Tag: PBS NewsHour

Trump’s Legal Problems Are Putting the GOP in a Vise

The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee.

In the days leading up to the indictment of the former president, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced two days ago, a succession of polls showed that Trump has significantly increased his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest competitor in the race for the Republican nomination.

Yet recent surveys have also signaled that this criminal charge—and other potential indictments from ongoing investigations—could deepen the doubts about Trump among the suburban swing voters who decisively rejected him in the 2020 presidential race, and powered surprisingly strong performances by Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.

“It is definitely a conundrum that this potentially helps him in the primary yet sinks the party’s chances to win the general,” says Mike DuHaime, a GOP strategist who advises former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a potential candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination. “This better positions [in the primary] our worst candidate for the general election.”

That conundrum will only intensify for Republicans, because it is highly likely that this is merely the beginning of Trump’s legal troubles. As the first indictment against a former president, the New York proceeding has thrust the U.S. into uncharted waters. But the country today is not nearly as far from shore as it may be in just a few months. Trump faces multiple additional potential indictments. Those include possible charges from Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, who has been examining his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state, as well as the twin federal probes led by Special Counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to block congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

“I think I had a pretty good track record on my predictions and my strong belief is that there will be additional criminal charges coming in other places,” says Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I think you are going to see them in Georgia and possibly [at the] federal” level.

The potential for such further criminal proceedings is why many political observers are cautious about drawing too many firm conclusions from polling around public reaction to this first indictment, which centers on Trump’s payment of hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels late in the 2016 campaign.

Read: The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment

The multiple legal nets tightening around Trump create the possibility that he could be going through one or even multiple trials by the time of next year’s general election, and conceivably even when the GOP primaries begin in the winter of 2024. In other words, Trump might bounce back and forth between campaign rallies in Iowa or New Hampshire and court appearances in New York City, Atlanta, or Washington D.C. And such jarring images could change the public perceptions that polls are recording now.

“You are just looking at a snapshot of how people feel today,” Dave Wilson, a conservative strategist, told me.

Yet even these initial reactions show how Trump’s legal troubles may place his party in a vise.

Polls consistently show that Trump, over the past several weeks, has widened his lead over DeSantis and the rest of the potential 2024 field. That may be partly because Trump has intensified his attacks on DeSantis, and because the Florida governor has at times seemed unsteady in his debut on the national stage.

But most Republicans think Trump is also benefiting from an impulse among GOP voters to lock arms around him as the Manhattan investigation has proceeded. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released this week, four-fifths of Republicans described the various investigations targeting Trump as a “witch hunt,” echoing his own denunciation of them. “There’s going to be some level of emotional response to someone being quote-unquote attacked,” Wilson said. “That’s going to get some sympathy points that will probably bolster poll numbers.”

Republican leaders, as so many times before, have tightened their own straitjacket by defending Trump on these allegations so unreservedly. House GOP leaders have launched unprecedented attempts to impede Bragg’s investigation by demanding documents and testimony, and even Trump’s potential 2024 rivals have condemned the indictment as a politically motivated hit job; DeSantis may have had the most extreme reaction by not only calling the indictment “un-American” but even insisting he would not cooperate with extraditing Trump from Florida if it came to that (a pledge that is moot because Trump has indicated he plans to turn himself in on Tuesday.)

As during the procession of outrages and controversies during Trump’s presidency, most Republicans skeptical of him have been unwilling to do anything more than remain silent. (Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot potential 2024 candidate, has been the most conspicuous exception, issuing a statement that urged Americans “to wait on the facts” before judging the case.) The refusal of party leaders to confront Trump is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because GOP voters hear no other arguments from voices they trust, they fall in line behind the assertion from Trump and the leading conservative media sources that the probes are groundless persecution. Republican elected officials then cite that dominant opinion as the justification for remaining silent.

