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      Republicans to descend on Milwaukee – where they’ve been trying to dilute Black voting power

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      Shortly after the 2022 midterm elections, Robert Spindell sent out an email to his fellow Republicans explaining why he was pleased with the results even though Tony Evers, a Democrat, had just won a second term.Spindell, one of three Republicans on the body that oversees elections in Wisconsin, said “we can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”The comment sparked outrage and calls for Spindell to resign. Spindell, who also served as a fake elector in 2020, has refused, saying, “The last thing I want to do is suppress votes.”While it was astonishing to see a top Republican official boasting of lower voter turnout with such bluntness, it wasn’t surprising to anyone to see Republicans celebrating fewer votes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s most populous city.Nearly 223,000 Black people live in Milwaukee – roughly 60% of Wisconsin’s entire Black population. That means that Black voters in the city can have an outsize effect on election outcomes in the state – they have long been a bastion of Democratic votes and are crucial for any Democrat who wants to win the state (More than one out of every 10 votes Joe Biden received in Wisconsin in 2020 came from the city of Milwaukee). Activists have long understood attacks on the city to be code for attacks on Black voters.Now Republicans are set to descend on the city they have long attacked to formally nominate Donald Trump to a second term at the Republican national convention in July.“They’re not coming here because they love the city of Milwaukee at all,” said Angela Lang, the executive director of Black Leaders Organizing Communities, a non-profit in the city. The decision to hold the GOP convention in Milwaukee, a city Lang said Republicans often “say racist dog whistles about” was a “slap in the face”.Republicans have not shied away from using coded language to attack the city. In 2013, as Republicans debated a measure to curtail early voting, state senator Scott Fitzgerald said “the question of where this is coming from and why are we doing this and why are we trying to disenfranchise people, I mean, I say it’s because the people I represent in the 13th district continue to ask me, ‘What is going on in Milwaukee?’”Donald Trump, for his part, has directly insulted Milwaukee, reportedly telling fellow Republicans in June it was a “horrible city”.Both Democrats and Republicans have touted the economic benefits the event will bring to the city. And Reince Priebus, the former RNC chair who led the effort to bring the convention to Milwaukee, said having the event in the city would bring around $200m in economic benefits and would focus Republican attention on Wisconsin, a critical battleground state. The convention, Priebus said in 2023, “can turn a purple state where only 20,000 people will decide who those electoral votes will go to”.“They have no shame,” said Greg Lewis, a minister in Milwaukee who leads the Souls to the Polls, a non-profit that works to educate churchgoers and get them to vote. Historically, the program has been remarkably successful in mobilizing Black voters.“Even though they have totally tried to abolish folks in our community from expressing themselves with their vote, they still want you to support a system or an organization or a party that is totally against them expressing their power,” Lewis said.In 2018, Robin Vos, the Republican who serves as the powerful speaker of the Wisconsin assembly, said his party would have done better in statewide elections “if you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula”.Republicans have also used their impenetrable, gerrymandered majorities in the state legislature to attack Milwaukee and its Black residents, including passing a sweeping voter ID measure and moving to limit early voting in the city. Non-white voters are more than four times more likely to lack a current ID than their white counterparts. One study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that voter ID in Wisconsin discouraged up to 23,000 people in Milwaukee and Dane counties from voting in the 2016 election.In 2016, US district judge James Peterson struck down a Republican-enacted law trying to limit the amount of early voting in the state. He noted that the practice was especially popular among Latino and Black voters. Milwaukee at the time allowed for more early voting than other places in the state.“The legislature’s ultimate objective was political: Republicans sought to maintain control of the state government. But the methods that the legislature chose to achieve that result involved suppressing the votes of Milwaukee’s residents, who are disproportionately African American and Latino,” he wrote. An appeals court has since overturned Peterson’s ruling.Turnout in the city in 2016 dropped by 41,000 votes compared with 2012, nearly double Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the state. When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin in 2016, turnout in Black wards in the city was around 58%, according to a Journal Sentinel analysis. In 2020, it fell to 51%. Black turnout has lagged after white turnout in the city in the last presidential and gubernatorial elections, according to data analyzed by John Johnson, a researcher at Marquette University.