic and Republican Parties, focused on America’s history of white supremacy, the demand for racial justice, and fear of who will now lead the country at such a moment. This was a war of choice for Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and they lost. Joe Biden won by more than six million votes nationally and by the same majority as Trump achieved in the Electoral College in 2016. As president of the United States, Biden will have an outsized role in defining Trump’s corrupt and racist presidency and the issues the country must address.

The role of race in the election was a choice for Democrats, too. It was a moral choice. After the murder of George Floyd and the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor and pervasive protest marches, Democratic leaders joined the marches and House Democrats passed the Justice in Policing Act. Joe Biden chose an African American woman as his vice president and devoted a major part of the Democratic Convention to the fight for racial justice. He closed the campaign with an ad where Biden said, “Black Lives Matter,” and promised he would address the country’s racial inequities. And after winning, he said one of his highest priorities was addressing “systemic racism.”

Campaigns are fights to define the choice in the election. Biden wanted voters to choose a leader who would get COVID under control, protect the Affordable Care Act, unite the country, and address America’s racial divide, but Trump focused relentlessly on race.

Trump attacked the Black Lives Matter protests, called out peaceful protesters as looters, defended the police no matter how extreme their abuses, and invited white nationalists and Trump supporters to liberate Democratic-run cities and states, and defend the election from being stolen in Black-run cities.

Those attacks grew more politically damaging to Democrats when peaceful protests were accompanied by looting, overnight violence, and occasional attacks on police, even when Biden forcefully condemned violence of any kind. There are, of course, varied explanations for the rise in violent crime in the major cities, but Trump does not do nuance. According to Trump, Democrats winning this election means liberals and Blacks in charge of the cities, and the breakdown of law and order.

The full article can be read at The American Prospect.

Was The Last Debate A Shitshow For Donald Trump?

The commentariat has totally missed how much the final debate has damaged President Trump and further pushed the race’s dynamic to favor Vice President Joe Biden.

• The debates take place in a country where Trump’s approval and vote is stuck at 42 percent when the rest of the country decides whether they can vote for Biden. Our research showed Biden would gain from the 1st debate because of increased favorability and more saying, “he represents the middle class.” It was no surprise there was a much bigger audience for Biden town hall because the undecided are focused on him. 

• Trump got heard in this debate, but that was a disaster for him. Biden gained in favorability and seeing him as someone representing middle class values battling for forgotten Americans and working Americans. For each, the intense, “describes very well,” increased by 10 points after the debate.

• That gain for Biden himself really affected the choice in the election. Biden increased his margin by 8 points on which candidate would improve things for the middle class, 5 points on uniting the country and 5 points, and most importantly, on getting health care costs down.

• If you thought Trump did okay and Biden simply made no mistakes, then you do not know America.  You need to watch how they reacted to the exchanges on “your family,” Trump minimizing the damage from COVID, Trump describing the public option as socialism and defense of Social Security, Biden calling Trump a racist and Trump claiming he’s the best president for Black Americans since Lincoln, Trump attacking Fauci, Biden talking about DACA and separating children, the cities being a disaster, Biden describing the need for minimum wage and central workers, and Biden warning Iran and Russia.

• Many commentators described the 1st debate as a “shitshow,” but it was the 2nd and final that was a shitshow for Trump.

The full slide deck PDF can be downloaded at Democracy Corps’ website.

After Trump, the Republican Party May Become More Extreme

If Biden wins, Democrats will face a harsh political landscape.

The numbers give Joe Biden ample reason for confidence about the election. Only 42 percent of voters, according to polling averages published by FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics, currently support the Republican incumbent’s reelection. When asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president?”—the wording used by many polling organizations—only about 43 percent of Americans say they approve.

Although only about 2 percent of voters are still undecided, Trump stands before a nearly insurmountable wall. America has never had a president whose disapproval rating, since the first month of his presidency, has been higher than his approval rating. Two weeks before the election, more than 50 percent of voters think he is doing a bad job and plan to vote for his opponent. Many already have. As a Democratic pollster, I am delighted by all the evidence that most of the country will reject Trump, his racism, his values, his policies, and his vision for America.

