Ronald Brownstein | The Atlantic

Why ‘Late Regime’ Presidencies Fail

2025-01-09T09:00:00-05:00

Presidents whom most voters view as failures, justifiably or not, have frequently shaped American politics long after they leave office—notably, by paving the way for presidencies considered much more successful and consequential. As President Joe Biden nears his final days in office, his uneasy term presents Democrats with some uncomfortable parallels to their experience with Jimmy Carter, whose state funeral takes place this week in Washington, D.C.

The former Georgia governor’s victory in 1976 initially offered the promise of revitalizing the formidable electoral coalition that had delivered the White House to Democrats in seven of the nine presidential elections from 1932 (won by Franklin D. Roosevelt) to 1964 (won by Lyndon B. Johnson), and had enabled the party to enact progressive social policies for two generations. But the collapse of his support over his four years in office, culminating in his landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, showed that Carter’s electoral victory was instead that coalition’s dying breath. Carter’s troubled term in the White House proved the indispensable precondition to Reagan’s landmark presidency, which reshaped the competition between the two major parties and enabled the epoch-defining ascendancy of the new right.

The specter of such a turnabout now haunts Biden and his legacy. Despite his many accomplishments in the White House, the November election’s outcome demonstrated that his failures—particularly on the public priorities of inflation and the border—eclipsed his successes for most voters. As post-election surveys made clear, disapproval of the Biden administration’s record was a liability that Vice President Kamala Harris could not escape.

Biden’s unpopularity helped Donald Trump make major inroads among traditionally Democratic voting blocs, just as the widespread discontent over Carter’s performance helped Reagan peel away millions of formerly Democratic voters in 1980. If Trump can cement in office the gains he made on Election Day—particularly among Latino, Asian American, and Black voters—historians may come to view Biden as the Carter to Trump’s Reagan.

In his landmark 1993 book, The Politics Presidents Make, the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek persuasively argued that presidents succeed or fail according to not only their innate talents but also the timing of their election in the long-term cycle of political competition and electoral realignment between the major parties.

Most of the presidents who are remembered as the most successful and influential, Skowronek showed, came into office after decisive elections in which voters sweepingly rejected the party that had governed the country for years. The leaders Skowronek places in this category include Thomas Jefferson after his election in 1800, Andrew Jackson in 1828, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Roosevelt in 1932, and Reagan in 1980.

These dominating figures, whom Skowronek identifies as men who “stood apart from the previously established parties,” typically rose to prominence with a promise “to retrieve from a far distant, even mythic, past fundamental values that they claimed had been lost.” Trump fits this template with his promises to “make America great again,” and he also displays the twin traits that Skowronek describes as characteristic of these predecessors that Trump hopes to emulate: repudiating the existing terms of political competition and becoming a reconstructive leader of a new coalition.

The great repudiators, in Skowronek’s telling, were all preceded by ill-fated leaders who’d gained the presidency representing a once-dominant coalition that was palpably diminished by the time of their election. Skowronek placed in this club John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Carter. Each of their presidencies represented a last gasp for the party that had won most of the general elections in the years prior. None of these “late regime” presidents, as Skowronek called them, could generate enough success in office to reverse their party’s declining support; instead, they accelerated it.

The most recent such late-regime president, Carter, was elected in 1976 after Richard Nixon’s victories in 1968 and 1972 had already exposed cracks in the Democrats’ New Deal coalition of southerners, Black voters, and the white working class. Like many of his predecessors in the dubious fraternity of late-regime presidents, Carter recognized that his party needed to recalibrate its message and agenda to repair its eroding support. But the attempt to set a new, generally more centrist direction for the party foundered.

Thanks to rampant inflation, energy shortages, and the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter was whipsawed between a rebellion from the left (culminating in Senator Edward Kennedy’s primary challenge) and an uprising on the right led by Reagan. As Carter limped through his 1980 reelection campaign, Skowronek wrote, he had become “a caricature of the old regime’s political bankruptcy, the perfect foil for a repudiation of liberalism itself as the true source of all the nation’s problems.”

Carter’s failures enabled Reagan to entrench the electoral realignment that Nixon had started. In Reagan’s emphatic 1980 win, millions of southern white conservatives, including many evangelical Christians, as well as northern working-class white voters renounced the Democratic affiliation of their parents and flocked to Reagan’s Republican Party. Most of those voters never looked back.

The issue now is whether Biden will one day be seen as another late-regime president whose perceived failures hastened his party’s eclipse among key voting blocs. Pointing to his record of accomplishments, Biden advocates would consider the question absurd: Look, they say, at the big legislative wins, enormous job growth, soaring stock market, historic steps to combat climate change, skilled diplomacy that united allies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and boom in manufacturing investment, particularly in clean-energy technologies.

In electoral terms, however, Biden’s legacy is more clouded. His 2020 victory appeared to revive the coalition of college-educated whites, growing minority populations, young people, and just enough working-class white voters that had allowed Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to win the White House in four of the six elections from 1992 through 2012. (In a fifth race over that span, Al Gore won the popular vote even though he lost the Electoral College.) But the public discontent with Biden frayed almost every strand of that coalition.

Biden made rebuilding his party’s support among working-class voters a priority and, in fact, delivered huge gains in manufacturing and construction jobs that were tied to the big three bills he passed (on clean energy, infrastructure, and semiconductors). But public anger at the rising cost of living contributed to Biden’s job-approval rating falling below 50 percent in the late summer of 2021 (around the time of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal), and it never climbed back to that crucial threshold. On Election Day, public disappointment with Biden’s overall record helped Trump maintain a crushing lead over Harris among white voters without a college degree, as well as make unprecedented inroads among nonwhite voters without a college degree, especially Latinos.

The defecting Democratic voters of 2024 mean that as Biden leaves office, Gallup recently reported, Republicans are enjoying their biggest party-identification advantage in the past three decades. All of the intertwined and compounding electoral challenges Democrats now face ominously resemble the difficulties that Skowronek’s other late-regime presidents left behind for their parties.

Although Carter identified as an outsider and Biden was the consummate insider, each sought to demonstrate to skeptical voters that he could make the government work better to address their most pressing problems: Carter called upon his engineer’s efficiency; Biden used his long experience to negotiate effectively with both Congress and foreign nations. In the face of a rising challenge from the right, each hoped to revive public confidence that Democrats could produce better results.

Yet by the end of their term, voters—fairly or not—had concluded the opposite. As Skowronek observed, that kind of failure is common to late-regime presidents. By losing the country’s confidence, these leaders all cleared the way for the repudiating presidents from the other party who succeeded them. “Through their hapless struggles for credibility,” Skowronek wrote, “they become the foils for reconstructive leadership, the indispensable premise upon which traditional regime opponents generate the authority to repudiate the establishment wholesale.”

In an email last week, Skowronek told me he agreed that the public rejection of Biden had provided Trump with an opening for a repudiating leadership very similar to the one Carter had unwittingly bequeathed Reagan.

“Characteristically, reconstructive leaders do three things,” Skowronek wrote to me. “They turn their immediate predecessor into a foil for a wholesale repudiation of ‘the establishment’ (check). They build new parties (check). They dismantle the residual institutional infrastructure supporting the politics of the past (check; see Project 2025). Everything seems to be in place for one of these pivotal presidencies.”

“Biden,” Skowronek added, “set up his administration as a demonstration of the system’s vitality. He tried to prove that (what Trump called) the ‘deep state’ could work and to vindicate it.” The public’s disenchantment with Biden’s record could now have precisely the opposite effect, Skowronek believes, by undermining people’s already fragile faith in government. That could strengthen Trump’s hand to pursue “a substantial dismantling and redirection” of existing government institutions.

Carter and Biden each paved the way for his successor’s agenda by conceding ground on crucial fronts. “In Carter’s case, that included deregulation, the defense build-up, and prioritizing the fight against inflation,” Skowronek wrote. “In Biden’s case, that ultimately included tariffs, immigration restrictions, and an ‘America first’ industrial policy. Just as one could discern in Carter some consensual ground for a new ordering under Reagan, one can discern in Biden’s innovations some consensual ground for a new ordering under Trump.”

Although Biden may look like a classic late-regime president, Skowronek doubts whether Trump can grow into the kind of transformative leader who has typically followed such beleaguered figures—not least because Trump seems quite likely to exceed his mandate and overreach in a way that provokes a voter backlash in 2026. Much in Trump’s record does indeed suggest that his agenda and style will be too polarizing, his commitment to the rule of law too tenuous, for him to build a coalition as durable or expansive as that assembled by any of the mighty repudiators of the past.

For Democrats, however, the sobering precedent of the Carter era is a public loss of faith that set up 12 years of Republican control of the White House. They can only hope that the late-regime rejection of Biden doesn’t trigger another period of consolidated GOP dominance.

The Potential Backlash to Trump Unbound

2024-12-20T16:20:00-05:00

Donald Trump will return to office facing far fewer constraints than when he entered the White House in 2017. The political, legal, institutional, and civic forces that restrained and often frustrated Trump during his first term have all palpably weakened. That will be a mixed blessing for him and for the Republican Party.

There’s less chance that forces inside or outside his administration will thwart Trump’s marquee campaign proposals, such as mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, big tariffs on imports, and sweeping rollbacks of climate and other environmental regulations. But there will also be fewer obstacles to the kind of polarizing ideas that got stopped during Trump’s first term. On numerous occasions, his own aides intervened to prevent the president from, for example, deploying the military to shoot racial-justice protesters, firing missiles into Mexico against drug-cartel facilities without authorization from the Mexican government, or potentially quitting NATO. Republicans in Congress thwarted parts of his agenda, as when senators blocked his attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The courts ruled against some policies, such as separating the children of undocumented migrants from their parents at the southern border.

This time, Trump’s fate will be much more in his own hands. If he can deliver greater economic stability for working families, while avoiding too many firefights on militant MAGA priorities, strategists in both parties agree that he will be in a strong position to consolidate the gains he’s made among traditionally Democratic constituencies, such as Black, Latino, and younger white men.

But if an unbound Trump veers in directions that too many voters don’t want to follow—including vaccine skepticism, politicizing the criminal-justice system against his opponents, and the separation of undocumented parents from their U.S.-citizen children—he could quickly shrink his coalition again. And if his economic agenda rekindles inflation, as many independent analysts forecast, that effect will only be stronger.

Even in our highly polarized age, the fundamental hydraulics of America’s two-party system still govern elections: When one party falls in the public’s esteem, the other inevitably rises. That remained true even when the alternative for voters dissatisfied with the country’s direction was a candidate with as many vulnerabilities as Trump. Swing voters who soured on President Joe Biden’s performance turned to the other party. The same is likely to happen again, if voters sour on an unbound Trump.

[Charles Sykes: The GOP is treating Musk like he’s in charge]

Just how much more running room Trump has now than in 2017 is hard to overstate. Back then, the Republican leaders of the Senate (Mitch McConnell) and House (Paul Ryan) were both skeptical of Trump, especially in private, as were many rank-and-file members and major party donors. Upon taking office, Trump engineered “a hostile takeover” of the Republican infrastructure in Congress and beyond, Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Virginia and former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told me. “Trump had the energy level of the party at the grass roots, but the contributors and everyone else was very leery.”

Now all of the GOP leaders in both chambers of Congress are visibly reluctant to challenge, or even question, Trump. With a 53–47 Senate majority, the GOP holds one more seat than it did when Trump took office in 2017; that may sound like a minuscule difference, but the edge it provides Trump could be enormous. Consider, for instance, that his first-term effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act was doomed by just three “no” votes from GOP senators.

The most significant institutional constraint on Trump may be the GOP’s achingly slim majority in the House of Representatives: The party will begin 2025 with just 217 seats, compared with 241 when Trump took office in 2017. That diminished advantage may limit some of the party’s legislative goals. Still, the House GOP caucus, though smaller than in his first term, is more unconditionally loyal to him. This week’s fractious GOP fight over funding to prevent a government shutdown (and potentially extend the debt limit) shows that when House Republicans do break from Trump, they are most likely to do so from the right. That dynamic means that if any sustained pressure comes to bear on Trump from the GOP-controlled Congress, it is likely to push him toward more, not less, extreme actions.

The consolidation of Trump’s hold on the Republican Party has given him more freedom in his appointments as well. In his first term, Trump felt compelled to appoint several top aides with roots in more traditional GOP factions, particularly for national-security posts (such as James Mattis as defense secretary and John Kelly at the Department of Homeland Security). Having effectively crushed all other power centers in the GOP, Trump this time is naming loyalists up and down the government, daring Republican senators to oppose even his most extravagantly contrarian selections. The senior officials in Trump’s first term who had roots outside the MAGA movement resisted some of his most combustible ideas. Despite the influence of Susie Wiles, a more conventional GOP operative, as his White House chief of staff, Trump’s new Cabinet appointees are unlikely to push back nearly as much. The second Trump administration could be less divided than the first, but could as a result be even more divisive.

When Trump arrived in Washington in 2017, the Supreme Court was split 4–4 between Democratic- and Republican-nominated justices, after Senate Leader McConnell had refused to allow a vote the previous year for outgoing President Barack Obama’s choice to replace the conservative Antonin Scalia, who had died. Justice Anthony Kennedy—though appointed by Ronald Reagan—did not always align with the Court’s conservatives and tended to act as a swing vote.

Now Trump returns with a solid majority of six Republican-appointed justices. They already issued a ruling in their last term to make Trump virtually immune from criminal prosecution for his actions in office, removing that potential constraint. And that majority has repeatedly proved willing to override long-standing precedent to advance conservative causes and circumscribe the authority of federal regulators, assisting another Trump-team priority. Court-watchers caution that the way justices rule on any given case is not always predictable, but few legal experts expect this majority to obstruct many of Trump’s plans.

Other sources of possible restraint on Trump have visibly weakened. Many prominent business leaders who largely kept their distance from him after his first victory have made pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, as Trump triumphantly noted at his press conference this week. Major mainstream media outlets may have less appetite for aggressive oversight of this Trump administration than they did for the first one. Late in the campaign, the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post killed editorials endorsing Trump’s Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. More recently, ABC News settled a Trump defamation case that many legal analysts considered flimsy.

Even elected Democrats have been more muted. Last time, Democrats were pressed into full-scale opposition by an energized resistance movement that began with the huge women’s march against Trump the day after he took office and rarely slackened over his first four years. This year, after Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three tries, the liberal grass roots appear numbed and uncertain how to respond. Congressional Democrats in turn have mostly kept their heads down and spoken out relatively little, even about Trump’s most provocative Cabinet nominations. Likewise, Democrats—including Biden himself and leaders in the Capitol—have mostly stayed in the background while Republicans have torn themselves apart over a failed deal to prevent a government shutdown.

“I don’t think it’s uncertainty [about how to respond to Trump’s victory], so much as a belief that the activist resistance opposition to Trump was misguided, and that it created an activist agenda that created problems for the party,” Stanley B. Greenberg, the longtime Democratic pollster, told me. Behind the relative quiescence is “a determination that elected officials [rather than activists] should get back in charge of figuring out the direction of the party.”

One reason Democrats haven’t focused more fire yet on Trump, Greenberg said, is that many of them recognize how much work they face to repair their own party’s image after an election showing that many voters considered it more focused on niche social and cultural issues than the economic fortunes of ordinary families. Elected Democrats are conscious of a need to express “respect for the working-class vote that he won,” Greenberg said. “A majority of this country is working-class: He won them … It is a different starting point.”

[Jonathan Chait: How liberal America came to its senses]

Republicans’ coming choices about how far and fast Trump should move in this more favorable climate echoes the defining internal GOP debate of the early 1980s. During Reagan’s first term, movement conservatives were repeatedly frustrated that moderate White House advisers, led by Chief of Staff James A. Baker III and the image guru Michael Deaver, steered the president toward incremental rather than revolutionary change. Those disaffected conservatives rallied behind a four-word mantra: “Let Reagan be Reagan.”

The course set by Baker and Deaver prioritized deal-making on the biggest issues with Democrats at home and Soviet leaders abroad; more ideological flourishes on secondary fronts came only intermittently. By nourishing the base and reassuring the center at the same time, Baker and Deaver guided Reagan through a successful first term and toward, in 1984, a landslide reelection. But conservative insurgents, led by an impatient young House backbencher named Newt Gingrich, bristled because Reagan did not pursue more sweeping change or try harder to polarize the electorate against liberals and Democrats.

This time, the hard-liners in the GOP do not plan on being frustrated. Prominent MAGA acolytes such as the designated White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, and Trump’s cheerleader in chief, Stephen Bannon, are updating the cry of conservatives a generation ago to “Let Trump be Trump.” With the guardrails so weakened, they see a generational chance to remake American life.

That expansive vision of radical change could quickly lead to a backlash. Blanket pardons for January 6 rioters, restricting access to abortion medication, deporting long-residing undocumented immigrants without any criminal record—possibly along with their U.S.-citizen children—are all policies that poll poorly. If Trump’s health appointees, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice as secretary of Health and Human Services, undermine school vaccine compliance in a way that triggers outbreaks of childhood diseases, the outrage could be intense. “If we have a resurgence of measles epidemics, a resurgence of polio, a resurgence of tooth decay, that’s going to have a whale of an impact on people,” the Republican pollster Whit Ayres told me. (Ayres believes that Republican senators would actually do Trump a favor if they reject such nominees as RFK Jr. “who are going to do nothing but create problems for him over the next four years.”)

Any such controversies could chip away at Trump’s public support. But just as during the campaign, Trump’s political standing in office will likely be determined mostly by voters’ assessment of his impact on the economy and their personal finances. The exit polls conducted by Edison Research and the AP VoteCast survey both made clear that many voters who harbored doubts about Trump’s character or agenda voted for him anyway because they thought he would be better for their pocketbook.

If that pattern holds, many voters may look past actions they dislike, as long as they believe that Trump is delivering them greater economic stability. “Voters will forgive a lot if the country is doing well,” Davis told me. Greenberg and some other Democratic strategists concur. That explains why some Democrats are urging the party to pull back from their approach during Trump’s first term—generalized resistance on many fronts—and concentrate on making him accountable for one big thing. They want the party to highlight the contradictions that will surely emerge between Trump’s pledge of widely shared prosperity and a policy agenda that could reignite inflation while benefiting principally the wealthiest individuals and big corporations.

“I know Elon Musk is interesting, but these voters who broke for Trump were not looking for the oligarchs to take charge, and they are,” Greenberg said.

The conundrum facing Democrats is that their chances in the 2026 and 2028 elections will likely rise the more Trump advances a maximalist MAGA agenda—but so will the damage he inflicts on a wide array of causes and constituencies that Democrats prize, not to mention the erosion he may cause to the rule of law and small-d democratic institutions.

“The very crass political answer is: Democrats benefit” in the long run from Trump’s stronger position “because Trump always goes too far when he is uninhibited,” Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, told me. “However, he is going to break things that are very hard to fix. And he is going to hurt people who are very vulnerable—whom my fellow Democrats and I are in this business to protect. So we can’t root for that.”

But with Republicans holding both congressional chambers and GOP-nominated justices controlling the Supreme Court, the uncomfortable reality is that what Democrats prefer doesn’t count for much. “I think in official Washington,” Bennett told me, “there’s a deep understanding of how few levers Democrats have to stop Trump.”

Trump Is About to Betray His Rural Supporters

2024-12-13T07:52:00-05:00

Updated at 8:25 a.m. ET on December 17, 2024

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Donald Trump’s support in rural America appears to have virtually no ceiling. In last month’s election, Trump won country communities by even larger margins than he did in his 2020 and 2016 presidential runs. But several core second-term policies that Trump and the Republican Congress have championed could disproportionately harm those places.

Agricultural producers could face worse losses than any other economic sector from Trump’s plans to impose sweeping tariffs on imports and to undertake what he frequently has called “the largest domestic deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants “in American history.” Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face the greatest strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand “school choice” by providing parents with vouchers to send their kids to private schools.

Resistance to such measures in deep-red rural areas could represent one of the few obstacles Trump would face from a GOP-controlled Congress over implementing his agenda. Still, the most likely scenario is that elected Republicans who represent rural areas will ultimately fall in line with Trump’s blueprint. If so, the effects will test whether anything can loosen the GOP’s grip on small-town America during the Trump era, or whether the fervor of his rural supporters provides Trump nearly unlimited leeway to work against their economic interests without paying any political price.

“I don’t think [the Trump agenda] is going to lead to a dramatic reversal of these partisan shifts, because the truth is that the disdain for the Democratic Party is decades in the making and deep in rural America,” Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College and the author of the 2023 book The Rural Voter, told me. But if Trump acts on the policies he campaigned on, Jacobs added, “it’s hard to imagine that rural [places] will not suffer and will not hurt, and it’s hard to imagine that rural will not respond.”

[Read: Let us now praise undecided voters]

Trump’s support in rural places reached imposing proportions in last month’s election, with gains even in heavily Latino rural counties in the Southwest and some Black rural areas in the Southeast. The nonpartisan Center for Rural Strategies has developed a six-category classification system that segments the nation’s roughly 3,100 counties from the most urban to the most rural. The center found that in the second most-rural grouping, small metropolitan areas, Trump won 60 percent of the vote compared with Vice President Kamala Harris’s 40 percent. In the top most-rural category, nonmetropolitan areas, Trump beat Harris even more resoundingly, by 69 percent to 31 percent.

Trump’s vote share in the nonmetro areas exceeded even his commanding 66 percent there against Joe Biden in 2020 and 67 percent against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump’s advantage in the small metros outstripped his margin over Biden and equaled his advantage over Clinton.

Across his three runs for the White House, Trump gained considerably more support in the most-rural counties than in the nation’s more populous communities. Although he ran no better in the most-urban counties than did the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, Trump roughly doubled the GOP margin in nonmetro areas from 20 points in 2012 to nearly 40 this year. In the small metros, Trump’s 20-point lead in 2024 represented a significant increase over Romney’s 12-point advantage.

Congressional elections have largely followed the same trajectory. Once, rural areas were the political base for economically moderate, culturally conservative “blue dog” Democrats in the House, but since the GOP sweep in the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans have hunted the blue dogs to virtual extinction. Maps of party control of House seats now show the countryside solidly red in almost every state. Barring a few exceptions in New England, the states where rural residents compose the largest share of the population preponderantly elect Republicans to the Senate as well.

As Jacobs noted, the GOP advances in small-town America feed on these communities’ deep sense of being left behind in a changing America. Trump, as a thrice-married New Yorker who has lived much of his life in a Fifth Avenue penthouse, has always seemed an unlikely tribune for rural voters, yet his connection with them is visceral. After years of seemingly inexorable decline in more remote communities, Jacobs believes, rural residents are especially responsive to Trump’s attacks on “elites” and his promises to upend the system. “I think rural people are rejecting the idea that the devil we know is worse than the devil Trump may bring,” Jacobs told me.

Despite the appeal of Trump’s promise of “retribution” against the forces these people believe have held them back, the change he’s offering in the specifics of his second-term agenda may strain those ties. The potential conflicts begin with Trump’s plans for trade. Agricultural producers faced the most turmoil from the tariffs that Trump in his first term slapped on numerous trading partners, including China, the European Union, Mexico, and Canada. Trump bought peace with farm interests by disbursing more than $60 billion in payments to producers to compensate for the markets they lost when China and other countries imposed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products such as soybeans, corn, and pork. Those payments consumed nearly all of the revenue that Trump’s tariffs raised, according to an analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Trump’s payments to farmers preempted any large-scale rural revolt during his first term. But they nonetheless imposed long-term costs on agricultural producers.

The bruising trade conflicts of Trump’s first term encouraged foreign purchasers of American farm products to diversify their supply in order to be less vulnerable to future trade disruptions, Sandro Steinbach, the director of the Center for Agricultural Policy and Trade Studies at North Dakota State University, told me. As a result of Trump’s trade conflicts, Steinbach said, the United States lost share in those markets and never recovered it. In 2016, for example, the U.S. sold nearly as many soybeans to China as Brazil did; now Brazil controls three times as much of the Chinese market. “China is demanding more commodities” but is buying them from other suppliers, Steinbach said, “and that means we left a lot of money on the table.”

All of these disruptions came from Trump’s relatively targeted first-term tariffs on imports. He’s now threatening much more sweeping levies, including a 10 percent tariff on all imports, rising to 60 percent on those from China and 25 percent for goods from Mexico and Canada. Steinbach believes farmers will “very likely” now face even greater retaliatory trade barriers against their produce than they did in Trump’s first term. “The worst-case scenarios are really bad,” he told me.

Farm lobbies are welcoming Trump’s pledge to slash environmental regulations and hoping that he can deliver on his promise to cut energy costs. But his determination to carry out the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants will create another challenge for farmers. Agriculture relies on those workers as much as any other industry: Varying estimates put the proportion of farm laborers who are undocumented at one-sixth to nearly a quarter; they also make up large workforce shares in other industries along the food chain, such as meatpacking.

Removing a significant share of those workers through deportation, Steinbach said, would further erode the international competitiveness of American farmers by raising their labor costs and thus the price of their products. Eliminating undocumented workers would also put upward pressure on domestic food prices—after an election that, as Trump himself noted, he won largely because of the price of groceries—and would also weaken rural economies by removing those workers’ buying power.

“It is a stretch to think that if you start deporting undocumented labor, rural people who are hanging out in town are going to step in and fill those jobs, or people are going to move back to the countryside,” Jacobs told me. “There is very little evidence to suggest the labor market would self-correct in that direction.”

A recent attempt to model how Trump’s tariff and mass-deportation plans would affect agricultural producers found a devastating combined impact. In a scenario where Trump both imposes the tariffs he’s threatened and succeeds at deporting a large number of immigrants, the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics has forecast that by 2028, agricultural exports could fall by nearly half and total agricultural output would decline by a sixth. Mass deportation, the institute projected, would reduce the workforce for agricultural production more than for any other economic sector. This forecast underscores Steinbach’s astringent assessment: “Any of those policies will be pretty painful in the short run for rural America.”

[Read: Tariffs once tore the GOP apart—and may be doing so again]

Equally painful for rural America could be Trump and congressional Republicans’ agenda for health care. Big cuts in federal spending on Medicaid and subsidies for the uninsured to buy coverage under the Affordable Care Act were central to the Trump-backed plan that House Republicans passed in 2017 to repeal the ACA. Trump’s administration later backed a Senate Republican proposal to convert Medicaid into a block grant and significantly cut its funding.

Retrenching federal spending on Medicaid and the ACA remains a priority for congressional Republicans. Trump has consistently excluded Medicaid when he’s pledged not to seek cuts in the other biggest federal safety-net programs, Social Security and Medicare. The Republican Study Committee, a prominent organization of House conservatives, called in its latest proposed budget for converting Medicaid and ACA subsidies into block grants to states and then cutting them by $4.5 trillion over the next decade, more than four times the scale of cuts passed by the House in its 2017 bill.

“At the level of cuts some of these groups are talking about, we are not looking at making things more efficient,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan KFF think tank, told me. “We are looking at cutting tens of millions of people off from coverage.”

Rural places would be especially vulnerable to cuts anywhere near the level that Republicans are discussing. Rural residents tend to be older and poorer, and face more chronic health problems. Rural employers are less likely to offer health insurance, which means that Medicaid provides coverage for a larger share of working-age adults in small towns: Multiple studies have found that about a fifth of rural residents rely on Medicaid, compared with less than a sixth in urban areas. Nearly half of all children in rural areas receive health coverage through the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program launched during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Medicaid is especially important in confronting two health-care challenges particularly acute in rural communities. One is the opioid epidemic. In a KFF poll last year, more than 40 percent of rural residents said that they or someone in their family had been addicted to opioids, a far higher proportion than in urban or suburban communities.

Medicaid has become the foundation of the public-health response to that challenge. One recent study found that Medicaid provides treatment for about 1.5 million opioid users every year. Particularly important in that effort has been the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid to cover more working-poor adults who are just above the poverty level. Hundreds of thousands of people are receiving opioid-addiction treatment under Medicaid in heartland states that Trump won, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. In all of those states, a majority of people receiving care are covered through the Medicaid expansion, the center-left Urban Institute has calculated. “A lot of effort has gone into beefing up the community-based resources for mental health and substance abuse, and Medicaid has been the linchpin in the financing for that,” Cindy Mann, a health-care attorney who oversaw the Medicaid program during Barack Obama’s administration, told me.

One of the options most discussed among Republicans for reducing Medicaid spending has been to eliminate the extra federal money (the so-called enhanced match) that Washington has offered states to cover more of the working poor under the ACA. If that money is withdrawn, states would face enormous fiscal pressure to reduce such coverage. That would directly undercut the financing that Medicaid has provided for responding to the opioid epidemic, something that Trump has pledged to prioritize.

Medicaid is also a linchpin in the struggle to preserve rural hospitals. These face much more financial stress than medical facilities in more populous areas. Mann says that over the past two decades, 190 rural hospitals have closed or converted to other purposes, and nearly a third of the remaining facilities show signs of financial difficulty.

Private insurance, Mann notes, doesn’t provide as much revenue for rural hospitals as it does for urban ones, because fewer rural residents have such coverage to begin with; even for those who do, rural providers lack the economic leverage to demand reimbursement rates that are as high as private insurers provide to urban hospitals. That situation makes Medicaid a crucial lifeline for rural hospitals. “With large cuts to federal health spending, it would be very hard for rural health-care providers to simply survive,” said the KFF’s Levitt. “In many cases, rural hospitals are hanging by a thread already, and it wouldn’t take much to push them over the edge.”

[Read: The education deserts of rural America]

In the same way that rural hospitals are especially vulnerable to Trump’s health-care agenda, his education plans could threaten another pillar of small-town life: public schools. Trump has repeatedly promised to pursue a nationwide federal voucher system that would provide parents with public funds to send their children to private schools.

In numerous state ballot initiatives over recent years, rural residents have voted against proposals to create a school-voucher system. That record continued last month when rural areas again mostly voted against voucher systems in ballot initiatives in Nebraska and Kentucky. (In Colorado, rural areas split about evenly on a similar proposition.)

Kelsey Coots, who managed the campaign against the Kentucky voucher initiative, told me that the proposal was rejected even in culturally conservative rural counties “because everyone in the community is connected to the school.” Small-town residents, she said, recognized that rural public schools already facing financial strain from stagnant or shrinking enrollments have little cushion if vouchers drain more of their funding. Regardless of how receptive conservative rural voters might be to Republican attacks on “woke” educators, Coots noted, “if you ask them about their public school or their neighborhood school, they like it, because they know what the public school means for their community.”

Throughout three elections, Trump’s messaging—particularly his hostility to racial and cultural change—has resonated strongly in rural communities. His second term may test whether that deep reservoir of ideological support can survive policies that threaten the material interests of rural America in so many ways.

This article originally misnamed a nonpartisan pro-rural-community group as the Center for Rural Studies. In fact, it is the Center for Rural Strategies.

Why They Lost

2024-12-02T07:50:00-05:00

In the past few days, four of the senior officials who directed Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign spoke with me about how the race unfolded, from the chaotic first weeks after President Joe Biden’s sudden withdrawal until the final hours of Election Day. My conversations with Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair; David Plouffe, the former Barack Obama campaign manager enlisted as a senior adviser; Quentin Fulks, the principal deputy campaign manager with responsibility for broadcast advertising; and Rob Flaherty, a deputy campaign manager in charge of digital operations and advertising, offered a view into their decision making through every stage of the campaign.

In these interviews, and another one that these principals conducted recently with alumni of the Obama campaigns on the podcast Pod Save America, the senior Harris-campaign leadership was notably unremorseful about the choices it made in Harris’s failed sprint to the White House. Instead, the officials stressed the welter of difficult decisions that rapidly engulfed them from the moment Biden stepped aside. No president in modern times had withdrawn from the race so close to Election Day. Immediately, Harris had to formally secure the Democratic nomination, put her own stamp on the Biden campaign operation, introduce herself to voters, and begin the process of digging out from the deficit in the polls that Biden left after his disastrous June debate performance against Donald Trump.

“Our first week, it was like, Well, we need a biography ad; we need to talk about the border; we need to lay out an economic contrast; we need to get health care in there, abortion,” Plouffe told me. “If you have six, seven, eight months, you storyboard all this stuff, you have a narrative arc. Everything was smashed and collided here.”

The analysis of the race from Harris’s senior team won’t satisfy the shell-shocked Democratic critics who believe that the campaign’s tactical choices and the vice president’s occasional missteps as a candidate contributed materially to her defeat. They described what critics consider her most obvious blunders as largely irrelevant to the outcome.

[Franklin Foer: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

Some on the left believe that Harris depressed turnout among the party’s core voters by emphasizing her support from anti-Trump Republicans such as former Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Some in the center believe she erred by not renouncing more forcefully the progressive positions she’d adopted during her ill-fated 2020 primary run. Others wonder how her campaign could raise more than $1 billion and still end up losing and in debt. Across the party, the most commonly held criticism has been that Harris should have done more to separate herself from Biden.

Against those complaints, her campaign leadership argued that no matter the tactics or the messages they tried, Harris could never fully escape the vortex of voter discontent with the economy, the country’s overall direction, and Biden’s performance as president. Even as voters remained disenchanted on all those fronts—arguably, because they remained so disenchanted—retrospective assessments of Trump’s first term were rising, to a point where, in the VoteCast survey conducted by the AP and NORC, a 52 percent majority approved of his performance. Only 42 percent of voters approved of Biden’s.

“When I would recite the headwinds [to the campaign staff], they were: right track/wrong track, presidential approval, candidate part of the administration—although I think a lot of voters were willing to give her some room about how she’d be different—and approval of Trump’s first term,” Plouffe told me. “Those are historically ferocious headwinds.”

And in fact, for all the focus on what Harris, Trump, and their teams did or did not do, in the history of modern polling, every time an incumbent president has faced comparable headwinds of discontent, the opposition party has won the White House—just as Trump did last month.

Trump was anything but a normal candidate. As the 2024 race proceeded, however, evidently most voters were treating him as if he were one. Despite all of the controversy constantly swirling around Trump, the usual hydraulics of America’s two-party system reasserted themselves: Voters who had lost faith in a president of one party preponderantly voted for the presidential nominee of the other party. In the history of modern polling, every time a president has been about as unpopular as Biden was, either he has lost reelection (Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1992, Trump himself in 2020) or his party has lost the White House if the incumbent himself could not or did not run again (Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008). Against that history, the most shocking thing about the outcome, paradoxically, was how normal it was.

The predominant view among Democrats has been that Harris generally played well the very poor hand Biden bequeathed her with fewer than four months until Election Day. Harris was a much steadier, engaging, even inspiring public presence than she had been in her 2020 presidential campaign (when she withdrew from the primary race before a single vote was cast) or during her first years as vice president. Since emerging as the administration’s principal voice contesting the rollback of abortion rights and other liberties by red states during Biden’s term, she had developed more confidence as a speaker, and it showed on the campaign trail. By any reasonable measure, Harris aced the biggest moments of the race: her convention speech, the September presidential debate, her closing address at the Washington Ellipse.

But mistakes were made. At times, Harris seemed overly cautious and bound too tightly to talking points, especially in her early media interviews. An almost uniform consensus among Democrats determined that her lowest moment was an answer on ABC’s The View, when she said she could not think of anything she would have done differently from Biden over the past four years. In my interviews, the Harris advisers were more defensive and vague about that moment than on any other point. “It’s hard for me to put myself in the vice president’s mindset,” Fulks said. “But it is hard to differentiate yourself from an administration that you’re part of.”

