So how does a Democratic U.S. Senator in a very red state run to keep his seat? Sen. Jon Tester provides the emblematic example in his bid to hold his senate seat in Montana. Stephen Neukam shares some observations at Axios: “Tester’s campaign in deep-red Montana could be the difference between Democrats keeping control of the Senate or relinquishing it to the GOP….Some of the earliest advertising from the Tester camp have elevated his splits with Biden, including an ad that said the Democrat “fought to stop President Biden from letting migrants stay in America instead of remain in Mexico.”….But Republicans are pouring money into the race and are painting Tester as a lawmaker who says one thing to Montanans and then acts differently in Washington….Another ad from early in the cycle highlights how Tester joined with Republicans to protect funding for gun safety and hunter education classes….He has also made recent moves on Capitol Hill to differ from Biden, including pushing the president to take action at the southern border and opposing new energy regulations.…National Republican Senatorial Committee communications director Mike Berg told Axios that Tester’s distance from Trump would be “at the center” of the campaign against the Democrat….Tester also notably voted to convict Trump in both of his impeachments….Tester, along with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), are two of the only Democrats running for Senate this year who have been so openly critical of the White House on the campaign trail…The Tester campaign told Axios the lawmaker has “worked with President Trump and Republicans to help veterans, crack down on government waste and abuse, and support our first responders.”….”He stood up to President Biden by demanding action be taken to secure our border and protect Montana’s way of life,” Monica Robinson, a Tester campaign spokesperson, said.” It is one of the many ironies of American politics that Tester, who is fighting to keep his Senate seat, might make a strong presidential candidate, who could pull from moderates and conservatives, as well as liberals.

Almost every political observer will tell you that Pennsylvania is a top swing state in the 2024 presidential and U.S. Senate elections. Some of the results of Tuesday’s PA primary elections may shed a bit of light on how Democratic campaigns are doing: 538’s stable of writers offer some clues at ABC News: Geoffrey Skelley, Kaleigh Rogers and Monica Potts write that “In the solidly blue 12th District, ABC News reports progressive Democratic Rep. Summer Lee is projected to defeat Edgewood Borough Council member Bhavini Patel by about 20 percentage points, with 99 percent of the expected vote reporting. Lee’s win is an early indication that The Squad’s criticisms of Israel won’t necessarily weigh members down in the primaries to come this summer….Meanwhile, in the 10th District, former news anchor Janelle Stelson is projected to win the Democratic primary with 44 percent against a field of five other candidates and 99 percent of the expected vote, ABC News reports. She’ll face Republican Rep. Scott Perry, a former chair of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, in a slightly GOP-leaning seat that may be competitive….In the 1st District, another seat that could be in play, Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick held off a challenge from the right in anti-abortion activist Mark Houck, leading by 26 points at this point with 91 percent of the expected vote. ABC News reports that Fitzpatrick is projected to win that race. Fitzpatrick will now face off against Democrat Ashley Ehasz, whom he defeated by 10 points in 2022, but it may very well be a closer race in this swingy district this time around….And over in Eastern Pennsylvania, three Republicans squared off tonight for the opportunity to run against — and potentially unseat — three-term Democratic Rep. Susan Wild in the 7th District. But it was state Rep. Brian Mackenzie who came out on top and is projected to win according to reporting by ABC News. He’s currently leading with 42 percent of the vote, and 85 percent of the expected vote reporting, perhaps in part thanks to the nearly half a million dollars spent on his behalf by the Koch Brothers’ PAC. Mackenzie and Wild will now be gearing up for a tight race that is set to be one of the most competitive House races in the nation, so expect a lot of attention — and money — to be paid to Lehigh Valley….Neither candidate faced primary opposition in the U.S. Senate contest today, meaning that Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr. and former hedge fund CEO Dave McCormick will face off in November.”

Skelley, Rogers and Potts explain further: “Finally, in notable races for the state House and Senate, we watched Democratic primaries in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas — which will set up key contests this fall, as Democrats fight to hold onto their narrow, one-vote majority in the state House and flip the Senate to secure a state government trifecta. Incumbents mostly fended off challenges from more progressive candidates in these races, notably Rep. Amen Brown in West Philadelphia, and Rep. Abigail Salisbury, who won against a Summer Lee-backed candidate, Ashley Comans.” ….Monica Potts shares this addendum: “As Meredith said, I think the big takeaway for the night is that Republicans did not nominate some of their more extreme candidates. That was a losing strategy in 2022, and we may see more competitive statewide races as a result this fall….The 1st District race I noted earlier is a good example: Anti-abortion Republicans suffered a notable loss with Houck’s decisive defeat in favor of incumbent Fitzpatrick, one of the most moderate Republicans in the U.S. House. So far, abortion has been a winning issue for Democrats, and it’s likely to be a defining issue in the race this fall — so Republicans are likely glad Fitzpatrick prevailed in this purple district.” Potts is surely right that abortion politics is the big story in Pennsylvania, which is one of the most heavily Catholic states. And if Tuesday’s primary election results indicate anything significant for the fall presidential election, it is that reproductive freedom still looks like a potent issue favoring Democrats — in what may be the largest electoral vote swing state on the map in 2024.

The United Auto Workers historic victory in organizing the Chattanooga, TN Volkswagen auto plant is not only an earthquake for labor news; it bodes well for Democrats, who could benefit immeasurably from a significant uptick in union membership. Unions not only contribute significant funds to Democratic campaigns; they also provide needed manpower when it comes to GOTV and they help build political solidarity between workers of different races and cultures. At The American Prospect, Editor at Large Harold Meyerson offers some insights on the importance of the UAW victory: “History—good history, if conditional history—was made last Friday in Chattanooga, as workers at Volkswagen’s factory there voted to join the United Auto Workers by an overwhelming margin of 2,628 to 985, a 73 percent to 27 percent landslide….The vote was historic on any number of counts. It marks the UAW’s first successful unionization of a foreign-owned auto factory after a number of failed attempts; it marks the first unionization in many decades of a major group of workers in the non-union South; it may even mark the rebirth of a powerful union movement, something the nation has lacked over the past 40 years….It also marks, alongside the provisional victory of the Starbucks baristas, a breakthrough in the type of occupation that’s been able to unionize. In recent years, there’s been a wave of unionizations among university teaching assistants, interns and residents, museum docents, and other workers who can’t readily be replaced should management fire them for their pro-union proclivities. But it’s been standard practice for management to fire assembly-line workers, retail clerks, drywall installers, and the myriad of other workers for whom replacements can indeed be found if and when they threaten to unionize. It’s illegal for employers to do that, but the penalties are so negligible (restoring those workers to their jobs after months or years of litigation, giving them their back pay, and posting a notice of this settlement somewhere in the workplace) that it’s long been standard practice in American business. The VW and Starbucks workers had that sword hanging over their heads, yet managed to prevail nonetheless. Should their example inspire the millions of workers who’d like to unionize but fear employers’ retaliation, that would mark a sea change in America’s political economy….The historic status of the victory at Volkswagen, however, is still as yet conditional. To really mark a historic break with nearly 60 years of union decline—a decline that is at the root of the erosion of the New Deal’s egalitarian economics and, correspondingly, the rise of record levels of economic inequality—it can’t be a one-off. The UAW has to roll this on to other Southern foreign-transplant factories; the first test of its ability to do that will come the week of May 13, when workers at the Mercedes factory in Vance, Alabama, will also vote on whether to join the UAW….As Mike Elk noted in a report from Chattanooga that we ran on Friday, the workers at the VW plant are a younger and more racially diverse group than those who voted down previous attempts to go union. The teaching assistants, baristas, and now autoworkers who’ve voted to go union in the past couple of years come disproportionately from, by the evidence of multiple polls, the most pro-union generation that this country may have ever seen.”

