1). “There’s a 'Fascism Debate' in the Summer of 2024? Really? Why?”, May 29, 2024, Paul Street, Paul Street Report, at < https://paulstreet.substack.
2). “Why is the Guy Who Told Us to Drink Bleach a Step Away from Being President?: Trump's political Teflon coating is at least a hundred times more effective than Reagan’s was in his wildest dreams. Why?”, May 23, 2024, Thom Hartmann, The Hartmann Report, at < https://hartmannreport.com/p/
3). “Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden: One adviser to major Democratic donors keeps a running list of reasons Biden could lose”, May 28, 2024, Christopher Cadelago, Sally Goldenberg & Elena Schneider, Politico, at < https://www.politico.com/news/
4). “Biden’s Black voter troubles are setting off alarm bells: The message out of battleground states and focus groups is that the president’s problems are real — and he is running out of time to fix them”, May 30, 2024, Eugene Daniels & Lauren Egan, Politico, at < https://www.politico.com/news/
5). “Could the Catholic Vote Cost Biden the Election?”, May 30, 2024, Stewart Lawrence, CounterPunch, at < https://www.counterpunch.org/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: It is, to say the least, disheartening to realize that the Overt Fascist, Donald Trump, could win the Presidential Election due to the absurd Electoral College, and Biden's lack of dynamism. In Item 1)., “There’s a 'Fascism Debate' ….” Paul Street (no fan or partisan for Joe Biden) points out that:
“Trump says he wants to declare the Insurrection Act on the day he is inaugurated for a second time, to quell protests with the US military. Recall that Trump as president wanted to deploy the US armed forces to crush the George Floyd Rebellion. ….
“Recall that Trump spent the last night of his 2020 campaign in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in honor of teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder of two people with an illegally owned AR-15 there at a Black Lives march the previous summer. ….
“This is no longer about the bloviating fascist Steve Bannon and the neo-Nazi Mercer family whispering in Herr Donald’s ear. The Republican policy establishment has now congealed around the orange-tinted cult leader. Led by the once 'conservative' Heritage Foundation, these neofascist planners have crafted an ambitious, many-sided agenda for the full white Christian nationalist takeover/makeover of US government and society: 'Project 2025.' With revanchist policy input from Heritage, the Claremont Institute, America First Legal, the Heartland Institute, and more than 90 other 'conservative' organizations, the 2024 Donald 'Retribution' Trump campaign promises a presidency that will: inflict a deportation operation meant to remove more than 11 million people from the country; build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military to round up 'illegals' and asylum-seekers; permit states to monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans; withhold funds appropriated by Congress at his personal discretion; fire a U.S. Attorney General who doesn’t follow his command to prosecute political enemies of his choice; pardon all the thugs who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6; gut the U.S. civil service; deploy the US military to 'end inner city crime in one day,' quell protests, and round up immigrants; shutter the White House pandemic-preparedness office; slash all environmental regulations and 'drill, drill, drill' (his most dangerous promise of all); end 'Marxist domination of higher education' (a hilarious myth); fill his Administration and the executive branch more broadly with toadies who support his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.”
Street's article spends more than half its energy looking at leftists and liberals who are still debating whether or not there is a Fascist regime about to descend on the U.S. if Trump once again ascends the throne.
In Item 2)., “Why is the Guy Who Told Us to Drink Bleach ….”, Thom Hartman (a Democratic Party loyalist and associated operative) lists a long litany of outrages and lies that Trump committed and told. A few are ridiculous Democratic Party dogma but most are pretty well right on target. He rounds out the article with some good analysis that notes that Trump is given a media and PR pass for an endless series vicious and crazed actions, that would have finished off any normal politician. What Hartmann does not say, when he claims the best economic conditions in over a generation is that, like Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini before him, Trump noted the large numbers of people who have been excluded from a decent life, people many of whom 40 years ago had good paying jobs in our factories and shops, not the starvation wage “service” jobs that are the norm now.
The articles in Item 3)., “Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden: ….”, Item 4)., “Biden’s Black voter troubles ….”, and Item 5)., “Could the Catholic Vote ….” all present various evidence, based mostly on polling about how Joe Biden does not excite any enthusiasm in traditional Democratic Party Constituencies.
IMHO, the Democratic Party elders and power brokers need to show Biden the door, get him to resign his candidacy. Nominate Gavin Newsom (who appears right on Fox News to debate Republicans), Gretchen Whitmer, Andy Beshear, or some other younger and more energetic candidate. I am sure our readership will point out the many flaws of all these people, but any one of them would have a far better chance of fending off this latest Fascist Overture that Joe Biden does.
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There’s a “Fascism Debate” in the Summer of 2024?
I hear that academics are having “a fascism debate” regarding Donald “Poisoning
I hear that academics are having “a fascism debate” regarding Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump and his followers.
Seriously? Why?
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“A Lot of People Like My Talk of Dictatorship”
Recall that Trump tried to subvert the last presidential election and to physically overthrow previously normative US bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy in 2020-21. He wanted his “beautiful” January 6 rioters armed with military assault weapons. He wanted to be physically present at the Attack on the Capitol as Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and Proud Boys rounded up Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence for extrajudicial execution on the US Capitol’s steps.
Trump’s refusal to accept the peaceful transfer of power in 2020-21 was easily predicted by commentators and activists who had the basic intelligence, knowledge, and decency to identify Trump and Trumpism as fascist from the beginning.
Here we are three and a half years after the ugly conclusion to Trump’s first fascist presidency[1]. All but a tiny number of “traditional” non-Trump Republicans have been purged from the party of Trump.
Three-fourths of the nation’s Republicans buy Trump’s Hitlerian Lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
Most of the party’s base believes his claim that the belated and obstructed efforts to prosecute him for some of his high crimes – election interference, obstruction, the theft of public documents, campaign finance crimes, and more – are nothing more than partisan political persecution.
Trump openly expresses his desire to be “a dictator”…“for a day.” He tells Time Magazine that “a lot of people like” his “talk of dictatorship.”
In a December 2022 “Truth Social” post, Trump said that the (mythical) theft of the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
Trump says he wants to declare the Insurrection Act on the day he is inaugurated for a second time, to quell protests with the US military. Recall that Trump as president wanted to deploy the US armed forces to crush the George Floyd Rebellion. (For an exhaustive catalogue of Trump’s fascist actions and statements during his first presidency, see the third chapter – titled “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21” – of my most recent book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America. )
Trump has just preposterously charged that the FBI had orders to assassinate him when they searched his Mar a Lago estate for classified documents he stole – part of his claim that he is being persecuted by “the radical left deep state.”
Close Trump observers know that his malignant narcissism involves constant projection so that his FBI charge has an chilling translation: he wants to use federal gendarmes to assassinate his political enemies. And indeed Trump is currently arguing before the Christian fascist Supreme Court (that he and Mitch McConnell created) that he would as president possess full legal immunity from prosecution from sending out a military hit squad to assassinate one of his political opponents.
