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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: And show your work! [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-01
We begin today with Hannah Hartig. Scott Keeter, Andrew Daniller, and Ted Van Green of Pew Research Center and Pew's new analysis of the results of the 2024 presidential election.
In his third run for president in 2024, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris by 1.5 percentage points overall, winning 312 Electoral College votes and the national popular vote for the first time. Trump won with a voter coalition that was more racially and ethnically diverse than in 2020 or 2016, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of the 2024 electorate. Among Hispanic voters, Trump battled to near parity in 2024 (51% Harris, 48% Trump) after losing to Joe Biden 61%-36% in 2020.
Trump won 15% of Black voters – up from 8% four years earlier.
Trump also did better among Asian voters. While a majority of Asian voters (57%) backed Harris, 40% supported Trump. This was a narrower margin than Biden’s in 2020 (70% to 30%). These shifts were largely the result of differences in which voters turned out in the 2020 and 2024 elections. As in the past, a relatively small share of voters switched which party’s candidate they supported.
As of 1:08 am, the Senate is still slogging through amendments of the Big Oo-gly Bill.
Also...I'm 29 today (or I will be 29 about 2 hours and 5 minutes after this posts).
Those who know what I am talking about...KNOW!
G. Elliot Morris writes for his "Strength in Numbers" Substack specifically about what the Pew report said about non-voters.
The hard work behind all this data-wrangling lets Pew find out a lot of things you can’t know with polls alone. For example, Pew says that 15% of people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 didn’t vote in 2024, and that Donald Trump won 2020 non-voters in 2024 14% to 12% (the vast majority of 2020 non-voters didn’t vote last year). In 2024, Trump won 85% of his 2020 voters. You may infer from this that the people who didn’t vote in 2024 were Democratic-leaning, since more 2020 Democrats sat out than 2020 Republicans. But Pew finds that many of those people must have changed their preferences since 2020: According to their polling, while Trump won by 1.5 percentage points among voters in 2024, among Americans who did not vote in 2024, he led Harris in pre-election surveys by 4 points, 44 to 40. That’s an advantage that reverses Democrats’ longtime edge with non‑voters. This is a trend that has been moving against Democrats since 2012. Pew’s finding makes the top spot in this newsletter for three reasons: The first is that this is the highest-quality and most comprehensive public analysis that assesses vote preference among validated non-voters in 2024. Several private firms have released their own estimates, but don’t publicly explain how they arrived at them. Others, like the polling team at the New York Times, have done some estimation but not released a full report. The second reason this is notable is for what it says about turnout. After the 2024 election, lots of Democrats claimed that if turnout had been higher, Harris would have won. But Pew shows that higher turnout might have widened Trump’s margin.
Mike Madrid writes for his Substack "The Great Transformation" about what Arizona U.S. Senator Ruben Gallego and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani have in common.
..Both Ruben Gallego and Zohran Mamdani focused on working-class struggles when making their case to Latino voters, and both adopted very different policies. But guess what…? Both worked. [...]
Gallego and Mamdani are talking to working-class Latinos where they’re at - I don’t just mean in their neighborhoods, though that’s true - but in their wallets, which is more important. Notice, Mamdani wasn’t talking about ICE raids in New York City despite the crackdowns going on? You’d think that would be central to a far left candidates platform, but no, they’re figuring it out.
It’s the economy, stupid. [...] Arizona's 2024 election results revealed a political puzzle that should reshape how Democrats think about Latino outreach. While Donald Trump carried Arizona by 5.5 points, Democrat Ruben Gallego won the Senate race by 2.4 points, a stunning 8-point gap that Noble Predictive Insights attributed to massive ticket-splitting among Republican and Independent voters. Mike Noble's polling found that "2 to 1 Republicans were defecting against Lake compared to Trump," with a crucial "small group of Independents willing to vote for Trump and Gallego." Meanwhile, 3,000 miles away in New York City, Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani pulled off an even more shocking upset, winning the Democratic mayoral primary by building a multiracial coalition anchored by working-class Latino voters in Queens and Brooklyn. The 33-year-old assemblyman's victory came through the exact opposite playbook of Gallego's, unapologetic progressivism instead of calculated centrism.
