As Election Day draws closer, I’m joined by my AEI colleague Sean Trende to break down all things 2024. We discuss swing state polling before moving into who we think might be favored to win the White House. Did Democrats make the wrong VP pick? What’s behind Harris’s stubborn leads in the Midwestern battlegrounds? Why are some pollsters suddenly weighting on recalled vote? Who’s favored to win the House and Senate? [If the forward arrow on the red button doesn’t work, click on the YouTube logo.]

“A new Jacobin / Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) / YouGov poll conducted between September 24 and October 2 finds 46.8% of registered voters in Pennsylvania support Vice President Kamala Harris while 44.7% support former president Donald Trump for president in 2024,” Jacobin editors write. “Another 5.5% remain undecided, and 3.0% support another candidate. In a head-to-head matchup, 51.3% of voters prefer Harris, while 48.7% prefer Trump….“We have found results consistent with other polls showing a very tight race,” Jared Abbott, executive director of CWCP, said. “Kamala Harris is showing a razor-thin lead over Donald Trump, but there are enough undecided voters to tip the election, and in Pennsylvania that could prove pivotal to the entire race.” The survey also included a range of questions to determine the state of the race among working-class voters in Pennsylvania….Among the lowest-income voters, those making less than $30k a year, Harris holds a commanding lead with 53.3% to Trump’s 38.3% support. Among lower-middle-income ($30k–$60k) and middle-income voters ($60k–$100k), Trump leads by a margin of 0.6% and 4.6%, respectively. Among upper-middle-income voters ($100k–$200k), Harris leads with 47.6% to Trump’s 45.6%. And among the highest-income voters (>$200k), Trump has a lead with 51.7% compared to only 48.3% for Harris. Overall, voters with a household income below the median favor Harris (47%) over Trump (44%), while voters earning above the median are split between the candidates at 47% support for each….

Jacobin editors continue, “Among manual workers, 55.9% prefer Trump and only 36.2% prefer Harris. Among service and clerical workers, Harris has the edge with 47.7% support to Trump’s 42%. Among professionals, Harris leads with 47.3% support to Trump’s 44.9% support. The candidates are in a dead heat among managers and business owners: Harris has 46.4%, Trump has 46.4%….Among voters with a four-year college degree or more, Harris commands a sizable lead (51.1%) over Trump (40.4%). Voters with some college education, an associate degree, or vocational education also prefer Harris (49.6%) over Trump (42.3%). However, voters with a high school diploma or less prefer Trump (49.6%) over Harris (41.8%)….Among current and former union members, Trump leads with 47.1% support compared to Harris’s 43.2%, while Harris has the advantage among nonunionized Pennsylvanians, with 48.2% of the vote compared to Trump’s 43.2%….Interestingly, among workers who report having recently “experienced a job loss due to unfair firing,” 52.6% support Trump and only 37.4% support Harris, while 47.1% of workers who have not reported such a job loss prefer Harris and 45.3% prefer Trump. Among workers who report working a “very or somewhat insecure job,” 58.3% prefer Trump while only 32.6% prefer Harris. Those who work a “very or somewhat secure job,” however, prefer Harris (47.5%) to Trump (44.5%)….Among urban and suburban voters, 52.8% prefer Harris and 39.9% prefer Trump. Among rural and small-town voters, 52.4% prefer Trump and 37.4% prefer Harris. Among white, non-Hispanic voters, 51.5% prefer Trump and 42% prefer Harris. And among non-white voters, 68.2% prefer Harris and 14.5% prefer Trump….The results demonstrate that, while Harris has a strong lead among lower-income voters, she is struggling to win middle-income blue-collar voters without a college degree, and especially those voters who have recently experienced a job loss or who report job insecurity. “The bottom line is Harris needs to win more working-class voters. That’s the key to this election,” said Dustin Guastella, a researcher with the CWCP. “Blue-collar voters could decide the race in Pennsylvania.”

In “Harris’ mission critical in final push: Wipe out Trump’s advantage on the economy,” Sahil Kapur writes at nbcnews.com: “Kamala Harris is zeroing in on a monumental task that could make or break her prospects in the final month before Election Day: wiping out Donald Trump’s persisting advantage among voters on whom they trust to handle the economy….While Harris has gained ground on stewardship of the economy, Trump still leads in most surveys about the issue, which frequently ranks as the top concern for voters. The Harris campaign and Democratic allies believe she must erode that advantage and at least fight it to a draw….“With four weeks to go, we’re going to be laser-focused on this and be talking about this,” a Harris aide said….The aide, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss strategy, said Harris and her team will spend the final stretch of the campaign presenting her as the candidate fighting for the middle class, citing her upbringing and agenda, while portraying Trump as caring more about cutting taxes for wealthy Americans like himself and hitting his plan for aggressive tariffs as a de facto middle-class tax hike….Her strategy is playing out through TV and digital campaign ads, a gradual stream of policy rollouts and speeches, and a new media blitz by Harris designed to connect her biography to her economic vision….Top Democrats are acutely focused on the economy after they were burned by the issue in recent elections….And exit polls showed Joe Biden underperforming the polls in 2020 amid a deficit against Trump on handling the economy. Now party strategists believe that among the narrow but crucial slice of swing voters in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada, the economy will carry the day.”