Trump says he will not promise to honor the outcome of the 2024 presidential election if it doesn’t go his way – no surprise there, same as in 2016 and 2020.
Political Violence
Dictatorship is one of the core pillars of fascism. So is the embrace of political violence, seen of course on January 6, the Trump-triggered physical culmination of Trump’s many-sided attempt to sabotage and revoke the 2020 presidential election.
Here it is worth recalling that Trump would likely have been convicted by the US Senate for inciting insurrection and thereby banned from further public office but for some Republican Senators’ concern that voting to convict him would have put the lives of their families at risk. The senators in question were too frightened of Trumpist assassins to fulfill their basic duty to the Constitution. That’s mafia state shit.
Trump has opened his 2023 and 2024 campaign rallies with the tune, “Justice for All,” the Star-Spangled Banner badly sung by some of his cult members who were jailed over the participation in the January 6 attack on US Capitol. The wannabe fascist strongman recites the Pledge of Allegiance while the song, recorded over a prison phone line, plays.
Trump promises to pardon untold hundreds of the January 6 rioters.
Trump openly taunts and demeans the rule of law by intimidating and mocking jurors, prosecutors, witnesses, and judges in the various legal cases against him.
Trump has gone full bore with the neofascist National Rifle Association (NRA), calling for the arming of just about everyone, including kindergarten teachers, as the solution to the nation’s insane gun violence and mass shooting epidemic. Recall that the NRA ran a commercial threatening the assassination of liberal elites during Trump’s first presidency.
Recall that Trump spent the last night of his 2020 campaign in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in honor of teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder of two people with an illegally owned AR-15 there at a Black Lives march the previous summer.
White Power Republi-Nazi meet up at Mar a Lago
The threat of right-wing political bloodshed is now ubiquitous and normalized across all levels of government, no small problem in a nation that glorifies violence and is more heavily armed than any nation in history.
Fascism is about (among other things) the rule of men over the rule of law.
“Poisoning Our Blood”
Trump has in recent months openly channeled the ultimate genocidal fascist Hitler by saying that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and promising to rid the nation of socialist, communist, and Marxist “vermin.”
Trump absurdly calls the dismal capitalist-imperialist Democrats and the blood-soaked warmonger “Genocide Joe” Biden “radical left.” He has declared his determination to rid higher education of “the radical left” and “Marxists,” whom he preposterously says are running academia.
A leading Congressional Trumpist-fascist, US Senator Lyndsey Graham (Rf-SC) says that Israel should consider nuking Gaza.
Another leading Congressional Trumpist-fascist, Rep. Elise Stefanik (RF-NY), has responded to righteous coast-to-coast campus protests of the genocidal US-Israel crucifixion of Gaza by launching a neo-McCarthyite witch-hunt absurdly demonizing universities as hotbeds of supposed leftist “antisemitism.”
It’s one Goebbels- and Orwell-worthy falsehood after another and another with Trump and his ilk.
Project Amerikan Reich
This is no longer about the bloviating fascist Steve Bannon and the neo-Nazi Mercer family whispering in Herr Donald’s ear. The Republican policy establishment has now congealed around the orange-tinted cult leader. Led by the once “conservative” Heritage Foundation, these neofascist planners have crafted an ambitious, many-sided agenda for the full white Christian nationalist takeover/makeover of US government and society: “Project 2025.” With revanchist policy input from Heritage, the Claremont Institute, America First Legal, the Heartland Institute, and more than 90 other “conservative” organizations, the 2024 Donald “Retribution” Trump campaign promises a presidency that will: inflict a deportation operation meant to remove more than 11 million people from the country; build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military to round up “illegals” and asylum-seekers; permit states to monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute people who violate abortion bans; withhold funds appropriated by Congress at his personal discretion; fire a U.S. Attorney General who doesn’t follow his command to prosecute political enemies of his choice; pardon all the thugs who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6; gut the U.S. civil service; deploy the US military to “end inner city crime in one day,” quell protests, and round up immigrants; shutter the White House pandemic-preparedness office; slash all environmental regulations and “drill, drill, drill” (his most dangerous promise of all); end “Marxist domination of higher education” (a hilarious myth); fill his Administration and the executive branch more broadly with toadies who support his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
Meanwhile, numerous states under Republi-Trumpist control have implemented a broad sweep of far-right policies including harsh women-enslaving abortion restrictions and bans, permission for motorists to run over civil rights and social justice protesters, voter disenfranchisement measures, and prohibitions against educators tell their students the truth about racism and sexism in US society past and present.
Republi-Nazis have led revanchist book banning campaigns across the “red” (try brown for brownshirt) “heartland.”
Hallmark Characteristics
Under the leadership of Trump and his party and movement, we see now the overlap and interplay of key hallmark aspects of fascism past and present: the call for dictatorship; the embrace and advance of political violence; the demonization and Othering of racial and political enemies; the rejection of previously normative electoral and parliamentary “democracy” and civility; a cult of personality; mocking and violation of the rule of law even as the cult leader trumpets fearsome “law and order;” constant propagandistic lying and truth-inversion; xenophobic border obsession; arch-patriarchy; white supremacism; paranoid-style conspiratorialism; anti-intellectualism; glorification of the rural and white “heart/mother/fatherland” combined with racially tinged and sexually threatened suspicion of multicultural and cosmopolitan cities; virulent anti-Marxism/-leftism; palingenetic ultra-nationalism.
First Wave Academic AFD
And yet, even now, on the precipice of unprecedented fascist consolidation in the world’s most dangerous and powerful country, we have academics who think there is something debatable about the claim that Trump and Trumpism are fascist. In the fourth chapter (titled “The Anatomy of Fascism Denial”) in my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York, Routledge), I provided a detailed, point-by-point critique of a cadre of academic fascism deniers (AFDs) who sadly emerged in the semi-public eye in the in the last summer and fall of Trump’s initial fascist administration. This head-in-the-sand crew included NYU law professor Bruce Neuborne, historian Eliah Bures, historian Robert Paxton (who thankfully dropped his denialism after January 6), historian Stanley Payne, emeritus Oxford historian Roger Griffin, political scientist Sheri Berman, government professor Jason Brownlee, political scientist Cory Robin, and Yale law and history professor Samuel Moyn.
I guess or at least hope that many of the current and former academics who denied the fascism of Trump and Trumpism in 2020 have changed their tune in response to subsequent developments.
Second Wave AFD
Calling Jimmy Dore
The current AFD team includes Robin, Moyn, University of Washington historian Daniel Bessner, University of Pennsylvania historian Bruck Kuklick, and Wesleyan University historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins.