But while the investigations may be bolstering Trump’s position inside the GOP in the near-term, they also appear to be highlighting all the aspects of his political identity that have alienated so many swing voters, especially those with college degrees. In that same NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, 56 percent of Americans rejected Trump’s “witch hunt” characterization and described the investigations as “fair”; 60 percent of college-educated white adults, the key constituency that abandoned the GOP in the Trump years, said the probes were fair. So did a slight majority of independent voters.

In new national results released yesterday morning, the Navigator project, a Democratic polling initiative, similarly found that 57 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of independents, agreed that Trump should be indicted when they read a description of the hush-money allegations against him.

Read: What Donald Trump’s indictment reveals

The Manhattan indictment “may keep his people with him, it may fire them up, but he’s starting from well under 50 percent of the vote,” Mike DuHaime told me. “Somebody like that must figure out how to get new voters. And he is not gaining new voters with a controversial new indictment, whether he beats it or not.” Swing voters following the case in New York, DuHaime continued, “may not like it, they may think Democrats have gone too far, and that might be fair.” But it’s wishful thinking, he argues, to believe that voters previously resistant to Trump will conclude they need to give him another look because he’s facing criminal charges for paying off a porn star, even if they view the charges themselves as questionable.

The NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist survey underlines DuHaime’s point about the limits of Trump’s existing support: In that survey, a 61 percent majority of Americans—including 64 percent of independents and 70 percent of college-educated white adults—said they did not want him to be president again. That result was similar to the latest Quinnipiac University national poll, which found that 60 percent of Americans do not consider themselves supporters of Trump’s “Make America great again” movement. The challenge for the GOP is that about four-fifths of Republicans said they did consider themselves part of that movement, and about three-fourths said they wanted him back in the White House.

The open question for Trump is whether this level of support, even in the GOP, may be his high-water mark as the investigations proceed. Eisner and John Dean, the former White House counsel for Richard Nixon, both told me they believe that the New York case may be more threatening to Trump than many legal analysts have suggested. “I think that the New York case is much stronger than people perceive it to be,” Dean told me yesterday. “We really don’t know the contents of the indictment, and we really won’t know for a much longer time the evidence behind the indictment.”

Whatever happens in New York, Trump still faces the prospect of indictments on the more consequential charges looming over him in Georgia and from the federal special prosecutor. Dean says that Bragg’s indictment, rather than discouraging other prosecutors to act “may have the opposite effect” of emboldening them. Trump “has escaped accountability literally his entire life and it finally appears to be catching up with him,” Dean says. Academic research, he adds, has suggested that defendants juggling multiple trials, either simultaneously or sequentially, find it “much harder to mount effective defenses.”

Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, the Democratic polling consortium that conducts the Navigator surveys, says the potential for multiple indictments presents Trump with a parallel political risk: The number of voters who believe he has committed at least one crime is very likely to rise if the criminal charges against him accumulate. “It’s hard to imagine any scenario where multiple indictments is useful” to him, Bennett told me.

DuHaime and Wilson both believe that multiple indictments eventually could weigh down Trump even in the GOP primary. “The cumulative effect takes away some of the argument that it’s just political,” DuHaime said. Each additional indictment, he continued, “may add credibility” for the public to those that came before.

Wilson believes that repeated indictments could reinforce the sense among Republican voters that Trump is being treated unfairly, and deepen their desire to turn the page from him. He likens the effect to someone living along a “Hurricane Alley,” who experiences not one destructive storm in a season but several. “The weight of a single hurricane blowing through is one thing,” Wilson told me. “But if you have several hurricanes of issues blowing through, you will get conservatives [saying], ‘I don’t know if I want to continue living in Hurricane Alley’ with Trump, and they are going to look at other candidates.”

Given Trump’s hold on a big portion of the GOP coalition, no one should discount his capacity to win the party nomination next year, no matter how many criminal cases ensnare him. And given the persistent public dissatisfaction with the economy and lackluster job approval ratings for Biden, no one dismisses the capacity of whoever captures the Republican nomination to win the general election.