Harris’s lame response was a misstep that Republicans immediately converted into negative advertising. Even so, the argument that this mistake had a material impact on a race driven by such fundamental forces of discontent with the incumbent president is hard to sustain. That reality, to me, also applies to the other chief criticisms of Harris and her allied super PACs—that, for instance, they did not spend enough money on advertising to remind voters about everything people had disliked about Trump’s presidency.

I’m inclined to agree with that critique, but merely pounding harder at Trump’s vulnerabilities seems unlikely to have overcome voters’ underlying discontent with the status quo. As I’ve written previously, it was not as if voters were unaware of Trump’s flaws. In the exit polls and the VoteCast survey, the two principal sources available so far on voters’ decision making, a majority of voters agreed that Trump was too extreme and would steer the U.S. toward authoritarianism. Yet a decisive slice of voters who held those negative views about Trump voted for him anyway, so strong was their desire for change.

The Harris advisers all stressed that the view among most voters that they had been financially better off under Trump than they were under Biden created an overwhelming imperative for the campaign to persuade the electorate to look toward the potential risks of a second Trump term. “We had to take this conversation into the future and not just make it about the past,” O’Malley Dillon told me. Yet, like other campaigns in a similar situation—Carter against Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Bush against Bill Clinton in 1992—the Harris team found that it could not shift the attention of enough voters from their dissatisfaction with the present. As I wrote during the Bush-Clinton race, when voters are deeply unhappy with current conditions, they see stability as the risk.

Once voters had reached that conclusion, many of them simply did not want to hear negative information about Trump that would cause cognitive dissonance about their choice. As Jackie Payne, the founder and executive director of Galvanize Action, which studies the political attitudes of moderate white women, told me shortly before the election, many female voters who believed that Trump would improve their economic situation simply dismissed any rhetoric and proposals from him that they might find troubling. “They were choosing to believe a vision of him that was aligned with what they wanted to get out of him—a strong economy—and they were absolutely discounting anything that felt extreme as disinformation or hyperbole, even if he said he would do it,” she said.

Amid all the geographic and demographic analyses of the results, one data point stood out to me as perhaps the most revealing about the outcome. The CNN polling unit provided me with an analysis of the exit polls that looked at the voters who supported legal abortion in all or most circumstances but who also viewed the economy in negative terms (as either not so good or poor). That turned out to be a surprisingly large group: 36 percent of all voters held both those views. They were a group simultaneously drawn to each side’s strongest argument: Trump’s case that he could better manage the economy and Harris’s contention that Trump was a threat to abortion rights (as well as other freedoms and democracy itself). In the trial of strength for voters swayed by the two parties’ central claims, the analysis found that slightly more of them backed Trump than Harris.

The preference for Trump among pro-choice, economically pessimistic voters was especially pronounced among white women without a college education: Two-thirds of them with those views supported the former president, the exit poll found. And, just as in 2016, those blue-collar white women proved essential to Trump’s narrow victories in the three former Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which once again decided the outcome. Harris fell short because for too many voters—especially working-class voters living paycheck to paycheck—inflation and economic discontent, reinforced in some cases by unhappiness about immigration and crime, trumped abortion and democracy.

In a race shaped so profoundly by fundamental forces of disaffection with the country’s direction, could anything have changed the outcome? As the Democratic strategist Mike Podhorzer has argued, more voters might have ranked their hesitations about Trump higher if the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court had not blocked any chance that the former president would face a criminal trial before this election on the charges that he tried to subvert the previous one. Plouffe pointed to another what-if potentially big enough to have changed the result: Biden’s withdrawal from the race much earlier rather than only after his disastrous debate performance in June. If Biden had dropped out last winter, Plouffe argued to me, Democrats could have held a full-fledged primary that would have either produced a nominee more distant from his administration or strengthened Harris by requiring her to establish her independence. Looking back at what contributed to Trump’s victory, Plouffe said pointedly, Biden’s choice not to step aside sooner was “the cardinal sin.”

Even so, Plouffe acknowledged, “I’m not sure, given the headwinds, any Democrat could have won.” For all the difficulties that the atmosphere created for Harris, the election unquestionably raised warning signs for Democrats that extend beyond dissatisfaction with current conditions. It continued an erosion that is ominous for the party in its support among working-class nonwhite voters, particularly Latino men. And as Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager, told me, the Republican Party’s win powerfully demonstrated that it—or at least Trump himself—has built more effective mechanisms for communicating with infrequent voters, especially young men who don’t consume much conventional political news.

Those are real challenges Democrats will debate in the coming months. They will also be pondering the painful question of whether enough voters (including female voters) are willing to elect a woman president—Plouffe and his colleagues acknowledged that this had likely been another obstacle in Harris’s way. But the biggest reason behind the 2024 election result, from any angle, looks more straightforward.

In 2008, when Obama won the election to succeed an unpopular president from the other party, the exit poll found that 62 percent of voters who said they were dissatisfied with conditions in the country voted for him. In 2024, when Trump won the election to succeed an unpopular president from the other party, the exit poll found that, again, 62 percent of voters dissatisfied with conditions in the country voted for him. Even against an opponent carrying as much baggage as Trump, the Harris campaign was never able to overcome the axiomatic principle of presidential elections: When one party sinks in the public’s esteem, the other rises.

The transcript of my conversations with Harris’s team members has been edited for clarity.

Andrew Harnik / Getty

Part 1: Early stages

What was the state of the race on the day that Biden withdrew and Harris announced her candidacy?

O’Malley Dillon: We had just come through a tough period, so we were on the outer edges of some of the [polling] margins that we would want to be seeing. We definitely saw fundamental challenges with the national headwinds on the key issues, and we saw a tough battleground map. It was a harder environment than we had faced previously, even [from earlier] in the cycle.

Plouffe: When I got in, it was the first time I saw the actual numbers under the hood. They were pretty gruesome. The Sun Belt was worse than the Blue Wall, but the Blue Wall was bad. And, demographically, young voters across the board—Hispanic voters, Black voters, Asian voters—were in really terrible shape. When the [candidate] switch happened, some of that stuff got a little bit better, but nowhere near where we ended up or where we needed to be. This was a rescue mission. It was catastrophic in terms of where it was.

Fulks: At the time, we were in damage control. We definitely saw a pathway because these are battleground states, and this country is pretty evenly split down the middle. [But] there would have been considerable work to do, motivating people to turn out to vote.

What were voters’ perceptions of Harris when she entered the race?

Fulks: As crazy as it may sound to say, because she’s the vice president, we had a candidate who was relatively unknown—in her bio, where she came from, her value set, her motivation … something I like to call a “voter value proposition” of why are they voting for this person; who is this person? And can they trust them to deliver on what they say that they’re going to deliver on?

O’Malley Dillon: We knew out of the gate that there was a lack of awareness about her, a lack of an awareness about what she did as vice president, which is consistent with most vice presidents. That was a big part of our early strategy and certainly made the 107 days we had more complex than they would traditionally be.

[Read: The Democrats’ 2022 error message]

Plouffe: When she got in [the race], her favorable rating, I believe, was 35 or 36 [percent]. When you dug beneath that, there wasn’t much stickiness outside core Democrats. [Voters’ perception of her] was unformed but negative.

What were Harris’s biggest needs as she entered the race?

Fulks: The biggest imperative for her was shoring up Democratic base support—those voters among whom we saw a little less enthusiasm for President Biden. That was a metric we were really watching. Then it was really the race to define herself.

Plouffe: There’s a lot to do in a presidential campaign: biography, contrast, positive economy … We had a condensed time frame, so we weren’t going to be able to do all the things you would have liked. There was the reality of where the race stood with the electorate, and then there were some of the operational challenges we faced.

Fulks: We knew that we had an opportunity to introduce her upbringing and her accomplishments in public service outside the Biden administration. And some of that aligned [as a way to rebut] the attacks that were coming at her—such as on immigration. [We could talk about] her being a prosecutor from a border state, going after cartels, gang members. It was an easy segue into introducing her and at the same time defending her from attacks that had started before she even became the top of the ticket.

Through 2023 and 2024, voters’ retrospective assessments of Trump’s presidency were improving. What did that mean for the race?

O’Malley Dillon: There’s no doubt that we saw him carry higher numbers, and they were more durable for much of the election. And that’s why we had to ensure that we were doing everything in our power to tell the story of the vice president … while doing what we could to be clear that a second term of Donald Trump would be worse for the American people. We felt we couldn’t just do one or the other. And we spent a lot of time [talking about] Project 2025.

Plouffe: It was a massive problem. We had somebody whose approval rating for his first term was about 10 points higher than the current incumbent.

So it was mission critical to raise the stakes of a Trump second term. Why? Because people’s view of the first term was too positive; it meant he was going to win the election. That was a problem when we started this thing, and it was a problem when we ended this thing.

Trump’s retrospective approval ratings were higher in some cases than they ever were when he was president. Why do you think it was improving so much?

Plouffe: One is he was the former president; you had a current president. So people were unhappy, and that [was an] easy reference point between now versus then. Two, there’s no doubt that from a price standpoint, things were lower. Harris is good about this; she understood people’s reality, but too many Democrats would want to lecture about the GDP and unemployment rate and inflation settling down, but [voters still feel that] things are a lot more expensive.

A third piece of this, which we heard particularly with younger voters—not first-time voters but voters who are mid-20s to mid-30s—is the country was still standing. So [to] the argument that the country would end, or democracy would end, people were like, ‘Well, I don’t know. We’re still here.’”

What political considerations went into the selection of the vice-presidential nominee?

Plouffe: I think she thought that if she were to win, Tim Walz was the kind of person she’d want as a counselor. And clearly, he had had political success in the Midwest, so even though Minnesota wasn’t an important battleground, he would be an effective surrogate out there.

Given the uphill nature of the race, was there any thought of a more dramatic pick—like, say, Gretchen Whitmer to create an all-female ticket?

Plouffe: Historically, the vice-presidential selection matters very little in terms of vote. So would even [Governor] Josh Shapiro have delivered us Pennsylvania, given that we were down about 1.8 points? I don’t think so. History suggests that the only place the vice-presidential pick generally has made a difference is when you make a mistake.

As Harris settled into the race through August and September, were there any points where you considered yourself clearly ahead?

O’Malley Dillon: No, not in a durable way. We saw early on … a consolidation of our support, and we saw some key metrics start moving, including, over time, a 10-point increase in the vice president’s favorability. We were very pleased with how strong the vice president was in the debate … and we saw a bump there. But there was no point at all where data told us anything but that this was an extremely close race.

Plouffe: When we came in, Trump was at 48 percent, but Biden was in the high 30s to low 40s. Harris started there. We were getting back Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. So the movement was stuff that was easier for us to move. The tougher stuff to move is true undecideds or lean-Trump [voters], and ultimately we weren’t able to do enough of it.

Brandon Bell / Getty

Part 2: The fall election period

Why did she choose to minimize engagements with the media in the first weeks?

Fulks: I don’t say this to be defensive at all, but our priority was How do we get her into the battleground states? She [had been] traveling, but she was focused on the periphery states when she was the vice president and not the core battleground states, as President Biden was traveling to those places pretty frequently.

Why did she choose right from the outset not to challenge Trump’s plans for mass deportation?

Fulks: Our focus was on really making sure that we were protecting her flank on this. Republicans had done three years of advertising and campaigning against the vice president on immigration. We weren’t afraid to take it on: In her very first speech, she called out Trump for killing the bipartisan border deal and she promised she would bring it back. She went to the border and proposed her own plan to crack down on the flow of fentanyl and illegal crossings. We chose to focus more on the affirmative and shoring her up on the issue than the negative element of [Trump’s mass-deportation plan].

Plouffe: The economy “drove vote,” as we saw it based on our research, but the border did as well. Those were the two main headwinds. Now you see it in exit polls and polling; we saw it in our own research. We narrowed the gap on immigration a lot. But that was still a pronounced headwind.

How did the changing information environment affect your strategy?

Flaherty: We came into this election with a bunch of core assumptions. One was that this is a race that was going to be decided by low-information voters, voters who didn’t consume the news, voters who specifically made decisions to tune out politics in their life. Another [was] that we have an information environment that was defined by not just polarization but personalization, as algorithms are really dictating content selections. All of those things are factoring together to mean it’s harder than ever to reach voters and that the campaign is going to have to be in as many places as possible.

Was the assumption that it was going to be a race decided by low-information voters because presidential races involve a bigger electorate that includes those people? Or was there something about running against Trump that made that even more the case?

Flaherty: It’s a gumbo of the changing dynamics of the media environment since 2020, the nature of running against Donald Trump—who is the absolute best at generating attention for himself—and the fact that a lot of voters only show up in presidential elections. And those voters tend to be less civic-minded; they’ve got jobs, they’ve got better stuff to do than pay attention to politics. For all of those reasons, this was going to be a How do you reach people who don’t want to be reached? election.

How did your ability to reach those voters change when Harris replaced Biden?

Flaherty: The enormous groundswell of enthusiasm for the vice president gave people air cover to go out and talk to their friends and talk to their family, and post for themselves and curate themselves. It also gave air cover to creators and podcasters who didn’t want to get involved with politics before. In all of those corners, it made people start paying attention to the election earlier and made it cooler to engage with us.

[Listen: A former Republican strategist on why Harris lost]

We did literally dozens of interviews and short engagements with influencers and content creators. We had content creators in the actual program of our convention. This was a huge part of our strategy all the way through the end. But [the Trump campaign was] laser-focused on one audience: young men. We were focused all over the board on people we needed to consolidate. That was always a challenge.

After the debate, had you moved ahead in the race?

Plouffe: No. There might have been one run of internal analytics that had us up in all three Blue Wall states, but it was by a point. This notion that we had a lead post-debate that we squandered—we never saw that internally.

The Trump campaign and allied super PACs pounded Harris with negative advertising in the swing states, including one memorable ad that attacked her position on transition surgery for transgender inmates. Some of the most pointed second-guessing that the Harris campaign faced was frustration that it did not respond directly to that ad. But Harris’s advisers insisted that a direct response was not the best way to handle those attacks.

Fulks: [The impact of those ads] is probably not as much as people think. The trans issue ranked very low. All of our data, both quantitative and qualitative, said that voters wanted to hear about immigration, the economy, and crime. The [Trump team] really closed this campaign on the economy and immigration.

Flaherty: We tested all of these things, and what we found was that [ads] that specifically rebutted the attack [were less effective] than her just talking about the economy. The trans thing was one plank that sat under a broader argument that she [was too] liberal, and that was damaging, certainly. We worked to counter that with the Liz Cheney events and the videos of Republican people who worked for Trump saying You can’t vote for him; he’s dangerous.

Harris’s appearances with Cheney had some left-leaning activists complaining that they diluted Democratic enthusiasm. How do you respond to that?

O’Malley Dillon: We believe that the coalition to beat Trump requires moderate Republicans, independents, and Democrats of all stripes. It was the strength of her leadership that all of those people could see themselves in this campaign and in her candidacy.

Plouffe: We did it for two reasons: One was to create a permission structure for the type of voters we thought we needed to get to 50 percent in some of these states. Second, it was also a permission structure for the broader electorate. Having all these Republicans out there for us also helped inoculate us—and we saw this in our research—to some of the attacks that she’s a crazy California liberal.

Was support for legal abortion less of a factor in 2024 than it was in 2022, in the first election after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade?

O’Malley Dillon: In ’22, Dobbs was very fresh, and women leaned toward reproductive freedom as a driving force; we saw less of that this time.

Plouffe: I think abortion was still a critical part of why the race was so close despite the negative atmosphere, and [was] what fueled a lot of the activism and financial contributions. But there are going to be some voters who are pro-choice, who care about it, but if they’re pressed economically, they may decide to vote more on prices than on concern about a national abortion ban.

Harris campaigned in all seven of the swing states right up until the end, including some that Trump ended up winning decisively, such as Arizona and North Carolina. Did the campaign really feel it could win all of them, or was it trying to project strength by continuing to appear in them?

O’Malley Dillon: We were very clear and very public that we saw the Blue Wall as the most straightforward path to 270, and we never deviated from that vision. At the same time, we were also very clear that while the Sun Belt was a more challenging path, it was still within the margin. We definitely thought they were in play, but we also never lost sight of the Blue Wall being the most straightforward path.

Fulks: When you’re in the last week or two of the campaign, if you’re still seeing a margin-of-error race, pulling out of one of those states could be a huge mistake. You don’t keep a wide map [open] just to close it with a week left.

In the final week of the campaign, Trump seemed to be stepping on land mines every day, starting with his chaotic rally at Madison Square Garden. Yet exit polls found that most voters who said they decided in that final week broke for Trump. What was your read on that?

Plouffe: We’d talk about [how] he’s reminding people about some of the things they don’t like about him; she’s closing well, maybe that means the people who break late will break more in our direction and maybe it’ll hurt him on turnout. But what overwhelmed that was just people’s unhappiness with the current situation and wanting change.

So how, finally, did the race look to you on Election Day?

O’Malley Dillon: We came in ahead in our data in Michigan and Wisconsin, and tied in Pennsylvania; we had seen growth week after week on our direct-voter contact. Our atmospherics were quite strong. That doesn’t make an election victory, but [given] the metrics we were looking at, we felt positioned to win a very, very close race.

Plouffe: Very early, I got up and went to the Lincoln Memorial and spent a little time with Lincoln, and I just said, ‘God, I hope there’s a miracle here.’ So I was hopeful but not super-optimistic.

Fulks: The undecideds that we felt would break for us ultimately broke for Trump. And that is what did it. But you don’t know that until the polls are closing and numbers are being reported.

Andrew Harnik / Getty

Part 3: The result and its aftermath

Since the election, many Democrats have focused on the fact that Trump won, by last count, about 2.8 million more votes than he did in 2020 while Harris polled about 6.7 million fewer than Biden. Did Harris fall short in the battleground states because Trump won more votes than you expected or because Harris won fewer?

Fulks: For me, it’s about the votes we didn’t get [rather than] Trump getting so many more. Those undecided voters who make or break elections all the time—they just broke in Trump’s favor.

Plouffe: I will confess to you the headwinds outside those [battlegrounds] surprised me a bit—New Jersey moving double digits, Connecticut moving double digits. The blue-state shifts are hard to get your arms around, because that’s a big shift in four years.

While the Harris team was defensive about the question of whether she should have done more to separate from Biden, it was united in agreeing that the results signaled long-term challenges for the Democratic Party, even if it rejected the assertion from Trump and his allies that his national-popular-vote margin of about 1.6 percentage points constituted a fundamental realignment favoring the GOP.

Plouffe: I don’t think this is a permanent realignment, but we have seen, over a number of elections, some movement. And the math is the math: There are a lot more noncollege voters than there are college [voters] in most states. The math doesn’t work for the Democrats to win national elections, particularly in higher-turnout elections, if you lose much more of the noncollege vote, whether it be white, Black, brown, or Asian.

O’Malley Dillon: It is clear we’re going to need to do the work to reach [some voter segments]. No doubt, a lot of this country is anti-establishment and doesn’t subscribe to political information or traditional media. How do we reach those voters?

Plouffe: I would put the economy at the top of the reasons [for the decline with nonwhite voters]: people feeling their paycheck wasn’t going as far as they’d like. But there is a cultural thing, a sense that Trump [is] not talking like a politician, not being politically correct all the time. That appeals to some of these voters. Some of the most successful Democratic politicians of the past half century—Clinton or Obama—they can communicate with people in a way that is not condescending, that seems connected to their lives.

How much did Harris’s race or gender affect the outcome? Can a woman win the presidency in today’s America?

Plouffe: I’m really eager for political scientists and researchers to try to get an answer to this, because we certainly picked up some headwinds. Maybe statistically this will be disproven, but I think, given the ’16 experience and this experience, it’s probably a bigger burden to be elected president running as a woman than as a person of color.

I think America is ready to elect a woman president. Running for president and winning is an indescribably hard obstacle course. This throws another obstacle into the field. And that makes me incredibly sad to say that.

This year marked a clear turning point as both campaigns shifted their attention from mainstream outlets to niche media sources aimed at more narrow segments of the electorate. How did these new dynamics shape the campaign, and what do they mean for elections going forward?

Fulks: Republicans have a very good echo chamber regarding how they get their information out. Democrats will need to loosen up and take advantage of a changing media environment.

Flaherty: Trump did 30 podcasts to one audience. We did podcasts to a bunch of different audiences, which meant we never really got that frequency. The other lesson is that the nature of attention is fleeting, particularly in this media ecosystem. That is one of the things we struggled with. We were an attention machine for the first four weeks, then it was an open [competition] for attention—and that’s a cage fight with a guy whose entire life has been about getting attention for himself.

We clean up with the most politically engaged people. For folks who don’t have time to engage in politics, or folks who are just receiving a little bit of information here and there, usually from friends and family, the information environment is much more difficult, much more competitive, and much more tied to culture. If we Democrats want to win, particularly nationally, that’s the space that we’ve got to figure out, and quick.

Plouffe: If you had said two years ago Harris will be the nominee and she’ll do as well with seniors as she did, you might have said no. The reason is [that] those tend to be larger consumers of information. They also tended to be the voters who understood the stakes of the second Trump term more. The threat, whether it was abortion or democracy or rule of law, mattered more to them than younger parts of the electorate.

Do Republicans have a systematic advantage in reaching lower-propensity voters?

Flaherty: There’s the conservative ecosystem, which is Fox, Ben Shapiro, [Sean] Hannity, Newsmax—all these folks that are politically and ideologically aligned with Donald Trump and the work of electing conservatives. They built and cultivated that ecosystem. They also built and cultivated an ecosystem that was less political but more cultural. You can call it the “manosphere,” but I don’t think the manosphere is inherently partisan. Joe Rogan talked about politics, but that’s not his whole thing. That was an audience that [Republicans] viewed as key to mobilizing, and so they did a lot of work to migrate information, values, and Trump himself between the conservative ecosystem and this culturally aligned ecosystem.

There’s just not an analogous system on the left. It doesn’t exist because our voters don’t have the same demand signal for alternative media to the mainstream press. There just isn’t the same kind of profit incentive for alternative media.

Does the election signal a lasting electoral advantage for Trump-style conservative populism over the Democratic Party?

Flaherty: It does seem to me this particular version of conservatism has a cultural cachet among young people. I don’t think that’s an immutable fact. But I do think the nexus of Trump-style conservatism and culture is a thing that Democrats, progressives, folks on the left are going to have to grapple with.

[Caitlin Flanagan: The Democrats’ billionaire mistake]

O’Malley Dillon: I push against some estimation of this race being a great realignment. This is an anomaly race—because of Trump, and because of a 107-day campaign. The picture about working-class voters in America is pretty nuanced: We definitely saw declines there, but with the white working class we actually saw stability, and we saw increases with seniors.

Plouffe: If you look at the last four elections, there has been a drift [toward Republicans among non-college-educated voters of all races]. You have to arrest their gains, and we’ve got to begin to gain back. I think that’s possible, because we live in an era in which, because of economic inequality, generally there’s economic dissatisfaction. Incumbent parties are falling all over the globe, and then—what has also happened—whoever replaces them becomes unpopular pretty quickly.

I’m not sure, given the headwinds, any Democrat could have won. But if we had a primary in which a bunch of people ran and auditioned … through that process, whoever emerged … would have been a more fully formed person, would have had more time to mount a general election campaign. [Not having that process] is the cardinal sin.

The Democrats’ 2022 Error Message

2024-11-14T16:30:00-05:00

In 2022, Democrats defied the political history of poor midterm-election results for the party holding the White House by running expectedly well in the seven key swing states—most crucially, the former “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—despite pervasive dissatisfaction with the economy and President Joe Biden’s performance. That success, ironically, may have helped seal the party’s fate in the 2024 election.

Two years ago, the Democrats succeeded in quarantining the swing states and won most of the key governor and Senate races within them, even as the powerful nationwide current of dissatisfaction with Biden and the economy moved virtually every other state, red or blue, toward the GOP. If the midterms had gone as badly as many analysts initially forecast—with predictions of a towering “red wave” of Republican gains—Biden likely would have faced greater pressure to renounce running for a second term long before his disastrous debate performance in June. That might have forced him from the race much sooner, allowing a full-scale primary to take place, which would have either yielded a nominee unconnected to the administration or helped Vice President Kamala Harris establish an identity independent of Biden.

By the same token, their strong 2022 result also left Democrats too confident that former President Donald Trump had become unacceptable to voters. The decisive defeats of handpicked Trump candidates such as Kari Lake, Mehmet Oz, Herschel Walker, and Doug Mastriano across swing-state governor and Senate races encouraged a complacency among Democrats about the degree to which voters had rejected the former president himself. That overconfidence contributed to Democrats reacting too slowly as voters’ retrospective approval rating of Trump’s performance in office started rising through 2023. By Election Day 2024, a majority of voters in the VoteCast survey conducted by NORC said that they approved of Trump’s presidency, a level of support he famously never reached in office.

As a result, the persistent discontent with the country’s direction overwhelmed the Democratic defenses in the Blue Wall and the other four swing states—North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. That allowed Trump to sweep them all, propelling him back to the White House.

[Mike Pesca: The HR-ification of the Democratic Party]

Before the 2022 election, the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg was one of the few operatives in either party predicting that Democrats would avoid the supposed “red wave.” Rosenberg believed that Democrats would lose ground outside the states where the two sides were spending heavily in 2022. But, he argued, inside the states where Democrats were concentrating their organizing and advertising, they could neutralize the effect of conservative media and win elections by shifting voters’ attention to issues more congenial to the Democratic Party: abortion rights, democracy, and the extremism of Trump’s allies.

Rosenberg was thus an early exponent of the “two elections” theory, which held that the electoral environment inside the swing states could be isolated from the conditions that would determine voters’ choice beyond them. Mike Podhorzer, a former political director for the AFL-CIO, was another advocate of the theory—and the two influential Democratic strategists seemed validated by the 2022 results. With most voters disapproving of Biden’s job performance, and with three-quarters of them describing the economy as “not so good” or “poor” in 2022 exit polls, the national environment did tilt to the right. Indeed, Republicans won the national popular vote in races for the House of Representatives by 2.6 percentage points, a 5.6-point swing from the Democrats’ margin in 2020.

Despite that national current, Democrats did win governor’s races in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, as well as Senate contests in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania that allowed them to maintain control of the upper chamber. (The only blemishes were Republican wins in the Nevada and Georgia governor’s races, and Senate races in Wisconsin and North Carolina.) Wins in a number of white-collar suburban House districts also kept GOP gains in that chamber far below expectations.

“The big lesson for us here is that when we run full fledged national campaigns we can control the information environment, and stay in control of our own destiny in the most important battlegrounds in the country,” Rosenberg wrote shortly after the 2022 election.

The 2024 election replicated the general rightward tilt, with most voters again disapproving of Biden and expressing negative views about the economy. As of Wednesday, Trump has improved from 2020 by about 6.6 percentage points in the national popular vote (from a deficit of 4.5 points to a lead of roughly 2.1 points); when all of the votes are counted (notably including California’s), Trump’s gain is expected to be about 5.8 points, a swing almost identical to the GOP’s improvement in the House popular vote from 2020 to 2022. And as in 2022, in the places where the parties were not heavily spending, that overall national shift widened the GOP lead in red states and narrowed the Democratic advantage in blue states.

This time, though, Harris could not hold the swing states where Democrats won so many races two years ago. Harris ran somewhat better in most of the seven key swing states than she did nationally, but not nearly to the degree that the party did in 2022, nor well enough to carry any of them. Trump thus torpedoed the “two elections” theory that had underpinned Democratic hopes that Harris could still overcome Biden’s unpopularity in 2024.

The Republican pollster Gene Ulm points to one reason for the change: the operational advantages that helped Democrats so much in those states’ Senate and governor races two years ago aren’t as consequential in a presidential contest. “Tactics, money, and things like that,” he told me, “are just less important in a presidential race when the news is covering it wall-to-wall.” The fact that Democrats won the Senate races in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada despite Trump’s victories in those states supports Ulm’s argument: Those contrasting results suggest that the Democratic financial and organizational advantages mattered more in those contests than they did in the presidential race. (Among the swing states that Trump won, Republicans appear, pending final counts, to have captured a Senate seat only in Pennsylvania.)

[Jonathan Chait: Republican leaders are more afraid of Trump than ever]

The political landscape was tougher for Harris in the swing states than for Democrats in 2022 in at least three other respects. One is that Trump turned out far more low-propensity, right-leaning voters than GOP candidates did in 2022. Across the swing states (as well as nationally), the electorate in 2024 tilted Republican much more than in 2022, as the exit polls and VoteCast both determined.

The second crucial change was that Biden was even more unpopular in many of these states than in the last election: The share of voters who gave him positive ratings for his job performance compared with 2022 was eight points lower in Wisconsin, seven points lower in Michigan, and four points lower in Pennsylvania, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research.

The Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me that in spite of all Biden’s other successes on the economy, his reluctance to acknowledge the continued pain that most working-class voters felt from inflation further alienated them from him. “One of the big differences between ’24 and ’22 was, in the effort to get credit for the economy, we sounded out-of-touch to voters, and we sounded like we were the status quo,” Lake told me. In each of the swing states, at least four-fifths of voters who disapproved of Biden voted for Trump, meaning that the decline in Biden’s approval rating from 2022 to 2024 left Harris in a deeper hole.

The third big change in the swing-state environment may have been the most decisive. Far fewer of the voters in those states who were dissatisfied with the economy backed Harris in 2024 than had supported Democratic candidates two years earlier. Then, the exit polls in Pennsylvania, for instance, found that John Fetterman, the Democratic Senate candidate, lost voters who were negative about the economy by 18 percentage points; this time around, Harris lost those voters by twice as much. Then, Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, lost voters who were negative on the economy by 12 points; this year, Harris lost them by nearly four times as much. Harris lost voters who were down on the economy by at least 40 percentage points in Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. In each case, that was considerably worse than Democratic candidates had performed with comparable voters in 2022.

Tellingly, the Democratic Senate candidates who narrowly won in the swing states in this cycle (as well as Josh Stein, the Democrat who comfortably won the North Carolina governor’s race) all won a slightly higher share of voters dissatisfied with the economy than Harris did. To some extent, that reflected the tactical advantages Ulm stressed. But these Democrats’ success, like the 2022 results, also suggested that voters were more willing to look past their economic discontent when picking for positions other than the presidency—the office to which they assign responsibility for setting national economic policy.

Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who studies economic attitudes as part of a bipartisan team that conducts surveys for CNBC, told me that Harris could not prevail against the widespread verdict among voters that the cost of living was more manageable under Trump’s presidency than Biden’s. “The Harris campaign did what it could,” Campbell said. “We saw evidence that her middle-class-focused messaging was memorable to voters, and was sort of addressing the issue, but at the end of the day, the current of prices being as high as they still are, was just too strong.”

The greater difficulty Harris faced on the economy contributed to Democrats’ deep disappointment that, despite a big ad spend, abortion rights did not prove a more effective issue. Voters who said abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances provided crushing margins across the swing states in 2022: In governor races, Democrats won more than four-fifths of such voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and about three-fourths of them in Arizona and Wisconsin. This year, however, the exit polls found that only about two-thirds of pro-choice voters in those four states voted for Harris. That fall-off proved insurmountable for her.

In the aftermath of the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, “Democrats, and probably some independents, were much more animated by the abortion issue than they were [by] concerns about the economy,” Campbell told me. This year, that ranking reversed, particularly for the working-class white women who proved essential to Trump’s victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Trump’s insistence that he would leave abortion rights to the states probably helped him mute the issue. But the biggest factor appears to be the primacy that voters placed on the economy in their presidential vote. Previously unpublished results from the exit polls provided to me by the CNN polling unit found that a little more than one-third of voters said they supported legal abortion but were negative on the economy—and they preferred Trump to Harris by a narrow margin. This phenomenon was especially visible among blue-collar women, Lake told me: “They decided that they were going to ignore the other issues and were going to vote the economy, because they just had to get the economy going for their families.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Brace for the storm]

Trump is anything but a normal candidate, but the unavoidable conclusion from last week’s returns is that most voters treated him as one. The race followed the familiar hydraulic pattern of American presidential elections: When a president of one party falls in voters’ esteem, the nominee of the other party rises. In the major exit polls, 62 percent of voters who said they were dissatisfied with the country’s direction voted for Trump—exactly the same percentage of “wrong track” voters who backed Barack Obama in the race to replace George W. Bush in 2008.

Exactly how the race slotted into these familiar grooves remains a subject of debate among Democrats. Podhorzer blames the media for normalizing Trump and the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court for blocking Trump’s criminal trial for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which might otherwise have reminded voters about the threat he poses to the constitutional order. Both exit polls and the VoteCast survey, Podhorzer notes, suggest that millions of people who voted for Biden in 2020 stayed home this year. He attributes this to ebbing concern about the MAGA agenda among voters generally resistant to it. “The thing that struck me,” Podhorzer told me, “is how alarming the lack of alarm was.”

Rosenberg regrets the Harris campaign’s lukewarm effort to sell the Biden administration’s economic achievements, such as the strong job market and revived investment in manufacturing. “I think they took an enormous risk by not litigating and defending her record as vice president in this administration,” Rosenberg told me. “What she ended up getting was all the downside of the Biden record and none of the upside.”

Perhaps no set of strategies or messages or alternative nominee could have overcome the discontent over Biden’s record on inflation and immigration. Still, the unusually strong Democratic performance in the 2022 elections gave the party a false sense of security about its ability to surmount widespread discontent with Biden. The surprise may not have been that Trump swept the swing states in 2024, but that the Democrats got a stay of execution in them two years before.

What Swayed Trump Voters Was Bidenomics

2024-11-07T14:30:00-05:00

Donald Trump’s decisive victory may proclaim an unpredictable new era for American government and society, but it also reaffirmed an enduring political truth: It is virtually impossible for the incumbent president’s party to hold the White House when Americans are discontented with that president’s performance.

Americans provided Trump with a sweeping victory after a campaign in which he had darkly promised “retribution” against a long list of enemies and offered an agenda centered on mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Trump seems within reach of winning the popular vote, becoming the first Republican to do so since 2004. Republicans, exulting in winning at least three Senate seats as well as the White House, instantly called the magnitude of the victory “a mandate”—and Trump seems sure to treat it as a license to pursue his most aggressive ideas.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her team, recognizing the threat of widespread disillusionment with President Joe Biden, tried to transform the Democratic campaign from a retrospective referendum on the performance of the administration in which she served into a prospective choice about the agenda and style of leadership she and Trump would bring to the next four years. Ultimately, she could not overcome the widespread unhappiness over the country’s current conditions. Biden’s approval rating among voters never exceeded 43 percent in any of the major swing states, according to exit polls. At least 55 percent of voters in each of those states said that they disapproved of Biden’s performance, and Trump typically won four-fifths or more of them.

Overall, despite any expectation to the contrary, the gender gap was not especially large. Harris’s inability to amass a greater advantage among women likely reflected the fact that they were at least as dissatisfied with the economy and Biden’s performance as men were, according to exit polls. Just 44 percent of women in exit polls said they approved of Biden’s performance, and nearly seven in 10 described the economy in negative terms—a view even more emphatic than the one men expressed.

Disapproval of Biden’s record and disaffection over the economy proved a headwind that Harris could not overcome. Exit polls showed that Americans remained concerned about the possible excesses of a second Trump presidency. But in their deep frustration over current conditions, they placed less weight on those worries.

