Kamala Needs More Biden Voters To Win
Plus: Ukraine's F-16 crash, NY Dems' abortion struggles, Global fertility in crisis
The vice president has flipped the enthusiasm gap, the money gap and the polling gap in her favor in the six weeks since she replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee. But the race between Harris and Donald Trump remains not only tight nationally, but in a broader range of states than before.
The resulting two-month sprint to come is what Donna Brazile, the Harris confidante who managed Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, described as America’s first “snap election.” The challenge Harris’ campaign is now confronting is how to extend its late-summer surge through the fall.
“She has had as good of a first five weeks or last five weeks that I have seen since Barack Obama won [South Carolina‘s 2008 primary] and went on a roll and locked up the nomination,” said Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager who has served as an informal adviser to Harris. “But in every single battleground state, we’re still within the margin of error.”
Polls do show all the swing states within the margin of error. But the momentum, for now, appears to be with Harris. The clearest evidence of that was a Gallup poll last week that showed Democrats with a 14-point edge on which party’s voters were more enthusiastic about voting — a major shift from the organization’s March survey showing Republicans with a 4-point advantage in what was then a contest between two unpopular candidates in Biden and Trump.
The challenge for Kamala is holding on to voting blocs who were key to Joe Biden’s victory:
The Democratic coalition that elected President Biden in 2020 was fractured and weakened by the time he ended his campaign for re-election. In the six weeks since, Kamala Harris has gone a long way toward repairing the damage.
But recent Wall Street Journal polling shows the vice president has more work to do to overcome the gains former President Donald Trump has made among Black, Latino and young voters—groups that traditionally back Democrats. Any erosion in the Democratic coalition could decide the election, given that Biden’s support was barely strong enough to win in 2020. The president’s Electoral College victory rested on tiny margins of about 44,000 votes across three states.
Support for Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has grown by 13 percentage points among Black voters since Biden left the race in July, combined results of Journal polls in late July and August show. But at 81% support, she is still 10 points behind Biden’s 2020 mark.
Harris has also gained 13 points in Latino support—but lags behind Biden’s 2020 mark by 6 points.
Similarly, Harris has improved the party’s standing among young voters—those under age 30—by 7 points. But the party still has a deficit compared with 2020, when Biden’s support was 12 points higher.
Harris particularly needs Biden’s help in Pennsylvania, where they deployed yesterday for a typically angry Biden appearance:
F-16 Crash Shows Challenge for Ukraine
Training Ukrainians to fly F-16s is a challenge.
In a meeting with U.S. senators in June 2022, two of Ukraine’s most prominent military pilots were making a pitch for F-16 jet fighters when one of the senators spoke up to temper their hopes.
“I told them it’d be a hard sell,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said later. But he was impressed with the two pilots’ passion and charisma, and pledged to help persuade the Biden administration to green light the jets.
The pilots, Andriy Pilshchykov and Oleksiy Mes, former classmates best known by their call signs Juice and Moonfish, persevered. Both are now dead. Juice died in a training accident last August at the age of 30. Moonfish was killed last week at age 30 piloting one of the planes he campaigned so hard for Ukraine to receive.
The pilots’ deaths highlight the stakes in the debate over how the West should arm Ukraine. By the time the country had possession of the F-16s, many of Ukraine’s best pilots, like Juice, were already dead.
Now, another experienced pilot, Moonfish, has perished after months of arduous training to make the leap from operating Ukraine’s old aircraft to the tech-loaded F-16. In one of the first missions in which Ukraine deployed the new weapon, it has already lost one of the six jets in the first delivery from U.S. allies, and one of its only pilots trained to fly it. The circumstances of the crash are still unclear.
Kyiv’s partners, led by the U.S., have provided increasingly sophisticated weapons to Ukraine in ever larger volumes. But the equipment has often come after months of debate, with Western allies initially resisting appeals for more advanced equipment only to agree months later. The fitful flow has given Ukraine’s military less time to integrate the complex and powerful weapons—leaving an air force already operating at its limits grappling with a small number of high-tech machines thrown straight into a full-fledged war.