Madrid may turn out to be right but not by the data he provided. For one, exit polls show that Gallego bested Harris in getting the Latino vote in Arizona by 6 points (both Gallego and Harris won Arizona's Latino population by double-digit margins); not enough for Harris to win Arizona over Trump.
Secondly, I've already looked at two pre-election Mamdani videos where he spoke out forcefully against ICE (Mamdani called ICE a "rogue agency" on Medhi Hasan's show).
Having said that, I suspect that Madrid's thesis is more right than wrong.
But this is why math teachers ask you (or at least they used to ask) to show your work and turn in your scratch paper.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker takes a second look at “Zohranomics.”
Creating more affordable housing is hardly a radical new mayoral goal, of course. In 2014, at the start of his eight-year tenure, Bill de Blasio also unveiled a plan to build or preserve two hundred thousand affordable apartments, and, in 2021, his administration announced that it had achieved this goal. Arguably, the most successful expansion of the city’s affordable-housing stock came with the construction of public-housing projects, which began during the Great Depression under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who established the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), and continued in the postwar decades. Subsequently, federal funding dried up, and public housing came to be associated with crime and other problems. In recent decades, New York’s mayors have built affordable housing primarily through public-private partnerships, in which for-profit and not-for-profit developers receive tax breaks and other forms of support for putting up buildings that are privately managed. [...] “abundance” wing of the Democratic Party, such as pledging to eliminate parking minimums and encourage development around subway stations and other transport hubs. But the primary goal of his plan is to “unleash the public sector to build housing for the many.” That sounds sensible, and overdue, but the housing shortage facing the city is formidable: some recent studies say it needs to build as many as half a million new homes. Mamdani has put less emphasis on encouraging market-rate development. He has given a few nods to theof the Democratic Party, such as pledging to eliminate parking minimums and encourage development around subway stations and other transport hubs. But the primary goal of his plan is to “unleash the public sector to build housing for the many.” Another objective is to provide the city’s residents with cheap and healthy food. The Mamdani campaign says that its new grocery stores would operate in city-owned buildings in low-income areas that currently lack adequate options—so-called food deserts. It went on, “Without having to pay rent or property taxes, they will reduce overhead and pass on savings to shoppers.” Before moving to Massachusetts, Weber once lived in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she sometimes found it difficult to shop for healthy foods. “The price dimension”—of Mamdani’s proposal—“is important, but the other is the accessibility of nutritious food,” she said. It’s important to note, as some media accounts haven’t, that Mamdani is proposing a pilot scheme of just five new stores—one in each borough...
Michael Macagnone of Roll Call reports that the U.S. Supreme Court will decide a Republican-led case about campaign spending limits in the next term.
The Supreme Court announced Monday it will decide a Republican-led challenge to the limits on how much national political parties can spend in coordination with federal candidates. The case, brought by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, along with then-Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and former Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, contends that the campaign spending limits violate the First Amendment to the Constitution. The court will hold oral arguments in the next term, which starts in October, on whether to overturn a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit that upheld the limits first set in the 1970s. A decision would be expected by the conclusion of the term in June. The Supreme Court also granted a request Monday from the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senate and House campaign committees to defend the limits, setting up a partisan clash before the justices that could be a major shakeup for campaign spending. “A political party exists to get its candidates elected,” the NRSC wrote in its petition in the case. “Yet Congress has severely restricted how much parties can spend on their own campaign advertising if done in cooperation with those very candidates.”
Weren't we just having a discussion about the next topic in the comment section of yesterday's APR?
Colleen J. Shogan and John Bridgeland/The Hill
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American founding, we must confront the hard truth that democracies are not self-executing. They require constant tending by informed, engaged citizens who understand both the machinery and the meaning of self-government. But today, one in three Americans cannot name the three branches of government or what they do. In this “civics season” — the 16 days between the newest federal holiday (Juneteenth) and the oldest (Fourth of July) — we should commit to a civic education moonshot. While there is no right to an education in the Constitution, every state constitution —including the Massachusetts Constitution, which preceded the federal Constitution by a decade — makes the education of its citizens for participation in our democracy its primary mission. Despite this, the nation has collectively drifted from preparing young and older Americans alike as engaged citizens. A meager 13 and 22 percent of students score proficient in U.S. history and civics, respectively. Surveys show more than 70 percent of adults fail a civic literacy quiz on topics related to the basic functions of our democracy. We’ve seen this movie before. Several decades ago, alarm bells rang over poor performance in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In response, the U.S. marshaled public resources, implemented innovative teaching practices and dramatically improved STEM achievement. It was a national effort with support ranging from school principals to the president. Today, civics and history need the same urgent national attention and investment.
