Ronald Brownstein Profile picture
Apr 25 8 tweets 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Given his persistently low approval #s, "to win reelection, Biden likely will need to win an unusually large share of voters who are at least somewhat unhappy over conditions in the country and ambivalent or worse about giving him another term. Historically that hasn’t been easy"
For those who think Biden can break that pattern, last November’s midterm election offers the proof of concept. 55% of voters disapproved of his performance & 3/4 said economy was in bad shape. Yet Ds overperformed, especially in swing states like MI/PA/WI/AZ
In 22, Democrats defused the expected “red wave” by winning an unusually large number of voters who were mildly disappointed in Biden’s performance and/or the economy. Whitmer/Shapiro/Hobbs all won at least 70% of voters who called economy "not so good"-a stunning result
Why did Democrats so exceed the usual performance among voters dissatisfied with the country’s direction? The answer is that many of those voters rejected the Republican Party that Trump has reshaped in his image.
For Biden, more important than changing minds in 24 may be replicating the D success in 2022 at winning & mobilizing voters who aren’t wild about him but dislike Trump and the GOP even more.
Says long-time D strategist @taddevine “While there are not an overwhelming number of people who are tremendously favorable to Biden, I just don’t think there is an overwhelming number of persuadable people who hate him. They hate the other guy.”
Likewise GOP pollster @pollsterguy says Trump “is so terrific at sucking up all the political oxygen, he becomes the issue on which the election gets framed, not the terrible economy or the level of Americans’ dissatisfaction w/the direction of the country.”
@vavreck says while many D-leaning voters say they don't want Biden to run again, "The bottom line is that on Election Day, that D nominee, even the one they didn’t want to run again, is going to be closer to [the] vision of the world they want to live in than the R alternative"

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More from @RonBrownstein

Apr 13
"The Crow company bought the properties for $133,363 from three co-owners — Thomas, his mother and the family of Thomas’ late brother, according to a state tax document and a deed dated Oct. 15, 2014, filed at the Chatham County courthouse"
"Soon after the sale was completed, contractors began work on tens of thousands of dollars of improvements...[including] a carport, a repaired roof and a new fence and gates, according to city permit records and blueprints."
"A federal disclosure law passed after Watergate requires justices & other officials to disclose the details of most real estate sales over $1,000. Thomas never disclosed his sale of the Savannah properties. That appears to be a violation of the law, 4 ethics law experts" said
Read 4 tweets
Apr 13
TN Rs took the red state attack on urban political power to a new peak w/their vote. The expulsions went beyond making structural changes to diminish the power of big-city residents, to entirely erasing those voters’ decision on whom they want to represent them in the legislature
Similarly, red state are preempting prosecutor & policing powers of blue metros in GA/MS/MO/FL/TN/TX & more. But @GregAbbott_TX raised this to a new level by preemptively announcing he would approve a pardon for a man convicted of killing a #BLM protester just 1 day before
While many Rs are moving to constrain law-enforcement officials in blue counties, Abbott would invalidate a decision by a blue county jury. And while most preemption targets prosecutors b/c of cases they won’t prosecute, Abbott is overriding a prosecutor b/c of a case he did
Read 4 tweets
Jan 27
On every front the environment is even less hospitable today than it was during Obama’s presidency for the kind of budget deal that House Republicans are now demanding in order to raise the debt ceiling.
Although Obama’s team and many congressional Democrats genuinely believed that a big long-term deficit-reduction plan was both good politics and good economics, Biden, as well as most congressional Democrats today, are much more skeptical of that proposition.
Rs back then could at least formulate specific spending-cut demands back then, but they are far less likely to reach consensus today on a meaningful plan-b/c more of them recognize their political base, centered on older whites, is fine w/entitlement spending targeted toward them
Read 4 tweets
Jan 24
The GOP #SCOTUS majority is again key to this process. It has already shelved 2 key tools vs gerrymanders by ending Justice Dep't pre-clearance & blocking fed lawsuits vs. partisan lines. Now it could further limit Voting Rights cases & hobble (or ban) state Supreme Court review
In near-term #SCOTUS would mostly help Rs. Long-term impact is creating more districts where pols pick their voters not the other way around. "The alarming thing is you are taking the voters out of the equation," says former NRCC chair Tom Davis.
State Supreme Court reviews overturned 4 GOP gerrymanders in late 2010s that helped Ds recapture control. There’s a case House control flipped b/c a D majority NY court overturned a gerrymander from its own party while a Republican majority high court in FL did not.
Read 4 tweets
Nov 24, 2022
The House GOP majority has signaled its investigative agenda will channel the preoccupations of the former president and his die-hard base of supporters.
But it has set this course immediately after a midterm election in which voters outside the core conservative states sent an unmistakable signal of their own by repeatedly rejecting Trump-backed candidates in high-profile senate and gubernatorial races.
all sides in the GOP are likely to support efforts to probe the White House’s policy record. such as border security, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and how it is allocating the clean-energy tax credits and loan guarantees that the Inflation Reduction Act established.
Read 6 tweets
Nov 14, 2022
In Democratic-leaning & swing states, voters last week delivered an unmistakable cry of resistance to the restrictive GOP social agenda symbolized by the drive to ban abortion.
But in red states where Republicans have actually imposed that agenda over the past two years, GOP governors cruised to reelection without any discernible backlash.
That sharp contrast underscored the depth of the divide between red and blue America and points toward the further partitioning of the nation into divergent, and increasingly hostile, blocs living under fundamentally different rules for civil rights and liberties.
Read 5 tweets

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