“They’re going to places with large concentrations of Black people – that is the most hope we have at building Black political power in the state,” Lang said, referring to Republican efforts to restrict voting rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2020, Donald Trump and his campaign waged an aggressive, ultimately unsuccessful, legal effort to get votes in Milwaukee and Madison thrown out as part of his effort to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. He did not request a recount in any other county in the state.LaTonya Johnson, a Democrat who represents Milwaukee in the state senate, said it was no secret why Republicans were targeting the city. She said she had pleaded with her colleagues in the legislature to support legislation to curb gun violence in the city but had been rebuffed.“Republicans always make it seem like the bulk of – if they feel that there’s fraud – in the system that is coming from the city of Milwaukee, right? And the question is why? Because Milwaukee is majority minority,” she said in an interview.For the last few months, Lewis and Souls to the Polls have been calling for the executive director of the Wisconsin Republican party, Andrew Iverson, to resign. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published text messages earlier this year that showed Iverson trying to sabotage Souls to the Polls operations on election day in 2020. The text messages showed Iverson, then the head of Trump victory, a joint effort of the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, asking a Trump campaign staffer if he could get Trump supporters to use Souls to the Polls on election day.“I’m excited about this. Wreak havoc,” he said in one text message published by the Journal Sentinel. Iverson, who did not respond to an interview request, has denied wrongdoing, saying he was joking. Another Republican staffer told the Journal Sentinel that he took the messages to overwhelm Souls to the Polls.Beyond voting, Republicans have also attacked Milwaukee in other ways. As the city faced serious fiscal issues last year, lawmakers approved a measure allowing Milwaukee officials to raise taxes, but also imposed new restrictions on the city.The bill contained provisions that gave the city less control over the city’s fire and police commission and said it could not spend revenue on diversity initiatives, and limited how much could be spent on non-profits and the arts. The city was also blocked from using state funding on a local streetcar project.Lang said she and her staff planned to leave the city during the convention, but would have some virtual programming. “I have serious safety concerns,” she said.Attendees of the convention will be allowed to carry guns within the “soft” security perimeter around the Fiserv forum, the arena where the convention will be held, but not within a tighter “hard” security perimeter closer to the arena. The city could not ban the carrying of firearms because of a state law that prohibits localities from restricting them.“The same type of people who write manifestos, and shoot up grocery stores with people that look like me, they find home in the Republican party, and now we’re rolling out the red carpet to them in a predominantly Black and brown city that is largely Democratic, and I think that is a recipe for disaster,” Lang said.Still, Lang said she planned to use the convention as an opportunity to educate voters about the meaning of their vote.“If people are like, ‘I don’t really believe in politics or it’s so dysfunctional, I have no faith in it right now,’ well, there’s one party in particular that is happy when you don’t vote,” she said. More

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      Only one group can actually persuade Biden to exit the race: his rich donors | Robert Reich

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      At a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, last Friday, Joe Biden said: “Some folks … are trying to push me out of the race.”To whom was the president referring?Certainly not to Donald Trump or the Republicans, who have been uncharacteristically silent about the whole question of whether Biden should drop out. They couldn’t push him out of the Democratic race anyway.Nor was he referring to Democrats in Congress. Almost all have been publicly supportive of Biden. Only eight House Democrats out of 213 have called for him to drop out, and just one Senate Democrat has gone that far.Was Biden referring to the leaders of the Democratic party? Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the Senate majority leader and House Democratic leader, respectively, have been supportive of Biden, at least in public.He couldn’t have been talking about the Democratic National Committee. Not a single DNC member has called for Biden to exit from the race.Was Biden talking about the elite punditry on cable TV and on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post – almost all of who have called for Biden to drop out?Doubtful. The chattering class has little or no influence on the preferences of average voters. How many people at that Wisconsin rally avidly read opinion pieces in the New York Times?Did Biden have in mind some collection of gray-bearded leaders of America – a group of unofficial elder statesmen, perhaps including Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, whose counsel carries extraordinary influence behind the scenes?There is no longer any such group. (I recall a time decades ago when a bipartisan cabal of old hands held significant sway behind the scenes of official Washington – people like Lloyd Cutler, George Shultz and Jim Baker. But in the hyper-partisanship of today’s Washington, no such group exists.)The fact is, only one small group of people in the US has the power to push Joe Biden out of the race. Who are they? The major donors to the Democratic party.They’re the ones Biden is angry with.On Monday morning, Biden called into MSNBC’s Morning Joe and railed against the big-ticket donors who have been pushing him to withdraw.“I’m getting so frustrated with the elites … the elites of the party,” he said on the air. “I don’t care what the millionaires think.”Bingo. It was the first time any modern president has admitted that the elites of the party are the millionaires (and billionaires) who fund it, which gives them extraordinary political power – perhaps enough to push Biden out of the race.In truth, the Democratic party is little more than a national fundraising machine, as is the Republican party.I’m not blaming Biden. He’s simply stating the truth. America’s donor class has become extraordinarily powerful in both parties.Biden and his top aides aren’t hiding this reality. To the contrary, they’re actively portraying the effort to remove him as driven by the party’s wealthy elite.This may be an exaggeration. The polling data I’ve seen suggests that concerns about Biden’s age and evident decline worry a wide swathe of the public.But Biden continues to court the party’s major donors. Soon after Biden shared with the hosts of Morning Joe his frustrations with the moneyed elite of the party, he held a video conference call with that very same elite.In that call, according to the New York Times, he told them he was staying in the race. He also told them that they had to shift the focus of the campaign away from him and on to Trump.Telling them to shift their focus seemed to offer further evidence that the party’s biggest donors were responsible for focusing on Biden’s age and his stumbles since the debate. And it was they who must shift their focus to Trump.Over the last week and a half, I’ve been immersed in countless discussions about whether Biden should drop out of the race. I expect you have as well.But those discussions are irrelevant. You and I aren’t going to persuade Biden to stay in or drop out of the race.Only one group is going to persuade him – the Democratic party’s biggest donors. If they decide to stop funding the Biden campaign, Biden has no chance of winning.It’s rapidly becoming a game of chicken. If the biggest donors stop funding Biden and Biden stays in the race notwithstanding, he clearly loses. Yet so do we all.Biden’s efforts over the last few days confirm much of what I’ve increasingly observed over the years. The real political power in the US, regardless of party, lies in the hands of big money.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      This article was amended on 11 July 2024 to update the number of members of Congress who have called for Biden to drop out More

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      Biden under renewed pressure to step aside as top Democrats make agonized appeals

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      Joe Biden came under renewed moral pressure on Wednesday to abandon his presidential candidacy amid agonised appeals by a succession of senior Democrats for him to consider the broader picture.Those calls came as the US president dug in his heels to make it hard to supplant him as the nominee.With the backlash over his 27 June TV debate fiasco refusing to abate, Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, became the most senior party member yet to subtly float the possibility of Biden stepping down while stopping short of explicitly telling him to do so.Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, gleefully sought to further tighten the screw by summoning three White House aides to testify about Biden’s mental fitness.The summons came in the form of a subpoena from James Comer, the GOP chair of the House oversight committee, who demanded testimony from Anthony Bernal, the top aide to the first lady Jill Biden; the deputy White House chief of staff Annie Tomasini, and the president’s senior adviser Ashley Williams, Axios reported.Pelosi, 84, who was speaker until Republicans regained control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe that “it’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run”, adding: “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision. Because time is running short.”That remark came as the president seemed intent on running down the clock until next month’s Democratic national convention in Chicago, to make it practically impossible to replace him. Pelosi later qualified her comments, claiming they had been subject to “misrepresentations”, while adding: “The president is great.”But they prefaced further critical interventions from Senate Democrats, who followed the lead of Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado in voicing doubts over whether Biden could beat Donald Trump in November.Bennet told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday evening that Trump was likely to win November’s poll in a landslide because of the widespread concerns over Biden’s age and mental acuity.“This race is on a trajectory that is very worrisome if you care about the future of this country,” he said in an impassioned interview. “Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House. It’s not a question about politics, it’s a moral question about the future of our country.”He added: “I have not seen anything remotely approaching the kind of plan we need to see out of the White House that can demonstrate that he can actually beat Donald Trump, which is not going to be about the accomplishments that we all had, you know, three and four years ago. This is something for the president to consider.”Bennet’s comments stopped short of a full-blown appeal for Biden’s withdrawal, in contrast to Democrats in the House – where seven members have explicitly made such calls in the wake of the debate, where the president repeatedly appeared confused, mangled his words and allowed Trump to lie without effective contradiction.Soon after, Pete Welch of Vermont became the first senator to call on Biden to withdraw from the election. Welch said he was worried about the race because “the stakes could not be higher”.“I understand why President Biden wants to run,” Welch wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “He saved us from Donald Trump once and wants to do it again. But he needs to reassess whether he is the best candidate to do so. In my view, he is not.“For the good of the country, I’m calling on President Biden to withdraw from the race.”Richard Blumenthal, a senator from Connecticut, also voiced concerns.“I am deeply concerned about Joe Biden winning this November,” Blumenthal told reporters, adding that the party “had to reach a conclusion as soon as possible” and that Biden still retained his support.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA similarly circumspect call to reconsider came from Katie Hobbs, the Democratic governor of Arizona, a battleground state that was one of six moved by the Cook Political Report – a non-partisan election forecaster – in Trump’s direction following the president’s post-debate poll slide.“I want the president to look at the evidence and make a hard decision,” Hobbs told reporters, adding that Biden had “a lot to do to assure Americans and Arizonans”.And on Wednesday evening, Representative Earl Blumenauer, the longest-serving Democrat in Oregon’s House delegation, put it bluntly: “President Biden should not be the Democratic presidential nominee.”
      “The question before the country is whether the president should continue his candidacy for re-election. This is not just about extending his presidency but protecting democracy,” he said in an emailed statement.“It is a painful and difficult conclusion but there is no question in my mind that we will all be better served if the president steps aside as the Democratic nominee and manages a transition under his terms.”There were even signs of slippage within the staunchly loyal Congressional Black Caucus, which had pledged its support on Monday night. On Wednesday one of its members, Marc Veasey of Texas, became the first to break ranks by telling CNN that Democrats running in tight races should “distance themselves” from Biden in an effort to “do whatever it is they need to do” to win.The public agonising illustrated how Biden’s debate failure has plunged the Democrats into paralysis as the campaign approaches a key phase.Yet there seemed little imminent sign of Biden – who has already written to the party’s congressional group en masse telling doubters to challenge him at the convention – yielding to pressure to bow out.Far from Biden retreating, plans were announced for a second primetime television interview – this time with NBC’s Lester Holt next Monday in the symbolic setting of the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas – to follow last Friday’s with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.The latest interview, coming on the heels of Biden’s hosting of Nato’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington this week – where he has been meeting a succession of world leaders – appeared designed to reinforce the message that he intends to stay the course.On Wednesday, the president visited the Washington headquarters of the main US trade union body, the AFL-CIO, an important Democrat constituency.The trade union visit followed a virtual meeting from the White House on Tuesday evening with about 200 Democratic mayors, in which he restated his determination to remain and reportedly won their support. More