Steinmetz-Jenkins is so completely out of it that the following actually happened at a recent academic conference on “Illiberalism” at George Washington University:
“When asked how he reconciled his insistence that there was no serious fascist threat to democracy in America, that fascism was not an adequate term to describe the forces that were fueling Trump’s rise, with what happened during the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, Steinmetz-Jenkins insisted that there had been ‘many Black people’ marching with the neo-Nazis and far-right militias that day. He presented this as evidence that it was wrong to call the ‘Unite the Right’ protesters a white supremacist or fascist movement. When pressed by journalist Sarah Posner, who was in the audience and on the ground in Charlottesville in 2017, he referred to Cornel West, one of America’s best-known Black intellectuals, as a witness: West was among the counter-protesters in Charlottesville and, according to Steinmetz-Jenkins, confirmed that ‘many Black people’ were marching under the ‘Unite the Right’ banner.”[2]
What madness: Steinmetz-Jenkins needs to get on FOX News, or at least “the Jimmy Dore plantation,” to use Dr. West’s term for the deranged Trumpenleft Jimmy Dore YouTube Show. Dr. West was an early supporter of Refuse Fascism, which formed immediately after Trump’s first election. He explicitly identified the right-wing marchers who endangered his own and other civil rights and social justice activists’ lives in Charlottesville as fascists.
Behind the Times
Steinmetz-Jenkins is the editor of Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism and America, a 2024 anthology dedicated to “the fascism debate” regarding Trump and Trumpism.
Or perhaps I should say dedicated to ending the “debate.” Here is the bizarre conclusion of Steinmetz-Jenkins’ introduction to Did It Happen Here?:
“The way forward is to put the fascism debate to rest, even as we try to come to terms with the neurosis it revealed in us – a purpose that this anthology serves. ‘The past may live inside the present,’ observes the historian Matt Karp, ‘but it does not govern our growth.’ Instead of letting fear distort politics, the goal now should be to push forward with the hope of building a better society for a new age.”
As one reviewer of Did It Happen Here? notes, this is “like welcoming guests to a dinner party by promising them it will be over soon.” Equally absurd and insulting are Steinmetz-Jenkins’ assertions that fascism is essentially a thing of the (European) past, that observing a real and present fascist danger in the contemporary US is a sign of mental disturbance (“neurosis”), and that our politics and hope for a better world are enhanced by sticking our heads in the sand about contemporary fascism, which is dedicated to locking in existing social hierarchies and oppression structures by force.
Considering the current US political situation described in the opening pages of the present essay, Steinmetz-Jenkins’ title is jarringly off-putting. What’s with the past tense? Did It Happen Here? Really? Have Steinmetz-Jenkins, his editor, and his publisher been paying attention to US political news the last three and half years? Being a historian is no excuse for living in the past (properly understood or not).
A bizarre disconnect from present-day reality is evident in the commentaries featured in Did It Happen Here? More than twenty of the thirty previously published essays collected in the volume came out between 2020 and 2022. All but one of them were originally published before 2023. A handful appeared long before Trump was first elected. There’s just one primary or secondary source dated after 2022 in the book’s endnotes.
Steinmetz-Jenkins’ introduction to his “2024”anthology cites sources only from 2017 to 2021, with one exception: University of Pennsylvania historian Bruce Kuklick’s condescending and denialist volume Fascism Comes to America: A Century of Obsession in Politics and Culture, a film history which argues that “fascism has little informational meaning in the United States, but instead, it is used to denigrate or insult” (emphasis added).
Here is a preposterous statement from Harvard communications professor Mora Weigel, one of Steinmetz-Jenkins’ contributors, near the end of an essay whose endnotes contain no sources later than 2020: “Now that the Trump era has officially ended, and yet stochastic acts of racist violence and the macabre strangeness of [fascist] Q’Anon persist, it seems clear that there are still many social and psychological variables to map.”
Okay then: let’s get mapping! Steinmetz-Jenkins’ ill-fated anthology is copyrighted in 2024, a year in which the open Hitler channeler Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump leads Biden in all but one of the six contested states that absurdly determine presidential election outcomes under the archaic US Electoral College system.
“To Improve Our Democracy”
But, well… whatever. Professors Steinmetz-Jenkins and Bessner recently wrote this at the left-liberal DSA site Jacobin:
“seeing fascism everywhere prevents those who rightly despise Trump’s reactionary social and economic positions from crafting the bold alternatives we need for the new era that we’re so clearly entering. The time for stern warnings about our American (semi, proto, or fascoid) Adolf Hitler has long passed. If we really want to improve our democracy, we must lay the fascism debate to rest and turn to face our uncertain future.”
Please. What “democracy”? Whose democracy? As any good leftist should know (Steinmetz-Jenkins and Bessner’s appearance in Jacobin certainly suggests left identification) bourgeois democracy is cover for a capitalist-imperialist class dictatorship wherein majority public opinion has long been trumped by concentrated wealth and power on one major policy issue after another. One person, one vote: know any other good jokes? Bourgeois democracy US-American Style, is a right-tilted Minority Rule regime that vastly overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary regions, interests, and people through the Electoral College, Senate malapportionment, rampant gerrymandering and over suppression, plutocratic campaign finance, an undemocratically appointed and now epically corrupt and illegitimate judiciary, and “states’ rights.”
Serious scholars, commentators, and activists who see Trump and Trumpism as fascist (including Cornel West, Henry Giroux, Anthony DiMaggio, Jason Stanley, Ruth ben-Ghiat, Federico Finchelstein, Bob Avakian, Sunsara Taylor, Carl Dix, Samantha Goldman, Andy Zee, Rick Perlstein, Robert Reich, Jeff Sharlet, Thomas Zimmer, Robert Reich, and the present writer) do NOT “see fascism everywhere.” They/we are specific about precisely how they define fascism[3] and what aspects of Trump and Trumpist politics match the definition.
We are not going to make a better world and create a decent future by turning our heads away from overwhelming evidence that a dire fascist menace is afoot in the USA.
I don’t entirely disagree with Steinmetz-Jenkins. He’s right that there ought not be “a fascism debate” regarding Trump and Trumpism at this juncture. It’s so ridiculously obvious by now that Trump and Trumpism are fascist – as many observers saw from the start – that only a chucklehead or (worse) a Trumpenleftish/Jimmy Dorean/proto-Vichy collaborator could think – or pretend to think – that the “debate” is called for in the first place.
Postscript
No, this is not a campaign piece for Joe Biden, as anyone who follows my writing (all five of you!) should know. Later this week or early next week I will take down a critical aspect of the mind-boggling idiocy behind the leftish academic and non-academic fascism-denial still absurdly evident on the precipice of a second and much worse Trump presidency: the notion that telling the empirical truth bout the fascism of Trump and Trumpism makes one an apologist for or ally of the capitalist-imperialist Democrats and their current bloody-jawed standard bearer Joe Biden. First, however, I intend to write a piece making the case for the International Criminal Court to indict Biden for war crimes in connection with the imperialist atrocities unfolding in Ukraine and Palestine.
Endnotes
1. Please see Paul Street, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021), 1-135.
2. Thomas Zimmer, “The Anti-Liberal Left Has a Fascism Problem,” Democracy Americana, May 24, 2024. Zimmer provides eyewitness testimony on this depressing event.