Kapur continues, “Still, Harris is performing better than Biden did on the economy against Trump. She has put proposals to lower costs front and center in a departure from Biden, who focused more on touting macroeconomic gains; that fell on deaf ears with many middle-class and lower-income voters, who still feel the pinch of higher prices more than low unemployment or record-high stocks….A recent NBC News poll found that Trump led Harris by 9 points on handling the economy — down from the 22-point lead he held over Biden earlier this year. A Cook Political Report swing state survey in late September found Harris pulling even with Trump on “getting inflation under control,” although Trump still led by 5 points on whom voters would rather see “deal with the economy.” A New York Times/Siena College national poll released Tuesday found that the economy is the No. 1 issue influencing likely voters, with abortion a distant second and immigration just behind that….As Harris ramps up her media appearances, a Democratic strategist said she would do well to deliver “tight and strong” answers about the economy at every opportunity. The aide, who spoke candidly about Harris on condition of anonymity, added: “She has this instinct to go to a word salad, and there’s no need for that.” Alyssa Cass, the chief strategist for Blueprint 2024 added, “A closing message very laser-focused on reducing prices by going after corporations and a middle-class tax cut, paired with a focus on protecting Social Security, Medicare and the [Affordable Care Act], allows her to close the gap on prices that currently exists….”

After the Democratic National Committee ran an ad warning that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump, I assessed her spoiler potential at New York:

In a presidential contest so close that every one of the seven battleground states could go either way, the major-party campaigns are spending some of their enormous resources trying to ensure that minor-party candidates don’t snag critical votes. This ad from the Democratic National Committee is indicative of these fears:

Not only does this ad convey the simple message that “a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump,” but it includes the reminder that according to the Democratic narrative of the 2016 election, the Green Party candidate was the spoiler who gave Trump his winning margins in the key battleground states whereby he upset Hillary Clinton despite losing the national popular vote.

It’s true that Stein won more votes than Trump’s plurality in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2016. So if all of her voters had instead voted for Clinton, Trump would have not become the 45th president and the hinges of political history would have moved in a very different direction. But even though Stein was running distinctly to Clinton’s left and appealing to disgruntled Bernie Sanders primary voters, it’s not 100 percent clear what would have happened had she not run (the Greens, of course, are a regular presence in presidential elections; it’s not as though they were conjured up by Trump in 2016). Some might have actually voted for Trump, and even more might have stayed at home or skipped the presidential ballot line.

The picture is complicated by the presence of an even larger minor-party candidacy in 2016, that of Libertarian Gary Johnson, who won 3 percent of the national presidential vote compared to Stein’s one percent. One academic analysis utilizing exit polls concluded that Clinton would have probably lost even had neither of these minor-party candidates run.

In 2024, Libertarian Chase Oliver is on more state ballots (47) than Stein (39), including all seven battleground states (Stein is on six of them, all but Nevada). Traditionally Libertarians draw a bit more from Republicans than from Democrats (many of them wouldn’t vote for a major-party candidate in any event). But it’s understandably the Greens who worry Democrats, particularly since Stein is counting on defections from Democratic-leaning voters who are unhappy with the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel in its war on Gaza. As the Times of Israel reported last month, there are signs Stein’s strategy is working to some extent with Muslim voters:

“A Council on American-Islamic Relations poll released this month showed that in Michigan, home to a large Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed the Green Party’s Stein. Republican candidate Donald Trump got 18% with Harris, who is US President Joe Biden’s vice president, trailing at 12%.

“Stein, a Jewish anti-Israel activist, also leads Harris among Muslims in Arizona and Wisconsin, battleground states with sizable Muslim populations where Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by slim margins.”

It’s also worth noting that Stein chose a Muslim (and Black) running mate in California professor Butch Ware.

Any comparisons of her 2024 campaign with her past spoiler role should come with the important observation that non-major-party voting is likely to be much smaller this year than it was in 2016, when fully 5.7 percent of presidential voters opted for someone other than Trump or Clinton. The non-major-party vote dropped to 1.9 percent — a third of the 2016 percentage — in 2020. Earlier this year it looked like independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would push the non-major-party vote even higher than it was eight years ago. But then Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race, which reduced the “double-hater” vote unhappy with both major-party candidates, followed by Kennedy’s withdrawal and endorsement of Trump showed that particular threat evaporating. Despite his efforts to fold his candidacy into Trump’s in the battleground states, Kennedy is still on the ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin, though it’s anybody’s guess how many voters will exercise that zombie option and who will benefit. Another independent candidate, Cornel West, stayed in the race, but he’s struggled with both funding and ballot access; he’s not on the ballot in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, or Pennsylvania, and he’s competing with Stein for left-bent voters unhappy with Kamala Harris. Unsurprisingly, Republican operatives have helped both Stein and West in their ballot-access efforts.

There are some indications that the non-major-party vote will drop even more than it did earlier this year. A new Pew survey shows that only 12 percent of registered voters who express a preference for a minor-party or independent candidate are “extremely motivated to vote,” and only 27 percent of these voters think it “really matters who wins.” These are not people who will be rushing to the polls in a state of excitement.

It’s hard to find a credible recent national poll showing Stein, Oliver, or West with more than one percent of the vote. But a late-September New York Times-Siena poll of Michigan, with its significant Arab-American and Muslim populations, did show Stein with 2 percent of likely voters. In an extremely close race, even small splinter votes can matter, as the experience of 2000 in Florida will eternally remind Democrats. Had that year’s Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, not appeared on the ballot, it’s pretty likely Al Gore would have been the 43rd president. So anything can happen in what amounts to a presidential jump ball, and you can expect Democrats to continue calling Stein a spoiler while Republicans not-so-quietly wish her well.