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      George Clooney implores Biden to step aside in opinion article

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      The Hollywood actor George Clooney, one of the Democratic party’s biggest fundraisers, has called on Joe Biden to step aside to save democracy from Donald Trump.In an opinion article in the New York Times, Clooney expressed deep affection for the US president but said that personal interaction with him at a recent fundraising event in Los Angeles – the Democratic party’s most successful ever, raising more than $30m – suggested that the stumbling performance in last month’s debate in Atlanta was not an aberration.“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” the actor and longtime Democratic party member and fundraiser wrote.“He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.“Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw,” he said, referring to explanations from the White House and Biden himself for his bad debate performance.More bluntly, he said explicitly that Biden could not prevail in an electoral rematch with Trump: “We are not going to win with this president.”Stressing that his call was made reluctantly, Clooney paid tribute to the political battles that Biden had won throughout his career but said his age represented an insurmountable adversary.“But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can,” he wrote.Clooney’s plea came as Biden continues to insist on staying in the race while senior Democrats agonise about how to apply pressure on him to change his mind, and serious questions continue over Biden’s health and viability for re-election.The actor called on leading party figures to come off the fence and make the case to Biden, while dismissing as “disingenuous” the president’s argument – stated in a letter to Democrats in Congress this week – that the party’s membership had already chosen the nominee in the primaries.‘Most of our members of Congress are opting to wait and see if the dam breaks,” he wrote in remarks clearly critical of continuing inaction. “But the dam has broken. We can put our heads in the sand and pray for a miracle in November, or we can speak the truth.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe concluded: “Joe Biden is a hero; he saved democracy in 2020. We need him to do it again in 2024.”Clooney’s intervention comes weeks after a disagreement with the White House over Biden’s criticism of the international criminal court’s move to issue an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over allegations of war crimes in Gaza.The actor’s wife, Amal Alamuddin Clooney, worked on the case. Clooney called Steve Ricchetti, the president’s counsel, to complain about Biden’s labeling the warrant as “outrageous”.Warrants were being sought for the arrest of Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, and three leaders of Hamas, which controls Gaza.Shortly afterwards, however, Clooney appeared at a huge fundraising event in Los Angeles for the campaign, which headlined with Biden and Barack Obama. More

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      ‘What we’ve been saying all along’: where do critical voters stand on Biden dropping out?

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      Concerns about Joe Biden’s fitness for re-election on the left may have been muted over the last year. But they were not absent.“There’s a lot of people, especially on the left, that have been talking about this,” said Alex Johnson, an IT worker in Atlanta.Democrats in the center of the party would chastise critics on the left as ageist or radical when bringing up the president’s age before the disastrous debate, he said. “They’re telling everybody that they were crazy. And then one thing happened, and all of a sudden, all of the people who have been calling progressives crazy, they’re like: ‘You know, maybe they were right.’”Biden has repeatedly reiterated that he will not withdraw from the race. Democratic party leaders are locking arms behind the president, instructing their ranks to be circumspect in conversation with news reporters and are strategizing ahead of the Democratic national convention.The conversation about Biden’s fitness ratcheted up after his debate performance last month. But they did not begin then, even among Democrats. Editorials from David Ignatius at the Washington Post and Mark Leibovich at the Atlantic last year called for Biden to refrain from running. Cenk Uygur, progressive co-creator of The Young Turks program, wanted Biden to give up re-election for more than a year and has been more than vocal about it, describing Biden’s supporters on the left as dead-enders.