[Read: How Donald Trump won everywhere]

As Doug Sosnik, the top White House political adviser to Bill Clinton, wrote in an email yesterday: “The 2024 election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.” The New York Times calculated that nine in 10 U.S. counties moved at least somewhat toward Trump in this cycle. A striking sign of that change was his dramatic improvement in big urban centers with large populations of Black and/or Latino voters, including the counties encompassing Philadelphia, Detroit, and Las Vegas. But Trump also improved (compared with 2020) in communities dominated by working-class white voters, such as Macomb in Michigan, Luzerne in Pennsylvania, and Kenosha and the small cities around Green Bay in Wisconsin.

Harris maintained the Democratic hold on the prosperous, well-educated inner suburbs around major cities. But in most of them, her party’s margins declined relative to its 2020 results. She slipped just slightly in predominantly white-collar areas such as Montgomery and Delaware Counties outside Philadelphia, and Oakland outside Detroit, and failed to improve on Biden’s deficit in Waukesha, around Milwaukee. The result was that in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Harris’s margins in these big suburbs were closer to Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 than Biden’s in 2020. That wasn’t enough to withstand what I’ve called the “pincer” move of Trump’s concurrent gains in the smaller, mostly white, blue-collar places and the much more diverse urban cores.

The geographic pattern of actual vote tallies for Trump captured the magnitude of the red shift more vividly than the two major surveys that try to measure voters’ behavior for media organizations: the exit polls conducted by Edison Research and the VoteCast survey done by NORC. Neither found any increase from 2020 in the national level of support for Trump among white voters; nor did the exit polls show more than minimal improvement for him among white voters in the Rust Belt states. The exit polls recorded modest improvements for Trump among Black voters, with his gains coming entirely from men, and a big improvement among Latinos. (VoteCast found solid advances for Trump among both Black and Latino voters.) In each survey, Trump made his most dramatic gains with Latino men but scored notable improvements among Latina women as well. Young voters, in both data sets, moved notably toward Trump as well.

The exit polls showed Harris winning women (of all races) by eight percentage points and losing men by 13 points. The VoteCast study similarly showed Harris winning women by seven points and Trump winning men by 10 percentage points. At that level, Harris’s lead with women was much smaller than Biden’s in 2020, and even smaller than Clinton’s advantage in 2016.

The story on the economy was similar. Two-thirds of voters in the national exit polls described the economy as only fair or poor; roughly that many expressed negative views in each of the three former “Blue Wall” states and Arizona, with discontent rising to about seven in 10 in North Carolina and Nevada, and beyond that in Georgia. Solid majorities of those economically discontented voters backed Trump in each state. So did a big majority of the roughly 45 percent of voters who said they were worse off than four years ago.

Harris did win handsomely among those who said they were better off, but they constituted just one in four voters. She also won the narrow backing of those who said their condition was unchanged. But none of that was enough to overcome Trump’s preponderant advantage among those who thought their condition had deteriorated under Biden.

Working-class voters without a college degree—many of them living paycheck to paycheck—were especially down on the economy. More than three-fourths of white voters without a college degree nationwide described the economy in negative terms—as did seven in 10 Latino voters. (An even more telling eight in 10 Latinos did so in the Sun Belt swing state of Nevada.)

The issues that Harris and the Democrats had hoped would offset economic discontent simply did not have enough bite. Two-thirds of voters in the national exit polls said that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, but about three in 10 of those voters supported Trump anyway. More than a quarter of women nationwide who supported legal abortion backed Trump.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

The muting of the abortion issue was especially dramatic in the former Blue Wall states that ultimately settled Harris’s fate. In 2022, the first election after the Supreme Court rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania each won about four-fifths of voters who supported legal abortion, while Tony Evers in Wisconsin carried about three-fourths of them. But, in a crucial erosion of that pro-choice support, Harris won only about two-thirds of those voters in Michigan and Wisconsin and about seven in 10 in Pennsylvania. A much smaller share of voters in each state said abortion should be illegal most of the time, but Trump won about nine in 10 of those.

Harris did not entirely fail at raising alarms about Trump. In the national exit polls, 54 percent of voters agreed that Trump was “too extreme.” But about one in nine voters who viewed Trump as too extreme voted for him anyway—a striking measure of their willingness to risk an uncertain future over an unacceptable present. Likewise, in the VoteCast survey, 55 percent of voters said they were very or somewhat concerned that Trump would steer the U.S. in a more authoritarian direction; yet nearly one in six of those voters supported him.

“I think that Trump has been helped by this sense that things are careening out of control at home and abroad, and it makes people more willing to contemplate the smack of authority,” William Galston, a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institution, told me.

Jackie Payne, the founder and executive director of Galvanize Action, which studies moderate white women, told me that according to her research, many female voters who believed Trump would improve their economic situation simply brushed aside rhetoric and proposals from him that they found troubling. “They were choosing to believe a vision of him that was aligned with what they wanted to get out of him—a strong economy—and they were absolutely discounting anything that felt extreme as disinformation or hyperbole, even if he said he would do it,” she said.

Voters around the world have reached similar judgments this year in the aftermath of the inflation that followed the coronavirus pandemic: As a Financial Times analyst pointed out this week, incumbent parties have lost ground, or lost power altogether, in all 10 major democracies that held elections in 2024. The priority voters gave to current economic conditions in their decision making followed a long U.S. tradition too. Incumbent presidents with low public-approval ratings almost never win reelection—as Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1992, and Trump himself in 2020 demonstrated. The similar but less discussed scenario is the difficulty facing a party seeking to hold the White House even when its unpopular president isn’t running. That applied when Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008 were off the ballot; their party lost the race to replace them in each case. Biden now joins that dour procession.

But the most apt precedent for this election may be 1980. Laboring under widespread discontent, including over a raging bout of inflation, Carter tried to use his campaign to shift attention to the risks he said his right-wing rival, Ronald Reagan, represented, with some success: Doubts about Reagan did keep Carter close in the polls. But in the campaign’s final days, voters decided that continuity with Carter represented a greater risk than change with Reagan—and flocked to the challenger in crushing numbers.

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

Voters were willing to take an even greater leap this time. Trump made almost no accommodation for voters uneasy about him. Instead, he intensified his false accusations, inflammatory racist rhetoric, and profane personal attacks. Trump has surrounded himself with extreme figures who promise a revolution in government and society.

His senior immigration advisers have promoted plans for a militarized mass-deportation operation, complete with internment camps, and the possible removal of U.S.-citizen children of undocumented adults. His party is likely to control both chambers of Congress—and in any case, the president has broad unilateral authority to set immigration policy, as well as to impose the large tariffs Trump has pledged. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has already rendered him virtually immune to criminal prosecution for any action he takes as president. Trump is returning to the White House unbound.

Reagan’s victory in 1980 solidified a realignment in American politics that began under his Republican predecessor, Richard Nixon. Reagan cemented working-class white voters into the conservative movement’s electoral coalition—both white southern evangelical Christians and northern industrial workers in places such as Michigan’s Macomb County—who became lastingly known as “Reagan Democrats.” Those voters remain a cornerstone GOP constituency: Even four-plus decades later, they were the two groups that supported Trump in the largest numbers on Tuesday.

Many Republicans believe that Trump now has the chance to secure an equally significant shift in the party allegiance of Black men and Latino voters of both genders, who voted for him in historic numbers this week. That opportunity surely exists. But realizing it in a lasting way will require Trump and the Republican Party to maintain the support of millions of voters of color and justify their faith in him on the economy over any concern about policies such as mass deportation and more aggressive law enforcement.

Now those communities, along with all of the other Americans disappointed in Biden over the past four years, will learn whether Trump can deliver the economic benefits he promised without plunging the country into deeper acrimony.

How to Understand the Election Returns So Far

2024-11-06T00:15:06-05:00

For the third consecutive election, the nation remains divided almost exactly in half around the polarizing presence of Donald Trump.

Early this morning, the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris appears likely to again come down to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the same states that decided Trump’s 2016 and 2020 races by razor-thin margins. Trump held a narrow but clear advantage in all of them as of midnight.

In 2016, those three Rust Belt battlegrounds made Trump president when he dislodged them by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes from the “Blue Wall” of states Democrats had won in all six presidential races from 1992 to 2012; four years later, they made Joe Biden president when he wrested them back from Trump by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes. Now, with Trump regaining an upper hand across Sun Belt battlegrounds where Biden made inroads in 2020, the three Rust Belt behemoths appeared likely to decide the winner once more.

The results as of midnight suggested that those three states were tipping slightly to Trump; the patterns of returns looked more like 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in them, than 2020, when Biden beat Trump. Given that Trump appears highly likely to also win the Southeast battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia, and has a strong hand in Arizona, Trump will likely win the presidency again if he captures any of the three Blue Wall states. He would become only the second man, after Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s, to win the presidency, lose it, and then regain it again on a third try.

Not only are the same industrial-state battlegrounds at the fulcrum of Trump’s third race, but they remain mostly divided along very familiar lines. As he did in both 2016 and 2020, Trump is running up big margins in exurbs, small towns, and rural communities where most voters are white, culturally conservative people without a college degree. Harris is amassing big—though, in some cases, diminished—margins in the populous, well-educated suburbs around the major cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Milwaukee. The one potentially crucial shift from 2020: The exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations showed Trump making gains among Black and Latino voters, and especially men, not only in the pivotal former Blue Wall states but also elsewhere.

In many respects, the results available as of midnight were a reminder that even in a race involving a figure as unique as Donald Trump, in politics (as in Casablanca), the fundamental things apply. Since World War II, it has been extremely difficult for parties to hold the White House when an outgoing president was unpopular: The White House flipped partisan control when Harry Truman left office in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008. Popular presidents haven’t always been able to guarantee victory for their party when they leave (the White House changed hands when relatively popular chief executives stepped down in 1960, 2000, and 2016), but unpopular outgoing presidents have usually presented an insurmountable obstacle.

If Harris ultimately falls short, that pattern would represent a big part of the reason. Biden’s deep unpopularity at the end of his term operated as a huge headwind for her. In the national exit poll, only 40 percent of voters said they approved of Biden’s job performance as president. In the battlegrounds, Biden’s approval rating ranged from a low of only 39 percent (in Wisconsin) to a high of 43 percent (Pennsylvania). Harris ran better than usual for a nominee from the same party among voters who disapproved of the outgoing president’s performance. But even so, the large majority of discontented voters in all of these states provided a huge base of support for Trump. In the national exit poll, fully two-thirds of voters described the economy in negative terms. Only one in four said they had suffered no hardship from inflation over the past year.

A lot has changed for Trump since the 2020 election. He launched a sustained campaign to overturn the results of that election, which culminated in the January 6 insurrection; Supreme Court justices he’d appointed helped overturn the constitutional right to abortion; he was indicted on multiple felony counts in four separate cases, and convicted on 34 of them; and he was hit with civil judgments for financial fraud and sexual abuse.

Yet the exit polls, at least, found remarkably little change in his support levels from 2020 among white voters across the battlegrounds. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, his white support was virtually unchanged from 2020; he suffered a small decline in Pennsylvania, and a slightly larger one in North Carolina.

Compared with 2020, white voters with at least a four-year college degree moved slightly, but not dramatically, away from Trump in those five big battlegrounds. Harris won about three in five white women with a college degree, a big improvement from what the exit polls recorded in 2020. But Trump offset that by improving at least slightly since 2020 among white voters without a college education, who tended to give Biden especially low marks for his performance. Crucially for Trump, he retained overwhelming support among white women without a college degree everywhere except Wisconsin, where he split them evenly. Democrats had hoped those women might abandon him over abortion rights and a general revulsion to his demeaning language about women. Because those blue-collar white women appeared on track to provide Trump as big a margin as they did in 2016 and 2020, the national exit polls showed Trump winning most white women against Harris—just as he did against Biden and Clinton. That will likely be a subject of intense frustration and debate among Democrats in the weeks ahead, whether or not Trump wins the race.

Overall, the abortion issue benefited Harris substantially, but not as much as it did the Democratic gubernatorial candidates who swept Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2022, the first election after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. In that election, the exit polls found that Democrats Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania won more than four-fifths of voters who said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances; in Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers won three-fourths of them. But this time—with the economy weighing on those voters—Harris won only about two-thirds of those pro-choice voters in Michigan and Wisconsin, and about seven in 10 in Pennsylvania. That slight shift might prove decisive. (In the national exit poll, Trump won almost three in 10 voters who said abortion should be legal all or most of the time; one-fourth of women who supported legal abortion backed Trump.)

Because abortion rights did not give her as much of a lift as it did the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in 2022, Harris did not appear on track to expand on Biden’s margins in many of the big suburban counties key to the modern Democratic coalition. She looked to be roughly matching Biden’s huge advantages in the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia. But she did not narrow the roughly 3–2 deficit Biden faced in Waukesha County, outside Milwaukee, perhaps the biggest Republican-leaning white-collar suburb north of the Mason-Dixon line, as of midnight. In Oakland County, outside Detroit, Trump appeared on track to slightly narrow her margin, perhaps dealing a fatal blow to her chances.

In the well-educated county centered on Ann Arbor, Harris’s margin of victory seemed on track to decline from 2020, in what might be a reflection of youthful discontent over the support she and Biden have provided for Israel’s war in Gaza. In Dane County, Wisconsin, centered on Madison, she appeared in line to match only Biden’s 2020 share and not the even higher number Evers reached in 2022. Overall, in several of the suburban counties across the Blue Wall states, Harris appeared on track to finish closer to Hillary Clinton’s margins in 2016, when she lost these states, than Biden’s in 2020, when he won them.

The failure to expand on Biden’s performance in suburban areas left Harris vulnerable to what I’ve called Trump’s pincer movement against her.

As in both of his earlier races, he posted towering numbers in rural areas and small towns. Trump posted his usual imposing advantages in the blue-collar suburbs around Pittsburgh, and appeared to gain dramatically in the mostly blue-collar counties including and around Green Bay.

From the other direction, he appeared to further narrow the traditional Democratic margins in heavily minority central cities. That was particularly evident in Philadelphia. Exit polls showed Trump slightly improving among Black voters in North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; that contributed to his win in North Carolina and gave him gains that placed him on the brink of flipping Wisconsin and Michigan as of midnight. In the national exit poll, Harris basically matched Biden’s vote share among white voters overall—but she fell slightly among Black voters and more substantially among Hispanic voters.

Almost lost in the ominous news for Democrats from the battleground states was the possibility that Harris would win the national popular vote, even if Trump also appeared likely to improve on his showings on that front from 2016 and 2020. If Harris did win the national popular vote, it would mark the eighth time in the past nine presidential elections that Democrats have done so—something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system, in 1828.

Yet even if Democrats achieved that historic feat, they faced the bracing prospect that Republicans could win unified control of the House, the Senate, and the White House while losing the national popular vote. Until the 21st century, that had happened only once in American history, in 1888; if it happens again this year, it would mark the third time in this century that Republicans will have won complete control of Washington while losing the popular vote.

Trump isn’t likely to view losing the national popular vote, if he does, for a third time (something only William Jennings Bryan had previously done) as a caution light. If anything, he will likely view the prospect that he could win the decisive battleground states by bigger margins than he did in 2016 and gain among voters of color as a signal to aggressively pursue the combative agenda he laid out this year. That includes plans for massive new tariffs, the largest deportation program in U.S. history, a purge of the civil service, and the use of the military against what he calls “the enemy from within.” Unless something changes dramatically in the final counts from the decisive states, American voters will have chosen, once again, to leap into that murky unknown.

The Democratic Theory of Winning With Less

2024-10-31T08:00:00-04:00

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.

For years, the dominant belief in both parties has been that Democrats need to run up a big lead in the national presidential popular vote to win an Electoral College majority. But in the dead-heat election of 2024, that may no longer be true. The distinctive dynamics of the 2024 campaign could allow Kamala Harris to eke out an Electoral College win even if Donald Trump runs better in the national popular vote this time than during his previous two campaigns.

The belief that Democrats need a big popular-vote win to prevail in the electoral vote hardened in the course of those two previous Trump campaigns. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump by a resounding 4.5 percentage points in the popular vote but still only squeezed past him by relatively small margins in the three Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that decided the race. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by two points in the national popular vote but narrowly lost those same three states, and with them the presidency.

That history has weighed heavily on Democrats as a procession of recent polls has shown Trump shrinking or even erasing Harris’s national lead. But the pattern of differences among white, Black, and Latino voters found in most of those national surveys show how Harris could still potentially capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed for victory—even if she wins the nationwide popular vote by much less than Biden did in 2020, and possibly by only about the same margin that Clinton got in 2016.

The principal reason is that these recent polls show Trump making most of his gains in national support by performing better among Black and, especially, Latino voters than he did in either of those previous elections. Even the most favorable surveys for Trump consistently find Harris polling very close to Biden’s level of support in 2020 among white voters, which had improved over Clinton’s performance with that group by several points. In other words, Harris will likely rely a bit more on white voters than her party’s past two nominees did.

That subtle shift is the crucial distinction from the earlier contests. It could allow Harris to scrape a win by sweeping the predominantly white, former “Blue Wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, even if Trump improves over his prior popular-vote results by gaining among Black and Latino voters (and Black and Latino men in particular).

[Read: Elon Musk wants you to think this election’s being stolen]

In each of his previous two races, Trump benefited because the decisive states leaned more Republican than the nation overall. In both 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin was the tipping-point state that provided the 270th Electoral College vote for the winner—first for Trump, then for Biden. In 2016, Trump ran about three percentage points better in Wisconsin than he did nationally; in 2020, he ran nearly four points better in Wisconsin than he did nationally, according to the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

The fact that Trump each time performed much better in the tipping-point state than he did in the national popular vote is central to the assumption that Democrats can’t win the Electoral College without a popular-vote majority. But as the Center for Politics research demonstrates, that hasn’t always been true.

The tipping-point states in the three presidential elections preceding 2016—Ohio in 2004 and Colorado in 2008 and 2012—each voted slightly more Democratic than the national popular vote. And in none of those elections was the disjunction between the tipping-point-state result and the national popular vote nearly as big as it was in 2016 or 2020. In fact, the gap between the national popular vote and the tipping-point state in Trump’s two races was considerably wider than in any election since 1948, the Center found.

Polling in the past few weeks, however, has indicated that this gap has shrunk to virtually nothing. Trump and Harris remain locked in a virtual tie both nationally and in the swing states. With polls that closely matched, none of the swing states appears entirely out of reach for either candidate.

Still, professionals on both sides with whom I’ve spoken in recent days see a clear hierarchy to the states. Both camps give Harris her best chance for overall victory by winning in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; Trump is considered stronger across the Sun Belt in North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada (ranked from most to least promising for him).

That separation reflects the race’s unexpected racial dynamics. If Trump’s polling gains among voters of color bear out in practice, that would benefit him the most in the Sun Belt battlegrounds. There, minority voters are such a large share of the electorate that even a small shift in their preferences—toward Trump—would greatly diminish Democrats’ chances.

Whatever happens in the Sun Belt, though, if Harris sweeps the Rust Belt big three, she would reach exactly the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win (so long as she held all of the other states that Biden carried by about three percentage points or more, which is very likely). All three of those major industrial states are much less diverse than the nation as a whole: In 2020, white people cast about four-fifths of the vote in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and roughly nine-tenths of it in Wisconsin, according to census figures.

“One of the potential outcomes here is that at the end of the day, Trump will have gained with Blacks and Latinos and it may not have decided the Electoral College, if we don’t need [the Sun Belt states] to win,” Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster with long experience in Wisconsin, told me.

Obviously, Harris has no guarantee that she could survive a smaller national popular-vote margin than Biden: The polls showing national gains for Trump could be capturing a uniform uptick in his support that would deliver slim victories across most—and possibly all—of the seven decisive states. Even the most optimistic Democrats see marginal wins in the battlegrounds as probably Harris’s best-case scenario. But the prospect that she could hold the former Blue Wall states even while slipping nationally challenges the conventional wisdom that Democrats must amass a significant lead in the national popular vote to secure enough states to win the electoral vote.

“The Blue Wall states are the likeliest tipping point for either candidate,” Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the Sabato’s Crystal Ball newsletter published by the Center on Politics, told me. “If the country moves two to three points to the right but those states only move a point or less, that’s where you start to get the tipping point looking pretty close to the popular vote.”

The Democratic strategist Mike Podhorzer, a former political director at the AFL-CIO, also believes that Harris could win the Electoral College with a smaller popular-vote advantage than most analysts have previously assumed. But he says the demographic characteristics of the swing states aren’t the primary cause of this possibility. Rather, the key factor is that those states are experiencing the campaign in an immersive way that other states are not thanks to huge advertising spends, organizing efforts, and candidate appearances.

That disparity, he says, increases the odds that the battleground states can move in a different direction from the many states less exposed to such campaigning. Both Podhorzer and Kondik note that the 2022 midterm elections supported the general thesis: Although broad dissatisfaction with Biden allowed Republicans to win the national popular vote in House elections, Democrats ran much better in statewide contests across the most heavily contested battlegrounds, especially in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

“It is really the difference between how well you are doing outside the battlegrounds and inside the battlegrounds,” Podhorzer told me. Inside the battlegrounds, he pointed out, voters have for years now been exposed at blast-force volume to each party’s arguments on all the major issues. “The cumulative effect of it is that they have an awareness of what is at stake, a different worldview, than people living outside those states,” he said.

The analogue to 2022 this year would be whether general disappointment in Biden’s economic record increases Trump’s popular-vote total in less-contested blue and red states alike, but Harris holds on to enough of the battlegrounds where voters are hearing the full dimensions of each side’s case against the other.

[Read: How the Trump resistance gave up]

The same national polls that show Trump gaining among voters of color this year do not show much, if any, improvement for him compared with his 2020 performance among white voters. The latest aggregation of high-quality national public polls published by Adam Carlson, a former Democratic pollster, found that Harris is almost entirely preserving Biden’s gains among white voters; that means Harris is also exceeding Clinton’s showing with them from 2016.

The comparison with Clinton is instructive. Among voters of color, Clinton ran better in 2016 than either Biden in 2020 or how Harris is polling now. But Clinton lagged about three to four points below both of them among white voters. If Harris wins the popular vote by only about the same margin as Clinton, but more of Harris’s lead relies on support from white voters, the vice president’s coalition would be better suited to win the Rust Belt battlegrounds. In that scenario, Harris would assemble what political scientists call a more electorally “efficient” coalition than Clinton’s.

Biden’s margins of victory in the former Blue Wall states were so slim that Harris can’t afford much erosion with voters of color even there. But two factors may mitigate that danger for her. One is that in the Rust Belt states, most voters of color are not Latino but Black, and Democrats feel more confident that they can minimize losses among the latter than among the former.

The other key factor is a subtle change in those states’ white populations. Calculations from the latest census data provided to me by William Frey, a demographer at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank, found that since 2020, white voters without a college degree—the demographic group in which Trump performs best—have declined as a share of eligible voters by about three percentage points in both Michigan and Wisconsin, and by about 1.5 points in Pennsylvania. In Michigan and Wisconsin, college-educated white voters, who now tilt mostly toward Harris, largely made up the difference; in Pennsylvania, the share of minority voters grew. In a typical election, these slight shifts in the electorate’s composition probably would not matter, but they could in a contest as close as this one.

“There is still room to grow in the suburbs [across the region], and two things are going to contribute to that growth: January 6 and the Dobbs decision,” Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic consultant, told me, referring to the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021 and the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. The racist slurs against Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally last weekend could also cost him with Pennsylvania’s substantial Puerto Rican population.

Sweeping Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with a smaller national-popular-vote lead than Biden’s is nonetheless a high-wire assignment for Harris. A significant concern for Democratic strategists is whether the party has plausibly declined since 2020 only among voters of color, without suffering material losses among white voters as well.

One strategist with access to a wide array of party polls, who asked for anonymity to discuss that private research, told me that although many Democrats are optimistic that surveys overestimate Trump’s strength among Black voters, a risk also exists that polls underestimate Trump’s strength with white voters (something that has happened before). That risk will rise if Trump turns out unexpectedly large numbers of the blue-collar white voters who compose the largest share of infrequent voters in the Rust Belt battlegrounds.

However, the Republican pollster Whit Ayres told me that he is seeing the same divergence between slipping non-white support and steady white backing for Harris in his surveys—and he sees good reasons for that pattern potentially persisting through Election Day. “The Hispanic and African American weakness [for Harris] is a function of a memory of the Trump economy being better for people who live paycheck to paycheck than the Biden-Harris economy,” Ayres said. “On the other hand, there are far more white voters who will be voting based on abortion and the future of democracy. There’s a certain rationale behind those numbers, because they are making decisions based on different issues.”

Democrats generally believe that they maintain a fragile edge in Michigan and Wisconsin, partly because many public polls show Harris slightly ahead, but even more because their party has built a better turnout operation than the GOP in those states. Pennsylvania looks like the toughest of the three for Harris and, in the eyes of many strategists in both parties, the state most likely to decide this breathtakingly close race.

“Looking statewide, I’ve always thought from the time she got in that Harris would do better in the suburbs and the cities than Biden, and Trump would do better in a lot of these redder counties, and the million-dollar question is what number is bigger and how much bigger,” Mikus, the Pittsburgh-based consultant, told me.

Biden carried the Keystone state by only 1.2 percentage points while winning the national popular vote by nearly 4.5 points. Whether Trump wins a second term to execute his dark vision of “retribution” against “the enemy from within” may be determined by whether Harris can hold Pennsylvania while winning the national popular vote by much less, if at all. It would be a fitting conclusion to this bitter campaign if the state that decides the future shape of American democracy is the same one where the nation’s Constitution was written 237 years ago.

The Improbable Coalition That Is Harris’s Best Hope

2024-10-22T11:21:00-04:00

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.

Big margins in the biggest places represent Kamala Harris’s best chance of overcoming Donald Trump’s persistent strength in the decisive swing states. Across those battlegrounds, Harris’s campaign is banking on strong showings both in major urban centers with large minority populations and in the white-collar inner suburbs growing around the cities. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the economy under President Joe Biden, those are the places where she can find the highest concentrations of voters likely to reject Trump anyway, because they view him as a threat to their rights, their values, and the rule of law.

Posting significant advantages in these large metropolitan areas represents Harris’s best—if not only—opportunity to squeeze past Trump in the most closely contested swing states, particularly the Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that remain her most likely path to an Electoral College majority.

When Harris visited Michigan last weekend, her itinerary underscored this priority. On Friday night, she appeared before a sizable, enthusiastic audience in Oakland County, a well-educated and prosperous Detroit suburb that has shifted dramatically from red to blue over the past three decades. Then, on Saturday morning, Harris held an event with the singer Lizzo in downtown Detroit on the first day that city residents were eligible to vote early. Yesterday, Harris returned to Oakland County to campaign with former Republican Representative Liz Cheney as part of a day-long sweep by the two women through white-collar suburbs outside Philadelphia and Milwaukee as well.

“That pairing and that geography tells you we think we have a lot of room to run up the score” in those places, Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, told me. Over the weekend, the campaign released strategy memos that cited expanded margins in well-educated suburban communities as the key to Harris’s ability to hold Michigan and Pennsylvania next month. The campaign hasn’t released similar blueprints for the other battleground states, but its formula for victory in all of them looks the same.

[Read: Harris’s best answer to Trump’s resilient appeal]

Trump is betting heavily on his ability to combine his historical advantage with working-class white voters with improved performance among working-class Black and Latino voters, especially men—and polls show him making progress toward that goal. Harris’s hopes, particularly in the key Rust Belt battlegrounds, depend on preserving enough of her party’s traditional advantage among striving minority voters clustered in the biggest cities, while expanding the Democrats’ edge among the affluent families who step out of their gleaming SUVs at the Whole Foods and Panera stores a few miles away. If Harris is to prevent Trump’s reelection under a more explicitly authoritarian banner, that incongruous electoral alliance among voters whose lives rarely intersect in other ways may represent the last line of defense for American democracy.

Running up the score in the most populous places has underwritten the Democratic advance in virtually all of the states where the party has prospered since the 1990s. Almost by definition, the few remaining swing states in U.S. politics are those whose populations are closely balanced between the Democratic-leaning big cities and inner suburbs and the Republican-leaning small towns and rural communities.

This year, with college-educated voters, especially women, continuing to recoil from Trump, Harris appears on track for strong performances in the large well-educated suburbs around major cities. That’s particularly true in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the three states that made Trump president in 2016 when he dislodged them from what I called “the blue wall.” To win those states, much less the Sun Belt battlegrounds where she faces longer odds, Harris will need every vote she can squeeze out of these suburban communities.

Across all the battlegrounds, Trump is pressuring Harris with a powerful pincer movement. From one side, the former president appears poised once again to record towering margins among largely rural, working-class white voters, who are frustrated with higher prices and drawn to his vitriolic attacks on immigrants, elites, and liberals. From the other direction, polls show Trump with an opportunity to make those small but potentially pivotal gains among urban voters of color, particularly men. Harris is unlikely to repel that multifront assault unless she can further improve on Biden’s already significant 2020 margins in the suburbs around major cities from Philadelphia to Phoenix.

These dynamics were at play in Harris’s appearances around the Detroit area last weekend; Trump also appeared in the region last week. When Harris rallied supporters Friday night in Oakland County’s Waterford Township, the fervor of resistance to Trump among the college-educated, professional middle-class voters was fully apparent—even more so than I’d seen in Trump’s earlier campaigns.

The people who were heading into the rally repeatedly reached, unprompted, for the same dire analogy. “Take him at his word,” Powell Miller, an attorney from nearby Rochester, told me. Citing Trump’s recent threat to use the military against “the enemy from within,” he said: “I wish the people of Germany in 1933 took Mr. Hitler at his word.” That sentiment was echoed by June McCallumore, a retired history teacher who wore a T-shirt that read Vote Like Your Granddaughters’ Rights Depend on It. “It’s like ’30s Germany,” she told me. “I know people don’t like you to compare anybody to Nazi Germany, but I’ve studied history.”

Miller and McCallumore were astonished at the backing Trump has sustained after everything that has happened since his defeat in the 2020 election: the January 6 insurrection, the Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, his manifold legal troubles, and his lurch toward more overtly racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, and plain vulgar language.

“It is shocking to me how many people support him and drank the Kool-Aid,” Miller told me—though he saw one encouraging sign among some lifelong Republican acquaintances who have told him Trump has grown so unstable and vindictive that they’re planning to support Harris.

Inside Harris’s crowded rally in a large exposition hall, the mingled ardor and anxiety was just as intense. “She has to win,” Susan Carey, a retired media director for an ad agency, told me, her voice almost quaking. “My husband and I are doing everything we can to make that happen. I think our democracy depends on it. The other option to me is just unthinkable.” She said that she has recently volunteered to join Democratic voter-mobilization efforts in the county. “Personally, I’m terrified,” she said. “Everyone who is not voting for Trump is incredulous: You can’t understand how this stuff is even happening.”

The next day in Detroit, the picture was more complicated. I spent much of the day at a community event called the Just F**kin Care Fest, sponsored by Detroit Action, a grassroots group that organizes in low-income minority neighborhoods, focusing on the people who are most alienated from the political process. Guiding Detroit Action’s work is a recent study of Black public opinion that calls these disaffected residents the “Rightfully Cynical,” a mostly younger group that it contrasts with the older “Legacy Civil Rights” residents, who retain faith in the political process and more reliably turn out for elections.

As rappers and DJs performed at the festival, I saw plenty of evidence that Harris’s replacement of President Joe Biden as the nominee has rekindled excitement among the legacy generation of Black voters. “A lot of people who are working and middle class can relate to her, that she knows what it is like to struggle,” Panella Page, a retired Air Force veteran, told me. Black women, she said, “are the most disrespected” members of American society, so to see a woman of color “running for commander in chief is substantial.” But Page observed more division among younger generations of Black voters. “What they like about Trump is he’s an entrepreneur,” she said, “he’s a businessman” who, they think, can create more economic opportunity for them.

[Mark Leibovich: Mike Pence is haunting this election]

A few minutes after I spoke with Page, Piper Carter, a cultural trainer for Detroit Action, took the microphone and, moving through the crowd, issued a passionate warning. “Who is kind of frightened in this moment, politically?” she asked the audience. “Who is very concerned right now that we might lose democracy?” She looked around the crowd, which had offered only a few muted murmurs of assent. “I don’t hear enough concern,” she told them, before adding ominously, “We are the lamb that’s on the altar.”

After Carter returned the mic to the emcee, I caught up with her. The problem was not, she told me, that minority communities did not see Trump as a danger; it was that the failure of any election to improve their neighborhoods had dulled their expectation that voting would produce material change. “Every single time that Detroiters said they wanted something through their vote, it didn’t happen,” she told me. “So it’s difficult to care, because there’s a lot of trauma and pain. It’s not because people don’t care; it’s [that it is] harmful to care.”

Also at the Detroit Action event was Prentiss Haney, a senior adviser for the Democracy Power and Innovation Fund, which works with the organizing group and helped fund the recent study. He told me that focusing solely on Trump is a luxury that most of the people they encounter can’t afford: Economically marginalized Black voters are too consumed by the daily struggle to stay afloat to view Trump as the existential danger that the more financially secure voters I met at Harris’s rally in Oakland County do. “There is a part of the Black electorate that already feels so threatened that the threat [from Trump] is not front and center to them,” Haney told me.

A few blocks away, the city had closed off several streets for a large party sponsored by the Detroit Pistons to promote early voting on its opening day. As local rappers performed, a steady flow of mostly young people filed into the city clerk’s office to cast a ballot. About 800 people ultimately voted at the event, among about 2,000 Detroiters who cast a ballot at similar centers that day.

Because the city’s population has declined so much over the years, Detroit is not the electoral powerhouse it once was: In 2020, Biden won about 240,000 votes from the city, way down from the roughly 325,000 it generated for Barack Obama in 2008. But Daniel Baxter, the longtime COO for the Detroit Department of Elections, told me at the Pistons block party that the stream of early voters on Saturday reinforced the signal from the large number of absentee ballots already returned: He expects turnout among eligible Detroit voters to rise slightly from the 51 percent who showed up in 2020—and significantly from its level in 2016, which was the only recent presidential election when turnout in the city fell below half of eligible voters. That year, Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by 10,700 votes.

In the Rust Belt battlegrounds, the electoral math for Democrats includes holding their own in the region’s unusually large number of midsize, mainly blue-collar cities such as Erie and Scranton in Pennsylvania, Saginaw and Flint in Michigan, and Eau Claire and Green Bay in Wisconsin. Both campaigns have devoted significant time and advertising spending to these places. But history suggests that Harris’s fate will turn on whether she can maximize the party’s advantage in the largest communities that drive these states’ growth of both population and economic activity.

Biden improved over Clinton’s 2016 margins in the counties centered on Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee—but only by relatively modest amounts, as Trump’s improvement among nonwhite voters that he already demonstrated in 2020 could be more pronounced this year. The bigger shift toward the Democrats in 2020 came in the inner suburbs around those cities. Biden won Michigan’s Oakland County by roughly twice as large a margin (108,000 votes) as Clinton did in 2016, or as Obama did in 2012; Biden also made significant gains in well-educated Kent County, around Grand Rapids, and Washtenaw County, which encompasses the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Similarly, Biden won the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia by a breathtaking combined margin of about 293,000 votes, roughly 115,000 more than Clinton’s four years earlier. In Wisconsin, Biden won booming Dane County, centered on Madison, by about 35,000 more votes than Clinton got in 2016, and he cut her deficit in Waukesha, a historically Republican-leaning suburb outside Milwaukee, by about 10,000 votes. (Harris appeared with Cheney in Waukesha yesterday.)