3. Refuse Fascism’s definition is quite concise and specific, in direct contrast with the claims of Steinmext-Jenkins and Bessner (“seeing fascism everywhere”) and Kuklick (“little informational meaning” and just a term “used to denigrate or insult”). Read it here. See the second chapter, titled “The Fascist Wolf Defined and Foretold,” in This Happened Here for my own considerably more (and perhaps overly) elaborate definition in 2021.
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Why is the Guy Who Told Us to Drink Bleach a Step Away from Being President?
Americans are dumbfounded. How is it that half this nations’ voters are on the verge of returning to office a guy who:
— Began his life of crime busted for writing “C” for “Colored” on Black rental applicants’ forms,
— Mismanaged the Covid crisis so badly America had the developed world’s highest mortality rate with at least a half-million unnecessary deaths,
— Is credibly accused of sexual assault by more than twenty women (one 14 years old) and found by a jury — twice— to have raped one of them,
— Forcibly tore nursing babies from the arms of their mothers with almost a thousand of those children still missing,
— Solicited a billion-dollar bribe just this month and illegally took over $7 million (that we know of: the real number is almost certainly a multiple of that) from foreign governments while in office (Senator Robert Menendez was a slacker),
— Praised Nazis who marched chanting “Jews will not replace us!” as “very fine people,”
— Conspired with militia leaders to storm the US Capitol, leading to the death of 5 civilians and 3 police officers,
— Regularly quotes Hitler’s vicious, racist rhetoric referring to human beings as “scum” and “vermin” while claiming people of color “poison the blood of our nation,”
— Stole national security secrets and repeatedly lied to the FBI when we tried to recover them,
— Abandoned our Kurdish allies to Putin, leading to their mass slaughter by Russian troops and warplanes,
— Gave to Russia at least one spy we know of in an Oval Office meeting with that country’s foreign minister and US ambassador,
— Did his best to destroy NATO and hand Ukraine to Putin,
— Negotiated a deal to build an office/apartment building in Moscow that was to be executed a week after he took office and lied to the American people about it,
— Knowingly lied to the nation for almost four full years about having lost the last election,
— Called our fallen soldiers buried at Normandy and Arlington “suckers” and “losers” and ridiculed John McCain and every other American POW,
— Gutted the EPA and sold off public lands to drilling and mining interests who were greasing his party’s palms,
— Proudly packed the Supreme Court with people he hand-selected to end women’s right to abortion,
— Repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, using federal property for campaign and political activities,
— Is currently violating the Logan Act by interfering in President Biden’s foreign policy efforts,
— Praised the world’s worst dictators while trash-talking our democratic allies,
— Holds rallies in which he curses, using words that can’t be broadcast on TV or radio,
— Threatened the Georgia secretary of state with jail if he wouldn’t help overturn the 2020 election,
— Facilitated his son-in-law extracting two billion dollars from a murderous dictator,
— Gave billionaires a two-trillion-dollar tax cut that’s being paid for by raising taxes on working class people for the next few years,
— Promises he’ll be a dictator from his first day in office and will bring about a “Unified Reich,”
— Said he’ll imprison or destroy the media and those who criticize him, using language last attributed to Hitler,
— Slept with a porn star and a Playboy bunny in the months after his less-than-two-years-married trophy wife gave birth to his son and then paid them both to hush it up so he could get elected,
— Convinced China to give his daughter millions worth of trademarks while accusing his opponent’s son of corruption for taking a routine payment for being on the board of a foreign natural gas company,
— Used explicit Nazi iconography to label his political opponents,
— Tried to extort a foreign leader to manufacture dirt on his political opponent while withholding military aid to that nation as it was under attack by Russia,
— Collaborated with Putin to get elected and, when the FBI tried to investigate it, engaged in at least 10 documented felony obstructions of justice,
— Trash talks America’s criminal justice system, insisting he’s the victim of “racist” Black and Hispanic prosecutors and judges,
— Committed multiple campaign finance crimes,
— Convinced about half of Americans the country’s in a recession when in fact we’re in better economic shape than any time since World War II,
— Engaged in and was convicted for both tax and insurance fraud,
— Got multiple deferments to avoid the Vietnam War because he bought a X-ray of somebody else’s bone spurs from a corrupt doctor,
— Stole from a children’s cancer charity,
— Repeatedly joked about the assault and murder attempt of Paul Pelosi, implicitly encouraging his followers to commit more violence against Democrats,
— Was found liable for running a fraudulent university,
— Tried to get his own vice president assassinated, and, among other things,
— Stole millions from his siblings and relatives and then pissed it all away by being an incompetent playboy businessman, having to declare bankruptcy six times.
Any one of these things would have destroyed a normal politician. Two or more would consign him or her to permanent political purgatory.
Howard Dean screamed. Larry Craig was busted in a mens’ room trying to hook up with an undercover cop. Gary Hart was photographed with Donna Rice on his lap. Mark Sanford ran off to Argentina with his mistress. Republicans claimed John Kerry faked a war injury (he didn’t). Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney dared criticize January 6th.
How, many Americans wonder, is Trump getting away with all this? I don’t know the answer, but I do have a few theories:
— What if it’s because the media loves Trump because his bombast, scandals, and lies deliver them clicks and views they can monetize in a way impossible for normal politicians like our current president?
— Could it be because rightwing social media and search engine billionaires along with China’s TikTok owners have rigged their algorithms to push pro-Trump and anti-Biden content?
— Maybe the media is so desperate for the billions in revenue they’ll get from a tight “horserace” election that they’ll do anything they can to hide Trump’s incompetence, hate, and crimes while raising questions about Biden?
— Or is it that Trump is a singularly brilliant politician, cut in the mold of historical demagogues like Huey Long and Adolf Hitler?
— Maybe Trump’s popularity comes from all of us underestimating how much racial and gender hatred has been simmering below the surface of America, just waiting for a politician who’d proudly go farther than Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” or Reagan’s “young bucks” and “monkeys” rhetoric?
— How about people fearful of economic uncertainty, climate change, and experiencing PTSD over the pandemic embracing a confident, self-assured sociopath, smooth as an oiled snake, whose lies slither effortlessly from his lips?
— Could it be that bullies and sociopaths identify with him and are thus drawn to him?
— Can one speculate that 1,500 rightwing radio stations broadcasting pro-Trump messages all day every day are having an impact? Amplified by Fox “News” and other right wing media willing to lie to the American people?
— What if Trump gets a pass because he promises more tax cuts and thus more billions in profits to the owners of big media, social media outlets, and TV networks?
— Maybe the flood of dark money from billionaires wanting more tax cuts and deregulation has reached a critical mass?
— Can we consider the possibility that the American public has just become so desensitized to Trump’s crimes that he’s established a new baseline for political behavior, which we’re now seeing acted out by Supreme Court justices and Republican politicians across the country?
Whatever the answer is, we’re seeing it play out daily in ways that are increasingly impossible to ignore.
In the most recent example, imagine if we learned this week that Joe Biden had lied and hidden some of the top secret documents he said he’d turned over to the FBI in his bedroom. It would be a front-page, above-the-fold story in The New York Times.