En route to his conclusions in “Media organizations are blowing their endorsements, Matthew Yglesias flags a study, “Political practitioners poorly predict which messages persuade the public,” by David E. Brookman, Joshua L. Calla, Christian Caballero and Matthew Easton at OSF Reprints. From the Abstract:

Recent research finds that political persuasion efforts often have limited effects. We explore a potential explanation for this finding: that political practitioners have poor intuitions about how to persuade. This would be surprising in light of longstanding theories that political elites can easily manipulate public opinion (Lasswell 1938) and the large sums spent to secure their expertise (Sheingate 2016)—but resonate with findings regarding the surprising limits of expert forecasts (Milkman et al. 2022; Tetlock 2005). In this paper, we evaluate how well political practitioners can predict which messages are most persuasive. We measured the effects of N = 172 messages about 21 political issues using a large-sample survey experiment (N = 67, 215 respondent-message observations). We then asked both political practitioners who work to persuade the public (N = 1, 524 practitioners, N = 22, 763 predictions) and laypeople (N = 21, 247 respondents, N = 63, 442 predictions) to predict the efficacy of these messages. We find that: (1) political practitioners and laypeople both perform barely better than chance at predicting persuasive effects; (2) once accounting for laypeople’s inflated expectations about the average size of effects, practitioners do not predict meaningfully better than laypeople; (3) these results hold even for self-identified issue experts and highly experienced practitioners; and (4) practitioners’ experience, expertise, information environment, and demographics do not meaningfully explain variation in their accuracy. Our findings have theoretical implications for understanding the conditions likely to produce meaningful elite influence on public opinion as well as practical implications for practitioners.

None of which bolsters confidence in the messaging skills of campaign strategists. That doesn’t mean campaigns should not bother seeking experienced political message crafters and strategists. But it does suggest that their messages should be subjected to rigorous review and more skepticism.

Many a campaign has run aground by emphasizing the wrong messages or poorly presenting the right ones. There’s no foolproof way for a campaign to hire the best messaging talent. Although likable candidates with lackluster messages have sometimes won elections, winning political campaigns would rather have message-crafters and strategists who have a good track record.

Recently I got to thinking about the use of defectors from the other party by the Harris and Trump campaigns, and wrote up some implications at New York for how they differed:

For a presidential election characterized by immense partisan polarization, there is a remarkable amount of attention being paid to defectors. Kamala Harris campaigned last week with Liz Cheney, the woman who was the No. 3 House Republican as recently as 2021 and who happens to be the daughter of iconic conservative Dick Cheney, who has also endorsed Harris. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s campaign has blessed a road show by ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard that is showing up in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada.

The obvious reason for this high-profile deployment of apostates is that this is a very close presidential election between two equally matched party bases that can achieve total victory with even a small accretion of additional support. But that doesn’t mean the two campaigns have mirror-image strategies for deploying defectors. A closer look, in fact, suggests very different approaches based on very different ideas of where to find the crucial bloc of persuadable voters.

The Harris-Walz campaign, like the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020, is focusing on a clearly identifiable slice of the electorate: Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (some call them anti-Trump Republicans and others Nikki Haley Republicans) who don’t want to vote for Donald Trump but are reassured by the company of like-minded leaders that it’s acceptable to vote for Democrats. Despite the complaints of some progressives that the size of this bloc of voters is perpetually overrated, Pew’s authoritative analysis of validated voters shows the share of moderate/liberal Republicans voting for the Democratic nominee doubled from 8 percent to 16 percent between 2016 and 2020. The value of these voters is enhanced by their demographic characteristics; they are disproportionately college educated and somewhat older and very likely to show up at the polls, all other things being equal. In addition, the Harris campaign can reach out to them without modifying its message significantly, as my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out:

“Harris’s Republican supporters generally don’t claim her policy agenda is better than Trump’s. Their argument is simply that supporting the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power is a threshold issue he fails to clear. Trump ‘tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,’ said [Liz] Cheney, ‘He can never be trusted with power again.’”

So conventionally speaking, Harris is able to use Republican surrogates to reinforce her implicit message that she is much closer to the country’s mainstream — closer to “the center,” in the language of the Beltway — than Trump and a safer option for voters fearful of both left and right extremism. If Harris is indeed a “Marxist,” as Trump likes to say, could Dick Cheney and his daughter really support her? Probably not.

Now the mirror-image strategy for the Trump-Vance campaign would be to identify and deploy relatively conservative Democrats to denounce Harris and Tim Walz as radical leftists who are inadequately patriotic, too “woke,” and in love with open borders and runaway government spending. That is, after all, what the Trump campaign and conservative media are saying around the clock. But there just aren’t any notable Democratic celebrities this year who are willing and able to play the role of centrist defector played by Zell Miller in 2004, Joe Lieberman in 2008, or Artur Davis in 2012. To a remarkable extent, Democratic opinion leaders have lined up behind Harris. That’s one major reason the Trump campaign is going in a different direction in using apostates. The big-name defectors who are available are by no means sensible centrists tut-tutting about her San Francisco liberalism. They are people like Kennedy and Gabbard, who have an entirely different rationale for going MAGA, as the Bulwark’s Marc Caputo explained after taking in their Reclaim America event for Trump in Michigan:

“The message delivered to the thousand people who showed up at a local Detroit area theater that day was hardly typical GOP fare.

“Speakers issued dire warnings about the dangers of illiberalism, corporate power, ‘poison food,’ state surveillance, and the military industrial complex. Former Vice President Dick Cheney and past Ambassador John Bolton were name-dropped and booed as war pigs. Mentions of illegal immigration were scant. Dystopian rhetoric about big city crime was absent.

“This is Blue MAGA.”

If the messengers aren’t the Democratic equivalent of the Cheneys or the host of former GOP administration appointees who have endorsed Harris, neither are the voters Kennedy and Gabbard are targeting typical middle-of-the-roaders. Au contraire, particularly with respect to the former 2024 candidate Kennedy:

“Kennedy’s political value is not in the typical Democrats he can bring to Trump but in the unconventional voters and audiences he can reach. He has received positive attention on influential podcasts, most notably the Joe Rogan Experience, whose host praised Kennedy as ‘the only [presidential candidate] who makes sense to me’ before he quit his campaign in August …

“How big a boost Kennedy and Gabbard provide Trump is ultimately the million-dollar question. A Trump campaign adviser, speaking anonymously, said the campaign’s internal data indicates about 30 percent of the Reclaim America Tour’s audiences are people who ‘are not in our system.’”