Some excerpts from “Democrats Aren’t Campaigning to Win the Working Class” by Jared Abbott and Fred Deveaux at Jacobin:

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 the new Book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

“Be realistic—demand the impossible!” So went the slogan of the young revolutionaries who thronged the streets of Paris in May, 1968. At the time, the slogan was viewed by mass working-class parties as profoundly misguided, regardless of the high idealism that lay behind it. But over half a century later, it could well be the slogan of today’s left parties—which are now more Brahminthan working class—as they have rushed to embrace “net zero” emissions by 2050 and the elimination of fossil fuels.

This net zero commitment stems from the extremely high priority placed on this goal by the educated elites and activists who now dominate these parties. They believe that nothing is more important than stopping global warming since it is not just a problem, but an “existential crisis” that must be confronted as rapidly as possible to prevent a global apocalypse. Portuguese Socialist politician, Antonio Guterres, now Secretary-General of the United Nations, has claimed “the era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived” and that “humanity has opened the gates to hell”. President Biden said last September:

The only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next 20—10 years. That’d be real trouble. There’s no way back from that.

More frightening than nuclear war, eh, from which there is presumably a way back? Up and down the Democratic Party, rhetoric is more similar than not to the president’s histrionic take. Whatever else one might say about these statements, it is easy to see how they are not conducive to clear thinking on this issue. The first instinct is to do something—anything!—and do it as fast as possible to forestall this apocalypse.

Hence the commitment to net zero by 2050 to limit global warming to 1.5ºC. Hence the commitment to an extremely rapid elimination of fossil fuel usage. Hence the commitment to an equally rapid build up of wind and solar in energy production.

But how possible is any of this? Is it really possible to hit net zero by 2050? Is it really possible to eliminate fossil fuels that fast? The answer is that, for both technical and political reasons, it is not possible (outside of edge “solutions” like crashing industrial civilization or world authoritarian government to ration energy usage).

The insistence on trying to do so anyway is why “be realistic—demand the impossible!” is, astonishingly, not so far from the guiding philosophy of much of today’s mainstream left, including dominant sectors of the Democratic Party.

Consider the technical feasibility of this program. As the polymath, Vaclav Smil, universally acknowledged to be one the world’s premier energy experts, has observed:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

Smil backs his argument with a mountain of empirical evidence in a new and hugely important paper, “Halfway Between Kyoto and 2050: Zero Carbon Is a Highly Unlikely Outcome.” The paper is a gold mine of relevant and highly compelling data. Smil outlines the realities of the net zero 2050 challenge:

The goal of reaching net zero global anthropogenic CO2 emissions is to be achieved by an energy transition whose speed, scale, and modalities (technical, economic, social, and political) would be historically unprecedented…[T]he accomplishment of such a transformation, no matter how desirable it might be, is highly unlikely during the prescribed period….In terms of final energy uses and specific energy converters, the unfolding transition would have to replace more than 4 terawatts (TW) of electricity-generating capacity now installed in large coal- and gas-fired stations by converting to non-carbon sources; to substitute nearly 1.5 billion combustion (gasoline and diesel) engines in road and off-road vehicles; to convert all agricultural and crop processing machinery (including about 50 million tractors and more than 100 million irrigation pumps) to electric drive or to non-fossil fuels; to find new sources of heat, hot air, and hot water used in a wide variety of industrial processes (from iron smelting and cement and glass making to chemical syntheses and food preservation) that now consume close to 30 percent of all final uses of fossil fuels; to replace more than half a billion natural gas furnaces now heating houses and industrial, institutional, and commercial places with heat pumps or other sources of heat; and to find new ways to power nearly 120,000 merchant fleet vessels (bulk carriers of ores, cement, fertilizers, wood and grain, and container ships, the largest one with capacities of some 24,000 units, now running mostly on heavy fuel oil and diesel fuel) and nearly 25,000 active jetliners that form the foundation of global long-distance transportation (fueled by kerosene).

On the face of it, and even without performing any informed technical and economic analyses, this seems to be an impossible task given that:

• we have only a single generation (about 25 years) to do it;

• we have not even reached the peak of global consumption of fossil carbon;

• the peak will not be followed by precipitous declines;

• we still have not deployed any zero-carbon large-scale commercial processes to produce essential materials; and

• the electrification has, at the end of 2022, converted only about 2 percent of passenger vehicles (more than 26 million) to different varieties of battery-powered cars and that decarbonization is yet to affect heavy road transport, shipping, and flying.

The slogan of “be realistic—demand the impossible!” does indeed seem to fit.

And how are we doing so far on this incredibly daunting task?

We are now halfway between 1997 (27 years ago) when delegates of nearly 200 nations met in Kyoto to agree on commitments to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases, and 2050; the world has 27 years left to achieve the goal of decarbonizing the global energy system, a momentous divide judging by the progress so far, or the lack of it.

The numbers are clear. All we have managed to do halfway through the intended grand global energy transition is a small relative decline in the share of fossil fuel in the world’s primary energy consumption—from nearly 86 percent in 1997 to about 82 percent in 2022. But this marginal relative retreat has been accompanied by a massive absolute increase in fossil fuel combustion: in 2022 the world consumed nearly 55 percent more energy locked in fossil carbon than it did in 1997.