The best-case scenario sketched by Trump supporters is that a succession of indictments will allow him to inspire even higher turnout among the predominantly non-college-educated and non-urban white voters who accept his argument that “liberal elites” and the “deep state” are targeting him to silence them. But even the heroic levels of turnout Trump inspired from those voters in 2020 wasn’t enough to win. For the GOP to bet that Trump could overcome swing-voter revulsion over his legal troubles and win a general election by mobilizing even more of his base voters, Bennett said, “seems to me the highest risk proposition that I can imagine.”

Ronald Brownstein

Source link

April 1, 2023
The Double-Negative Election

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.

Ronald Brownstein

Source link

October 28, 2022
What Will Happen in Georgia?

ATLANTA—The three dozen young Black men and women who gathered in a church meeting room last Friday night were greeted with a rousing exhortation that had the added benefit of being true.

In welcoming remarks, Bryce Berry, a senior at nearby Morehouse College and the president of the Young Democrats of Georgia club, told the group that none of the party’s national-policy accomplishments of the past two years would have been possible without people like them. “Without young Georgians, young Black Georgians,” Berry said for emphasis, “there would be no Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, no American Rescue Plan … no Inflation Reduction Act, no student-debt relief, and no gun-safety bill.”

It was the sort of thing speakers always say to motivate a crowd at political rallies. But in this case it was historically accurate: Massive turnout and huge margins among young voters, especially young voters of color, were crucial to the twin runoff victories of Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock in January 2021 that delivered Democrats their unexpected majority in the upper chamber.

Young adults have become an essential electoral asset for Democrats—and loom as a potentially decisive factor in determining whether the party can avoid the worst outcomes up and down the ballot this November. In particular, young voters may decide whether Democrats can preserve the fragile hold on the Senate that Georgia provided to them.

A sharp generation gap is among the most consistent findings in public polling across almost every competitive Senate race this year. Here in Georgia, for instance, an array of recent public polls (including surveys by Quinnipiac University, Marist College, Monmouth University, and the University of Georgia) have found Warnock leading the Republican Herschel Walker by as much as two to one among young adults from about 18 to 34 and consistently by a margin of about 10 percentage points among those in early middle age. Polls almost always show Walker at least slightly ahead among those in their later working years, and solidly leading among those 65 and older. (This week’s explosive allegations about Walker—the claim that he allegedly funded an abortion for a girlfriend and the subsequent accusations of domestic violence from his son—seem likely to weaken him, perhaps substantially, with every group, but are unlikely to erase these sharp generational differences.)

David A. Graham: Herschel Walker is demonstrating the new law of politics

These patterns are so common across the competitive states that it’s hard to imagine Democrats maintaining their Senate majority unless young voters like those who gathered at Atlanta’s Allen Temple AME Church turn out in substantial numbers.

Compared with older generations, Millennials and members of Generation Z are more racially diverse, more likely to hold postsecondary degrees, and less likely to identify with any religious tradition. Both cohorts have leaned sharply Democratic since the first Millennials entered the electorate in large numbers in the 2004 election; the party has routinely carried about three-fifths of young adults in recent presidential contests. In 2018, Democrats hit a peak of support among young voters, winning two-thirds of those younger than 30 and three-fifths of those ages 30 to 44, according to estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm.

Millennials and Gen Z are especially crucial to Democratic fortunes across Sun Belt states like Georgia and Arizona. In this region, younger generations are far more racially diverse than the mostly white, older voters who provide the backbone of GOP strength. In Arizona, for instance, Latino voters and other people of color compose almost three-fifths of the population under 30 but less than one-fifth of the population over 65, according to calculations from census data by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro. In Georgia, Black voters and other people of color represent half of eligible voters under 45 but only three in 10 of those over 65. The gap between what I’ve called “the brown and the gray”—the diverse younger and the mostly white older generations—is comparably large in Texas and Nevada and nearly as big in North Carolina, Frey’s data show.