We just learned yesterday, however, that Trump did exactly that, but the Times inexplicably buried the story inside the paper under the misleading headline, “Trump Lawyers Accuse Prosecutors of Misconduct in Documents Case.”
Every day brings new examples of Trump getting away with things that would politically destroy any other politician; they’re far too numerous to list here. His political Teflon coating is at least a hundred times more effective than Reagan’s was in his wildest dreams.
So, why do you think Trump’s getting away with all these crimes and social violations?
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Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden
A pervasive sense of fear has settled in at the highest levels of the Democratic Party over President Joe Biden’s reelection prospects, even among officeholders and strategists who had previously expressed confidence about the coming battle with Donald Trump.
All year, Democrats had been on a joyless and exhausting grind through the 2024 election. But now, nearly five months from the election, anxiety has morphed into palpable trepidation, according to more than a dozen party leaders and operatives. And the gap between what Democrats will say on TV or in print, and what they’ll text their friends, has only grown as worries have surged about Biden’s prospects.
“You don’t want to be that guy who is on the record saying we’re doomed, or the campaign’s bad or Biden’s making mistakes. Nobody wants to be that guy,” said a Democratic operative in close touch with the White House and granted anonymity to speak freely.
But Biden’s stubbornly poor polling and the stakes of the election “are creating the freakout,” he said.
“This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end.’”
Despite everything, Trump is running ahead of Biden in most battleground states. He raised far more money in April, and the landscape may only become worse for Democrats, with Trump’s hush-money trial concluding and another — this one involving the president’s son — set to begin in Delaware.
The concern has metastasized in recent days as Trump jaunted to some of the country’s most liberal territories, including New Jersey and New York, to woo Hispanic and Black voters as he boasted, improbably, that he would win in those areas.
While he’s long lagged Biden in cash on hand, Trump’s fundraising outpaced the president’s by $25 million last month, and included a record-setting $50.5 million haul from an event in Palm Beach, Florida. One adviser to major Democratic Party donors provided a running list that has been shared with funders of nearly two dozen reasons why Biden could lose, ranging from immigration and high inflation to the president’s age, the unpopularity of Vice President Kamala Harris and the presence of third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“Donors ask me on an hourly basis about what I think,” the adviser said, calling it “so much easier to show them, so while they read it, I can pour a drink.”
The adviser added, “The list of why we ‘could’ win is so small I don’t even need to keep the list on my phone.”
On the day after news broke that Biden had trailed Trump in fundraising last month, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey raised the pressure on donors as she introduced the president to a crowd of 300.
The cluster of fundraising events Biden attended in Boston that day were expected to bring in more than $6 million for his political operation. But Healey said that wasn’t good enough.
“To those of you who opened up your wallets, thank you,” said Healey, a Democrat in her first term. “We’d like you to open them up a little bit more and to find more patriots — more patriots who believe in this country, who recognize and understand the challenge presented at this time.”
Laughter rippled through the room. But Healey’s voice turned serious. With unusual urgency for Healey, the governor implored the room of high-dollar donors and local Democratic leaders to “think long and hard” about the stakes of the election.
There have been few moments in Biden’s term as president that haven’t been second-guessed, and his aides have made sport of sneering at grim predictions, compiling dossiers of headlines and clips in which the president was underestimated. Biden campaign aides and allies point to some positive polls, including in the battlegrounds, and Trump’s comparative lack of campaigning and infrastructure in the key states, including staff, organizing programs and advertising.
A Biden campaign adviser granted anonymity to speak freely stressed that the president’s team never made any indication that Trump’s hush-money trial would help — or hurt — him. Instead, the adviser contended that Trump will be forced to defend cutting back abortion rights, attacking democracy and advancing corporate interests as president.
“Trump’s photo-ops and PR stunts may get under the skin of some very serious D.C. people as compelling campaigning, but they will do nothing to win over the voters that will decide this election,” Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz told POLITICO. “The work we do every day on the ground and on the airwaves in our battleground states — to talk about how President Biden is fighting for the middle class against the corporate greed that’s keeping prices high, and highlight Donald Trump’s anti-American campaign for revenge and retribution and abortion bans — is the work that will again secure us the White House.”
Biden supporters who remain optimistic say they’d rather be him than Trump, before rallying around abortion and issues of reproductive rights, which Rep. Dan Kildee, a Michigan Democrat, called “a fundamental game-changer.”
“We have to run a campaign, where honestly, we drive home the message that Donald Trump takes us back to the 19th century. Biden takes us further into the 21st century,” Kildee said.
He did not remark on whether such a campaign is being run, or run to his satisfaction.
“A lot can happen between now and then,” acknowledged Rep. Ann Kuster, a Democrat from New Hampshire, who is retiring after the fall election. She, too, pointed to eroding abortion rights under the conservative-led Supreme Court remade by Trump. “I know a significant number of voters are going to be motivated by the Dobbs decision.”
But Democratic critics of the campaign’s approach — while agreeing that abortion should be a winning issue — said they’re challenged when pressed by friends to make the case for why Biden will win.
“There’s still a path to win this, but they don’t look like a campaign that’s embarking on that path right now,” said Pete Giangreco, a longtime Democratic strategist who’s worked on multiple presidential campaigns. “If the frame of this race is, ‘What was better, the 3.5 years under Biden or four years under Trump,’ we lose that every day of the week and twice on Sunday.”
In the swing state of Michigan, Democratic state Rep. Laurie Pohutsky suggested Biden’s standing is so tenuous that down-ballot Democrats can’t rely in November “on the top of the ticket to pull us along.”
“In 2020, there was enough energy to get Donald Trump out and there were other things on the ballot that brought young people out in subsequent elections.”
She said, “That’s not the case this time. I worry that because we’ve had four years with a stable White House, particularly young voters don’t feel that sense of urgency and might not remember how disastrous 2017 was right after the Trump administration took over.”
Whatever the Biden campaign has been doing over the past two months — and it’s a lot of activity, including $25 million in swing-state ad spending, according to AdImpact — it has had only a limited effect. According to FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s average job-approval rating on March 7, the date of his State of the Union Address, was 38.1 percent. As of Friday, it’s 38.4 percent.
And his standing against Trump has also changed little. On April 22, the day Trump’s criminal trial began, the presumptive GOP nominee held a 0.3-point lead in national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight. Trump is up about a point since then, currently leading Biden by 1.4 points in the FiveThirtyEight average.
Asked about polling, Munoz said: “The only metric that will define the success of this campaign is Election Day.”
Trump, meanwhile, has already started his incursion into safe blue states. His campaign’s psychological warfare in New York, California and New Jersey — where House districts will determine control of Congress’ lower chamber — is spiking Democrats’ already-elevated blood pressure.
“New York Democrats need to wake up,” said Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine. “The number of people in New York, including people of color that I come across who are saying positive things about Trump, is alarming.”
