Tag: democratic nominee
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Suddenly, MAGA Is Feeling Doubt About Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill'

With House Republicans narrowly passing President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act—which is designed to blow up the national debt, cut taxes for the rich, and partially pay for that by gutting programs for the poor and working class—you’d think MAGA conservatives would be cheering. But many of them aren’t.

Let’s back up.

Trump defied historic voting patterns in 2024 by winning voters making under $50,000 a year, 50 percent to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ 48 percent. He tied her among voters making over $50,000, at 49 percent. And when the threshold was raised to $100,000, the income divide got starker: Trump won the under-$100K crowd, 51 to 47 percent, while Harris won the over-$100K vote, 51 to 47 percent.

That flipped the old partisan narrative. In general, Republicans were the party of the working class, and Democrats the party of those with more money.

While culture-war hysteria around transgender people and immigrants drove much of Trump’s support, his promise to lower prices “on Day 1” clearly resonated with economically desperate voters. Exit polls back this up. He won 76 percent of those who had faced “severe hardship” from inflation in the previous year, and 52 percent of those who’d faced “moderate hardship.” Meanwhile, Harris dominated among those who said they’d faced “no hardship,” winning 78 percent of them.

As former Daily Kos reporter Kerry Eleveld once said in our old podcast, “Democrats are the party of voters who don’t have to look at prices when grocery shopping.”

That’s why we see so many variations of “this isn’t what we voted for” in all these “Leopards Ate Faces” stories. Yes, we could scream, “IT WAS ALL THERE IN PROJECT 2025!” But let’s be honest: Most voters aren’t policy wonks. For those doing price math in the grocery aisle, politics isn’t a priority. Trump’s promise may have been absurd, but it was simple and seductive.

But falling for those lies has a cost. On the economic front, Trump and the Republican Party are governing like they always have—for the ultrawealthy, connected, and powerful, at the direct expense of their own voters. As I’ve written repeatedly, it’s like Trump is trying to hurt his base.

Early Thursday morning, House Republicans voted to gut Medicaid, which disproportionately helps rural Americans. Their tax cuts for billionaires effectively raise taxes on low-income voters—i.e., their core voters in last year’s election. MarketWatch, reporting on a University of Pennsylvania analysis of a close-to-final draft of the GOP tax bill, noted:

  • The top 0.1 percent of households would rake in over $390,000 in after-tax income.
  • The top 1 percent would gain $44,190.
  • Households making $51,000 to $92,999 a year would get an additional $815.
  • The lowest-income households, though, will see their after-tax income shrink by $940.

Yes, that voter making under $50,000, they get to deal with Trump’s price-raising tariffs and a tax hike.

On Reddit’s r/conservative subreddit, the reactions to the House passing the bill were surprisingly muted.

Some echoed traditional deficit concerns, such as the commenter who noted, “Conservatives are supposed to want less government spending and less debt. This bill will add trillions of dollars of debt over the next 10 years. We're not even kind of moving in the right direction.”

But a surprising number took umbrage at the gutting of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.

One top commenter the subreddit—i.e., not a troll—wrote, “I'm all for cutting waste fraud and abuse on Medicaid and SNAP, but … I think if the medicaid/SNAP changes go through as is, GOP will get mauled in the mid-terms.”

Another top commenter noted, “[I]t's not that I like high taxes, it's that I think high taxes on the lower, middle, and upper-middle-class are much more damaging than high taxes on the ultra-rich. It's both about keeping taxes low on most people, and about preventing the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny number of people. It's also frustrating because Trump has repeatedly spoken out in favor of such tax hikes on the richest taxpayers as a way of making budgets and tax breaks work.”

This commenter also called the Medicaid provisions “cruel,” and on SNAP, they said, “[I]t's going to deny benefits to some people we would probably prefer have them. for example the people who are going to be hit hardest are the people who live in areas where jobs are scarce, who have difficult lives with a lot of barriers to getting anything done, and who have other life responsibilities like caring for family members or doing something else important in their community that they don't get paid for.”

If only there was a party that worked to protect such people …

All over social media, Trump voters are realizing they’re the ones being labeled as “fraud and waste.” Like this gem on Threads:

Again, we can point to Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s agenda for a second Trump administration—and note how it promised to gut SNAP and Medicaid. Yes, we warned them. But pointing fingers now isn’t useful.

What is useful? Turning this betrayal into motivation.

No, we won’t win over all Trump voters. Many are too far gone. It’s a cult.

But we don’t need all of them. We don’t even need most. We just need a small shift.

In Pennsylvania, Trump won last year by 120,266 votes. In Michigan, it was 80,103. And in Wisconsin, 29,397. Altogether, that makes for just 229,766 votes in an election where 155,512,532 were cast—or just 0.15 percent of all ballots. That’s how small of a shift we’re talking about, though obviously, the bigger the better.

I can’t recall ever seeing a party so eagerly swing a baseball bat at its own voters—many of them new to the Republican coalition.

The pain is real. And yes, most of us are impacted in some way. But if we can turn that pain into political clarity for even a slice of those voters, we can begin to reverse the damage—and take back our future.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Kamala Harris

With Leap In Favorable Rating, Harris Posts Big Lead In New NBC Poll

A new NBC poll published Sunday shows that 2024 Democratic nominee Kamala Harris just received "the largest favorability increase for any politician" the news outlet "has measured since George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks," according to The Daily Beast.