And what would it take in the future to reach the cherished net zero by 2050 goal? Smil estimates that

…the cost of global decarbonization [would be] $440 trillion, or nearly $15 trillion a year for three decades, requiring affluent economies to spend 20 to 25 percent of their annual GDP on the transition. Only once in history did the US (and Russia) spent higher shares of their annual economic product, and they did so for less than five years when they needed to win World War II. Is any country seriously contemplating similar, but now decades-long, commitments?…

Even though we are technically far better equipped than we were 150 to 200 years ago, the task presented by the second energy transition appears to be no less challenging. Just before the end of 2023 the International Energy Agency published its estimate of global investment in “clean energy,”—in other words, essentially the recent annual cost of the energy transition. In 2023 it was close to $2.2 trillion…[W]e should be investing about six times more, or about $13 trillion a year, to reach zero carbon by 2050. Making it $15-17 trillion a year (to account for expected cost over-runs) seems hardly excessive, and it takes us, once again, to a grand total of $400-460 trillion by the year 2050, good confirmation of [the] previously derived value. This is not a forecast, just a plausible estimate intended to indicate the commonly underestimated cost of this global endeavor.

No natural laws bar us from making the enormous investments needed to sustain such massive annual shifts: we could resort to an unprecedented, decades-long, and civilization-wide existential mobilization of constructive and transformative efforts or, conversely, we could deliberately reduce our energy use by lowering our standard of living and keeping it low to make it easier to displace all fossil carbon.

In the absence of these two radical choices, we should not ignore the experience of the past grand energy transition (from traditional biomass energies to fossil fuels) and we should not underestimate the concatenation of challenges presented by practical engineering, material, organizational, social, political, and environmental requirements of the unfolding transition to a fossil carbon-free world that have been partially reviewed in this essay. When we do assess these challenges realistically, we must conclude that the world free of fossil carbon by 2050 is highly unlikely.

By any reasonable standard of feasibility, I’d make that flat-out impossible. That’s one reason why Democrats, and left parties generally, will eventually have to become energy realists. However much they wish it not to be so, grand energy transitions take time—many, many decades. Absent drastically lowered living standards and/or radical social disruption, this transition will be no different. Fossil fuels, and the support they provide to the high living standards enjoyed by the advanced world and aspired to by everyone else, will be with us for a loooong time.

But hey, “be realistic—demand the impossible!” right?

Read more…

Read “Yes, Joe Biden Can Win the Working-Class Vote: Since 2020, Joe Biden’s support among working-class voters of all races has fallen alarmingly. Here are seven ways he and his party can reverse the slide” by Timothy Noah at The New Republic. Among bis observations: “Only half of the Democratic-candidate websites surveyed by the Center for Working-Class Politics bothered to mention Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Only about one-quarter mentioned Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which is spending another half-trillion on technologies to reduce climate change. And only 15 percent mentioned the CHIPS Act, signed into law three months before the election, which will spend another $53 billion to boost domestic manufacture of semiconductors. The combined effect of these three bills has been to nearly triple the construction of manufacturing facilities since Biden took office….however unpopular Biden was (and remains), Biden’s policies are very popular, especially among working-class voters—on those rare occasions when they hear about it. The IRA, for example, was favored in a March 2023 poll by 68 percent of people earning between $50,000 and $99,999. But these working-class people needed the pollsters (from Yale and George Mason) to first explain what the Inflation Reduction Act was. A 61 percent majority had no idea….To prevail in 2024, Biden will need to win the working-class vote. Over the past century, no Democrat—with one exception—has ever won the presidency without winning a majority of working-class voters. The single exception was Joe Biden in 2020; Biden lost noncollege voters that year to President Donald Trump, 47 to 51. That was slightly worse than Hillary Clinton did with noncollege voters in 2016. Biden performed better than Clinton among noncollege whites, but 8 percentage points worse among noncollege Latinos and 3 percentage points worse among noncollege African Americans. Biden became president anyway, but under a unique set of circumstances—a deadly and economically costly pandemic that the incumbent mishandled badly. It’s doubtful the president can remain an exception in 2024 and win reelection….electoral math compels the Democrats to pick up two college graduates for every noncollege voter who leaves….The electoral math gets even worse when you consider this year’s battleground states. Battleground swing voters will likely determine who becomes president (not to mention whether the Senate remains Democratic), and they skew more heavily toward noncollege voters (72 percent) than the nation as a whole (63 percent). Democrats in those crucial states, according to Jared Abbott and Fred DeVeaux of the Center for Working-Class Politics, will need to pick up not two but three college grads for every noncollege voter they lose. Rather than obsess about further expanding its share of college voters, the party would do better to think hard about how it can shore up a working-class constituency that, even at this late date, remains essential to winning the White House.”

At nbcnews.com, Mark Murray reports that “RFK Jr. candidacy hurts Trump more than Biden, NBC News poll finds: The finding contrasts with a number of other national polls, and it comes amid concerted Democratic efforts to prevent Kennedy from harming Biden’s campaign” and writes: “The latest national NBC News poll shows the third-party vote — and especially independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — cutting deeper into former President Donald Trump’s support than President Joe Biden’s, though the movement the other candidates create is within the poll’s margin of error….Trump leads Biden by 2 percentage points in a head-to-head matchup, 46% to 44%, in the new NBC News poll….Yet when the ballot is expanded to five named candidates, Biden is the one with a 2-point advantage: Biden 39%, Trump 37%, Kennedy 13%, Jill Stein 3% and Cornel West 2%….The big reason why is that the poll finds a greater share of Trump voters in the head-to-head matchup backing Kennedy in the expanded ballot. Fifteen percent of respondents who picked Trump the first time pick Kennedy in the five-way ballot, compared with 7% of those who initially picked Biden….Also, Republican voters view Kennedy much more favorably (40% positive, 15% negative) than Democratic voters do (16% positive, 53% negative).” Plug in all the caveats: It’s only one poll; it’s too early to take polls seriously. We’re only talking about a couple of points, anyway. And perhaps more important, it’s a national, instead of swing states polls, which would be more significant. Dems must guard against wishful thinking. As Murray writes, “The NBC News poll results on Kennedy’s impact are “different than other surveys,” said McInturff, the GOP pollster. “So there’s always two possibilities: One, it’s an outlier. … Or two, we’re going to be seeing more of this, and our survey is a harbinger of what’s to come….The Biden campaign has actively tried to peel support away from Kennedy. Most recently, Biden held an event Thursday with members of the Kennedy family who are endorsing the president over their relative.” One could also hope that Trump’s infantile behavior in his trials has finally become embarrassing for a few more of his supporters.