Biden’s weaker numbers bear that out. A Siena College poll released Wednesday showed Biden leading Trump in New York by only 9 points — 47 to 38 percent among registered voters. Four years ago, Biden won the state by 23 points. The president is under water with every demographic delineated in the poll — other than Black voters. Fifty-three percent of Latinos and 54 percent of whites reported having an unfavorable opinion of him. To that end, Biden released TV and radio ads in the Empire State on Thursday, ahead of Trump’s campaign rally in the Bronx.
Levine has been something of a Paul Revere in New York, sounding alarms two years ago when a Trump-aligned Republican gubernatorial candidate, Lee Zeldin, appeared to be gaining on Kathy Hochul, the moderate Democratic incumbent. Hochul narrowly held him off.
“I’m worried it’s going to be a 2022 situation, where everyone wakes up in the last seven weeks and has to scramble,” Levine said of his state, which hasn’t swung to the GOP since Ronald Reagan in 1980.
This cycle, Democrats also have to contend with the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas, which has deeply divided their ranks and contributed to a sense of chaos. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat known for his ardent defense of Israel, was similarly concerned for his party, though he pointed to the higher cost of groceries and goods that started during the pandemic and has yet to abate.
“The greatest political challenge confronting the president starts with an “i,” but it’s not Israel, it’s inflation,” Torres said. “The cost of living is a challenge that we have to figure out how to manage.”
“The election is more competitive than it should be, given the wretchedness of who Donald Trump is,” he said. “In a properly functioning democracy, Donald Trump should have no viable path to the presidency. The fact of a competitive race is cause for concern.”
Trump has railed against blue-state officials, starting with the justice system in New York. In California, he dispatched his daughter-in-law, Lara, and one of his sons, Eric, to hold up the West Coast’s Democratic heavyweight as a cautionary tale.
“I’m sorry you have to live in communism,” Eric Trump said Wednesday at the Stampede, a country music venue in Temecula, an inland community between Los Angeles and San Diego. Trump casually dismissed California Democrat Gavin Newsom as the nation’s “worst governor.”
“Make no mistake,” Trump said, “there is a war happening in this country.”
The elder Trump is set to appear in early June at the San Francisco fundraiser hosted by tech investor David Sacks and his wife, Jacqueline, a clothing brand executive, along with venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya.
Palihapitiya’s past political donations run the gamut, from Elizabeth Warren to a super PAC supporting Kennedy Jr. He also gave to the recall committee against Newsom in 2021 and briefly considered running for governor. Silicon Valley’s red pilling has brought even more unwanted national attention on issues of open-air drug use, homeless encampments and gangs of thieves who ransack retail stores across the Bay Area.
And as in New York, California Democrats are bracing for more incoming from Trump.
“San Francisco has changed with the taxpayers, the job creators, the tech CEOs who want to engage with the city and its politics,” said Harmeet Dhillon, the RNC committee member from California.
Dhillon was reflecting on her run-ins with Democrats in the city, where she spent years leading the local GOP before her law firm represented Trump in legal fights to remain on state ballots. Few Democrats are willing to confide in Dhillon about their fears, she conceded, but no one is sharing a sense of enthusiasm for Biden, either.
“The most diplomatic thing I hear from Democrats is, ‘Oh my God, are these the choices we have for president?’”
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Biden’s Black voter troubles are setting off alarm bells
The message out of battleground states and focus groups is that the president’s problems are real — and he is running out of time to fix them.
Some Black operatives worry that the overtures that President Joe Biden and his team are making are directed toward the wrong slice of the electorate. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Prominent Black officials are warning the Biden campaign that the president’s efforts to keep Black voters firmly and enthusiastically in his electoral coalition aren’t working — and that time is running out to get his message across.
The publicly voiced concern from these Black Democrats isn’t that the White House lacks policy achievements — it’s that Black voters aren’t hearing about them. Worse, they fear that the Biden campaign has not fully grasped the severity of the information gap at hand, particularly in key battleground states.
“I’m in a battleground state. I know what has and hasn’t been done. I felt a level of disconnection earlier on the message, on the messengers and on mobilization,” said Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. He said he has brought this issue directly to the campaign.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) said a balkanized news landscape — where voters are increasingly tuning in to more nontraditional sources of information — has contributed to the problem. “I think that the way that we communicate has changed in such a way that, if you don’t invest earlier, it’s going to be a problem,” she said. “I’m not saying that it’s the last minute, but we are in crunch time.”
But more privately, Democratic operatives express other fears, including that Black influencers and media personalities have soured on Biden and that the president himself has eschewed major interviews and less scripted campaign stops, making him less accessible to voters. Black leaders also see the community as open to the Donald Trump campaign’s targeted entreaties.
And while Black voters, according to surveys, are supportive of Biden policies — like student debt relief and funding for historic Black colleges — when they’re familiar with them, the stubbornness of inflation remains a huge concern, as with the broader public.
Those concerns could prove especially critical in the battleground states of Georgia, where Black people make up about 32 percent of the eligible voting population, and in North Carolina, where they account for roughly 22 percent. Even a slight dip in support among Black voters in states like Pennsylvania — where roughly 10 percent of eligible voters are Black — could cost Biden the election.
Though Horsford said he believes the campaign has begun to make changes — on Wednesday, it launched “Black Voters for Biden-Harris” at a splashy campaign rally with the president and vice president at a Black college in Philadelphia — he also noted that he wasn’t the only notable Democrat to talk to the Biden reelection team about his fears.
Black Democratic operatives in the field say their research shows that the information gap problem Biden faces is severe, and that it’s causing a dip in enthusiasm. In a recent North Carolina focus group of Black voters conducted by BlackPAC, those who backed Biden in 2020 said they felt the promises he made to their community hadn’t come to fruition.
“When you tell people ‘Here’s what the Biden administration has done,’ particularly related to issues the Black communities care about, people are really surprised,” Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, told POLITICO.
The voters that BlackPAC has focused on are the working-class Black voters, who don’t attend Morehouse College or even end up in HBCUs. The PAC believes these voters have yet to hear about Biden’s accomplishments, and could determine the election results in several key states.
“It is that distinction between the MSNBC crowd and getting their political information from social media sources,” said Cornell Belcher, who has conducted the focus groups for BlackPAC and was President Barack Obama’s pollster. “That’s really the big difference. If they are watching Joy Reid, they know Biden’s accomplishments. If they are spending time in the Shade Room or a dozen other social media news sites, [they] never hear that Biden used an executive order to ban chokeholds in federal office.”
Black voters are one of the most important blocs for Biden, with older Black women in particular having been the backbone for Democrats for years. But polling and focus groups show that young voters and Black men have soured on Biden. A recent Washington Post poll found that just 41 percent of Black Americans ages 18 to 39 are certain to vote this year — down from 61 percent in June 2020.
A senior Biden campaign official said the campaign is not blind to the frustration from Black leaders or the importance of bringing back this voting bloc into the fold. The official acknowledged there was a lack of awareness of Biden’s accomplishments among Black voters but argued that the campaign was sanguine in confronting the challenge.
