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Democrats moving to the cities of Atlanta in Georgia, Las Vegas in Nevada, and Phoenix, Arizona, could ensure the three key swing states vote for in November's presidential election, according to a new report. The study by removal company moveBuddha said all three states have been "drawing in new residents" to their biggest cities, which it dubbed "blue islands." Perhaps because of the sheer people-power of their blue islands, these three swing states have seen progressives make state-level inroads since 2012," the report states. , and all narrowly backed Biden in the 2020 presidential election, by less than 0.5 percent of the vote in the first two cases. These states are expected to play a crucial role in determining whether the incumbent can hold off the challenge from presumptive in November.

Just ahead of last week’s , I wrote that we were “, which may look very different than the predictions based on polling.” The first batch of post-verdict polls are in and, well, I must admit that a lot of things are looking very much the same, with the race between Trump and President Joe Biden still neck and neck. That’s not to say things are entirely the same. According to in June with Siena College, Biden gained on Trump by about 2 percentage points after the verdict. By itself, that’s not eyebrow-raising. The result is within the margin of error of most polls and tracks relatively closely with the tiny swing have detected. stands out because it was a recontact study; nearly 2,000 people who’d responded before the verdict were polled again. Moreover, the shift wasn’t evenly spread across the board. A look below the hood shows that there may be more to that 2% swing than initially meets the eye “The shift was especially pronounced among the young, nonwhite and disengaged Democratic-leaning voters who have propelled Mr. Trump to a lead in the early polls,” the Times noted. “Of the people who previously told us they had voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but would vote for Mr. Trump in 2024, around one-quarter now said they would instead stick with Mr. Biden.” The demographics of the people who shifted means “it’s possible Mr. Biden gained a bit more than the two-point improvement among those we successfully recontacted,” Nate Cohn, the Times’ chief political analyst, Wednesday. “That’s because older, white and highly engaged voters were relatively likely to retake the survey, and those groups were much less likely to swing in the aftermath of the verdict.”

538 published their official forecast for the 2024 election on June 11, showing that Biden is currently just ahead in the close race. The model predicts that Biden has a 53-in-100 chance of winning the election, slightly more than half the model's simulations of how the election could unfold. Trump is not far behind with a 47-in-100 chance, suggesting the election could still go either way between now and November.

The Biden-Harris campaign said Sunday morning that they had raised $30 million, a record sum for a single Democratic fundraiser. It also eclipses the $26 million the Biden campaign raised from a March fundraiser in New York City with Mr. Biden, Obama and former President Bill Clinton. 

According to an Emerson College Polling national survey conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday, 45.6 percent of registered voters said they would vote for Trump, while 45 percent chose Biden in a head-to-head matchup. Of the 9.4 percent that remain undecided, 5.3 percent said they are leaning toward Biden, while 4.1 percent picked Trump. The poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters and has a credibility interval, similar to a margin of error, of plus or minus 3 percentage points. A poll by The Economist/YouGov performed from Sunday to Tuesday found that support for Biden and Trump was tied (42 percent) among 1,565 registered voters when independent candidates , Jill Stein and  were added to the mix. The poll also had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Biden will win – ahead in fundraiser momentum post a record-breaking event in California

At launch, our forecast shows President Joe Biden locked in a practically tied race with former President Donald Trump, both in the Electoral College and national popular vote. Specifically, our model reckons Biden has a 53-in-100 chance of winning the election, meaning he wins in slightly more than half of our model's simulations of how the election could unfold. However, Trump still has a 47-in-100 chance, so this election could still very much go either way. The range of realistic* Electoral College outcomes generated by our forecasting model stretches from 132 to 445 electoral votes for Biden — a testament to how much things could change by November (and how off the polls could be).

President is the favorite to defeat in the 2024 election, according to a forecast model. Polling and forecasting website 538, formerly FiveThirtyEight, said that when run through a , Biden won November's race 53 times out of 100, with Trump coming out on top 47 times out of 100. The simulation forecast explores likely election outcomes based on several factors, including adjusted polling averages, economic and political indicators, and demographic data.