For Democrats, this year’s nightmare scenario of losing both the House and Senate is a repeat of 2010 and 2014, when the GOP midterm sweeps were turbocharged by a catastrophic falloff in turnout among young people from the presidential race two years earlier.

The anemic youth turnout in those off-year elections during Barack Obama’s presidency fueled a widespread perception that Democrats now faced a structural disadvantage in midterms because the electorate in those years was destined to be much older and whiter than in the presidential contest. But the 2018 results upended that assumption: Much more robust turnout among young adults helped power the Democratic gains that allowed them to recapture the House of Representatives. Compared with 2014, youth turnout increased in every state in 2018, more than doubling across the country overall, Circle, a think tank at Tufts University that studies young voters, has calculated. Some of the biggest increases occurred in Sun Belt states where the youth population is the most racially diverse, including Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.

The turnout surge continued into 2020, when exactly half of adults younger than 30 showed up to vote, a big increase from the 39 percent in 2016, Circle concluded. Georgia again ranked among the states with the biggest youth-turnout increase compared with 2016—a key factor in the Democrats’ razor-thin victories there in the presidential race and the two Senate runoffs.

Democrats this year are highly unlikely to win as big a share of youth voters as they did during their 2018 sweep (they didn’t even equal it in 2020). But one of the pivotal questions remaining for the 2022 election is how close Democrats can come to matching the strength with young voters they displayed while Donald Trump was in the White House.

Democrats face some serious headwinds. Never enthusiastic about President Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic primaries, young people have given him lackluster approval ratings throughout his presidency. Generally operating with less of a financial cushion than older voters, young people have also been more affected by the highest inflation in four decades. “The cost of living is going up, but our salaries are not,” Alexia Brookins, a manager at a construction company, told me at the AME event sponsored by the group Millennials of Faith last weekend.

In a mid-September NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, just 37 percent of Millennials and Gen Z said that Biden’s actions had strengthened the economy; 55 percent said that he had weakened it. In a late-September Yahoo News/YouGov survey, only about one-fifth of young adults ages 18 to 44 said life was better for people like them since Biden took office (the rest said it was unchanged or worse).

Annie Lowrey: Generation Z doesn’t remember when America worked

Terrance Woodbury, a partner at HIT Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm that focuses on young voters of color, worries that these verdicts will make it difficult for Democrats to reach the turnout and margins they need among young voters. In polling that HIT recently conducted for the NAACP, he told me, three-fourths of Black adults younger than 50 said their lives had not improved since Biden took office.

Woodbury told me that although the media seem fixated on whether potential Republican gains among men will widen the Black gender gap this year, he expects that the “generational gap” in the African American community will be much wider. “Younger voters are much more likely to say Democrats take Black voters for granted, much less likely to approve of the direction of the country, and much less likely to approve of the performance of Democrats in Congress and the White House,” he told me. “All of that is significantly higher by generation than by gender. I actually do think there is a real risk of Democrats underperforming with young voters, and specifically young voters of color.” Equis Research, a Democratic polling firm that specializes in Latino voters, raised similar warnings about young Hispanic voters in a late-September memo analyzing the upcoming election.

But other factors may help Democrats approach, if not necessarily match, their recent advantages with young voters.

More young adults may vote in 2022 simply because so many of them registered and voted in 2018 and 2020. One reason for that is structural: “There are more young people on the voter rolls because of the [2018 and 2020] elections, which is a huge boost, because it means they are more likely to be contacted by parties and organizations,” and those contacts increase the likelihood of people voting, Abby Kiesa, Circle’s deputy director, told me.

The other key reason is attitudinal: Higher youth turnout may mean that not only is voting becoming a habit for those who have already done it; it is also becoming more expected among the 18-year-olds who age into the electorate every two years (more than 8 million of them since 2020, Circle projects). At the AME event, for instance, Kendeius Mitchell, a disability-claims manager, told me that youth engagement in Georgia is feeding on itself. “Just having it around so much in the conversation now is making people take accountability,” he said.