What this suggests is that the deployment of these ex-Democrats is part and parcel of a Trump campaign strategy that has eschewed traditional get-out-the-vote methods in favor of a focus on “low-propensity” voters. This controversial approach has its critics and its admirers, but it does seem Team Trump is pursuing it consistently.

It’s probably not a coincidence that prize Trump surrogate Kennedy had a sizable following among low-propensity voters at the peak of his now-abandoned independent presidential campaign: voters hard to classify by conventional ideological categories and often relying on unconventional sources of political information — like, for example, Joe Rogan — while expressing mistrust and even fury toward conventional politics and other Establishment institutions. It’s not surprising that a master of rage and chaos like Trump might have a potential edge among “I hate everybody” voters who believe government and corporations are conspiring to poison their children and then send them off to war.

A lot may depend on which campaign’s theory of the nature of persuadable voters is accurate and how well their surrogates are able to reach out to them. For all we know, the Cheneys could be the key to victory for Harris and Kennedy the key to victory for Trump. In either event, that would blow many minds.

At 538, Monica Potts reports: “The American public has long been generally supportive of Israel, and was largely in favor of sending U.S. military aid to Israel at the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict, but polling since then suggests that support has fallen as the war drags on — instead, many Americans are worried about the harshness of the Israeli government’s response to the attacks, and want the U.S. government to help broker a diplomatic end to the conflict….Last year, a 538 analysis found that sympathy for Israelis spiked soon after the attacks despite a longer-term trend of increasing sympathy for Palestinians, especially among Democrats and independents. In an average of polls at the time, a solid plurality of around half of Americans said they sympathized more with Israelis than they did with Palestinians (or with both/neither party)….Today, Americans are more split on who they sympathize with. In a AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll from Sept. 12-16, 25 percent leaned more toward Israelis, while 15 percent said they sympathized more with Palestinians, 31 percent answered both equally, and 26 percent said neither…..A YouGov/The Economist poll fielded in late September found that 32 percent now think the Israeli government’s response has been too harsh, while 22 percent think it has been about right and 17 percent think it has been not harsh enough. Other polling suggests even more Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions, though the number may not have shifted drastically since last year: For example, 42 percent of Americans thought the Israeli military’s response had gone too far in the September AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll, which was two points higher than the share in a similar AP-NORC poll from November of 2023….That’s all despite the fact that most Americans have consistently viewed Hamas, rather than Israel, as primarily responsible for the conflict.”

Potts adds, ” Nearly 60 percent said Hamas is the “main culprit” in the current conflict in an Atlas poll from Sept. 11-12, while 14 percent blamed Israel (and the rest said they didn’t know). But when given the option, Americans held other actors responsible as well: The September AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll found that around three-quarters of Americans thought the Israeli government, Hamas and the Iranian government each bore at least some of the responsibility for the continuation of the Israel-Hamas conflict — though a larger share said Hamas bore “a lot” of the responsibility (52 percent, compared to 44 percent who said the same of the Israeli government)….The Israel-Hamas conflict has had more than a few effects on politics here at home, as different groups clashed over U.S. support for Israel — the United States has sent more than $12 billion in military aid to Israel since the attacks — in the face of a growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Whether and how the U.S. should continue sending aid to Israel is a question that has proved a political minefield for American leaders….The public’s views on U.S. military aid to Israel have shifted over the course of the conflict. In YouGov/The Economist polling over the past year, the share of Americans who think the U.S. should increase its military aid to Israel has decreased over time, from 24 percent in November 2023 to 18 percent in September 2024. Over the same time period, the share who felt the U.S. should send more humanitarian aid to Palestinians has increased from 26 percent to 32 percent….In the September AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll, 41 percent thought the U.S. was spending too much aiding Israel. Moreover, 38 percent think that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, according to the most recent YouGov/The Economist poll….However, Americans remain invested in the U.S. helping resolve the conflict in some manner, according to the September AP-NORC/Pearson Institute poll: While only 27 percent said it was extremely or very important that the U.S. aid Israel’s military against Hamas and 42 percent said the same of providing humanitarian aid in Gaza, 57 percent wanted the U.S. to play a role in recovering getting the remaining hostages held in Gaza by Hamas released, and 52 percent wanted the U.S. to help negotiate a permanent ceasefire. A Pew Research Center survey last month also found that 61 percent of Americans want the U.S. to play a “major” role in diplomatically resolving the conflict, up from 55 percent in February.”

Potts concludes, “When it comes to the upcoming U.S. presidential election, Trump had an advantage on the issue of handling the Israel-Hamas war, with 52 percent in a late September Fox News poll saying they trusted him more, compared to 45 percent who picked Harris. In the September YouGov/The Economist poll, 31 percent said Trump’s stance in the conflict was “about right,” compared to only 22 percent who said the same of Harris….That said, both Trump and Harris may actually have some room for persuasion here: Many Americans were unclear about both candidates’ approaches to the current conflict — 37 percent in the same poll said they were “not sure” whether Harris had been too supportive of Israel, not supportive enough or about right, and 38 percent said the same of Trump….Overall, Trump’s advantage over Harris could be a reflection on the fact that Trump is out of office and not currently making decisions regarding the conflict, or the fact that he has repeatedly claimed to be the most pro-Israel president in history, appealing to the pro-Israel stance shared by most of his base. In contrast, Harris faces pressure from both wings of her own party, and her role in the current administration could pose a challenge to her campaign if the conflict continues to escalate and the U.S. struggles to respond.” Despite other polls showing voters in general are more concerned about issues like inflation and immigration, in a close election, the U.S. role in the war between Israel and its Arab neighbors could be a significant issue in Michigan and other states.

