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Tag: Exit polls

  • Here’s what CBS News exit polls told us about the 2025 elections

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    The Trump factor

    He may not have been on the ballot, but President Trump was on the minds of voters in the 2025 elections. 

    He was a factor for many voters in each of the places where exit polls were conducted: Virginia, New Jersey, New York City and California. And more said their vote in these races was to oppose him, than support him.

    These are historically Democrat-leaning places, and more voters here disapproved than approved of his overall job as president. They also found that his administration’s actions on immigration enforcement have gone too far. 

    New York City: Cost of living and bringing needed change

    New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won a decisive victory over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on a campaign of affordability, and the cost of living was the most important issue to voters in New York City. Mamdani handily won the majority of voters who picked it. More specifically, he focused on the cost of housing, which seven in 10 voters in New York said was a major problem where they live, and he won among renters, who made up more than half of the electorate.

    Voters who made up their minds in the last month of the campaign voted overwhelmingly for Cuomo, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the majority of voters who decided on Mamdani before October.

    Cuomo led Mamdani among Jewish voters — most of whom said a candidate’s position on Israel was important in their vote. 

    Mamdani’s coalition was led by enormous support among voters under 30 and very liberal voters, but his support extended to all voters under 45 and to those who considered themselves only somewhat liberal, while older voters, as well as moderates and conservatives, voted for Cuomo.

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    The Republican candidate in the New York City mayoral race, Curtis Sliwa, came in a distant third and didn’t even win self-identified Republicans (they voted for Cuomo). Had he dropped out of the race, it might not have made a difference. Though most of Sliwa’s supporters said they would have voted for Cuomo, exit polls indicate that in a hypothetical two-way race, Mamdani still would have been victorious.

    Mamdani also ran on change, and that was picked as the most important quality in how voters made their decision. A changing electorate was also a hallmark of Mamdani’s win — his strongest support was not just young voters, but also those who were voting in a mayoral race for the first time and those who had moved to New York within the past 10 years.

    New Jersey and Virginia: The economy, women voters

    Economic issues also loomed large in the Democratic wins in the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia. In New Jersey, Jack Ciattarelli won voters who were most concerned about taxes and who said electricity was a major problem for them, but voters who said the most important issue was the economy overall voted for Sherrill. In Virginia, those “economy” voters voted for Abigail Spanberger over Winsome Earle-Sears by more than 20 points.

    Women voted in big numbers for the women Democratic candidates in Virginia and New Jersey. Sherrill and Spanberger’s margins with women were far larger than Kamala Harris’ were nationally in 2024.

    Independents were key, too. They swung toward Spanberger in Virginia, after Glenn Youngkin won them in 2021. Independents also backed Sherrill in New Jersey. 

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    California Prop 50: Getting back at Republicans’ plans

    The proposition, pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, authorizes temporary changes to the state’s congressional district maps in response to redistricting in Texas. 

    “Yes” voters didn’t necessarily think this ballot initiative was the best way to draw congressional district line — but they overwhelmingly said it was to counter the changes made by Republicans in other states. 

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    Polls may have updated since this post was published.

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  • Are Gen Z Men and Women Really Drifting Apart?

    Are Gen Z Men and Women Really Drifting Apart?

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    Judging by recent headlines, young men and women are more politically divided now than ever before. “A new global gender divide is emerging,” the Financial Times data journalist John Burn-Murdoch wrote in a widely cited January article. Burn-Murdoch’s analysis featured several eye-popping graphs that appeared to show a huge ideological rift opening up between young men and young women over the past decade. The implications—for politics, of course, but also for male-female relations and, by extension, the future of the species—were alarming. A New York Times opinion podcast convened to discuss, according to the episode title, “The Gender Split and the ‘Looming Apocalypse of the Developed World.’” The Washington Post editorial board warned, “If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage.”

    But nearly as quickly as the theory gained attention, it has come under scrutiny. “For every survey question where you can find a unique gender gap among the youngest age cohort, you can find many other questions where you don’t find that gap,” John Sides, a political-science professor at Vanderbilt University, told me. “Where we started with this whole conversation was that there’s this big thing happening; it’s happening worldwide. Then you just pick at it for a few minutes, and it becomes this really complex story.” Skeptics point out that, at least as far as the United States goes, the claims about a new gender divide rest on selective readings of inconclusive evidence. Although several studies show young men and women splitting apart, at least as many suggest that the gender gap is stable. And at the ballot box, the evidence of a growing divide is hard to find. The Gen Z war of the sexes, in other words, is probably not apocalyptic. It may not even exist at all.

    The gender gap in voting—women to the left, men to the right—has been a fixture of American politics since at least the 1980 presidential election, when, according to exit polls, Ronald Reagan won 55 percent of male voters but only 47 of women.

    Some evidence suggests that the divide has recently widened. In 2023, according to Gallup data, 18-to-29-year-old women were 15 percentage points more likely than men in the same age group to identify as liberal, compared with only seven points a decade ago. Young men’s ideology has remained more stable, but some surveys suggest that young white men in particular have been drifting rightward. The Harvard Youth Poll, for example, found that 33 percent of white men aged 18 to 24 identified as Republican in 2016, compared with 41 percent in 2023. This trend has begun appearing in new-voter-registration data as well, according to Tom Bonier, a Democratic political strategist. “Believe me, as a partisan Democrat, I would prefer that it’s not the case—but it appears to be true,” he told me. “We’re still generally arguing about if it’s happening, which to me is silly. The conversation hasn’t moved to why.”

    Ronald Brownstein: Is Gen Z coming for the GOP?

    Why indeed? Several factors present themselves for consideration. One is social-media-induced gender polarization. (Think misogynistic “manosphere” influencers and women who talk about how “all men are trash.”) Another, as always, is Donald Trump. Twenty-something-year-old women seemed repelled by Trump’s ascendance in 2016, John Della Volpe, who heads the Harvard Youth Poll, told me. They were much more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Then there’s the #MeToo movement, which emerged in 2017, soon after Trump took office. Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market-conservative think tank, argues that it durably shaped young women’s political consciousness. A 2022 poll found that nearly three-quarters of women under 30 say they support #MeToo, the highest of any age group. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade also seems to have been a turning point. Going into the 2022 midterm election, 61 percent of young women said abortion was a “critical” concern, according to a survey conducted by AEI. “Young women increasingly believe that what happens to any woman in the United States impacts their lives and experiences as well,” Cox told me. “That became really salient after Roe was overturned.” Gen Z women are more likely than Generation X or Baby Boomer women—though slightly less likely than Millennial women—to say that they have been discriminated against because of their gender at some point in their life.

    Not so fast, say young men. Gen Z men are also more likely than older generations to say that they’ve been discriminated against based on gender. “There’s this kind of weird ping-pong going on between Gen Z men and women about who’s really struggling, who’s really the victim,” Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. Reeves, who founded the American Institute for Boys and Men, argues that although men still dominate the highest levels of society in the U.S., those on the lower rungs are doing worse than ever. They are far less likely than women to go to college or find a good job, and far more likely to end up in prison or dead. These young men feel—rightly, in Reeves’s view—that mainstream institutions and the Democratic Party haven’t addressed their problems. And, in the aftermath of #MeToo, some seem to believe that society has turned against men. Survey data indicate that Gen Z men are much less likely to identify as feminists than Millennial men are, and about as likely as middle-aged men. “I really do worry that we’re trending toward a bit of a women’s party and a men’s party in politics,” Reeves told me.

    But if young men and women really were drifting apart politically, you would expect to see evidence on Election Day. And here’s where the theory starts showing cracks. The Cooperative Election Study, a national survey administered by YouGov, found that nearly 68 percent of 18-to-29-year-old men voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, compared with about 70 percent of women in that age group—the same percentage gap as in 2008. (The split was larger—nearly seven points—in 2016, when Trump’s personal behavior toward women was especially salient.) Catalist, a progressive firm that models election results based on voter-file data, found that the gender divide was roughly the same for all age groups in recent elections. In the 2022 midterms, according to Pew’s analysis of validated voters, considered the gold standard of postelection polling, the youngest voters had the smallest gender divide, and overwhelmingly supported Democrats.

    Richard V. Reeves: Redshirt the boys

    Many of the polls that show a widening gender divide ask about ideology. But research shows that many people don’t have a clear idea of what the labels mean. Gallup, whose data partly inspired the gender-gap frenzy, notes that only about half of Democrats identify as liberal. Ten percent describe themselves as conservative, and the remainder say their views are moderate. The ideological lines are only slightly less scrambled among self-identified Republicans. “Everything here hinges on what characteristics or questions we are trying to measure,” Sides told me. “When you ask people if they identify as liberal or as a feminist, you learn whether people believe that label describes them. But you didn’t ask how they define that label.” People might dislike the term liberal but still support, say, abortion access and high government spending. Indeed, 2020 polling data from Nationscape, which assesses people’s positions on individual issues, indicated that young men and women are no more divided than older generations. In every age group, for example, women are more in favor of banning assault rifles and providing universal health care than men are, by a comparable margin.

    Or perhaps the unique Gen Z gender divide just hasn’t shown up electorally yet. Most 2024 election polling doesn’t break down different age groups by gender—and even if it did, trying to draw firm conclusions would be foolish. Twenty-somethings are just hard to study. Young people are less engaged in politics, with high rates of independent and unaffiliated voters. Their worldviews are still malleable. Many of them are reluctant to answer questions, especially over the phone. Under those circumstances, even high-quality polls show wildly, even implausibly divergent possibilities for the youth vote. A recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that, in a hypothetical 2024 rematch, Trump beat out Biden among registered voters under 35—an almost-unheard-of shift within four years. In October, a New York Times/Siena poll suggested that the youngest generation is equally split between Trump and Biden, whereas last month’s Times survey showed Biden winning young voters by double digits even as he lost ground overall.

    Whatever is going on inside all of those young minds, the old people studying them have yet to figure it out. The biggest chasm, as always, may be not between young men and young women, but between young people and everyone else.

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    Rose Horowitch

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  • Closing This Gap May Be Biden’s Key to a Second Term

    Closing This Gap May Be Biden’s Key to a Second Term

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    Just since last November, the most closely watched measure of consumer confidence about the economy has soared by about 25 percent. That’s among the most rapid improvements recorded in years for the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment, even after a slight decline in the latest figures released yesterday.

    And yet, even as consumer confidence has rebounded since last fall, President Joe Biden’s approval rating has remained virtually unchanged—and negative. Now, as then, a solid 55 percent majority of Americans say they disapprove of his performance as president in the index maintained by FiveThirtyEight, while only about 40 percent approve.

    That divergence between improving attitudes about the economy and stubbornly negative assessments of the president’s performance is compounding the unease of Democratic strategists as they contemplate the impending rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump. Most Democratic strategists I spoke with believe that brightening views about the economy could still benefit Biden. But many also acknowledge that each month that passes without improvement for Biden raises more questions about whether even growing economic optimism will overcome voters’ doubts about him on other fronts.

    Read: The real reason Trump loves Putin

    Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser to Bill Clinton during his 1996 reelection, told me that if he was in the White House again today, “I would say I’m not that concerned” about improving economic attitudes not lifting Biden yet, “because this takes time.” But, Sosnik added, “if you come back to me in six weeks or two months and we haven’t seen any movement, then I’d start becoming very concerned.”

    Historically, measures of consumer confidence have been a revealing gauge of an incumbent president’s reelection chances. Presidents Ronald Reagan, Clinton, and Barack Obama, as I’ve written, all saw their job-approval ratings tumble when consumer confidence fell early in their first terms amid widespread unease over the economy. But when the economy revived and consumer confidence improved later in their term, each man’s approval rating rose with it. Riding the wave of those improving attitudes, all three won their reelection campaigns, Reagan in a historic 49-state landslide.

    By contrast, when Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush lost their reelection bids, declining or stagnant consumer confidence was an early augur of their eventual defeat. Collapsing consumer confidence amid the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 also foreshadowed Trump’s defeat, after sustained optimism about the economy had been one of his greatest political strengths during his first three years.

    Read: Biden Is still the Democrats’ best bet for November

    Polling leaves little doubt that since last fall, more Americans are starting to feel better about the economy. An index of economic attitudes compiled by the Gallup Organization recently reached its highest level since September 2021. Even after the small retreat in the latest numbers, the University of Michigan’s index is now at its highest level since the summer of 2021. A separate consumer-confidence survey conducted by the Conference Board, a business group, also slipped slightly in February but remains higher than its level last fall.

    None of this, though, has yet generated any discernible improvement in Biden’s standing with the public. In fact, the recent Gallup Poll that documented the rise in economic optimism since last October found that Biden’s approval rating over the same period had fallen, from 41 to 38 percent—a single percentage point above the lowest mark Gallup has ever measured for him. The fact that consumer confidence has revived without elevating Biden’s ratings suggests “that impressions of his economic handling have been set and will likely be hard to change as he faces other struggles with perceptions of age and capacity,” the Republican pollster Micah Roberts told me.

    Paul Kellstedt, a political scientist at Texas A&M University, told me that two big structural shifts in public opinion help explain why Biden has not benefited more so far from these green shoots of optimism.

    One, Kellstedt said, is that the relationship is weakening between objective economic trends and consumer confidence. Compared with the days of Reagan or Clinton, more voters in both parties are reluctant to describe even a booming economy in positive terms when the other party holds the White House, Kellstedt noted. Given Biden’s record of overall economic growth and job creation, as well as the dramatic rise in the stock market, the consumer-confidence numbers, though improving, are still lower “than they should be based on objective fundamentals,” he told me.

    Still, optimism about the economy has increased since last fall, not only among Democrats but also among independents and even Republicans, trends that have lifted previous presidents. That points to what Kellstedt calls the second structural challenge facing Biden: The relationship between voters’ attitudes about the economy and their judgments about the president is also weakening.

    Amid these new patterns in public opinion, “a strengthening economy is not going to hurt Biden, of course, but how much it is going to help him is quite uncertain,” Kellstedt told me.

    Political strategists in both parties believe another central reason Biden isn’t benefiting more from the many positive economic trends under his presidency is that so many Americans remain scarred by the biggest exception: the highest inflation in four decades. Although costs aren’t rising nearly as fast as they were earlier in Biden’s presidency, for many essentials, such as food and rent, prices remain much higher than when he took office.

    Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who also surveys economic attitudes for CNBC, told me that more than anything else, “what is holding back” Biden from rising is that “it is still well within your memory when you were spending at the grocery store 10 to 20 percent less than you are now.”

    Republicans see a related factor constraining Biden’s potential gains: The baseline that voters are comparing him against is not in the distant past, but what they remember from the Trump presidency before the pandemic. Even though the University of Michigan’s consumer-confidence index and Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index have improved substantially since last year, for instance, in absolute terms they still stand well below their levels during Trump’s first three years. “There’s an alternative economic approach that voters can remember and compare to the years under Bidenomics,” Roberts told me. Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s 2024 campaign, told me voters don’t credit Biden for moderating inflation largely because they blame him for causing it in the first place.

    A silver lining in all this for Biden is that, as Kellstedt noted, voters’ judgments about which candidate can better manage the economy don’t determine their preferences in the presidential race as much as they once did. Today, as I’ve written over the years, the two political coalitions are held together more by shared cultural values than by common economic interests.

    As recently as the 2022 election, Democratic House candidates not only carried the small share of voters who described the economy as good, but also won more than three-fifths of the much larger group who called it only fair, according to exit polls. That was primarily because a historically large number of voters down on the economy, and Biden’s performance, nonetheless rejected Republican candidates whom they viewed as a threat to their rights (particularly on abortion), their values, and democracy itself. That same dynamic will undoubtedly help Biden in 2024, particularly among upper-middle-class voters who have felt less strain over inflation, are most likely to be benefiting from the stock market’s surge, and are the most receptive to Democratic charges that Trump will threaten democracy and their personal freedoms.

    But Biden also has plenty of his own vulnerabilities on noneconomic issues. Not only Republicans but also independents give him dismal ratings for his handling of immigration and the border. His expansive support of Israel’s war against Hamas has deeply divided the Democratic coalition. And a broad consensus of voters, now often about 80 percent or more in polls, worry that Biden is too old for another term. If attitudes about the economy continue to mend, and Biden’s approval remains mired, “the stories that will be written is that voters have tuned him out, they’ve made their minds up, he’s too old,” Sosnik told me.