Hollywood actors have had a presence on the campaign trail in support of Biden in recent weeks. Robert De Niro took part in a May campaign press conference outside the lower Manhattan courthouse where former President Donald Trump's "hush money" trial was taking place. Ralph of "Abbott Elementary" campaigned with Vice President Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania, and Jane Fonda appeared at a campaign event in Reno, Nev. with first lady Jill Biden on Friday. The money comes at a time when the race is tight between Biden and Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. A from June found Mr. Biden up 1 point in the battleground states, a virtual tie. The Biden campaign says money raised Saturday will go to growing their grassroots operation (field offices, staffers) and towards paid media.

Biden will win – Trump is behind Biden in 2 key swing states – Wisconsin and Michigan

President Joe Biden’s campaign raised more than $27 million across Thursday, the day of the first presidential debate, and Friday, according to a campaign official. The campaign is looking to highlight fundraising bright spots even as following the at the CNN debate. The president is expected to speak at two fundraisers in the Hamptons in New York and one in Red Bank, New Jersey, this afternoon. Barry Rosenstein, the host of one of the fundraisers in the Hamptons, told CNN he is expecting more than 200 attendees, and he said more donations for the event came in Friday morning after the debate. The two-day fundraising haul announced Saturday comes on the heels of Biden raising roughly $40 million over five days earlier this month, which included major fundraisers with former President Barack Obama in Los Angeles and former President Bill Clinton in Virginia.

Thursday night’s presidential debate left the sense that swing voters have a choice between a candidate unlikely to accept unfavorable election results and a candidate who might not have the stamina for four more years. President Joe Biden came out of the gate flat and lethargic, speaking so softly it was occasionally hard to hear him — he later said he had a sore throat. Former president Donald Trump was full of energy — even as much of what he was saying was untrue. “They’re going to be out there fact-checking,” Biden told supporters at a watch party in Atlanta after the debate. “I can’t think of one thing that he said was true.” From afar, Biden seemed to have more vigor in that setting and at a later stop at an Atlanta Waffle House before he headed to North Carolina for a campaign event Friday. The key post-debate moment of the day may not come until Friday evening, however, when the president is due to participate in a campaign reception in New York City. The debate moderators asked the candidates about policy, but on some questions, such as what they would do to lower the cost of child care, there were few answers. And Trump at one point said he was the president who lowered the out-of-pocket cost of insulin for senior citizens, when that was the result of legislation passed by a Democratic Congress through budget reconciliation and signed into law by Biden. Trump also repeated falsehoods about his actions during the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, arguing that the riot was the fault of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for not having enough security around the Capitol. He also suggested that former Republican Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam B. Kinzinger of Illinois and the Democratic members of the select committee that investigated the insurrection “should go to jail” for “deleting” information. But while Trump seemingly did nothing to appeal to undecided voters, Biden’s performance caused a four-alarm fire among Democrats and discussions about whether a change could be made before the party’s convention in Chicago in August. David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, said on MSNBC after the debate that Biden’s performance was a “DEFCON 1 moment” for Democrats. But he added that how actual undecided voters viewed the debate might not be known for a few days. “I have deep suspicion that Donald Trump with swing voters bombed as well,” Plouffe said.

It’s clear that Biden’s energy and capability is still there, as he warmed up throughout the night. He even seemed like an entirely different person in an appearance at an Atlanta watch party that MSNBC aired after the debate ended. The question is how to make sure that version of Biden is on full display throughout the remainder of the campaign, countering the image that may unfortunately be locked into many voters’ minds now. The answer may rest with reminding Americans that no matter what concerns they might have had about Biden’s performance tonight, there was nothing that Trump did that made it seem like he is the better choice to return to the White House.