J. Miles Coleman shares some observations about the battle for Georgia’s electoral votes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Since 2004, Democrats have flipped a half-dozen counties in the Atlanta metro area. While Biden didn’t add any new counties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 coalition in 2020—he simply expanded on her margins—the county that seems next in line to flip is Fayette, which is immediately south of Atlanta’s Fulton County. In 2020, Trump carried it 53%-46%, down from his 57%-38% win from 2016….Republicans can still sweep the precincts in southern and western Fayette County, where the population center is Peachtree City. But the northern part of the county, which is anchored by Fayetteville, has grown at a faster rate over the past few decades and is voting more in line with nearby Henry County—which is to say, quickly in the blue direction….In 2022, Secretary of State (and new Center for Politics scholar) Brad Raffensperger led the Republican ticket statewide. Raffensperger’s 56%-41% vote in Fayette County was impressive by Trump-era standards, but it was not the 30-point spread that Obama-era Republicans could routinely get. Map 2 compares Raffensperger’s showing to Romney’s from a decade earlier. Map 2 also includes Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-GA) result in Fayette County from his 2022 runoff. Warnock took 49.5% there, which was still a loss, but it was an improvement from the 46.4% he took in the 2021 runoff election. On the 2012 map, about one-third (13 of 37) of the precincts are colored the deepest shade of red—in the Senate runoff map, only two are….Outside of the Atlanta metro, we are also watching a county that is about two hours south of Fayetteville—one of this county’s residents made news last week for a historic milestone. Jimmy Carter’s home of Plains is located in Sumter County, GA. Though it has less than half the population, it has voted roughly in line with Wilson County, NC: both counties have strong Democratic heritage but, with their rural character, have become more marginal over the longer term….A few decades ago, Republicans could usually only carry Sumter County in landslides: in both his runs, George W. Bush carried it by a single point as he easily won the state. While Biden’s 5-point margin there was an improvement over Clinton’s showing, Warnock was the only statewide Democrat who carried it in 2022 (he did so in both the general election and runoff)…Assuming Georgia remains highly competitive, we’d expect Fayette County to move towards Harris and Sumter County towards Trump, while a “maximum realignment” scenario could involve both counties changing sides….We would also note generally that, while none of our selected counties came from the impacted regions in either state, Hurricane Helene’s aftermath may add an extra layer of uncertainty in parts of both Georgia and North Carolina.”

“Vice President Harris is taking a significantly different approach than fellow Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the final stretch of the presidential campaign,” Amie Parnes writes in “Harris employs radically different approach than Hillary Clinton” at The Hill. “Harris hasn’t leaned into shattering the glass ceiling or making history the way Clinton did, even though she’d be the first woman elected to the nation’s highest office….She’s also hyperfocused on the Midwest, including Wisconsin, a state Clinton regretted not visiting in the final days of the campaign. Clinton ended up losing the Badger State as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania, stunning Democrats at the time.”

Regarding Harris’s messaging tone, Parnes explains “In another difference, Harris has used an advertising strategy centered around positive or contrast ads, instead of just negative ads attacking former President Trump, as Clinton employed in the last few weeks of her campaign. “Kamala saw what Hillary did, what Hillary went through, what slings and arrows came her way and she seems to be both ready for it and seemingly able to thread a needle in a way that has been very successful,” said Tracy Sefl, the veteran Democratic consultant who has served as an adviser to Clinton. “Is it fair to say that Hillary showed her the way? Yeah. Are there also a million differences? That is also true.”

Parnes notes, “Democrats point to Harris’s recent visit to the border as proof that they’re seeking to go on offense even on issues where Republicans may have an edge. While Biden had gotten pummeled on the issue in recent years, Harris “took a chance” on highlighting the issue when she traveled to the southern border in Arizona. ”

“I think one of the biggest changes is how risk-averse we were,” one Democratic operative said, referring to the Clinton campaign. “We didn’t do anything to shake the apple cart. But I think this campaign feels good about doing those things, and that’s a huge difference.”

In addition, “Since becoming the Democratic nominee following Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Harris has not highlighted her own identity, something Clinton doubled down on throughout her campaign, with signs that read ‘I’m with Her’ and talk of shattering the glass ceiling.”

Further, “Democratic strategist Steve Schale, the director of the super PAC Unite the Country, which is also running positive and contrast spots, said the contrast ads are a “smart place” for Harris to be with about a month remaining until Election Day….As long as they’re in a place where her favorables remain where they are, it’s a good spot to be,” Schale said. “And I suspect they’re going to stay in this lane that they’re in.”

Chilling excerpts from “Why the ‘Brooks Brothers riot’ of 2000 inspired Trump’s campaign operative in 2020” by Zachary B. Wolf at CNN Politics: “For the Trump campaign four years ago in 2020, according to [Jack] Smith’s filing, disruption was the aim. Trump has denied any wrongdoing and said the legal cases against him are all part of a “witch hunt.” He won’t get a chance to present a defense against Smith’s allegations before Election Day, but that’s because his strategy of delaying the case has been very effective….It’s worth focusing in on the Brooks Brothers riot of 2000 and comparing it with the request for a Detroit riot in 2020. Smith’s allegation could be as much a warning as a history lesson if, as many expect, counting and recounting ballots in the election next month stretches well past Election Day. Republicans have made no secret of their plans to deploy 100,000 supporters to keep a close eye on the counting of ballots in swing states….The Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer wrote for CNN just before the 2020 election that the Brooks Brothers riot was a key early example of the GOP “weaponizing outrage,” and he predicted Trump and his allies would go to great lengths to dispute the election outcome. That wasn’t exactly an outlier prediction since Trump had been alleging, falsely, that the 2020 election was being rigged against him….“This moment builds on two to three decades of an increasingly radicalized party,” Zelizer told me by email. “We saw with the Brooks Brothers riot how media-attention grabbing theatrical chaos was an essential part of the strategy, shift attention away from damaging issues while also creating the impression that things are out of control – with the underlying argument that the GOP is needed to bring those things back together.”….As CNN’s Supreme Court expert Joan Biskupic has noted, the current Supreme Court includes three justices – John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – who, while they weren’t among the shouting lawyers in Miami, worked on behalf of the Bush campaign in Florida during the recounts that year.”