    Trump inspires such intense resistance that Biden, in a rematch, is virtually certain to win more support than any modern president from voters who are pessimistic about the economy. But that doesn’t mean Biden can overcome any deficit to Trump on the economy, no matter how large. And that deficit right now is very large: In national polls released last month by both NBC News and Marquette University Law School, voters trusted Trump over Biden for handling the economy by about 20 percentage points.

    At some point, the strategists I spoke with agree, the economic hole could become too deep to climb from by relying on other issues. (Both the NBC and Marquette polls showed Biden running much closer to Trump in the ballot test than on the economy—but still trailing the former president on the ballot test.) To overtake Trump, Biden likely needs twin dynamics to continue. He needs the slight February pullback evident in the University of Michigan and Conference Board surveys to prove a blip, and the share of Americans satisfied with the economy to continue growing. And then he needs more of those satisfied voters to credit him for the improvement.

    Biden has some powerful arguments he can marshal to sell voters on his economic record. Wages have been rising faster than prices since last spring, particularly for low-income workers. The big three economic bills Biden passed in his first two years have triggered an enormous investment boom in new manufacturing plants for clean energy, electric vehicles, and semiconductors, with the benefits flowing disproportionately toward smaller blue-collar communities largely excluded from the tech-heavy information economy. He can also point to significant legislative achievements that are helping families afford prescription-drug and health-care costs—a potentially powerful calling card, especially with seniors. If the Federal Reserve Board cuts interest rates by this summer—which it has signaled it will do if inflation remains moderate—that could turbocharge the improvement in consumer confidence.

    “There is so much other good news that I feel like there’s a case to be made to people that this president has substantially improved the economy,” Campbell told me. “But whether that ultimately supersedes people’s negativity about [inflation] is a question that I don’t have an answer to.”

    Biden still has time to improve his standing on the economy, but that time isn’t unlimited. Sosnik says history has shown that voters solidify their judgments about a president’s performance in the period between the second half of his third year in office and the first half of his fourth year, about four months from now. President John F. Kennedy, speaking about the economy, famously said, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” The next few months will reveal whether Biden’s has run aground too deeply for that still to apply.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • South Carolina voter exit polls show how Trump won state’s 2024 Republican primary

    South Carolina voter exit polls show how Trump won state’s 2024 Republican primary

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    Note: Exit poll percentages may have updated since this post was published.

    The home-state advantage wasn’t there for Nikki Haley Saturday in the 2024 South Carolina Republican primary.

    Former President Donald Trump was projected to win the South Carolina Republican primary, besting Haley among most key demographic groups. He won majorities of both men and women and among all age groups.

    Trump ran especially well among parts of the Republican base that were predominant in the GOP electorate, including conservatives and White evangelicals. More than four in 10 South Carolina GOP primary voters identified themselves as part of the MAGA movement and nearly nine in 10 of them backed Trump. 

    The former president also beat Haley among veterans.

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    Haley did well with independents and moderates, but there weren’t a lot of them. 

    South Carolina has an “open primary,” meaning any registered voter could participate in the state’s Republican presidential primary as long as they did not vote in the state’s Democratic primary. Even so, just over a quarter of voters self-identified as independents and just about 4% as Democrats — a far smaller share compared to the GOP primary electorate in New Hampshire.

    So, while Haley did well among independent voters, there weren’t enough of them to make her competitive with Trump.  

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    Haley also performed relatively better among college graduates and moderates, polling even with Trump among the first group and handily beating him among the latter. Haley led among voters who oppose a national abortion ban, something that most GOP primary voters favor, but most likely general election voters oppose it. 

    The former South Carolina governor also won among those voting in a Republican primary for the first time and among those who made up their minds in the final weeks of the campaign. Both of these groups comprised relatively small shares of the GOP electorate in South Carolina. 

    Haley campaigned on her foreign policy credentials, and she led Trump among voters who picked foreign policy as their top issue, but few voters chose it relative to issues like immigration and the economy, and Trump won the voters who prioritized those issues. 

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    More South Carolina voters think Trump is electable in November

    Haley has argued that she is the more electable candidate in a general election, and CBS News national polling shows she fares better than Trump against President Biden. But Republican primary voters in South Carolina feel Trump is their best shot: more say Trump is very likely to defeat Mr. Biden than say Haley is. 

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    Candidate qualities and characteristics

    Haley has questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office, but Trump’s voters overwhelmingly refute this, and most charge that it’s Haley who lacks the physical and mental health needed to serve effectively as president. As a result, Trump beats Haley on this measure among overall. 

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    Haley’s charges that Trump is a “chaos candidate” didn’t seem to resonate with South Carolina voters either.  Though she led Trump by a wide margin among those who wanted a candidate with the right temperament, few voters picked that as their top quality. 

    Instead, just as they did in Iowa and New Hampshire, voters were looking for a candidate who fights for people like them and shares their values, and Trump defeated Haley handily among voters who picked these qualities.

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    Haley had some late momentum, but it wasn’t enough

    Momentum shifted toward Haley in the weeks leading up to primary day. Among the fewer than one in five who made their decision this month, most backed Haley. But most of the electorate had made up their minds before February, and they backed Trump. 

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    Trump’s legal woes don’t matter to most

    Still, Trump’s control of the narrative and political agenda is clear in how the South Carolina GOP electorate views both the state of the country and Donald Trump as a candidate. Voters express pessimism, if not downright anger, at the way things are going in the country — citing immigration as their top concern — and nearly half rate the economy as poor. More than six in 10 reject the idea that Mr. Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, and most think Trump would be fit to serve in the White House even if he were to be convicted of one of the several indictments against him.

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    The exit poll for South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary was conducted by Edison Research on behalf of the National Election Pool. It includes interviews with more than 2,100 Republican primary voters across 40 different polling places in South Carolina on the primary election day. 

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  • In South Carolina, Nikki Haley’s Bill Comes Due

    In South Carolina, Nikki Haley’s Bill Comes Due

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    The afternoon before Donald Trump’s blowout win in South Carolina’s primary, Shellie Hargenrader and Julianne Poulnot emerged from a rally for the former president bubbling with righteous conviction.

    They had spent the previous hour listening to the candidate’s son Donald Trump Jr. regale supporters at the campaign’s headquarters in an office park outside Charleston. The crowd had been energized, frequently calling out in response to his words as if at a church service, while Trump Jr. lacerated President Joe Biden, the media, the multiple legal proceedings against his father, and the punishment of the January 6 insurrectionists. “Trump is my president,” one man shouted.

    Hargenrader and Poulnot were still feeling that spirit when they stopped on their way out from the rally to talk with me. When I asked them why they were supporting Trump over Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor, they started with conventional reasons. “Because he did a great job and he can do it again,” Hargenrader told me. Poulnot cut in to add: “He stands for the people and he tells the truth.”

    But within moments, the two women moved to a higher plane in their praise of Trump and condemnation of Haley. “I think the Lord has him in the chair,” Hargenrader told me. “He’s God’s man.” Poulnot jumped in again. “And the election was stolen from him,” she said. “You have to live on Mars to not realize that.” And Haley? “I think she’s an opportunist and … she sold her soul to the devil,” Poulnot told me.

    Such is the level of evangelical fervor for Trump within much of the GOP base that buried Haley in her home state on Saturday. Haley had said her goal in South Carolina was to match the 43 percent of the vote she received in last month’s New Hampshire primary, an exceedingly modest aspiration. But she appeared to fall short of even that low bar, as Trump routed her by a tally of about 60 percent to 40 percent, at the latest count.

    Trump’s victory in South Carolina placed him in a virtually impregnable position for the nomination. Since South Carolina established its primary near the front of the GOP calendar in 1980, the candidate who won here has captured the Republican nomination in every contested race except one. With his win tonight, Trump became the first GOP contender other than an incumbent president to sweep the big three early contests of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

    Reinforcing the message from the key initial contests of Iowa and New Hampshire, the South Carolina result showed that Haley faces a ceiling on her support too low to beat Trump. For Haley to catch Trump now would require some massive external event, and even that might not be enough.

    But for all the evidence of Trump’s strength within the party, the South Carolina results again showed that a meaningful floor of GOP voters remains uneasy with returning him to leadership. “I like his policies, but I’d like to cut his thumbs off and tape his mouth shut,” Juanita Gwilt of Isle of Palms told me last night just outside Charleston, before Haley’s final rally leading up the primary. In Haley’s speech to her supporters, she insisted that she would remain in the race. “I’m an accountant. I know 40 percent is not 50 percent,” she said. “But I also know 40 percent is not some tiny group. There are huge numbers of voters in our Republican primaries who are saying they want an alternative.”

    As in Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump’s pattern of support in South Carolina simultaneously underscored his dominant position in the party while pointing to some potential vulnerabilities for the general election. In this deeply conservative state, Trump carried virtually every major demographic group. Trump beat Haley, for instance, by nearly as much among women as men and by nearly as much among suburban as rural voters, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. The robust overall turnout testified again to Trump’s greatest political strength—his extraordinary ability to motivate his base voters.

    Still, some warning signs for him persisted: About one-third of all primary voters and even one-fourth of self-identified Republicans said they would not consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. More than four in five Haley voters said he would be unfit if convicted, about the same elevated share as in Iowa and New Hampshire. And as in the earlier states, Trump faced much more resistance among primary voters with a college degree than those without one, and among voters who did not identify as evangelical Christians than those who did. (The exit polls showed Haley narrowly carrying both groups.) As in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Trump won only about two in five independents in South Carolina, the exit polls found.

    The magnitude of Trump’s victory was especially striking given the mismatch in time and money the two candidates devoted to the state. Haley camped out in South Carolina for most of the month before the vote, barnstorming the state in a bus; Trump parachuted in for a few large rallies. Her campaign, and the super PACs supporting her, spent nearly $9.4 million in South Carolina advertising, about nine times as much as Trump and his supporters, according to data provided by AdImpact.

    In South Carolina, Haley also delivered a case against Trump that was far more cogent and cohesive than she offered earlier in the race. During the multiple nationally televised Republican debates through 2023, Haley barely raised a complaint about Trump. Through Iowa and New Hampshire—when she had the concentrated attention of the national media—she refused to go any further in criticizing Trump than declaring that “chaos follows him, rightly or wrongly.”

    But after allowing those opportunities to pass, she notably escalated her challenge to Trump over the past month in her South Carolina rallies and a succession of television appearances. This morning, after she voted near her home in Kiawah Island, reporters asked her about some racist comments Trump made last night at an event in Columbia. In her response, no trace remained of that passive voice. “That’s the chaos that comes with Donald Trump,” she said firmly, now clearly describing him as the source of the chaos rather than a bystander to its eruption. “That’s the offensiveness that is going to happen every day between now and the general election.”

    Yesterday, at a rally in Moncks Corner, a small town about an hour north of Charleston, Haley delivered a biting critique of Trump’s comments that he would encourage Russia to invade NATO countries that don’t meet the alliance’s guidelines for spending on their own defense. “Trump is siding with a thug where half a million people have died or been wounded because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin invaded Ukraine,” she said. “Trump is siding with a dictator who kills his political opponents. Trump is siding with a tyrant who arrests American journalists and holds them hostage.”

    A few minutes later, Haley lashed Trump for questioning why her husband, who is on a military deployment, has not appeared with her during the campaign. “Donald Trump’s never been near a uniform,” she said. “He’s never had to sleep on the ground. The closest he’s ever come to harm’s way is if a golf ball happens to hit him on the golf course.” Later, she criticized Trump for using tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to pay his own legal bills. And she insisted that he cannot win a general election.

    Read: Could South Carolina change everything?

    Haley remains careful to balance every criticism of Trump with an equal jab at Biden. But though she portrays both Biden and Trump as destabilizing forces, the core of her retooled message is a repudiation of Trump’s insistence that he will make America great again. No, she says, the challenge for the next president is to make America normal again. “Our kids want to know what normal feels like,” she insisted in Moncks Corner.

    Taken together, this is an argument quite distinct from the case against Trump from Biden, or his sharpest Republican critics, including former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Representative Liz Cheney. Haley doesn’t join them in framing Trump as a threat to democracy or an aspiring autocrat. The refusal to embrace that claim as well as the staunch conservatism of her own agenda and her repeated indications that she’ll likely support Trump if he wins the nomination probably explains why Haley failed to attract as many independent and Democratic voters as she needed to participate today. Those non-Republicans cast only about 30 percent of the total votes, according to the exit polls. That’s about the same share as in both the 2016 and 2012 South Carolina primaries, and far less than the nearly 40 percent share then-Senator John McCain turned out in his “maverick” 2000 presidential bid against George W. Bush. (And even with that, Bush beat him by consolidating a big majority of partisan Republican voters, as Trump did earlier today.)

    Instead, in South Carolina, Haley offered a case against Trump aimed more directly at wavering Republicans. She accused Trump of failing to display the personal characteristics that conservatives insist they value. It’s telling that at Haley’s rallies yesterday, she drew almost no applause when she criticized Trump on policy grounds for enlarging the federal deficit or supporting sweeping tariffs. But she inspired cries of disdain from her audience when she disparaged Trump, in so many words, as a grifter, a liar, and a self-absorbed narcissist more focused on his own grudges than on his voters’ needs. “Poor guy,” one man yelled out last night after Haley complained about Trump constantly portraying himself as a victim.

    Would it have made any difference if Haley had pressed these assertions earlier in the race, when she had the large national audience of the debates, and Trump had not progressed so far toward the nomination? Several GOP strategists and operatives this week told me that attacking Trump while the field was still crowded would only have hurt Haley and benefited the other contenders who stayed out of the fray. Even now, in a one-on-one race, directly confronting Trump is rapidly raising Haley’s negative rating among GOP voters. Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP pollster, told me as the results came in Saturday night that GOP voters who voted for Trump twice might take it as a personal insult about their own prior decisions if Haley echoed Christie and Cheney in portraying the former president as “unfit for office and a threat to democracy.”

    Read: The GOP has crossed an ominous threshold on foreign policy

    Hargenrader and Poulnot underscored Ayres’s point yesterday: They speak for millions of Republican voters who see Trump in quasi-religious terms as uniquely fighting for them, and the legal challenges ensnaring him only as evidence of the burdens he’s bearing on their behalf. “I don’t think people appreciate sufficiently the fine line Nikki Haley has to walk with this coalition,” Ayres told me.

    After months of vacillation and caution, Haley is now making a forceful case against Trump, and displaying great political courage in doing so: She is standing virtually alone while most of the GOP establishment (including virtually all of the political leadership in South Carolina) aligns behind him. Ayres believes that Haley is speaking for a large enough minority of the party to justify continuing in the race for as long as she wants—even if there’s virtually no chance anymore that she can expand her coalition enough to truly threaten Trump. “Nikki Haley represents a perspective, an outlook on the world, and a set of values that are still held by what remains of the Reagan-Bush coalition in the Republican Party,” Ayres told me.

    But the bill for treating Trump so gingerly for so many months has now come due for Haley in South Carolina. Haley waited until the concrete in this race had almost hardened before giving Republican voters a real reason to think twice about nominating Trump again. Perhaps the circle of GOP voters open to an alternative was never large enough to support a serious challenge to the former president. What’s clear after his decisive victory in South Carolina is that neither Haley nor anyone else in the GOP tried hard enough to test that proposition until it was too late.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • New Hampshire primary exit polls for 2024 elections

    New Hampshire primary exit polls for 2024 elections

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    In the 2024 New Hampshire primary Tuesday, an unhappy electorate, economy and immigration are the top issues. One in five voters made up their minds in the last few days. Most had decided before then, according to CBS News exit polling. 

    This is a more moderate and more “independent” primary electorate, compared to Iowa.

    Republican primary voters said they’re dissatisfied with the country and the economy.

    New Hampshire Republican primary voters are unhappy with how things are going in the country, including about a third who are angry about it, according to early exit polls. 

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    Sixty-nine percent of GOP primary voters said the condition of the national economy is not good, compared with 30% who said it was good.