still has a shot of winning the as though voters agreed the debate was a disaster, very few in the poll said it would change their vote. They broadly agreed President Biden, 81, performed badly and 60 per cent said his opponent did better in Atlanta on Thursday. Only 21 per cent said Biden did the better of the two bitter rivals and 19 per cent said they didn't know who came out on top. About 73 per cent of debate watchers said Biden's performance was poor or terrible and just eight per cent said it was excellent or good. Trump didn't exactly win the debate, however, as only 40 per cent rated him good or excellent, 25 per cent mixed, and 33 per cent was poor or terrible. Biden took a moderate hit in how many voters were concerned about his age, but it was already so low it couldn't get much worse. 'Before the debate, 27 per cent of likely voters rated Biden as good or excellent when it came to his mental fitness to be president,' Ipsos said. 'Following the debate, that level declined to 20 per cent. The decline was steepest among Democratic respondents, going from 56 per cent before the debate to 42 per cent after the debate.' One worrying sign for the president was that black voters, a group Biden needs to win as they overwhelmingly supported him in 2020, dropped 15 per cent in their confidence of his mental fitness. Voters aged 65 or older were 11 per cent less confident, and feelings among those with a Bachelor's degree or better fell 10 per cent. Voters also dropped their confidence in Biden's physical ability to be president from 21 to 15 per cent. 'Ratings of Trump's mental (39 per cent pre-debate, 41 per cent post-debate) and physical (43 per cent, 45 per cent) fitness were stable,' Ipsos said. However, when asked about their voting intentions, very few respondents said the debate would alter who they would actually support at the election.

Allan Lichtman, the historian who has  the results of nine out of the 10 most recent presidential elections argued on Saturday that replacing  could cost Democrats the 2024 election.  

Lichtman, a professor at American University, rejected the growing chorus of political pundits and Democratic activists who have called on Biden, 81, to  of the presidential race after his  last week against former President Donald Trump. The pivotal moment brought fresh questions about Biden’s age and ability to serve a second term.

The re-election campaign for says it has raised a whopping $27 million since his rocky debate performance against former President Trump. From the day of the debate through Friday evening, the told Fox News that it had raised $27 million. The updated figure comes after the campaign said on Friday that it raised $14 million in "a sign of strength of our grassroots support" on debate day and the morning after. The campaign also noted Friday that 11 p.m. to 12 p.m. on Thursday – the first hour after the debate – was the single since the campaign's launch in April 2023. The large sums of cash come as Biden's campaign seeks to address panic over whether he is mentally fit to serve as president following his disastrous faceoff with Trump in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday. "I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious," Biden, who at 81 is the oldest president in the nation's history, told cheering supporters at a Friday afternoon rally in the crucial battleground state of North Carolina. "Folks, I don’t walk as easy as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. I don’t debate as well as I used to," Biden acknowledged. "But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. And I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. And I know, like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down you get back up." The president, pointing to his 2024 emphasized, "I would not be running again if I did not believe with all my heart and soul that I can do this job." Struggling with a raspy voice and delivering rambling answers, Biden struggled during portions of the debate. Several political analysts noted, however, that the president sharpened his answers as the debate progressed. Biden's uneven and, at times, halting performance grabbed the vast majority of headlines from the debate and sparked a new round of calls from political pundits, publications and some Democrats for the president to step aside as the party's standard-bearer. Top Biden allies have pushed back against such talk as they defended the president and targeted Trump for "lying" throughout the debate. Two Democratic sources confirmed to Fox News that top Biden campaign officials worked to calm concerns and fears as they huddled privately on Friday at a previously scheduled meeting with top party donors. "Biden‘s record grassroots fundraising from the day of the debate is critical. It helps blunt the criticism from Biden’s performance," veteran political strategist and Democratic National Committee member Maria Cardona told Fox News. Cardona, a top Biden supporter, said spotlighting the fundraising "reminds Democrats that there is enthusiasm for the president and urgency to make sure that the liar and criminal Donald Trump doesn’t get close to the Oval Office."

Louis René Beres, “If Trump Returns as President: An Existential Threat to the United States,” Modern Diplomacy, 3 March 2023, https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2023/03/03/if-trump-returns-as-president-an-existential-threat-to-the-united-states/#_ftn1.