John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, sees the same trend in the institute’s national surveys. “Voting … could be becoming a part of this new generation and how they think,” he told me.

Read: The GOP’s demographic doom

Also lifting Democratic hopes is the party’s summer succession of policy advances on issues important to young people. Della Volpe said the “No. 1” criticism of Biden among young adults in the Harvard poll was “ineffectiveness.” But the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, with its sweeping provisions to combat climate change, and the president’s decision to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers have provided Democratic organizers and ad makers something they lacked earlier this year: evidence to argue to young adults that their votes did produce change on things they care about. Biden gave organizers another talking point yesterday afternoon, when he announced a sweeping pardon of all people convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law.

On the ground in Georgia, Keron Blair, the chief organizing and field officer for the New Georgia Project, a grassroots political organization founded by the Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, told me that with the Democrats’ recent successes, “it feels a little bit easier” than in the spring to make the case to young adults that their vote counts.

Looking across the overall record of Democrats since they took power, “people aren’t like, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing,’” Blair told me. “But people are clear that some of the wins and the political and economic shifts that we are seeing [are] the result of the [voting] choices that people have made.”

Also working for Democrats is the gulf in values between most young voters and the Trump-era Republican Party. Fully 70 percent of adults younger than 30, for instance, said in a Pew Research Center poll this summer that abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, by far the most of any age group. That places them in sharp opposition to a GOP that is intensifying talk of passing a national ban on abortion if it wins control of Congress. “If we maintain that [recent] surge among young voters and voters of color,” Woodbury said, “they are voting against the crazy on the other side.”

Although different public surveys have sent different signals about youth engagement, the latest IOP youth survey, which is considered a benchmark in the field, found that as many young people said they “definitely” intend to vote this fall as did in 2018.

That prospect points toward an incremental but inexorable power shift. In 2020, for the first time, Millennials and Gen Z roughly equaled Baby Boomers and their elders as a share of eligible voters. By 2024, the younger generations will establish a clear advantage. As their numbers grow, so does their capacity to influence the national direction. There’s no guarantee they will exercise that inherent power next month by turning out to vote in large numbers. But more young people appear to be recognizing how much their choices can matter. Berry, the young Georgia activist, told me that his message to his friends is centered on understanding the strength in numbers that they are accumulating: “I really impress on folks, ‘Look at what happened because of you. You understood the moment in 2020; now you have to understand the moment in 2022.’”

Ronald Brownstein

Source link

October 7, 2022
Fauci Addresses ‘The Pandemic Is Over’

Several days after President Joe Biden declared that “the pandemic is over,” Anthony Fauci weighed in on the president’s controversial remarks during an interview at The Atlantic Festival, an annual live event in Washington, D.C.

“He was saying we’re in a much better place with regard to the fulminant stage of the pandemic,” Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, said. “It really becomes semantics and about how you want to spin it.”

By “the fulminant stage,” he meant the phase of the coronavirus pandemic during which we saw sudden, unpredictable spikes in disease and death. Thanks in large part to vaccines and antivirals, Fauci explained, we are now in a new phase, one in which even as case counts and hospitalization numbers fluctuate, death tolls hold fairly constant. The United States is no longer seeing thousands of deaths a day, and for many Americans, the risk of serious illness has declined dramatically.

Read: Are we really getting COVID boosters every year forever?

Still, the idea that declaring the pandemic over is truly a matter of semantics is a fraught message coming from the nation’s top public-health communicator. Especially during the rollout of the country’s first Omicron-specific boosters, some experts and insiders worry that the declaration could have real consequences: Six administration officials told The Washington Post that the president’s comments would likely make the tasks of persuading Americans to get shots and securing funding from Congress even more challenging than they already were.