“If it was the flip side or the inverse and every Black person across the country knew everything that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had done for their life, we wouldn’t need to advertise on pay media,” the official said. “We wouldn’t need to open field offices in that community to communicate that. So I agree with it in the sense that that’s what we have to do because that awareness [isn’t] there. But I don’t agree with the sentiment that somehow [we’re] waiting around or not talking about it.”
The Biden campaign invested seven figures this month in Black media, including a series of new television and radio ads last week challenging Trump’s record with the Black community. Biden also met with family members of the plaintiffs from the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, invited the leaders of the “Divine Nine” — the historically Black fraternities and sororities — to the White House, spoke at NAACP events in Detroit and Washington, D.C., and delivered the commencement address at the storied Morehouse College in Atlanta. And this year alone, Biden has done 12 interviews with Black journalists or radio hosts, the most recent with D.L. Hughley on Wednesday.
“Our campaign believes that Black voters deserve to hear from Team Biden-Harris, and they deserve to have their vote earned, not assumed,” the Biden campaign said in a statement.
But some Black operatives worry that the overtures that Biden and his team are making are directed toward the wrong slice of the electorate. W. Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, said Biden needed to venture outside of spaces that cater to a more elite, college-educated crowd.
“There’s only one type of outreach people are willing to do. And unfortunately for them, the outreach they’re willing to do is not significant,” Robinson said. “Talking to Black men at Morehouse, talking to Black men who own businesses — you’re not talking to the majority of brothers who are sitting out elections.”
The campaign argues that its approach to informing and winning over Black voters is holistic. In a recent podcast interview, Vice President Kamala Harris put a finer point on something the campaign has said before: They know they need to earn the support of Black voters, especially Black men.
“Black men are like everybody. You got to earn the vote,” Harris said. “Like any group, this is not a monolith. So let’s not just have the rote kind of talking points as though Black men only care about criminal justice.”
But time is running low in order to earn those votes. And there are a lot of votes to earn. An April Wall Street Journal poll of seven swing states found that 30 percent of Black men were either “definitely or probably going to vote” for former President Donald Trump — a jump from the 12 percent of Black men who supported Trump nationwide in 2020. Those numbers haven’t just alarmed party officials, they’ve confounded them.
“This is blasphemy for me, as an Obama guy, I would argue, he’s got a better story to tell,” said Belcher. “[But], they are running out of time? If you say to me, Cornell, what worries you most? They have a shorter runway than they think.”
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Could the Catholic Vote Cost Biden the Election?
How important is the Catholic vote? You don’t hear much about it this election cycle, amid the Gaza War, which seems to place the views of Arab-Americans and Jewish Americans front and center in the national discourse – and rightly so.
But the Catholic vote continues to loom large in a country with some 52 million self-professed Catholics – 23% of the population overall, largely dwarfing other religious groups.
Most of the US states with the highest percentage of Catholics are reliably “Blue” states – Rhode Island tops the list with 42%, followed by Massachusetts, New Jersey and New Mexico at 34%, Connecticut at 33%, and New York at 31%.
But that doesn’t mean that most Catholics in those states consistently vote “Blue.” They don’t.
Catholics represent a “swing” vote – of sorts. They supported George W. Bush in 2004, then swung to Barack Obama in 2008 – and again in 2012. In 2016, they swung back heavily to Donald Trump, but in 2020, narrowly favored Joe Biden. You see the picture: despite some distinctive issue concerns, especially related to abortion and “family” values, Catholic voting patterns tend, in the end, to reflect the views of the mainstream electorate.
That makes the Catholic vote more of a bellwether vote – rather than a true swing vote.
And that’s where the problem lies for Democrats and Joe Biden this year. Because according to the latest authoritative polling by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the nation’s leading tracker of religion and its impact on politics, the Catholic vote has swung sharply back to Donald Trump again.
Pew just released the results of its annual survey among 12,000 US adult respondents and found that only 35% of US Catholics held a favorable view of Biden, while 64% held an unfavorable view. Biden’s favorability rating is considerably lower than his rating among all US voters, and his net negative 19% rating is also much higher than the average – by about 5%. Trump, in comparison, is viewed favorably by 42% of all US Catholics, while 57% hold an unfavorable view. Overall, that gives Trump a healthy 7% advantage over Biden, a real warning sign to Biden come November.
An earlier Pew survey – from April – also shows a stark tilt toward Trump among Catholics. Despite his low favorability rating, if the election were held today, Trump would win the allegiance of 55% of Catholics, compared to just 43% for Biden. That’s roughly the same double-digit advantage Trump enjoyed in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, a complete reversal from 2020.
Trump’s lead among White Catholics – in a head-to-head contest – is even higher, 61%-38%, or 23 points. Among Hispanic Catholics, he’s pulled even at 47%, compared to Biden’s 49%. Pew notes that Trump has made even larger gains with Hispanic Catholics than with White Catholics – but both trends, left unchecked, bode poorly for Biden come November.
What accounts for this recent shift? To a certain extent, it simply parallels trends in the larger electorate, with the economy, inflation, crime and immigration causing Catholics of all stripes to pull back from Biden. But culture war issues also figure more prominently with Catholic voters. Biden has tacked away from his own relatively moderate pro-abortion stance from past years, especially since the Dobbs decision. He’s also voiced support for abortion rights – even beyond the framework of Roe v. Wade – and has catapulted the issue to the forefront of the Democratic party agenda. That’s begun setting off alarm bells with many Catholics, even those that support legal abortion rights.
But it’s not just abortion. Biden has also publicly embraced the rights of gender minorities, not just gays and lesbians, but the entire LGBTQ community, including the transgendered. Without fully recognizing it, a new Rubicon line of sorts appears to have been crossed. A slight majority of Catholics, including Hispanic Catholics, are opposed to strict abortion bans, and they do express tolerance and a growing number support for the basic rights of the LGBTQ community, broadly speaking. But positions that are starkly at odds with Church teachings – and seem out of step with the preservation of more traditional “family” values – are a tougher sell.
Many older Catholics and first-generation Hispanic immigrants are especially leery of the latest Democratic Party stances, fully embraced by Biden, and they’re becoming more open to GOP “conversion.”
Here again, though, it’s not across the board. Pew detects a sharp variance in attitude toward Trump and Biden based on the intensity of Catholic religious devotion – measured, in part, by the frequency of mass attendance, especially weekly. Those with the highest mass attendance are far more conservative and GOP-leaning than infrequent mass attendees or “lapsed” Catholics – those with a nominal affiliation who are not especially observant.
Nominal Catholics may not be as hostile to Biden’s lurch leftward on gender issues as those that consider themselves “devout.” But discomfort with Biden’s policies on gender, on top of discontent with his economic policies, may be pushing a growing number of more devout Catholics toward Trump and the GOP. In fact, a rising number of Catholics are also registering as Republicans, tilting the partisan balance to the GOP, for the first time in years.