“At this point, eight out of 10 Americans think that Joe Biden’s mental health is not sufficient to be president,” Uygur said. “That’s what we’ve been saying all along. That number was already sky high before the debate.”Uygur has been arguing that it’s more than Biden’s age; no president with poll numbers in the 30s at this point in the election cycle has won re-election. Uygur tried to run as a candidate himself, despite being born in Istanbul – a constitutional disqualification for the office – simply to make the point.Karl Olson in St Louis Park, Minnesota, generally votes for Republican candidates. In 2020, “to save democracy”, Olson made the maximum possible legal contribution to the Biden campaign, he said. He voted for Biden in 2020, but has been calling for Biden not to run for re-election for years.He voted for Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary. Now he is considering a vote for Trump.“I have long held that [Biden] should quit while he’s ahead,” Olson said. “I have concluded that if the Democrats insist on renominating Biden and Harris, they deserve to lose.”“Here’s the thing,” he added. “If Donald Trump is a political antichrist who will destroy democracy, then why are Democrats insisting on renominating Biden-Harris when he’s too old and she’s not enough of a leader to win?”Much of the anger today is being directed at the media, both for ignoring the substance of concerns about Biden’s age before the debate, and now the seeming pile-on after it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe headlines may be overdue, said Blue Tannery, a radio engineer in Atlanta. But they are not helpful.“The age thing in particular; yes, it’s an important problem. I’m really, really, really sick of seeing headlines about it,” Tannery said. The one thing that Biden said that makes any sense: you should all shut up about how old that I am and start talking about what I’ve done over the last four years.”Tannery said he had wanted Biden not to run, but also said the standard the media applies to Biden is unfair. “This is eight years of being in this country, watching Trump just open his mouth onstage and exhale a horde of locusts and the headline is about Biden,” Tannery said. “Because that’s what Trump does every time. That’s not news anymore. It is exhausting.”Samantha Ruddy, a comedy writer in Philadelphia, may be typical of reluctant Biden voters. She’s still voting for Biden. But now she also thinks he’s going to lose.“I have wanted Democratic candidates more politically aligned to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders during the past two election cycles,” Ruddy said. “In 2020, I felt Biden was better than Trump. I still feel he’s better than Trump. However, I don’t think he can win in 2024. I believe the best move is to replace him on the ticket. That being said – much like Donald Trump – I’m an entertainer who looked at the eclipse, so what do I know?” More

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      For US democracy to survive, it needs progressives like Sanders and AOC | Judith Levine

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      In France, more than 200 candidates dropped out of their races to consolidate the left-center vote and defeat the extreme right. In Israel, Labor and the leftwing Meretz party are merging to offer “a real alternative to the path of the failed and dangerous government”.And in the US, the Democrats are on a death march behind the zombie Joe Biden, more worried about looking disunited than winning the election.They are disunited – and that may be their last hope. If they’re going to try to save democracy, Biden’s stated campaign goal, they must look to the faction they’ve distanced themselves from: the left. And if the left cares about democracy, it needs to get onboard with the Democrats.The only excitement that the Democrats have generated since Barack Obama’s presidency has come from its further-left members: people such as Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent senator, and erstwhile Democrat; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York City representative; and Jamie Raskin, the left-of-center Maryland representative, who brilliantly orchestrated Donald Trump’s impeachment for attempting to overturn the election.Yet the party establishment is intent on sidelining its progressive wing. Before the 2020 elections, the Democratic congressional campaign committee changed its rules to cut business ties with any consultant who worked with primary challengers – who were coming, not coincidentally, from the left. The party has sat on its hands as the rightwing American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) pours $100m into defeating seven members of Congress’s progressive “Squad” because of their vocal opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza.All