Watch: Atlantic deputy editor Ross Andersen in conversation with Anthony Fauci

Fauci is not the only administration official who has walked back the president’s remarks, which came just a few days after Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, said, “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.” According to Politico, Biden’s remarks caught senior administration health officials off guard, and indeed, in the following days, the White House clarified that the president was referring to public sentiment, not epidemiological reality. “The president,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told Yahoo Finance, “was reflecting what so many Americans are thinking and feeling.” (In today’s interview, Fauci built on Ghebreyesus’s sentiment with a trademark Fauci-ism: Easing up on our efforts to fight the pandemic now, he said, would be like saying, “Just because I see what the finish line is, I’m gonna stop and get a hot dog. No, you don’t want to do that.”)

Fauci himself is no stranger to the delicate art of discussing the pandemic’s end. In a late-April interview with PBS NewsHour, he said that the United States was “out of the pandemic phase,” only to reverse course the next day and say that the country (along with the entire world) was “still experiencing a pandemic.” Last month, when he announced that he would step down from his government position by the year’s end, Fauci said that he was not satisfied with this state of affairs. “I’m not happy about the fact that we still have 400 deaths per day,” he said. “We need to do much better than that … But I hope that over the next couple of months, things will improve.”

So far, they have not. Statistically speaking, not a whole lot has changed since last month—or, for that matter, since late April: Average daily cases, which Fauci acknowledged are an underestimate, are up slightly, from about 50,000 to just under 60,000. The numbers of people hospitalized and in ICUs rose to a peak in late July and have slowly declined since. Death tolls have held fairly constant, as Fauci said, at about 400 a day. And modelers think they may remain there for a while yet. “I’ll say it even today,” Fauci repeated. “Four hundred deaths per day is not an acceptable number as far as I’m concerned.”

Read: Hundreds of Americans will die from COVID today

Meanwhile, America has done away with nearly all of its pandemic precautions, and Congress has declined to renew funding for vaccines and therapeutics. Whether or not the pandemic really is behind us, many people are living as if it is. An Axios/Ipsos poll released last week found that nearly half of Americans have returned to their pre-COVID lives, and 66 percent only occasionally or never wear a mask in public indoor spaces—by far the highest percentage that has given that answer since pollsters first posed the question in May 2021.

In his wide-ranging interview at The Atlantic Festival, Fauci touched on a number of other topics, including his decades of work on the HIV/AIDS crisis, the politicization of public health, and how during the pandemic he’s become something of a larger-than-life figure—to both those who adore him and those who despise him. He laughed about the Dr. Fauci–themed candles, bobbleheads, and other paraphernalia that are sent to him. “That is as unrealistic in many respects as the craziness of people who want to decapitate me because I’m ruining the economy,” he said.

Fauci also addressed the origins of the coronavirus, repeating his oft-cited position that while he keeps an open mind to theories that the virus leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China, evidence points toward natural spillover from animals in a market in the city. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever get definitive proof in either direction, he said, but one thing that would help is greater transparency from the Chinese government, beginning with answers to the question of what exactly happened at the Wuhan wet market to which some of the earliest COVID cases have been traced.

“The thing I think would be the best thing to do would be to open up those markets,” which are now closed to investigation, Fauci said. “If we were able to go and do surveillance easily in China, we would get a lot more information than we have now.”

Jacob Stern

Source link

September 21, 2022
Why This Election Is So Weird

The two major factors shaping the 2022 midterm elections collided in tumultuous fashion on Tuesday morning.

First came the government report that inflation last month had increased faster than economists had expected or President Joe Biden had hoped. The announcement triggered a sharp fall in the stock market, the worst day on Wall Street in two years.

That same afternoon, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced legislation that would impose a nationwide ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

The inflation report captured this year’s most powerful tailwind for Republicans: widespread dissatisfaction with Biden’s management of the economy. Graham’s announcement captured this year’s strongest Democratic tailwind: widespread unease about abortion rights.