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  • Trump Is About to Steamroll Nikki Haley

    Trump Is About to Steamroll Nikki Haley

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    If one word could sum up Nikki Haley’s ambivalent challenge to Donald Trump in the New Hampshire Republican primary, that word might be: if.

    If as used by New Hampshire’s Republican Governor Chris Sununu, Haley’s most prominent supporter in the state, when he concluded his energetic introduction of her at a large rally in Manchester on Friday night. “If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, don’t sit on your couch and not participate in democracy,” Sununu insisted. “You gotta go vote, right?”

    In that formulation, if served as more shield than sword. By framing his argument that way, Sununu clearly intended to appeal to the voters who do consider Trump a threat to democracy, but without endorsing that sentiment himself.

    That slight hesitation about fully confronting the GOP’s fearsome front-runner has been the consistent attitude of Haley’s campaign. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, has shown impressive political skills and steely discipline to outmaneuver a large field of men and emerge as the most viable remaining alternative to Trump. She has displayed fortitude in soldiering on against Trump as a procession of Republican elected officials has endorsed him for the nomination over the past few weeks. And beginning with her speech last Monday night after the Iowa caucus, Haley has turned up the volume on her own criticism of Trump, yoking him to Joe Biden as too old and divisive. “With me, you’ll get no drama, no vendettas, no vengeance,” she told the crowd on Friday night.

    But in this possibly decisive week of the GOP race, Haley has made clear that she will go so far and no further in criticizing or challenging Trump, just as Sununu did with his telltale if. Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary realistically represents the last chance for Haley to stop, or even slow, the former president’s march to his third consecutive GOP nomination. If Trump wins, especially by a big margin, he will be on a glide path to becoming the nominee. Nothing Haley has done this week reflects the gravity of that moment. “She’s got to swing for the fences, and so far she’s just throwing out bunts,” Mark McKinnon, who served as the chief media adviser to George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns, told me.

    Read: What Trump’s victory in Iowa reveals

    Many New Hampshire political leaders resistant to Trump fear that Haley has not done nearly enough to generate a surge of turnout among independent voters—known locally as “undeclared voters.” Mike Dennehy, a longtime GOP strategist in New Hampshire, says that Haley’s messaging to these undeclared voters has lacked enough urgency to generate the brushfire of excitement she needs among them. “In my opinion, she’s not doing what she needs to do to connect with independent voters,” Dennehy told me. Haley, he believes, should be framing the choice to New Hampshire voters much more starkly, telling them: “It’s the end of the road here; I’m your last chance to stop a Trump-Biden rematch.” Haley fleetingly raised that argument in her remarks following the Iowa caucus, but it has receded as she’s reverted toward her standard stump speech in New Hampshire.

    McKinnon and Dennehy know something about New Hampshire presidential campaigns that catch fire among independents. Dennehy was the New Hampshire campaign manager for then–Senator John McCain when he stunned George W. Bush, McKinnon’s candidate, in the 2000 New Hampshire primary. Bush arrived after a big win in the kickoff Iowa caucus and held a commanding lead in national polls. On the day of that New Hampshire primary, I had lunch with McKinnon; Matthew Dowd, the campaign’s voter-targeting guru; and Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist. They were relaxed, confident, and starting to kick around ideas for how they would contest the general election, while I scribbled in a notebook. Then, halfway through the lunch, Rove took a call, abruptly left the table, and never came back. The reason for his sudden summons back to campaign headquarters became apparent a few hours later: McCain that night beat Bush among independent voters by three to one, exit polls found, and won the state overall by nearly 20 percentage points.

    In retrospect, McKinnon said, the Bush campaign should have seen what was coming. “McCain was definitely on fire; you could feel it on the ground,” he told me. For months McCain had held lengthy town halls across the state, answering questions for hours and then driving to the next event on the “Straight Talk Express” campaign bus, taking questions from reporters for hours more. He was provocative, funny, unfiltered, and unafraid of challenging Republican orthodoxy. “He was entirely authentic, entirely accessible; he was campaigning like he was running for governor of New Hampshire, steely, granite-like,” McKinnon recalled.

    Like McCain, Haley has burrowed into New Hampshire with months of grassroots events. But the similarities stop there. Haley’s town halls are much more structured and controlled; sometimes she doesn’t even take questions from the audience. Her interactions with reporters are limited and often stilted. And she made a choice this week to reject debates by ABC and CNN unless Trump also participated, which forced the sponsors to cancel the sessions. Some Republican strategists are sympathetic to her decision not to appear again with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, but more of the people I spoke with believe that by withdrawing, she forfeited the biggest platforms she would have had this week to drive a message to New Hampshire voters. “It’s about pulling as many independents out to vote as you can, and you can’t get to those independents if you don’t go on places like CNN and WMUR,” Dennehy said, referring to the powerful local New Hampshire television station that would have co-hosted one of the debates with ABC.

    Read: The end is coming for Trump’s GOP rivals

    Haley is pushing a tougher message against Trump than she was before Iowa. When a reporter this weekend asked her what her closing message was to New Hampshire voters, Haley replied, “Americans deserve better than what the options are. You’ve got Biden and Trump both distracted with investigations, both distracted with other things that aren’t about how to make Americans’ lives safer and better.” She says flatly that Trump is lying about her record and that America should not have to choose between two roughly 80-year-old candidates. After Trump at a Friday-night rally confused Haley with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during an extended monologue about the January 6 riot, Haley on Saturday responded by questioning his mental acuity: “When you’re dealing with the pressures of a presidency, we can’t have someone else that we question whether they’re mentally fit to do this.” And she’s been willing to differentiate from Trump on issues where she can reaffirm positions that were considered conservative in the Ronald Reagan–era GOP. That includes criticizing Trump for running up the federal deficit, not taking a tough enough stand against China, and playing “footsy,” as she termed it, with dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

    But Haley has muffled her case against Trump by more often refusing to confront him or by even defending him. When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash last week about Trump being held liable for sexual abuse in the defamation case brought against him by writer E. Jean Carroll, Haley implausibly replied, “I haven’t paid attention to his cases.” Last Friday, reporters asked Haley whether she saw racism in Trump’s multiplying jabs at her immigrant ancestry, which included reposting an inaccurate “birther”-like claim that she was ineligible to run because her parents had not been U.S. citizens when she was born. Her response could not have been more tepid: “I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks.”

    Haley has also continued to insist that, if elected, she would pardon Trump should he be convicted in any of the cases against him. Hours before the Iowa caucuses last Monday, she told a Fox News anchor that she would vote for Trump over Biden “any day of the week.” She’s closing her New Hampshire campaign with an unusual three-minute ad centered on a testimonial to her compassion and commitment from the mother of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who died in North Korean captivity; but nowhere does the ad criticize Trump for his coziness with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. In Haley’s stump speech to New Hampshire voters, she still declares that chaos “follows” Trump “rightly or wrongly,” as he if is potentially just an innocent bystander to all the firestorms that he ignites with his words and actions. (Haley does Olympic-level contortions to avoid expressing any value judgments about Trump.) On Saturday, she even tempered her criticism of Trump’s confusion the night before when she reassuringly told a Fox interviewer, “I’m not saying that this is a Joe Biden situation.” To truly threaten a front-runner as commanding as Trump, “you’ve just got to throw caution to the wind,” McKinnon said.  “And it’s the opposite with Haley: The wind throws caution to her.”

    The evidence from Iowa suggests that Haley’s cautious approach has left her with a coalition too narrow to make a strong stand. With Trump bashing her in ads and his stump speech as “liberal” and “weak,” particularly on issues relating to immigration, Haley predictably ran poorly in Iowa among the most conservative voters, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations.

    But although she performed better among more moderate elements of the GOP coalition—particularly those with four-year college degrees—she failed to inspire enough of them to come out and vote on a cold night. In Iowa, Haley won her highest share of the vote in the most populous urban and suburban counties. But the total number of votes she won in the big counties was only a fraction of the total that had come out for Marco Rubio, a candidate who appealed to a similar coalition, in the 2016 GOP caucus. Max Rust, a data analyst at The Wall Street Journal, told me in an email that his unpublished analysis found that Iowa turnout fell more compared with 2016 in better educated and more affluent areas than in rural and blue-collar places. “I was really surprised how much Haley underperformed in the suburbs,” David Kochel, a longtime GOP strategist, told me.

    With Trump holding a steady double-digit lead over her in the New Hampshire tracking polls, Haley faces the prospect of a similar squeeze in Tuesday’s primary. Trump’s ferocious attacks on her from the right leave her with little opportunity to crack his support among staunch conservatives. And her much more carefully nuanced criticism of him leaves her facing long odds of catalyzing the massive turnout among independent voters she’d need to generate any momentum moving forward. The Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC-10 tracking poll released Saturday showed Haley only running even with Trump among undeclared voters, signaling that she’s failing to draw into the primary the large center-left contingent most hostile to the former president. (At the same time, Trump continued to lead her in the survey by two-to-one among Republicans.)

    “There’s always been this ambivalence that emanates from her about Trump,” Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire, told me. Scala, the author of Stormy Weather, a book about the New Hampshire primary, said that he understands that Haley must maneuver carefully, because “ultimately, if you want to win the nomination of this party, you are going to have to win over voters who like Trump.” But, Scala added, “I have to think [her] ambivalence rubs off on voters” and may discourage many of those most critical of Trump from bothering to turn out. (Sununu hasn’t helped that problem by publicly insisting that Haley may be hoping only for a strong second-place finish, and repeatedly declaring that he would vote for Trump if he wins the nomination.)

    In my interactions with voters at a few Haley events here, she seems to inspire more respect than enthusiasm. Some are drawn to her contained and cerebral style, and to her message of generational change. “I was thinking if we give her a chance, we will get an opportunity to go in a new direction,” George Jobel, a marketing manager from Concord, told me after Haley’s Manchester rally. But for many others, Haley is simply the last option to register a vote of disapproval about Trump. Dan O’Donnell, a realtor and undeclared voter from Hollis, is planning to cast his ballot for the former South Carolina governor. But he told me that when friends ask him if he’s voting for Haley, “I tell them, ‘No, I’m going to vote against Trump.’” In the latest Suffolk tracking poll, most independent voters backing Haley likewise said that they were motivated primarily to vote against Trump, rather than for her.

    In fairness to Haley, it’s not like anyone else this year—or, for that matter, in 2016—cracked the code of beating Trump in a Republican primary. DeSantis tried the opposite of her strategy, by running to Trump’s right and hoping that moderates would eventually consolidate around him if he was the only alternative remaining; that approach has left DeSantis in an even weaker position than Haley, barely surviving in the race. And toppling a front-runner is never easy: Even after McCain’s New Hampshire upset in 2000, he won only a few more states, and Bush recovered to resoundingly win the nomination.

    But McCain at least went down swinging, indelibly imprinting a maverick image that allowed him to come back and win the GOP nomination eight years later. In his own way, even DeSantis seems liberated by the prospect of defeat, publicly declaring that Trump cares more about personal loyalty than the good of the country or even the party, and accurately complaining that Fox and other conservative media outlets function as a “Praetorian guard” suppressing criticism of the former president.

    Haley, by contrast, still seems here to be weighing every word, as if she expects she will eventually need to defend it from the witness box in some Stalin-esque future MAGA-loyalty trial. If Haley thought she had a better chance to win, maybe she and her allies would dispense with the word if when describing Trump’s potential threat to American democracy. But her reluctance to fully confront Trump probably betrays what she really thinks about the odds that she can wrest control of the party from him this year. In this break-the-glass moment for Trump’s Republican opponents, Haley has made clear she will do no more than tap lightly on the window.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Why These Progressives Stopped Helping Biden

    Why These Progressives Stopped Helping Biden

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    Updated at 10:54 a.m. ET on December 6, 2023

    Throughout the summer, the Progressive Change Institute, a prominent grassroots organization aligned with Democrats, teamed up with the White House to promote President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda. The group helped organize events across the country, including in battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, to publicize one of the president’s most popular proposals: a crackdown on unnecessary or hidden consumer charges popularly known as “junk fees.”

    The institute was encouraged by how much positive local-media coverage the events generated, taking it as a sign that a concerted campaign could lift the president’s lackluster approval ratings ahead of his reelection bid. Its leaders were eying a second round of activity this fall to amplify Biden’s record on lowering prescription-drug and child-care costs.

    Since October 7, however, those plans are on hold. Many progressives are protesting the administration’s support for Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, which began after Hamas’s massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis and has left more than 16,000 dead, according to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled health ministry. On perhaps no other issue is the gap between Democratic leaders and young progressives wider than on the Israel-Palestine conflict. “It’s just a reality that the Middle East crisis is a superseding priority for many activists and takes oxygen out of the room on other issues the White House needs to break through on,” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Institute, told me. “We’ve let that be known.”

    Biden had hoped to extend a fragile week-long truce that the United States helped broker between Israel and Hamas, during which Hamas returned dozens of hostages it had captured on October 7 in exchange for the release of three times as many Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. But now that cease-fire has ended. And the president’s advocating unconditional aid to Israel and his embrace of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war aims have fractured the Democratic coalition that Biden will need to reassemble in order to beat Donald Trump, the current Republican front-runner for 2024.

    Franklin Foer: Inside Biden’s ‘hug Bibi’ strategy

    The president had won over many of his critics on the left—the institute’s campaign arm, for example, had backed one of his more progressive rivals, Senator Elizabeth Warren, in the 2020 Democratic primary before supporting Biden—with his run of domestic legislative victories during his first two years in office, including a major climate bill last year. Now left-wing groups that worked to persuade and turn out key constituencies in 2020, especially young and nonwhite voters, are participating in demonstrations against the president’s Middle East policy rather than selling his economic message.

    “Our public communications have been transformed by this moment,” says Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, which initially endorsed Warren and then Bernie Sanders in 2020 but spent the general-election campaign mobilizing progressive voters for Biden in swing-state cities such as Phoenix, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Atlanta.

    The Sunrise Movement, a climate advocacy group associated with the Green New Deal, has never been a big fan of Biden. But its leaders worked with the White House over the summer as the administration developed the American Climate Corps, an initiative to train 20,000 young people for jobs in the clean-energy industry. When Biden announced the program in September, the Sunrise Movement hailed it as “a visionary new policy.” Two months later, the group joined activists holding a hunger strike outside the White House in protest of Biden’s support for Israel’s offensive. Given the president’s stance, “we cannot explain his policy to our generation, and that makes it very difficult for any of his administration’s good deeds to resonate,” Michele Weindling, the Sunrise Movement’s political director, told me.

    Young people in particular have soured on the president, a big factor in poll results showing Biden trailing Trump in a potential 2024 general election. Voters under the age of 30 backed Biden by 24 points in 2020, according to exit polls; some surveys over the past few weeks show Biden and Trump nearly tied among the same cohort.

    “Man, it is jaded right now among this generation,” Elise Joshi, the 21-year-old executive director of Gen-Z for Change, a group of social-media activists that organized under the banner of “TikTok for Biden” during the 2020 campaign, told me. Young voters’ disenchantment with the president predates October 7; they have long been more likely than older people to rate the economy poorly, and the Biden administration’s approval earlier this year of oil and natural-gas projects in Alaska and West Virginia frustrated younger climate activists. But anger toward the president erupted once Israel began shelling Gaza. “There’s been a surge since October 7,” Joshi said. “When it comes to Gaza, there’s little optimism that there’s much of a difference between the Democratic and the Republican Party.”

    Read: Is Biden toast?

    Biden, along with his party’s most powerful members of Congress, have broadly supported Israel’s war against Hamas despite their discomfort with Netanyahu’s conservative government. That stance is in accord with polls of the general public, but not with the views of more liberal voters. In protests on college campuses and elsewhere, left-wing demonstrators have denounced Israel as an apartheid state waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing—or worse—against the Palestinians. “Instead of using the immense power he has as president to save lives, he’s currently fueling a genocide,” Weindling said of Biden.

