Americana

Biden’s in trouble. Democratic governors say they’ll save him.

THE SCENE

PHOENIX — President Joe Biden’s approval rating was in the 30s. He was dogged, constantly, by questions about his age. His son was about to be indicted again, right before Republicans re-launched their impeachment inquiry.

How did Democratic governors feel about this? Just great, thanks for asking.

“It’s going to be a binary choice: President Biden, or [Donald] Trump,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, in an interview after his colleagues elected him to lead the Democratic Governors Association.

“People have underestimated him all of his life,” said North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper of Biden — who, he said, could flip his swing state next year. “He comes out on top.”

Democrats were in a cheerful mood at the DGA’s post-election meeting, despite having lost control of Louisiana and narrowly failing to win in Mississippi. They sketched out how swing states, where Democrats like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro were popular, would re-evaluate the president; they described their plan to defend the three states where Democrats were retiring (Delaware, North Carolina, Washington) while potentially expanding the map into red states. In their eyes, the typical Democratic platform of defending abortion access, emphasizing pragmatic governance, and serving as anti-MAGA bulwarks required little tweaking after another relatively successful cycle.

“Extremism doesn’t work,” said Jennifer McCormick, a Republican-turned-Democrat running for governor of Indiana. “Teachers aren’t groomers. We’re not sharing porn in our classrooms.”

McCormick, her state’s last elected education superintendent, said that she’d realized how alienated she was from the GOP when she heard from conservatives who wanted to “ban books.” This year, Indiana Democrats gained ground in mayoral and school board races, which to her showed that her now-former party was too obsessed with culture wars — and that, she says, will help her and help Biden. “I’m not hearing the dislike or distaste for Biden at all — at all,” she said. “I am hearing it for Trump.”

In their targeted 2023 races, Democrats ran far ahead of Biden’s numbers, just as they did in 2022. Few voters, they said, had processed the reality that Trump would almost certainly be the GOP nominee. And in six months, they predicted that voters would be thinking better of the Biden administration’s record — and the economy.

“The Fed may move as early as May,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom, suggesting that interest rates could drop before the election, with mortgage rates following. “The markets are starting to game that out, [and] that’s very positive for the Biden campaign.”

DAVID’S VIEW

One of the biggest questions in politics — big, but not hard to answer — is why so many voters are optimistic about their states but pessimistic about their country. Democratic governors are popular; the president that they keep trying to give credit for the post-Covid recovery is unpopular.

What explains that? The usual answer is that the president is 81, and the governors aren’t.

“I would own his age,” said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who handed the DGA’s chairmanship over to Walz. “I’d joke about it. I’d talk about the wisdom. I’d point to Warren Buffett, and countless other examples [of important men] who are 15 years older than he is.”

In my conversations in Phoenix — at the Biltmore Hotel, where two years ago Republicans were celebrating Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and talking about how his win could be modeled across America — no Democrat expected Biden to be more popular in 2024 than he was in 2020.

But incumbents said they could help Biden, with constant ribbon-cuttings and groundbreakings that could connect last year’s infrastructure package and CHIPS bill to new jobs. Walz suggested that they might even put up signs, telling voters who got funding for the new bridge or road they were about to use. Challengers said that Biden would, at best, be a non-factor; they plan to make their races about Republican extremism and the threat to the Affordable Care Act if Republicans were to win again.

“We’re going to be able to tell the American people about what Donald Trump wants to do,” said Cooper, who planned to campaign extensively for the Democratic nominee to replace him — likely Attorney Gen. Josh Stein. After a seven-year battle, the state had finally expanded Medicaid, and they could spend a year talking about Trump’s promise to gut it, contrasting it with “Joe Biden, providing hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians a way to get healthcare through the Affordable Care Act.”

I’m not naive. It would be strange if Democrats invited reporters to a resort hotel to vent about how badly they were doing. But their 2022 and 2023 results, the first races since the end of Roe v. Wade and since Trump re-emerged as the GOP’s leader, inculcated the idea that they can polarize elections around healthcare and job growth. There’s a reason they think there’s a soft Democratic vote that doesn’t approve of Biden but will walk over coals to oppose Trump and social conservatives.

THE VIEW FROM REPUBLICANS

The Republican Governors Association held its own retreat this week, and saw a different electoral map: North Carolina and Washington were highly winnable, and Democrats wouldn’t seriously be able to compete in red states during a presidential cycle.

“If the DGA wants to bring Joe Biden and his failed policies to Missouri, Montana, Indiana, and New Hampshire — go for it,” said Courtney Alexander, the RGA’s national press secretary. “Americans have had enough of the disastrous national Democrat agenda.”

NOTABLE

• In Politico, Walz talked at length with Elena Schneider about the 2024 map. “When we’re running against the generic Republican, our races are always really close, but there’s no such thing,” he said. “These guys are weird.”
• For NBC News, Alexandra Marquez talked with female Democratic governors about a new initiative to support more female candidates. Issues often pigeonholed as “women’s issues,” said Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, were “exactly what our business community cares about.”