this effort represents a suicidal denial of the politics of the Democratic base. More than three-quarters of Democrats oppose the war. As many as 750,000 presidential primary voters chose “uncommitted”, “no preference” or a blank ballot to protest against Biden’s unconditional support for Israel. In early June, the Nation predicted that the uncommitted delegates, a substantial number of them from the battleground states of the upper midwest, would be a critical constituency at the Democratic convention. If Biden finally throws in the towel, that faction will become much more critical.Pundits are calling the trouncing of Jamaal Bowman, the progressive Democratic incumbent from New York’s congressional district 16, a sign of Democratic voters’ swing to the center, even though it was money from the right – Aipac’s $15m to his moderate primary opponent – that defeated him. Yet elsewhere in New York state, progressives, including socialists, running as Democrats handily fought off primary challenges, thanks not to the Democratic party but to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Working Families party (WFP).A 2022 Pew poll found that Democrats under 30 view socialism positively at twice the rate as they favor capitalism. In fact, all Democrats under 65 – Black and brown people more than white, women more than men, poor more than rich – have a better opinion of socialism than of capitalism.While the Republicans cede all power to the radical right, the Democrats, since Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” of the party in the 1990s, have clung to the middle. By simultaneously marginalizing the left and depending on its votes, the party has courted only mistrust and cynicism from the social justice movements whose ideas, in milder form, they eventually co-opt.The problem is not just that the Democrats snub progressives. The progressives are carrying on as if no more were at stake in this election than in the last one, when a lot was at stake. Jill Stein and Cornel West, presidential candidates of the Green party and the People’s party, respectively, keep campaigning – and sparring with one another – knowing that they might scrape off enough votes to give the election to Trump.Since the debate, both are sounding delusional. “Biden’s dropping out, Trump is on his way to jail. I could be the last one standing constant and consistent,” West told the talkshow host Tavis Smiley. On the media circuit, Stein is describing the exchange as “zombie versus psychopath”, proof of the two-party system’s dysfunction – and claiming a surge of support for her campaign. Surge or not, Stein is on the ballot in five swing states; according to Politico, she could determine who wins.In spite of the animosity, progressives and progressive organizations – MoveOn, Lean Left, the DSA, the WFP – continue to pitch in. Most of the people I’ve met making get-out-the-vote phone calls for whatever mediocre candidate the Democrats put on the ballot come from the old, New, Labor, feminist, anti-war or antiracist left. The Democratic party needs the left.And as much as the Democrats need the left, the left needs democracy. In June 2020, under Trump’s orders, national guard troops in riot gear fired teargas and rubber bullets at citizens peacefully protesting George Floyd’s murder in Washington’s Lafayette Park so that the president could have his picture taken holding up a Bible in front of a church. When Trump lectured governors to “dominate” – arrest, prosecute, jail and “do retribution” to – demonstrators in their cities, only the Illinois Democrat JB Pritzker, whose name has been floated to replace Biden on the ticket, objected.In an extraordinary move, Trump’s defense secretary, along with other active and retired military officers, condemned the deployment of the military against non-violent domestic protest. The next time, surrounded by vetted loyalists, Trump will not be constrained.For the people who braved Covid and the cops, it’s more than distasteful to canvass for the party that named its reform bill after Floyd, then spent hundreds of millions to put more cops on the streets. West and Stein are right: unlike parliamentary systems, where parties large and small represent proportionate popular support within government, the US electoral duopoly fails democracy. But the duopoly is what we’ve got. And this time, the greater of two evils is far eviler than the lesser.Overlapping crises – a US supreme court that has (most recently) coronated all past and future presidents, and the flameout of the already sputtering Democratic nominee – have muddled the rescue of democracy with the election of Democrats. If they win, they’re unlikely to do better than resuscitate the white supremacist minority-ruled oligarchy we have now.Still, the prospect of Trumpian fascism ought to stir our fealty to the good old American oligarchy we call democracy. If the left values democracy, it must help the Democrats. And if the Democrats prevail, they must look to the left to make democracy worthy of its name.