[Frederick Kempe: The U.S. is electing a wartime president]

In all of these suburban counties, the share of college graduates exceeds the national average. Although they remain predominantly white, they have added more middle-class Black, Asian, and Latino families in recent years. In most of these places, the Democratic share of the vote improved in the 2022 governors’ elections even over Biden’s 2020 performance. These were the first statewide votes after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion: The abortion issue, Democratic pollsters uniformly believe, remains very salient not only among college-educated suburban women, but also among men in that demographic. On Friday night in Oakland County, the loudest applause for Harris’s speech came when she pledged to sign legislation restoring a nationwide right to abortion.

Given the discontent over the economy, and the ferocity of Trump’s advertising campaign that portrays Harris as an extreme cultural liberal (particularly on crime, immigration, and transgender rights), she will find it difficult to avoid even deeper voter deficits than Biden saw among the smaller, outlying communities of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. At the Harris rally in Oakland County, Paul Witulski, a union shop steward who lives in Macomb County—a heavily blue-collar area fabled as the birthplace of the white, working-class “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s—told me that pro-Trump fervor is so unconditional in his neighborhood that he fears his house would be vandalized if he planted a Harris sign in his yard.

Given, also, the indications of incremental Trump gains among voters of color, particularly men, Harris’s campaign would consider it a win just to preserve Biden’s margins in the urban cores of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee (not to mention in the Sun Belt cities of Atlanta, Phoenix, and Las Vegas). In any scenario, Harris won’t win as large a share of the vote in the white-collar suburbs as she does among the more diverse voters in the central cities. But the potential for the vice president to improve on Biden’s vote share among college-educated women of all races, and possibly among the men in their lives, makes these affluent suburbs the one type of community where she might consistently accumulate a larger advantage than Democrats did in 2020. That represents her best chance to hold back the tide of support that has carried Trump closer to the presidency than seemed possible when he left Washington in disgrace nearly four years ago.

Harris’s Best Answer to Trump’s Resilient Appeal

2024-10-17T15:45:00-04:00

Kamala Harris’s fate in the remaining weeks of the presidential campaign may turn on whether she can shift the attention of enough voters back to what they might fear from a potential second White House term for Donald Trump.

Since replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee this summer, Harris has focused her campaign message above all on reassuring voters that she has the experience and values to serve in the Oval Office. But a consensus is growing among Democratic political professionals that Harris is failing to deliver a sufficiently urgent warning about the risk Trump could pose to American society and democracy in another presidential term.

“Reassurance ain’t gonna be what wins the race,” the Democratic pollster Paul Maslin told me—an assessment almost universally shared among the wide array of Democratic strategists and operatives I’ve spoken with in recent days. “What wins the race is the line from the convention: We ain’t going back. We aren’t going to live with this insanity again. It has to be more personal, on him: The man presents risks that this country cannot afford to take.”

Harris aides insist that she and the campaign have never lost sight of the need to keep making voters aware of the dangers inherent in her opponent’s agenda. But she appears now to be recalibrating the balance in her messaging between reassurance and risk.

[Read: The question hanging over Harris’s campaign]

At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Monday night, Harris had a video clip play of some of Trump’s most extreme declarations—including his insistence in a Fox interview on Sunday that he would use the National Guard or the U.S. military against what he called “the enemy from within.” Then, in stark language, she warned: “Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged, and he is out for unchecked power.” In her combative interview on Fox News last night, Harris again expressed outrage about Trump’s indication that he would use the military against “the enemy from within,” accurately pushing back against Bret Baier and the network for sanitizing a clip of Trump’s reaffirmation of that threat at a Fox town-hall broadcast earlier in the day.

Many Democratic strategists believe that the party has performed best in the Trump era when it has successfully kept the voters in its coalition focused on the risks Trump presents to their rights and values—and his latest threat to use the military against protesters is exactly one such risk to them. Using data from the Democratic targeting firm Catalist, the Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer has calculated that about 91 million different people have come out in the four elections since 2016 to vote against Trump or Republicans, considerably more than the 83 million who have come out to vote for him or GOP candidates. To Podhorzer, the vital question as Election Day looms is whether the infrequent voters in this “anti-MAGA majority” will feel enough sense of urgency to turn out again.

“The reason [the race] is as close as it is right now is because there’s just not enough alarm in the electorate about a second Trump term,” Podhorzer, who was formerly the political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “And that’s what is most alarming to me.”

Harris is pivoting toward a sharper message about Trump at a moment when his campaign appears to have seized the initiative in the battleground states with his withering and unrelenting attacks on her. National polls remain mostly encouraging for Harris; several of them showed a slight tick upward in her support this week. But Republicans believe that after a weeks-long barrage of ads portraying Harris as weak on crime and immigration and extreme on transgender rights, swing voters in these decisive states are inclined to see her, rather than Trump, as the greater risk in the White House.

Although Harris is describing Trump as “unstable,” Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s campaign, says that at this point, more voters see him over her as a potential source of stability amid concerns that inflation, crime, the southern border, and international relations have at times seemed out of control under Biden. “They think [Trump] is the one who will give us that peace and prosperity they look for in a president,” McLaughlin told me. “They want somebody who is going to take charge and solve their problems, and that’s what Donald Trump is really good at.”

Democrats are not worried that large numbers of voters outside Trump’s base will ever see him as a source of stability. But they acknowledge that the Republican ad fusillade—particularly the messages about Harris’s support, during her 2019 presidential campaign, for gender-affirming surgery for prisoners—has caused some swing-state voters to focus more on their worries about her (that she’s too liberal or inexperienced) than their fears about Trump (that he’s too erratic, belligerent, or threatening to the rule of law).

The clearest measure that voters’ concerns about a second Trump presidency are receding may be their improving assessments of his first term. A Wall Street Journal poll conducted by a bipartisan polling team and released late last week found that Trump’s retrospective job-approval rating had reached 50 percent or higher in six of the seven battleground states, and stood at 48 percent in the seventh, Arizona.

An NBC poll released on Sunday, which was conducted by another bipartisan polling team, found that 48 percent of voters nationwide now retrospectively approve of Trump’s performance as president; that rating was higher than the same survey recorded for Trump while he was in office. A Marquette Law School national poll released yesterday similarly showed his retrospective job approval reaching 50 percent. (Trump was famously the only president in the history of Gallup polling whose approval rating never reached 50 percent during his tenure.)

Views about Trump’s first term are improving, pollsters in both parties say, because voters are mostly measuring him against what they like least about Biden’s presidency, primarily inflation and years of disorder on the southern border (though it has notably calmed in recent months). “Trump’s retrospective job rating is higher because of the contrast with Biden,” Bill McInturff, a longtime Republican pollster who worked on the NBC survey, told me. “Majorities say the Biden administration has been a failure. A plurality say Biden’s policies hurt them and their families, while Trump’s policies helped them.”

Harris could still win despite voters becoming more bullish about Trump’s first term, but it won’t be easy: The NBC poll found that, in every major demographic group, the share of voters supporting Trump against Harris almost exactly equals the share that now approves of his performance as president.

Harris speaking at Monday’s campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania (Michael M. Santiago / Getty)

ecause of the unusual circumstances in which Harris secured her party’s nomination, voters probably knew less about her at that advanced stage in the presidential campaign season than they did about any major-party nominee since Republicans plucked the little-known business executive Wendell Willkie to run against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Few political professionals dispute that her late entry required her campaign to devote much of its initial effort to introducing her to voters.

In her speeches, media appearances, and advertising, Harris has placed most emphasis on convincing voters that she is qualified to serve as president, tough enough on crime and the border to keep them safe, committed to supporting the middle class because she comes from it, and determined to govern in a centrist, bipartisan fashion. This sustained effort has yielded important political dividends for her in a very short period. Polls have consistently shown that the share of Americans with a favorable view of her has significantly increased since she replaced Biden as the nominee. Harris has gained on other important personal measures as well. A recent national Gallup poll found that she has drawn level with Trump on the qualities of displaying good judgment in a crisis and managing the government effectively. Gallup also found that she has outstripped him on moral character, honesty, likability, and caring about voters’ needs.

The question more Democrats are asking is whether Harris has squeezed as much advantage as she can out of this positive messaging about her own qualifications. That question seemed especially acute after she raced through a swarm of media interviews earlier this month, appearing on podcasts aimed at young women and Black men, as well as on The View, 60 Minutes, CBS’s The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and a Univision town hall.

Across those interviews, Harris seemed determined to establish her personal “relatability,” demonstrating to voters, especially women, that she had lived through experiences similar to their own and understood what it would take to improve their lives. But she offered no sense of heightened alarm about what a second Trump term could mean for each of the constituencies that her appearances targeted.

One Democratic strategist, who is closely watching the campaign’s deliberations and requested anonymity to speak freely, worries that Harris has not been airing a direct response to Trump’s brutal ad attacking her position on transgender rights, or pressing the case against him aggressively enough on what a second Trump term might mean. “We’ve been trying to fight this negative onslaught with these positive ads,” this strategist told me. “We’re bringing the proverbial squirt gun to the firefight here in terms of how we are dealing with the most vicious negative ad campaign in presidential history.”

Harris’s emphasis on reassurance has also shaped how she’s approached the policy debate with Trump. Her determination to display toughness on the border has, as I’ve written, discouraged her from challenging Trump on arguably the most extreme proposal of his entire campaign: his plan for the mass deportation of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.

[Read: Kamala Harris’s muted message on mass deportation]

Likewise, her determination to stress her tough-on-crime credentials has apparently discouraged her from challenging another of Trump’s most draconian plans: his pledge to require every U.S. police department to implement so-called stop-and-frisk policies as a condition of receiving federal law-enforcement aid. In New York City, that policy was eventually declared unconstitutional because it resulted in police stopping many young Black and Latino men without cause. Yet for weeks, Harris never mentioned Trump’s proposal, even in appearances aimed at Black audiences.

“For low-propensity Black voters, Donald Trump’s just atrocious policy proposals for the civil-rights agenda and policing is one of the main motivators that moves them toward the Democrats,” Alvin Tillery, a Northwestern University professor who founded a PAC targeting Black swing voters, told me. “Forget Bidenomics; forget all the kind of race-neutral things she is trotting out today. Mentoring for Black men? Really? That is not going to move a 21-year-old guy that works at Target who is thinking about staying home or voting for her to get off the couch.” Tillery’s PAC, the Alliance for Black Equality, is running digital ads showing young Black men and women lamenting the impact that stop-and-frisk could have on them, but he’s operating on a shoestring budget.

More broadly, some Democrats worry that Harris’s priority on attracting Republican-leaning voters cool to Trump has somewhat dulled her messages about the threat posed by the Trump-era GOP. Harris has repeatedly offered outreach and reassurance to GOP-leaning voters, by promising, for example, to put a Republican in her Cabinet and establish a policy advisory council that will include Republicans. (She held another rally in the Philadelphia suburbs yesterday to tout her Republican support.) That could help her win more of the Nikki Haley–type suburban moderates—but at the price of diluting the sense of threat necessary to motivate irregular anti-Trump voters to turn out.

“I do think some sacrifices have been made in the spirit of trying to win over a certain segment of voter who is a Republican,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a senior vice president at Way to Win, a group that provides funding for candidates and organizations focused on mobilizing minority voters, told me.

The Republican pollster Greg Strimple told me that last month’s presidential debate hurt Trump so much not only because Harris was strong, but also because his scattered and belligerent performance reminded voters about everything they didn’t like about him in office. “Now it feels to me like her momentum is gone, and Trump is steadily advancing, almost like the Russian army, in the center of the electorate,” Strimple told me. “I don’t know how she can muster enough throw weight behind her message in order to change that dynamic right now.”

Even among the most anxious Democrats I spoke with, hardly anyone believes that Harris’s situation is so dire or settled. They are widely confident that she possesses a superior get-out-the-vote operation that can lift her at the margin in the pivotal battlegrounds, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Still, Harris this week seemed to acknowledge that she needs to sharpen her message about Trump. In an interview with the radio host Roland Martin, she forcefully denounced Trump’s long record of bigoted behavior. With Charlamagne tha God, Harris came out of the gate criticizing Trump’s stop-and-frisk mandate more forcefully than I’ve heard before, and condemning the former president for, as Bob Woodward reported in a new book, sending COVID-19 test kits to Vladimir Putin “when Black people were dying every day by the hundreds during that time.” Later, she agreed with the host when he described Trump’s language and behavior as fascist, a line she had not previously crossed.

Harris’s campaign also rolled out a new ad that highlights his comments about deploying the military against the “enemy from within,” and featured Olivia Troye, an aide in his administration, speaking on camera about how he’d discussed shooting American citizens participating in protests when he was president.

McLaughlin, the Trump pollster, says a big obstacle for Democrats trying to stoke fears of returning him to the White House is that voters have such an immediate point of comparison between their economic experiences in his tenure and Biden’s. Democrats “can try” to present another Trump term as too risky, but to voters, “what is it going to mean?” McLaughlin said. “I’m going to be able to afford a house because, instead of 8 percent mortgage rates, I’m going to have less than 3 percent? I’m going to have a secure border?”

Like many Democratic strategists, Fernandez Ancona believes that enough voters can be persuaded to look beyond their memories of cheaper groceries and gas to reject all the other implications of another Trump presidency. That dynamic, she points out, isn’t theoretical: It’s exactly what happened in 2022, when Democrats ran unexpectedly well, especially in the swing states, despite widespread economic dissatisfaction.

[Gilad Edelman: The man who’s sure that Harris will win]

“If the question in 2022 was: Do you like the Biden administration and the state of the economy? We lose,” she told me. “But that wasn’t the question people were responding to. They were responding to: Your freedoms are at stake; do you want to protect your freedoms, or do you want them taken away?”

Democratic voters are understandably dumbfounded that Trump could remain this competitive after the January 6 insurrection; his felony indictments and convictions; the civil judgments against him for sexual abuse and financial fraud; the strange lapses in memory, desultory tangents, and episodes of confusion at rallies; and his embrace of more openly racist, xenophobic, and authoritarian language. Yet nearly as remarkable may be that Harris is this competitive when so many more voters consistently say in polls that they were helped more by the policies of the Trump administration than by those of the Biden administration in which she has served.

The definitive question in the final stretch of this painfully close campaign may be which of those offsetting vulnerabilities looms larger for the final few voters deciding between Harris and Trump or deciding whether to vote at all. Nothing may be more important for Harris in the remaining days than convincing voters who are disappointed with the past four years of Biden’s tenure that returning Trump to power poses risks the country should not take. As a former prosecutor, Harris, more than most candidates, should understand the importance of a compelling closing argument.

Kamala Harris’s Muted Message on Mass Deportation

2024-10-10T14:30:00-04:00

As the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, veers into open xenophobia, Vice President Kamala Harris faces a crucial decision about how to respond when she appears today on Univision, the giant Spanish-language television network. Trump’s attacks on immigrants in the past few weeks have grown both sweeping and vitriolic: He is blaming migrants for a lengthening list of problems, even as he describes them in more dehumanizing and openly racist language. As he amplifies these attacks, Trump has also explicitly embraced the kind of eugenicist arguments that were used to justify huge cuts in immigration after World War I, such as his claim this week that Democrats are allowing in undocumented immigrants whose “bad genes” incline them toward murder.

“Certainly, in my lifetime nobody as prominent as Trump has been this intentional, this racist, so consistently—and this all-inclusive in terms of scapegoating,” Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, told me. “We have certainly seen flare-ups in the past, with governors in different states—and even with Trump, of course, in his first term. But this is on another level. And it begs the question of what comes next.”

Harris so far has responded to this Trump onslaught cautiously, and in a tone more of sorrow than of anger. She has often labeled Trump as divisive in general terms. But when talking about immigration, she has focused mostly on presenting herself as tough on border security. She has almost entirely avoided any direct discussion of Trump’s most militant immigration ideas—particularly his proposal to carry out the mass deportation of millions of undocumented migrants.

But Harris will very likely face pressure to offer a more frontal response to Trump’s mass-deportation plan in a town hall she’s holding with Univision in Nevada. With most polls still showing Trump making gains among Latinos since 2020, many Democratic activists and interest groups focused on that community believe that a more forceful rejoinder from Harris to Trump’s intensification of his anti-immigrant rhetoric can’t come too soon.

“We are in the last four weeks of the election, and she needs to be really clear about showing the contrast,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration-advocacy group, told me. “It is a missed opportunity for [Democrats] not to lean more into the consequences of this mass-deportation slogan.”

Leon Neal / Getty

Some immigrant-rights activists and Democratic strategists believe that Harris is so focused on proving her strength on the border that she has become reluctant to criticize almost any element of Trump’s immigration agenda, out of concern that doing so would support his jackhammer portrayal of her as soft on the issue. This debate among Democrats about Harris’s approach to immigration is part of a larger internal conversation that is quietly gathering momentum. Some senior party operatives are privately expressing concern that Harris is spending too much time trying to reassure voters about her own credentials, and not enough making a pointed case against a possible second Trump term. This pattern was starkly apparent in her series of friendly media interviews this week. “Bring a bazooka to a gunfight, please, not a BB gun,” one worried Democratic pollster told me yesterday. Today’s Univision town hall will provide another revealing measure of whether Harris is advancing her case forcefully enough in the campaign’s final stages.

[Watch: The candidates’ policy differences]

Hostility to immigrants and immigration has been integral to Trump’s political brand from the outset. Yet, even by his standards, the volume and venom of Trump’s attacks on immigrants have amped up sharply during this campaign.

In recent weeks, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, have insisted that migrants are: stealing jobs from native-born Americans, spurring a national crime wave, driving up housing costs, spreading disease, committing voter fraud, and consuming so many Federal Emergency Management Agency resources that the government doesn’t have enough money to help hurricane victims in North Carolina and Florida. Despite protestations from local officials that the story is a fabrication, Trump and Vance have also insisted that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating residents’ pets.

The other claims have also been debunked. FEMA’s big reserves for responding to natural disasters are held in a congressionally appropriated account that is separate from the funds the agency has for resettling migrants. Violent crime, which rose immediately after the onset of the pandemic, has been declining, and some research suggests that undocumented migrants commit offenses at lower rates than native-born Americans. Despite Vance’s additional claim that Springfield, Ohio, has seen a “massive rise” in communicable disease, local records show that the county-wide rates of such diseases have declined over the past year.

Equally specious is the GOP candidates’ claim that all of the nation’s job growth is accruing to foreign-born workers. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provided by the White House show that nearly 4.5 million more native-born Americans in their prime working years (defined as ages 25 to 54) are employed today than when Trump left office. Contrary to the Trump-Vance claim, this demographic group has added more jobs during President Joe Biden’s term than foreign-born workers have; the share of native-born workers ages 25 to 54 participating in the labor force is higher now than at any point in Trump’s presidency. The latest unemployment rate for native-born Americans in these prime working years is lower than for comparable foreign-born workers.

More ominous even than the multiplying allegations against migrants may be the language Trump is using to describe them. He has said that they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing a formulation used by Adolf Hitler. In Ohio, he said of undocumented migrants, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” Later in the same speech, he called them “animals.” In Wisconsin last month, he said of undocumented immigrants, “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” Removing some of the undocumented migrants, Trump mused last month, during another Wisconsin visit, “will be a bloody story.”

Earlier this week, Trump resorted to unvarnished eugenics, twisting federal statistics to argue that the Biden administration has let into the country thousands of murderers. “You know now, a murderer—I believe this—it’s in their genes,” Trump told the conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. “And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Hewitt chose not to challenge this toxic assertion.

Witnessing this cascade of allegations from Trump and Vance, Erika Lee, a Harvard history professor and the author of America for Americans, told me that she feels a weary sense of “déjà vu” about their anti-immigrant theme—“as if they have dusted off the well-worn playbook that generations of xenophobes have used before.” Nearly every major argument Trump is making, she says, has been made before by nativist campaigners during periods of anti-immigrant backlash.

In 1917, for instance, a Missouri journalist named James Murphy Ward wrote that the great wave of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century was taking jobs from Americans and threatening the nation’s religious traditions. Calling it a “foreign invasion,” he saw their importation as a Catholic plot to undermine the political influence of white American Protestants—this was the Great Replacement theory of his age. The title of Ward’s book would not seem out of place in a political debate today: The Immigration Problem; or, America First. And the most damning example of the immigrant menace that Ward claimed to find has an even more resonant contemporary echo.

“The Chinese laborers who have come to this country, we have been told, are not at all averse to a diet of rats,” Ward wrote, while “the writer himself has heard at least one of these aliens speak of little ‘pups’ as making ‘a fine soup.’”

[Adam Serwer: The real reason Trump and Vance are spreading lies about Haitians]

Harris’s response to Trump’s harsh turn on immigration has been constrained by the Biden administration’s difficulties with the issue. After Congress refused to consider Biden’s legislative proposal to combine tighter border security with a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s population of about 11 million undocumented immigrants, the administration struggled to respond to an unprecedented surge of migrants seeking asylum at the southern border.

The political pressure on Biden ratcheted up last year after Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, started transporting tens of thousands of migrants to northern cities, straining local resources and prompting loud complaints from some Democratic mayors and governors. Finally, in January, Biden endorsed a bipartisan Senate plan led by the conservative James Lankford of Oklahoma that proposed to severely restrict opportunities to seek asylum.

When Lankford’s Republican colleagues abandoned the plan after Trump denounced it, Biden moved in June to use executive action to implement some of its key provisions that narrow opportunities for asylum. The new rules have reduced the number of migrants seeking asylum by as much as three-fourths since late last year, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. But the political damage was done. Polls consistently showed that Americans: disapproved of Biden’s performance on the border in larger numbers than on any other issue except inflation; by a big margin, trusted Trump more than Biden to handle the problem; and were growing more open to Trump’s hard-line solutions, including building a border wall and carrying out a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants already in the country. In July, Gallup found that the share of Americans who wanted to reduce immigration had reached 55 percent, the highest level since soon after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Republican groups, sensing a Democratic vulnerability, have spent heavily on ads portraying Harris—whom Biden early on appointed to deal with the root causes of migration—as weak on the border.

These headwinds have encouraged Harris to center her immigration messaging on convincing the public that she would be tough enough to secure the border. She has emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and as California’s attorney general pursuing “transnational gangs,” as well as promising to tighten Biden’s limits on asylum even more. She has also hugged the bipartisan Senate compromise that Trump derailed—similarly to the old political analysts’ joke about Rudolph Giuliani and the 9/11 terror attacks, a typical sentence on immigration for Harris is Noun, verb, Lankford.

Harris has coupled these promises of tougher enforcement with the traditional Democratic promise to “create, at long last, a pathway to citizenship for hardworking immigrants who have been here for years,” as she put it in Arizona last month during a set-piece speech on immigration. Yet she has almost completely avoided discussing Trump’s mass-deportation plan.

Implicitly, Harris’s agenda rejects any such scheme, because the longtime residents for whom she would provide a path to legalization are among those Trump would deport. Apart from a passing reference in a speech last month to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, however, she has not explicitly criticized the Trump plan; nor has Harris discussed at any length how the proposal would disrupt immigrant communities and harm the economy. When her running mate, Tim Walz, was asked directly about Trump’s deportation agenda during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month, he responded by talking almost entirely about the Lankford bill himself. Walz has called the language from Trump and Vance about immigrants “dehumanizing,” but Harris has tended to wrap Trump’s attacks on immigrants into a more generalized lament about his divisiveness.

[Paola Ramos: The immigrants who oppose immigration]

Amid the campaign sparring on immigration, Trump has seemed to be enjoying a double dividend: He has energized his core support of culturally conservative whites with vehement anti-immigrant language and has gained ground, according to most polls, with Latino voters, even as Latino communities would be the principal targets of his deportation plans. Although polls show Harris recovering much of the ground Biden had lost among Latinos, she is still lagging the level of support he had in 2020, particularly among Latino men.

Supporters at a rally for Donald Trump in the Bronx earlier this year.

Polls of the Latino community have consistently found that, like other voters, they are more concerned about the economy than immigration. Surveys also show a slice of Latino voters who, departing from the view among advocacy groups, feel that recent asylum seekers are, in effect, jumping the line—and this has moved them toward Trump’s hard-line approach.

But Carlos Odio, a Democratic pollster who focuses on Latino voters, says surveys show that support for mass deportation plummets among not only Latinos but also other voters when “people learn that Trump’s plans are to deport [undocumented] people who have been living and working here for decades.” So Trump is holding his elevated Latino support despite that opposition to mass deportation, Odio told me, in large part because most Latinos “don’t actually believe any of this stuff is going to happen”; they expect that the courts, Congress, or business groups would prevent him from pursuing widespread removals.

Odio, the senior vice president for research at the polling firm Equis, believes that Harris has run an effective campaign to regain much of Biden’s lost ground among Latino voters, but he thinks she could benefit from more forcefully targeting Trump’s enforcement agenda, including mass deportation and his refusal to rule out again separating migrant children from their parents at the border. (Given that nearly 4 million U.S.-citizen children have at least one undocumented parent, Trump’s deportation agenda could be said to amount to a mass family-separation policy as well.) “There has been such a desire to tamp down the border debate [that] there’s been less of an ability to pivot to other parts of the immigration debate that could be helpful,” Odio told me. Even conservative Latinos who moved toward Trump, he notes, overwhelmingly opposed his family-separation policies in an Equis post-2020 election survey.

Castro likewise thinks Harris’s overall approach to Latino voters has been sophisticated, but he worries that the reluctance that she, along with almost all other prominent Democrats, shows to challenging the mass-deportation proposal is “moving the Overton window” and normalizing the plan. “There’s not enough pushback on it,” Castro told me. “The consequence of not pushing back is that more people believe that something like mass deportation is a reasonable, moral policy choice, which is completely wrong.”

The history of immigration politics is that it tends to be what political scientists call a “thermostatic” issue, meaning that public opinion moves left when a president moves right (as happened under Trump) and right when a president moves left (as happened for most of Biden’s presidency). That pattern underscores the likelihood that enforcement of a Trump mass-deportation program—complete with TV images of mothers and children herded onto buses, even detained behind the barbed-wire fences of internment camps—would face much more public resistance in practice than polls suggest today.

Yet Lee, the Harvard historian, says that the previous eruptions of anti-immigrant agitation show how great a challenge the more explicit xenophobia that Trump has catalyzed could present in the years ahead. Although many scholars believe that xenophobia flourishes primarily during periods of economic distress, Lee says that a more common factor in the past “has been the effectiveness of the messenger and the medium.” For instance, she told me, the first great wave of 19th-century anti-Catholic agitation “spread through newspapers and newly available cheap novels”; then the anti-Chinese propaganda a few decades later “spread through even more newspapers and illustrated magazines.”

Those distribution systems for anti-immigrant ideas pale next to what we’re seeing today, Lee believes. “Now we have a 24/7 news cycle, organized networks pushing content, plus social-media platforms that broadcast xenophobia around the world as it happens,” she told me. “As a result, xenophobia today feels both frighteningly familiar and devastatingly more widespread and violent than other periods in history.”

Harris and other Democrats have tactical incentives to avoid a full-on confrontation with those sentiments in the final weeks before next month’s election. But the history of America’s experience with xenophobia indicates that Trump’s lurid attacks will only find a larger audience unless Harris, and others who believe in a more inclusive society, challenge them more directly than they have so far.

Health Care Is on the Ballot Again

2024-10-03T07:00:00-04:00

In an otherwise confident debate performance on Tuesday, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, conspicuously dodged questions from the CBS moderators about his views on health care. For weeks, Vance has made clear his desire to dismantle one of the central pillars of the Affordable Care Act: the law’s provisions that require the sharing of risk between the healthy and the sick. On Tuesday, though, Vance refused to elaborate on his plans to reconfigure the ACA, instead pressing the implausible argument that Donald Trump—who sought to repeal the law, and presided over a decline in enrollment during his four years in office—should be viewed as the program’s savior.

Vance’s evasive response to the questions about health care, on a night when he took the offensive on most other subjects, exposed how fraught most Republicans still consider the issue, seven years after Trump’s attempt to repeal the ACA died in the Senate. But Vance’s equivocations should not obscure the magnitude of the changes in the program that he has signaled could be coming in a second Trump presidency, particularly in how the law treats people with significant health problems.

The ACA provisions that mandate risk-sharing between the healthy and sick underpin what polls show has become its most popular feature: the requirement that insurance companies offer coverage, at comparable prices, to people with preexisting conditions. In numerous appearances, Vance has indicated that he wants to change the law to restore to insurance companies the ability to segregate healthy people from those with greater health needs. This was a point that Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, accurately stressed during the debate.

The political paradox of Vance’s policy is that the trade-off he envisions would primarily benefit younger and healthier people, at a time when most young people vote Democratic. Conversely, the biggest losers would be older adults in their last working years before they become eligible for Medicare. That would hit older working-class adults, who typically have the biggest health needs, especially hard. Those older working people are a predominantly white age cohort that reliably favors the Republican Party; in 2020, Trump won about three-fifths of white voters ages 45 to 64, exit polls found. The threat that the GOP’s ACA alternatives present to these core Republican voting groups represents what I called in 2017 “the Trumpcare conundrum.”

“Going back to the pre-ACA days of segregated risk pools would lower premiums for young and healthy people, but result in increased cost and potentially no coverage at all for those with preexisting conditions,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation), told me.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign hopes to exploit that tension by launching a major advertising campaign across swing states this week to raise an alarm about the plans from Trump and Republicans to erode the ACA’s coverage. Support for the ACA—in particular, its provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions—may be one of Harris’s best assets to hold support from older and blue-collar white women, who may otherwise be drawn to Trump’s argument that only he can keep them safe from the threats of crime and undocumented immigration.

[Helen Lewis: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]

The efforts of Republicans like Vance to roll back the ACA this long after President Barack Obama signed it into law, in 2010, are without historical precedent: No other major social-insurance program has ever faced such a lengthy campaign to undo it. After Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, Alf Landon, the GOP presidential nominee in 1936, ran on repealing it. But when he won only two states, no other Republican presidential candidate ever again ran on repeal. And no GOP presidential candidate ever ran on repealing Medicare, the giant health-care program for the elderly, after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1966.

By contrast, this is the fourth consecutive election in which the GOP ticket has proposed repealing or restructuring the ACA—despite polling that shows the act’s broad popularity. During Trump’s first year in office, House Republicans passed a bill to rescind the law without support from a single Democrat. The repeal drive failed in the Senate, when three Republican senators opposed it; the final gasp came when the late Senator John McCain voted no, giving a dramatic thumbs-down on the Senate floor.

Most health-care analysts say that, compared with 2017, the ACA is working much better today. At that point, the ACA exchanges had begun selling insurance only three years earlier, following a disastrously glitchy rollout of the federal website that consumers could use to purchase coverage. When congressional Republicans voted on their repeal plans, about 12 million people were receiving coverage through the ACA, and the stability of the system was uncertain because insurers feared that too many of those buying insurance on the exchanges were sicker people with more expensive health needs.

“In 2017, not only did we have rising premiums because insurance companies were worried the market was getting smaller and sicker, but we also had insurance companies exiting markets and raising the risk that parts of the country would have nobody to provide coverage,” Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, told me.

Today, however, “we are in a very, very different place,” she said. “I would argue that the ACA marketplaces are thriving and in a very stable” condition. The number of people purchasing insurance through the ACA exchanges has soared past 21 million, according to the latest federal figures. Premiums for plans sold on the ACA exchanges, Corlette said, are rising, but generally not faster than the increase faced by employer-provided insurance plans. And enough insurers are participating in the markets that more than 95 percent of consumers have access to plans from three or more firms, according to federal figures.

Despite Vance’s portrayal of Trump as the program’s savior, the number of people receiving coverage through the ACA exchanges actually declined during Trump’s term, to 11.4 million, after he shortened the enrollment period and cut the advertising promoting it. The big leap forward in ACA participation came when the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021 passed a major increase in the subsidies available to people for purchasing insurance on the exchanges. That made a mid-range (“silver”) insurance plan available for people earning up to 150 percent of the poverty level at no cost, and ensured that people earning even four times that level would not have to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income on premiums.

“The biggest criticism of the ACA from the start, which in many ways was legitimate, was that the coverage was not truly affordable,” Levitt said. “The enhanced premium subsidies have made the coverage much more affordable to people, which has led to the record enrollment.”

Neera Tanden, the chief domestic-policy adviser for President Joe Biden, told me that the steady growth in the number of people buying insurance through the ACA exchanges was the best indication that the program is functioning as intended. “A way to determine whether a program works is whether people are using it,” Tanden said. “No one is mandated to be in the exchanges, and they have grown 75 percent in the past four years. This is a program where people are voting with their feet.”

Conservative critics of the law nonetheless see continuing problems with the system. Michael Cannon, the director of health-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, points out that many insurers participating in the ACA exchanges limit their patients to very narrow networks of doctors and hospitals, a trend acknowledged even by supporters of the law. And Cannon argues that the continued rise in premiums for plans sold on the ACA shows that it has failed in its initial ambition to “bend the curve” of health-care spending, as Obama often said at the time.

The ACA “has covered marginally more people but at an incredible expense,” Cannon told me. “Don’t tell me it’s a success when it is exacerbating what everyone acknowledges to be the main problem with the U.S. health sector”—the growth in total national health-care spending.

Other analysts see a more positive story in the ACA’s effect on coverage and costs. The insurance exchanges established by the ACA were one of the law’s two principal means of expanding coverage for the uninsured. The second prong was its provision providing states with generous grants to extend Medicaid eligibility to more working, low-income adults. Although 10 Republican-controlled states have still refused to extend eligibility, nearly 24 million people now receive health coverage through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.

Combined with the roughly 21 million receiving coverage through the exchanges, that has reduced the share of Americans without insurance to about 8 percent of the population, the lowest ever recorded and roughly half the level it was before the ACA was passed.

Despite that huge increase in the number of people with insurance, health-care spending now is almost exactly equal to its level in 2009 when measured as a share of the total economy, at slightly more than 17 percent, according to KFF figures. (Economists usually consider that metric more revealing than the absolute increase in spending.) That share is still higher than the equivalent figure for other industrialized countries, but Levitt argues that it counts as an overlooked success that “we added tens of millions of people to the health-insurance rolls and did not measurably increase health-care spending as a result.”

[David Frum: The Vance warning]

The ACA’s record of success underscores the extent to which the continuing Republican opposition to the law is based on ideological, rather than operational, considerations. The GOP objections are clustered around two poles.

One is the increase in federal spending on health care that the ACA has driven, through both the generous premium subsidies and the costs of expanding Medicaid eligibility. The repeal bill that the House passed in 2017 cut federal health-care spending on both fronts by a total of about $1 trillion over a decade. This spring, the conservative House Republican Study Committee released a budget that proposed to cut that spending over the same period by $4.5 trillion; it also advocated converting Medicaid from an entitlement program into a block grant. Every serious analysis conducted of such proposals has concluded that they would dramatically reduce the number of Americans with health insurance.

Even if Republicans win unified control of Congress and the White House in November, they may not be able to muster the votes for such a sweeping retrenchment of federal health-care spending. (Among other things, hospitals in reliably red rural areas heavily depend on Medicaid.) At a minimum, however, Trump and congressional Republicans would be highly unlikely to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies that expire at the end of 2025, a move that could substantially reduce enrollment on the exchanges.

The other main Republican objection is the issue that Vance has highlighted: the many elements of the ACA that require risk-sharing between the healthy and the sick. The ACA advanced that goal with an array of interlocking features, including its core protection for people with preexisting conditions.

In varying ways, the GOP alternatives in 2017 unraveled all of the law’s provisions that encouraged risk-sharing—by, for instance, allowing states to override them. That triggered the principal public backlash against the repeal effort, as Americans voiced their opposition to rescinding the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting conditions. But Vance has made very clear that a second Trump administration would resume the effort to resurrect a pre-ACA world, in which insurers sorted the healthy from the sick.