The Boston Review has a forum entitled “The New Blue Divide,” in which Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson probe  the possibilities for a “bold economic agenda” in the Democratic Party, despite relying on “affluent suburbanites” for support. As Hacker and Pierson write, “The place to begin is the changing geography of American politics. The partisan divide is now a “density divide.” Over the past few election cycles, Republicans have registered particularly big gains among white voters in lower-density regions of the country battered by the shift to a postindustrial knowledge economy. The consequences of the GOP’s retreat from dense metro areas are now well understood. It has powered the party’s embrace of Christian nationalism and right-wing populism as well as its growing attack on American democracy, leading to a base that is older, whiter, more heavily Evangelical, and less highly educated….Less well understood is the other half of the story—the transformation of the Democratic Party. Democrats are now firmly established as the political voice of multiracial, cross-class, metro America. Democrats have always done well in urban cores; what has changed over the past several decades is the party’s performance in the suburbs, which have grown more Democratic even as they have grown more affluent. Some of these gains have occurred because the suburbs have diversified racially and economically. Yet the most striking change in recent cycles is growing Democratic margins in the richest suburban communities—the biggest beneficiaries of U.S. economic growth over the last two decades. Most of these areas remain disproportionately white, and many leaned Republican not long ago….Because of these shifts, Democrats are now much less clearly the party of the “have nots.” In 2021–22, they represented twenty-four of the twenty-five congressional districts with the highest median household income—a striking change from the past. (Documentation for most of the statistics in this piece can be found in a recent academic article we wrote with Amelia Malpas and Sam Zacher.) At the presidential level, Democrats now win counties that produce the lion’s share of the nation’s economic output; some 71 percent of GDP came from the 1 in 6 counties that backed Biden in 2020. Indeed Biden won every one of the twenty-four most economically productive metro areas, and forty-three of the top fifty.”

“In remaking their coalition to bring in affluent college-educated voters,” Hacker and Pierson add, “Democrats are hardly alone. Left-of-center parties in most other rich democracies have evolved along broadly similar lines as the knowledge economy has built up steam—gaining highly educated professionals while losing white working-class voters, who increasingly embrace the populist right. In economist Thomas Piketty’s evocative depiction, parties that were once oriented toward the working class—the British Labor Party, the French Socialists, the German Social Democrats, as well as the U.S. Democratic Party—now represent the “Brahmin left.” In their efforts to court the affluent and educated, Piketty maintains, these left parties have retreated from their historical commitment to redistribution….This argument echoes the claims of many American observers, including prominent journalists and analysts such as David Leonhardt, Thomas Frank, Thomas Edsall, John Judis, and Ruy Teixeira. In their recent book Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (2023), for example, Judis and Teixeira lament that the party has “steadily lost the allegiance of ‘everyday Americans’” and that the “main problem” is its “cultural insularity and arrogance.” Democrats, these critics insist, have embraced the social liberalism of their affluent, college-educated white voters at the expense of the working class….Perhaps change will only come with greater direct investments in building a stronger network of supportive organizations, including labor unions. Or perhaps polarization is now so deeply entrenched—and the media landscape is now so noisy—that the ability of a party to build electoral support through economic governance is severely limited. Indeed, the changing media landscape is probably a major reason why sharply negative perceptions of Democrats are so hard to shake. Both GOP leaders and right-wing commentators relentlessly pillory the Democrats as obsessed with identity and culture. These narratives, amplified through mainstream as well as conservative media, make it extremely difficult for the party to reshape its image, especially when its policy initiatives so often fall victim to congressional gridlock….With a slightly stronger Democratic hand in Congress, the agenda of 2021 could be revived. The money will certainly be there—the only benefit of the spectacular transfer of financial resources to corporations and the wealthy over the past generation—and if the electoral shifts we have charted endure, there is a real chance that the political momentum could be as well.”

A lot of people who weren’t alive to witness the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago are wondering if it’s legendary chaos. I evaluated that possibility at New York:

When the Democratic National Committee chose Chicago as the site of the party’s 2024 national convention a year ago, no one knew incumbent presidential nominee Joe Biden would become the target of major antiwar demonstrations. The fateful events of October 7 were nearly six months away, and Biden had yet to formally announce his candidacy for reelection. So there was no reason to anticipate comparisons to the riotous 1968 Democratic Convention, when images of police clashing with anti–Vietnam War protesters in the Windy City were broadcast into millions of homes. Indeed, a year ago, a more likely analog to 2024 might have been the last Democratic convention in Chicago in 1996; that event was an upbeat vehicle for Bill Clinton’s successful reelection campaign.

Instead, thanks to intense controversy over Israel’s lethal operations in Gaza and widespread global protests aimed partly at Israel’s allies and sponsors in Washington, plans are well underway for demonstrations in Chicago during the August 19 to 22 confab. Organizers say they expect as many as 30,000 protesters to gather outside Chicago’s United Center during the convention. As in the past, a key issue is how close the protests get to the actual convention. Obviously, demonstrators want delegates to hear their voices and the media to amplify their message. And police, Chicago officials, and Democratic Party leaders want protests to occur as far away from the convention as possible. How well these divergent interests are met will determine whether there is anything like the kind of clashes that dominated Chicago ’68.

There are, however, some big differences in the context surrounding the two conventions. Here’s why the odds of a 2024 convention showdown rivaling 1968 are actually fairly low.

Gaza isn’t Vietnam.

Horrific as the ongoing events in Gaza undoubtedly are, and with all due consideration of the U.S. role in backing and supplying Israel now and in the past, the Vietnam War was a more viscerally immediate crisis for both the protesters who descended on Chicago that summer and the Americans watching the spectacle on TV. There were over a half-million American troops deployed in Vietnam in 1968, and nearly 300,000 young men were drafted into the Army and Marines that year. Many of the protesters at the convention were protesting their own or family members’ future personal involvement in the war, or an escape overseas beyond the Selective Service System’s reach (an estimated 125,000 Americans fled to Canada during the Vietnam War, and how to deal with them upon repatriation became a major political issue for years).

Even from a purely humanitarian and altruistic point of view, Vietnamese military and civilian casualties ran into the millions during the period of U.S. involvement. It wasn’t common to call what was happening “genocide,” but there’s no question the images emanating from the war (which spilled over catastrophically into Laos and especially Cambodia) were deeply disturbing to the consciences of vast numbers of Americans.

Perhaps a better analogy for the Gaza protests than those of the Vietnam era might be the extensive protests during the late 1970s and 1980s over apartheid in South Africa (a regime that enjoyed explicit and implicit backing from multiple U.S. administrations) and in favor of a freeze in development and deployment of nuclear weapons. These were significant protest movements, but still paled next to the organized opposition to the Vietnam War.