      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books More

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      The Republicans’ new party platform is scary – because it can win | Dustin Guastella and Bhaskar Sunkara

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      The new Republican platform was released yesterday. Some liberal journalists – the opinion-makers of what has been called the Democrats’ “shadow party” – dismissed the new platform as a “joke”. They’re wrong. The Republican party platform is scary. Not because it rolls out the usual litany of conservative policy preferences, but precisely because of where it breaks from that orthodoxy.The new party platform is scary, because it can win.Remember, the Republican party did not release a platform in 2020. Presumably, many in the party had not yet accepted that Trumpism was not an aberrant virus but instead the new normal for conservative politics. But in 2024 party leaders, billionaire donors, and rightwing media have embraced Donald Trump without reservation. The new platform reflects his political formula: moderate, at least rhetorically, on abortion; double down on immigration; and reject the small-government Republican tradition.In addition to the ex-president’s signature anti-immigrant positions, consider the following changes: the drafters have dropped the party’s longstanding commitment to cut “entitlements” and now say that Republicans “will not cut one penny” from social security or Medicare. The platform also does not mention reducing the national debt, opting instead for vague language about slashing “wasteful spending”. The platform endorses an industrial policy to make the US the “Manufacturing Superpower”. The platform rails against the “unfair trade deals” and politicians who “sold our jobs and livelihoods to the highest bidders overseas”. And there is a new commitment to “rebuild our cities and restore law and order”.Most strikingly, the platform does not mention any national abortion ban, only opposition to “late-term abortion”. The platform describes itself as “a return to common sense” and Trump has distanced himself from the radical framing of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.In US politics, platforms typically don’t mean much, and both Democrats and Republicans tend to throw together broad programs designed to triangulate between appeasing ideologues and appealing to swing voters. But platforms can be consequential if they signal a genuine break from past orthodoxy, and if legislators take them seriously. Given the sudden advocacy of platform positions from several leading Republican figures such as JD Vance and Marco Rubio, the new Republican platform does not seem like window dressing.This is the new core of the Republican party’s appeals: moderate on certain cultural issues and economic issues. That can win against a feeble Democratic party that is too busy wrestling over who their nominee should be to promote a second-term agenda. (“Let’s Finish the Job” says Joe Biden, in a recent ad, with no indication what that job is.)Democrats seem to have tricked themselves into thinking that the voting public’s general rejection of the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision means that polarization around abortion will catapult them to victory. They seem to think that because Ron DeSantis lost by making his campaign all about “wokeness”, voters really don’t mind corporate DEI language. They seem to think that because the Republican party is unwilling to follow through on the populist economics presented in their 2016 and 2024 platforms, voters will laugh off those promises. And, of course, they underestimate the degree to which inflation has soured voters on the president and the Democrats.Much was made in the lead-up to 2016 about the civil war within the Republican party between “Never Trump” conservatives and the Steve Bannon populist wing of the party. Moderate figures like Joe Scarborough and Colin Powell left the party in opposition to their presumptive candidate, while Marco Rubio said that Trump’s nomination would “fracture the party and be damaging to the conservative movement”. Far from crippling the Republican party, however, Trump brought it back to power. And in office, he reassured establishment figures by coupling largely symbolic protectionist measures with the deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy that one would have expected from a Mitt Romney administration.And now, instead of moving the Republican party to the radical right, Trump, on key issues like abortion, is at least theoretically moving his party closer to the center. Indeed, the Republican platform appears to be a winning one. Yet while the Republican party is offering a relatively coherent program, Democrats are all over the place, with a nominee unable to effectively communicate with the American people and no unifying theme other than opposition to Trump. Rather than running on the Biden administration’s oversight of job growth in distressed areas and its new industrial policy, liberals seem content to do battle on the cultural front.This discursive failing has allowed common sense policies that are more reflective of the governing practice of today’s Democratic party – from defending the social safety net to growing manufacturing jobs – to become rebranded as the bread-and-butter of the Republican party.In power, it’s likely that Trump will once again betray his working-class supporters and govern like a typical business conservative, because he is utterly committed to more tax cuts and weakening trade unions. He’s promised his richest political donors whatever they want if they help him get back in power. As a result, we’ve seen billionaires lining up to shower him with cash.Yet Trump has displayed surprising political discipline lately. While the Democrats bicker among themselves about Biden’s fitness, Trump is only now beginning to spend big money in swing states like Wisconsin – where he is already leading in the polls.This is a side of Trump we haven’t previously seen; he is campaigning to win in a dangerously coherent way. If progressives don’t wake up and offer an appealing alternative, Trump might do more than rule through the courts and through executive orders – he might forge a long-lasting, majoritarian movement.
      Dustin “Dino” Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia
      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin, and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More