“A young American doesn’t have the same health-care needs as a 65-year-old American,” Vance argued recently on Meet the Press. “A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health-care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition.” Although “we want to make sure everybody is covered,” Vance claimed, “the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Supporters of this vision, such as Cato’s Cannon, argue that it would allow younger and healthier people to buy less comprehensive plans than the ACA now requires, at much lower cost. As those more affordable options become available, Cannon says, cutting Medicaid spending to the degree Republicans envision would be more feasible, because people currently covered under that program could instead purchase these skimpier but less expensive private-insurance policies. Government-subsidized high-risk pools, the argument goes, could provide affordable coverage for the people with greater health needs whom insurers would weed out from their new, slimmed-down plans.

“If you want to make health care universal, you need to give insurers and consumers the freedom to agree on the prices and terms of health-insurance contracts themselves,” Cannon told me. “You need to let market competition drive the premiums down for healthy people as low as possible so they can afford coverage.”

Supporters of the ACA generally agree with the first point: that a deregulated system would allow insurers to create less expensive plans for young, healthy people. But they believe that all the arguments that follow are mistaken. Initial premiums might be lower, but in a deregulated system, even young and healthy families might find comprehensive policies, including such coverage as maternity benefits, unaffordable or unavailable, Georgetown’s Corlette told me. And when, before the ACA, states sought to establish high-risk pools for people with greater health needs, those efforts almost uniformly failed to provide affordable or adequate coverage, she pointed out.

Even if a reelected Trump lacks the votes in Congress to repeal the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements, he could weaken them through executive-branch action. In his first term, Trump increased the availability of short-term insurance plans that were free from the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements and its protections for people with preexisting conditions. Biden has shut down such plans, but if Trump won a second term and reauthorized them, while ending the enhanced subsidies, that could encourage many healthy people to leave the exchanges for those lower-cost options. Such actions would further the goal of Vance and other ACA critics of separating the healthy and sick into separate insurance pools.

Vance’s most revealing comment about this alternative vision may have come during a recent campaign stop in North Carolina, when he said that his proposed changes to the ACA would “allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools.” But—as many health-policy experts noted to me, and Walz himself observed last night—that notion rejects the central purpose of any kind of insurance, which is to spread risk among as many people as possible—which, in fact, may be the point for Vance and other conservative critics of the ACA.

“The far right,” Tanden told me, “has always believed people should pay their own way, and they don’t like the fact that Social Security, Medicare, the ACA are giant social-insurance programs, where you have a giant pooling of risk, which means every individual person pays a little bit so they don’t become the person who is bankrupted by being sick or old.”

To date in the presidential race, health care has been eclipsed by two other major issues, each foregrounded by one of the nominees: immigration for Trump, and abortion for Harris. Under the glare of the CBS studio lights on Tuesday night, Vance was tactical in saying very little about his real health-care ideas. But the arguments he has advanced aggressively against crucial provisions of the Affordable Care Act have made clear that its future is still on the ballot in 2024.

The Undecided Voters Are Not Who You Think They Are

2024-09-26T05:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

For the great majority of Americans who have firmly settled on Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, the idea that anyone could still be undecided in that choice is almost incomprehensible. But the incredulity may be rooted in confusion about who most undecided voters really are.

When most people think about a voter still trying to make up their mind, they probably imagine a person who is highly likely to vote but uncertain whether to support Harris, Trump, or a third-party candidate. Both political parties, however, are more focused on a different—and much larger—group of undecideds: potential voters who are highly likely to support Harris or Trump, but unsure if they will vote at all.

Campaigns typically describe the first group of reliable but conflicted voters as persuadable; they frequently describe the second group as irregular voters. Persuadable voters get the most attention from the media, but campaigns recognize that irregular voters can loom much larger in the outcome—especially in presidential elections when more of them ultimately participate.

“There are a gajillion more of those [irregular] people than the Harris/Trump ‘I don’t know; I’m still thinking about it’” kind of voter, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a communications consultant for Democrats and progressive groups, told me. “There are more humans who are non-habitual voters than there are voters who swing back and forth. That’s just math.”

[David A. Graham: Trump was president once]

The first group of undecided Americans—the persuadable voters still vacillating between Harris and Trump—are always the subject of intense media focus. Pollsters use an assortment of questions to gauge how many people fit that description. The NBC News national poll released Sunday, for instance, found that almost exactly one-sixth of voters either declared themselves undecided in the race or said that there was at least a chance they would switch from the candidate they’re now supporting. The most recent national Pew Research Center survey likewise found that the same proportion of Harris and Trump backers said that they either were merely “leaning” toward their candidate or could change their mind. The latest New York Times/Siena College national poll put the shares of undecided voters and persuadable voters at almost exactly the same level.

All of these results suggest that the pool of likely voters not firmly bound to either Harris or Trump is more than large enough to tip the election. The problem is that most strategists in both parties consider those numbers an illusion: They do not believe that roughly one-sixth of likely voters are ambivalent enough about one candidate that they could still switch to the other before November.

“There is an immaterial number of ‘certain to vote’ people who are undecided,” says the longtime GOP pollster Bill McInturff, whose firm has conducted the NBC poll along with a Democratic partner for decades. This is a view widely shared among strategists in both parties.

Mike Podhorzer, a former AFL-CIO political director who has built a large audience among Democrats and progressive groups for his detailed analyses of voting behavior, says that traditional polling questions significantly overstate the number of voters truly up for grabs between the parties. “There are people who will say that they are undecided in a survey,” Podhorzer told me, “and it’s just not true.” Podhorzer says that in polls he’s commissioned over the years, he always asks voters whether they have mostly voted for one major party or the other in the past.

“The effect of turning the question from making a statement about how you identify yourself to reporting on your previous behavior was kind of jaw-dropping,” he told me. “Almost all” of the people who said they were undecided at any given time turned out “to actually be on one side or the other. It was just how they were asked.”

Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s campaign, notes that as the electorate has grown more polarized since 2000, winning presidential candidates of both parties have shifted strategy. “You look at Obama’s election,” McLaughlin told me. “It was a turnout election. The same thing with George W. Bush. You’ve got to keep that base motivated, so you are messaging toward that—and what they are voting for and against matters.” This dynamic has only hardened in the age of Trump. “No question, there are not a lot of ‘persuadables’ at this point,” McLaughlin said.

Among the operatives and strategists that I spoke with in both parties, the best estimate is that just 4 to 7 percent of voters in the battleground states are such persuadables—people highly likely to vote but genuinely uncertain about whom they will support.

These include people like Fred, a white project manager from Minneapolis, and Ronmel, a Hispanic securities analyst from Dallas, who participated in a focus group of undecided voters convened in late August, after the Democratic National Convention, by Sarah Longwell, a political consultant and the executive director of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project. (Longwell’s focus groups reveal only the first names of participants.) Although both men had supported Biden in 2020, neither was ready to commit to Harris. “I think the issue with Kamala for me is that she does not have or has conveyed the gravitas for the role,” Fred said. Ronmel expressed frustration over inflation under Biden: Even though “you’re making a good living, you still feel like you’re living paycheck to paycheck,” he said.

When Longwell’s firm contacted the two men again last week, after the Harris-Trump debate, Fred had made his choice: “Kamala eliminated all my doubts about gravitas: She is 100 percent ready to be president on day 1.” Fred wrote in a text. “Trump, on the other hand, exacerbated every concern I had.”

But Ronmel was still conflicted. “They don’t seem to have any clear economic project,” he texted, “only promises that we know are not going to be fulfilled.”

The remaining persuadable voters, strategists and pollsters told me, are mostly people like Ronmel who believe that Trump’s presidency generated better results than Biden’s has, particularly on the economy, but who remain hesitant about entrusting Trump again with the presidency. (They cite various doubts—about his character and his views on issues beside the economy, such as abortion rights.)

These persuadable voters wavering between the two candidates split mostly into two camps. The largest group may be the traditionally Republican-leaning voters (including many who identify as independents) uneasy about Trump. These voters are the remnants of the suburban, largely college-educated constituency that favored Nikki Haley during the GOP primaries.

Based on the focus groups she has conducted with a wide array of voters, Longwell said that the persuadable voters “who are left are [mostly] two-time Trump voters who don’t want to vote for him again but are really struggling to get to [Harris].” After listening carefully to their answers and watching their body language, she told me that she expects most of these voters to support Harris eventually, because they are now so resistant to Trump. But she also believed that some of them are “leave-it-blank types” and won’t vote for either candidate.

The other big group of potentially persuadable voters, according to the NBC, Pew, and New York Times/Siena polls, are younger and minority voters who dislike Trump but are disappointed by their economic experience under Biden—and are uncertain whether Harris offers a sufficient change in approach. In the recent Pew survey, Hispanics who currently support Trump were much more likely than white voters to indicate that they might change their mind; for Harris-leaners, both Hispanic and Black voters were more likely to say they might reconsider. For both candidates, more younger than older voters indicated that they might switch.

In the end, however, neither party expects too many of the voters who are telling pollsters today that they might switch to the other candidate to actually do so. The bigger prize for the two campaigns is the irregular voters who are, as Longwell put it, deciding “whether they are going to get off the couch” to vote at all.

[Adam Serwer: The Trump campaign wants everyone talking about race]

How many of these irregular voters are available for the campaign to pursue? Even in the 2020 election, which produced the highest turnout rate since 1900, about one-third of eligible voters didn’t vote. That’s about 80 million people. About two-fifths of both eligible people of color and white people without a college degree didn’t vote last time; neither did nearly half of young people.

Those patterns frame the 2024 mobilization challenge for each party. Catalist, a Democratic voter-targeting firm, shared with me data rarely disclosed in public, based on its modeling, that attempt to quantify the number of infrequent voters in each of the swing states who lean strongly toward Harris or Trump. That research shows, first, that across the battleground states white people without a college degree routinely account for 70 percent or more of the Trump-leaning nonvoters; and, second, that people of color make up a big majority of Harris’s potential targets across the Sun Belt battlegrounds, as well as in Michigan. In the three big Rust Belt battlegrounds—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—working-class white women without a college degree, Catalist’s projections show, also make up a significant share of the voters who lean Democratic but don’t vote regularly.

The infrequent voters on both parties’ target list have some common characteristics, other strategists say. “Part of what you are seeing in this electorate is: a) a lot of anger; but b) discouragement,” Page Gardner, a Democratic expert on voter turnout, told me. “People are discouraged about their lives and feel … I’m trying really hard and I’m not getting anywhere.” Against that backdrop, she said, the challenge for Democrats is “giving them some sort of agency to feel like My vote matters, because a lot of people feel that no one is paying attention to them.”

As a lead organizer for the Sunrise Movement, a liberal group focused on mobilizing young people to support action on climate change, Paul Campion knows the challenge of engaging irregular voters for Harris. Sunrise is trying to reach young voters of color in battleground states through a combination of phone-banking, door-knocking, and text-messaging.

Like other campaigners seeking to organize young and non-white voters, Campion told me that “the biggest issue is not people choosing between Trump and Harris, but choosing between not voting … or voting for Harris-Walz.” Campion sees a fundamental conflict between Harris’s attempts to reassure centrist swing voters, by emphasizing moderate positions on energy from fossil fuels and on the war in Gaza, and her need to activate more progressive young voters uncertain whether to vote at all. “Young people want to hear Harris articulate over and over again more forcefully how she will fight for them and listen to their demands,” Campion told me.

[Ronald Brownstein: Can Harris reassemble Obama’s coalition?]

For years, Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO official, has been among the Democrats who have argued most ardently that expanding the electorate—rather than focusing on the smaller number of genuine swing voters—can be the key to the party’s success. This, he argues, is especially true when competing against Trump, who has proved so effective at activating his own constituency of infrequent voters. Podhorzer has calculated (using data from Catalist) that about 91 million separate individuals have turned out at least once in the four national elections since 2016 to vote against Trump or Republican candidates, while about 83 million have come out to vote for Trump or the GOP.

Although Democrats have improved their performance in recent years among the most reliable voters—largely because the party has gained ground among college-educated white people, who vote more regularly than any other major group—Podhorzer has calculated that people who voted in all four national elections since 2016 still narrowly favored the GOP in the battleground states. In those crucial Electoral College states, however, Democrats have posted commanding advantages among the infrequent voters who entered the electorate only after Trump’s victory in 2016. That group is disproportionately younger, Black, and Latino. This surge of new voters has been crucial in creating what Podhorzer and other Democratic strategists such as the Hopium Chronicles author Simon Rosenberg call the “anti-MAGA majority” that mostly frustrated GOP expectations in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022.

Shenker-Osorio said that replacing Biden with Harris has engaged more of these less reliable voters resistant to Trump. “When we were in the place of an exact rematch between the same two people that we had in 2020, the election was boring for a lot of people,” she told me. “And now it’s Okay, we at least cast somebody different in this season of the reality show, so that’s good.” But Shenker-Osorio added, the level of concern among these inconsistent voters about the potential downsides of another Trump presidency still has not reached the level Democrats need. “The task is to raise the salience of the election itself … and its pivotal role as a crossroads between two extraordinarily different futures,” she told me. “That is just something we have to hammer home and lift up.”

The thin sliver of reliable but persuadable voters still undecided between Harris and Trump matter in the crucial states, Podhorzer said, “because everything matters” there. But he predicted that whichever party turns out more of the irregular voters in its favor will win those states. That’s the bitter irony of modern U.S. politics: In a country divided so ardently and irrevocably between the two parties, the people who aren’t sure they care enough to participate at all are the ones who could tip the balance.

‘Americans Will End Up Paying the Tariffs’

2024-09-19T15:47:00-04:00

One day after the Federal Reserve Board announced its long-awaited cut in interest rates, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen declared during an interview this morning at The Atlantic Festival that the economy has reached a “soft landing” of low inflation and steady job growth.

“When we spoke two years ago, what I said was, I believed that there was a path to bring inflation down in the context of a strong job market,” she told me, referring to her previous appearance at the festival, in 2022. “And if the Fed and the administration’s policies could succeed in accomplishing that, we’d call that a soft landing. And I believe that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the economy.”

Without commenting on specific proposals by the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, Yellen also argued that sweeping tariffs on foreign goods and the mass deportation of undocumented migrant workers—two ideas that Trump has insisted would be priorities of a second White House term—could significantly disrupt the economy and reverse progress in reducing inflation.

“I think it would be devastating to simply remove” that many undocumented workers from the economy, Yellen said, predicting that it would revive inflation. And although Trump has argued that foreign countries would pay the cost of the sweeping tariffs he says he will impose as president, Yellen echoed almost all mainstream economists when she said: “Americans, if we have tariffs, will end up paying the tariffs and seeing higher prices for goods that they purchase.”

Yellen has operated at the highest level of national economic-policy making for the past 30 years. An economist by profession, she was appointed as a Federal Reserve Board governor by President Bill Clinton in 1994, and later served as the chair of his Council of Economic Advisers. President Barack Obama appointed her as chair of the Federal Reserve Board, the first woman to hold the position. When President Joe Biden named her Treasury secretary, she became the first person to complete the trifecta of holding that job as well as having held those of the CEA chair and Fed chair.

This morning, Yellen sat down with me at The Atlantic Festival to discuss the state of the economy, the thorny U.S. economic relationship with China, and how changes in tax, trade, and immigration policy might affect American families.

The transcript of our conversation has been edited for clarity.

Ronald Brownstein: You are also, in addition to your current role, a former chair of the Fed. The Fed yesterday made its long-awaited decision to cut interest rates. What did you make of what they did? Did they go far enough?

Janet Yellen: Well, I’m not going to comment on the details of their decision, but let me just say, I see this as a very positive sign for where the U.S. economy is. It reflects confidence on the part of the Fed that inflation has come way down and is on a path back to the 2 percent target. At the same time, we have a job market that remains strong. Monetary policy has been tight, and readjusting the stance of monetary policy to preserve the strength of the labor market when inflation has come down is what I think this decision signifies.

Brownstein: Does that imply that this should be the first of several cuts?

Yellen: I think the stance of monetary policy remains restrictive. Federal Reserve Board Chair Jay Powell said yesterday that the expectation is that interest rates will come down further. But it’s, of course, necessary to watch incoming data, and there can always be surprises.

Brownstein: Last time we were on this stage, in 2022, there was a great deal of apprehension about the economy, about the Biden administration’s management of the economy. Here we are now, two years later: Unemployment is at 4.2 percent; inflation is under 3 percent. The Fed is finally cutting interest rates. Taylor Swift has been in the news a lot lately—so let me ask you: “Are we out of the woods yet?”

Yellen: There are always risks to the economy, so you want to avoid being overconfident. But when we spoke two years ago, what I said was, I believed that there was a path to bring inflation down in the context of a strong job market. And if the Fed and the administration’s policies could succeed in accomplishing that, we’d call that a soft landing. And I believe that’s exactly what we’re seeing in the economy.

Brownstein: So just buttoning up this point, you think we have achieved the soft landing, and we will not see unemployment rise unacceptably?

Yellen: I do believe the job market remains strong. The unemployment rate has moved up meaningfully, but from historically low levels—and it’s rare to have, in the United States, an unemployment rate with four as the first digit.

Wages are going up at a good pace faster than inflation. So workers are getting ahead in real terms. But what we’re seeing is a normal, healthy labor market. We still have positive job growth in the economy. And I believe it’s possible to stay on this course.

Brownstein: Let me ask you about two immediate events in the news. One, how big a disruption to the economy would it be if the government shuts down at the end of this month?

Yellen: It would be very undesirable for the government to shut down. It would cause disruption in the lives of many people. And it’s utterly unnecessary, so I truly hope that that is not something that is going to happen.

Brownstein: I know it’s handled at the Office of Management and Budget and the White House, but do you see a pathway to keeping the government open?

Yellen: It’s an easy pathway to keeping the government open: We need a continuing resolution. We’ve achieved that in the past, and I certainly hope it’s something that we will achieve again.

Brownstein: President Biden has pretty clearly signaled his opposition to Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel, citing national-security concerns. You chair the committee that reviews these kinds of international economic deals. This administration has talked about “friendshoring” from the beginning, trying to integrate our supply chains more tightly with allied countries. Why would Japan, of all places, be a national-security risk to own a major American company?

Yellen: I’m not able to talk about the specifics of this or any transaction under very strict confidentiality rules that govern the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. But let me say: I do believe that trade and foreign direct investment are very beneficial for the U.S. economy. You’re right that we have focused on trying to deepen our ties, with trade and investment, with a range of countries who are our friends to diversify our supply chains, and in particular to reduce our dependence on China for a number of key inputs in goods.

It’s critically important to have an open and welcoming environment, encouraging foreign direct investment in the United States. But the committee’s job is to identify if there are any national-security concerns, and that is always the focus, both in the law and in the process that the Committee on Foreign Investment engages in.

Brownstein: I know you can’t talk about specific policies or individual candidates in the presidential race; I want to ask you about the debate about tariffs and this fundamental question about tariffs. Who pays the tariff? Is it a foreign country that is really paying the tariff? Or if tariffs are raised, is it American consumers who ultimately pay the bill?

Yellen: There’s been a great deal of economic research on this topic, and almost all of it suggests that the purchasers of the goods—in this case Americans, if we have tariffs—will end up paying the tariffs and seeing higher prices for the goods that they purchase.

Brownstein: There was a study the other day that calculated that undocumented migrants account for 22 percent of agricultural workers, 15 percent of construction workers, 8 percent of manufacturing workers, and 8 percent of service workers, including child-care workers. In your view, what would be the impact of removing all or most of them from the economy in a short time through a program of mass deportation?

Yellen: I believe that immigrants have always made, and continue to make, a positive contribution to the U.S. economy. We have an aging population, and between 2010 and 2018, immigrants made up, I believe, 60 percent of all additions to the labor force. They obviously contribute to the dynamism of the U.S. economy.

We need, I believe, an orderly immigration system. And there’s obviously work to do for Congress to work with the administration to accomplish that. But I think it would be devastating to simply remove this number of immigrants.

Brownstein: What would that mean, in your view, for inflation?

Yellen: I think it would raise inflation. These workers have contributed to America’s ability to produce more goods, including agricultural goods.

Brownstein: The biggest fiscal-policy decision facing the next president is that, at the end of next year, the Trump tax cuts passed in 2017 expire. Let’s walk through the different scenarios in your view. What would be the impact of extending the entire tax cut, as it was passed in 2017?

Yellen: If the entire tax cut is just extended and nothing is allowed to expire, I believe the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that, over 10 years, that would be almost a $5 trillion blow to the overall budget deficit. Honestly, I believe that is something the United States can’t afford. We need to be on a sustainable fiscal path. If we extend any of the tax cuts—and President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have suggested extending the tax cuts that benefited middle-class families, families making under $400,000, increasing the child tax credit—ways absolutely have to be found to pay for that. In addition, we need to lower deficits to stay on a fiscally sustainable path.

Brownstein: Given the pressure on deficits that the Congressional Budget Office shows, and given what you said before about an aging society, what’s the case against just letting the whole thing expire?

Yellen: President Biden and Vice President Harris are really concerned about the ability of middle-class families to make ends meet. And [these people] really face a variety of stresses due to the high cost of living, particularly in areas like child care, health care, housing. And the president and vice president believe it’s the right thing to have middle-income families not see their taxes increase. On top of that, there are ways to pay for investments that make our economy function better, more productive, and address the high cost of living that is of such concern to Americans.

Brownstein: And you believe that if you look at the costs of the investment agenda—what the administration wants to do for the care economy, as well as the cost of an aging society—that all of that can be funded primarily by raising taxes on people at the very top? Is it really plausible to do all the things that Democrats want to do in the long run solely by raising taxes on the very top 5 percent or so?

Yellen: I believe it actually is.

The wealthiest individuals, much of their income comes from capital gains, which, until they’re realized, are never taxed and often escape taxation entirely through step-up basis when people die. And the impact is that some of the wealthiest Americans, the highest-income Americans, are paying average taxes that are under 10 percent. And something like 60 percent of those people pay 2 percent or less, which is less than a schoolteacher or police officer pays on their income.

Brownstein: Let’s turn to another issue that has occupied a lot of your time: China. This summer, President Biden issued an executive order limiting U.S. investment in Chinese technology companies. Last week, the administration finalized a series of tariffs on Chinese imports of electric vehicles, EV batteries, solar panels, critical minerals, steel, and aluminum. Are you concerned about the direction of the economic relationship between these two giant economies, particularly when the U.S. is so dependent on, so intertwined with, China?

Yellen: We have an extensive trade and investment relationship with China, and I believe most of it is beneficial both to the United States and also to China—and uncontroversial: It doesn’t raise national-security issues and doesn’t raise profound issues of unfair trade. I’ve worked to develop a relationship with China in which that kind of trade and investment can continue to thrive.

That said, we do have concerns. We have controlled the exports of goods that we think can boost China’s military in ways that will be damaging to U.S. national security. In addition, we have extreme supply-chain dependence—and, I would say, overdependence in many areas—on China.

In some cases, these are areas in which China has heavily engaged in building capacity through enormous subsidies to their industry. And those are areas where we do have concerns. We feel trade should be on a level playing field. And we want to make sure that we have resilient and diverse supply chains.

The tariffs that you mentioned that we put on electric vehicles and on battery components, aluminum, and steel, these are areas in which China has enormous excess capacity. We’ve made a conscious decision that in the area of clean energy, we want to develop this as an industry in the United States. That’s not to say we want to do everything entirely ourselves. We believe in friendshoring; we have built deepened ties with many countries that—in Latin America, in Asia—can be part of those supply chains. But we really want to reduce our dependence on China.

Brownstein: It isn’t just the supply chain, though, right? As you point out, the administration has put enormous effort into accelerating the development of the clean-energy industries in the United States. Are you concerned that, without these tariffs, Chinese imports would simply overwhelm those nascent industries that we are trying to develop in the U.S.? Is this fundamentally about protecting the new clean-energy industries?

Yellen: That is an issue that is an important motive. At the moment, in areas like solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, electric batteries, China’s prices and costs are extremely low. All of these are areas in which China has engaged in enormous investment over the last decade. And in many cases, there is just utter overcapacity in China: China’s production of solar panels exceeds total global demand. The Chinese government at all levels has been throwing money at developing these industries.

So, yes, I would say that without some protection, our industry is not going to get off the ground. And this is a conscious decision that, while we’re certainly willing to engage in trade in clean energy with friends, we do want to have some presence in the United States in these industries of the future that are important in supplying jobs, good jobs, especially to people who don’t have a college education.

Brownstein: You served in the Clinton administration as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. In the Clinton era, certainly he believed that integrating China into the global economy was a way, not only of providing economic opportunity for the developed world, but also of moderating its behavior. I would say that if there’s one area of convergence among Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, J. D. Vance, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, it is the rejection of that view.

Has the pendulum swung too far in the other direction? Are we missing an opportunity as countries around the world become more focused on nurturing these domestic industries and building barriers to more economic integration?

Yellen: Regarding some of the hopes and aspirations we had for the development of democracy in China, along with economic development, we’ve been disappointed that that hasn’t come to pass. The impact of China—our burgeoning trade with China in the aftermath of China joining the World Trade Organization—really imposed, along with other factors, harm, especially on workers in America who lacked a college education. We experienced something that’s referred to as the China shock: We saw several million manufacturing jobs eliminated in parts of the country that truly needed these jobs. They disappeared.

Trade is good, and it can enhance overall the welfare of a country. But if the gains are not sufficiently widespread, it’s something that is not sustainable over the longer run. I think we saw that while there may have been gains, there were a significant group of Americans that were losers.

This is not to say that we should shut down trade and investment with China. We gain from much of it. But I think the attitude about what impact it has on the United States has become more realistic over time.

Brownstein: This shift in temperature toward China: Do you see it reversing anytime soon, or is this now the new policy consensus in the U.S. that’s going to endure?

Yellen: There does seem to be bipartisan agreement. And I understand the rationale for it, and agree with it. But I do think that we have a deep trade and investment relationship with China, and much of it is beneficial to America. It supports our export industries. We gain new technology from it. And I would not want to see this backlash proceed to the point where we really interfere with those benefits.

The Post-debate Challenge for Harris

2024-09-11T14:00:00-04:00

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.

The only way that last night’s presidential debate could have gone better for Vice President Kamala Harris is if it had been held in late October, not early September. With a forceful, confident, needling performance, Harris did everything Democrats could have hoped for when they pressured President Joe Biden to leave the race earlier this summer. Former President Donald Trump, to a remarkable extent, marginalized himself, spending much of the evening wallowing in personal grievances and feverish conspiracy theories of the far right.

A snap poll from CNN showed that a decisive majority of voters thought Harris won the debate. And as Harris did with her convention speech last month, she likely made substantial progress last night in convincing open-minded voters that she is capable of handling the presidency. Trump, meanwhile, displayed all the tumultuous and divisive behavior that repels even voters sympathetic to his policy priorities. The debate underscored every personal contrast that the Harris campaign wanted to establish: controlled versus chaotic, young versus old, temperate versus angry, normal versus strange.

“I was expecting Trump to try to rattle Kamala Harris, and I didn’t expect Kamala Harris would rattle Trump as much,” Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a group that works to elect liberal women of color, told me. “He seemed very off-kilter. I’m sure his debate handlers and prep people didn’t tell him to talk about eating cats and dogs, and talk about rally size. She lived rent-free in his head.”

So much time—nearly two months—remains before Election Day, however, that Harris’s strong display last night is unlikely to be the last twist in this campaign. The momentum from the debate will ease concerns among Democrats about a series of recent polls showing Trump cutting into the lead that Harris had established immediately after the Democratic National Convention. And her performance will energize Democrats as early voting begins this month in several states.

But the underlying gravity of the race pulls toward a close and grueling election. Partly, that’s because the nation remains evenly divided between the two parties, but it’s also because most Americans remain dissatisfied with Biden’s presidency. Discontented with inflation, they are inclined to vote for change. Except in his closing statement, a distracted and querulous Trump largely failed last night to make the case against the economic record of the administration in which Harris serves. Yet that case remains available for him to make in the eight weeks ahead.

As for Harris, despite her other accomplishments last night, she probably made the least progress in explaining to voters why they should trust her, not Trump, on the economy. Before Democrats can truly exhale, Harris in turn must still convince more voters that she can produce better results than they believe they’ve seen over the past four years.

[David Frum: How Harris roped a dope]

As I’ve written, one of the most ominous trends for Democrats has been that voters’ retrospective assessment of Trump’s performance as president has been improving, to the point where it exceeds the highest job-approval rating he received during his time in office. Political strategists believe that’s largely because voters have been looking back at Trump’s tenure through the lens of what they like least about Biden’s: the high cost of living and the pressure on the southern border.

Last night, though, Harris was able to remind voters that the Trump presidency involved more—and worse things—than just lower prices for gas and groceries. In this, she received an assist from him over and over again: All of the aspects of Trump’s personal conduct that suppressed the support he enjoyed in office, despite broad satisfaction with the economy, were vividly evident during the debate. He was angry, contemptuous, dismissive, and fixated on right-wing preoccupations: defending the January 6 rioters, repeating false claims that immigrants are eating pets, taking credit for overturning the constitutional right to abortion, again insisting that he won the 2020 election. For much of the evening, he looked and sounded like a man who spent so much time cosseted in the bubble of conservative media and his own rallies that he had lost sight of how to communicate with the broader audience that decides presidential elections.

Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster, told me he thought that Trump “didn’t lose any votes” last night because his supporters are so irrevocably bonded to him. But he believed that Trump’s faltering performance had dangerously lowered his ceiling of potential support. “He came across as a bitter, angry old man,” Ayres said. “And that limits his ability to expand beyond the 46–47 percent he’s received in the past.”

By contrast, Harris delivered the same kind of assured, even steely performance that she did in her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. Her answers on defending abortion rights and recounting Trump’s history of race-baiting and racial discrimination were among the most powerful responses I have seen in four decades of covering presidential debates. Democrats thought her measured toughness in confronting Trump—without the agitation that Biden tended to display in his encounters with the former president—may have sent a reassuring signal about her ability to stand up to other world leaders, such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

“She emerged as a very strong leader, and Trump seemed irredeemably negative and dour, and not someone you’d want to handle power again,” Stanley Greenberg, a longtime Democratic pollster, told me. “She was very strong on defense, [and talking about] the military leaders who support her and not him.” Like other Democratic strategists I spoke with, Greenberg thought the debate inverted the most damaging contrast from the Trump-Biden debate, which was dominated by the image of Biden as frail and scattered. “It was strong leader/weak leader,” Greenberg said of the image conveyed by last night’s encounter—with Trump on the wrong side of that comparison.

Ayres agreed. “Her preparation, her strategy, her expressions all worked very well to help fill in the blanks that millions of Americans have about her,” he said.

Beyond creating the personal contrasts that the Harris campaign sought, the debate also followed her preferred direction on another important front. Given voter disaffection with the past four years’ economic outcomes—as many as 60 percent of Americans in some polls have said that they are not better off because of Biden’s policies—the campaigns are wrestling over whether voters will mostly look forward or back in making their choice.

Trump’s clear preference is that they look back. He wants the election to be a referendum on whether voters believe they were doing better economically under his presidency or Biden’s. Harris is just as determined that they look forward, and ask who will fight for them and deliver better results over the next four years.

From the debate’s very first question, when the ABC News moderators asked whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago, Harris steered the conversation toward the future. Although nervous in that initial response, Harris focused not on defending the Biden administration’s record of the past four years but on emphasizing her agenda to help voters over the next four; she also accurately highlighted the conclusion of numerous economic studies that, compared with the Democrats’ plans, Trump’s economic agenda poses a greater risk of reigniting inflation, slowing economic growth, and swelling the federal budget deficit. (Harris twisted the knife on the last point by citing a forecast from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Trump’s alma mater.) On immigration and border security, Harris’s other great vulnerability, she briskly pivoted from a question about the Biden years to detailing how Trump had helped sink a bipartisan bill—which she supported and has pledged to sign if given the opportunity as president—to beef up border enforcement.

[Peter Wehner: Kamala Harris broke Donald Trump]

Trump was so distracted by Harris’s jabs, and his own tendency to revert to a playlist of conservative obsessions, that he did not consistently challenge her efforts to shift voters’ attention toward the future. Only when Trump finally slowed down for his closing statement did he return to an argument that could yet prove compelling for some voters: “Why hasn’t she done it” already? he asked, of the many plans that Harris had touted over the previous 90 minutes.

That talking point, if sustained, might ultimately prove more threatening to Harris than almost anything else Trump said last night. Alternatively, the erratic behavior he displayed through the rest of the debate might sink his chances. Such a small number of voters, in so few swing states, will decide the outcome of this election that no one can predict with any confidence what will move them in a little less than two months from now. Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a senior vice president at Way to Win, a group that provides funding for candidates and organizations focused on mobilizing minority voters, told me after the debate that Harris’s performance will likely reinforce her gains with women. But, Fernandez Ancona added, “our biggest challenge in the next period is to persuade men, particularly men of color” who have proved receptive to Trump’s contention that he’s more capable of managing the economy. “Some of those arguments he was making that fall flat overall are working with men,” she said.

On the fundamental hope of all the Democrats who worked to push Biden from the race, Harris delivered: She prosecuted the Democratic case against Trump in a manner that the current president no longer could. But Trump may not always be as ineffective as he was last night in making the Republican case against her. Harris has regained the initiative in the race, but she still has to hold it—for what may seem to Democrats like an eternity. Already, an age seems to have passed since Biden dropped out of the race, but the time left until Election Day is slightly longer.

Why the Blue Wall Looms So Large

2024-08-22T07:00:00-04:00

American politics over the past generation has experienced the equivalent of continental drift. The tectonic plates of our political life have shifted and scraped, toppling old allegiances and forging new demographic and geographic patterns of support. The turmoil has shattered and remade each party’s agenda, message, and electoral coalition. And yet, no matter what else changes, the most direct path to the White House always seems to run through a handful of blue-collar states in the nation’s old industrial heartland.

This year is no exception. Strategists in both parties consider Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin the pivotal states that are most likely to decide the winner in 2024—just as they did in 2020 and 2016. Although taking this trio of Rust Belt battlegrounds is not the only way for Vice President Kamala Harris to reach the necessary 270 Electoral College votes, “if you look at the history of those states … then you have to believe they are the fastest way to get there,” says the longtime Democratic operative Tad Devine, who managed the Electoral College strategy for the Democratic presidential nominees in 1988, 2000, and 2004. Republicans consider those three states equally indispensable for Donald Trump.

If Harris can sweep Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which offer a combined 44 Electoral College votes, and hold every state that President Joe Biden won by three percentage points or more in 2020, and win the congressional district centered on Omaha in Nebraska (one of two states that award some of their electors by congressional district), she would reach exactly the magic 270 votes. In turn, even if Trump sweeps all four of the major Sun Belt battlegrounds—North Carolina and Georgia in the Southeast, and Arizona and Nevada in the Southwest—he cannot reach 270 without carrying at least one of the big three Rust Belt states (unless he achieves a major upset in one of the states that Biden won last time by at least three percentage points).

The priority on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin is evident in both the time and the money that each campaign is expending there. Both sides are bombarding these states with personal appearances and television advertising: Pennsylvania ranks first, Michigan second, and Wisconsin fourth (behind Georgia) in the ad-spend total, at more than $200 million so far for the three states, according to figures from AdImpact. And for the Democrats gathered in Chicago, Harris’s prospects in the three Rust Belt states is a perpetual topic of discussion, excitement, and anxiety.