Molly Jong-Fast: Of course voters care about abortion

The shift in the campaign debate away from Biden’s management of the economy and toward the GOP’s priorities on abortion and other issues has been the principal factor improving Democratic prospects since earlier this summer. But the unexpectedly pessimistic inflation report—which showed soaring grocery and housing bills overshadowing a steady decline in gasoline prices—was a pointed reminder that the economy remains a formidable threat to Democrats in November.

These two events also underscored how, to an extremely unusual degree, the parties are talking past each other. As the Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me, 2022 is not an election year when most Americans “agree on what the top priorities [for the country] are” and debate “different solutions” from the two major parties.

Instead, surveys show that Republican voters stress inflation, the overall condition of the economy, crime, and immigration. For Democratic voters, the top priorities are abortion rights, the threats to democracy created by former President Donald Trump and his movement, gun control, climate change, and health care.

Few questions may shape the November results as much as whether the issues Democrats are stressing continue to motivate roughly as many voters as Republicans’ preferred issues. Gene Ulm, a Republican pollster, told me he believes that pocketbook strains will ultimately prove decisive for most voters, particularly those without a college degree. Those voters, he added, are basically saying, “‘I am worried about putting food on the table, and you are talking to me about all this other crap.’”

Yet there is no question that Democratic candidates are performing far above the consistently bleak public assessments of the economy, and especially Biden’s management of it. In one sense, that’s not shocking: Over the past few decades, voters’ economic assessments have become less predictive of election results, in large part because those judgments are themselves so heavily shaped by partisanship. But even in light of that trend, the disconnect between voters’ views on Biden’s economic management and their willingness to support Democratic candidates for the House and Senate remains striking.

Read: How the Democrats rallied

Biden has positive trends in the economy to celebrate, particularly robust job growth. He’s been cutting ribbons at a steady procession of infrastructure projects and manufacturing-plant openings (like last week’s groundbreaking for an Intel semiconductor facility in Ohio) tied to the tax incentives and direct spending from the infrastructure, climate, and semiconductor bills that he’s signed. Those economic milestones—yesterday, for instance, the White House touted $85 billion in new private investments for electric-vehicle production since Biden took office—will likely be a political asset for him in 2024, especially in the pivotal states across the industrial Midwest. But those accomplishments won’t necessarily sway voters this November, and in any case, all of these favorable trends for now are being overshadowed in most households by the persistent pain of higher prices on consumer goods.

Even before this week’s inflation report, voters gave Biden an extremely negative grade for his economic performance. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Institute poll released last week, just 34 percent of those surveyed said that his actions have helped the economy, while 57 percent said they have hurt it. Not surprisingly, that discontent was most intense among Republicans and also among white voters without a college degree (a stunning 76 percent of whom said Biden’s actions had hurt the economy.) But that belief was also shared by 63 percent of independents, 55 percent of Generation Z and Millennial voters, 47 percent of nonwhite voters, and even 16 percent of people who voted for him in 2020.

However, the share in each of these groups that gave Biden an overall positive mark on his job performance was consistently five to nine percentage points higher than those who believed his actions had helped the economy. And the share in each group that said they intend to support House Democrats in the November election was higher still—enough to give Democrats a narrow lead on that crucial question. Independents, for example, were split evenly on which party they intend to support in November, even though they were negative on Biden’s economic performance by more than two to one.

This stark pattern points to another consequential anomaly in the 2022 polling so far. One of the most powerful modern trends in congressional races is a correlation between voters’ attitudes toward the president and their willingness to vote for candidates from his party. Virtually all voters who “strongly disapprove” of a president have voted against his party’s candidates in recent House and Senate elections. In 2018, two-thirds of voters who even “somewhat disapproved” of Trump voted for Democratic House candidates, according to exit polls. In 2010, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Barack Obama likewise voted for Republican candidates.

By contrast, in the Marist survey, and another recent national poll by the Pew Research Center, Democrats led slightly among those who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden—a stunning result.