Political conventions are different today.

One reason the 1968 Chicago protests created such an indelible image is that the conflict outside on the streets was reflected in conflict inside the convention venue. For one thing, 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey had not quelled formal opposition to his selection when the convention opened. He never entered or won a single primary. One opponent who did, Eugene McCarthy, was still battling for the nomination in Chicago. Another, Robert F. Kennedy, had been assassinated two months earlier (1972 presidential nominee George McGovern was the caretaker for Kennedy delegates at the 1968 convention). There was a highly emotional platform fight over Vietnam policy during the convention itself; when a “peace plank” was defeated, New York delegates led protesters singing “We Shall Overcome.” Once violence broke out on the streets, it did not pass notice among the delegates, some of whom had been attacked by police trying to enter the hall. At one point, police actually accosted and removed a TV reporter from the convention for some alleged breach in decorum.

By contrast, no matter what is going on outside the United Center, the 2024 Democratic convention is going to be totally wired for Joe Biden, with nearly all the delegates attending pledged to him and chosen by his campaign. Even aside from the lack of formal opposition to Biden, conventions since 1968 have become progressively less spontaneous and more controlled by the nominee and the party that nominee directs (indeed, the chaos in Chicago in 1968 encouraged that trend, along with near-universal use of primaries to award delegates, making conventions vastly less deliberative). While there may be some internal conflict on the platform language related to Gaza, it will very definitely be resolved long before the convention and far away from cameras.

Another significant difference between then and now is that convention delegates and Democratic elected officials generally will enter the convention acutely concerned about giving aid and comfort to the Republican nominee, the much-hated, much-feared Donald Trump. Yes, many Democrats hated and feared Richard Nixon in 1968, but Democrats were just separated by four years from a massive presidential landslide and mostly did not reckon how much Nixon would be able to straddle the Vietnam issue and benefit from Democratic divisions. That’s unlikely to be the case in August of 2024.

Brandon Johnson isn’t Richard Daley.

Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was a major figure in the 1968 explosion in his city. He championed and defended his police department’s confrontational tactics during the convention. At one point, when Senator Abraham Ribicoff referred from the podium to “gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” Daley leaped up and shouted at him with cameras trained on his furious face as he clearly repeated an obscene and antisemitic response to the Jewish politician from Connecticut. Beyond his conduct on that occasion, “Boss” Daley was the epitome of the old-school Irish American machine politician and from a different planet culturally than the protesters at the convention.

Current Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who was born the year of Daley’s death, is a Black progressive and labor activist who is still fresh from his narrow 2023 mayoral runoff victory over the candidate backed by both the Democratic Establishment and police unions. While he is surely wary of the damage anti-Israel and anti-Biden protests can do to the city’s image if they turn violent, Johnson is not without ties to protesters. He broke a tie in the Chicago City Council to ensure passage of a Gaza cease-fire resolution earlier this year. His negotiating skills will be tested by the maneuvering already underway with protest groups and the Democratic Party, but he’s not going to be the sort of implacable foe the 1968 protesters encountered.

The whole world (probably) won’t be watching.

The 1968 Democratic convention was from a bygone era of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the three broadcast-television networks that then dominated the media landscape and the living rooms of the country. When they were being bludgeoned by the Chicago police, protesters began chanting, “The whole world is watching,” which wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Today’s media coverage of major-party political conventions is extremely limited and (like coverage of other events) fragmented. If violence breaks out this time in Chicago, it will get a lot of attention, albeit much of it bent to the optics of the various media outlets covering it. But the sense in 1968 that the whole nation was watching in horror as an unprecedented event rolled out in real time will likely never be recovered.

Some nuggets from “Does it matter that Democrats are raising more money than Republicans?,” a 538 panel with Nathaniel Rakich, Kaleigh Rogers and Geoffrey Skelley:

Nathaniel Rakich: “President Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee say they raised a combined $90 million in March, while former President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee say they combined for $66 million. Democrats have an even wider advantage in cash on hand: $192 million to $93 million. But my first question is simple: Does it really matter that Republicans are so far behind in the money race?….Trump will probably be able to basically print money going forward….CNN’s Matt Holt highlighted just how much more cash on hand Democrats have than Republicans in nearly all competitive Senate races….Republicans have adopted a deliberate strategy of recruiting rich guys to run for Senate this year, meaning they can self-fund their campaigns — like Hovde in Wisconsin, as Kaleigh mentioned. Other examples are Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, Bernie Moreno in Ohio and Tim Sheehy in Montana. The multimillion-dollar question, though, is how much they’re willing to dip into their own pockets.”

Kaleigh Rogers: “It doesn’t not matter, though I know that’s an unsatisfying answer. In a race in which both candidates are household names and — despite Trump’s current deficit — will raise and spend gobs of money before the election is over, these differences aren’t going to make or break a campaign….Money never guarantees success (my go-to example of this is former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s billion-dollar losing bid for president in 2020), but it’s not irrelevant. Money buys ads, campaign workers, billboards, yard signs and T-shirts with your respective campaign meme on them. All of this helps get out the vote, get a candidate’s message out and (especially in this race) possibly challenge voters’ preconceived notions of the candidates and what they bring to the table. That’s valuable, but having more digits in your receipts column for Q1 doesn’t equate to a decisive advantage….Democrats outraised Republicans in every single competitive race except Wisconsin, and that was only because GOP candidate Eric Hovde topped up his campaign with $8 million of his own funds in his bid to unseat Sen. Tammy Baldwin.”

geoffrey.skelley: “In the long run, a consistent spending advantage for one candidate could matter. For instance, if Biden were to steadily outspend Trump on ads in swing states down the stretch, that could make a slight difference in his support, as we’ve seen in past campaigns….Trump got an incredible $5.9 billion in earned media (that is, free publicity) in the 2016 campaign, dwarfing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s $2.8 billion and arguably minimizing her almost 2-to-1 edge in more traditional campaign spending….it’s mainly just a question of whether either one can sustain a significant financial lead throughout much of the campaign. My guess is no….No one should be equating Biden’s current fundraising lead with the idea that Biden has a superior campaign….the toughest seats for Democrats to hold this cycle (after Ohio and Montana) should be the open seats in Arizona and Michigan. And the likely Democratic nominees in both states notably outraised their GOP opposition.”

Read the whole article to get the flow of the panelists responses to each other. Also, for an insightful explanation of the unlimited spending power of Super Pacs and the role of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision in elections, check out this video, featuring Chisun Lee, deputy executive director of The Brennan Center and read “Super PACs keep testing the limits of campaign finance law” by Jessica Piper at Politico.