“Let me just say, in conclusion,” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the Michigan delegation at the convention yesterday morning. “No pressure: The future of the nation is riding on you.”

[Ronald Brownstein: How the Rustbelt paved Trump’s road to victory]

Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were a significant part of what I termed in 2009 the “Blue Wall”—the 18 states that ultimately voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in all six elections from 1992 through 2012. That was the largest bloc of states consistently won by the Democrats over that many elections since the formation of the modern party system in 1828. The 2016 election broke that pattern: Trump won the presidency by dislodging the big three of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from the Blue Wall by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes. In 2020, Biden reclaimed all three—and with them, the White House—by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes.

Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll, has calculated that in both 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin was the tipping-point state that provided the 270th Electoral College vote (first for Trump and then for Biden). Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC, projects that Pennsylvania is the most likely such fulcrum this year. Perhaps because of this tipping-point effect, my term Blue Wall has morphed into a shorthand for these crucial states—even though they were simply the three bricks that fell out of the rest of the wall in 2016.

At a breakfast meeting of the Pennsylvania delegation that kicked off convention week in Chicago on Monday, speakers talked about defending the Blue Wall across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin against Trump as urgently as characters in Game of Thrones would discuss fortifying the Wall in the north against the White Walkers.

“It is no secret; we are the keystone state of the Blue Wall,” Sharif Street, the Pennsylvania party chair, said. “As goes Pennsylvania, so will go America.”

A little later, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Harris’s vice-presidential nominee, popped into the meeting with a similar message. “I just came from the Wisconsin breakfast, and the Blue Wall is solid, people,” he told the large crowd in a hotel ballroom.

Another special guest, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, dwelled on the topic. “Can we all agree we are going to be the Blue Wall again in 2024?” she asked. “Thank you for helping to save the world with us a few years ago. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin: This race once again is going to come down to our big states.”

[Franklin Foer: Kamala Harris settles the biggest fight in the Democratic Party]

Before these states became the three-headed decider in presidential elections, campaigns usually considered Ohio—a demographically and economically similar neighbor—to be the tipping-point state. Early in the 1988 presidential race, I interviewed Lee Atwater, the legendary GOP strategist who was running George H. W. Bush’s campaign, and he told me that the campaign’s entire Electoral College strategy was to lock down so many states that Democrat Michael Dukakis could not reach 270 without winning Ohio, and then to defend Ohio with what Atwater called a “gubernatorial” level of campaign spending.

Sixteen years later, Karl Rove, the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s reelection campaign against the Democrat John Kerry, likewise considered Ohio “the key state,” he told me this week. Bush eventually won a second term (by the second-narrowest Electoral College majority for a reelected president ever) when he outstripped Kerry in Ohio by about 120,000 votes.

The state remained vital for Barack Obama, who carried it in both his 2008 and 2012 victories. But since then, Ohio has moved solidly toward the Republican Party, which has established overwhelming advantages in the state’s small towns and rural areas. Ohio no longer functions as a fulcrum in the presidential race; it is no longer even a state that Democrats contest at that level.

As Ohio has faded, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have together filled its former pivotal role in presidential contests. An earlier generation of political analysts and operatives viewed Ohio as decisive partly because it seemed to capture America in miniature, due to its racial, educational, and economic mix and rural/urban makeup. Yet that microcosm thesis doesn’t explain the prominence of the new big three. Demographically, the states are not all that representative of an America that is inexorably growing more diverse: All three are whiter and older than the national average, with a lower proportion of college graduates and immigrants, according to census figures. The national trends regarding educational attainment and ethnic diversity that have unfolded in many other states, especially across the Sun Belt, have evolved much more slowly in the big three Rust Belt states.

In particular, white voters without a college degree, who fell below 40 percent as a proportion of the national vote for the first time in 2020, according to census data, still cast about half the vote in Michigan and Pennsylvania that year and nearly three-fifths of it in Wisconsin, according to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro, a center-left think tank. Voters of color, who in 2020 cast about three of every 10 votes nationally, constituted only about one in five voters in Michigan, one in six in Pennsylvania, and one in 10 in Wisconsin.

[Derek Thompson: The new law of electoral politics]

If these Rust Belt battlegrounds still wield great influence in presidential races without being representative of the country overall, what explains that continued prominence? Experts I spoke with offered three persuasive explanations.

One is that a critical mass of voters in these states are conscious of their fulcrum role and therefore devote more attention to presidential contests than most voters do elsewhere. Rove likens the role that Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin now play in the general election to the part that Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina have typically played as the early states on the primary calendar. “There may be something to be said for them taking their roles seriously,” Rove told me. “Like, ‘We are going to pay a little bit more attention to this, and our politics are going to be slightly more robust.’”

Another explanation for these states’ central role is that they have remained highly competitive in presidential elections when so many other states “have made a very rapid transition,” as Rove put it, into the camp of one party or the other. Mark Graul, a GOP operative who ran George W. Bush’s Wisconsin campaigns, told me that the Rust Belt battlegrounds have remained so close because, within them, all of the big political changes over the past generation have largely offset one another. For example, although Democrats are benefiting from better performance in the growing white-collar suburbs around such cities as Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee, those gains have largely been matched by increasing GOP margins among the substantial small-town and rural portions of these states. In the long run, Graul told me, Republicans won’t be able to sustain that trade-off, because their strongholds are either stagnant or losing population. For the near term, though, these states “have been able to weather the demographic and geographic voting shifts and still remain incredibly closely divided,” he said.

The third explanation—identifying perhaps the most important dynamic at work—centers on these states’ powerful tendency to move together in elections. The big three have voted for the same party in every presidential election since 1980, with the sole exception of 1988 (when Wisconsin went with Dukakis, while Michigan and Pennsylvania backed Bush). Even more remarkably, in this century the same party has controlled the governorship in all three states simultaneously, except for one four-year period when Democrats held Pennsylvania while the other two elected Republicans.

Devine told me that because of the demographic and economic similarities and their proclivity for moving in tandem, the three states should be “considered a single entity,” which he calls “Mi-Pa-Wi.” With its 44 combined Electoral College votes, Devine said, Mi-Pa-Wi is in effect the last true swing state of that size, given that the states of comparable magnitude—California, New York, Florida, and Texas—all tilt solidly blue or red. “These three states are really one big state that is going to decide the election,” he said.

[Read: The DNC is a big smiling mess]

On paper, that should be an ominous prospect for Democrats in the Trump era. The foundation of Trump’s electoral coalition is non-college-educated white voters—and they constitute a significantly larger share of the vote in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin than they do nationally.

Yet, at their national convention this week, Democrats from these states clearly feel more optimistic about their prospects now than they did when Biden was the presumptive nominee. “I think this race has been reset,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, told me after the delegation breakfast on Monday. A recent survey from the New York Times/Siena College poll showed Harris with a four-percentage-point lead over Trump in all three states. Other surveys have shown the two candidates more closely matched, but almost all polls show Harris gaining.

Her revival builds on the larger trend across the region. After Trump’s upset victories in 2016, Democrats have regained the initiative in all three states. In 2018, each of them elected a Democratic governor; then each backed Biden in 2020; and in 2022, all three elected Democratic governors again—in every instance by a larger margin than in 2018. Democrats now also hold five of their six U.S. Senate seats.

The winning formula for Democrats in all three states has been similar. Although the party has rarely captured a majority of working-class white voters, its winning candidates—such as Whitmer, Shapiro, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, and Biden in 2020—have routinely performed a few points better with those voters than the party does elsewhere. Democrats have also posted huge advantages among young people, especially in such college towns as Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin. And in all three states, Democrats are benefiting from expanding margins among college-educated voters in the suburbs of major cities—an advantage that widened after Dobbs, the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion. (Later that year, Whitmer, Shapiro, and Evers each won about three-fifths of college-educated white voters: a crushing margin that improved on Biden’s performance, according to exit polls.) These formidable gains with white-collar voters have enabled the party to withstand disappointing turnout and somewhat shrinking margins among Black voters in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and other midsize cities.

Democrats hope that Harris can reverse that electoral erosion in Black communities, while expanding the party’s advantages in well-educated suburbs, especially among women, and recapturing young people who had soured on Biden. Her biggest challenge in the region will be holding as much as possible of Biden’s support among older and blue-collar white voters, who are probably the most receptive audience for the coming Republican attack ads claiming that Harris is a “woke” liberal extremist who is soft on crime and immigration.

Dan Kildee, a Democrat who is retiring after this session as the House representative of a district that includes Flint, Michigan, told me that this sort of hard-edged message will find an audience among some working-class white voters, but he believes Harris can keep those losses to a manageable level. “There’s a whole segment of that cohort of the electorate that now has evidence of what a Donald Trump presidency looks like,” Kildee said, “and will weigh that against the more hopeful and optimistic message that Vice President Harris brings.”

The margin is very tight: Even if Harris does everything right, an optimal outcome for her in these states might be winning them by one or two percentage points. Shapiro could have been speaking about all three states when he told reporters on Monday: “You can get to a race that’s sort of basically statistically tied, and getting that last point or two in Pennsylvania is really, really tough.”

But unlike what happened in 2016, when Hillary Clinton famously, fatally, took her eye off Michigan and Wisconsin to focus on campaigning elsewhere, Democrats are singularly focused on cementing Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin back into the Blue Wall. At the Pennsylvania breakfast, Whitmer told the delegates: “Josh [Shapiro] and I and Tony [Evers] are talking about a Blue Wall strategy. The three of us together, in all three of our states, turning out the voters, getting people pumped up, educating people.” If they can celebrate victory after that effort, she said, it will mean they can “say ‘Madam President’ for the first time in the history of this country.”

The One Big Policy That Kamala Harris Needs

2024-08-16T07:30:00-04:00

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.

Kamala Harris has quickly unified and energized the Democratic coalition—and so far without being pressured into sweeping policy commitments that might provide tempting targets for the GOP. That absence of detailed proposals has itself drawn criticism from Republicans and some news-media commentators. But those complaints overlook both the degree to which a broad policy direction is already clear for a possible Harris presidency and how the goal of preventing Donald Trump from imposing his agenda eclipses other priorities for most of the voters Harris can realistically attract.

“To the extent voters could say ‘Maybe she’s a little bit different than Joe Biden,’ it’s on the economy and immigration she wants to show that,” the longtime Democratic pollster Paul Maslin told me. “Beyond that, it’s the framing vis-à-vis Trump that’s going to win the race.

“If you put me on a linear scale and say, ‘How much of this is pure policy exposition and how much is framing a choice going forward between you and Donald Trump’s world?’” Maslin added, “I’d say it’s 75–25 the latter.”

Harris has already provided signals in her stump speech about what her priorities will be if she’s elected: The list begins with protecting personal liberties and helping economically squeezed families manage the cost of living, partly by expanding federal support for services such as child care and home health care. But several Democratic strategists I spoke with said the issue on which she most needs to add detail is the cost of living. “The economy and inflation are the top issue for every voter group, including the groups that are important to the Democratic coalition, particularly younger voters and people of color,” Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, a progressive organization, told me. “So no matter what, centering economic policy is going to be absolutely essential for Harris.”

Harris seems alert to this imperative. Her first big policy speech, today in North Carolina, will focus on the economy and inflation. The preview her campaign released made clear that her proposals—for instance, to fight market concentration in the meatpacking industry—will draw on her experience, as California’s attorney general, of suing companies that exploited consumers, to help distinguish her approach from Biden’s unpopular record. When Harris joined Biden yesterday to celebrate the reduced drug prices that the administration negotiated for Medicare, she likewise presented this breakthrough as an extension of her prior work on making drug companies accountable “for their deceptive and illegal practices.”

[Read: Does Kamala Harris have a vision for the Middle East?]

Harris aides promise that she will lay out more specific policy commitments at the Democratic National Convention, which starts on Monday in Chicago. “People need to know what she’s going to do,” says one Democratic official familiar with convention planning who asked for anonymity to discuss plans that are not yet public. “And that certainly will be a part of the convention.”

But anyone expecting from Harris a procession of policy white papers and five-point plans from now to November is likely to be disappointed, multiple sources familiar with the campaign’s thinking told me. Focused on the overriding goal of stopping Trump, the key interest groups in the Democratic coalition are unlikely to press Harris for more granular commitments.

“I don’t see the leadership of groups that would typically ask the Democratic administration for this or that policy to be imposing demands,” the progressive strategist Michael Podhorzer, a former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “With so much goodwill out there for Harris and Tim Walz, I don’t think any of those groups would want to be seen as saying suddenly, ‘My interest is so important that I’m going to stop this momentum.’”

This deference from Democratic-aligned interest groups offers the latest example of the way Harris has benefited from the unusual upheaval that allowed her to claim the nomination without winning a single primary. For a presidential-primary candidate, especially on the Democratic side, detailing extensive (and typically expensive) policy commitments is usually a daily obligation. That can produce an intraparty bidding war that can bind a candidate to positions that become difficult to defend in a general election. Harris’s own unsteady 2019–20 primary run exemplified that problem as she embraced a series of distinctly liberal goals (such as single-payer health care, a fracking ban, and police-funding reductions) that lurched to the left of positions she’d held for most of her political career.

Trump and his allies have already targeted Harris’s 2020 campaign agenda to portray her as a “radical” and “dangerous liberal.” But her aides have quickly disavowed the main proposals that Republicans are targeting. Eventually, Harris will have to explain why she moved away from those positions, either at her debate with Trump scheduled for next month or in interviews with reporters. But that task may not be as difficult for Harris as Republicans hope it will be: Many Democrats expect her to argue that her time in the White House, at the highest level of the federal government, has changed her thinking. And she is unlikely to add many, if any, big new commitments before Election Day.

As one Harris adviser, who asked for anonymity to discuss her team’s internal deliberations, told me, the campaign doesn’t feel much need to respond to “people who are asking, ‘Where is her five-prong policy agenda in terms of surging affordable housing for low-income individuals?’” at a time when “we are living through this historic moment” of swelling enthusiasm among Democrats about the prospect of electing Harris and blocking Trump.

Even so, Republicans are trying to use the absence of new Harris policies to fashion a character argument against her. The GOP vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance has called her a “chameleon.” In a statement, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung described Harris as a “dishonest fraudulent failure” who is dodging the press to avoid answering questions on “why she has inexplicably flip-flopped” on many issues since her 2020 campaign. Trump stressed similar arguments in his North Carolina speech this week. Kellyanne Conway, a former senior adviser to Trump, expressed the charge in snarky terms on Fox this week when she said, “Left to her own devices, Kamala Harris is just one big old blind date, and everybody’s making her whatever they need her to be.”

Being labeled a “flip-flopper” was devastating to John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race. But it could be difficult for Republicans to make a case stick that Harris is hiding her real intentions from voters. When Harris and Walz appeared in Las Vegas on Sunday, she gave a clear account of her goals, which include action on health-care and child-care costs, abortion and voting rights, drug prices, immigration and the border, gun control, the “climate crisis,” the minimum wage, and ending taxation on tips for service and hospitality workers (her variation on a Trump proposal). All of that makes a demanding legislative dance card for any White House—especially given the probability that the best-case scenario for a President Harris would be razor-thin majorities in both the House and the Senate.

Those issues would surely preoccupy a Harris presidency for a larger reason than the fact that she’s talking about them: Up and down the party, a broad consensus backs those goals. With only a few exceptions, such as an earned pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, some version of these policies already passed the House of Representatives when Democrats controlled it during the first two years of Biden’s presidency (only to be blocked in the Senate). “These are issues that have animated the Democratic Party, and she has been a leader on that,” Neera Tanden, Biden’s chief domestic-policy adviser, told me.

[Charles Sykes: The Trump campaign endorses a racist theory]

Rank-and-file Democrats are, if anything, even more enthusiastic than elected representatives about those policies. Bennett told me that in his organization’s surveys over the past few years, almost every idea Harris has discussed draws support from at least 85 percent of Democratic voters and, often, more than 90 percent. “You can see this tapestry: Economic justice, reproductive rights and freedom, and protecting American democracy are really central issues” to the voters who are plausibly open to Harris, Bennett said.

The criticism that Harris has not put forward enough policy proposals ignores this bottom-up consensus that would likely determine the agenda of a Harris administration as much as her own top-down preferences would. The issues likely to rise to the top are those for which her personal interests and the party’s institutional goals most overlap.

In a Harris presidency, those coinciding priorities would center on the so-called care economy. On those issues, the party has an agenda already on the shelf: The version of Biden’s Build Back Better plan that the House passed in 2021 included programs for universal prekindergarten and proposals to subsidize child-care costs, expand access to home health care, and establish a nationwide paid family-and-medical-leave program. These measures failed to advance in the Senate only when the dissenting Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocked them. “There’s obviously room to build from there, but what passed in the Build Back Better Act in the House is a very strong foundation,” Ai-jen Poo, the president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told me.

These areas are also a personal priority for Harris. In the Senate, she introduced legislation addressing each of the care-economy issues, as Jonathan Cohn recently documented for HuffPost. Biden has stressed the challenges of providing care to children and seniors as well, but when he talks about bolstering the middle class, he tends to sound as if he envisions a blue-collar worker on a construction site or in a factory.

In contrast, Harris is more familiar with a postindustrial landscape in California, and draws upon her own experience of caring for her mother as she died of colon cancer. That background gives Harris a keener focus on using public policy to support domestic-service workers, many of whom are women and minorities. “If there were archetypes of the working-class hero in this country, home-care workers are one of those archetypes for her,” said Poo, who also serves as the executive director of Caring Across Generations, a coalition of advocacy groups.

Democrats I’ve spoken with expect that showing voters how Harris’s agenda on the issues they care most about—the economy, crime, and immigration—derives from such personal experiences will be a major goal of next week’s convention. The aim, as I’ve written, is to do as Bill Clinton did at the 1992 Democratic National Convention: He argued that he would defend the middle class because he was a product of it.

[Read: The one policy idea uniting Trump and Harris]

Numerous polls have shown Harris significantly narrowing Trump’s advantage on the economy even before she’s issued any proposals differentiating her plans from Biden’s. The most dramatic of these recent surveys, from the Financial Times and the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, found that slightly more Americans trusted Harris than Trump to manage the economy.

Those findings suggest that Harris is benefiting less from a sense that she has better ideas than Trump on any particular issue and more from the notion that she would provide more energetic and unifying leadership across the board than the former president. That dynamic, visible in multiple recent polls, has helped her scoop up many of the “double hater” voters who disliked both Trump and Biden; in a survey released on Wednesday, the Democratic polling firm Equis Research found Harris making dramatic gains among Latino voters across the battleground states largely because she was capturing almost two-thirds of the voters who were negative about both Biden and Trump—nearly twice the share that Biden himself had been attracting.

When forced to choose between Biden and Trump, many Latinos defaulted to the belief that under Trump, “the economy was doing better [and] I had more money in my pocket,” Carlos Odio, a co-founder and senior vice president for research at Equis, told me. “But with Harris, it seems to be a different calculus. People see Harris as Option C: Turn the page.”

Odio noted that even with Harris’s big gain in the Equis poll, she still isn’t drawing quite as much support among Latinos as Biden did in 2020 (which was itself down from the Democratic performance in 2016 and 2012). Odio believes that the last few points of Latino support that Harris will likely need in states such as Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania could come from voters “who are waiting to see what it is she is proposing on the economy.” Bennett thinks the same is true for the broader electorate.

Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative strategist turned staunch Trump critic, pointed to another way Harris could benefit from offering more specific economic plans: Doing so might help separate her from the discontent over Biden’s record on handling inflation. “I don’t think people need the Hillary Clinton–level detail,” Kristol told me. “But the thing about having an economic agenda is it’s forward-looking … It creates the sense that you are thinking ahead and not looking back.”

Still, more policy proposals may not be all that relevant to the particular electoral challenge Harris is confronting. Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director, argues that Harris doesn’t so much need to dislodge voters from Trump as inspire turnout among the voters who reject his vision for America. “For the anti-MAGA majority voters who are not paying that much attention to politics, she’s a new face, so they just have to feel that they will be comfortable that when she’s president, everything will be fine,” Podhorzer told me. “The idea of an 86-year-old Biden was not fine with them. It wasn’t about policy. It was: Do I really trust this person to be making the big decisions that come before the president?, as opposed to having a legislative agenda. That’s [the bar] she has to clear.”

Harris’s best chance to surmount that hurdle is convincing voters that she has the personal qualities of strength and vision to succeed in the presidency. Proving that case seems much more likely to lift her over the top than stacking up policy papers.

What the Convention Could Do for Kamala Harris

2024-08-09T06:00:00-04:00

No presidential nominee in decades has approached their convention with a greater opportunity to reshape their public image than Vice President Kamala Harris.

Harris is the first nonincumbent since Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to claim either party’s presidential nomination without first enduring months of grueling primary contests. Because Harris did not experience the setbacks and triumphs that come from waging such a fight, public impressions of her are uncommonly shallow for a nominee on the convention’s eve, strategists in both parties agree.

That gives Harris a chance to benefit more than usual from the Democratic gathering in Chicago later this month if she can flesh out her story in an engaging way—but also leaves more room for Republicans to define her in negative terms. “We probably haven’t in modern times seen anybody emerge as the nominee who is less well known,” the longtime Democratic strategist Robert Shrum told me. “Her first impression with people is obviously extremely positive. But now you want to fill in the canvas.”

[Read: The Kamala Harris problem]

By choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her vice-presidential nominee on Tuesday, Harris did little to advance that process. Walz is personable, a good campaigner, and unobjectionable to any major Democratic faction. But other options might have provided star power (Arizona Senator Mark Kelly), relevance in a key swing state (Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro), or a generational contrast (Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear) that Walz does not. He looks like Hillary Clinton’s pick, Tim Kaine—a do-no-harm choice that, if the race goes sour, will be seen as a missed opportunity to make a bolder statement.

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which starts on August 19, now offers Harris her next opportunity to sharpen her image before Republicans do. In modern times, the candidate who has used the convention period best was Bill Clinton, who showed in 1992 how powerful a tool the convention can be in addressing loosely held, or even erroneous, perceptions among the voters.

The Arkansas governor had beaten a weak field to win the Democratic nomination, but his victory left him badly damaged by revelations that he had engaged in extramarital affairs and maneuvered to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War. After he clinched the nomination in early June, a succession of general-election polls showed him in third place, trailing not only Republican President George H. W. Bush, but also Ross Perot, the quirky independent candidate.

Over the next several weeks, Clinton and his team engineered a remarkable turnaround built on a plan that his campaign dubbed the “Manhattan Project.” Its most important revelation was that most voters mistakenly thought Clinton was a child of privilege because he had attended Georgetown and Yale, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and avoided Vietnam. Once voters learned that he had suffered through a difficult upbringing with an alcoholic stepfather in a small Arkansas town, they became much more likely to view him as genuinely committed to improving life for the middle class that he had emerged from. As Stanley Greenberg, the campaign pollster, wrote later, “The key to having Clinton’s project heard and understood was for voters to learn about his life.”

Clinton reintroduced himself through a series of media appearances that were at the time pathbreaking—including playing the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show and presenting himself for a town hall on MTV. He underlined his generational and ideological reconstruction of the Democratic Party by picking as his running mate not an older Washington veteran, but another brainy southern Baby Boomer centrist, Al Gore. At the convention, Clinton completed his comeback with a stirring nomination-acceptance speech in which he pledged to defend “our forgotten middle class,” because he was a product of it. “I still believe in a place called Hope,” he declared, poetically referencing the town where he spent part of his childhood.

On the day Clinton delivered his acceptance speech, Perot dropped out of the race. (He later reentered it and ultimately won nearly one-fifth of the popular vote.) Clinton soared into first place after his convention and never again trailed Bush in Gallup polls. Clinton’s 16-point gain in Gallup polls was by far the largest convention bump for any candidate in the past six decades, according to an analysis by the American President Project at UC Santa Barbara.

Harris’s position is in one respect easier than Clinton’s, and in another more difficult. The more difficult aspect is that in this highly polarized political era, neither side can easily achieve big bumps in support from their convention. Christopher Wlezien, a University of Texas professor of government, notes that although political scientists believe that the two party conventions mostly cancel each other out, one side has typically benefited from its convention somewhat more than the other. When the two conventions are completed, the race usually “ends up at a different place than where it was before,” Wlezien—a co-author of The Timeline of Presidential Elections, a book about the impact of campaigns on presidential-election outcomes— told me. But he also told me that the effects of the conventions have dampened over time, now that so many voters are bound to one side or the other. In the 21st century, only the Democrat Al Gore and the Republican George W. Bush in 2000 have seen substantial movement in their support around their conventions. In each of the past three contests, the conventions produced minimal shifts in support, polls found.

[Read: Having a chance has changed the Democrats]

In the modern era, a more achievable goal at the convention than dramatically shifting the ballot has been fortifying underlying impressions of the candidate that can lead to ballot gains later. It’s on this front that Harris’s task is easier than Clinton’s was. Voters’ impressions of her are less negative than amorphous.

Until Biden stepped aside, Harris had spent very little time in the national spotlight. Her 2020 presidential campaign began only a few years after she was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 and flamed out before a single vote was cast. Even after Biden selected her as his running mate and won the presidency, his administration did not provide her a high-profile role until she emerged as its principal critic of the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade as well as various civil-rights rollbacks proliferating in Republican-controlled states. Studies of the public’s views about Harris conducted by Democratic-leaning groups such as Way to Win and EMILY’s List before Biden withdrew all found that, beyond some awareness of her advocacy for abortion rights, voters know very little about her.

“She is really undefined, and that is not different than past vice presidents,” says Melissa Williams, who directs the independent-expenditure program at EMILY’s List, which works to elect Democratic women who support legal abortion. “People don’t know what the vice president’s job is. She has universal name identification, they know who she is, but they don’t know what’s in her portfolio and they don’t know what her accomplishments are.” Williams added, “When you have a conversation about her accomplishments, the numbers move dramatically because you are filling in an information gap. The ceiling is quite high to move voters because they don’t know about her.”

Matthew Dowd, who served as a senior strategist for both of George W. Bush’s campaigns, noted that, before Biden stepped aside, Harris’s favorable and unfavorable ratings closely tracked the president’s—which suggested that she was caught in the undertow as voters soured on his physical and mental capacity to do the job. That conclusion, Dowd told me, is reinforced by the rapid improvement in the public’s view of Harris since she emerged as the Democratic alternative.

“The perceptions of her were simultaneously soft and being held back by the perceptions of Biden,” Dowd told me. “Once the baggage of Biden was removed, then I think she naturally started to move her numbers.” Because views of Harris are so fluid, she might be able to reach the upper end of the convention bump still available in this polarized time. But even that is a relative measure: Dowd says that for Harris, a post-convention gain of one to three points would be significant.

Several of the strategists I spoke with predicted that the lack of knowledge about Harris would draw television viewers, potentially providing her with a bigger audience than the roughly 25 million that Donald Trump attracted. The strategists broadly agreed that Harris’s greatest need is less to detail a specific policy agenda than to execute a version of Bill Clinton’s blueprint by talking about her personal history—and explaining how it motivates and equips her to lead a diversifying, multiracial, multicultural America.

[George Packer: What Democrats can learn from the trauma of 1968]

“The convention ought to be designed to tell all about her and tell her story,” said Shrum. Matt McDermott, a pollster for Democratic campaigns and progressive causes, argues that the convention could help Harris most by underscoring both her credentials for assuming the presidency and the generational transition she represents. She is about 20 years younger than either Biden or Trump. “The one singular data point that in hindsight will prove to drive this entire election is that 70 percent of voters wanted a different option,” McDermott predicted. “There was a huge contingent of voters, myself included, sitting there saying, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be nice to have another option on the table?’ And the Democratic Party gave them that option.” As a result, “with a strong convention,” McDermott continued, “I think there is an untapped part of the electorate that will say, ‘Let’s jump on board because we can’t go back to this other thing we’ve had.’”

Democrats gained a tactical advantage when Biden didn’t abandon his reelection bid until immediately after the Republican convention last month. That meant the GOP targeted most of its criticism at him—which became largely irrelevant—instead of focusing on defining Harris. She had already benefited, Dowd notes, because Republicans could not spend months trying to seed negative impressions of her during a contested primary, as they had successfully done with most other recent Democratic nominees.

Now the GOP is trying to make up for lost time. Trump has besieged Harris as a radical liberal who will be ineffective on crime and immigration; J. D. Vance, his vice-presidential nominee, this week disparaged her as an elitist who “thinks she’s better than you.” This portrayal of her as a coastal ideologue who’s too weak to keep Americans safe is an updated version of the attack that George H. W. Bush and his fierce campaign manager, Lee Atwater, wielded to devastating effect against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential race. Insulating her against that argument may be among the Democrats’ greatest needs at their convention.

Trump’s own gathering last month in Milwaukee did not help him much. The share of voters viewing Trump favorably never reached 50 percent in the aftermath of the GOP convention—despite the added factor of sympathy for the former president after the attempt on his life—and has now slipped back below 45 percent in most surveys. The indications that Trump has stalled while Harris is rising has rekindled hope among Democrats that what they call the “anti-MAGA majority” that came out to vote in 2018, 2020, and 2022 could prevail again in 2024. Harris has to prove that she can unify and mobilize those voters. But now Democrats see at least a chance to revive their coalition at a convention that only a few weeks ago many of them feared might pass for a wake.

How Harris Can Tackle the Clinton Factor

2024-08-01T08:03:00-04:00

Amid all the Democratic excitement about Vice President Kamala Harris’s historic presidential candidacy, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump lingers like the ghost at the feast.

Now Harris’s sudden ascension as her party’s presumptive nominee is providing Democratic women with a second chance to elect the first female president and break what Clinton often called the “highest, hardest glass ceiling.”

By any standard, Harris has benefited from an astounding outpouring of enthusiasm since President Joe Biden announced that he would no longer seek reelection. But her nascent campaign still faces some of the same challenges that Clinton’s did. The first polls measuring Harris’s support have generally not found women flocking toward her in unusually large numbers. And some grassroots Democrats otherwise euphoric about Harris remain concerned that too many voters, including plenty of women, will not accept a woman president.

How gender has evolved as a factor in presidential politics in the eight years since Trump’s unexpected victory will likely emerge as a pivotal feature of this reconfigured 2024 race. Perhaps even more than in 2016, Trump aims to embody a hyperbolic definition of masculinity, surrounding himself with pro wrestlers and emphasizing his physical courage after the assassination attempt a few weeks ago. Harris, for her part, is highlighting questions of gender equity even more explicitly than Clinton did, framing Republican efforts to ban abortion as part of an overall effort to reverse women’s gains in society.

These stark contrasts—reinforced by Harris’s status as the first woman of color atop a major-party national ticket—set the conditions for an election contest that could make America’s changing landscape of race and gender a central element. That prospect came sharply into view yesterday when Trump, speaking to an audience of Black journalists, suggested that Harris identified as Black solely for political advantage.

[Tyler Austin Harper: ‘White dudes for Harris’ was a missed opportunity]

The positive trends for women in politics since Clinton’s defeat are unmistakable. The Reflective Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan group that does research and political organizing related to race and gender, recently released an analysis showing that women have increased their share of elected offices at the state-legislative level or higher from one in four in 2014 to one in three today. Women of color have doubled their share of all elected offices from one in 20 then to one in 10 now.

“Absolutely people are more accustomed to women in elected office than they were 10 years ago,” Brenda Choresi Carter, the group’s director, told me. “Just numerically, there are a lot more women in elected office. More people are living with that reality, and more people are voting for that reality.”

The group also found that gains have come in all parts of government. Women have significantly increased their representation in both state and federal offices, and in both legislative and executive-branch positions. “This is a trend, really a phenomenon, across geographies, blue states and red states, levels of office, really nationwide,” Carter said.

Attitudes about women as leaders are improving too. In surveys conducted by Tresa Undem, a pollster for progressive causes, the share of adults who say that men make better leaders than women slipped from 16 percent in 2016 to 13 percent in 2022, while the share who say that women make better political leaders than men more than doubled over that period, from 6 percent to 14 percent. The majority of adults surveyed—77 percent in 2016, 73 percent in 2022—say that both genders are equally qualified to serve as leaders.

Although some Democrats worry that Black and Latino men may be more resistant to women leaders, Undem said her data show that a rising share of both groups agree that women make better political leaders. (The share of Black men expressing that view has more than quadrupled since 2016 from 5 percent to 22 percent, she found.) To the extent that Trump is gaining among men of color, “that growing openness,” Undem told me, “is unrelated to gender—it really is economic in nature,” centered on a belief that he can manage the economy more effectively than a Democratic president. This suggests that Harris, rather than facing intractable objections rooted in her identity, has an opportunity to regain at least some ground with men of color if she can mount a persuasive economic case.

Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist at the University of Virginia who has extensively studied the experience of women in politics, told me that other academic and media surveys have found a growing willingness to consider women appropriate leaders across a wide range of professional fields. She sees “very little difference in how male and female candidates and how male and female leaders in other industries” are viewed. “Over time, gender stereotyping has declined considerably,” she said. “Generally, there is not a predisposition any longer to think of a man as stronger than a woman in the same job.”

These trends notwithstanding, views about gender roles are a major partisan dividing line. Over the past generation, voters have become more sorted into the two parties according to their attitudes about demographic, cultural, and economic change in America—and that includes new patterns in gender relations. As I wrote in 2012, Republicans have established a dominant advantage among the people and places most uneasy with these fundamental changes, forming what I called the “coalition of restoration.” Correspondingly, Democrats have performed best with voters who are most comfortable as part of a “coalition of transformation.”

This re-sorting of the electorate reached a peak in the Clinton-Trump race. The best evidence from multiple academic studies of the 2016 election is that both men and women were more polarized in that contest than in 2012 over their attitudes toward demands for greater equity from women and racial minorities. In their 2018 book, Identity Crisis, the political scientists John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck found that white women and especially white men who expressed the most sexist attitudes voted for Trump at higher levels than voters with those same attitudes who had backed the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney.

In another landmark study of the 2016 result, the Tufts University political scientist Brian F. Schaffner and two co-authors showed that the best predictors of support for Trump were, in order, hostility toward demands for greater racial equity and hostility toward demands for greater gender equity; each attitude correlated with Trump support more powerfully than economic discontent did. Clinton came out ahead with voters who expressed the most concern about these inequities.

[David A. Graham: The underdog vs. the victim]

This stark separation of voters in 2016 set a new mold, emphasizing that attitudes toward social and economic change had become the clearest, most consistent distinction between the two parties’ coalitions. “The 2016 race changed the landscape of what was being contested in politics,” Vavreck, a professor at UCLA, told me.

The actual personalities on the ticket may not be all that significant. According to Schaffner, attitudes toward racial and social change predicted support for candidates as powerfully in the 2018 congressional elections as they had in 2016, even without Trump or Clinton on the ballot. In 2020, when the presidential race reverted to the historic pattern of two male candidates, Biden ran only slightly better than Clinton had among voters who expressed the most sexist attitudes, Schaffner found, while Trump ran slightly better than his own showing four years earlier among those who expressed the least sexism.

The 2020 race nevertheless followed the basic grooves of 2016, Schaffner told me, with voters still sorting markedly over gender roles and racial equity. Similarly, Undem found that not only men but also women voting for Trump were far more likely than Biden supporters of either gender to agree with such statements as “Society seems to punish men just for acting like men”; “White men are the most attacked group in the country right now”; and “Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.” Women as well as men who voted for Trump in 2020, she reported, expressed overwhelmingly negative views toward the #MeToo movement, which had emerged during his presidency.

All of this suggests, as Schaffner told me, that 2016 culminated in a “mini-realignment,” such that voters who “have a more traditional view on the role of women in society” shifted toward the GOP, while those with “a more feminist view” moved toward Democrats.