From “135.9 Million Reasons Why the Working Class Is So Angry: Workers know that when a private equity firm buys up the company at which they work or a stock buyback is announced, they are likely about to get kicked in the face” by Les Leopold at Common Dreams: “Since 1993, 60.2 million workers who had been on the job for at least three years have been laid off, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Another 75.7 million with less than three years tenure have also been let go….In total, that’s 135.9 million workers who know all too well the pain and suffering of a major disruption to their employment….Working people understand that the periodic ups and downs of the economy can legitimately lead to job loss. But they also know that in many cases the reason they lost their job was not mismatches in supply and demand. Rather, their jobs were sacrificed to satisfy out and out corporate greed….A stock buyback, which was essentially illegal until 1982, is a form of stock manipulation. A company uses its funds, or borrows money, to go into the market place and buy up its own shares of stock. By doing so, the number of shares in circulation goes down, while the earnings per share goes up. The stock price rises even though no new value was added to the company. The rise in the share price rewards company executives, who are mostly paid with stock incentives, and moves corporate wealth into the pockets of Wall Street investors….In 2025, Goldman Sachs estimates that corporations will conduct more than $1 trillion in stock buybacks. Tens of millions of jobs will be sacrificed to shift all that money to the richest of the rich….Reducing the use of mass layoffs to provide financing for corporate and executive looting would be a big win for working people. Alas, we all know deep down that politicians are not about to bite the Wall Street hands that feed them. In the meantime, millions of workers will continue to be sacrificed on the alter of corporate greed.” Read the article for Leopold’s proposed solutions to the problem.

At The American Prospect, Paul Starr mulls over a question on the minds of many a Democratic strategist, “What Should Democrats Say to Young Men? Young men appear to be drifting right. Ignoring them means trouble,”and comes up with a few provocative insights, including: “Signs have been mounting that, for the first time in recent decades, Democrats may lose majority support from young men in 2024. The risk to Democrats is that this is not just a one-time fluke but an indication of growing trouble with men in coming elections. Democrats can celebrate the support they are getting from young women, but they also need to take the disaffection of young men seriously, engage them directly, and respond to the visions of manhood and masculinity that Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are offering….Although men overall have moved toward the Republicans over the past half-century, the youth vote has given Democrats grounds for hope that the losses among men have been transitional, a reflection of an older generation’s difficulties in adjusting to more equal gender relations and a changed economy. Young men’s support for Democrats reached a high point in Barack Obama’s victories. According to exit polls in 2008, Obama won 62 percent of 18-to-29-year-old men as well as 69 percent of women that age. By 2020, the gender gap among young voters had widened, but Joe Biden still received the votes of 52 percent of young men along with 67 percent of young women. As recently as the 2022 midterms, Democrats won 54 percent of young men as well as 72 percent of young women….Democrats need to find ways both to uphold their commitments to gender equality and to bring young men around from Trump and Vance….ALTHOUGH DEMOCRATS DID NOT ADDRESS YOUNG MEN or issues of masculinity directly at their convention, they do have a potential messenger in vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz. As a football coach, teacher, and officer in the National Guard, he has had long experience in working with young men. He could take up the challenge of engaging Republicans directly on what a worthy life is for men today. By going on the podcasts and YouTube shows with male audiences, he could reach out to the young men who have heard from Trump and Vance but not from the Democrats.”

Starr continues, “In late July, two weeks before Harris asked him to run on the ticket, Walz changed the national conversation about Trump and Vance with five words, “These guys are just weird.” What Walz said immediately afterward connected that weirdness to Trump and Vance’s hypermasculinity: “They’re running for He-Man Women Haters Club or something, that’s what they go at. That’s not what people are interested in.” Together, those attention-catching lines have the kernel of what Democrats ought to be saying to young men—one part a counterattack against Trump and Vance; one part positive statement about the Democratic alternative and the genuine interests of young men….In making their case, Democrats do not have to be highly original, any more than Trump and Vance have been. They can rightly claim to be the ones who are talking sense about how men and women normally relate today, not as boss and underling but as members of a team, as “Coach Walz” might say….A major part of the message that Walz could carry to the online audiences of young men concerns the Democrats’ economic program, including their commitments to expand housing construction and aid for first-time homebuyers, forgiveness of student debt, child tax credits, and policies aimed at bringing back manufacturing jobs that pay well and don’t require a college degree. Democrats shouldn’t expect to win the competition for young men with policy proposals, but the odds are that young men haven’t heard about their proposals, which convey a message that Democrats want to make a practical difference in their lives. Democrats don’t have to pull back on abortion rights to win their support; there’s no evidence that young men have turned right on abortion—they just don’t vote on it….we need more men in K-12 teaching as well as more investment in vocational education and technical high schools to give young men who may not go to college the chance to make a decent living….Guys, we see you. We’re on your side as well.” And because Republicans “performatively” side with young men but don’t follow that up with policies, Democrats can gain an advantage by backing up rhetoric with substantive ideas that work for young men. It wouldn’t kill them to point out to young men that the infrastructure bill Biden passed is creating lots of good-paying jobs for them.”

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

Why are Democrats fumbling the issue of education, which they have dominated for many years? There are multiple reasons: they mishandled the Covid-related school closures, they are letting the culture wars distract from the core mission of schools, and they are downplaying the importance of merit and academic achievement. Before I discuss how the Dems could effect a turnaround, let’s dig deeper into these missteps and unfortunate trends.

The school closures went on way too long. Democrats, far more than Republicans, worked to keep public schools closed during the Covid pandemic—longer than in other advanced countries and far longer than was justified by emerging scientific understanding of the virus and its effects. Pushed by their allies in the teachers unions, Democrats ignored the justified warnings that extended school closures would severely harm student learning and social development, especially for poorer children. The returns are now in, and it is clear that the warnings Democrats ignored were, if anything, too mild.