There are many reasons to fear Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House, but one remains especially worrisome. It stems from the former president’s conspicuous ignorance of international law and US foreign policy. Among assorted particulars of this debility, a previously failed Trump posture – “America First” – would likely prove more injurious the second-time around.[1] Prima facie, its restoration, thoughtless in the most literal sense, would dignify a numbingly vacant US president’s indifference to science, logic, history and law.[2] Could it get any worse? Could anything be more absurd? Here is a basic answer: Following escalating aggressions by Russia in Ukraine and potentially destabilizing aggressions by China and North Korea in Asia,[3] America needs a leader who can read and think meaningfully. The American White House is not a proper place for foreign policy pretenders, especially a former president who already displayed a pernicious fusion of historical indifference and intellectual incompetence. There are also relevant specifics. Any future presidential retrogressions to “America First” would stem from misapplied US cultural underpinnings. These backward steps, absurd steps, would reflect variously intersecting declensions of “mass-man.”[4] Though Donald Trump remains a celebrated leader of the American “mass,” not just a member, he has never actually risen above the capacities of his chorus. Rather, amid the constant rancor and noisy defilement, he has remained one of mass man’s most fervid exponents. From time immemorial, international relations have been rooted in Realpolitik[5] or power politics.[6] Though such traditional patterns of thinking are normally accepted as “realistic,” they actually undermine world law and global order. It follows that any sitting US president should finally acknowledge the lethal limitations of our planet’s global threat system,[7] and recognize, as inevitable corollary, that US power ought never be founded upon delusions of national primacy. “America First” has a pleasing resonance with the Many, with those who like to chant in crowds. But this narrow political resonance does not extend to the Few, to those who would prefer to think as conscious individuals.[8] About the “Few,” German-Swiss philosopher Thomas Mann attributes the downfall of civilizations to gradual absorptions of the educated classes by the Mass, to the “simplification of all functions of political, social, economic and spiritual life.”[9] If nothing else, America’s Trump era was a humiliating period of deliberate and falsifying simplifications. Is it anything less than preposterous to actually seek its return? Americans require intellect-based answers, not an endless barrage of silly clichés and partisan rancor. In turn, such answers will call for dialectical (mind challenging) thinking.[10] Analytically, in these calculations, the United States should always be considered as one significant part of the larger world system, the world system configuration created by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.[11] Though more or less ignored by global leaders, the “Westphalian” system of international law[12] (a system of institutionalized global anarchy) is destined to fail. Moreover, together with the accelerating spread of nuclear weapons technologies and infrastructures, any such failure would prove remorseless, unprecedented (sui generis would say the logicians) and irremediable.[13] At another level, it would signal the potentially insufferable triumph of anti-reason.[14] There are also relevant nuances. Grievous world system failure could take place in hard to fathom increments, or with great suddenness, as an unanticipated nuclear “bolt from the blue.” On such bewilderingly unpredictable matters, any US policy resurrection of Donald Trump’s “America First” would prove starkly injurious. Conceptually, it’s not complicated. In these indispensable calculations, history deserves a much more manifest pride of place. False bravado and belligerent nationalism have never succeeded in any decipherable ways or for longer than brief intervals. Indeed, from an historical standpoint, no observation could be more obvious. Plausibly, in a Trump-resurrected future, unsteady expressions of national security policy would be exacerbated by multiple system failures. At times, these failures could be mutually reinforcing or “synergistic.”[15] At other times, they could involve “force-multiplying” weapons of mass destruction. In any case, they could be brought about by the defiling restoration of an absurd presidency. Rejecting the banalities of “America First” and its derivative foreign policy deformations, a capable US president should think along clarifying lines of subject-matter interrelatedness. It is preposterous to deny that “America First” would fail US national security obligations. Moreover, any such failure, even one that did not produce catastrophic war or terror, would be degrading to United States. “The visionary,” teases Italian film director Federico Fellini, “is the only realist.” But there can be nothing “visionary” about “America First.” Whether in its previous Trump-defined iteration or in a future modified version, this stitched together amalgam of a former president’s clichés would be absurd. Should such a lack of vision find its way back into the American White House in 2024, its multiple and recycled harms could fatally undermine whatever might still remain of American Reason.[16] At some point, especially if strengthened and expanded by manipulative resurrections of “America First,” world system failures could become both tangibly dire and irreversible. In the final analysis, it will not help the United States or any other country to tinker “thoughtlessly”[17] at the ragged edges of our “Westphalian” world legal order. At that decisive turning point, any US presidential reaffirmations of “America First” could significantly hasten the onset of a regional or worldwide nuclear war.