Given this history, whether the two parties’ coalitions will differ in their views about gender roles is beyond question. What remains to be seen is whether that divide will be wider because a female nominee is on the ballot again—and which party may benefit more from that.

Schaffner, like others I spoke with, believes that virtually all of the voters who would be uncomfortable with a woman or a person of color (or both) as president were already supporting Trump—and that this was true even when Trump was presumptively running against Biden, an 81-year-old white man.

“There are not a lot of sexist people who were going to vote for Joe Biden anyway,” said Schaffner, who is also a co-director of the Cooperative Election Study, which conducts a large-sample survey of voters during election years. “It’s hard to say that it doesn’t cost [Harris] maybe one point on the margin, because we can’t really measure things that precisely. But I can’t imagine it would be more than that, if it’s anything at all.”

Lawless similarly believes that Harris will not face as much resistance based on her gender as Clinton did. Gender politics were arguably more fraught for Clinton both because she was the first female major-party presidential nominee, Lawless told me, and because she had been a controversial figure since Bill Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s. “In terms of Clinton 2016,” she said, “it’s hard to know how much was sexism and how much was Hillary Clinton–ism.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Identity politics loses its power]

Many Democrats are cautiously optimistic that the ad hominem jabs against Harris rooted in her race or gender—such as the one from a Republican senator who called her a “ding-dong”—might backfire for Trump by reactivating younger women and nonwhite women who had seemed unenthused about voting for Biden. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who studies gender dynamics in the electorate, told me that she believes Harris’s background as a district attorney in San Francisco and as the attorney general of California will help neutralize Republican claims that she’s not strong enough to protect Americans as president. “The strength axis was very, very damaging to Biden, but I think she answers a lot of the strength questions,” Lake said. “Then, for Trump, the questions of his kind of strength become more operational. Trump’s strength brings a lot of other qualities: divisiveness, ego … To some women, it brings toxic masculinity.”

Harris’s campaign also offers an opportunity for a reconciliation among liberal white women and women of color, many of whom had felt marginalized by Clinton’s campaign operation (although nonwhite women did overwhelmingly support Clinton, while a majority of white women backed Trump). Many activists believe that the cross-racial cooperation among women seems much more genuine for Harris than it was for Clinton. Largely spontaneous Zoom calls with huge attendance figures—to organize support first among Black women, then among white women, and then among white men—testify to an eruption of energy around her candidacy and a shifting dynamic among activist women.

“This is different,” Aimee Allison, who founded the group She the People to elect more women of color partly in response to the frustrations of the Clinton campaign, told me. “You had white women who said explicitly in that call ‘that we delivered the presidency as a group to Donald Trump in 2016 and that’s something we have to contend with—and now we look to Black women in particular for leadership.’ Their language of solidarity is evolving right before my eyes.”

[David A. Graham: Donald Trump questions whether Kamala Harris is really Black]

Harris faces plenty of obstacles in her quest to shatter the glass ceiling. Besides discontent over inflation and other aspects of Biden’s record, she will need to demonstrate her own qualifications against Republicans disparaging her as a “DEI hire,” and rebut Republican efforts to portray her as an extreme liberal whose policies will lead to more crime and to chaos at the border. Those GOP efforts are aimed primarily at voters in the preponderantly white and older Rust Belt battlegrounds that are at the top of both parties’ target list: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

But Allison, the She the People founder, believes that Harris’s candidacy could mobilize enough people of color and younger people to prove to the Democratic Party that it can win without concentrating so hard on courting culturally conservative older and working-class white voters. The old playbook, she told me, said, “‘Let’s bank on the more moderate voter as the center of our campaign; let’s have events and messaging that they will appreciate, and focus on older white voters.’ Now we have to be thinking differently.”

As a child of immigrants from Jamaica and India who is in a mixed-race marriage herself, Harris embodies the changes remaking America even more comprehensively than Clinton or Obama did. Although Trump has been attracting more support from Latino and Black voters than he did in earlier races, his campaign message remains centered on an implicit pledge to resist those changes and restore a social hierarchy in which white Christian men wield authority. With her braided identities, Harris could, by winning, show that “many more segments of society understand that there’s no one dominant group—that everyone is in the mix,” as Allison put it. The question of whether a rapidly diversifying nation will share power in new ways is on the ballot once again, perhaps even more pointedly than when Clinton ran. With Harris on the ticket, America has an opportunity to choose a different answer.

Can Harris Reassemble Obama’s Coalition?

2024-07-22T12:43:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

If the Democrats nominate Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed President Joe Biden, which now seems the most probable scenario, the shift will likely force the party to accelerate the continuing transformation of its coalition.

As the nominee, Harris could alleviate Biden’s most intractable electoral problem—his erosion of the support of younger and nonwhite voters—but she could also potentially squander his greatest remaining political asset, his continuing support among older and blue-collar whites. What makes this moment so nerve-racking for Democrats is that they have no sure way of knowing whether Harris could gain more with the former groups than she might lose among the voters that Biden brought back.

I asked Joe Trippi, the Democratic strategist who managed Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, whether the benefits of switching to Harris as a potential nominee are greater than the costs. “I don’t think [that] is a knowable thing,” he said.

Despite that uncertainty, by the time Biden announced his withdrawal from the race yesterday, most Democratic professionals had concluded that the risks of sticking with Biden far exceeded the dangers of switching to Harris. Doubts about Harris’s ability to beat Donald Trump, considering the way her own presidential campaign sputtered in the lead-up to the 2020 Democratic primaries, were a principal reason Biden did not face more pressure to withdraw earlier, even though the polling persistently showed his reelection bid in a perilous position.

[Tim Alberta: This is exactly what the Trump team feared]

Since the first moments of last month’s debate, however, most of the party’s top operatives and strategists have come to view Harris as a better bet than the president. That assessment rests on the fact that, at a minimum, she offers an opportunity to shake up a race in which voter resistance to Biden, centered on doubts that he can still do the job, has been steadily solidifying. Yesterday, you could almost hear a collective sigh of relief as Democrats welcomed the opportunity to change the script: Now they could throw aside the need to defend Biden’s visibly diminished capabilities and redefine the presidential contest with new contrasts.

“There’s a chance it won’t work. There’s a chance we have already dug too big a hole here to get out of,” Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster, told me. “But we need a juiced-up party—and she and a running mate, and a new reset, and all the attention, might do it.”

Biden won in 2020 partly by luring back some of the older and blue-collar white voters who had resoundingly rejected Hillary Clinton four years earlier. That will be harder for Harris; instead, she will need to win back the younger and nonwhite voters whose support has been hemorrhaging from the Biden campaign, while further expanding the party’s margins with college-educated white women. In all of these ways, if the vice president wins the nomination, the Harris coalition will probably look a little less like the voting blocs Biden assembled and more like an updated version of the coalition that Barack Obama mobilized in his two victories.

Enough Democratic strategists, elected officials, donors, and voters worry about Harris’s viability against Trump to guarantee some receptivity at next month’s convention if one or more candidates want to contest the nomination. But after her endorsements from Biden and an array of party elected officials and interest groups yesterday, Harris may face no serious challenge. California Governor Gavin Newsom, one of the strongest possible rivals for the nomination, moved quickly yesterday to endorse Harris, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, another party favorite, joined him this morning.

“Behind the scenes, there are still people who are trying to make an argument for a contested convention,” Aimee Allison, the founder of She the People, a group that works to elect Democratic women of color, told me. “But I would be surprised after President Biden’s endorsement,” she said, “if any top-tier elected official would … make a play for the nomination.”

As I’ve previously reported, research by numerous Democratic groups this year has found that even after Harris’s three and a half years in office, voters hold very shallow impressions of the vice president. The good news is that Republican attempts to paint Harris as a “woke” San Francisco liberal have for the most part failed to stick. The bad news is that voters’ hazy view of her means that they also have little idea of what she’s accomplished or would like to—except for some limited awareness of the work she’s done defending abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned them in 2022. Probably because Harris is so little known, her favorability ratings have closely tracked the president’s, although some recent surveys have shown her running very slightly ahead of Biden against Trump.

One Democratic pollster, who late last week conducted focus groups that included discussions of Harris, told me just before Biden’s announcement that he was enthusiastic about a possible switch to Harris precisely because there was still “more room to define her” than there was for Biden. “She’d have to prove herself almost immediately out of the gate,” said the pollster, who asked for anonymity to discuss the private focus-group results, “but that is doable.”

Those excited about a switch to Harris point to several immediate benefits it can bring. The most immediate would be to reenergize party donors who had started a kind of sit-down strike against Biden. Harris also has the capacity to campaign far more vigorously than Biden and deliver more cogently the party’s core messages against Trump. Besides advocating for abortion rights, Harris has been the administration’s point person pushing back against book bans, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, classroom censorship, and other restrictions in Republican-controlled states.

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

That contrasts with Biden, who, as the presidential debate last month showed, “just cannot play offense,” Charles Coughlin, an Arizona-based Republican consultant who is critical of Trump, told me. Harris, Coughlin said, will have a better chance of reminding voters of what they didn’t like about Trump when he was president. That could help Democrats reverse a consistent and, for them, ominous trend in public opinion: Retrospective assessments of Trump’s performance as president routinely exceed the highest ratings he recorded while in office.

In particular, Harris has a proven ability to express more effectively than Biden the Democrats’ case that Trump threatens American rights, values, and democracy itself. She can try to frame the race as that of a prosecutor against a convicted felon. Harris, at 59, also has the advantage of relative youth: Polls have shown that a significant share of Americans doubt the mental capacity of Trump, who has stumbled through his own procession of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and incomprehensible tangents during stump speeches and interviews to relatively little attention in the shadow of Biden’s difficulties. Particularly if Harris picks a younger running mate, she could top a ticket that embodies the generational change that many voters indicated they were yearning for when facing a Trump-Biden rematch.

“Not only is she uniquely prepared to deliver our best argument for taking down Trump and the MAGA movement’s assault on our freedoms,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder of Way to Win, another liberal group that focuses on electing candidates of color, told me, “she embodies the passing of the torch to a new generation at a time when that is desperately needed to shore up our diverse, winning coalition.”

If Harris can strongly present herself that way, many Democrats believe she could improve on Biden’s performance with several significant groups of voters.

In the best-case scenario for this line of thinking, Harris could regain ground among the younger voters and Black and Hispanic voters who have drifted away from Biden since 2020. At the same time, she could further expand Democrats’ already solid margins among college-educated women who support abortion rights.

“One of our biggest problems is the lack of enthusiasm among younger voters and voters of color, younger independent women in particular,” Maslin, the Democratic pollster, told me. “They have been the standoffish voters who don’t like this choice.” A Harris-led ticket would be “at least an opportunity for those people to perk up their ears and listen.”

Against that hope, Democrats also express anxious uncertainty about how Harris might perform among other groups that the party prizes. Some party operatives are skeptical about whether she can reel back a meaningful number of the Black and Latino men, who, polls show, have moved toward Trump since 2020. Even greater concerns circulate about whether Harris can preserve the surprisingly durable support Biden has posted this year among older and non-college-educated white voters.

In 2020, Biden made modest but decisive gains compared with Clinton in 2016 among those groups (as well as among college-educated whites) in the key Rust Belt battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and Biden has largely held those gains in polling this year, despite his erosion among voters of color. Some Democrats worry that a Harris-led ticket could bleed support among working-class and older whites in the same way that cost Clinton narrow defeats in all three states.

If Harris, as the nominee, loses some of Biden’s older white voters, that could easily offset any gains she might make among nonwhite and younger ones. Mike Mikus, a Democratic consultant based in Pittsburgh, told me that in Pennsylvania—a must-win state for the Democrats where the polls have consistently shown Trump ahead—he didn’t see “much difference in the overall strength” of Harris and Biden.

“She makes it a little easier to turn out the base in Philly, particularly African American voters,” Mikus said, “but I think she probably loses some of the gains he’s made in these outlying areas with blue-collar white voters.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: The problem with coronating Kamala Harris]

That might seem to imply a racist undertow in attitudes toward Harris, but Mikus largely discounts this, believing that Democrats have already lost virtually all the voters who might oppose her because of her race. The bigger problem, he said, is that her background in California could enable Republicans to paint her as “too far out of the mainstream.” As if on cue, the main super PAC supporting Trump sent out a press release yesterday afternoon describing Harris as a “Radical California liberal.” Republicans also believe that Harris’s greatest vulnerability may be her work as the administration’s point person on the border—and this is an area that Democratic polls, too, have identified as a danger for her.

Others more optimistic about Harris’s prospects think the gains she could generate over Biden among the key elements of the old Obama coalition—young people, minorities, and college-educated whites—will exceed any further erosion she might experience with working-class and older white voters. Nominating a Black woman, Allison said, would challenge the belief “that politicians have to appease older white voters in order to be successful. Is that true now? Does it have to be true, or can we evolve?” A Harris nomination would present a real-world test of these questions, with the highest possible stakes.

Whether Harris can assemble a winning coalition also depends on electoral geography. Before Biden withdrew, most analysts in both parties believed that his only remaining path to reelection was to sweep Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the three former “blue wall” industrial states.

With Harris’s assumed strength among Black voters, Ancona of Way to Win argues that Harris reopens “the full 2020 map” of swing states, including North Carolina and Georgia. Coughlin, the GOP consultant in Arizona, thinks her potential improvement among white suburban women around Phoenix could allow Harris to put his state back in play; some consultants focusing on Latino voters expressed optimism that she could do the same in Nevada.

But if those hopes are overstated, Harris will have to follow the same path as Biden and win all three Rust Belt battlegrounds—where white voters, and non-college-educated white voters in particular, are a much larger part of the electorate than they are nationally. Given their demographic composition, those states may be at least as difficult for her as they were for Biden. For that reason, some Democrats are worried that Harris might well win a greater share of the national popular vote than Biden but still face long odds of amassing the 270 Electoral College votes to reach the White House.

These considerations would also loom over Harris’s choice of a running mate, if she becomes the nominee next month. The safe play would be to “balance the ticket,” as political professionals say, by picking a white, male vice-presidential nominee from a swing state. Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania top many of those professionals’ lists, with Shapiro most favored because Pennsylvania is more crucial to Democrats’ chances than Arizona.

The other option that energizes many Democrats would be for Harris to take the bold, historic option of selecting another woman: Whitmer. That would be a greater gamble, but a possible model would be 1992, when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore as his running mate; Gore was, like him, a centrist Baby Boomer southerner—rather than an older D.C. hand. “I love Josh Shapiro and I think he would be a great VP candidate, but I would double down” with Whitmer, Mikus told me. “I don’t think you have to go with a moderate white guy. I think you can be bold [with a pick] that electrifies your base.” I heard similar views from several consultants.

Until yesterday, Democrats were so despondent that the prospect of an electrified campaign seemed remote. That’s all changed. Many Democrats now believe they have a chance to reawaken what they call the “anti-MAGA majority” of voters who showed up for elections in 2018, 2020, and 2022. In the nearly two years since the midterm elections, that coalition has fractured under the weight of discontent about inflation and the border, as well as doubts about Biden’s capacity.

Demographic and cultural changes are remaking America—creating a political moment that has cultivated the conditions for a Democratic “coalition of transformation,” as I’ve called it, centered on the younger, nonwhite, and female voters who are most comfortable with this new America. A Catholic white man born during World War II, Biden was always an improbable leader for such a coalition. Harris can not only articulate the values of such an alliance, but also embody them in a powerful way.

If Harris becomes the nominee, she must prove that she can inspire this coalition to go to the polls in numbers big enough to stop a highly motivated MAGA-Republican movement. A Trump victory would herald a very different, far darker transformation of American life.

Democrats Are Drifting Toward Disaster

2024-07-18T06:00:00-04:00

As Donald Trump prepares to accept his third consecutive Republican presidential nomination tonight, Democrats remain trapped in a stalemate that could ease his return to the White House.

The movement to force President Joe Biden to step aside has widespread support in the party, but probably not enough support to overcome his adamant refusal to do so. In turn, Biden’s position against Trump in polls is weak enough to leave the incumbent with long odds of winning a second term—but not such slim odds that they make the case for replacing Biden irrefutable.

Caught between the growing signs of danger for their candidate and the shrinking window to change course, Democrats are drifting toward November with widening divisions and a pervasive sense of dread. Republicans, meanwhile, are overflowing with confidence, as this week’s party convention has demonstrated. Many Democrats now fear that they face the worst possible situation: a weakened nominee who will not withdraw and is angrily feuding with donors, elected officials, and other former allies pressing for his removal.

Amid all of these concerns, the Biden campaign insists that he retains a path to victory, primarily through the three key Rust Belt battlegrounds: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Some Democratic strategists and operatives with whom I’ve spoken since the debate agree. “Not only is the damage to Biden not as great as people are assuming, but Trump continues to be reviled,” Matt Morrison, the executive director of Working America, an AFL-CIO-affiliated group that politically mobilizes working-class people who don’t belong to unions. “That, somehow, has been overlooked in the past two weeks.”

But most Democratic political professionals—the party’s campaign managers, strategists, media consultants, and pollsters—are in a funereal mood about Biden’s chances to overtake Trump. Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster who is critical of Trump, says out loud what most of these Democratic professionals will still say to reporters only under terms of anonymity. “If the Democrats persist in nominating Joe Biden,” Ayres told me this week, “they are essentially ceding the presidency to Donald Trump.”

By any measure, Trump is in a stronger position today than when he accepted his previous two presidential nominations. On the day Trump was first nominated, in July 2016, the national polling average maintained by the political website FiveThirtyEight showed him trailing the Democratic nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton, by 2.5 percentage points. When President Trump accepted the GOP nomination again, in August 2020, that same average showed him trailing Biden by 8.4 percentage points.

[John Hendrickson: Biden isn’t listening]

Today, FiveThirtyEight shows Trump leading Biden by 2 percentage points. Yet that understates the extent of Trump’s advantage, as operatives in both parties agree. The main reason is Trump’s polling lead is greater than that margin in almost all of the swing states that will determine the election. The other reason is most of the other important measures in the polls are worse for Biden than his performance in the simple horse race against Trump. That indicates the difficulty Biden may face trying to expand his support enough to erase Trump’s lead.

Biden’s job-approval rating has been stuck at about 40 percent or less roughly since this time last year. Trump consistently leads Biden by double digits when voters are asked whom they trust more to handle the economy (with similar results for queries about immigration and crime). And in multiple polls, big majorities say they consider the nation on the wrong track, and believe that Biden’s agenda has left the country worse off.

These trends place Biden closer to the recent presidents who lost reelection than those who won a second term. The defeated incumbents include Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1992, and Trump himself in 2020. Looking across that history, the longtime GOP pollster Bill McInturff said to me that “every conventional polling standard tells us Joe Biden is going to lose.”

Beyond these downbeat views of his record, Biden faces bleak assessments of his personal capacity. The most obvious problem is the consistent polling finding that a majority of voters believe he lacks the mental and physical ability to do the job now, let alone for another four years. But Biden is also struggling on other measures that derive from this central concern. In a CBS/YouGov poll released earlier this month, just 28 percent of voters described Biden as tough and only 18 percent called him energetic; for Trump, the comparable numbers were 65 percent in each case. And that survey was taken before Trump’s defiant response to being shot on Saturday.

That searing event may serve as the bookend to last month’s presidential debate in what has been a disastrous spell for Biden. The debate compounded existing concerns about Biden’s weakness, then the assassination attempt reinforced perceptions of Trump’s strength.

“You put a picture of Trump shaking his fist in the face of an assassin alongside a picture of Biden’s blank stare in the debate, and there you have the choice,” Ayres told me. Trump’s critics in both parties fear that such a vivid contrast could validate Bill Clinton’s famous maxim that, in American politics, “strong and wrong” usually beats “weak and right.”

Against these headwinds, the Biden campaign maintains that it still can compete for all seven of the swing states across the Sun Belt and Rust Belt. But hardly any other professionals in either party believe that Biden can plausibly win Georgia or North Carolina in the Southeast; as for the southwestern battlegrounds of Arizona and Nevada, polls consistently show Trump leading there as well.

The dominant view among Democrats is that the most—perhaps the only—plausible path to stopping Trump runs through the industrial Midwest. If Biden sweeps Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and holds every other state that he won in 2020 by 2.5 points or more, he would reach exactly the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win. (That arithmetic would also require Democrats to hold the District of Columbia, as well as the congressional district centered on Omaha, Nebraska, in one of the two states that award some of their electoral votes by district.)

Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Biden-campaign chair, claimed in a recent memo to staff that the Sun Belt states are still within reach, but she did acknowledge that winning the big three Rust Belt states was “the clearest pathway” to victory. As O’Malley Dillon noted, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are each part of what I termed in 2009 the “blue wall.” That referred to the 18 states that ultimately voted Democratic in all six presidential elections from 1992 through 2012.

Recent history offers Democrats some reasons for optimism about the Rust Belt battlegrounds. Trump won the 2016 election because he dislodged Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from the blue wall by a combined 78,000 votes. But after Trump’s unexpected breakthrough then, resistance to him has powered a substantial Democratic recovery in all three states. In 2018, Democrats won the governorship of those states; in 2020, Biden won them all fairly comfortably; and in the 2022 midterms, the Democrats swept the three governorships again—in each instance, by wider margins than Biden’s victory two years earlier.

Biden’s position is relatively stronger in these three Rust Belt battlegrounds than in the four Sun Belt ones largely because of the surprising racial inversion shaping the two parties’ coalitions this year. Compared with 2020, Biden’s support has eroded considerably more among nonwhite than white voters and more among younger than older voters (trends that his campaign says have persisted after the debate in its own polling). That shift has left the president facing a tougher climb in the younger and more racially diverse Sun Belt states than in the older, less diverse industrial ones—a head-spinning reversal for strategists of both parties.

Reinforcing the Biden campaign’s imperative of focusing on the Rust Belt is the fact that the minority population there is concentrated among Black voters. Democrats believe they have a better chance of reversing Trump’s early inroads with this demographic group than with the Hispanic voters more plentiful in the southwestern states.

Biden usually runs better in Wisconsin than in any other swing state. As for Michigan, Adrian Hemond, a consultant for Democrats and progressive causes, told me, “You can’t feel great about it, but you certainly can’t feel like all is lost.” Of the three states, Biden is performing most poorly in the one with the most electoral votes: his original home state of Pennsylvania. But if Biden can’t sweep all three former blue-wall states, every other path forward for him is rocky.

The Biden campaign’s message to legions of distraught Democrats comes down to one word: wait. The core of its case for recovery is that Biden will revive when, in the final weeks of the election, voters fully weigh reelecting Trump.

“We know that the election for many voters is still not clearly defined as a choice between Biden and Trump,” Dan Kanninen, the Biden campaign’s battleground-states director, told me this week. “Once we do define that choice on the issues—on the record of Joe Biden, on values, on what Donald Trump represents—we move voters to our camp. We know the voters whom we have to win back favor us quite a bit more on all those fronts.”

[Mark Leibovich: Ruth Bader Biden]

Moreover, Kanninen said, Biden has spent months building a grassroots organization to deliver that message in the swing states, while Trump and the GOP are now scrambling to catch up (with a big financial assist from Elon Musk). “When those core issues are front and center for voters, with an apparatus in these states,” Kanninen told me, “and with trusted messengers that can drive that home to voters, that’s how you win.”

Biden advisers maintain that he is still well positioned because so many of the voters who have moved away from him since 2020 are from traditionally Democratic-leaning constituencies—particularly younger, Black, and Latino voters. “The people who are still making up their minds in this election—and there are enough of them in the key battleground states that the president can win—do not like Donald Trump,” Molly Murphy, one of Biden’s pollsters, told me. “They have deep concerns about him. Those double dislikers feel much more intensely negative toward Trump than toward the president. That is why this is not yet settled.”

Few outside Trump’s own campaign would dispute that resistance to the former president remains substantial, with most voters viewing him unfavorably, many considering him a threat to democracy, and crucial elements of his agenda and record—such as extending his 2017 tax cuts for the rich and corporations, and overturning Roe v. Wade—remaining unpopular.

Even so, many operatives in both parties consider it wishful thinking—“delusional,” Ayres said—to believe that Biden’s standing in the polls will inevitably rise as voters focus more on Trump. Strategists in both parties believe that the doubts about Biden’s capacity will prevent him from shifting voters’ attention solely to Trump.

If anything, the comparison between the two tends to benefit Trump: Retrospective assessments of his job performance now typically exceed his highest ratings during his actual presidency. That may be because voters are reconsidering Trump primarily on the issues that cause them the most discontent with the current president—inflation, the border, and crime—rather than on other aspects of Trump’s tenure they disliked at the time. Although Biden has virtually monopolized TV ad-buying across the swing states all year, a new survey released this week showed that Trump’s retrospective job approval was now at least 7 points higher than Biden’s current one in all of them. That is a formidable advantage.

Tresa Undem, a pollster for progressive groups and causes, points to a further flaw in the strategy of framing the race as a referendum on Trump: It requires Biden to drive home a cogent negative message—something that he has shown little consistent ability to do. “Biden’s problem is that polling for months and months shows that he has zero room for error just to have a shot at winning,” Undem told me. “That’s where the ability to campaign effectively becomes a real issue—articulating one’s record, one’s vision for the future, and the threat in clear, inspiring, and convincing ways. Is he up for that?”

Like many other worried Democrats, she fears the answer is no. That’s why Undem, along with the great majority of Democratic strategists and donors I’ve spoken with since the debate, desperately wants the party to replace Biden with another nominee, probably Vice President Kamala Harris. Yet no clear consensus to replace Biden has emerged among Democratic voters, elected officials, or interest groups.

The movement to replace Biden seems to wax and wane on an almost hourly basis. Yesterday, Representative Adam Schiff, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in California, provided new momentum when he called on Biden to withdraw; late in the day, ABC’s Jonathan Karl reported that Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer had privately urged Biden to step aside in a meeting last weekend. But the president still appears dug in. And Biden’s allies are pushing forward with a plan to short-circuit opposition by holding an online roll-call vote of delegates to renominate him before the Democratic convention opens in Chicago on August 19—though yesterday they backed away from the accelerated timetable first proposed. More twists seem inevitable before Biden’s fate as leader is settled.

The implications of a Trump victory extend far beyond a second White House term. If a decisive Trump win in November also delivers an unassailable Senate majority, that could reshape American life and the underpinnings of our constitutional democracy long after 2028.

Democrats this year are defending three Senate seats in states Trump is virtually certain to win (West Virginia, Montana, and Ohio); five more seats in swing states where Biden now trails (Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin); and several other seats in blue-leaning states where the presidential contest looks unexpectedly close (including New Mexico and New Jersey).

Democrats have been reassured by polls showing that their Senate candidates are ahead in almost all of those states (except for West Virginia and, intermittently, Montana). Far from clear, though, is whether Democrats can maintain those advantages if Biden loses badly: In 2016 and 2020, just one Senate candidate, out of 69 races, won in a state that favored the other party’s presidential candidate.

Concern is growing among Democrats that Republicans will show up in droves to support Trump after he was nearly assassinated last weekend, whereas Democratic-leaning younger and nonwhite voters may feel too dispirited by Biden’s struggles to do the same. Resistance to Trump did spur big turnout in Democratic constituencies for the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections (defying predictions of a “red wave” in the latter case). But Undem speaks for many Democrats when she questions whether hostility toward Trump will sufficiently offset disillusionment with Biden. “I keep wondering: Will people vote 100 percent against someone and zero percent for someone?” she told me. “Maybe if the threat becomes big enough, but it seems pretty dang hard.”

If a turnout edge does develop for Republicans, many of the Democratic senators now leading in swing states where Biden is trailing could also fall short. The consequences of such a surge cannot be overstated. It could allow Republicans to establish a majority in the Senate that would prove insuperable for Democrats until at least 2030 (because very few Republican-held Senate seats will be vulnerable to Democrats in the cycles before then).

[Rogé Karma: It wasn’t just the debate]

With Trump back in the White House, a sustained Senate majority would give the GOP more than enough time to nominate and confirm much younger replacements for Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, both of whom are in their mid-70s. That could lock in a conservative majority on the Court until as late as 2050.

These are among the very high stakes that Biden and Democratic leaders are gambling with as the president insists, despite his obvious vulnerability, that he remains the best hope of preventing a second Trump presidency. As for Trump, such a restoration, which seemed inconceivable in the days after the January 6 insurrection, moves a step closer tonight with his address to a jubilant Republican National Convention.

Democrats Turn to Their Deputy Leader

2024-07-11T09:00:00-04:00

Influential Democrats see an urgent need to bolster Vice President Kamala Harris’s position with the public, whether or not President Joe Biden withdraws from the presidential contest. If Biden leaves the race, which appears less likely as he digs in against his Democratic critics, Harris would immediately become the party’s most probable nominee. But even if Biden remains on the ticket, the widespread concern among voters about his ability to perform the job for another four years will increase scrutiny of Harris’s own fitness for the presidency.

Amid those concerns, the liberal advocacy group Way to Win is formulating what it calls a comprehensive “surround-sound” effort to boost Harris’s profile with voters, according to plans shared exclusively with The Atlantic. Way to Win, which focuses on electing candidates of color, is planning an extensive campaign on social media and through paid advertising to enhance her public image.

“The reality is Kamala was tapped by Biden as his partner on the ticket and a new standard-bearer for the party, and her role as the VP on the current ticket is more critical than ever, so investing in her is a no-brainer,” the group writes in a new strategy memo.

Way to Win has channeled more than $300 million to liberal groups and candidates since its founding in 2018, and has also emerged as an important source of ideas for Democrats (for instance, encouraging the party to center its 2022 campaign on Republican threats to Americans’ freedoms). The group’s plan reflects a wider belief among Democrats that Harris will loom large in the race whatever Biden decides. As the party tries to dig itself out of the hole that Biden deepened with his dire debate performance, it is belatedly growing more aware of the need to buttress the vice president’s public standing.

Research by several different Democratic groups has found that even after three and a half years in office, Harris largely remains a blank slate for voters. Mike Lux, an independent Democratic media consultant, is leading a major study of the party’s decline in blue-collar factory towns across the Rust Belt. “In the counties that we study, she is more of a cipher,” he told me. “People don’t know her. They don’t know what she stands for.” He’s found that people vaguely know she’s from California but have forgotten she was the state’s attorney general. “They don’t know what her big issues are,” he said, “other than abortion rights.”

“Message and messenger are inextricably linked,” Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director for Barack Obama, told me. “She will have to rapidly define herself before the Republicans define her.”

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

Partly as a result of Harris’s ill-defined profile, popular attitudes toward her closely track those of Biden. In a recent national CNN poll, voters with an unfavorable view of Harris outnumbered those who viewed her positively by 20 percentage points—about the same dismal result as Biden’s own 24-point deficit. “They are very merged in their image,” one Democratic pollster told me glumly. “People don’t think he’s got anything done; people don’t think she’s got anything done.” (Like most of the dozen senior party strategists I spoke with for this article, this Democrat asked to remain anonymous in order to talk candidly.)

Research conducted earlier this year by EMILY’s List, a group dedicated to electing Democratic women, and post-debate polling released Tuesday by Way to Win both found that the best way to improve Harris’s image would be to emphasize her role in defending abortion rights.

Since the six GOP-appointed Supreme Court justices overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the 2022 Dobbs decision, Harris has led the administration’s condemnation of that ruling and the restrictions it triggered in a succession of red states. That turn of events provided Harris with a more clearly defined role in the White House after an unsteady first two years that included a shaky spell as the administration’s “border czar.”

“Prior to Dobbs,” Jamal Simmons, who was Harris’s communications director in that period, told me, “our office struggled to narrow down the number of issues we focused on. After Dobbs, there was no question about what the issue priority was.”

From the first days after the decision, Harris linked abortion access to other civil-liberties rollbacks in red states, including on LGBTQ rights, book bans, and voting rights (another issue she had taken up for the administration). As Republican lawmakers passed new restrictions, Harris became the White House’s first responder, who rushed to those states to advocate against the rollbacks.

The result is that Harris has now spent two years honing what may be the most important argument Democrats can make in 2024. Polls invariably show that significantly more Americans trust Donald Trump than Biden, or Democrats generally, to handle the economy and inflation. Although Democrats can hope to narrow that daunting gap, it’s simply too large to eliminate by Election Day.

To win, therefore, the party’s presidential ticket will need to persuade millions of voters who believe that Trump is better for their bottom line to vote against him anyway. Democrats’ best chance of achieving that is to portray Trump and the GOP as a threat not only to democracy but also to Americans’ civil rights and liberties. The party saw how potent that argument could be in the 2022 midterm election.

Biden has been full-throated in his denunciations of Trump as a threat to democracy. But as a Catholic from a heavily blue-collar state, the president has always seemed hesitant about pressing the case for abortion rights. He is also an institutionalist, who has spent more than half a century in Washington, and this tends to inhibit his criticism of the Supreme Court—as last week showed when he focused far more on Trump than on the Court in condemning its ruling on presidential immunity. Many Democrats believed that Harris framed the issues with much greater energy and clarity in a widely circulated video clip.

“Whatever happens on the ticket, she is a very effective communicator about what’s at stake in terms of our freedoms, particularly the right to an abortion,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the chief strategy officer of Way to Win, told me. “And that is going to be a critical part of how we win, in part because it is how we are going to engage younger voters and voters of color who we know care a lot about that.”

Simmons, the former communications director, says that the vice president’s experience as a tough interrogator—both as a district attorney and as a senator during Supreme Court confirmation hearings—point toward her most valuable role in 2024. Voters notice Harris “when she is pushing and pressing and interrogating,” Simmons told me, “and that’s exactly what we need to do in this election against someone who is a 34-time convicted felon.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: The problem with coronating Kamala Harris]

An open question, of course, is whether Harris delivers those arguments as the nominee or in her supporting role as vice president. If Biden’s critics can persuade or pressure him to drop out, Democratic professionals believe that Harris is, by far, the most likely replacement. Although several leading Democrats—notably, the longtime strategist James Carville—have called for an open contest if Biden steps down, whether such a race would develop is far from clear.

Were Biden to withdraw without endorsing Harris, some of those I spoke with think that at least some credible alternatives would contest the nomination. A strategist working in one of the swing states told me that their advice to any Democrat with presidential ambitions would be to run now, rather than wait until 2028. “It’s not going to be easy for somebody else,” this person said, “but I think that the opportunity of going head-to-head with Kamala for delegates in some ways may be easier than going toe-to-toe with 10 people four years later.”

But that was a minority view. Most strategists I spoke with this week are dubious that a top-tier alternative would challenge Harris, should Biden bow out. One reason is that, in such a circumstance, the Democratic nominee would be chosen at the national convention by delegates who currently are almost all pledged to Biden; that would give Harris, as his vice president, an intrinsic advantage (especially if he endorsed her).

More important, anyone seeking to deny the nomination to the first woman of color to serve as vice president could risk damaging their long-term position with women’s groups and Black voters. Although several Black Democratic congressional leaders—prominent among them, Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina—have urged Biden to stay in the race, they have also indicated that they would back Harris if the president dropped out.

“It would be pretty difficult to explain to Black women, whom we always extol to be the backbone of our party, what the empirical evidence is for basically throwing her aside,” another Democratic strategist told me. “Anybody who steps into the arena against her has to face that argument, and I think it’s a pretty difficult case to make.”

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, considered by many the party’s strongest potential replacement for Biden, has already declared that she will not run even if Biden withdraws. California Governor Gavin Newsom, the other most discussed alternative, is also highly unlikely to run, the people I spoke with believe—and Newsom himself said yesterday that he would not run against Harris were Biden to withdraw. Harris would be strongly favored against any remaining possible rival if Biden left the race.