This was no minor error made by Democratic officials in the fog of pandemic confusion but a profound tragedy for millions of children that could have been avoided or at least substantially mitigated. To add to the shameful episode, parents in many communities around the country who wanted the schools reopened faster were frequently demonized by progressives as heartless, anti-science right-wingers who didn’t care about public health. The wounds from this still fester today.

Privileging politics over pedagogy. The culture wars rage on in the schools. Democrats argue that it is all the fault of the Right, who they say wishes to “ban books,” prevent children from learning about slavery, and subject gay and transgender-identifying children to bullying and worse. Progressive educators and school systems, on the other hand, simply stand for a modern, inclusive education that no decent, unprejudiced person should oppose.

This is disingenuous in the extreme. Over the last decade, and especially after the George Floyd summer of 2020, there has been a concerted effort by many school systems and educators to promote “anti-racist” education that goes way beyond benign pedagogical practices such as teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, the Tulsa Race Massacre, redlining, and so on. Instead, pedagogy itself is to be infused, from top to bottom and in every subject, with concepts drawn from the anti-racist playbook. As noted by sociologist Ilana Redstone, these concepts include the assertion that “[a]n unwillingness to recognize the full force of systemic racism as determining disparities between groups is a denial of the reality of racism today (and evidence of ignorance at best and racism at worst).” An army of diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants have stood at the ready to assist school systems in training their staff and teachers to implement this creed and incorporate it into their curricula.

This is politics, not pedagogy as traditionally and properly understood. It has little to do with what most parents want schools to do: develop their children’s academic skills and knowledge base so they can succeed in the world. Democrats have been hurt by their increasing identification with this ideological project rather than the traditional goals of public education.

Downgrading merit and educational achievement. Consistent with this ongoing politicization of educational practices, there has been a concomitant downgrading of academic merit and standard measures of educational achievement, especially standardized tests. In the name of fairness and “equity,” school systems in Democratic-controlled states and counties have taken steps to de-emphasize such measures as a means of evaluating students and controlling admissions to advanced courses, programs, and elite schools.

It hasn’t quite reached the “all shall have prizes” stage, but the message to aspiring students and parents who see educational achievement as their route to upward mobility and success in life is clear: students can no longer rely on hard work and objectively good academic performance to attain their goals (see “Your Neighborhood School Is a National Security Risk,” features, Winter 2024). Other priorities of the school system may take precedence, reducing the payoff from their performance. This does not sit well with most parents, who see it as public schools’ responsibility to encourage and reward their children’s talent and hard work. Democrats have been hurt by their diminishing association with what parents care about the most.

Getting Their Groove Back

In light of all this, is it possible for Democrats to regain their mojo on education during the 2024 election cycle? I think it is, though it will require changing their approach considerably from current practices. And it’s worth doing so. Even if education is not a central issue in the presidential contest, it is sure to loom large in many congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative races.

Here’s how Democrats can decisively change their current image on education and rebuild their advantage on the issue.

Get ideology, whether from the Left or Right, out of schools.Voters are sick of the culture wars around schools. Overwhelmingly, they just want children to get a good education based on standard academic competencies, not instruction in a politically inflected worldview. Democrats must assure voters that the former is their number-one priority. Just as they oppose attempts from the Right to inject their ideology into schools by restricting critical discussion of American history and society, so they must also oppose efforts by those on the Left to impose their views on curricula and analysis of social issues. Neither is appropriate. The job of schools is to give students the tools to make informed judgments, not tell them what those judgments should be.

Articulating this point would signal to voters that Democratic politicians understand what the real priorities of schools should be. But they shouldn’t leave it at that. They should advocate the addition of something positive to schools—that is, to “teach kids what it means to be an American,” in the words of Albert Shanker, the pathbreaking president of the American Federation of Teachers in the late 20th century.

By doing so, Democrats could dissociate themselves from the jaundiced and divisive attitudes of many progressive activists and embrace instead an approach emphasizing what students have in common as Americans. As education scholar Richard Kahlenbergwrites, civics instruction in public schools should embrace (or get back to) teaching

the core of the American Creed: the veneration of liberty and equality promised by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution…The Declaration and Constitution provide, as the Fordham Institute notes, “a common framework for resolving our differences even as we respect them.”… In emphasizing America’s distinctive system of governance, students can appreciate a shared American identity focused on shared values that counters both right-wing white identity politics that sees only white Christians as “real Americans” and left-wing race essentialism that sees a person’s race, ethnicity, gender, and religion as far more important than what citizens have in common as Americans.

Maintain high achievement standards for all groups, even while seeking to close racial disparities. The Democrats have a merit problem, and that has infected their approach to schools and schooling. The traditional Democratic theory of the case ran like this: discrimination should be opposed and dismantled and resources provided to the disadvantaged so that everyone can fairly compete and achieve. Those who were meritorious would be rewarded; those who weren’t would not be.

Democrats have lost interest in the last part of their case, and that abandonment undermines their whole theory. Merit and objective measures of achievement are now viewed with suspicion as the outcomes of a hopelessly corrupt system, so rewards should instead be allocated on the basis of various criteria allegedly related to social justice. Instead of dismantling discrimination and providing assistance so that more people have the opportunity to acquire merit, the real solution is to worry less about merit and more about equal outcomes—“equity” in the parlance of our times.

But here’s what ordinary voters believe: “Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism, and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.” This statement was tested in a nationwide poll of more than 18,000 registered voters by RMG Research and elicited 74 percent agreement versus a mere 16 percent disagreement. In Wisconsin, the statement generated agreement by 91 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats.