Ronald Brownstein explains why “Why Biden’s fate may be settled in the Rust Belt not the Sun Belt” at CNN Politics: “The shift in expectations reflects the upside-down racial dynamics of the 2024 race,with most national and state polls showing Biden largely holding his 2020 support among White voters, while facing, at this point, unprecedented erosion among Black and Latino voters. Biden, as I wrote last year, is likewise maintaining his 2020 support better among older than younger voters. These surprising patterns have made the relatively older and Whiter three industrial blue wall states appear a better bet for Biden. That’s largely because his fate in them is less dependent on minority voters than in the younger and more diverse Sun Belt states that top his target list – Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina….If Biden defends his 2020 victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – while also holding the single Electoral College vote he would gain by winning the Nebraska congressional district centered on Omaha – he would reach 270 Electoral College votes. That would be the case even if he loses Arizona, Nevada and Georgia, probably the three most vulnerable states among the 25 he carried last time, and fails to flip North Carolina, which narrowly backed Trump….James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, speaks for many in the party when he says that these Rust Belt states remain the indispensable building blocks of any Biden victory. “We used to say in 2020 it was Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and everything else is lagniappe, which is a New Orleans term that means ‘a little something extra,’” Carville said….The issue environment is also pushing Democrats toward greater reliance on the Rust Belt states. Biden is heavily stressing his support for legal abortion, and while polls show broad support for that position across racial lines, many pollsters believe it resonates most powerfully as a voting issue among college-educated White voters, especially women. Conversely, economic issues loom largest for most non-white voters; that’s a difficult dynamic for Biden across the Sun Belt because polls consistently show widespread discontent with his management of the economy, including among many Black and Latino voters.”

Brownstein adds that “public polling shows Biden’s position is generally stronger in the Rust Belt. In most surveys, he’s running better in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than in any battleground state; CNN’s latest Pennsylvania poll conducted by SSRS, for instance, showed him tied with Trump as did last week’s Wall Street Journal survey in Wisconsin….By contrast, polls consistently show Trump leading, often by around 5 points or more, in the big Sun Belt battlegrounds that Biden flipped in 2020 – Arizona and Georgia – as well as in North Carolina, which Biden hopes to put in play. Trump consistently leads more narrowly in polls of Nevada….In this configuration, Michigan is the potentially decisive outlier – a critical Rust Belt state where polls for months have showed Biden trailing….This general alignment upends the expectations of many political operatives and analysts, myself included, after Trump emerged as the GOP’s dominant figure in 2016. At that point, it appeared that Democrats would need gains in the Sun Belt battlegrounds to offset the possibility that Trump would lock in a GOP advantage in Rust Belt states crowded with the non-college-educated White voters who provided the cornerstone of his support….Since then, Democrats have indeed gained ground in the Sun Belt. When Trump took office, Democrats held just one of the six Senate seats in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia; now they control all six. (Although Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema recently declared herself an independent after being elected as a Democrat in 2018, she still caucuses with the party.) In 2020, Biden carried all three states, becoming the first Democrat to win Georgia since 1992 and Arizona since 1996. North Carolina was the conspicuous exception to this brightening picture for Democrats: though the party won the governorship there in 2016 and 2020, Republicans have continued to notch narrow victories in presidential and US Senate races….The key to these Democratic Sun Belt gains have been the twin demographic forces reshaping the region. Democrats have significantly improved their performance in growing well-educated upper-middle-income communities across the Sun Belt including Cobb and Gwinnett counties outside Atlanta, the suburbs of Charlotte and Raleigh and suburban areas in Maricopa County around Phoenix.”

Brownstein notes further, “As important, the Sun Belt states have been racially diversifying at a far more rapid pace than the Rust Belt states. From 2004 to 2020, the share of the vote cast by people of color increased by 10 percentage points in Georgia and 15 points in Arizona, according to calculations from Census data by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro, a nonpartisan think tank. By contrast, the non-White share of the vote increased over that same period by only about 6 points in Pennsylvania, 3.5 points in Michigan and 2 points in Wisconsin, Frey found….But that contrast means that Democrats rely on minority voters for a much larger share of their total vote in the Sun Belt states than they do in the Rust Belt battlegrounds. And that’s made them more vulnerable to the striking pattern in most public polls this year that has found Biden largely holding his 2020 support among White voters, but running well below his previous numbers among Black and particularly Latino voters. Trump is “clearly on offense among Blacks and Hispanics, especially among Black and Hispanic men,” said Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for the former president….The biggest question for Democrats in the Sun Belt states is whether they can push Trump off the beachheads he has established among minority voters. The Biden campaign points out that voters of color, especially Latinos in the southwest, often fully tune in later in the campaign. Biden is pursuing Black and Latino voters with unprecedented levels of targeted early media. These include ads in the Southwest that highlight Trump’s comments that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and ads aimed at Black voters that charge Trump “stoked racial violence [and] attacked voting rights” over images of the Charlottesville, Virginia, march by White supremacists and the January 6, 2021, insurrection.”

In addition, Brownstrein argues, “Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were all part of what I called, in 2009, the “blue wall.” Those were the 18 states that ultimately voted Democratic in all six presidential elections from Bill Clinton’s first win in 1992 to Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012.  Trump’s success at knocking Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin out of the blue wall by a combined margin of about 78,000 votes was the key to his surprise victory in 2016….But since his victory, Democrats have regained the initiative in each state – at least until now. In 2018, Democrats won the governorship in all three, and reelected three Democratic senators. In 2020, Biden recaptured all three states. In 2022, Democrats again won the governorships in all three states, captured an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, and won control of both state legislative chambers in Michigan and the state House in Pennsylvania. Last year, with strong support from state Democrats, the liberal candidate won a landslide victory in a Wisconsin State Supreme Court election that gave liberals a 4-3 majority on the body….In the 2022 governor races in the three key Rust Belt states, the Democrats maintained or exceeded Biden’s recovery with those working-class Whites, exit polls found. In 2024, the large number of blue-collar jobs flowing from the big three bills that Biden passed to promote more domestic manufacturing and infrastructure construction could help him maintain a competitive floor of support with these voters. “There are shovels going into the ground all over our state,” said Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler….Strong support for legalized abortion could allow Biden to run even better among college-educated White voters across the region in 2024 than he did in his first race. In 2022, the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in all three states exceeded Biden’s performance from two years earlier with both college-educated White men and women, the exit polls found….For Mark Graul, a veteran GOP consultant who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign in Wisconsin, that history points toward the critical dynamic that will likely decide the state this year….Graul doesn’t think Trump can expand his advantage among non-college Whites further than he already has, partly because Biden can tout the blue-collar jobs tied to his big legislative achievements. “I think Trump really maxed that out,” Graul said. “I don’t know how you do much better than he did there.” If that’s right, the crucial question is whether Biden can notch enough gains among white-collar Whites in Wisconsin to offset a likely decline in his margin and/or turnout among Black voters and young people. “Things can change, but I think that dynamic is so baked in right now I don’t see it changing much,” Graul said.”….To offset losing Michigan, Biden would need a big Sun Belt breakthrough: winning either Georgia or North Carolina, or both Arizona and Nevada. None of that looks easy, which is why many Democrats view a Rust Belt sweep as the most plausible road to victory for Biden….If the president can defend those three states, “you are not going to lose,” said Carville. “And if you don’t do this you are going to have to catch an inside straight to win.”

