At a time when the Republican Party seems united around Donald Trump and his MAGA vision, the ruling Democrats seem about to tear themselves into pieces. Even with the looming presence of a second Trump electoral triumph, a growing proportion of the party’s traditional constituencies – ethnic and religious minorities, working class people and young people – are detaching from the party.
Perhaps the fear of losing in November will be enough to keep this fraying coalition together. Still, there’s little that will unite the party in future elections. Democrats are polling poorly on big issues like inflation, the border, crime, and national security. Barely a third of the population thinks the country is headed in the right direction. Yet rather than address these concerns, Biden has focused on placating the party’s new political base, educated professionals, through vanity schemes like the massive cancellation of college debt.
As a recent Rasmussen survey suggests, there’s an enormous distance between the core of graduate school educated urban professionals and everyone else on virtually every major issue. Unlike most Americans, this class has benefited from Biden’s wild spending sprees, with most employment growth concentrated in public sector government jobs and largely public-funded health care.
In contrast, the traditionally private sector middle and the working classes buckle under the twin pressures of monopoly power and regulations that increasingly imperil smaller firms. Even young people are shifting away from Biden, who won their votes easily in 2020, and towards Trump. Media accounts may link this to the Palestine crisis but polling shows that young people rank virtually every other issue as being more important. Their concerns are real: one in four Americans overall fear losing their job in the next year.
Jewish Democrats, alarmed by the rise of pro-Hamas forces in the party, are financing bids to take on progressive legislators. Jewish organisations have targeted anti-Israel politicians in the primaries, and won some significant victories in California and Oregon. Mainstream Jewish organisations also seem likely to oust later this month the pro-Palestine New York progressive Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
Most Jews will likely vote for Biden, but support for the Democrats is gradually eroding. After all, Donald Trump managed to boost his Jewish vote from 24 per cent in 2016 to 30 per cent – well above the average for most modern Republican Presidents. The GOP also made gains in the 2022 election, going from one quarter in 2016 to fully one third. A recent Siena poll even showed Trump leading among New York’s large Jewish population. The Jewish vote could play a decisive role in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada. Biden’s handlers seem to have forgotten that unlike Britain or France, there are well over twice as many Jews as Muslims in the US.
Read the rest of this piece at Telegraph.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Anthony Lemus is a professor of practice and director of industry relations at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Engineering.
Photo: The White House, via Flickr, in Public Domain (U.S. Government Work).
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