Most worst-case scenarios appear to have an element of irreversibility. Once a species is lost, it is lost forever. The special concern for endangered species stems from the permanence of their loss (outside of Jurassic Park). One of the most serious fears associated with genetically modified organisms is that they might lead to irreversible ecological harm. Because some greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for centuries, the problem of climate change may be irreversible, at least for all practical purposes. Transgenic crops can impose irreversible losses too, because they can make pests more resistant to pesticides. If we invest significant wealth in one source of energy and neglect others, we may be effectively stuck forever, or at least for a long time. One objection to capital punishment is that errors cannot be reversed. In ordinary life, our judgments about worst-case scenarios have everything to do with irreversibility. Of course an action may be hard but not impossible to undo, and so there may be a continuum of cases, with different degrees of difficulty in reversing. A marriage can be reversed, but divorce is rarely easy; having a child is very close to irreversible; moving from New York to Paris is reversible, but moving back may be difficult. People often take steps to avoid courses of action that are burdensome rather than literally impossible to reverse. In this light, we might identify an Irreversible Harm Precautionary Principle, applicable to a subset of risks.' As a rough first approximation, the principle says this: Special steps should be taken to avoid irreversible harms, through precautions that go well beyond those that would be taken if irreversibility were not a problem. The general attitude here is "act, then learn," as opposed to the tempting alternative of "wait and learn." In the case of climate change, some people believe that research should be our first line of defense. In their view, we should refuse to commit substantial resources to the problem until evidence of serious harm is unmistakably clear.' But even assuming that the evidence is not so clear, research without action allows greenhouse gas emissions to continue, which might produce risks that are irreversible, or at best difficult and expensive to reverse. For this reason, the best course of action might well be to take precautions now as a way of preserving flexibility for future generations. In the environmental context in general, this principle suggests that regulators should proceed with far more aggressive measures than would otherwise seem justified.

For example, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the effects of climate change will be “severe,” “pervasive,” and “irreversible.” Or, as published in Nature and authored by over twenty scientists puts it, the consequences of climate change “will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.” Furthermore, in Science Advances confirms that humanity has already escorted the biosphere into the sixth mass extinction event in life’s 3.8 billion year history on Earth. Yet suggests that we could be approaching a sudden, irreversible, catastrophic collapse of the global ecosystem. If this were to occur, it could result in “widespread social unrest, economic instability and loss of human life.” Given the potential for environmental degradation to elevate the likelihood of nuclear wars, nuclear terrorism, engineered pandemics, a superintelligence takeover, and perhaps even an , it ought to take precedence over all other risk concerns — at least in the near-term. Let’s make sure we get our priorities straight.