    When the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC)—the political affiliate of the Progressive Change Institute—surveyed more than 4,000 of its members in early November, just 8 percent said they supported the actions of the Netanyahu government, and more than two-thirds wanted Biden to do more “to stop the killing of civilians.” In Biden’s support for Israel, many young progressives see a Democratic president giving cover to a far-right leader whose bid to weaken Israel’s judiciary sparked enormous protests only a few months ago. “There is a serious disconnect between arguing that you are a bulwark against authoritarianism at home and then aligning with authoritarians abroad,” Mitchell told me.

    When asked for comment, the Biden campaign touted the continuing support of a wide array of “groups and allies from across our 2020 coalition” that it considers essential to reelecting the president next year and have not been reluctant to help the campaign over the past two months. In addition to the immigrant-advocacy group America’s Voice and the abortion-rights PAC Emily’s List, those groups include youth-led organizations who say that, as the election nears, opposition to Trump among Gen Z will easily outweigh concerns about Biden’s support for Israel’s invasion of Gaza. “Joe Biden and Donald Trump are like night and day for young people,” Santiago Mayer, the 21-year-old founder of the Gen Z group Voters of Tomorrow, told me. “I can’t really be convinced that both of these candidates have an equal chance of winning over young people.”

    In a national Harvard University poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released yesterday, just 35 percent of respondents said they approved of Biden’s performance overall. And only 25 percent said they trusted Biden to handle the Israel-Hamas war, less than the 29 percent who said they trusted Trump on the issue. But this survey had better news for the president than other recent polls: In a hypothetical head-to-head 2024 matchup, Biden led Trump by 11 points, and that advantage grew to 24 points among those who said they will definitely vote next year.

    NextGen America, a young voter group founded by the billionaire Tom Steyer, endorsed Biden’s reelection over the summer. Its president, Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, pointed out that polls show that young voters prioritize inflation, climate change, and the prevalence of gun violence over foreign policy. But she told me that the level of opposition to Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war was significant. “We encourage the administration to listen to the concerns that young people have on this issue,” Ramirez said.

    Ronald Brownstein: Is Gen Z coming for the GOP?

    Biden has shifted his rhetoric in the past couple of weeks, acknowledging the high civilian death toll in Gaza and intensifying pressure on Israel to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid and agree to a pause in the fighting. Last Tuesday, he angered pro-Israel hawks with a post on X (formerly Twitter) quoting a passage from a speech he had recently delivered. In context, it was a push for a two-state solution, but devoid of that context, many read it as a push for an extension of the cease-fire in which he appeared to equate Israel’s military offensive with a campaign of terror. “To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek,” the president wrote. “We can’t do that.”

    Pro-Palestinian progressives told me they view the change in language, as well as Biden’s involvement in brokering the short-lived truce, as evidence that their activism is working. But their goal is a permanent cease-fire that will allow Palestinians to return to—and in many cases, rebuild—their homes in Gaza and resume their push for statehood.

    None of the activists I interviewed was certain about how lasting the political damage Biden has suffered among progressives will be. Elise Joshi said she had seen a rise in young people vowing on TikTok not to vote for Biden. “We’re almost certain that we’re going to have the same 2020 choices,” she said. “But whether we’re excited to vote or have people who don’t feel comfortable showing up or feeling too jaded to show up to vote is dependent on this administration.”

    The election, however, is still nearly a year away. And interest groups often warn about their voters staying home partly as a way to pressure a presidential administration to change course. Should the war end in the coming weeks or months, the issue is likely to fade from the headlines by Election Day. Groups like the PCCC and the Working Families Party aren’t threatening to withhold support for the Democratic ticket when the alternative is Trump. In previous presidential races, early polls have shown tighter-than-expected margins for Democrats among young and nonwhite voters only for those groups to come back around as the election neared. “It’s not Will the coalition show up? It’s At what rate?” Mitchell told me. “Today,” he continued, “I’m looking at a fraying coalition that needs to come together.”

    This article originally stated that the Working Families Party initially endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020. In fact, the party endorsed Elizabeth Warren before endorsing Sanders.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Abortion Is Inflaming the GOP’s Biggest Electoral Problem

    Abortion Is Inflaming the GOP’s Biggest Electoral Problem

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    The escalating political struggle over abortion is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas.

    The biggest counties in Ohio voted last week overwhelmingly against the ballot initiative pushed by Republicans and anti-abortion forces to raise the threshold for passing future amendments to the state constitution to 60 percent. That proposal, known as Issue 1, was meant to reduce the chances that voters would approve a separate initiative on the November ballot to overturn the six-week abortion ban Ohio Republicans approved in 2019.

    The preponderant opposition to Issue 1 in Ohio’s largest counties extended a ringing pattern. Since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide constitutional right to abortion with its 2022 Dobbs decision, seven states have held ballot initiatives that allowed voters to weigh in on whether the procedure should remain legal: California, Vermont, Montana, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, and now Ohio. In addition, voters in Wisconsin chose a new state-supreme-court justice in a race dominated by the question of whether abortion should remain legal in the state.

    Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio

    In each of those eight contests, the abortion-rights position or candidate prevailed. And in each case, most voters in the states’ largest population centers have voted—usually by lopsided margins—to support legal abortion.

    These strikingly consistent results underline how conflict over abortion is amplifying the interconnected geographic, demographic, and economic realignments reconfiguring American politics. Particularly since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s national leader, Republicans have solidified their hold on exurban, small-town, and rural communities, whose populations tend to be predominantly white and Christian and many of whose economies are reliant on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: manufacturing, energy extraction, and agriculture. Democrats, in turn, are consolidating their advantage inside almost all of the nation’s largest metro areas, which tend to be more racially diverse, more secular, and more integrated into the expanding 21st-century Information Age economy.

    New data provided exclusively to The Atlantic by Brookings Metro, a nonpartisan think tank, show, in fact, that the counties that voted against the proposed abortion restrictions are the places driving most economic growth in their states. Using data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, Brookings Metro at my request calculated the share of total state economic output generated by the counties that voted for and against abortion rights in five of these recent contests. The results were striking: Brookings found that the counties supporting abortion rights accounted for more than four-fifths of the total state GDP in Michigan, more than three-fourths in Kansas, exactly three-fourths in Ohio, and more than three-fifths in both Kentucky and Wisconsin.

    “We are looking at not only two different political systems but two different economies as well within the same states,” Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at Brookings Metro, told me.

    The Ohio vote demonstrated again that abortion is extending the fault line between those diverging systems, with stark electoral implications. Concerns that Republicans would try to ban abortion helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in the 2022 elections in the key swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, particularly in well-educated suburbs around major cities. Democrats won four of the six governor contests and four of the five U.S. Senate races in those states despite widespread discontent over the economy and President Joe Biden’s job performance. Even if voters remain unhappy on both of those fronts in 2024, Democratic strategists are cautiously optimistic that fear of Republicans attempting to impose a national abortion ban will remain a powerful asset for Biden and the party’s other candidates.

    When given the chance to weigh in on the issue directly, voters in communities of all sizes have displayed resistance to banning abortion. As Philip Bump of The Washington Post calculated this week, the share of voters supporting abortion rights exceeded Biden’s share of the vote in 500 of the 510 counties that have cast ballots on the issue since last year (outside of Vermont, which Bump did not include in his analysis).

    But across these states, most smaller counties still voted against legal abortion, including this last week in Ohio. A comprehensive analysis of the results by the Cleveland Plain Dealer found that in Ohio’s rural counties, more than three-fifths of voters still backed Issue 1.

    Opponents of Issue 1 overcame that continued resistance with huge margins in the state’s largest urban and suburban counties. Most voters rejected Issue 1 in 14 of the 17 counties that cast the most ballots this week, including all seven that cast the absolute most votes (according to the ranking posted by The New York Times). In several of those counties, voters opposed Issue 1 by ratios of 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1.

    Equally striking were the results in suburban counties around the major cities, almost all of which usually lean toward the GOP. Big majorities opposed Issue 1 in several large suburban counties that Trump won in 2020 (including Delaware and Lorain). Even in more solidly Republican suburban counties that gave Trump more than 60 percent of their vote (Butler, Warren, and Clermont), the “yes” side on Issue 1 eked out only a very narrow win. Turnout in those big urban and suburban counties was enormous as well.

    Jeff Rusnak, a long-time Ohio-based Democratic consultant, says the suburban performance may signal an important shift for the party. One reason that Ohio has trended more solidly Republican than other states in the region, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, he argues, is that women in Ohio have not moved toward Democrats in the Trump era as much as women in those other states have. But, he told me, the “no” side on Issue 1 could not have run as well as it did in the big suburban counties without significant improvement among independent and even Republican-leaning women. “In Ohio, women who were not necessarily following the Great Lakes–state trends, I think, now woke up and realized, Aha, we better take action,” Rusnak said.

    The Ohio results followed the pattern evident in the other states that have held elections directly affecting abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court decision. In Kansas, abortion-rights supporters carried all six of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Kentucky and Michigan votes, abortion-rights supporters carried eight of the 10 counties that cast the most votes, and in California they carried the 14 counties with the highest vote totals. Montana doesn’t have as many urban centers as these other states, but its anti-abortion ballot measure was defeated with majority opposition in all three of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Wisconsin state-supreme-court race this spring, Democrat Janet Protasiewicz, who centered her campaign on an unusually explicit pledge to support legal abortion, carried seven of the 10 highest-voting counties. (All of these figures are from the New York Times ranking of counties in those states’ results.) For Republicans hoping to regain ground in urban and suburban communities, abortion has become “a huge challenge because they really are on the wrong side of the issue” with those voters, Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, told me.

    The results in these abortion votes reflect what I’ve called the “class inversion” in American politics. That’s the modern dynamic in which Democrats are running best in the most economically dynamic places in and around the largest cities. Simultaneously, Republicans are relying more on economically struggling communities that generally resist and resent the cultural and demographic changes that are unfolding mostly in those larger metros.

    Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Northern Virginia who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, has described this process to me as Republicans exchanging “the country club for the country.” In some states, trading reduced margins in large suburbs for expanded advantages in small towns and rural areas has clearly improved the GOP position. That’s been true in such states as Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, as well as in Texas, Iowa, Montana, and, more tenuously, North Carolina. Ohio has fit squarely in that category as well, with GOP gains among blue-collar voters, particularly in counties along the state’s eastern border, propelling its shift from the quintessential late-20th-century swing state to its current position as a Republican redoubt.

    But that reconfiguration just as clearly hurt Republicans in other states, such as Colorado and Virginia earlier in this century and Arizona and Georgia more recently. Growing strength in the largest communities has even allowed Democrats to regain the edge in each of the three pivotal Rust Belt states Trump in 2016 dislodged from the “blue wall”: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

    In 2022, Democrats swept the governorships in all three states, and won a Senate race as well in Pennsylvania. Support for legal abortion was central to all of those victories: Just over three-fifths of voters in each state said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances and vast majorities of them backed the Democratic candidates, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media outlets. The numbers were almost identical in Arizona, where just over three-fifths of voters also backed abortion rights, and commanding majorities of them supported the winning Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. senator.

    Those races made clear that protecting abortion rights was a powerful issue in 2022 for Democrats in blue-leaning or purple states where abortion mostly remains legal. But, as I’ve written, the issue proved much less potent in the more solidly red-leaning states that banned abortion: Republican governors and legislators who passed severe abortion bans cruised to reelection in states including Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Exit polls found that in those more reliably Republican states, even a significant minority of voters who described themselves as pro-choice placed greater priority on other issues, among them crime and immigration, and supported Republican governors who signed abortion restrictions or bans.

    Ohio exemplified that trend as powerfully as any state. Though the exit polls showed that nearly three-fifths of voters said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, Republican Governor Mike DeWine cruised to a landslide reelection after signing the state’s six-week abortion ban. Republican J. D. Vance, who supported a national abortion ban, nonetheless attracted the votes of about one-third of self-described voters who said they supported abortion rights in his winning Ohio Senate campaign last year, the exit polls found.

    The fate of Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who’s facing reelection in 2024, may turn on whether he can win a bigger share of the voters who support abortion rights there, as Democrats did last year in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. (The same is likely true for Democratic Senator Jon Tester in Republican-leaning Montana, another state that voted down an anti-abortion ballot initiative last year.)

    Read: It’s abortion, stupid

    Brown has some reasons for optimism. After the defeat of Issue 1 last week, the follow-on ballot initiative in November to restore abortion rights in the state will keep the issue front and center. The two leading Republican candidates to oppose Brown are each staunch abortion opponents; Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the probable front-runner in the GOP race, was the chief public advocate for last week’s failed initiative. Most encouraging for Brown, the “no” vote on Issue 1 in the state’s biggest suburban counties far exceeded not only Biden’s performance in the same places in 2020, but also Brown’s own numbers in his last reelection, in 2018.

    For Brown, and virtually every Democrat in a competitive statewide race next year, the road to victory runs through strong showings in such large urban and suburban counties. Given the persistence of discontent over the economy, it will be particularly crucial for Biden to generate big margins among suburban voters who support abortion rights in the very few states likely to decide control of the White House. The resounding defeat of Issue 1 this week showed again that Republicans, in their zeal to revoke the right to legal abortion, have handed Biden and other Democrats their most powerful argument to move those voters.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Joe Biden Isn’t Popular. That Might Not Matter in 2024.

    Joe Biden Isn’t Popular. That Might Not Matter in 2024.

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    By almost any historic yardstick, President Joe Biden is beginning the reelection campaign he formally announced today in a vulnerable position.

    His job-approval rating has consistently come in at 45 percent or less; in several recent high-quality national polls, it has dipped closer to 40 percent. In surveys, three-fourths or more of Americans routinely express dissatisfaction with the economy. And a majority of adults have repeatedly said that they do not want him to seek a second term; that figure rose to 70 percent (including just more than half of Democrats) in a national NBC poll released last weekend.

    Those are the sort of numbers that have spelled doom for many an incumbent president. “Compared to other presidents, Biden’s approval is pretty low [about] a year and a half from Election Day,” says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, in Atlanta. “It’s not where you want to be, for sure.”

    David A. Graham: Biden’s in

    And yet despite Biden’s persistently subpar public reviews, there’s no sense of panic in the Democratic Party about his prospects. No serious candidate has emerged to challenge him for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. No elected leaders have called on him to step aside. And though some top Democratic operatives have privately expressed concern about Biden’s weak standing in polls, almost every party strategist I spoke with leading up to his announcement said they consider him the favorite for reelection.

    There are many reasons for this gap between the dominant views about Biden’s immediate position and his eventual prospects in the 2024 race. But the most important reason is encapsulated in the saying from Biden’s father that he often quotes in speeches: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty; compare me to the alternative.” Most Democrats remain cautiously optimistic that whatever concerns Americans might hold about the state of the economy and Biden’s performance or his age, a majority of voters will refuse to entrust the White House to Donald Trump or another Republican nominee in his image, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

    “I think there’s no question that neither Trump nor Biden are where they want to be, but … if you project forward, it’s just easier to see a path for victory for Biden than for Trump or DeSantis,” says the Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who was one of the few analysts in either party to question the projections of a sweeping red wave last November.

    Rosenberg is quick to caution that in a country as closely split as the U.S. is now, any advantage for Biden is hardly insurmountable. Not many states qualify as true swing states within reach for both sides next year. And those states themselves are so closely balanced that minuscule shifts in preferences or turnout among almost any constituency could determine the outcome.

    The result is that control over the direction for a nation of 330 million people could literally come down to a handful of neighborhoods in a tiny number of states—white-collar suburbs of Detroit, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Atlanta; faded factory towns in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; working-class Latino neighborhoods in Las Vegas; and small-town communities across Georgia’s Black Belt. “Never have so few people had such a big impact in deciding the future of American politics,” Doug Sosnik, the chief White House political adviser for Bill Clinton, told me.

    On an evenly matched battlefield, neither side can rest too comfortably about its prospects in the 2024 election. But after Trump’s upset victory in 2016, Republicans have mostly faced disappointing results in the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022. Across those campaigns, a powerful coalition of voters—particularly young people, college-educated white voters, those who don’t identify with any organized religion, and people of color, mostly located in large metropolitan centers—have poured out in huge numbers to oppose the conservative cultural and social vision animating the Trump-era Republican Party. Many of those voters may be unenthusiastic about Biden, but they have demonstrated that they are passionate about keeping Trump and other Republicans from controlling the White House and potentially imposing their restrictive agenda nationwide. Biden previewed how he will try to stir those passions in his announcement video Tuesday: Far more than most of his speeches, which typically emphasize kitchen-table economics, the video centers on portraying “MAGA extremists” as a threat to democracy and “bedrock freedoms” through restrictions on abortion, book bans, and rollbacks of LGBTQ rights.