According to Pew, the share of Catholics who are registered Republicans has risen to 52% – compared to 46% in 2020. A similar shift in partisan voter registration patterns is apparent in the general electorate, but it’s not to the same degree. And while registering GOP doesn’t necessarily guarantee a vote for Trump, it certainly makes that vote far more likely than before.
All of these trends matter in 2024, but, of course, they matter most in the swing states where the battle for the Electoral College is decided. While none of these swing states make the top 10 Catholic states, quite a few – including Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida and Minnesota – do fall in the top 15 or 20, with a fifth or more of their population identifying as Catholic.
Moreover, the vast majority of these Catholics, like the voting population overall in these states, is White – which likely gives Trump a distinct edge.
For example, White Catholics make up nearly 90% of the Catholic population in the three key Rust belt states – Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – and weekly (or more) mass attendance) is unusually high – 33% in Wisconsin and a whopping 40% in Pennsylvania. Another 37% of Pennsylvania Catholics report less frequent but still regular (mostly once a month) attendance, making the Keystone State one of the most devout Catholic states in the nation.
Of the three, Wisconsin may be the biggest danger for Biden. A Marquette University poll released just last week found a precipitous drop in Biden’s support among Wisconsin Catholics since 2020 – and indeed, among all religious groups – while his support among non-religious voters has largely held steady. Ignoring these shifting preferences among Catholics – which the Biden team seems to have done so far – could prove fatal. The election is less than six months away, and early voting begins as soon as four months in some states.
How many of these conservative drifting Catholics are still persuadable? In past years, Democratic and Republican candidates alike have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to sway Catholic voters– even late in their campaign. So, in theory, there’s still hope.
Take 2012. Obama, who’d crushed John McCain among Catholics in 2008, was running just even with Mitt Romney in June of that year, but by September had opened up a double-digit lead. His campaign began a concerted effort to woo the Catholic hierarchy and also conducted targeted outreach to Catholic voters, highlighting the Affordable Care Act, while pegging Mitt Romney as a heartless capitalist unconcerned for the poor. The messaging worked.
In theory, Biden, who’s only the second professed Catholic (after JFK) to serve as US president, should have an advantage. But Biden faces considerable criticism from the Catholic hierarchy, which, while no ally of Trump’s, seems loath to endorse him.
One prominent Black archbishop recently disparaged Biden as a “cafeteria” Catholic – someone who orders his faith a la carte, selectively picking elements he likes, while discarding others. Relations with the church hierarchy aren’t likely to improve much without a significant new overture from the White House. If Biden’s planning one, he’s yet to show it – and time is running out.
Let’s be clear: Catholics overall do tend to support liberal positions on social policy, as well as immigration and climate change, and many of these voters undoubtedly find Trump’s stances on key issues, as well as his moral character suspect – perhaps, even more so than the general voter. But Biden’s strong shift to the left on abortion and on culture war issues – combined with his downplaying of inflation and its effects on the poor and the working class – appear to have lost him a significant measure of support among Catholics.
This lost support may not be entirely retrievable – but given the stakes, and how tight the election appears to be, it’s certainly worth a try.
What is Ben doing? Like Clinton and Obama before him, his primary focus appears to be on the African-American churches – which are overwhelmingly Protestant. At one level, that makes sense, given the party’s core base of support in the Black community. And only a very small percentage of African-Americans (9%) identify as Catholic. But Hispanics, who remain overwhelmingly Catholic, are a different issue. So, why not appeal more directly to Hispanic Catholics, based on their faith?
The thinking in the campaign seems to be that Hispanics matter most in the Southwest where Biden is faring especially poorly now, with large single and even double-digit leads for Trump in Nevada and Arizona, for example. Neither state carries exceptional weight in the electoral college. From a strategic standpoint, they may be less important than, say, Georgia, which has the largest Black voting population in the country, and a cache of 20 electoral votes.
Biden managed to flip Georgia in 2020 – while he’s currently behind Trump in the polls, it remains a coveted prize. If Biden decides to make a play for North Carolina, where Democrats may have an opening, a similar tilt toward Black Protestants will likely prevail.
Even now, though, Biden’s appeals to the Black community make little or no mention of religious themes – in sharp contrast to Clinton, and even Obama, who were both closely associated with Black churches – and showed it. Both men proved adept, when needed, at weaving Scriptural passages and references into their policy stances, rather seamlessly in the case of Clinton. Clinton and Obama both understood the need to bridge the gap between secular and religious Democrats with appropriately targeted messaging – and it helped them not just with Catholics but all religiously-affiliated voters.
Biden’s campaign so far has failed to appreciate this need. Instead, amid the strident attacks from the party’s feminist and LGBTQ base on evangelical Christians and pro-life supporters across the board, hid campaign seems to be avoiding faith-based appeals, hoping against hope that simply stigmatizing Trump as a law-breaker and a miscreant – and a Christian “hypocrite” – will be enough to gain the moral edge.
In fact, one might go a step further: there seems to be a deepening aversion among Democrats to dealing with religious themes and messaging at all. It’s a mistake.
Hostility to right-wing Christians may be understandable. But antipathy toward religious voters overall – including liberal and even moderately conservative Catholics – threatens to weaken the party, not strengthen it, with key demographics needed to win in November.
Right now, Trump, for all his obvious faults, has a mobilized religious base, and a fervent one. Biden – outside of Black Protestants – does not. Democrats cannot afford to position themselves – and be seen by mainstream voters – as a largely secular-oriented party. If this perception remains unchecked, more religious voters beyond the Christian right – especially Catholics – will find themselves drawn to Trump and the GOP.
In 2001, George W. Bush’s concerted appeals to the Catholic hierarchy – and to Catholic voters – paid off handsomely in his own re-election bid in 2004. His Democratic opponent John Kerry, though nominally Catholic, like Biden, made no such overtures, and despite his natural advantage, he proved no match for Bush with these voters.
Bottom line: Like it or not, faith-based Catholics remain a critical part of the Democratic coalition. In Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other swing states, how these Catholics cast their ballots could well decide the party’s fortunes in November.
Most Democrats do seem to be aware of Biden’s religious affiliation. In an earlier Pew study, the share of Americans who said Biden is a “very” or “somewhat” religious person rose from 55% in February 2020 to 64%. In fact, there has been a particularly pronounced increase in the share of Americans who say Biden is “very” religious (from 9% in February 2020 to 27% today). But here’s the problem – virtually all of this increase has occurred among Democrats alone.
Biden’s campaign – which seems to be in deep denial about its loss of support among key voter groups – needs to take fresh stock of its standing with Catholics – especially independents and Republican leaners – as it looks for ways to woo back disaffected minorities and working class voters, especially Whites. It also needs to engage in a major fence-mending campaign with the Catholic hierarchy – to limit public criticism of the kind it’s received in recent months.
Failure to adjust its strategy and messaging with more targeted faith-based appeals to this voter group, especially in the Rust Belt, will only result in a further erosion of Biden’ support, and a likely loss to Trump.
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