The Contradictions of Ron DeSantis

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Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida hasn’t officially decided whether he’ll seek the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. But already the contradictions are sharpening between his prospective general-election strengths and his emerging strategy to win the Republican primaries.

Many of DeSantis’s boosters are drawn to him as a potential Republican nominee because they believe that his record as the chief executive of an economically thriving state would position him to win back some of the college-educated suburban voters who have stampeded away from the GOP since 2016.

But DeSantis, through his escalating attacks on what he calls “woke” ideology, has signaled that if he runs, as most expect, he will seek the GOP nomination by emphasizing the same cultural grievances about racial and social change that former President Donald Trump has stressed. Those messages have enabled Trump to energize hard-core conservatives, but at the price of repelling many well-educated suburbanites.

With that approach, DeSantis seems destined to test a question that sharply divides strategists from the two parties: Will more voters accept Trumpism without Trump himself attached to it? CONTINUED

Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic

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Both White and Nonwhite Democrats are Moving Left

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Key Points
• One of the big stories of American politics over the past half-century has been a growing ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans.
• This has also led to more ideological cohesion within parties, including a dramatic increase among Democrats between 2012 and 2020. Democrats are now as ideologically cohesive as Republicans, which is a big change from a decade ago, when Republicans were significantly more cohesive than Democrats.
• While white Democrats have moved more to the left than nonwhite Democrats have on some issues, both groups have become more liberal since 2012. CONTINUED

Alan I. Abramowitz (Emory), Sabato’s Crystal Ball

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The Senate Primaries to Watch So Far

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Key Points
• It has been over a decade since an incumbent senator was successfully primaried in a regularly-scheduled election; though a few senators may be vulnerable, 2024 may continue that streak.
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) decision to retire removed one vulnerable senator from the primary conversation; Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (I-AZ) decision to leave the Democratic Party removed another. Among the other incumbents who are still deciding whether to run for reelection, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) stands out as someone who could hypothetically be vulnerable in a primary.
• The open-seat Senate contests are all in various stages of flux. Indiana, the sole GOP-held open seat so far, seems to be the most straightforward, as Rep. Jim Banks (R, IN-3) is a heavy favorite to replace Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN). CONTINUED

Kyle Kondik & J. Miles Coleman, Sabato’s Crystal Ball

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Donald Trump did not win in 2016 because the establishment “split the field”

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… Conventional wisdom about the 2016 primary has analysts stipulating that dividing the anti-Trump vote will allow him to win the primary again with plurality support, as he did last time around. After all, he only won 45% of the popular vote in the primary; surely if Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich had united against him they could have won, right?

Wrong, actually. This cursory analysis of the 2016 primary makes a key mistake. Looking solely at actual primary vote totals obscures how primary voters would have cast their ballots in a two-horse race. For that, you need a survey.

Jonathan Woon, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, and co-authors have an answer for us. In their paper “Trump is not a (Condorcet) loser! Social choice analysis of the 2016 Republican presidential nomination” the authors look at two academic surveys conducted in January 2016. Their goal is to establish whether supporters of Trump’s opponents were in fact opposed to Trump, or if enough would have coalesced around him to push him over the majority threshold in all hypothetical races with only two candidates. CONTINUED

G. Elliott Morris, Politics by the Numbers

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Gallup/Knight Study Offers New Insights On Why Americans’ Trust In News Continues To Decline

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As part of Knight Foundation’s belief that a strong Fourth Estate is paramount to a thriving democracy, the organization has worked with Gallup to study Americans’ trust in the news media, consistently finding that their level of confidence is driven by perceptions of news organizations’ accuracy, bias and transparency. However, a new report finds that there are additional factors that contribute to Americans’ trust in the media.

“American Views: Trust, Media and Democracy, Part 2” explores the disconnect between newsrooms’ efforts to rebuild the public’s trust and the continued decline of confidence in that effort by posing questions that distinguish between the practical and emotional dimensions of trust. The findings show that “emotional trust” in news organizations is meaningfully linked to whether people want to pay to receive news coverage and to how they feel in general about the state of American democracy. CONTINUED

Knight Foundation

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Artificial Intelligence Use Prompts Concerns

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Artificial intelligence. We’ve heard about it. We use it. But we are not necessarily comfortable with what the future holds. The Monmouth University Poll finds awareness of AI developments has increased over the past decade, but opinion about its potential impact remains largely unchanged, with a few exceptions. Most Americans express concern about the impact of new products such as ChatGPT and offer their support to the use of AI in just a few types of applications. That skepticism comes even though nearly half actually use one form of AI – voice recognition – on a regular basis. …

Overall, only 1 in 10 (9%) Americans believe computer scientists’ ability to develop AI would do more good than harm to society. The remainder are divided between saying AI would do equal amounts of harm and good (46%) or that it would actually do more harm to society overall (41%). CONTINUED

Monmouth University Polling Institute

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