    “The fear of MAGA has been the most powerful force in American politics since 2018, and it remains the most powerful force,” Rosenberg told me. “It’s why Democrats did so much better than the fundamentals [of public attitudes about Biden and the economy] in 2022, and that will be the case again this time.”

    After the Democrats’ unexpectedly competitive showing in the midterm election, Biden’s approval rating ticked up. But in national polls it has sagged again. Recent surveys by The Wall Street Journal, NBC, and CNBC each put Biden’s approval rating at 42 percent or less.

    Sosnik said the pivotal period for Biden is coming this fall. Historically, he told me, voter assessments of an incumbent president’s performance have hardened between the fall of their third year in office and the late spring of their fourth. The key, he said, is not a president’s absolute level of approval in that period but its trajectory: Approval ratings for Ronald Reagan, Clinton, and Barack Obama, each of whom won reelection, were all clearly rising by early in their fourth year. By contrast, the approval ratings over that period fell for George H. W. Bush and remained stagnant for Trump. Each lost his reelection bid. Economists and pollsters say voters tend to finalize their views about the economy over roughly the same period and once again tend to put less weight on the absolute level of conditions such as inflation and unemployment than on whether those conditions are improving or deteriorating.

    With that crucial window approaching, Biden will benefit if inflation continues to moderate as it has over the past several months. He also could profit from more time for voters to feel the effects of the massive wave of public and private investment triggered by his trio of major legislative accomplishments: the bipartisan infrastructure and semiconductor bills, and the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act.

    Read: Biden’s blue-collar jobs bet

    But Biden also faces the risk that the economy could tip into recession later this year, which some forecasters, such as Larry Summers, the former Clinton Treasury Secretary who predicted the inflationary surge, still consider likely.

    If a recession does come, the best scenario for Biden is that it’s short and shallow and further tamps down inflation before giving way to an economic recovery early in 2024. But even that relatively benign outcome would make it difficult for him to attract more supporters in the period through next spring when voters traditionally have solidified their verdicts on a president’s performance.

    That means that, to win reelection, Biden likely will need to win an unusually large share of voters who are at least somewhat unhappy over conditions in the country and ambivalent or worse about giving him another term. Historically that hasn’t been easy for presidents.

    For those who think Biden can break that pattern, last November’s midterm election offers the proof of concept. Exit polls at the time showed that a solid 55 percent majority of voters nationwide disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that three-fourths of voters considered the economy in only fair or poor shape. Traditionally such attitudes have meant disaster for the party holding the White House. And yet, Democrats minimized the GOP gains in the House, maintained control of the Senate, and won governorships in most of the key swing states on the ballot.

    In 2022, the exit polls showed that Democrats, as the party holding the White House, were routed among voters with intensely negative views about conditions. That was typical for midterm elections. But Democrats defused the expected “red wave” by winning a large number of voters who were more mildly disappointed in Biden’s performance and/or the economy.

    For instance, with Trump in the White House during the 2018 midterms, Republicans won only about one in six voters in House elections who described the economy as “not so good,” according to exit polls; in 2020, Trump, as the incumbent president, carried only a little more than one-fifth of them. But in 2022, Democrats won more than three-fifths of voters who expressed that mildly negative view of the economy.

    Similarly, in the 2010 midterm elections, according to exit polls, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Obama’s performance as president voted against Democrats running for the House; almost two-thirds of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Trump likewise voted against Republicans in 2018. But in 2022, the exit polls found that Democrats surprisingly carried almost half of the voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden.

    The same pattern persisted across many of the key swing states likely to decide the 2024 presidential race: Democrats won the governors’ contests in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and Senate races in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, even though the exit polls found a majority of voters in each state said they disapproved of Biden’s performance. Winning Democratic gubernatorial candidates such as Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, and Katie Hobbs in Arizona each carried at least 70 percent of voters who described the economy as “not so good.”

    Why did Democrats so exceed the usual performance among voters dissatisfied with the country’s direction? The answer is that many of those voters rejected the Republican Party that Trump has reshaped in his image. The exit polls found that Trump was viewed even more unfavorably than Biden in several of the swing states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And nationally, more than two-fifths of voters who expressed negative views about the economy also said they considered the GOP “too extreme.” Particularly on social issues such as abortion rights and gun control, the 2022 results demonstrated that “Trump and these other Republicans have painted themselves into a corner in order to appeal to their base,” Abramowitz told me.

    Biden may expand his support by next year, especially in the battleground states, if economic conditions improve or simply because he may soon start spending heavily on television advertising touting his achievements, such as new plant openings. But more important than changing minds may be his ability to replicate the Democrats’ success in 2022 at winning voters who aren’t wild about him but dislike Trump and the GOP even more. “While there are not an overwhelming number of people who are tremendously favorable to Biden, I just don’t think there is an overwhelming number of persuadable people who hate him,” says Tad Devine, a long-time Democratic strategist. “They hate the other guy.” A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released today offered one concrete measure of that dynamic: In an echo of the 2022 pattern, three-fourths of the adults who said they mildly disapproved of Biden’s performance in office nonetheless said they did not want a second term for Trump.

    Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at UCLA, told me that dynamic would likely prove powerful for many voters. Even Democratic-leaning voters who say they don’t want Biden to run again, she predicted, are highly likely to line up behind him once the alternative is a Republican nominee whose values clash with their own. “The bottom line is that on Election Day, that Democratic nominee, even the one they didn’t want to run again, is going to be closer to most people’s vision of the world they want to live in than the Republican alternative,” she said.

    In both parties, many analysts agree that in a Biden-Trump rematch, the election would probably revolve less around assessments of Biden’s performance than the stark question of whether voters are willing to return Trump to power after the January 6 insurrection and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “President Biden by every conventional standard is a remarkably weak candidate for reelection,” the longtime Republican pollster Bill McInturff told me in an email. But “Biden’s greatest strength,” McInturff continued, may be the chance to run again against Trump, who “is so terrific at sucking up all the political oxygen, he becomes the issue on which the election gets framed, not the terrible economy or the level of Americans’ dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.”

    On both sides, there’s greater uncertainty about whether DeSantis could more effectively exploit voters’ hesitation about Biden. Many Democrats and even some Republicans believe that DeSantis has leaned so hard into emulating, and even exceeding, Trump’s culture-war agenda that the Florida governor has left himself little chance of recapturing the white-collar suburban voters who have keyed the Democratic recovery since 2018. But others believe that DeSantis could get a second look from those voters if he wins the nomination, because he would be introduced to them largely by beating Trump. Although Devine told me, “I do not see a path to the presidency in the general election for Donald Trump,” he said that “if DeSantis were to be able to get rid of Trump and get the credit for getting rid of Trump…I think it’s fundamentally different.”

    One thing unlikely to change, whomever Republicans nominate, is how few states, or voters, will effectively decide the outcome. Twenty-five states voted for Trump in both 2016 and 2020, and the strategists planning the Biden campaign see a realistic chance to contest only North Carolina among them. Republicans hope to contest more of the 25 states that voted for Biden, but after the decisive Democratic victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2022, it’s unclear whether either is within reach for the GOP next year. The states entirely up for grabs might be limited to just four that Biden carried last time: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Wisconsin. And as the decisive liberal win in the recent state-supreme-court election in Wisconsin showed, winning even that state, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, may be an uphill battle for any Republican presidential nominee viewed as a threat to abortion rights.

    Read: The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment

    In their recent book, The Bitter End, Vavreck and her co-authors, John Sides and Chris Tausanovitch, describe hardening loyalties and a shrinking battlefield as a form of electoral “calcification.” That process has left the country divided almost in half between two durable but divergent coalitions with antithetical visions of America’s future. “We are fighting at the margins again,” Vavreck told me. “The 2020 election was nearly a replica of 2016, and I think that largely this 2024 election is going to be a repeat of 2020 and 2016.” Whatever judgment voters ultimately reach about Biden’s effectiveness, or his capacity to handle the job in his 80s, this sorting process virtually guarantees another polarized and precarious election next year that turns on a small number of voters in a small number of states.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Biden’s Blue-Collar Bet

    Biden’s Blue-Collar Bet

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    When President Joe Biden visited Kentucky yesterday to tout a new bridge project, most media attention focused on his embrace of bipartisanship. And indeed Biden, against the backdrop of the GOP chaos in the House of Representatives, signaled how aggressively he would claim that reach-across-the-aisle mantle. He appeared onstage with not only Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, but also GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, a perennial bête noire for Democrats.

    But Biden also touched on another theme that will likely become an even more central component of his economic and political strategy over the next two years: He repeatedly noted how many of the jobs created by his economic agenda are not expected to require a four-year college degree.

    Throughout his presidency, with little media attention, Biden has consistently stressed this point. When he appeared in September at the groundbreaking for a sprawling Intel semiconductor plant near Columbus, Ohio, he declared, “What you’ll see in this field of dreams” is “Ph.D. engineers and scientists alongside community-college graduates … people of all ages, races, backgrounds with advanced degrees or no degrees, working side by side.” At a Baltimore event in November touting the infrastructure bill, he said, “The vast majority of these jobs … that we’re going to create don’t require a college degree.” Appearing in Arizona in December, he bragged that a plant producing batteries for electric vehicles would “create thousands of good manufacturing jobs, 90 percent of which won’t require a college degree, and yet you get a good wage.”

    Peter A. Shulman: What infrastructure really means

    Economically, this message separates Biden from the past two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Both of those men, as I’ve written, centered their economic agendas on training more Americans for higher-paying jobs in advanced industries (and opening markets for those industries through free-trade agreements), largely because they believed that automation and global economic competition would doom many jobs considered “low skill.”

    Although Biden also supports an ambitious assortment of initiatives to expand access to higher education, he has placed relatively more emphasis than his predecessors did on improving conditions for workers in jobs that don’t require advanced credentials. That approach is rooted in his belief that the economy can’t function without much work traditionally deemed low-skill, such as home health care and meat-packing, a conviction underscored by the coronavirus pandemic. “One of the things that has really become apparent to all of us is how important to our nation’s economic resiliency many of these jobs are that don’t require college degrees,” Heather Boushey, a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me this week.

    Politically, improving economic conditions for workers without advanced degrees is the centerpiece of Biden’s plan to reverse the generation-long Democratic erosion among white voters who don’t hold a college degree—and the party’s more recent slippage among non-college-educated voters of color, particularly Latino men. Biden and his aides are betting that they can reel back in some of the non-college-educated voters drawn to Republican cultural and racial messages if they can improve their material circumstances with the huge public and private investments already flowing from the key economic bills passed during his first two years.

    Biden’s hopes of boosting the prospects of workers without college degrees, who make up about two-thirds of the total workforce, rest on a three-legged legislative stool. One bill, passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $75 billion in direct federal aid and tax credits to revive domestic production of semiconductors. An infrastructure bill, also passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $850 billion in new spending over 10 years for the kind of projects Biden celebrated yesterday—roads, bridges, airports, water systems—as well as a national network of charging stations for electric vehicles and expanded access to high-speed internet. The third component, passed on a party-line vote as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, provides nearly $370 billion in federal support to promote renewable electricity production, accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, and retrofit homes and businesses to improve energy conservation.

    All of these measures are projected to trigger huge flows of private-sector investment. The Semiconductor Industry Association reports that since the legislation promoting the industry was first introduced, in 2020, companies have already announced $200 billion in investments across 40 projects in 16 states. The investment bank Credit Suisse projects that the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy provisions could ultimately spur $1.7 trillion in total investment (in part because it believes that the legislation’s open-ended provisions will produce something closer to $800 billion in federal spending). And economists have long demonstrated that each public dollar spent on infrastructure spurs additional private investment, which could swell the total economic impact of the new package to $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, the administration estimates.

    Taken together, the three bills constitute a level of federal investment in targeted economic sectors probably unprecedented in recent U.S. history. “The kind of money we are going to see going into these sectors is just unheard-of,” Janelle Jones, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor under Biden, told me. Though rarely framed as such, these three bills—reinforced by other Biden policies, such as his sweeping “buy American” procurement requirements—amount to an aggressive form of industrial policy meant to bolster the nation’s capacity to build more things at home, including bridges and roads, semiconductors, and batteries for electric vehicles. “This is a president that is taking seriously the need for a modern American industrial strategy,” Boushey said.

    Read: What Joe Biden has (and hasn’t) accomplished

    These measures are likely to open significant opportunities for workers without a college degree. Some analysts have projected that the infrastructure bill alone could generate as many as 800,000 jobs annually. Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, estimated that about four-fifths of the jobs created under an earlier version of the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the House would not require a college degree, and he told me he believes the distribution is roughly the same in the final package. A Georgetown University institute projected an even higher percentage for the infrastructure bill. More of the jobs associated with semiconductor manufacturing require advanced education, but even that bill may generate a significant number of blue-collar opportunities in the construction phase of the many new plants opening across the country. (The industry is also pursuing partnerships with community colleges to provide workers who don’t have a four-year degree with the technical training to handle more work in the heavily automated facilities.)

    Yet even if these programs fulfill those projections, it remains unclear whether they will reach the scale to improve the uncertain economic trajectory for the broad mass of workers without advanced education. These three bills mostly promote employment in manufacturing and construction, and together those industries account for only about one-eighth of the workforce (roughly 21 million workers in all), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total construction employment peaked in 2006, manufacturing in 1979. Far more workers, including those without degrees, are now employed in service industries not as directly affected by these bills.

    What’s more, both of those occupations remain dominated by men. And largely because of resistance from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Congress didn’t pass Biden’s companion proposals to bolster wages and working conditions for the preponderantly non-college-educated, nonwhite, female employees in the low-paid “care” industries such as home health care and child care. “We can’t [ignore] these millions and millions of care workers, particularly Black and brown women,” said Jones, now the chief economist and policy director for the Service Employees International Union.

    Another complication for Biden is that his plans are colliding with the Federal Reserve Board’s drive to tame inflation. Spending on his big three bills is ramping up in 2023, which could increase the demand for—and bargaining power of—workers without college degrees. But the Fed’s push to slow the economy may neutralize that effect by increasing unemployment. “They are undercutting the job creation that we are supposed to be incentivizing,” Hersh said.

    The list of further projects tied to these three bills is almost endless. The White House calculates that firms have announced some $290 billion in manufacturing investments since Biden took office; the Congressional Budget Office projects that spending from the infrastructure bill could be more than twice as high in 2023 as last year and then increase again by half in 2024.

    That pipeline means Biden could be cutting ribbons every week through the 2024 presidential campaign—which would probably be fine with him. Biden rarely seems happier than when he’s around freshly poured concrete, especially if he’s on a podium with local business and labor leaders and elected officials from both parties, all of whom he introduces as enthusiastically (and elaborately) as if he’s toasting the new couple at a wedding. At his core, he remains something like a pre-1970s Democrat, who is most comfortable with a party focused less on cultural crusades than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to people who work with their hands. In his instincts and priorities, Biden is closer to Hubert Humphrey or Henry Jackson than to George McGovern or Obama.

    Less clear is whether that throwback approach—the formula that defined the Democratic Party during Biden’s youth—still works politically. Over the course of Biden’s career, the parties have experienced what I’ve called a “class inversion”: Democrats have performed better among college-educated voters while Republicans have grown dominant among white voters without a college degree and more recently have established a beachhead among nonwhite, non-college-educated workers. For most of these voters, the evidence suggests that cultural attitudes have exerted more influence on their political allegiance than their economic circumstance has.

    Ruy Teixeira: Democrats’ long goodbye to the working class

    Biden, with his “Scranton Joe” persona, held out great hopes in the 2020 campaign of reversing that decline with working-class white voters, but he improved only slightly above Hillary Clinton’s historically weak 2016 showing, attracting about one-third of their votes. In 2022, exit polls showed that Democrats remained stuck at that meager level in the national vote for the House of Representatives. In such key swing states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, winning Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates ran slightly better than that, as Biden did while carrying those states in 2020. But, again like Biden then, the exit polls found that none of them won much more than two-fifths of non-college-educated white voters, even against candidates as extreme as Doug Mastriano or Kari Lake, the GOP governor nominees in Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively.

