All posts tagged: swing states

Joe Biden’s Unrequited Love for American Workers

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Joe Biden courted the leaders of the Teamsters this week, looking for the endorsement of the 1.3-million-member union. He will probably get it. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, calls him “the most pro-union president in history.” He’s already won the endorsement of many of the country’s most important unions, including the United Auto Workers, the AFSCME public employees’ union, the Service Employees International Union, and the main umbrella organization, the AFL-CIO. Biden’s real concern in November, though, isn’t getting the support of union leaders; it’s winning the support of union members. Labor’s rank and file were a valuable part of his winning coalition in 2020, when, according to AP VoteCast, he got 56 percent of the union vote. Today, things on this front are looking a little shakier, particularly in key electoral battlegrounds. A New York Times/Siena survey of swing states late last year, for instance, found that Biden was tied with Donald Trump among union voters (who, that same survey noted, had voted for Biden by an eight-point margin …

Why Biden’s Pro-worker Stance Isn’t Working

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Joe Biden courted the leaders of the Teamsters this week, looking for the endorsement of the 1.3-million-member union. He will probably get it. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, calls him “the most pro-union president in history.” He’s already won the endorsement of many of the country’s most important unions, including the United Auto Workers, the AFSCME public employees’ union, the Service Employees International Union, and the main umbrella organization, the AFL-CIO. Biden’s real concern in November, though, isn’t getting the support of union leaders; it’s winning the support of union members. Labor’s rank and file were a valuable part of his winning coalition in 2020, when, according to AP VoteCast, he got 56 percent of the union vote. Today, things on this front are looking a little shakier, particularly in key electoral battlegrounds. A New York Times/Siena survey of swing states late last year, for instance, found that Biden was tied with Donald Trump among union voters (who, that same survey noted, had voted for Biden by an eight-point margin …

Biden Is Still the Democrats’ Best Bet for November

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Let’s start with the obvious. The concerns about Joe Biden are valid: He’s old. He talks slowly. He occasionally bumbles the basics in public appearances. Biden’s age is so concerning that many Biden supporters now believe he should step aside and let some other candidate become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. The New York Times journalist Ezra Klein made the best-available case for this view recently in a 4,000-word piece that garnered intense attention by arguing that Biden is no longer up to the task of campaign life. “He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago,” Klein writes. “The way he moves, the energy in his voice. The Democrats denying decline are only fooling themselves.” In one sense Klein is correct. As the political strategist Mike Murphy said many moons ago, Biden’s age is like a gigantic pair of antlers he wears on his head, all day every day. Even when he does something exceptional—like visit a war zone in Ukraine, or whip inflation—the people applauding him are thinking, Can’t. Stop. …

A Snapshot of Biden’s Swing-State Troubles

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Last week, when The New York Times and Siena College released a poll that showed President Joe Biden in trouble in battleground states, Democrats began to sound apocalyptic. The panic, turbocharged by social media, was disproportionate to what the surveys actually showed. Although the results in my home state, Nevada, were the worst for the president out of the six swing states that were polled, the findings are almost certainly not reflective of the reality here, at least as I’ve observed it and reported on it. Nevertheless, they bring to the surface trends that should worry Democrats—and not just in Nevada. The Times/Siena data show Donald Trump ahead of Biden in Nevada 52 percent to 41 percent, a much larger margin than the former president’s lead in the other battleground states. Could this be true? I’m skeptical, and I’m not alone. After the poll came out, I spoke with a handful of experts in both parties here, and none thinks Trump is truly ahead by double digits in the state, where he lost by …

Virginia Could Decide the Future of the GOP’s Abortion Policy

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] A crucial new phase in the political struggle over abortion rights is unfolding in suburban neighborhoods across Virginia. An array of closely divided suburban and exurban districts around the state will decide which party controls the Virginia state legislature after next month’s election, and whether Republicans here succeed in an ambitious attempt to reframe the politics of abortion rights that could reverberate across the nation. After the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, the issue played a central role in blunting the widely anticipated Republican red wave in last November’s midterm elections. Republican governors and legislators who passed abortion restrictions in GOP-leaning states such as Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa did not face any meaningful backlash from voters, as I’ve written. But plans to retrench abortion rights did prove a huge hurdle last year for Republican candidates who lost gubernatorial and Senate races in Democratic-leaning and swing states such as Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona. Now Virginia Republicans, led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, are attempting to formulate a …