Climate change intersects with pre-existing national security risks to function as a threat multiplier and accelerant to instability, contributing to escalating cycles of humanitarian and socio-political crises, conflict and forced migration. Climate-change impacts on food and water systems, declining crop yields and rising food prices driven by drought, wildfire and harvest failures have already become catalysts for social breakdown and conflict across the Middle East, the Maghreb and the Sahel, contributing to the European migration crisis. Understanding and foreseeing such events depends crucially on an appreciation of the real strengths and limitations of climate-science projections, and the application of risk-management frameworks which differ fundamentally from conventional practice. SCIENTIFIC RETICENCE Climate scientists may err on the side of “least drama”, whose causes may include adherence to the scientific norms of restraint, objectivity and skepticism, and may underpredict or down-play future climate changes. In 2007, security analysts warned that, in the two previous decades, scientific predictions in the climate-change arena had consistently under-estimated the severity of what actually transpired. 3 This problem persists, notably in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose Assessment Reports exhibit a one-sided reliance on general climate models, which incorporate important climate processes, but do not include all of the processes that can contribute to system feedbacks, compound extreme events, and abrupt and/or irreversible changes. 4 Other forms of knowledge are downplayed, including paleoclimatology, expert advice, and semi-empirical models. IPCC reports present detailed, quantified, complex modelling results, but then briefly note more severe, non- linear, system-change possibilities in a descriptive, non-quantified form. Because policymakers and the media are often drawn to headline numbers, this approach results in less attention being given to the most devastating, difficult-to-quantify outcomes. In one example, the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report in 2014 projected a sea-level rise of 0.55-0.82 metre by 2100, but said “levels above the likely range cannot be reliably evaluated”. By way of comparison, the higher of two US Department of Defence scenarios is a two-metre rise by 2100, and the “extreme” scenario developed by a number of US government agencies is 2.5 metres by 2100. 5 Another example is the recent IPCC 1.5°C report, which projected that warming would continue at the current rate of 0.2°C per decade and reach the 1.5°C mark around 2040. However the 1.5°C boundary is likely to be passed in half that time, around 2030, and the 2°C boundary around 2045, due to accelerating anthropogenic emissions, decreased aerosol loading and changing ocean circulation conditions.6 EXISTENTIAL RISK An existential risk to civilisation is one posing permanent large negative consequences to humanity which may never be undone, either annihilating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtailing its potential. With the commitments by nations to the 2015 Paris Agreement, the current path of warming is 3°C or more by 2100. But this figure does not include “long-term” carbon-cycle feedbacks, which are materially relevant now and in the near future due to the unprecedented rate at which human activity is perturbing the climate system. Taking these into account, the Paris path would lead to around 5°C of warming by 2100. 7 Scientists warn that warming of 4°C is incompatible with an organised global community, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable. The World Bank says it may be “beyond adaptation”. But an existential threat may also exist for many peoples and regions at a significantly lower level of warming. In 2017, 3°C of warming was categorised as “catastrophic” with a warning that, on a path of unchecked emissions, low-probability, high-impact warming could be catastrophic by 2050. 9 The Emeritus Director of the Potsdam Institute, Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, warns that “climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.” He says that if we continue down the present path “there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years.” 11 Unfortunately, conventional risk and probability analysis becomes useless in these circumstances because it excludes the full implications of outlier events and possibilities lurking at the fringes.12 Prudent risk-management means a tough, objective look at the real risks to which we are exposed, especially at those “fat-tail” events, which may have consequences that are damaging beyond quantification, and threaten the survival of human civilisation. Global warming projections display a “fat-tailed” distribution with a greater likelihood of warming that is well in excess of the average amount of warming predicted by climate models, and are of a higher probability than would be expected under typical statistical assumptions. More importantly, the risk lies disproportionately in the “fat-tail” outcomes, as illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 1. Schema of climate-related risk. (a) Event likelihood and (b) Impacts produce (c) Risk. Lower likelihood events at the high end of the probability distribution have the highest risk (Credit: RT Sutton/E Hawkins). This is a particular concern with potential climate tipping-points — passing critical thresholds which result in step changes in the climate system that will be irreversible on human timescales — such as the polar ice sheets (and hence sea levels), permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming are non-linear and difficult to model with current scientific knowledge. Recently, attention has been given to a “hothouse Earth” scenario, in which system feedbacks and their mutual interaction could drive the Earth System climate to a point of no return, whereby further warming would become self-sustaining. This “hothouse Earth” planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even lower.13