Murphy told me this disconnect has been evident since the outset of Biden’s presidency: Even when his approval numbers were high during his first months, she said of her polling, that didn’t lift other Democratic candidates, so she’s not entirely surprised that his decline hasn’t tugged them down. But Murphy, like others in the party, believes that concerns about Republicans—centered on their abortion-restriction efforts, their nomination of extremist and election-denying candidates, and their unflagging defense of Trump—also explain why Democratic candidates are consistently running ahead of Biden’s approval rating.

“It should have been pretty easy for [Republicans] to put these races away, given how concerned voters are about the economy and inflation,” Murphy told me. Now, she said, “I do think they are having to go back to the drawing board.”

Graham’s abortion legislation is certain to benefit Democratic efforts to shift voter focus from what Biden has done to what Republicans might do if returned to power. In a press conference, Graham flatly declared, “If we take back the House and Senate, I’ll assure you we’ll have a vote on our bill.” Although many Republican senators and candidates quickly distanced themselves from his proposal, his pledge meant that every Democratic Senate candidate can plausibly argue that creating a GOP majority in the chamber will ensure a congressional vote on a national abortion ban.

Dan Sena, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who now consults for many party House candidates, told me that the abortion fight’s biggest impact will be to inspire higher turnout from liberal-leaning and young voters. Abortion, he said, “has energized a group of people that we saw in 2018 and we saw in 2020 that traditionally don’t participate in midterm elections and are much more motivated by the cultural fight.”

Read: Abortion could define California’s elections

Yet few Democrats believe that the political threat from inflation and general unease about the economy is behind them in this election cycle. In focus groups, Ulm, the GOP pollster, told me, “We hear more gripes about groceries than anything.” Sena largely agrees: “Jobs and paychecks still matter, pal,” he said.

One Democratic pollster, who asked not to be identified while discussing private campaign research, told me that inflation and crime—the principal issues Republicans are stressing on the campaign trail—remain tangible and immediate concerns in swing districts. In House district polling, the pollster said, the firm often asks voters whether they worry more that Democratic policies are fueling inflation and crime or that Republicans are too extreme on abortion and too soft on the January 6 insurrection. On balance, the pollster told me, most respondents in swing districts say they worry more about Democratic policies.

Yes, the pollster said, the Supreme Court abortion decision, the revelations about Trump from the House January 6 committee hearings, and the Justice Department’s investigation into his stockpiling of classified documents have energized and awakened Democratic voters. But, the pollster added, it’s not as if everyone has decided that abortion and January 6 are more important than crime and inflation.

Strategists and pollsters on both sides believe that these diverging agendas could intensify one of the most powerful trends in modern American politics: the class inversion in which Democrats are running stronger among white voters with college degrees and Republicans are gaining ground among white voters without them, as well as among blue-collar Latino voters.

In white-collar America, inflation may be more of an inconvenience than an existential threat, which provides space for voters to prioritize their values on issues such as abortion or Trump’s threat to democracy. In blue-collar America, where inflation often presents more difficult daily choices and sacrifices, abortion and the fate of democracy may be less salient, even among those who agree with Democrats on those issues. In the Marist poll, twice as many white voters without a college degree picked inflation over abortion as their top concern in November, while slightly more college-educated white voters picked abortion than inflation.

Even with inflation at its highest level in 40 years, Republicans appear unlikely to significantly cut into such key Democratic constituencies as college-educated white voters, young people, and residents of large metropolitan areas. And even such a seismic shock as the Supreme Court abortion decision may not significantly loosen the Republican hold on white women without a college education. Although there may be some movement around the edges (inflation, for instance, could help Republicans gain among Latino voters), the biggest story of 2022 may be how closely it follows the lines of geographic and demographic polarization that the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections have engraved.

As in those contests, a handful of competitive swing states (Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) will tip the precarious national balance of power between red and blue areas that now behave more like separate nations than different sections. The November elections seem likely to demonstrate again that the U.S. remains locked in a struggle between two coalitions that hold utterly antithetical visions of America’s future—yet remain almost equal in size.

Ronald Brownstein

Source link

September 15, 2022