U.S. officials say the incremental approach is calibrated to equip Ukraine with the weapons it needs without triggering escalation with Russia. Critics say it has cost Ukraine opportunities to deal large blows to Russia’s military, and given Russia time to pre-empt and counteract Ukraine’s next moves.
New York Democrats Worry About Abortion
Concerns arise that radical measure is facing backlash.
Democratic consultants for swing seat candidates are increasingly anxious that a well-organized campaign by conservatives to sink a proposed state constitutional amendment on abortion could hurt the party’s candidates in battleground seats.
For now, top New York Democrats are not planning to open up their coffers to respond to those attacks.
The unwillingness to spend has some party operatives concerned state Democratic leaders are failing to effectively counter an opposition that has seized on the amendment’s expansive language pledging rights for LGBTQ+ people. The so-called equality amendment would ban discrimination against “gender identity” and “pregnancy outcomes,” adding to current constitutional protections for race and religion.
An issue that should have been as easy a win in New York as it has been for Democrats across the nation is now at risk of backfiring because of how they chose to craft the amendment.
The pushback from the right has relied heavily on anti-trans rhetoric, a line of attack that internal polling shows has proven persuasive to voters in battleground House districts, three people who have reviewed the data told POLITICO. They were granted anonymity to discuss the inside information.
Without a well-funded campaign to defend and bolster the equality amendment, deep blue New York could reject a referendum in support of abortion rights — with dire national political implications for Democrats.
“This should have happened already,” said Teresa Gonzalez, a Democratic consultant in New York who’s running a Puerto Rican voter outreach campaign in Long Island and Hudson Valley swing districts. “This is a call to action; we need to sound the alarm. It’s a crisis moment.”
Interviews with six Democratic consultants and advisers, including those working on battleground races, revealed a growing concern that the referendum — once considered an effective vehicle to boost turnout and help the party gain control of the House — has become an afterthought for a state party confident it will pass because of its potential bipartisan appeal…
One Democratic consultant who has reviewed internal polling found voters in battleground House districts are susceptible to the argument that the amendment would harm kids. Voters generally support abortion rights and the rights of LGBTQ+ people, the polling found.
“But if you add in the far-right talking points about this — boys competing in girls’ sports — support erodes quickly, and in these swing districts it can dampen the enthusiasm for the candidates who are running on a support position,” said one Democrat who reviewed the data and was granted anonymity to speak frankly about the internal polling.
But that could be a challenge for Democrats. The sole campaign backing the amendment, New Yorkers for Equal Rights, has tried to walk a nonpartisan line by suggesting Republican and independent voters supportive of abortion rights could be persuaded to vote for the amendment. State Democratic Committee officials have pointed to that stance as a reason for distancing themselves from that effort.
The Global Fertility Crisis Is Already Here
According to the UN World Population Prospects, the global total fertility rate last year was 2.25 — a little above the replacement rate. But the UN was wrong. It’s not easy to calculate the figure because there’s a lack of statistics in many countries. In others, political constraints bind the organization. For many places with reliable records, last year’s birth numbers were between 10 percent and 20 percent lower than UN estimates. In Colombia, the UN estimate was 705,000 births. Yet its national statistical agency counted 510,000.
There’s another reason to be skeptical of the UN figures — the replacement fertility level of 2.1 is valid for the UK, not universally. We get the 2.1 figure using a calculation: 1.06 boys are born for every girl in Britain. To ensure an average of one girl born, we need 2.06 children overall to be born. We then look at the probability a woman lives to reach her reproductive years, which in Britain is 0.98. To get the reproductive rate, we divide 2.06 by 0.98 — which equals 2.1.
However, in many developing countries fewer women survive to a reproductive age. Globally, the figure drops to 0.94. So the replacement fertility level needed worldwide is more than 2.1.
Many countries also have a higher male-to-female ratio, often due to selective abortion. In China, it’s around 1.15; in India, 1.1. An estimate for the sex ratio globally is 2.08. To estimate a global replacement fertility rate we divide 2.08 by 0.94, which comes out at 2.21 children per woman.
By adjusting the UN’s figures to account for the lower births in many countries, I estimate the global fertility rate last year was 2.18, i.e. below the 2.21 replacement threshold. It could be even lower than that, as it’s likely that the birth rate in many African countries saw a larger fall than the UN estimated.
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