RFK Jr. and MTG are using the same dismissive term for major-party differences. I took at look at this phenomenon at New York:

Partisan polarization has been steadily growing in the U.S. since roughly the 1960s. Ironically, during this time, the complaint that the two parties are actually too alike has become increasingly prevalent. For years, right-wing Republicans have called people in the GOP who don’t share their exact degree of ideological extremism RINOs, or “Republicans in name only,” suggesting they’re basically Democrats. Left-wing Democrats occasionally echo these epithets by calling (relative) moderates “DINOs,” “ConservaDems,” or — back when maximum resistance to George W. Bush was de rigueur — “Vichy Democrats.”

Today the term “Uniparty” has come to denote the idea that Democrats and Republicans are actually working for the same evil Establishment enterprise, their loudly proclaimed differences being a mere sham. This contention was the culmination of a five-page letter Marjorie Taylor Greene recently sent her Republican colleagues calling for House Speaker Mike Johnson’s removal, unless he changes his ways instantly. She wrote:

“With so much at stake for our future and the future of our children, I will not tolerate this type of ‘leadership.’ This has been a complete and total surrender to, if not complete and total lockstep with, the Democrats’ agenda that has angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority …

“If these actions by the leaders of our conference continue, then we are not a Republican party – we are a Uniparty that is hell-bent on remaining on the path of self-inflicted destruction.”

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also leaned heavily into the Uniparty idea in his recent speech introducing running-mate Nicole Shanahan:

“Our independent run for the presidency is finally going to bring down the Democrat and Republican duopoly that gave us ruinous debt, chronic disease, endless wars, lockdowns, mandates, agency capture, and censorship. This is the same Trump/Biden Uniparty that has captured and appropriated our democracy and turned it over to Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, and their other corporate donors. Nicole Shanahan will help me rally support for our revolution against Uniparty rule from both ends of the traditional Right vs. Left political spectrum.”

The Uniparty claim is ridiculous, of course, as FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley demonstrates:

“[O]ur current political moment is arguably farther away from having anything resembling a uniparty than at any other time in modern U.S. history. Based on their voting records, Democratic and Republican members of Congress have become increasingly polarized, and both the more moderate and more conservative wings of the congressional GOP have moved to the right at similar rates. Meanwhile, polling suggests that Americans now are more likely to view the parties as distinct from one another than in the past, an indication that the public broadly doesn’t see a uniparty in Washington. Although there are areas where the parties are less divided, the broader uniparty claim is at odds with our highly polarized and divided political era.”

Kennedy’s subscription to the Uniparty notion is understandable on two points. The first is that his candidacy is vastly more likely to tilt the 2024 presidential campaign in the direction of one of the two major-party candidates (likely Donald Trump, according to most of the polling) than to actually succeed in winning the presidency. Maintaining that it really doesn’t matter whether it’s Biden or Trump running the country is essential to maintaining RFK’s appeal as November approaches and the futility of his bid becomes clearer. Second, Kennedy’s pervasive conspiracy-theory approach to contemporary life lends itself to the argument that the apparent gulf between the two major parties is a ruse disguising a sinister common purpose.

MTG’s Uniparty contention also reflects dual motives. In part she is simply echoing Trump’s weird but useful contention that he’s an “outsider” battling a Deep-State Establishment that secretly controls both parties, which is pretty rich since he dominates the GOP like Genghis Khan dominated the Golden Horde. But there is a marginally more legitimate sense in which key elements of the two parties really are in line with each other on isolated issues that happen to obsess Greene, such as aid to Ukraine. If you are a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail.

The same is true of other implicit Uniparty claims, particularly those made by progressive pro-Palestinian protesters who adamantly argue that the need to smite “Genocide Joe” Biden for his pro-Israel policies outweighs all the reasons it might be a bad idea to help Trump return to the White House (including the fact that Trump is palpably indifferent to Palestinian suffering). If the two parties do not appear to differ on your overriding issue, then the fundamental reality of polarization can fade into irrelevance.

So we’re likely to hear more Uniparty talk even as Democrats and Republicans head toward another highly fractious election with very high stakes attributable to their differences.

An excerpt from “Democrats lean into border security as it shapes contest for control of Congress” by Stephen Groves at AP:

“Democrats aren’t going to win on immigration this year, but they have to get closer to a draw on the issue to get to a place where people take them seriously,” said Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at Third Way, a centrist Democrat think tank. “Be palatable enough on that issue that people are then willing to consider other priorities.”

Still, Democrats face a difficult task when it comes to the politics of border security. A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research has found that almost half of adults blame Biden and congressional Democrats for the current situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, while 41% blame Republicans in Congress.

Despite the data, at least Democrats can point to reforms they have advocated, which Republicans have obstructed in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Democrats “believe they can tout their own proposals for fixing the border, especially after Trump and Republican lawmakers rejected a bipartisan proposal on border security earlier this year.”

“You’re going to be painted as an open border Democrat no matter what, so talk about solutions,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist.

She is urging candidates to lean into the immigration debate by discussing plans for border security and policies to help immigrants who have set up lives in the country. It’s an approach that worked under former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, she said.

Still, the shift in the way Democrats talk about the border could shape the future of immigration policy. The hardline immigration measures pursued by the Trump administration spurred a reaction by Democrats to oppose tough immigration enforcement measures. Now, some Democrats argue that the party should move away from a stance that border security and reforms for legal immigration should not be inextricably tied together. But that approach could also disenchant progressive and Latino voters.

Every Democratic candidate for the U. S. House, Senate, and state and local legislative seats should energetically address Republican refusal to even consider reforms they have previously advocated. The point is to portray the G.O.P. as the obstructionist, do nothing, finger-pointing party that would rather posture and blame than act for border security. Democratic candidates have to master the details of their proposed reforms and develop some sharp soundbites that highlight the Republican’s failure to win any legislative wins to protect America’s borders.