    The Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me she’s relatively optimistic that Biden’s focus on creating more opportunity for workers without a college degree can bolster the party’s position with them. She said the key is not only improving living standards, but “validating that this is real work … not the consolation prize to a job that a college degree gets you.” No matter how many jobs Biden’s initiatives create, she said, “if you are treating them as lesser jobs, we are still going to have our problems from the cultural side of things.” Biden has certainly heard (or intuited) such advice. In his speeches, he commonly declares that an apprenticeship as an electrician or pipe fitter is as demanding as a college degree.

    Yet Murphy’s expectations remain limited. “Just based on the negative arc of the last several cycles,” she said, merely maintaining the party’s current modest level of support with working-class white voters and avoiding further losses would be “a win.” Matt Morrison, the executive director of Working America, an AFL-CIO-affiliated group that focuses on political outreach to nonunion working-class families, holds similarly restrained views, though he told me that economic gains could help the party more with nonwhite blue-collar voters, who are generally less invested in Republican cultural and racial appeals. No matter how strong the job market, Murphy added, Democrats are unlikely to improve much with non-college-educated workers unless inflation recedes by 2024.

    What’s already clear now is how much Biden has bet, both economically and politically, on bolstering the economic circumstances of workers without advanced education by investing literally trillions of federal dollars in forging an economy that again builds more things in America. “I don’t know whether the angry white people in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are less angry if we get them 120,000 more manufacturing jobs,” a senior White House official told me, speaking anonymously in order to be candid. “But we are going to run that experiment.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • What the Georgia Runoff Revealed

    What the Georgia Runoff Revealed

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    Senator Raphael Warnock’s win in yesterday’s Georgia Senate runoff capped a commanding show of strength by Democrats in the states that decided the 2020 race for the White House—and will likely pick the winner again in 2024.

    With Warnock’s victory over Republican Herschel Walker, Democrats have defeated every GOP Senate and gubernatorial candidate endorsed by Donald Trump this year in the five states that flipped from supporting him in 2016 to backing Joe Biden in 2020: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.

    Coming even amid widespread discontent over the economy, this year’s Democratic sweep against the Trump-backed candidates underscores the continuing resistance to the former president’s influence. In particular, Warnock’s decisive margins in Atlanta and its suburbs yesterday extended the Democratic dominance of white-collar (and usually racially diverse) metropolitan areas, as varied as the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia and the booming hot spots of Phoenix and Madison.

    Read: The great Senate stalemate

    “The huge question after the election of 2020 was whether the suburbs would snap back to the GOP column after Trump was no longer on the ballot,” Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party chair in Wisconsin, told me. “What we saw in 2022 was suburbs continuing to trend toward Democrats.”

    Apart from perhaps Michigan, none of these states appears entirely out of reach for the GOP in 2024. Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, told me that although suburban voters recoiled against “delusional candidates” who “parroted” Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, Republicans “could very well come back and win the suburbs” with “non-delusional candidates.”

    Of the five pivotal states from the last presidential election, Republicans this year actually performed best in Georgia, where the party swept the other statewide offices. Even Walker remained stubbornly close to Warnock in the final results, despite an avalanche of damaging personal revelations and gaffes. Across these states, Republican dominance in rural areas that the GOP consolidated under Trump continued through this year’s midterm and allowed several of his endorsed candidates, like Walker, to remain competitive despite big deficits in the largest population centers.

    But in the end, the Democratic strength in the largest metropolitan areas proved insurmountable for the seven Trump-backed candidates in governor or Senate races across these five states. The only Republicans who won such contests in these states were Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who sharpened an image of independence by standing up to Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss in the state, and Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who echoes many of Trump’s themes but has an established political identity apart from him. (Johnson barely held off his Democratic challenger, Mandela Barnes.)

    “You have a large percentage of Americans who are wary of MAGA and have now voted against MAGA three times,” Simon Rosenberg, the president of NDN, a Democratic research and advocacy group, told me. Rosenberg was the most forceful public skeptic of the “red wave” theory. “They are now going to have to take all those people and turn them into Republican voters in 2024. It’s certainly not impossible, but I’d much rather be us than them going into the 2024 election”

    In many ways, yesterday’s Georgia result underscored the partisan chasm that has left the country closely divided for at least the past decade. Walker was, by any objective measure, among the weakest general-election candidates for a major office either party has produced in modern memory. Tarred by an endless procession of scandals, prone to nonsensical statements on the campaign trail (as when he mused on the relative merits of vampires and werewolves), and unwilling or unable to articulate positions on many major issues, he nonetheless drew unflagging support from national Republican leaders and held the large majority of the state’s Republican votes.

    That Walker came as close as he did to winning underscores the growing parliamentary nature of House and Senate elections, in which fewer voters are casting their ballots based on personal assessments of the two candidates and more are deciding based on which party they want to control the national agenda.

    Read: How Democrats avoided a red wave

    Yet all of that still left Walker, like the other Trump-backed candidates, short in the face of solid margins for Democrats in and around these states’ major population centers. Exit polls showed Democrats posting big advantages among all the demographic groups that tend to congregate in large metropolitan areas: young people, people of color, college-educated voters, secular voters, and LGBTQ adults.

    Thriving Cobb and Gwinnett Counties outside Atlanta, with a combined population of 1.7 million people, encapsulate the suburban evolution that has tilted the balance of power. For years, these counties were Republican redoubts: George W. Bush won them by roughly a combined 150,000 votes in the 2004 presidential race, and even as late as the hard-fought 2014 Georgia Senate race, the winning GOP nominee, David Perdue, carried each of them by double-digit margins.

    But both counties have grown more diverse. White people now make up only about three-fifths of the population in Cobb and a little more than half in Gwinnett, and nearly half of Cobb adults hold at least a four-year college degree. This has alienated them from a GOP that Trump has reshaped to reflect the cultural priorities and grievances of culturally conservative white voters, particularly those without college degrees or who live outside urban areas. Hillary Clinton narrowly carried both counties in 2016, Biden won just under 60 percent of the vote in each in 2020, and Warnock in November roughly matched Biden’s performance. As of the latest count, Warnock yesterday again carried about three-fifths of the vote in both Cobb and Gwinnett. He also ran up big margins in the suburban counties just south of Atlanta.

    The same patterns were evident in the large white-collar suburbs of the other states that Republicans must win back to recapture the White House in 2024. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, in crushing her Trump-backed opponent, Tudor Dixon, won a higher share of the vote in Oakland and Kent Counties than she managed in 2018 or than Biden did in 2020. In Pennsylvania, Senator-elect John Fetterman matched Biden in exceeding three-fifths of the vote in both Delaware and Montgomery Counties, outside Philadelphia. In Arizona, Senator Mark Kelly carried Maricopa County, centered on Phoenix, by almost 100,000 votes—more than doubling Biden’s margin in 2020, when he became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the county since Harry Truman in 1948. In Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers won booming Dane County, centered on Madison, by 25,000 more votes than he had in 2018, and an analysis of the statewide results showed him improving the most over his first election in the counties with the highest levels of educational attainment.

    After this year’s defeats, many analysts in both parties are dubious that Trump can recapture enough (and maybe any) of these five states in 2024. The bigger question facing Republicans is whether another candidate, one who does not have Trump’s personal baggage but who shares most of his culture-war views, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, could perform much better.

    Read: Georgia sends a preacher to Washington

    Republicans are generally optimistic that DeSantis could regain ground Trump has lost among suburban voters who leaned Republican not too long ago. They point to Georgia Republican Governor Kemp performing better than Walker did in the Atlanta suburbs as evidence that a more mainstream Republican can slice the Democratic advantage in such places. DeSantis, Ayres said, “has got a lot of things he can sell to suburban Republican voters that Trump just can’t sell.”

    Almost universally, Democrats believe that Republicans are underestimating how hard it will be to reel back in college-educated suburban voters who have now mobilized against Trump’s vision for America in three consecutive elections, especially in these battleground states. Although DeSantis is less belligerent than Trump, and not associated with the violence and subversion of the January 6 insurrection, so far he has emphasized a similar style of politics focused on conservative grievance against “woke” cultural liberalism. “Ron DeSantis is every bit as MAGA as Donald Trump,” Rosenberg said. “This idea that he is some more moderate version of Trump is just farcical.”

    The fact that even a candidate as weak as Walker remained as competitive as he did underscores how difficult it may be for either side to establish a comfortable advantage in these states in 2024. (The exceptions could be Michigan, which even many Republicans agree looks daunting for them, and maybe Pennsylvania, which also tilted blue last month.)

    These states provided Democrats with their own warning signs this year. Exit polls last month showed that most voters in these states disapproved of Biden’s job performance and that big majorities in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the states where the question was asked, did not want him to run again. Democrats also faced a worrying trend of lagging Black turnout in many urban centers this year, though Black voters came out in big numbers in Georgia’s early voting, and activists in the state are confident they will remain highly engaged through 2024. “Our goal was to build a culture of voting, and that’s what we have done in Georgia over the past five years,” Amari Fennoy, the state coordinator for the NAACP Georgia State Conference, told me.

    Yet the consistency of the results this year, both demographically and geographically, signal that the re-sorting of the parties in the Trump era has left Democrats with a narrow, but potentially durable, advantage in these five crucial states. That doesn’t mean Democrats are guaranteed to win them in the 2024 presidential race, but it does suggest an important takeaway from the 2022 election that finally ended last night: As long as voters still perceive Republicans to be operating in Trump’s shadow (much less if they again nominate Trump himself), Democrats will begin with an advantage in the states most likely to pick the next president.

    “I think that the coalition that turned out to stop Trump is going to be the starting point for the next presidential race,” Wikler said. “There are new threats and new opportunities, but this was not a one-off coalition that came together for a special occasion and went home.” Georgia, again, made that very clear last night.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Gujarat and Himachal Elections 2022: BJP to emerge victorious in both states, say exit polls

    Gujarat and Himachal Elections 2022: BJP to emerge victorious in both states, say exit polls

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    Gujarat Assembly Election 2022: As the second and final phase of the Assembly elections in Gujarat concluded on Monday, the exit polls have revealed that BJP will win in both Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh even as it might be a close fight in the latter state.

    Votes will be counted on December 8. 

    The AAP is expected to win the Delhi MCD, as per India Today-AxisMyIndia. Gujarat voted in two phases on December 1 and 5, while Himachal voted in a single phase on November 12. On December 4, an election for MCD (Municipal Corporation of Delhi) was held. The BJP has held power in Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, and the Delhi Municipal Corporation. The Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party have challenged the BJP’s bid to retain power in two states and the Delhi civic body (AAP).

    The BJP is likely to win 125 to 130 seats, while Congress may win 40 to 50 seats, TV9 Gujarati exit poll showed on Monday. The AAP, a new entrant to Gujarat’s political scene, is likely to win three to five seats, TV9 exit poll showed.

    According to Republic exit poll, the BJP looks set to retain power in Himachal Pradesh, but it will be a close fight with the Congress. The BJP will likely win on 34 to 39 seats in the state assembly election while the Congress may claim victory on 28 to 33 assembly seats, Republic exit poll showed on Monday.

    P-Marq exit poll has predicted a win for the BJP in Himachal, with the party likely to win 34 to 39 seats. The Congress, on the other hand, may win 28 to 33 assembly seats, the survey showed.

    Meanwhile, Jan ki Baat exit poll predicted a close race between the BJP and the Congress for the Himachal Pradesh assembly. The BJP is likely to win on 32 to 40 seats while the Congress may claim victory on 27 to 34 seats, Jan ki Baat exit poll showed.

    ETG-TNN exit poll predicted a BJP sweep in the Himachal Pradesh polls, with the saffron party likely to win on 38 seats. The Congress, which is close second, is likely to win 28 seats, ETG-TNN exit poll showed.

    P Marq exit polls show the BJP winning 128 to 148 seats in Gujarat. The Congress and BJP are likely to trail behind in the seat share, with the former likely to win 30 to 42 seats while the latter may claim victory on 2 to 10 seats.

    Also Read: Exit Poll Results 2022 LIVE: India Today-Axis My India predicts tough fight in Himachal

    Also Read: Delhi MCD elections: AAP set to sweep Delhi civic polls with 149-171 wards, predicts India Today-Axis My India exit poll

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  • Is Trump Still a Viable Candidate? Yes and No.

    Is Trump Still a Viable Candidate? Yes and No.

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    Even before Donald Trump announced he was seeking the presidency again, last week’s election results showed Republicans how difficult it will be to escape the former president’s gravitational pull.

    Widespread voter resistance to a Republican Party refashioned in Trump’s image offset disenchantment with the economy and President Joe Biden’s performance and allowed Democrats to post one of the best first-midterm showings for the sitting president’s party in more than a century. In almost all the key battleground states, the same powerful coalition of voters who opposed Trump in the 2018 and 2020 elections delivered stunning rebukes to GOP candidates running with the former president’s endorsement or in his polarizing style, or both.

    David Frum: Trump’s running, and Republicans have only themselves to blame

    The results were much better for Republicans running in red states and districts. But for party strategists operating anywhere outside the most reliably conservative terrain, the election’s message was unequivocal. In those contested areas, “there is no road back to relevance if Donald Trump continues to be the dominant figure in the Republican Party and especially if he is our nominee in 2024,” Dick Wadhams, the former GOP chair in Colorado, told me.

    Trump’s unusually early presidential announcement, though, made clear that he will not surrender his grip on the GOP without a fight. Last night’s announcement speech itself was instantly forgettable, a rambling greatest-hits collection of familiar priorities (building a border wall), bombastic descriptions of American carnage (“the blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities”), and well-worn grievances (“I’m a victim”) delivered with surprisingly little emotion or energy. He pointedly denied responsibility for the GOP’s disappointing showing last week, instead blaming “the citizens of our country [who] have not yet realized the full extent and gravity of the pain our nation is going through.”

    Yet Trump’s greatest obstacle to a comeback may be the widespread belief among party leaders, donors, and key figures within conservative media that continued hostility toward him is the principal reason Democrats last week succeeded at holding the Senate, adding control of more governorships and state legislatures and minimizing their losses in the House of Representatives, even though Republicans are poised to capture a slim majority in the chamber.

    Such a strong performance is exceedingly rare for the party in the White House during the president’s first midterm. Over at least the past century, it is unprecedented for that party to do so well when the president faces as much discontent as Biden does now. Since 1900, the only other examples of the incumbent party running at least as well as Democrats did this year came for presidents who were soaring in popularity, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 (during the early New Deal), John F. Kennedy in 1962 (after he defused the Cuban Missile crisis), Bill Clinton in 1998 (amid the backlash to the Republican Congress’s moves to impeach him), and George W. Bush in 2002 (after 9/11).

    This year, though, just 44 percent of voters nationwide said they approved of Biden’s job performance, while a 55 percent majority disapproved, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. Biden, the exit polls found, did not receive majority support in any of the states with the most closely watched gubernatorial and Senate races, and in some of those states (including Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona), his approval rating barely peaked above 40 percent.

    In the 21st century, as I’ve written, there are very few examples of Senate (and even gubernatorial) candidates from the president’s party winning elections in states where his approval rating had fallen that low. Yet Democrats rolled to unexpected victories in many of the key swing-state races, including Senate contests in Arizona, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and governor’s races in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (Democrats also led in the Georgia Senate race heading for a December runoff between Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and the Republican challenger, Herschel Walker.) In more reliably blue states, such as Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York, Republicans were uniformly frustrated in their hopes for breakthroughs in Senate and governor’s races (though the GOP did flip several New York House districts).

    Read: Trumpism is toxic

    GOP governors did score decisive reelection victories in Republican-leaning states such as Florida, Georgia, and Texas. GOP Senate candidates also won in states with large populations of non-college-educated white voters (particularly Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina). Exit polls showed GOP candidates continuing to benefit from the electoral advantages Trump has bequeathed them: dominant majorities among white voters without a college education, nonurban, and white Evangelical voters, as well as a higher floor of support among Latino voters, particularly men.

