No Labels, No Luck

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun.

 Voters are not happy about having to choose between Trump and Biden.  Nevertheless, it is dawning on people that third parties face daunting barriers in American politics.

Ken Thomas and Kristina Peterson at WSJ:

No Labels, the centrist group which has sought to field a third-party presidential bid, is abandoning efforts to create a “unity ticket” aiming to win the White House, the organization announced Thursday.
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Thursday’s announcement represented an implosion of the group’s ambitious plans to unleash a budget of $70 million toward ballot access and then establish a ticket that could serve as an alternative to President Biden and former President Donald Trump in November’s election.

But even as the group cited polling showing public dissatisfaction with Biden and Trump and broad support for a generic third-party candidate, No Labels couldn’t convince any prominent leaders to mount a challenge that aimed to become the first substantial third-party effort since independent Ross Perot’s showing of nearly 19% in the 1992 election.

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Their final attempts to convince Christie to run for president coincided with the death of their 82-year-old founding chairman, former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, who suffered a fall and died March 27. Organizers said Lieberman’s death was a major blow to the group’s attempt to field a candidate, and the late senator had been heavily involved in recruiting efforts.

Showing Up in Rural America

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  

Jeff Bloodworth at The Liberal Patriot:

“Polarization is a by-product of Democrats. They don’t even try to compete in rural America.” Matt Barron should know. The principal at MLB Research Associates specializes in rural Democratic politics—and he sees a party that has quit rural America. The political consequences of this development are as obvious as they are profound.

The rural vote is where MAGA predominates. Donald Trump took 65 percent of the rural vote in 2020, up from 59 percent in 2016. Among rural whites, the Republican took an eye-popping 71 percent of the vote in 2020, a nine-point improvement over 2016. Around one fifth of Americans live in rural environs and small towns, but the GOP’s monopoly automatically puts around two dozen states with significant rural populations out of reach—and Democrats don’t even bother to compete for them.
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The Democrats’ deep woes in rural America are recent. Historically, the party of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson was built upon rural America. By the 1930s, FDR successfully brought the urban working class and rural Americans together to make the Democrats into a dominant majority party. As recently as 1980, rural voters helped Democrats control nearly twice as many state legislatures as Republicans. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton took a bit more than half the rural vote. Heck, 43 percent of rural voters cast ballots for Barack Obama in 2008.

Obama never hoped to win the rural vote outright. But by reducing his margin of defeat in rural regions, he won key states and an electoral mandate. The first black major-party candidate performed three points better than John Kerry in 2004 in rural areas and won nine points more than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. In retrospect, however, 2008 proved a strange inflection point. A rural Democratic state legislator complained to me, “The Obama people showed-up [in 2008] and then they left—there was no follow-up. Voters felt abandoned.”

Leading the way was Obama himself. In his first year in office, the president traveled to domestic events 43 times. Out of these 43 trips, he went to rural America just once. In conjunction with this was the substance of Obama’s agenda. Multiple analysts complained that Democrats have turned their backs on local issues; all politics became national because Democrats were mostly uninterested in knowing these local issues and campaigning on them. The political fallout was impossible to miss. During the Obama presidency, Democrats lost 13 Senate and 69 House seats, 11 governorships, 913 state legislative seats, and 30 state legislative chambers, according to analysis from The Washington Post. The overwhelming majority of these losses came because of the party’s weakness with rural voters.

Outsiderism 2024

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  The 2024 race has begun.

Theodoric Meyer and Leigh Ann Caldwell at WP:

Five Senate Republican challengers have never held public office. In four of those states — Wisconsin, Ohio, Montana and Pennsylvania — the Democratic incumbents have served in public office for more than two decades. (The fifth state is Nevada, but Sen. Jacky Rosen is a relative newcomer to politics who is running for her second Senate term.)

Republicans bet this is an election in which voters will gravitate toward outsider candidates as congressional approval ratings have hovered at 15 percent for the past six months, according to Gallup.

“Voters are sick of do-nothing career politicians. That is going to be a real problem for these Democrat Senators who have been sitting in office for decades,” National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Mike Berg said.
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The career politician attack has been used time and time again with mixed results — because of the strength of candidates and the mood of the electorate.

In 2018, the first election under President Donald Trump, annoyed voters kicked out incumbents. Nine percent of House incumbents lost, all of them Republicans except for two Democrats who lost their primaries, handing Democrats the majority. It was the third-lowest reelection rate of House members since 1994, according to OpenSecrets.

Indiana Republican Mike Braun sensed the mood in 2018. In his primary, the first-time candidate used the political outsider theme, catapulting him from behind to beat his challengers, Reps. Todd Rokita and Luke Messer (remember cardboard cutouts?). He went on to defeat Sen. Joe Donnelly (D) in the red state. (Donnelly voting not to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh also played a major role in his loss.)

It was less effective in 2022

But in the last election, in 2022, voters wanted little change despite a sour mood on the economy, Republican lobbyist and political consultant Bruce Mehlman wrote in a memo after the midterms, calling it the “least change-y change election since 2002.” Every Senate incumbent won reelection, and 94.5 percent of House incumbents won.

It’s too early to tell whether this year will be a change election. One big unknown is the how the top of the ticket — the candidates for president — will play into the career politician critique.

Biden was first elected to the Senate nearly 52 years ago. Trump bills himself as an outsider but is a former president. Both men are unpopular.

Chinese Interference

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses foreign influence and Trump's attack on democracy.  Trump solicited Russian interference in 2016 and Chinese interference in 2020.

Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers at NYT:

Covert Chinese accounts are masquerading online as American supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, promoting conspiracy theories, stoking domestic divisions and attacking President Biden ahead of the election in November, according to researchers and government officials.

The accounts signal a potential tactical shift in how Beijing aims to influence American politics, with more of a willingness to target specific candidates and parties, including Mr. Biden.

In an echo of Russia’s influence campaign before the 2016 election, China appears to be trying to harness partisan divisions to undermine the Biden administration’s policies, despite recent efforts by the two countries to lower the temperature in their relations.

Some of the Chinese accounts impersonate fervent Trump fans, including one on X that purported to be “a father, husband and son” who was “MAGA all the way!!” The accounts mocked Mr. Biden’s age and shared fake images of him in a prison jumpsuit, or claimed that Mr. Biden was a Satanist pedophile while promoting Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

“I’ve never seen anything along those lines at all before,” said Elise Thomas, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research organization that uncovered a small group of the fake accounts posing as Trump supporters.

Ms. Thomas and other researchers have linked the new activity to a long-running network of accounts connected with the Chinese government known as Spamouflage. Several of the accounts they detailed previously posted pro-Beijing content in Mandarin — only to resurface in recent months under the guise of real Americans writing in English.

In a separate project, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research organization in Washington, identified 170 inauthentic pages and accounts on Facebook that have also pushed anti-American messages, including pointed attacks on Mr. Biden.

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Intelligence assessments show Russia using increasingly subtle influence tactics in the United States to spread its case for isolationism as its war against Ukraine continues. Mock news sites are targeting Americans with Russian propaganda.

Russian Money and Trump

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses foreign influence and Trump's attack on democracy.  Russia helped Trump through 2020.  As Russia began its latest invasion of Ukraine, Trump lavished praise on Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. 

Hugo Lowell at The Guardian:

Donald Trump’s social media company Trump Media managed to go public last week only after it had been kept afloat in 2022 by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.

The former US president stands to gain billions of dollars – his stake is currently valued at about $4bn – from the merger between Trump Media and Technology Group and the blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which took the parent company of Truth Social public.

But Trump Media almost did not make it to the merger after regulators opened a securities investigation into the merger in 2021 and caused the company to burn through cash at an extraordinary rate as it waited to get the green light for its stock market debut.

The situation led Trump Media to take emergency loans, including from an entity called ES Family Trust, which opened an account with Paxum Bank, a small bank registered on the Caribbean island of Dominica that is best known for providing financial services to the porn industry.

Through leaked documents, the Guardian has learned that ES Family Trust operated like a shell company for a Russian-American businessman named Anton Postolnikov, who co-owns Paxum Bank and has been a subject of a years-long joint federal criminal investigation by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into the Trump Media merger.

 

Biden and Niche Media

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. The 2024 race has begun. The nomination phase has effectively ended. 

Oliver Darcy at CNN:

During his trip to New York City last week, President Joe Biden sat down for a rare joint interview alongside former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

But the interview, which received significant attention, was not with a national news organization. Neither was it with a local newspaper or outlet. It was with the comedy podcast, “Smartless,” hosted by the actors Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett.

The decision to speak with the Hollywood trio, while jilting the traditional press in the process, is emblematic of Biden’s media strategy as he faces a high-stakes reelection with democracy itself on the line. While a caricature has been painted of the president holed up in the White House dodging the media spotlight, he is actually participating in a fair share of interviews — just not with the Beltway press.

In fact, Biden has engaged in a number of interviews this year, particularly with the Black and Hispanic press. Facing sagging poll numbers with Black Americans, Biden has granted at least 10 interviews with media outlets reaching the community this year, most of them with local radio stations during the drive time hours. Biden has also participated in two interviews with Hispanic radio outlets in 2024 and is set to sit down with Univision’s Enrique Acevedo this week, Adrian Carrasquillo reported Monday for Vanity Fair.

“People in D.C. and New York may not always see it,” Michael Tyler, the Biden campaign communications director, told me by phone. “But you know who is seeing it? The voters we are trying to reach.”

GOP Money Problem: Exhausting the Small Donors

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses party organizations and campaign finance.

Josh Dawsey, Michael Scherer and Clara Ence Morse at WP:

In the years after Donald Trump lost the presidency to Joe Biden, Trump sent so many emails and text messages asking for money that Republican consultants warned his mailing lists could become useless. The former president’s friends told him that they were being asked for too much, too often, and Trump himself ordered aides at one point to slow the solicitations. Some of his fans, pockets emptied, mailed handwritten letters apologizing for not being able to give more.

Now, as Trump and Biden prepare for a rematch, Trump’s vaunted small-dollar fundraising operation is not bringing in as much money as it once did.

In 2020, Trump and his fundraising committees raised a record $626.6 million from small-dollar donors, 35 percent more than Biden took in from that group.

But last year, Trump raised just $51 million from small donors, way down from the $119 million he registered in 2019 and only 18 percent more than Biden’s total. His small-dollar haul — which includes donations of $200 or less — was not nearly enough to offset Biden’s 
lead among major donors.

The Republican National Committee also raised much less money from small-dollar donors in 2023 than it had in 2019, contributing to budget problems for the party. Officials at the National Republican Senatorial Committee were shocked by the low returns on their investment in the strategy ahead of the last midterm elections.

 

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“The biggest problem in GOP fundraising is that we don’t treat donors well,” said John Hall, a Republican small-dollar fundraiser who runs the digital firm Apex Strategies. “Sending eight emails and texts a day that promise an artificial match, threaten to take away your GOP membership, or call you a traitor if you don’t donate doesn’t build a long-term relationship with donors.”