Even so, 43 percent of Americans approve of how Trump is doing. Consider the implications for both parties and the nation. These voters approve after 215,000 people have died from the coronavirus; after 25 million ended up on unemployment insurance; after The New York Times found that Trump had paid only $750 in taxes in his first year as president and owes hundreds of millions of dollars to his creditors; after The Atlantic reported that he called American soldiers who died in battle “suckers” and “losers.”

Yet if Democrats win the presidency—and even both houses of Congress—their difficulties will burgeon the day Trump leaves office. Not only must they hold their own coalition together as they contend with the coronavirus and the economic crisis that it created, but they will face fierce opposition from the voters who support Trump despite everything. Far from being chastened into moderating the GOP’s rhetoric and cooperating with a new administration, the remaining elements of a vanquished Republican Party will likely become more extreme. It’s happened before.

The full article can be read at The Atlantic.

How Trump Is Losing His Base

Focus groups with working-class and rural voters show the deep health care crisis in America, and trouble for Trump’s re-election.

The heartbreaking health care crisis that is ravaging working-class and rural communities threatens to cut short Donald Trump’s political career, and demands a forceful response from opposition Democrats. It will teach big lessons about how to reach working people who are struggling, regardless of color. That is clear to me after listening to white working-class voters in Zoom focus groups for the American Federation of Teachers and Voter Participation Center in the first week of August, outside of metropolitan areas in rural Wisconsin, the Mahoning Valley region in Ohio (also known as Steel Valley), northern Maine, and suburban Macomb County, Michigan.

The results of these sessions also fit with the results of a phone survey I conducted of working-class voters in the 16 battleground states, after Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris for vice president and the launch of the Democratic National Convention, though before his final-night acceptance speech. In 2016, a white working-class revolt enabled Trump to win men by an unimaginable 48 points and women by 27. But disillusionment was real in the midterms: The Republican House margin dropped 13 points across the white working class. In the new poll, Trump lost a further 6 points with white working-class women, where Biden only trailed Trump by 8 points (52 to 44 percent). While Trump has been throwing a lot of red meat to his base, white working-class men have not been dislodged from their trajectory, as Trump’s margin eroded another 4 points.

These are mostly low-wage families, many with children raised by a single parent. They are consumed with rising opioid deaths and disabilities and a deadly expensive health care system. That was a big part of why they voted for Donald Trump in 2016: so he could end Obamacare and its costly mandate, and deliver affordable health insurance for all. When he failed to do so, many voted against the Republicans in the midterms.

The full article can be read at The American Prospect

Believe the Polls This Time

These aren’t Hillary Clinton’s numbers. Biden has a wide lead because the landscape has changed.

Recent polls could hardly be more reassuring for voters who want to be done with Donald Trump. “Biden Builds Largest Lead This Year,” a CNN headline declared. “Biden Hits 55%–41% Against Trump in Biggest National Poll Lead Yet,” reported The Daily Beast. “Republicans should be petrified by the polls,” a Washington Post opinion piece asserted. Yet the polls also frighten Democrats who, four years ago, got their hopes up amid favorable numbers for Hillary Clinton.

Noting reports that Joe Biden holds a healthy lead in Michigan—one of three Rust Belt states in which Trump narrowly upset Clinton—Representative Debbie Dingell told participants in a recent online Democratic campaign event, “I don’t believe these numbers.” And Dingell, who introduced herself at the event as “Debbie Downer,” has standing to dispute polls that look rosy for her party. In 2016, she’d warned me that the Clinton campaign was going badly in Macomb County—the suburban home of the white, working-class, Catholic voters whom my research decades earlier had labeled “Reagan Democrats.” Dingell’s fear that Clinton could lose Michigan was borne out.

But this moment is very different. To start, during the summer and fall of 2016, Clinton never had the kind of national poll lead that Biden now has. She led by an average of four points four months before the election and the same four points just before Election Day. This year, after Biden effectively clinched the nomination, he moved into an average six-point lead over Trump, which has grown to nearly 10 points after the death of George Floyd and the weeks of protests that have followed. The lingering apprehension among Democrats fails to recognize just how much the political landscape has changed since 2016. We are looking at different polls, a different America, and different campaigns with different leaders.

The full article can be read at The Atlantic