    But the overall ledger showed more bright spots for Democrats. And given Americans’ broadly negative views on Biden and the economy, the only plausible explanation for that success is many voters’ unwavering resistance to the Trump-era GOP. Democrats successfully painted many Republican nominees (including most of the high-profile contenders Trump endorsed) as extremists, citing their opposition to legal abortion and refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of Biden’s 2020 victory. Outside the conservative heartland, Democrats in most key statewide races maintained a winning edge among the groups that most resisted Trump: younger voters, college-educated white voters, people of color, and secular adults, with women in each group tilting more toward them than men.

    Most striking, the exit polls found that Democrats carried a plurality of independent voters nationally and won them by bigger margins in most of the marquee contests. “I think, at the end of the day, our crazy was more repelling than their crazy,” Jason Cabel Roe, a Michigan-based GOP consultant, told me.

    Nationally, nearly six in 10 voters said they had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, and they voted almost four to one for Democrats. Among independent voters, Trump’s national unfavorable ratings rose to two-thirds overall, nearly three-fourths among women. Among women especially, that was a far more negative rating than independents gave to Biden.

    Election results showed that the white-collar suburban areas across blue and swing states that rejected Trump remained locked down against GOP candidates this year, even amid the pervasive discontent over the economy.  In Pennsylvania, the Democratic candidate John Fetterman matched Biden’s elevated advantage over Trump in the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia; Warnock did the same in the populous Cobb and Gwinnett Counties, outside Atlanta. In 2020, Biden became the first Democratic candidate since Harry Truman in 1948 to carry Maricopa County (centered on Phoenix and its suburbs) when he won it by about 45,000 votes; as of this morning, Senator Mark Kelly led there by nearly 100,000 votes. In Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet almost exactly matched Biden’s massive 2020 margins in Denver and its big surrounding suburban counties.

    Especially striking was that these suburban areas broke as badly against GOP candidates who tried to define themselves as centrists, including the Senate nominees in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Washington State.

    In Colorado, the GOP nominated Joe O’Dea, a moderate, energetic candidate who explicitly distanced himself from Trump. Yet he too was swamped. To Wadhams, that pattern is a clear signal that in Democratic-leaning and swing states, virtually no individual Republican can wash off Trump’s stain on the GOP image.

    Heading into the election, Wadhams told me, the key uncertainty in Colorado was whether “those vast numbers of unaffiliated voters who had voted so strongly Democratic and anti-Trump in 2018 and 2020 would … give strong Republican candidates a serious look in 2022,” now that Trump is no longer in the White House. On Election Day, he added, “I got my answer, and the answer was no.” The lesson, he said, “is that even among the unaffiliated voters who I thought we had a shot at, they ultimately said, ‘Those Republicans are still crazy; they are still in the hip pocket of Donald Trump.’”

    House elections produced the same pattern. Republican House gains were concentrated in the least urban districts, where Trump has always been strongest, including sparsely settled distant suburbs and pure rural areas, according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump. But the GOP’s overall House success was constrained because the party still faced a virtual brick wall of resistance in the central cities and inner suburbs of the large metro areas that repeatedly rejected Trump: With about 10 races still to be called, Democrats have won 129 of the 140 seats in the three most urban districts, according to figures Bump provided to me.

    Such disappointing results have led more GOP leaders than at any point in Trump’s political career to publicly declare that the party must now move beyond him. Trump will likely also face much more serious resistance from party elites and leading conservative media outlets. His announcement speech had a musty feel, which may preview the difficulty he could face convincing GOP voters that his day has not passed. And in Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, Trump could face a challenger more formidable than any he swept aside in 2016.

    But, still, displacing Trump may not be so easy. Compared with the Democrats, the GOP presidential primary rules favor winner-take-all systems that benefit the candidate with the largest block of support, even if that’s less than a majority, Benjamin Ginsberg, the former chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, told me. That could benefit Trump because even if the disappointment over last week’s results shrinks his potential ceiling of support, he retains a dedicated floor among non-college-educated, nonurban, and evangelical white Republicans. In 2016, as I wrote at the time, Trump pulled away from the field to become the presumptive nominee at a point where he had not won 50 percent of the vote in any state and had captured only about 40 percent of all ballots cast.

    A second challenge is whether anyone, including DeSantis, can consolidate the college- educated Republican voters most resistant to the former president. Some early 2024 polls already show Trump attracting only about one-third of Republicans holding a four-year degree or more. But that’s about as much support from them as he captured during the competitive stage of the GOP race in 2016; he won because he amassed a dominant advantage among non-college Republicans (many of whom are also evangelical Christians), while those with degrees splintered among many alternatives, such as John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.

    That could easily happen again, particularly if candidates who position themselves as more centrist on social issues, such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, run. Both men are probably too moderate (or at least perceived that way) to win a GOP presidential nomination, but they could siphon away too many of the voters that a more viable alternative like DeSantis would need to overtake Trump.

    Then there is the grueling practical reality of running against Trump, who has shown himself willing to say and do almost anything. In 2016, he bludgeoned Cruz and Rubio so relentlessly that they still seem broken in a manner reminiscent of Game of Thrones. DeSantis might fare better, but until someone actually runs against Trump, it’s impossible to guarantee that they can handle the jackhammer pressure. Nor is it clear that the donors and strategists who now insist that the party must move on from Trump will remain steadfast if he threatens to trash the nominee or run as an independent should he lose.

    Another wild card is a possible indictment of the former president, from investigations by either the Justice Department or the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. An indictment could cause more Republican voters to reflexively rally around him. But it could also make some back away, either because his behavior offends them, or more likely, because they conclude that his legal troubles would further degrade his capacity to win a general election.

    Last week’s results signaled plenty of vulnerabilities also for Biden, including the national-exit-poll finding that two-thirds of voters do not want him to run again. But if the 2022 election demonstrated anything, it is that many Americans who are disappointed in Biden will stand with him and his party nonetheless if the alternative is to entrust power to a Trump-era GOP that they view as a threat to their rights, their values, and democracy itself. That’s the ominous prospect for GOP officials in swing states nervously watching Trump storm into the party’s next presidential nominating contest.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • How Abortion Defined the 2022 Midterms

    How Abortion Defined the 2022 Midterms

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    Ask anyone what Mehmet Oz said about reproductive rights during last month’s Pennsylvania Senate debate, and they’ll probably tell you that the TV doctor believes an abortion should be between “a woman, her doctor, and local political leaders.” The truth is, that dystopian Handmaid’s Tale–esque statement did not come verbatim from the Republican’s mouth. But it may have cost him the election anyway.

    Instead, that catchphrase entered Pennsylvania voters’ consciousness—and ricocheted across social media—via a tweet by Pat Dennis, a Democratic opposition researcher. Dennis’s megaviral post included a clip purporting to show Oz pitching something akin to a pregnancy tribunal. But the clip was, well, clipped: In the 10-second video, Oz does not even say the word abortion. Did it matter? Not in the least. Here was Oz’s fuller, unedited response to the question:

    There should not be involvement from the federal government in how states decide their abortion decisions. As a physician, I’ve been in the room when there’s some difficult conversations happening. I don’t want the federal government involved with that at all. I want women, doctors, local political leaders, letting the democracy that’s always allowed our nation to thrive to put the best ideas forward so states can decide for themselves.

    Although that by no means utterly rebuts Dennis’s three-clause summary, it is different. Of course, voters zeroed in on—and recoiled from—the pithier version. Oz failed to shake his association with the thorny abortion hypothetical, much as he failed to shake the long-running joke that he actually lives in New Jersey. Abortion decided this race, and Oz was on the wrong side of history.

    Read: Why this election is so weird

    In red and blue states alike, reproductive autonomy proved a defining issue of the 2022 midterms. Although much pre-election punditry predicted that Pennsylvania Democratic nominee John Fetterman’s post-stroke verbal disfluency was poised to “blow up” the pivotal Senate race on Election Day, the exit polls suggest that abortion seismically affected contests up and down the ballot.

    Concerns over the future of reproductive rights unequivocally drove Democratic turnout and will now lead to the rewriting of state laws around the country. In deep-red Kentucky, voters rejected an amendment that read, “Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.” In blue havens such as California and Vermont, voters approved ballot initiatives enshrining abortion rights into their state constitutions.

    In Michigan, a traditionally blue state that in recent years has turned more purple, voters likewise enshrined reproductive protections into law, with 45 percent of exit-poll respondents calling abortion the most important issue on the ballot. In the race for the Michigan statehouse, the incumbent Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, trounced her Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon, who had said that she supports abortion only in instances that would save the life of the woman, and never in the case of rape or incest. Dixon lost by more than 10 percentage points and almost half a million votes.

    After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision ended the federal right to abortion in June, many observers wondered whether pro-abortion-rights Democrats would remain paralyzed with despair or whether their anger would become a galvanizing force going into the election season. The answer is now clear—though, in fact, it has been for some time.

    Mary Ziegler: If the Supreme Court can reverse Roe, it can reverse anything

    In August, just six weeks after Dobbs, Kansas voters rejected an amendment to the state constitution that could have ushered in a ban on abortion. That grassroots-movement defeat of the ballot initiative was a genuine shocker—and it showed voters in other states what was possible at the local level.

    Nowhere in the midterms voting did abortion seem to matter more than in Pennsylvania. Oz, like his endorser, former President Donald Trump, spent years as a Northeast cosmopolitan before he tried, and failed, to remake himself as a paint-by-numbers conservative. That meant preaching a party-line stance during the most contentious national conversation about abortion in half a century. It came back to haunt him.

    At the October debate, Fetterman was mocked for (among other things) his simplistic, repetitive invocation of supporting Roe v. Wade. Even when asked by moderators to answer an abortion question in more detail, he simply kept coming back to the phrase. Whatever it lacked in nuance, Fetterman’s allegiance to his pro-abortion-rights position was impossible to misconstrue. This was an abortion election, and voters knew exactly where he stood.

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    John Hendrickson

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  • How Democrats Avoided a Red Wave

    How Democrats Avoided a Red Wave

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    The coalition of voters who turned out to oppose Donald Trump in 2018 and 2020 largely reassembled yesterday, frustrating Republican expectations of a sweeping red wave.

    Under the pressure of high inflation and widespread disenchantment with President Joe Biden’s job performance, that coalition of young voters, people of color, college-educated white voters, and women eroded at its edges. And because Democrats began the night with so little margin for error in Congress, that erosion—combined with high Republican turnout—seemed likely to allow the GOP to seize control of the House, and possibly the Senate as well.

    But even if the GOP does squeeze out majorities in one or both chambers when the final votes are counted, its margins will be exceedingly narrow, with control of the Senate, once again, possibly turning on another Georgia runoff. Up and down the ballot, Democrats dominated among voters who believe that abortion should remain legal—despite predictions from Republicans and many media analysts that the issue had faded in importance. Democrats held House seats in states including Rhode Island, Virginia, Michigan, and Ohio that Republicans had confidently expected to capture. And with the exception of Georgia, which reelected Governor Brian Kemp, Democrats could win gubernatorial races in each of the five swing states that flipped from Trump to Biden in 2020—a development that would greatly ease Democratic fears of Trump allies trying to rig the vote (and potentially the presidency) in 2024.

    David Frum: Trump lost the midterms. DeSantis won.

    The results largely followed the outline of what I’ve called a “double negative” election. On balance, voter dissatisfaction with Biden’s performance meant that Democrats faced more losses, but the continuing unease about the Republican Party lowered the ceiling on GOP gains well below what the party might have expected.

    These relatively positive results for Democrats were so striking because the findings of the national exit poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations, like virtually all preelection polling, showed deeply pessimistic attitudes that typically spell doom for the sitting president’s party. More than three-fourths of voters, Edison found, described the economy as only “fair” or “poor.” Four-fifths of voters said inflation had caused them either severe or moderate hardship. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they disapproved of Biden’s job performance as president. His approval stood even lower in many of the key Senate battleground states: 43 percent in Nevada and Arizona, 42 percent in New Hampshire, just 41 percent in Georgia.

    Exit polls suggested that unhappiness over the economy could doom the most embattled Democratic Senate incumbent, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, though that race remains on a knife’s edge awaiting the counting of the last mail ballots. Across a wide array of other battleground states, Republicans carried significant majorities of voters who expressed negative views on the economy.

    But Republicans did not win those economically pessimistic voters by quite as big a margin as midterm precedents had suggested. Usually, the party out of power has dominated voters with those views: Democrats, for instance, in 2018 won about 85 percent of those who described the economy as either not so good or poor. This year, Republicans slightly exceeded that result among those who called the economy “poor,” the most negative designation. But among those who gave the equivocal verdict of “not so good,” Republicans won only 62 percent, way down from the Democrats’ total four years ago.

    The relationship between presidential-approval ratings and the midterm vote was similar. Biden’s national job-approval rating in the exit poll (44 percent positive, 55 percent negative) resembled Trump’s in 2018 (45–54). But, compared with Republicans in 2018, Democrats this year carried slightly more of the voters who disapproved of Biden, as well as slightly more of those who approved of him. Particularly noteworthy: Democrats won almost exactly half of voters who said they “somewhat disapproved” of Biden, whereas about two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of both Trump in 2018 and Barack Obama in 2010 voted against their party in House races.

    These effects were even more pronounced in several of the battleground states. In 2018, no Republican Senate candidate in a competitive race carried more than 8 percent of the voters who disapproved of Trump, the exit polls found. But Cortez Masto and Raphael Warnock in Georgia carried about 10 percent of them, while Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona and Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman in Pennsylvania reached about 15 percent of support with Biden disapprovers, the exit polls found. In New Hampshire, the exit poll found Senator Maggie Hassan winning a striking one-fifth of voters who disapproved of Biden. Similarly, Warnock won about one-third of voters who described the economy as only fair or poor, while Kelly and Fetterman approached 40 percent with them in the exit polls. All of this may sound like a small difference—but it proved to be the margin between defeat and victory for Democrats in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, and potentially in Arizona and Georgia.

    David A. Graham: The divided states of America

    How did Democrats overperform recent historical trends with voters dissatisfied with the economy or the president? Attitudes about the former president, and the party he has reshaped in his image, may largely explain the difference. In the exit poll, nearly three-fifths of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Trump, and more than three-fourths of them voted Democratic this year. Many of the Republican Senate and gubernatorial candidates he helped propel to their nominations also faced negative assessments from voters. And despite predictions from both Republicans and media analysts that abortion had faded as a galvanizing issue, a clear three-fifths majority of all voters in the national exit poll said they believed that the procedure should remain legal in all or most circumstances—and about three-fourths of them voted Democratic. Democrats also won about three-fourths of the voters who said abortion should remain mostly legal in the key Senate states of Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and two-thirds of them in New Hampshire. In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer won a stunning four-fifths of the voters who said abortion should remain legal.

    These concerns about Trump and abortion rights didn’t completely erase voter discontent over the economy and inflation. Inflation still ranked highest when the exit polls asked voters what issues most concerned them (with abortion a very close second). And Republicans still won most of the voters who expressed the purest “double negative” views—those with unfavorable opinions of both Biden and Trump. But it’s hardly a surprise that the party out of the White House might win most voters who express an unfavorable view of the sitting president, no matter what other attitudes they hold. The notable part was that the exit poll found Democrats holding 40 percent of those double-negative voters—a number that helped them apparently avoid a titanic red wave.

    In the past, when midterms have turned decisively against the sitting president’s party, one reason is a backlash among independent voters, who are the most likely to shift allegiance based on current conditions in the country. Each time the president’s party suffered especially large losses in a midterm since the mid-1980s (a list of electoral calamities that includes 1986, 2006, and 2018 for Republicans and 1994, 2010, and 2014 for Democrats), independents have voted by a double-digit margin for House candidates from the other party, according to exit polls. But yesterday’s exit polls showed the two parties splitting independent voters about evenly on a national basis and Democrats winning among them in the Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania Senate races.

    The other ingredient in decisive midterm losses has been what political strategists call “differential turnout.” Almost always in American history, the party out of the White House has shown more urgency about voting in midterms than the side in power, but when midterms get really bad, that disparity becomes especially pronounced.