New York. Local Democrats picked ex-Rep. Tom Suozzi as their candidate in the Feb. 13 special election to replace George Santos. Suozzi, who left the 3rd Congressional District for an ill-fated 2022 gubernatorial bid, defeated Santos in 2020 — a 13-point rout, long before voters became aware of Santos’ faked biography and alleged criminal behavior. Republicans will pick their nominee next week.

Wisconsin. Ten Republicans who served as electors for Trump settled a Democrat-led lawsuit on Wednesday, affirming that Joe Biden won the race. “The Wisconsin electors were tricked and misled into participating in what became the alternate elector scheme and would have never taken any actions had we known that there were ulterior reasons beyond preserving an ongoing legal strategy,” said then-state GOP chair Andrew Hitt, who added that he wouldn’t support Trump in 2024.

Mike Braun for Indiana, “Safer.” One of the Biden era’s Republican mantras is that “every state is a border state.” Braun, who’s running for governor after one term in the Senate, promises to “destroy the cartels” and “deport criminal illegals.” The border’s threat to Indiana is dramatized with an image of China literally pouring fentanyl tablets into the state.

Sheila for Houston, “Ready.” Voting in Houston’s mayoral runoff ends tomorrow, on Dec. 9. This spot for Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, which went live during early voting, ends with an appeal to vote “on or before Dec. 7.” That blunder (understandably) overshadowed everything else in the ad, which doesn’t mention her runoff opponent John Whitmire, but pitches her as the pro-growth, pro-choice, tough-on-crime Democrat in the race.

Nikki Haley for President, “American Strength.” Haley’s second ad combines a personal story about her husband’s military deployment with a defense of her least popular stance with GOP voters. “If Russia wins, China wins; if Hamas wins, Iran wins,” says Haley, a quick reference to her support for funding Ukraine’s defense against invasion. She’s the only Republican candidate saying that on the air, and while her speeches blame the Russian invasion on Biden’s foreign policy, she doesn’t mention the president at all here.

Two years ago, still hurting from higher crime rates and the unpopularity of police abolition movements on their left, national Democrats embraced Adams. They stay away from him now. In New York, just 32% of voters say he’s “honest and trustworthy,” and, as the FBI probes his chief fundraiser, just 20% believe he did nothing wrong. His budget cutbacks are toxic, too, as two-thirds of voters say they’d rather see higher taxes on the wealthy than cuts to services. Adams, a longtime police officer, isn’t even getting much credit for falling crime rates; fewer voters call it a “serious” problem, but just 8% say they feel “safer” now.

The marquee state race of 2024 will be in North Carolina, where Cooper is term-limited and Robinson, the lieutenant governor, has been a one-man oppo shop for Democrats. He starts in a strong position anyway, helped by high name recognition and vote loyalty among Republicans and a tarnished Democratic brand; the president’s approval rating in the state, which he nearly won in 2020, is at 37%.

White House. Just 4.1 million viewers tuned in live to the fourth GOP primary debate, the lowest for any televised, party-sanctioned debate — for either party — in more than a decade. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley got more time than ever before to interrogate each other directly, with DeSantis going after her (and by proxy, Trump) from the right, over her resistance to a 2016 South Carolina bill that would have prevented trans women from using women’s bathrooms.

Chris Christie used his time to ask why no one else was attacking the “unfit” Donald Trump. He also defended Haley from Vivek Ramaswamy — “the most obnoxious blowhard in America” — after the “Woke, Inc.” author challenged Haley to name three Ukrainian provinces and she refused to respond. Both men are at risk of being cut from the next two debates, which CNN has offered to host in Iowa and New Hampshire. To qualify, candidates need to hit 10% in state and national polls. Christie has reached that number in New Hampshire, but nowhere else — and DeSantis hasn’t cracked 10% in a New Hampshire poll since October. (In 2019, CNN set a lower 5% threshold for its pre-primary debates in both states.)

But there’s plenty of mystery swirling around those debates. The RNC has considered relaxing its debate rules and letting candidates do events not sanctioned by the party; DeSantis has only said that he looks forward to debating “in Iowa.” And the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, which is planning a January debate endorsed by the state GOP and moderated by ABC News, said this week that it did not hear from CNN before the network announced its own separate debate on campus.

House. Ex-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will resign from his safe California seat at the end of the year, creating a vacancy that might cause trouble for his party, and a special election that probably won’t.

McCarthy’s 20th Congressional district, which includes Bakersfield and most of Kern County, backed Trump by 25 points in 2020 — about the same as Trump’s win margin in Kentucky. Democrats who challenged McCarthy had no problem raising money, thanks to his profile, but were never competitive. It’s up to Gov. Newsom to set an election date.

Whatever happened to the political revolution? In 2019, after New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and three other young progressives joined the House, Ryan Grim published “We’ve Got People,” a reported, optimistic look at how the Bernie Sanders campaign had changed Democrats. In “The Squad,” his follow-up, Grim looks at how the Sanders wing of the party — which has mixed thoughts on that whole “squad” brand — immediately came under fire from centrists, dealt with a president it had tried to defeat in the 2020 primary, and still achieved some of its goals while coming under constant attacks from activists who wanted more. This is an edited transcript of our conversation about the book.

