Welcome to Thunderdome. There’s really no question now that Israel will be a major issue driving protests at the summer conventions, particularly at the DNC in Chicago. The scene that’s played out on Ivy League campuses over the past several weeks can easily be transported to the outskirts of the Chicago convention, where media presence alone will be beneficial for protesters and sympathetic Democratic politicians could provide aid and comfort. As someone who enjoyed getting teargassed in Minneapolis in 2008, and was profoundly disappointed at the Rage Against the Machine non-protests in 2016, I’m eager for the test.
Tim Stanley shares his thoughts:
One: Biden owns the Middle East conflict even as he denounces the casualties. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times notes that in January, the Israelis dropped a US-made bomb from a US-made plane on a US-relief group in a war supported by the US. “How can that not come back to Biden?” Kristof concludes that the president, for all his anti-war instincts, remains a die-hard Zionist, reluctant even to cut ties with an alleged crook like Netanyahu (there is reportedly a photo of the president on the prime minister’s desk inscribed: “Bibi, I love you but I don’t agree with a damn thing you have to say.”)
Did the US like the South Vietnamese government? Not much. But it regarded its survival as essential to US security, even as the cost of defending it mounted.
That cost wasn’t just material or reputational; it also alienated America’s youth and divided liberals. Step Two: Gaza, like Vietnam, is splitting the Democratic coalition along historic fault-lines of generation, race and class. “Again,” writes Ross Douthat, “you have an aging Democratic president struggling to modulate a conflict with no endgame”. Again, the Left finds its voice on campus, where students and academics compare Israel to Apartheid South Africa and evoke the wider cause of “decolonization” (the line from “Black Lives Matter” to “From the River to the Sea” is depressingly straight). And, once more, older liberals struggle to contain forces with which they are usually sympathetic.
Take Columbia, where students opened an occupying encampment demanding the university disinvest from Israel. The demand is naive – it’ll be hard to unbundle the institution’s vast and complex portfolio – and hijacked by the usual racists and nutcases who have made Jewish students feel besieged. One professor reports that shouts of hate ruined his music class’s appreciation of John Cage’s piano composition “4.33”: unsurprising as the modernist piece comprises four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence (Columbia, sigh conservatives, has been occupied by weirdos for decades).
Protesters, some of them Jewish, have denounced media coverage as hysterical and false, arguing that the real story is the administration’s reactionary response. When former Harvard president Claudine Gay infamously said that antisemitic remarks should be considered in context, she lost her job. Minouche Shafik of Columbia has cannily gone the other way, reassuring Congress that anti-Zionist professors will be punished and calling the cops to clear the protests (kids claim they were hand-tied and held for eight hours in cells with a shared toilet). One casualty was the daughter of Ilhan Omar, the radical congresswoman – left “homeless” and “starving” by the university.
Columbia was an epicenter of anti-Vietnam war protest in 1968. So was Chicago – here we come to Step Three – when it hosted the Democratic Convention that fateful year. In the city of machine mayor Richard Daley, working-class cops ran truncheon-first into young radical activists, casting a bloody image for TV viewers that led to Democrat defeat in November. It’s a wound that took a long time to heal. And where, pray, are the Democrats meeting to re-nominate Biden in 2024? Chicago.
At this point, it’d be more of a shock if things don’t get nuts.
RFK now threatens both campaigns
For a while there, the independent ticket of ex-Democrats Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Nicole Shanahan seemed to be taking crucial votes away from Democrat Joe Biden, at least as indicated by comparing three-way and five-way (with Cornel West and Jill Stein) polls to head-to-head match-ups of the incumbent and Donald Trump. Now, even as Biden has all but erased his polling deficit against Trump, he’s getting some more good news in surveys that include other candidates.
Two recent major national polls show Biden running better in a five-way than a two-way race. According to NBC News, Biden moves from two points down to two points up when the non-major-party candidates are included. In the latest Marist poll, Biden leads Trump by three points head-to-head and by five points in a five-way race. Since left-bent candidates West and Stein are pulling 5 percent in the former poll and 4 percent in the latter (presumably taking very few votes from Trump), you have to figure Kennedy is beginning to cut into the MAGA vote to an extent that should get Team Trump’s attention. And it has, NBC News reports:
Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he’s confident that independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will pull more votes away from President Joe Biden than from him — a net win for the Republican’s candidacy.
“He is Crooked Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, not mine,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. “I love that he is running!”
Behind closed doors, however, Trump is less sure. A Republican who was in the room with Trump this year as he reviewed polling said Trump was unsure how Kennedy would affect the race, asking the other people on hand whether or not Kennedy was actually good for his candidacy.
Politico notes that Kennedy is drawing higher favorability numbers from Republican voters than from Democratic ones, which could indicate a higher ceiling for RFK Jr. among Trump defectors. And it’s generally assumed from his past performances that there is a lower ceiling on Trump’s support than on Biden’s; he needs to be able to win with significantly less than a majority of the popular vote.
Biden’s poll numbers continue to improve
Biden and Trump are tied 46 percent-46 percent in the latest Quinnipiac University national poll. Throw RFK in the mix, and it’s still tied 37 percent-37 percent. But force RFK voters to choose and they break 47 percent-29 percent for Trump.
That dynamic is consistent with two other polls — a Marist survey on Monday and a NBC News one on Sunday — that show Biden’s margin increasing when RFK and other third party candidates are included.
Driving the news: Biden is convinced that his numbers are moving in the right direction. He especially likes that top line Marist number: 51 percent-48 percent.
Abortion vulnerability for Trump
From a Politico-Morning Consult poll.
Donald Trump’s leave-abortion-to-the-states tack may be the least harmful position the former president can take as reproductive rights remain the favorite campaign trail cudgel of Joe Biden and Democrats in the post-Roe era.
Half of voters in a new Politico-Morning Consult poll support states making their own laws about abortion access, compared with just 35 percent who oppose that.
But the poll also shows the former president remains vulnerable on abortion with independents and even with some Republican voters who are unhappy that the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights — a signal that Trump could struggle to reverse the GOP’s losses over the issue, even if his new position is more popular. He may also face challenges if voters or lawmakers push him to articulate a more detailed stance on the issue that runs afoul of either side of the debate.
The survey — conducted after Trump rolled out his abortion policy earlier this month — also highlights areas where Biden can still gain ground on the issue as he seeks to tie Trump to the Supreme Court decision and the patchwork of unpopular state abortion bans that have cut off access to the procedure in almost all circumstances in nearly a third of the country since the ruling.
One more thing
An interesting piece here on how TikTok mismanaged its lobbying operation, miscalculating on their level of vulnerability and trying to use children as pawns and just throw money at influencers instead of building up support over time:
Lewis said his meeting with Andersen “was probably for me the point where you realize they have lost touch with reality, and it wasn’t going to go that well.”
He called TikTok’s misplaced confidence “part of a larger pattern of being tone-deaf to how the Congress actually works.” With around 170 million monthly active users in the US, Lewis said TikTok executives felt they were “too big” for Congress to squash without alienating their constituents.
“They kind of felt — and this was in multiple conversations — that they were untouchable,” Lewis said.
Hubris is the constant sin in Washington, for politicians and entities alike.