[Elaina Plott Calabro: The White House’s Kamala Harris blunder]

The Democrats still hoping that Biden drops out are clear-eyed about the risks in potentially replacing him with Harris. Some note that it would be naive to dismiss the inherent resistance that would confront a Black female presidential nominee. Memories of Harris’s performance during her ineffectual bid for the 2020 nomination still haunt those uneasy about her leading the ticket now.

Some Democrats are especially fearful that she cannot hold enough working-class white voters to win the three former blue-wall states of the Rust Belt that now appear to be the party’s only plausible path to 270 electoral votes: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Even if Harris recaptures some of the Black voters and young voters who have soured on Biden, “I don’t think that makes up for the potential losses in the white working-class voter in Michigan,” Adrian Hemond, a consultant advising Democrats in the state, told me.

Still, many Democrats who express such concerns nonetheless believe that shifting to Harris at least offers the opportunity to shuffle the deck, whereas sticking with Biden looks more and more like playing out a losing hand. At a comparatively young 59, she could focus attention on Trump’s own age-related decline. In turn, she would have the opportunity to make a yet-younger vice-presidential pick, which could appeal to some voters turned off by the present choice.

Although it would be a gamble, some Democrats believe that Harris as nominee could galvanize the party by picking Whitmer and creating an all-female ticket, one that would also have roots in the must-win Rust Belt states. Simmons told me that this possible combination animated people he’s spoken with more than any other option for a potential Harris-led ticket. The challenge Democrats face this year “isn’t really about giving people a safe harbor as much as it is about exciting them to act,” he said, and pairing Whitmer with Harris offers a better chance of that than “any other of them in the thinking.”

None of these factors would erase Harris’s real vulnerabilities or establish her as a favorite over Trump. Democrats widely expect Republicans at next week’s national convention to echo the argument that Nikki Haley made during the GOP primaries: that a vote for Biden amounts to a vote to make Harris the president sometime before 2028. “Vote Joe Biden today; get Kamala Harris tomorrow,” declared a Trump campaign ad that aired after last month’s debate. Trump himself escalated his attacks on Harris at a Tuesday rally in Florida. More is sure to come.

Republicans believe that Harris’s roots in San Francisco politics gives them the chance to define her as an extremist “woke” liberal. After her role as border czar, they are also eager to tie her to public discontent with the Biden administration’s immigration record.

But to Democrats hoping to nudge out Biden, Harris’s problems look more manageable at this point than his. In these internal party discussions, she is benefiting from the same concept that Biden likes to invoke: Compare me to the alternative, not to the Almighty. One progressive leader summed up the view of many I spoke with about the relative merits of Biden and Harris when he told me: “I think she’s a less-bad bet.”

Bill McInturff, a longtime Republican pollster, agreed. “If Biden is the nominee, the Democrats are going to face enthusiasm and turnout issues that will impact every Democrat on the ballot,” he told me. “It is not that Harris is a strong candidate, but she at least is a different candidate with an unpredictable effect. This is the rare case where ‘unpredictable’ should be the preferred outcome for the Democratic Party.”

Every Democrat I spoke with agreed that Harris now delivers the party’s key messages on rights and values more cogently and crisply than Biden. Even if Harris simply remains his running mate, however, next week’s Republican convention will create a severe test of her credibility with the Trump campaign’s fresh focus on her as Biden’s potential successor during a second term. And almost all of those Democrats agreed that Harris’s greater fluency won’t count for much if Republicans succeed in convincing voters that she is a San Francisco liberal who failed on the border.

Democrats Begin Their Shift From Anxiety to Action

2024-07-03T12:50:00-04:00

The ground may be starting to shift under President Joe Biden after his scattered and sometimes disoriented debate performance last week.

Across the party, widespread agreement is emerging that Biden’s chances of beating Donald Trump have dramatically diminished. “No one I have talked to believes Biden is going to win this race anymore: nobody,” said one longtime Democratic pollster working in a key battleground state who, like almost all of the party insiders I interviewed for this article, asked for anonymity to discuss the situation candidly.

That reticence about going public was symptomatic. A general reluctance to publicly express those concerns, or to urge Biden to step aside, has been obvious—particularly because the White House has pushed back fiercely against critics, and many senior Democrats have issued supportive, if not ironclad, statements. And even some of those Democrats who considered Biden’s performance calamitous continue to believe that replacing him with Vice President Kamala Harris or another candidate would endanger the party’s chances more than staying the course.

“Universally we’re in this state of suspended animation,” the leader of a prominent Democratic advocacy group told me.

[Read: Biden’s delegates are flirting with a breakup]

But the first signs that this paralysis may be lifting are appearing. Representative Mike Quigley of Illinois suggested yesterday that Biden may need to consider leaving the race; Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas also called on him to do so yesterday, as did former Representative Tim Ryan, the party’s 2022 Senate candidate in Ohio, and Julián Castro, a rival for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. A senior House Democrat told me that many colleagues who are running in competitive districts express similar views and concerns in private. “The frontliners are melting down,” this high-ranking representative told me.

Notably, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended Biden on MSNBC yesterday, but acknowledged that after the debate, “It’s a legitimate question to say: Is this an episode or is this a condition?” (She said that question should apply to both candidates.) Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island likewise said that Biden must provide reassurance about his cognitive and physical abilities.

Despite these first few individuals going public with their doubts, no organized effort has yet coalesced in the party to encourage or pressure Biden to leave the race. Most Democrats feel helpless to affect Biden’s decision, even as they grow more concerned that his vulnerabilities may be paving the way to a Trump victory that would create an existential threat not only to the party’s policy priorities but to American democracy itself.

That’s the overwhelming conclusion from my conversations over the past few days with a broad cross section of Democratic leaders, including members of Congress, the directors of several major advocacy and constituency groups, large donors, and longtime pollsters and strategists.

“I think it’s a collective-action problem, where no one wants to go first, but as soon as someone does, it is going to feed on itself,” one prominent Democratic fundraiser told me.

Publicly, the furthest that almost all Democrats have been willing to push Biden has been to call on him to schedule a flurry of voter town halls and media interviews through which he could try to offset the flailing and vacant impression that his debate performance left. “He needs to relentlessly speak to the American public in unscripted events over the next week,” Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group that has led this push, told me. “The only way to replace a bad impression is with a good one. Success with unscripted events like town halls and press conferences can show that the debate was an anomaly.”

Biden’s campaign has scheduled an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC and a campaign appearance in Wisconsin, both on Friday, but it hasn’t announced anything like the volume of appearances that Third Way and others have urged; overall, the president’s schedule this week is light on public events. On Monday night, Biden gave very brief remarks responding to the decision handed down by the Supreme Court’s Republican majority that provides presidents with broad immunity for their actions in office.

The fact that Biden has not already announced such high-profile unscripted interactions is being interpreted by those worried about Biden’s prospects as confirmation of their fears. “You would have thought they would have quickly put together a roundtable with steelworkers, which is relatively safe, or have Shawn Fain pull together something with autoworkers,” the director of the advocacy group told me, referring to the United Auto Workers president. “Anything where he can be seen in conversation with people ... and people will see he can function without a script. They haven’t done it, because clearly, he can’t.” This official also noted how little Biden has interacted with the media in office and said the White House has virtually shut off small meetings between the president and key groups in the Democratic coalition.

One leader of a major liberal advocacy group told me that the organization viewed a gantlet of public events for Biden as a win-win proposition for the party. Either he performs well and eases concerns about his capacity, this official said, or he performs badly and explodes the idea that his debate performance was the result of a bad night—an idea that no one I spoke with, in fact, accepts.

This official at the liberal advocacy group told me that many in the party were focusing on the way Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, one of Biden’s staunchest congressional allies, has phrased his support for the president since the debate. Clyburn has analogized Biden’s poor showing to a single strike during an at-bat, saying, “If this were a ball game, he’s got two more swings.”

The official said that some Democrats are taking that to mean Clyburn could urge Biden to step aside if the president continues to struggle in public settings. The high-ranking House Democrat I spoke with said that nervous members in competitive districts similarly view Clyburn—whose endorsement at a crucial moment in the primary was vital to Biden’s 2020 nomination—as the congressional leader with the greatest capacity to influence the president’s decision. Clyburn, this Democrat told me, has been telling those members to wait and see how Biden performs in the coming days. But, the Democrat added, Clyburn has also frustrated vulnerable members by so emphatically defending Biden in public, which they feel has limited their room to take a more critical stance.

Clyburn’s office did not respond to a request for comment on whether Democratic allies are correctly interpreting his three-strikes comments as a signal that he may be willing to break with Biden, if more episodes suggesting incapacity occur.

The president of another Democratic constituency group told me that multiple factors are discouraging activists from airing concerns about Biden, despite private anxieties that have exploded since the debate. “I don’t see anyone, whether it’s an elected official or nongovernmental organization, getting out there publicly saying he needs to go,” this official told me. “A: It’s not going to matter if we say it; and B: If he does win, we’re totally cut off from any conversation. So what’s the point?”

The group president continued: “I can say privately, and I have said it—I think it would be better if he was replaced. It’s a risky move but we are in a dark place, and I think it would be better if it’s someone else. It almost doesn’t matter who it would be. But none of us are going to say that publicly.”

This constituency-group leader and several others told me that a big part of the challenge in coalescing any organized pressure on Biden is that though virtually everyone agrees the debate weakened the president’s chances of beating Trump, no one can say that Biden has no chance of winning—or that a replacement candidate would surely run better. In addition, Biden is benefiting from the same dynamic that allowed Trump to once confidently claim that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing any support: Most of the electorate is so dug in at this point that almost nothing could move them toward supporting the other party.

Generally, public and private polling so far has not shown a collapse for Biden in the horse-race numbers against Trump. A national USA Today/Suffolk University survey released yesterday showed Trump slightly widening his lead to three percentage points; a CNN survey conducted by SRSS, also released yesterday, showed Trump holding a daunting six-point advantage, but that survey has typically been the worst major poll for Biden, and Trump’s lead was no larger than in the survey’s previous result, in April. A national CBS/YouGovAmerica poll released today put Trump’s lead at two percentage points, a statistically insignificant one-point decline from its previous survey.

Biden’s team has put forward its own campaign pollsters, Geoff Garin and Molly Murphy, to argue that the debate did not materially change the race. Garin and Murphy are widely respected in the party, but the Democratic strategists worried about Biden’s chances say that this optimism ignores two key messages from even a best-case reading of the polling.

One is that even a status-quo polling result after the debate leaves Biden on track to a probable defeat. Democrats almost universally agree that Biden’s campaign sought this early debate because it understood that he was losing and needed to change the dynamics of the race. Party strategists believe he has fallen almost out of range in his southeastern target states of Georgia and North Carolina, and faces a substantial, if less insurmountable, deficit in his southwestern targets of Arizona and Nevada.

Even before the debate, Biden’s most plausible path to 270 Electoral College votes was to sweep the three former “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But before last week, most Democrats viewed his odds as no better than 50–50 in any of them—and the odds of winning all three below that (the chance of three successive coin flips falling on the same side is only one in eight).

The Democratic pollster working in one of these blue-wall states told me that his initial post-debate polling shows Trump slightly widening a lead he had taken in the weeks before the encounter. The question after the debate, this pollster said, was not whether Biden could stay within range of Trump (as the White House argues he can), but whether the president now could ever find the last few thousand votes he would need to overcome his Republican opponent.

“I don’t know where he gets the votes—his favorable ratings are so bad,” the pollster told me. “I think his odds in this state, which were probably getting close to 50–50 at best, are now at least two to one against.” (Another set of post-debate poll results from a different pollster circulating among liberal groups that was shared with me last night also found Biden’s deficit widening to an ominous level in these key states.)

The pollster’s comments point to the second polling problem facing Biden: The top-line number in polls, which generally show Trump ahead, is typically the best result for Biden. His standing in all the subsidiary polling metrics is almost without exception weaker. In yesterday’s CNN survey, for instance, Biden’s job-approval rating fell to 36 percent, the lowest level that poll has recorded for him. More than seven in 10 voters in the survey said that Biden’s physical and mental ability was a reason to vote against him.

The longtime Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, the senior campaign pollster in Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, over the weekend released so-called dial groups tracking moment-by-moment voter reactions to the debate from Democratic-leaning groups that are not fully committed to Biden, including younger, Hispanic, and Black voters, as well as those considering support for a third-party candidate.

These respondents went into the debate supporting Biden by two to one, Greenberg reported, and Trump did nothing in the debate to improve their preponderantly negative perceptions of him. Those watching gave Biden credit on some fronts, such as standing up for the middle class, but “when asked the overall impression, the first was on his cognitive and physical fitness, expressing concern about his age, mental acuity, saying words, ‘confused,’ and ‘frail,’” Greenberg wrote. “Then, they commented on difficulty articulating his thoughts and his train of thought.” By his account, almost two-thirds of these Democratic-leaning voters concluded that he was too old to be president, with most of them “strongly” agreeing with that proposition.

“Those doubts make it pretty certain that he is going to … be behind in almost all the Electoral College states,” Greenberg told me. “You are going to go into the convention with that backdrop. In a very difficult year, it has become dramatically more difficult.”

A final line of defense for Biden is that even many Democrats who accept that he has been badly hurt remain uncertain that removing him would improve the party’s chances against Trump. The pollster working in one of the blue-wall states told me that although House and Senate candidates are alarmed about Biden’s position, “I think they are scared to death about Kamala. And they are scared to death about the fight. There isn’t a grand plan.”

The high-ranking House Democratic member told me that the party leadership in the chamber has given no indication that it would push for Biden to step aside—but it has signaled that if he does, the leadership will seek to quickly unify behind Harris as the alternative. (Likewise, Clyburn declared yesterday that he’d urge the party to consolidate behind Harris if Biden withdraws.) Other Democrats have noted that under campaign-finance rules, only Harris could utilize the $240 million in cash that the Biden ticket has stockpiled (although some believe that another candidate could find a way to access that money).

[Adam Serwer: Biden must resign]

The prospect of Harris replacing Biden, as I’ve previously written, deeply divides Democrats. One reason Biden didn’t face much pressure to drop out earlier is the double fear many of his critics have that she can’t win either, yet that denying the nomination to the first woman of color would tear the party apart.

Still, based on my conversations, even some of those skeptical of Harris are moving toward the belief that she presents a better bet than continuing with a diminished Biden. “People have seen something they can’t unsee about this guy. And his performance will not get better; it won’t,” the official at the liberal advocacy group told me. “Harris is better. She has the ability to rally the troops and create some energy with turnout in these places in a way that Joe Biden can’t.” The former Senate candidate Ryan, a centrist popular in Democratic circles usually skeptical of Harris, made similar points in his social-media posts yesterday. “@VP has significantly grown into her job, she will destroy Trump in debate, highlight choice issue, energize our base, bring back young voters and give us generational change,” he wrote.

If Biden steps aside, plenty of influential Democrats would prefer the party to pass over Harris as well, for other alternatives such as Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Governor Gavin Newsom of California. “I don’t think everybody is going to step aside,” James Carville, the longtime party strategist, said when I appeared on his podcast yesterday. With the Sun Belt swing states already moving out of reach, many Democratic strategists fear that Harris could not win nearly enough of the working-class white voters essential to success in the Rust Belt.

Other Democrats, though, are dubious that any major party figure would enlist in a contest with Harris for the nomination, a confrontation that would inevitably be racially fraught, especially given the uncertain prospect that anyone who succeeds Biden could beat Trump. With that in mind, the finding in yesterday’s CNN survey that Harris, though still trailing, was polling better against Trump than Biden definitely raised eyebrows among Democrats. If Biden’s skeptics scale the mountain of removing him from the ticket, they may conclude that accepting Harris, with all her own limitations, is a more plausible option than climbing the second mountain of dislodging her too.

The Biden-Replacement Operation

2024-06-28T11:50:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

When I reached the longtime Democratic strategist James Carville via text near the end of last night’s presidential debate, his despair virtually radiated through my phone.

“I tried, man, I tried,” Carville wrote to me.

A few minutes later, when the debate was over, we talked by phone. Carville has been one of the loudest and most persistent Democrats arguing that President Joe Biden was too old to run again. Carville, who managed Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and is still, at 79, an influential political analyst, had tempered that criticism lately—though more out of resignation than conviction. His apprehension about Biden’s ability to beat Donald Trump had never really diminished in my previous conversations with him, but he’d seemed to accept as inevitable that the party would not reject a president who wanted to seek a second term.

But last night, Carville, like other Democrats I spoke with, sounded almost shell-shocked, as he searched for words to describe Biden’s scattered, disoriented, and disjointed debate performance.

“What is there to fucking say?” Carville told me. “How could somebody not see this coming? I’m just flummoxed.”

What do you think will happen next? I asked. “I have become aware of the limits of my own power,” Carville responded. He thought that Biden running again “was a terrible idea. I said it publicly. I failed … I understand that. But how could you not see this coming?”

I had one last question. What do you think should happen next—should Biden step aside? “I don’t know,” he said, in a leaden tone. “The Democratic Party is at a come-to-Jesus moment. That’s where we are.”

[Read: A disaster for Joe Biden]

Carville was far from the only Democrat reconsidering a scenario that had seemingly passed into political fantasy: whether Biden could be persuaded, or pushed, not to run again. Another prominent Democratic strategist, who is considered one of Biden’s staunchest defenders in the party and did not want to be named for this report, told me his view last night that “there’s a very high likelihood that he’s not going to be the candidate.” Even so, the strategist added, “I don’t know how that happens.”

If Biden insists on staying in the race, the odds remain high that Democrats will in fact nominate him at their convention in August; dislodging an incumbent president is a huge task. But more Democrats in the next few days are likely to crack open the party-nomination rules. And those rules actually provide a straightforward road map to replace Biden at the convention if he voluntarily withdraws—and even, if he doesn’t, a pathway to challenge him.

Trump was hardly a colossus in the debate. Though less belligerent than in his first 2020 debate with Biden, and far more vigorous than Biden last night, Trump continued to display all of his familiar negative traits: He lied almost obsessively, defended the January 6 rioters, bragged about his role in overturning the constitutional right to abortion, and repeated his discredited claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Nothing in Trump’s performance convinced Democrats that he could not be beaten in November. But Trump’s evident vulnerabilities will probably compound the concern about Biden, because they showed that Democrats might still stop him if they had a candidate who was not laboring under so many painfully apparent vulnerabilities of his own.

For Democrats fearful that Biden can’t win, the president’s showing last night was so bad that it might have been good—in the sense that it put the idea of replacing him as the nominee, which the White House had almost completely banished from conversation, back on the table. The pro-Biden strategist last night flatly predicted, “I do think that somebody is going to declare and challenge him.”

[Read: Dropping out is Biden’s most patriotic option]

Some top party strategists said last night that they considered the widespread panic over Biden’s performance a hysterical overreaction. “Missed opportunity, but the idea that it is a game changer is totally wrong,” Geoff Garin, the experienced Democratic pollster, told me.

Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder of Way to Win, a liberal group that focuses on electing candidates of color, offered no praise for Biden’s performance but also did not view it as an insurmountable obstacle to beating Trump. “This election has always been bigger than these two candidates and their performances,” she told me. “The choice and contrast between the two different futures they represent is clear and will become more stark as we get closer to Election Day.”

But these voices were very much the exceptions in the communal cry of despair that erupted from prominent Democrats last night. “Unmitigated disaster” was the summary of one, who is a senior strategist for an elected Democrat considered a possible Biden replacement and who asked to remain anonymous. “I think there was a sense of shock at how he came out at the beginning of this debate, how his voice sounded; he seemed a little disoriented,” David Axelrod, the chief political strategist for Barack Obama, said on CNN immediately after the debate. “He did get stronger as the debate went on, but by that time, I think the panic had set in.”

The key mechanism in the party rules that allows for replacing the nominee resulted from a change approved decades ago after the bitter 1980 primary fight, when Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts challenged a weakened President Jimmy Carter for the nomination. After a convention battle, which Carter won, Democrats agreed to eliminate the so-called robot rule, which required convention delegates to vote on the first ballot, at least, for the candidate they were chosen to support, says Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, who played a central role in the change.

Instead, she told me last night, the rules now say that delegates to the convention “shall ‘in all good conscience’ vote for the person they were elected to represent.” This means, she added, that “there is a presumption you will vote for Biden, but the ‘all good conscience’ could cover a lot of things.”

If Biden voluntarily withdrew, the party would employ a process to replace him that harks back to the era when presidential nominees were selected mainly not through primaries but by party leaders at the convention itself. “If he does it himself, there are many, many ways to replace him,” Kamarck told me. “About 4,000 people have already been elected to the convention. If Biden stepped aside tomorrow, several people would get into the race, no doubt, and the race would consist of calling these people and trying to convince them.

“It would be an old-fashioned convention,” she went on. “All 4,000 delegates pledged to Biden would suddenly be uncommitted, and you’d have a miniature campaign.” Under changes approved after the Hillary Clinton–Bernie Sanders 2016 race, the so-called superdelegates—about 750 elected officials and other party insiders—would become eligible to vote only if no candidate won a majority on the first ballot and the race went to a second round at the convention.

If Biden remains in the race, another candidate could still make a case to the convention delegates for replacing him. Even after last night’s performance, though, Kamarck doubts that a serious party leader would try this. “I don’t think anybody will challenge him, frankly,” she told me. “I think the depth of feeling for him in the party is very strong.”

But the staunchly pro-Biden strategist who expects a challenge thinks the operation could play out in a way similar to the two-step process that helped persuade Lyndon B. Johnson, the previous Democratic president not to seek reelection, to step aside in 1968. Johnson that year initially faced an anti–Vietnam War challenge from Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. After McCarthy—a relatively peripheral figure in the party—showed Johnson’s weakness in the New Hampshire primary vote, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, a much more formidable opponent, jumped in. Fifteen days later, Johnson announced his withdrawal from the race.

If a challenge to Biden develops before the August convention, the strategist predicted, it would unfold in a similar way. First out of the box will be a secondary figure unlikely to win the nomination, the strategist said. But if that person demonstrated a sufficient groundswell of desire for an alternative candidate, more heavyweight contenders—such as Governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Gavin Newsom of California—might quickly follow, the strategist predicted.

Talk of replacing Biden may conceivably dissipate once the initial shock of last night’s debate fades. Most Democrats who want to replace Biden also remain extremely dubious that his incumbent running mate, Kamala Harris, could beat Trump—but if she sought the nomination, then denying that prize to the first woman of color who has served as vice president could tear apart the party. The fear that such a fight could practically ensure defeat in November is one reason Democrats who are uneasy about renominating Biden have held their tongue for so long.

[Read: Time to go, Joe]

Still, the prospect of the party simply marching forward with Biden as if nothing happened last night seems difficult to imagine. Even before his disastrous performance, Democratic anxiety was rising with the release of a flurry of unsettling polls for Biden in the 48 hours before the CNN debate. National Quinnipiac University and New York Times/Siena College polls released Wednesday each gave Trump a four-percentage-point lead over the president, the challenger’s best showing in weeks. Yesterday, Gallup released a withering national poll that showed the share of Americans with a favorable view of Trump rising, while Biden’s number was falling—with more respondents saying that Trump, rather than Biden, had the personal and leadership qualities a president should have.

Tellingly, three-quarters of those whom Gallup polled said they were concerned that Biden “is too old to be president,” exactly double the share that registered the same concern about Trump. Like the Times/Siena and Quinnipiac polls, Gallup also found that Biden’s job-approval rating remained marooned below 40 percent—a level that, as Gallup pointedly noted, is much closer to the historical results at this point in the race for the recent incumbents who lost their reelection bids (Carter in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1992, and Trump in 2020) than those who won a second term.

Not all the polling on the debate’s eve was as glum for Biden. But the overall picture suggested that whatever polling boost Biden had received from Trump’s criminal conviction in the New York hush-money case a month ago has evaporated. Instead, polls are showing that the former president has regained a narrow but persistent advantage, both nationally and in the decisive battleground states.

All the usual caveats to ironclad conclusions from last night’s set piece apply, even if it was a debacle for Biden. Presidential races are marathons, with unpredictable twists. Many Democrats still believe that Biden is a decent man who has been an effective president. The resistance to Trump remains deep and durable among large swaths of the American electorate.

But the viability of Biden as the candidate who can overcome Trump’s lead looked much more doubtful within moments of the president taking the stage last night. Biden’s performance justified every fear of the cadre of longtime party strategists, such as Carville and Axelrod, who have openly voiced the concerns about renominating him that plenty of others have shared only privately.

Carville, though, was feeling no “told you so” joy last night. His parting words to me: “I hate being right.”

The 1970s Movie That Explains 2020s America

2024-06-20T07:30:00-04:00

This spring, I went to see Chinatown in a theater for the first time since its release, on June 20, 1974. The movie was headlining at the annual TCM Classic Film Festival on Hollywood Boulevard. Inside, every seat in the huge IMAX theater was taken. When Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway kissed for the first time, they filled the towering screen with every bit as much star power as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall did in Hollywood’s golden age. But the rapid descent into tragedy during the film’s second half had the audience rapt, eliciting audible gasps when the film’s director, Roman Polanski, in a cameo role, slit open the nose of the private eye J. J. Gittes (Nicholson) in one of the movie’s more notorious moments. In the scene when Evelyn Mulwray (Dunaway) admits that her daughter is also her sister, conceived through incest with her father, Noah Cross (played by John Huston), the auditorium was utterly silent.

I was struck by how, after all these years, Chinatown looks both of its time and ahead of it. The film’s warning that unaccountable power was shaping our lives in ways we couldn’t understand very much reflected the political sensibility of the late ’60s and early ’70s. That mood produced a torrent of transformative laws under both Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon meant to intensify government oversight of business power (through environmental, consumer-protection, and workplace-safety regulation) and public oversight of government power (through campaign-finance reforms and other transparency measures). Yet the film’s tragic ending anticipated the likelihood that all of these reforms, despite the good they might do, would not remake a society in which those with wealth and power, like Cross, routinely roll over those without. The film’s script writer, Robert Towne, told me, when we spoke for my book Rock Me on the Water, that he viewed his theme as “the futility of good intentions.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: In defense of Los Angeles]

The Watergate scandal, which would ultimately force Nixon to resign the presidency, was nearing its final act when Chinatown was released. The film was set in 1930s Los Angeles, yet it seemed to encapsulate America’s grim circumstance in that summer of 1974, when the nation was learning that Nixon’s administration had hired goons for a scheme to sabotage its political rivals and that the president had tried to hide it by orchestrating a cover-up.

Today, Donald Trump carries echoes of Cross in the way he blends personal and public corruption—evident, most recently, in the civil judgments against him for sexual abuse and financial fraud, and his criminal conviction for a hush-money scheme (in addition to the weirdly sexualized comments over the years about his daughter Ivanka.)

But Trump’s political ascent has added an unexpected coda to the questioning of institutions that animated so much of the activism of the ’60s and the popular culture of the early ’70s. The political and artistic voices that challenged the authority of government and business in those years mostly hoped to reform those institutions, not to raze them. More effectively than any right-wing populist before him, Trump has transmuted that desire for change into a darker crusade to topple the hazily defined elites and “deep state” that he says scorn and subjugate his followers, who represent the “real America.”

Trump, too, portrays the United States as a kind of Chinatown where unaccountable power is conspiring against everyday Americans. But Trump’s message to his audience is that he can tear it down on their behalf.

The movie was immediately recognized as a landmark achievement. Chinatown is a complex story of personal and political corruption, involving murder, stolen water rights, and incest. Towne started writing Chinatown long before the Watergate scandal engulfed Nixon. Yet the atmosphere of official deceit that extended from the Vietnam War in Johnson’s presidency to the “dirty tricks” of Nixon’s permeated Towne’s story.

In Towne’s script, Chinatown was more a state of mind than a place. It symbolized the enigmatic nature of evil and the inability of even well-intentioned people (such as Nicholson’s Gittes) to pierce the hidden layers of power, the wheels within wheels turning far from view and understanding. Like America itself in the age of Vietnam and Watergate, Nicholson’s character knew less than he thought as he excavated the secrets of Dunaway’s Mulwray and her monstrous father, and he understood even less than he knew.

Like many movies from earlier eras, portions of Chinatown clang against changing sensibilities. The scene where Dunaway makes her big admission, as Nicholson repeatedly slaps her, was tough to watch then, and is tougher now. Nicholson’s mimicking of Asian accents at one point—though surely something Gittes would have done—grates, too. Polanski’s later exile, after he fled the U.S. in February 1978, having pleaded guilty to a charge of “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl, cast a retrospective pall on his undeniable cinematic accomplishments.

[Read: France’s growing pushback against Roman Polanski]

Yet the movie transcends the limitations of its time. Chinatown’s creation unfolded in parallel with the Watergate scandal from the moment filming started, in October 1973. Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, who was facing corruption allegations from his years as Maryland’s governor, resigned almost exactly as Polanski shot the movie’s first scene. What became known as the Saturday-night massacre, when Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and provoked the first real consideration of impeachment, followed just a few weeks later. The real-life conspiracy loomed over Towne’s fictional one.

“When I was shooting the film, I was amazed sometimes, listening to the news programs, by the parallels between what I was hearing and what I was shooting,” Polanski said in a press interview at the time.

The resonance was not lost on others. When Chinatown came out, Newsweek described it as a “Watergate with real water” and recognized that “this is really a story about the decadence of the 1970s.” On the Chinatown shoot, Watergate “enveloped all of us,” Hawk Koch, the film’s assistant director, told me. “We were thrilled to be doing the movie because of what it was about.” Little more than a month after the film’s release, the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve the articles of impeachment that prompted Nixon’s resignation in early August.

[Read: Water, water still is scarce, except for California’s rich]

Chinatown remains on the shortlist of greatest movies not to win the Academy Award for Best Picture; it was beaten by another classic released that year, The Godfather Part II, which explored similar themes of public and private corruption. Both were part of the early-’70s wave of socially conscious movies that revitalized Hollywood after a long period of decline. These films differed in tone, style, and message, but the most important of them shared a mission to illuminate America’s failures and delusions. Although they rarely exhibited any overt political agenda, they aligned with a progressive belief that exposing the misdeeds of business and government could produce a more democratic society that would wrest power from unaccountable elites and give average Americans a greater say.

Now the passage of half a century has produced the irony that the distrust of institutions, which took root in America after the ’60s, has been most effectively marshaled by Trump. He has shown a unique ability to channel it behind a right-wing strongman agenda that promises to smash the restraints of custom, law, and democracy to deliver “retribution” against all the shadowy elites that he says are oppressing his followers.

Only a few years earlier, there was little chance that any of the Hollywood studios would have released a film as dark as Chinatown. Although the anti-Communist blacklist that exiled some of the industry’s brightest lights had slowly lifted in the late ’50s, Hollywood still seemed shell-shocked and tentative until well into the ’60s. It responded to the sexual revolution with cotton-candy, Doris Day–style comedies that seemed lame even in Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency. Soon, protesters were marching for civil rights and against the war, students were clashing with police on university campuses, and cities were burning with riots, yet Hollywood stubbornly looked back for inspiration, releasing a procession of World War II movies, Westerns, musicals, and, above all, gargantuan historical epics. Like the three TV networks in those years, Hollywood remained unwaveringly, even defiantly, disconnected from the social and political changes that the rising Baby Boom generation was bringing to American life.

For the film industry, the turning point came in 1967. Bonnie and Clyde, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Dunaway and Warren Beatty gave a modern countercultural sheen to the Depression-era outlaws. Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft), scathingly captured the Boomers’ hope for a life of greater meaning and authenticity than their parents’ generation was offering (the career advice Hoffman’s character receives: “Plastics!”). Two years later, in 1969, the huge success of Easy Rider—the story of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda as two nomadic, drug-dealing motorcyclists murdered by small-town rednecks—demonstrated the financial rewards of producing films that moved younger audiences.

The studios’ new appetite for contemporary films that appealed to this demographic created the economic foundation for a creative renaissance in Hollywood—and a succession of films that memorably portrayed America as adrift and rotting from within, a nation not only deceived by its leaders but deluded by its most cherished myths. So many compelling movies were released in these years that critics have called 1967–76 Hollywood’s “silver age,” after its 1938–46 golden age. Chinatown immediately claimed a top spot in the silver-age pantheon.

The idea that would grow into the movie came to Towne when he was laid up for several weeks with vertigo around Christmas 1969. He read an article in the Los Angeles Times’s Old West magazine titled “Raymond Chandler’s L.A.,” which recounted how much of the landscape described in those ’40s detective novels remained intact a quarter century later. The idea struck Towne that it would be possible to film a detective movie set in the Los Angeles of the ’30s on location around the city.

The movie’s central metaphor came from a Los Angeles Police Department vice detective who sold Towne a sheepdog named Hira. After the cop told Towne that he worked in Chinatown, the writer asked what he did there. “Probably as little as possible,” the cop said. How’s that? Towne asked. “Look, you can’t tell what’s going on, because we can’t crack the language,” the officer said. “There’s so many dialects and things like that, we can’t tell, frankly, if we’re helping prevent a crime or helping somebody commit one, and so the best thing to do is nothing.” As Towne told me, “And that was the origin of the significance of Chinatown.” In Towne’s script, Gittes repeats that line almost verbatim when Evelyn Mulwray asks him what he did in Chinatown when he worked for the DA. “As little as possible,” Nicholson replies.

Still, the words did not come easily for Towne. “No script ever drove me nuttier,” Towne later recalled. When he finally delivered a draft, in early 1973, it was a 180-page behemoth that perplexed the executives at Paramount. It also failed to satisfy Polanski, who had been hired to direct. Polanski was living in Rome and initially resisted returning to Los Angeles, where the Manson family had murdered his wife, Sharon Tate, only four years earlier. He feared returning to a city “where every street corner reminded me of tragedy.”

[Read: The eerie parallels between Trump and the Watergate ‘road map’]

Polanski and Towne spent eight weeks over the spring and summer of 1973 contentiously rewriting the script. Once filming started, the movie progressed on a brisk if bumpy trajectory. Tiny and tousle-haired, Polanski was an autocrat accustomed to dictating every detail of a scene, including every aspect of an actor’s performance. Nicholson, fluid and supremely self-confident, rolled with Polanski’s style, finding his edicts more amusing than threatening. But Polanski clashed with the tightly wound Dunaway. “They were at loggerheads a lot—over anything,” recalls Anthea Sylbert, a celebrated costume designer who handled those duties on Chinatown.

The movie’s ending was the greatest point of dispute between Polanski and Towne. Towne wanted a more bittersweet ending, but Polanski insisted on rewriting the finale with a conclusion as brutal as the drop of a guillotine. Dunaway’s Mulwray is shot and killed by the police as she tries to escape with her daughter. As Gittes turns to lunge at the police lieutenant who directed the shooting, an associate pulls him away and delivers the film’s unforgettable concluding line: “Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown.”

Gittes had precipitated the tragedy through his overconfidence. “You may think you know what you’re dealing with,” Huston’s Cross had warned him earlier, “but believe me, you don’t.”

Chinatown’s final moments anticipated a world just coming into focus as the production completed. “What was happening with Evelyn Mulwray,” Towne told me, was much like “what was happening in the country. You don’t know what’s going on.” Towne painted a morally bleak world in his script for Chinatown, and Polanski made it even bleaker. Even they, though, could not have envisioned a future in which millions of Americans would willingly entrust their fate to Trump, a man as coldly amoral as Noah Cross.

Portions of this article were adapted from Rock Me on the Water: 1974—The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics, published in 2021.