​​Americana: The Squad’s career in the House starts where we are now — with a fight about Israel. Early in 2019, [Minnesota Rep. Ilhan] Omar is getting attacked for her comments on AIPAC. But none of the Squad members centered this issue when they ran, did they?

Ryan Grim: Right, not even Rashida Tlaib. Her activism, throughout her entire life, was around environmental justice and corruption. All of them got into politics with a kind of populist, progressive agenda — what became a Bernie-style agenda. The Israel-Palestine issue found them more than they found it.

Americana: Why is this the issue that becomes such a stumbling block, and such a point of attack? It’s not the Green New Deal, it’s not Medicare for All. It’s Israel.

Ryan Grim: It’s a clash of concentrated power against diffuse power, similar to what you saw around the NRA. For a long time, gun control opponents were voting on that issue, whereas gun control advocates were really not that passionate about it, and ended up getting steamrolled. The Israel-Palestine question is pretty far down on the list of concerns for their opponents until it breaks out into full-scale war. Democrats are generally on the same page on the environment, on getting to universal health care, whereas when it comes to Israel-Palestine, all Democrats are not at all on the same page.

Americana: Stepping back a little: Why did Justice Democrats recruit a diverse group of non-white guys to build this progressive faction in Congress?

Ryan Grim: Partway into the formation of Justice Democrats — that’s the organization spawned by staffers from the Bernie Sanders campaign, which elects what became the Squad — [strategist] Waleed Shahid gave a PowerPoint presentation that collected a lot of analysis of the 2016 campaign. For all the cynicism and disingenuous criticisms coming from the Clinton campaign about “white Bernie bros,” it was in fact the case that, with the exception of Michigan, states that had the highest minority populations were states where Bernie Sanders did the worst.

They decide that one way to make inroads with those voters is to recruit more people of color that can speak directly to some of these voters that we’re not pulling in. There was a deliberate push to close that gap through, basically, a version of identity politics.

Americana: What are the Squad’s big victories? What happened that might not have happened if, after the 2016 Bernie campaign, everyone just hung it up and didn’t try to elect these people?

Ryan Grim: The climate money in the Inflation Reduction Act may not have made it through. It’s impossible to rate a counterfactual, but the salience of climate before and after the occupation of [then-Speaker Nancy] Pelosi’s office, and the introduction of the Green New Deal, is huge. Every presidential candidate except Biden endorsed the Green New Deal, and even Biden’s plan was probably to the left, eventually, of Bernie’s in 2016. So when [West Virginia Sen. Joe] Manchin is insisting that this thing be trimmed down, you see housing fall away, you see the care economy stuff fall away, but the climate folks make it so they had no choice but to keep that stuff in. Or look at the American Rescue Plan. Manchin wanted to strip out expanded unemployment insurance. The Squad was able to make a credible threat, through [Washington Rep. Pramila] Jayapal, that if Manchin pushed too hard, the Squad would walk.

Americana: In the winter of 2020, there’s a campaign to “force the vote” on Medicare for All, get it as a concession for supporting Pelosi for speaker. The Squad doesn’t do that; a lot of left-wing commentators call them sellouts and get cynical. What’s the effect of all that?

Ryan Grim: What did they do to manage those expectations? Not a lot. There was this real breakdown, basically, in communication between the outside, online left. The Squad lives on Twitter, and they often would only get feedback after something bad had happened; social media is generally kind of reactive rather than constructive.

Americana: What do they make of the argument that Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, by getting rid of McCarthy, proved you can bend the leaders to your will if you hold back your vote?

Ryan Grim: They don’t think Gaetz has achieved much yet, but I do think that they’re paying attention and wondering what they can draw from that. One of their frustrations during “force the vote” [on Medicare for All] was that they were actually engaged in using their leverage to extract concessions from Pelosi — but the things that they were going for were committee seats and rules changes. I think the jury’s still out on whether that’ll end up being effective. They got a much more conservative speaker as a result. We’ll see what that yields, in terms of actual policy or political concessions. But I do think that I do think it’s something that they’re watching.

Americana: There’s a little media obsession with what Ocasio-Cortez does next. Is any Squad member interested in running for president?

Ryan Grim: Not this cycle. But yes, I think so. I think that we will see an AOC for President campaign at some point. Ironically, she might have an easier path to winning the White House than to winning the New York Senate seat. What’s the real value in a Senate seat anyway? She already has a huge megaphone, and as this generation of young people who are 35 and under age into the electorate, I think they could go back and read this book in five or 10 years and wonder how on earth any of this stuff seemed controversial. The party will continue to move in a progressive direction.

• 38 days until the Iowa Republican caucuses
• 46 days until the New Hampshire primary
• 67 days until the special election to replace George Santos
• 78 days until the South Carolina Republican primary
• 332 days until the 2024 presidential election

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