Per the report, "The New York Times’ Chief Political Analyst Nate Cohn called the new NBC survey arguably Harris’ 'best poll result since the debate,' and 'not just because she’s up 5 points,' but 'because it’s the kind of poll (the kind of poll once called the ‘gold standard’ a decade ago) that hadn’t produced a good national result for her in a while.'"

NBC News' poll comes after an ABC News/Ipsos poll published earlier this week proved that Harris is leading over Donald Trump "among likely voters."

MSNBC's Chris Jansing noted that it "was the second major poll to put" the vice president "in the lead outside of the margin of error."

The Beast reports, "Compared to July, when Harris had a 32% approval and 50% disapproval rating (nearly identical to Biden), the new poll finds 48% of respondents view her positively and 45% negatively."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Will A Little Bit More Of The Sanders Campaign Hurt Democrats?

Will A Little Bit More Of The Sanders Campaign Hurt Democrats?

After Bernie Sanders announced on Wednesday that he would not yet suspend his campaign, many Democrats responded with concern, calling on him to step down so that the party could unite under Hillary Clinton.

“It will be almost impossible for Sen. Sanders to catch up. And he should do the math and draw his own conclusions,” Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski told Politico.

“Sanders should stop the intrigue and electoral gimmicks,” Froma Harrop wrote in her column yesterday.

But will Sanders’ continued campaign hurt the party — or its prospective nominee?

It’s likely that Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, and a clean, cohesive electoral narrative would have benefited from a Sanders withdrawal on Tuesday after losses in California and New Jersey, which ended his mathematical shot at the nomination. But extending his campaign another week until the Washington, D.C. primary, or even another month until the convention in Philadelphia, may not hurt Democrats’ eventual party unity as badly as some suggest.

While getting some Sanders supporters to support Clinton will be a challenge — no matter what he does, now and a month from now — Sanders is not building the “Bernie or Bust” movement by following through on a promise to finish the campaign. It is worth looking at the final stages of the last Democratic presidential primary to understand what is happening now.

In 2008, the PUMA (“Party Unity My Ass”) movement drew similar attention, battling the party leadership and steadfastly backing Hillary Clinton despite her loss to Barack Obama.

Headlines warned of an enormous rift in the Democratic Party, including the prediction, based on exit polls, that “half of Clinton’s supporters won’t back Obama.”

Following the 2008 convention, however, those numbers changed. Nearly 20 percent more voters who initially backed Clinton said they were certain they would vote for Obama following the Denver gathering — where both Bill and Hillary Clinton delivered speeches strongly supporting him, and she halted the roll call vote to ask for his nomination by acclamation.

What a little more airtime for Sanders is more likely to do is bring attention to his agenda — and to neglected issues like the fight over D.C.’s budget autonomy — in a primary that he will probably lose badly to Clinton.

 

Photo: Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (R) delivers a statement while his wife Jane (L) listens after departing the West Wing of the White House following the meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama (not pictured) in Washington, U.S. June 9, 2016. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

Webb Attacks Clinton With An Eye On Independent Campaign

Webb Attacks Clinton With An Eye On Independent Campaign

By Ben Brody, Bloomberg News (TNS)

WASHINGTON ––When Jim Webb quit the Democratic presidential race on Oct. 20 with low poll numbers and a minimal debate presence, the former senator from Virginia left open the possibility he would return to run in in a different political guise. Now he appears to be edging closer to doing that.

On Saturday morning, Webb used Twitter and his Facebook page to attack Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton for her handling of Libya during her time as secretary of state.

Webb’s lengthy condemnation on Facebook said, among other things, that “Clinton should be called to account for her inept leadership that brought about the chaos in Libya.”

Webb’s campaign team has said that year-end would be a reasonable time to decide whether he would run as an independent.

Since dropping out of the race for the Democratic nomination, Webb has continued to maintain his website, which he has updated with posts about the possibilities of an independent run. On Twitter, he and his fans have been promoting a (hashtag)WebbNation hashtag.

A run by Webb, who often manages his own social media accounts and has used them recently to promote a petition in favor of his candidacy and to congratulate Bernie Sanders in his battles with the Democratic National Committee, could complicate the 2016 election.

While observers typically have analyzed the prospect of a third-party or independent run by Republican front-runner Donald Trump — or even one from Sanders — Webb could alter the dynamics of the race even with his smaller profile.

A recent CNN poll, for example, forecast tight races between Clinton and several Republican contenders in hypothetical match-ups for the general election. Webb’s campaign said it would concentrate on mobilizing voters in the ideological middle, along with people who have become dissatisfied with politics.

In a tight race, even a small base of support could make him a factor. Ralph Nader won only fractions of a percent of the vote in many states in the 2000 presidential election, yet that arguably helped tip the Electoral College vote to George W. Bush, denying Democratic Vice President Al Gore, the winner of the popular vote, the presidency.

Webb’s public statements have focused economic populism and breaking the monopoly of the two-party system.

Despite the apparent escalation of his interest in an independent candidacy and his aides’ previously stated interest in making Webb’s intentions known by the beginning of 2016, history suggests he could toy with voters for quite some time. Webb missed a self-imposed deadline for getting into the Democratic race and disregarded conventional wisdom on political timing when finally declared hours before the beginning of the July 4 holiday.

©2015 Bloomberg News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Screenshot via CNN

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