By Dave Andrusko
Just for fun, I went to the webpages of the New York Times and the Washington Post this morning. I scanned the front page of each online which tells you much of what is in today’s paper. A cursory look tells us the Times had ten stories bashing former President Donald Trump, the Post chipped in with 12. And that doesn’t count all the additional stories clobbering Trump which will pop up during the course of the day.
As you probably know, the Post has this preposterously self-important promise/threat at the top of the front page: Democracy Dies in Darkness. They tell us it was kicking around for years, but it just happened to become the official motto on February 17, 2017. Guess who had just been inaugurated the month before?
So, if Democracy Dies in Darkness, the Post, by making its hatred of Trump brightly lit, is contributing to the preservation of democracy, right? Ugh.
Quick update on the polls. A couple of new surveys showed up that had Harris up on Trump, raising her overall advantage to 0.8. Four years ago, Joe Biden had a 7.9 advantage and eight years ago Hillary Clinton had an even larger lead.
Trump boosted his slight advantage in the all-important seven battleground states—Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia—to 1.2.
There are more than 2 weeks remaining and anything could happen. But “If this pattern continues in 2024, Trump will win, as he currently leads in every swing state by an average of one point in the RCP Average of the Battleground States,” Jonathan Draeger writes. “With an extra 1-1.5 points added [for underestimating Trump’s real support], he would win comfortably”.
But nothing is guaranteed. For example, perhaps pollsters have made enough adjustment so that Trump’s real numbers will not be underestimated.
One other point. Salena Zito is a reporter with her finger on the pulse of working class men and women. She has a piece in Real Clear Politics under the headline “Unseen Middle-Class Black Voters Move Right.”
She writes
Youngstown State University professor Paul Sracic explained that we are seeing more and more signs indicating that the country is in the midst of a significant realignment.
“What we saw in 2016 may well be looked back on as what the political scientist V.O. Key called a ‘critical election,’ similar to what happened in 1928 when Catholics joined what became the New Deal coalition,” he said.
Realignments are often candidate driven. In 1928, Democrats nominated a Catholic, Al Smith, to lead their ticket, but Catholics were already moving to the Democratic Party.
It was the same thing with Trump and working-class voters in 2016, said Sracic.
“These voters were already moving to the Republican Party. What is really interesting is whether the movement continues post-Trump and whether we can stop assuming that all of this Republican working-class support is limited to white voters,” he explained.
If that happens, this might look more like the realignment that took place in 1896, when Republicans managed to attract voters from different social classes to become the dominant party well into the next century.
More tomorrow.