Next, we have two stories from the Guardian about worldwide temperature extremes beginning with Ajit Niranjan and Alex Jones reporting on the southern European heatwave.
A vicious heatwave has engulfed southern Europe, with punishing temperatures that have reached highs of 46C (114.8F) in Spain and placed almost the entirety of mainland France under alert. Extreme heat, made stronger by fossil fuel pollution, has for several days scorched Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece as southern Europe endures its first major heatwave of the summer. The high temperatures have prompted the authorities in several countries to issue new health warnings and scramble firefighters to prevent wildfires from breaking out. More than 50,000 people in Turkey have been evacuated from their homes due to forest fires, according to the interior ministry’s disaster and emergency management authority.
And then we have Brendan Wood reporting on the frigid temperatures in parts of South America.
A sharp cold spell affecting the southern half of South America is expected to intensify and push northwards in the coming days as a broad area of high pressure builds over the continent. Over the weekend, large parts of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay had temperatures 10-15C below their seasonal averages. Night-time lows plunged well into the negative double digits. One weather station in Chile – located 69 metres above sea level at an airport near the city of Puerto Natales – recorded a minimum of -15.7C on Sunday evening, nearly 14C below the average June minimum. Chile in early winter, the severity of this cold spell prompted the Chilean Meteorological Directorate to issue warnings late last week highlighting the risk of severe frosts. Although subzero temperatures are not uncommon inin early winter, the severity of this cold spell prompted the Chilean Meteorological Directorate to issue warnings late last week highlighting the risk of severe frosts.
Saransh Sehgal of The Diplomat writes about the tricky politics of choosing the Dalai Lama's successor.
Traditionally, the search for the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation began only after the present Dalai Lama’s death. Senior monks interpret signs, consult oracles, and scour the Tibetan region for a child who exhibits qualities of the previous Dalai Lama. The process can take years, often leaving a spiritual and leadership vacuum. But this time, the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is rewriting the script, indicating that he may name his successor while still alive and that the child may be born outside of Tibet, pledging that his successor will not be born under the control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). “Since the purpose of a reincarnation is to carry on the work of the predecessor, the new Dalai Lama will be born in the free world,” the Dalai Lama wrote in his recent book, “Voice of the Voiceless.” This is a direct rebuke to Beijing, which has long insisted that it alone has the authority to approve reincarnations of Tibetan lamas. China has already installed its own Panchen Lama, the second-highest spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism and a key figure in identifying the next Dalai Lama, while detaining the boy recognized by the Dalai Lama and his followers. [...] The CCP has long sought to extend its control over Tibetan Buddhism, seeing it as both a threat and a potential political tool. Since the 1990s, Beijing has enforced “patriotic education” in monasteries, criminalized images of the Dalai Lama, and used surveillance to monitor monks and devotees.
Finally today, I was thinking of Muriel Vieux's recent diary about cultural appropriation when I ran across this story by Neyaz Farooquee of BBC News about a controversial new sandal made by the Italian label Prada; a design that has its roots in 12th century India.
Italian luxury fashion label Prada has said it acknowledges the Indian roots of its new footwear line, days after the design sparked a controversy in India. The sandals, showcased at the Milan Fashion Week last week, had an open-toe braided pattern that closely resembled the traditional Kolhapuri sandals made in the Indian states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. Prada described the sandals as "leather footwear" but did not mention its Indian origins, prompting backlash and allegations of cultural appropriation in India. [...] The sandals cost a few hundreds rupees in India but Prada's reported premium pricing angered some, though the brand's website does not mention the price tag. Most other sandals sold by the fashion house, retail at between £600 to £1,000 in the UK.
Have the best possible day that you can everyone!
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