    A complete picture of this midterm won’t be available for months. But the early indications are that this year’s electorate leaned more toward the GOP than the past few campaigns. In 2020 and 2018, the exit polls found that self-identified Democrats made up slightly more of the voters than Republicans. But the exit polls yesterday showed Republicans with a slight edge.

    Young people gave Democrats preponderant margins in most races, but likely made up slightly less of the electorate than they did in 2018. Among voters of color, the story was similar—some erosion in support for Democrats, but not a catastrophic decline. The exit polls showed Democrats winning about 60 percent of Latino voters and 85 percent of Black voters. That was down just slightly from their level in 2020, though it represented a bigger fall from the party’s support with those voters in 2018. Republicans in the coming days will likely trumpet the continuing gains—though Democrats can fairly rebut that they have a clear opportunity to rebound if and when the economy recovers.

    Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Five things to know about midterm election results

    Before Election Day, conservative pundits speculated rampantly about a sweeping shift toward the GOP among nonwhite voters without a college degree—what Axios breathlessly declared “a political realignment in real time.” But Democrats nationally carried about two-thirds of those non-college-educated voters of color, almost exactly their share among minorities with degrees; the picture was similar in the heavily diverse states across the Sun Belt, the exit polls found. Among white voters, the familiar educational divides held: The national exit poll showed Democrats slightly underperforming expectations among college-educated whites (winning only about half of them) but still showing much better with them than among non-college-educated whites, who once again broke about two-to-one for the GOP. (College-educated white voters did provide more resounding margins for Kelly, Hassan, and Fetterman, the polls found.)

    The full results won’t be known for days, and control of the Senate may not be settled until another runoff election in Georgia. But the 2024 presidential contest will likely kick into motion almost immediately. Trump has repeatedly hinted that he may announce a 2024 candidacy as soon as next week—and the GOP’s gains, even if less than the party anticipated, will only encourage him.

    Throughout American history, midterm results have had little relationship to the results in the next presidential contest. Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush had relatively good first-term midterm results in 1978 and 1990, and then lost for reelection two years later. Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama were all shellacked in their first midterm and then won reelection.

    Could Biden follow those precedents and recover in time for 2024? Much will depend on the economy. Doug Sosnik, a senior White House adviser to President Clinton during his recovery after the 1994 midterm, pointed out that the period from fall of the third year to spring of the fourth year is when voters really lock in their judgment about a first-term president. That doesn’t leave Biden much runway to dispel the economic pessimism that weighed so heavily on Democrats yesterday. Many economists believe that the Federal Reserve Board’s actions will trigger at least a mild recession before squeezing out inflation, potentially by late next year.

    Given the doubts many voters have expressed about Biden’s age, it’s not clear that a rising economic tide would lift his prospects as much as it did for Reagan, Clinton, and Obama. Many Republicans (and even some Democrats) believe that the loss of the House, and possibly still the Senate, when all of this year’s votes are counted will increase pressure on Biden to step aside in 2024. In the exit polls, two-thirds of voters said they did not want to see Biden run again.

    Yet the GOP may be saddled with a 2024 nominee carrying even more baggage. Trump will inevitably interpret any GOP gains as a demand for his return. But even in a Republican-leaning electorate, the exit polls still registered enormous resistance to him.

    One of the night’s clearest winners was Trump’s most serious competitor for the next GOP nomination, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who won a convincing victory that included breakthrough results in heavily Latino Miami-Dade County. His success will likely embolden the Republicans urging the party to turn the page from Trump—though Trump has already signaled his willingness to bludgeon DeSantis to secure the nomination, the way he did Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz in 2016.

    For Biden, the situation will likely be more equivocal: The results for Democrats probably won’t prove good enough to completely quiet the chatter about replacing him, but nor will they likely prove so bad as to significantly amplify it. After this double-negative election produced something of a standoff between the parties in 2022, it remains entirely possible that the nation may find itself plunged into the same grueling trench warfare between Trump and Biden again two years from now.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • First CBS News exit polls released in 2022 midterms

    First CBS News exit polls released in 2022 midterms

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    First CBS News exit polls released in 2022 midterms – CBS News


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    The first exit polls have been released before results start to trickle in. Vladimir Duthiers takes a look at what voters said was on their minds as they headed to the ballot box.

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  • Midterm elections exit polls live updates: More voters prefer Republicans to control Congress

    Midterm elections exit polls live updates: More voters prefer Republicans to control Congress

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    Suburban women are divided 52% to 46%, on Democrat John Fetterman to Republican Mehmet Oz, according to preliminary results.

    Their clout in Senate races isn’t clear: They voted 62% to 37% for Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in 2018, but retiring Republican Sen. Toomey won in 2016 with just 46% support in this group.

    Meanwhile, 50% of Pennsylvania voters think Oz’s views are too extreme, while 45% say the same of Fetterman.

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  • The Double-Negative Election

    The Double-Negative Election

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    This has become the double-negative election.

    Most Americans consistently say in polls that they believe that President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats have mismanaged crime, the border, and, above all, the economy and inflation. But roughly as many Americans say that they view the modern Republican Party as a threat to their rights, their values, or to democracy itself.

    Based on Biden’s first two years in office, surveys show that most Americans are reluctant to continue following the policy path he has laid out. But polls also show no enthusiasm for returning to the programs, priorities, and daily chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency. In an NBC national survey released last weekend, half of registered voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and congressional Democrats want to do, but more than that said the same about congressional Republicans and Trump. About half of all voters said they had little, or no, confidence in either party to improve the economy, according to another recent national survey from CNBC.

    Read: Why this election is so weird

    It remains likely that two negatives will still yield a positive result for Republicans. Most voters with little faith in both sides may ultimately decide simply to give a chance to the party that’s not in charge now, Jay Campbell, a Democratic pollster who helps conduct the CNBC survey, told me. That would provide a late boost to the GOP, particularly in House races, where the individual candidates are less well known. But even if that dynamic develops, Campbell said, the Democrats’ ability to hold so much of their coalition over concerns about the broader Republican agenda has reduced the odds that the GOP can generate the kind of decisive midterm gains enjoyed by Democrats in 2018 and 2006, or Republicans in 2010 and 1994.

    If Republicans make only modest gains this fall, it will be a clear warning that the party, as currently defined by Trump’s imprint, faces a hard ceiling on its potential support. But even a small Republican gain would send Democrats an equal warning that concerns about the GOP’s values and commitment to democracy may not be sufficient to deny them the White House in 2024. “If I was advising the Biden administration, I would say this is the No. 1 priority: Fix the fundamentals,” John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University and a co-author of a new book on the 2020 presidential election, The Bitter End, told me. “The biggest priority is inflation, and everything else is secondary.”

    By precedent, Democrats should be facing a rout next month. That’s partly because the first midterm election for a new president is almost always tough on his party, but also because most voters express deep pessimism about the country’s current conditions. Despite robust job growth, the combination of inflation, rising interest rates, and tumbling stock markets has generated intense economic dissatisfaction. National surveys, like last week’s CNBC poll, routinely find that on key economic measures, voters prefer Republicans over Democrats by double-digit margins. A September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that nearly three-fifths of voters say Biden’s policies have weakened the economy, compared with only about one-third who say they have strengthened it.

    Given those attitudes, academic models predict that Democrats should lose about 40 to 45 House seats next month, Sides recently noted.

    Likewise, Democrats are swimming upstream against the growing tendency of voters to align their selections for the Senate with their assessment of the incumbent president. In 2018, Republicans lost every Senate race in a state where Trump’s approval rating in exit polls stood at 48 percent or less; in 2010, Democrats lost 13 of the 15 Senate races in states where then-President Barack Obama’s approval rating stood at 47 percent or less. This year, Biden’s approval rating does not exceed 45 percent in any of the states hosting the most hotly contested Senate races, and more often stands at only about 40 percent, or even less.

    These precedents could ultimately produce Republican gains closer to these historic benchmarks. In polling, the party out of the White House traditionally has gained strength in the final weeks before midterm voting, as most undecided and less-attuned voters break their way.

    Bill McInturff, a veteran Republican pollster, told me that dynamic could be compounded this year because independent and less partisan voters remain focused on inflation (rather than the issues of abortion and democracy animating Democrats) and express preponderantly negative views about the economy and Biden’s performance. Campbell agreed that for those reasons, independent voters could move against Democrats, especially in House races. The number of blue-leaning House districts where Democrats are nonetheless spending heavily on defense in the final weeks testifies to that likelihood. Several House-race forecasters have recently upped their projections of likely Republican gains closer to the midterm average since World War II for the party out of the White House, about 26 seats.

    But even with all of these formidable headwinds, Democrats have remained highly competitive in polling on national sentiment for the House, and in the key Senate battlegrounds (including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). And although Democrats face unexpectedly difficult challenges in governor’s races in New York and Oregon, they remain ahead or well within reach in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. To be sure, Democrats are not decisive favorites in any of these races (except for governor of Pennsylvania), but despite the gloomy national climate, neither have any of these contests moved out of their reach.

    That’s largely because the party has minimized defections and increased engagement from the key groups in its coalition—including young people, college-educated voters, women, and people of color—by focusing more attention on issues where those voters perceive the Trump-era GOP as a threat. Weak or extreme Republican candidates have eased that work in several of these Senate and governor races.

    But another factor allowing Democrats to remain competitive is that, for all the doubts Americans are expressing about their performance, there is no evidence of rising confidence in Republicans.

    Read: What to expect when you’re expecting a Republican house

    For instance, the latest national NBC survey, conducted by the bipartisan team of Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research, found that 48 percent of voters said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who promised to continue Biden’s policies. That sounds ominous for Democrats, but voters were slightly more negative about a candidate who promised to pursue Trump’s policies (50 percent less likely). Only about one-third of independents said they preferred a candidate who would continue the policies of either Biden or Trump. All of that tracks with the survey’s other finding that although half of voters said they disagreed with most of what Biden and the Democrats are trying to do, even more said they mostly disagreed with the agenda of congressional Republicans (53 percent) and Trump (56 percent).

    Other polls have also found this double-barreled skepticism. The latest CNBC poll (also conducted by the Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies team) found the two parties facing almost identically bleak verdicts on their ability to improve the economy: Only a little more than one-fifth of voters expressed much confidence in each party, while more than three-fourths expressed little or none.

    When a Yahoo/YouGov America poll recently asked whether each party was focusing on the right issues, only about 30 percent of voters in each case said yes, and about half said no. Only about one-fourth of women said Republicans have the right priorities; only about one-fourth of men said Democrats have the right priorities. The capstone on all of these attitudes is the consistent finding that most Americans (an identical 57 percent in the Yahoo/You Gov survey) don’t want either Biden or Trump to run again in 2024.

    In baseball, they say a tie goes to the runner. The political analogue might be that equally negative assessments of the two parties are likely to break in favor of the side out of power. Campbell points out that while a striking 81 percent of independents say they have little or no confidence in Republicans to improve the economy, that number rises to 90 percent about Democrats. In the NBC survey, voters who said they mostly disagreed with both Biden’s and Trump’s policy agenda preferred Republicans to control Congress by a margin of three to one, according to detailed results provided by McInturff.

    Democrats seem acutely, though perhaps belatedly, aware of these challenges. They now warn that Republicans, if given control of one or both congressional chambers, would threaten Medicare and Social Security, most pointedly by demanding cuts in return for raising the federal debt ceiling next year. But it’s not clear that those arguments can break through the lived reality of higher prices for gas and groceries squeezing so many families. “Inflation, rising gas prices, interest rates—those are things people feel every day,” Tony Fabrizio, the lead pollster for Trump in 2020, told me recently. “There is no TV commercial that is going to change what they feel when they go to the grocery store or the gas station.”

    The challenge those daily realities pose to Democrats is not unique: As the political analyst John Halpin recently noted, “inflation is a political wrecking ball for incumbent governments” across the Western world (as demonstrated by England’s recent chaos and the election of right-wing governments in Sweden and Italy). No democratically elected government may enjoy much security until more people in its country feel secure about their own finances. For Democrats, the risk of an unexpectedly bad outcome next month seems greater than the possibility of an unexpectedly good one.

    Republican gains this fall would only extend a core dynamic of modern American politics: the inability of either party to establish a durable advantage over the other. If Democrats lose one or both congressional chambers, it will mark the fifth consecutive time that a president who went into a midterm election with unified control of government has lost it. The prospect of very tight races next month in almost all of the same states that decided the 2020 presidential election underscores the likelihood that the 2024 race for the White House will again divide the country closely and bitterly.

    Yet the undertow threatening Democrats now previews the difficulty they will face in two years if economic conditions don’t improve. In presidential races, political scientists say voters start to harden their verdicts on the economy about a year before Election Day. That means Biden is running out of time to tame inflation, especially if, as most economists expect, doing so will require at least a modest recession. Even amid widespread anxiety about both inflation and recession, Democrats remain competitive this fall by highlighting doubts about Republicans, particularly among the voters in their own coalition. But that cannot be an experiment any Democrat would look forward to repeating in 2024.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Exit poll: Center-right GERB party will win Bulgarian vote

    Exit poll: Center-right GERB party will win Bulgarian vote

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    SOFIA, Bulgaria — An exit poll in Bulgaria suggested Sunday that the center-right GERB party of ex-premier Boyko Borissov, a party blamed for presiding over years of corruption, will be the likely winner of Bulgaria’s parliamentary election.

    The poll conducted by Gallup International showed the GERB party earning 24.6% support, apparently edging out the reformist We Continue the Change pro-Western party of former Prime Minister Kiril Petkov, which is expected to capture 18.9%. Still, the predicted percentage won’t be enough for Borissov’s party to form a one-party government, and the chances for a GERB-led coalition are slim.

    The exit poll also predicted that eight parties could pass the 4% threshold to enter a fragmented parliament with populist and pro-Russia groups showing increased gains.

    The European Union nation’s fourth election in 18 months was marked by a raging war nearby, political instability and economic hardships in the bloc’s poorest member. A low turnout reflected voter apathy.

    Petkov conceded defeat late Sunday.

    “We lost the election, albeit by a small margin, and now GERB has the responsibility to form a coalition and govern the country,” he said.

    It could take days before the final official results are announced. If they confirm the exit poll, Borisov will be handed a mandate to form his fourth cabinet. It will be an uphill task for him to produce a stable governing coalition, however, since most political groups have in advance rejected any cooperation with his GERB party, which presided over years of corruption that hampered development.

    The early election came after a fragile coalition led by Petkov lost a no-confidence vote in June. He claimed afterward that Moscow had used “hybrid war” tactics to bring down his government after it refused to pay gas bills in rubles and ordered an expulsion of Russian diplomats from Bulgaria.

    The deputy chief of the European Council on Foreign Relations, Vessela Cherneva, said the predicted result could produce two types of coalitions: an anti-corruption coalition, in which GERB under Borissov would find no place, or a geopolitical coalition of the centrist parties, which would be possible only if Borissov resigns from leading his party.

    “The scenario under which there is no coalition possible would undermine parliamentary democracy in Bulgaria and will further tilt the balance towards the pro-Russian President (Rumen) Radev,” Cherneva said.

    After casting his vote Sunday, Borissov told reporters that Bulgaria needs to clearly position itself on Russia’s war in Ukraine.

    “With this aggression, with this war with a clear aggressor in the face of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin – (I have) nothing against the Russian people — with this farce with the referendums, Bulgaria must be very clear, categorical, and precise about its place in the European Union and NATO,” he said.

    He said getting Bulgaria into Europe’s 19-nation shared currency eurozone should be the next government’s most important task.

    Petkov ran on promises to continue efforts to eradicate corruption, but a European energy crisis sparked by Russia’s war on Ukraine was the dominant economic theme for voters.

    Many Bulgarians share pro-Russia sentiments, which provides fertile soil for aggressive Kremlin propaganda in the Balkan country.

    The pro-Russia party Vazrazhdane, riding on those feelings, captured 10.2% of the vote, up from 4.9% in the previous election, the exit poll predicted.

    Unlike the stance taken by the EU, which has fully condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine and slapped sanctions on Russia for it, Vazrazhdane leader Kostadin Kostadinov has urged “full neutrality” for Bulgaria in the war.

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