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 the new Book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

What’s wrong with this picture? The Republican Party seems a shambles, with the unpopular, erratic Trump, with all his massive baggage, as their standard-bearer. Yet the Democrats’ standard-bearer, Biden, is equally if not more unpopular.

For the last six months, Biden’s approval rating has been in the 39-41 percent approval range with 54-56 percent disapproval. As Harry Enten points out “Biden is the least popular elected incumbent at this point in his reelection bid since World War II.”

And critically, trial heats pitting Biden against Trump have consistently shown Biden running behind. Indeed, Biden hasn’t had a lead of any kind in the RCP running average since September of last year (though the race has tightened a bit in recent weeks). That compares to a Biden lead of over six points at this point in the cycle four years ago. As Enten also notes:

[A] lead of any margin for Trump was unheard of during the 2020 campaign—not a single poll that met CNN’s standards for publication showed Trump leading Biden nationally.

Biden is also running behind Trump in six of seven key swing states, consistent with his failure to establish a solid lead in the national popular vote.

In addition, Democratic Party identification has been declining throughout Biden’s presidency and is now at its lowest level since 1988. Looming over this trend and all the other rough results for the Democrats cited here is the indisputable fact that Democratic poor performance is being driven by defections among working-class (noncollege) voters of all races. Polling consistently shows Biden running deficits among working class voters in the mid-teens, a dramatic fall-off from the 4-point deficit he experienced in the 2020 election.

It’s time to admit that the Democratic party brand is in deep, deep trouble, especially with working-class voters. That is why the Democrats cannot decisively beat Trump and the Republicans, despite the latter’s many liabilities, and find themselves fighting desperately at the 50 yard line of American politics. So it is and so it will continue to be until Democrats figure out how to stop the bleeding with working-class voters.

That means the Democratic approach needs to change. Here’s my three point plan for doing so, originally put forward in October of 2022 and more relevant than ever.

1. Democrats Must Move to the Center on Cultural Issues

2. Democrats Must Promote an Abundance Agenda

3. Democrats Must Embrace Patriotism and Liberal Nationalism

I expand on each of these points below.

The Culture Problem

Here’s the deal (as Biden might put it): the cultural left in and around the Democratic Party has managed to associate the party with a series of views on crime, immigration, policing, free speech and of course race and gender that are quite far from those of the median voter. These unpopular views are further amplified by Democratic-leaning media and nonprofits, as well as within the Democratic Party infrastructure itself, all of which are thoroughly dominated by the cultural left. In an era when a party’s national brand increasingly defines state and even local electoral contests, Democratic candidates have a very hard time shaking these cultural left associations.

As a direct result of these associations, the party’s—or, at least, Biden’s—attempt to rebrand Democrats as a unifying party speaking for Americans across divisions of race and class appears to have failed. Voters are not sure Democrats can look beyond identity politics to ensure public safety, secure borders, high quality, non-ideological education, and economic progress for all Americans.

Instead, Democrats continue to be weighed down by those whose tendency is to oppose firm action to control crime or the southern border as concessions to racism, interpret concerns about ideological school curricula and lowering educational standards as manifestations of white supremacy, and generally emphasize the identity politics angle of virtually every issue. With this baggage, rebranding the party as a whole is very difficult, since decisive action that might lead to such a rebranding is immediately undercut by a torrent of criticism. Democratic candidates in competitive races certainly try to rebrand on an individual level but their ability to escape the gravitational pull of the national party is limited.

Have things improved on this front in the course of the Biden administration? I don’t think so. A Liberal Patriot/YouGov poll found that more voters thought the Democrats had moved too far left on cultural and social issues (61 percent) than thought the Republicans had moved too far right on these issues (58 percent). In the latest Wall Street Journal poll, Trump is preferred over Biden by 17 points on reducing crime and 30 points on securing the border, now the second most important voting issue after the economy.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Democrats’ steady movement to the cultural left and ever “woker” stances on these issues is the steady movement of the intended audience for these stances away from the Democrats. These charts by John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times illustrate this trend. Whatever else the Democrats’ left turn on cultural issues is accomplishing, it’s not doing them much good among the nonwhite voters—especially nonwhite working-class voters—who, activists assured them, were thirsting for the maximally “progressive” position on these issues.

This wasn’t supposed to happen! But it is. As Burn-Murdoch notes:

The image of the GOP as the party of wealthy country club elites is dimming, opening the door to working- and middle-class voters of all ethnicities…More ominous for the Democrats is a less widely understood dynamic: many of America’s non-white voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest.

This is staring to bite as Democrats’ cultural evolution takes them farther and farther away from the comfort zone of these voters. Damon Linker describes the process well in a recent post on his Substack:

Our polity is deeply divided over politics, with Democrats and Republicans often residing in morally and epistemologically distinct worlds, and each side viewing the country’s history, current condition, and possible futures very differently. But there’s also a common public culture all Americans share and take part in. It is governed by certain implicit norms and expectations that apply to everyone.

But who determines those norms and expectations? The answer is that these days it is often progressive activists. How do they accomplish this exercise of political-cultural power? I will admit that I’m not entirely sure. Something like the following process appears to happen: A group of left-leaning activists declares that certain words, claims, or arguments should be considered anathema, tainted as they supposedly are with prejudice, bigotry, racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, or transphobia; then people in authoritative positions within public and private institutions (government, administrative and regulatory agencies, universities, corporations, media platforms, etc.) defer to the activists, adjusting the language they use to conform to new norms; and then, once the norms and expectations have been adjusted, a new round of changes gets mandated by the activists and the whole process repeats again, and again, and again.

I suspect that to many millions of Americans (and to lots of people living in democracies across the world where something similar is going on) the process feels a bit like a rolling moral revolution without end that makes them deeply uncomfortable. That response is no doubt a function of right-leaning views among some voters. But I’d be willing to bet that for many others, the negative reaction follows from the sheer bossiness of it, with schools, government bureaucrats, HR departments at work, movie stars, and others constantly declaring: You can’t talk that way anymore; you must speak this other way now; those words are bad; these words are the correct ones. A lot of people are ok with this. But many others respond with: Who the f-ck are you to tell me how I’m allowed to talk? Who elected or appointed you as my moral overseer and judge?

To many voters, especially working-class voters, this is the world Democrats are bequeathing to them and they flat-out don’t like it. And that’s important! I never cease to be amazed by Democrats’ touching, if delusional, faith that they can simply turn up the volume on economic issues and ignore these sentiments. Culture matters and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.

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