Democratic politicians should fearlessly endorse this statement and assure voters that they are all about high standards, high achievement, and how they go together in successful schooling. Democrats should forthrightly oppose the watering down of academic standards in the name of equity and defend elite programs based on academic merit and rigorous tests. The latter is particularly important for reaching Asian voters and stopping the ongoing decline in their support for Democrats.

Provide more choice within the public school system. Public schools have been losing students lately to private schools and homeschooling, as misplaced priorities and academic failures in many public schools have some parents heading for the exits. That typically means they aren’t happy with the public school their child is assigned to. An obvious way to mitigate this problem is simply to give parents more choice of where they can send their child to school, through both more options within the local school system and a wider array of charter schools.

Read more…

It’s traditional in American politics to fret about “October surprises,” the unanticipated events that throw off years of plans and calculations. October has barely begun, but Hurricane Helene with its terrible destruction already has people wondering, so I wrote some preliminary thoughts about how to assess it at New York:

The upcoming presidential election is so close that it could easily be swayed by external developments. Perhaps a widening war in the Middle East will turn heads in one direction or the other, or possibly a dockworkers strike will shake the steadily improving economy and help Republicans. But the major event we already know about is Hurricane Helene, which took a horrific toll on a swath of coastal and inland communities stretching from Florida to Virginia. Confirmed deaths from the storm have already reached 175, with more likely as rescue crews sift through the wreckage and reach remote areas. Damage is expected to reach as much as $160 billion, making the storm one of the deadliest and costliest in U.S. history.

While the human tragedy of Helene remains front and center, it’s impossible to forget entirely that the nightmare storm hit late in a very close and highly consequential presidential election, and two battleground states (Georgia and North Carolina) were very much affected. Here’s what we know about the possible political fallout.

Will damage from the storm impact turnout?

A lot of what we know about the impact of a major destructive storm on the willingness and ability of citizens to vote comes from Hurricane Sandy, which hammered parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York in October 2012 during the run-up to a reasonably competitive presidential election. Sandy, to be clear, was much more proximate to Election Day (hitting the United States on October 29, eight days before the election) than Helene. On the other hand, early voting has become more significant since 2012, and mail ballots were going out in North Carolina when Helene roared across the area. The major study on the electoral impact of Sandy concluded that the famous “superstorm” did not have a significant impact on voter turnout in 2012.

There’s some talk in North Carolina of flooded polling places that may not be usable any time soon and fears of extended disruption of mail service. However, in all but a few isolated places, there should be plenty of time for recovery in the month before Election Day. Individuals, of course, may experience dislocations and psychological effects that might interfere with all kinds of civic participation, but it will be hard to anticipate the magnitude of such collateral damage.

If Helene does affect voting, will there be a disparate impact on candidates?

The Washington Post took a look at the communities experiencing the most death and destruction from Helene and quickly concluded Trump country was most affected:

“As of writing, the federal government has issued disaster declarations in 66 mostly rural counties across four states: 17 in Florida, 11 in Georgia, 25 in North Carolina, and 13 in South Carolina. The declarations follow Helene’s path, from the section of Florida where the state bends along the Gulf of Mexico, through eastern Georgia and into the western Carolinas …

“Overall, counties in those four states that weren’t declared disaster areas voted for Joe Biden by a slight margin. Counties that were declared disaster areas backed Trump by a nearly 16-point margin. In all four states, counties that were included in the federal government’s disaster declarations were more supportive of Trump than were counties that didn’t receive that designation. In Georgia and North Carolina, non-disaster counties gave more votes to Biden.”

The disparate impact is most notable in North Carolina, a red-hot battleground state and the one where Helene’s impact was most heavily concentrated:

“Trump won North Carolina by a bit over one percentage point in 2020. If no one in the counties currently undergoing a Helene-related disaster had voted, Biden would have won by more than three points. If those counties are unable to vote at the same level as they did four years ago by the time Election Day arrives, that could spell trouble for the former president.”

But again, it’s a long time until Election Day.

Will government relief and recovery efforts affect voter preferences?

People who have lost homes or other possessions to high winds and (especially) flooding and/or who lack power or other essentials for an extended period of time are especially dependent on emergency assistance and may be grateful if it arrives expeditiously. Beyond for those immediately affected, the perceived competence and compassion of government entities dealing with disaster relief and recovery efforts can affect how voters assess those in office, particularly in a high-profile situation like that created by Helene.

An American Enterprise Institute study of Sandy suggested that the Obama administration’s response to the storm was a major factor in the incumbent’s ability to win late deciders in 2012, topped by this finding: “Fully 15 percent of the electorate rated Obama’s hurricane response as the most important factor in their vote.”

At the other end of the spectrum, the George W. Bush administration’s tardy, confused, and seemingly indifferent response to the calamity of Hurricane Katrina in August and September of 2005 had an enduringly negative effect on perceptions of his presidency, even though it occurred nowhere close to a national election, as Reid Wilson explained:

“Voters, already turning skeptical over the mismanaged war in Iraq, blamed Bush for the unfolding disaster in New Orleans. Bush’s approval rating hit 45 percent in Gallup surveys the month after Katrina; they never again reached that high. The number of Americans who said the country was headed off on the wrong track rose north of 60 percent and stayed even higher for the rest of Bush’s presidency.”

While FEMA and HUD are typically the federal agencies most involved in disaster response and recovery, presidential leadership in a disaster always gets attention, too, and the risk of negative publicity or graphic displays of unmet needs won’t go away immediately. Bureaucratic backlogs in distributing funds and approving applications for assistance could cause voter unhappiness long after the initial damage is addressed.

Barring unexpected developments or a major series of screwups in the federal response, Hurricane Helene is likely to mark a big moment in the lives of people in and near the areas of devastation but probably won’t much affect their voting behavior. Obviously the campaigns and their allies will need to adjust their get-out-the-vote operations and show some sensitivity to the suffering of people whose lives were turned upside down. We can only hope the election itself and its aftermath don’t add violence and trauma to the damage done.