Several top Biden allies have privately raised concerns about the phrase to the White House, according to two people familiar with the backchanneling. And Rep. Steven Horsford, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, said in an interview this week that he’s warned the White House that the Bidenomics brand is built on shaky ground. He believes it advances a message that wrongly centers the conversation on the president and his electoral ambitions rather than the voters who stand to gain from the administration’s economic accomplishments. 'Middle out, bottom up': What does 'Bidenomics' really mean? “With all due respect to the president, to the White House, this is not so much about them as it is the people who are benefiting by the policies that they came out and demanded,” said Horsford (D-Nev.). “We have to do a better job framing this not so much for one person — for the office of the presidency — but for the people.” Their worries are underscored by a slew of polling showing that the economic recovery the White House has sought to spotlight as a triumph is not making a dent in the public’s psyche. Most Americans are still skeptical the U.S. is in an upturn, let alone one resilient enough to last much longer. The rising cost of living remains a dominant theme in voters’ minds, crowding out major gains in jobs and wages. And so far, the Bidenomics drumbeat that began earlier this summer has yet to prove it can change their minds. President Joe Biden put on his hat on stage at a podium with the presidential seal. A large banner of the American flag is behind him, while a man is seen holding a "union strong" poster in the crowd to the right. Biden is selling an economy on the rise. Voters aren’t buying it so far. “At this point, Bidenomics doesn’t really have strong answers to people’s biggest worries,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. “There ought to be a lot of thinking in the White House now about changes in the way they present their case for the economic good that this administration has done.” Inside the White House, aides have largely dismissed Democrats’ fears as premature and overblown, arguing it’s far too early to judge a messaging strategy designed to play out over the yearlong run-up to the 2024 election. They remain confident that, after winning the presidency and then defying predictions of a midterm wipeout, they have a better read on the national mood than their critics. “Bidenomics is the president’s economic agenda and it is strongly supported by the American people,” said White House spokesperson Michael Kikukawa. “That work and our message build on what the midterms and recent special elections proved: Americans favor the president’s vision for growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up over trickle-down MAGAnomics.” Americans are just beginning to reap the rewards of Biden’s economic agenda, officials said. Consumer spending continues to rise, signaling greater confidence in the economy’s stability than people may be willing to admit. Perhaps most crucially, Biden officials believe voters don’t yet see the issue as a choice between Biden’s economic vision and the policies of former President Donald Trump and his GOP allies. Sharpening that contrast will prove critical in changing Americans’ attitudes over the next several months, they said. Where GOP hopefuls stand on the economy “Like they did in 2022, Americans will face a choice between MAGA Republicans whose agenda serves the rich and powerful, and Joe Biden, whose agenda serves the middle class,” said Biden campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz, highlighting a pair of early ads that spotlight individual voters. “That strategy worked then, and it will again in 2024.” The administration has increasingly leaned into that contrast in recent weeks, emphasizing GOP proposals to cut taxes for the wealthy and roll back popular drug pricing moves. Bidenomics, top aides believe, gives the president a shorthand for comparing his various achievements against Republicans’ unpopular policies. “It’s important to have a unifying theme and a vision that we’re explaining and that all these policies fit within,” said one longtime Biden aide, waving off strategy concerns as “bedwetting and Monday morning quarterbacking” from nervous Democrats. “The president didn’t win in 2020 adjusting his concern every day to the latest concern on cable news.” But the administration’s case for patience is no longer masking the angst within the party that Bidenomics as a brand is falling flat — and perhaps is a microcosm of larger obstacles facing the coming campaign. An administration with accomplishments to sell has struggled to do so. A president who wants more credit for his work may, Democrats worry, be alienating voters by appearing insulated from their real life struggles. In more than a dozen interviews across the party, Democrats offered various defenses and diagnoses of the administration’s messaging strategy and what may need to change. But nearly all acknowledged that the Bidenomics messaging blitz has failed to brighten voters’ view of the economy to date. Some now bemoan that the White House has tied itself so closely to a future economic trajectory it can’t really affect and certainly can’t control. “I’ve never understood why you would brand an economy in your name when the economy hasn’t fully recovered yet,” said Michael LaRosa, a former spokesperson for first lady Jill Biden. “People need to be able to see and feel an economy in their own personal bank accounts. And it doesn’t change no matter how loud you scream the economy is better.” The White House’s inability to gain more credit has confounded many Democrats. They believe Biden’s ability to steer the nation out of the pandemic and into an era of wage gains and near-record-low unemployment should be paying major political dividends. Instead, most polling still shows clear majorities remain unhappy with the overall state of the economy and inflation in particular. A recent NBC News poll found fewer than 4 in 10 approve of the president’s handling of the economy. And though 55 percent said they were satisfied with their own financial situation, that figure tied a record low for the poll question dating back to 1994. “The place where economic confidence is faltering most is with the base of the Democratic Party — so it’s among young people, among African Americans and Latinos,” said Republican pollster Micah Roberts, a partner at Public Opinion Strategies who handled the economic questions in the bipartisan NBC poll. “There’s a disconnect between the two or three months of [the Bidenomics] campaign and what people are actually feeling.” Interviews with a diverse group of striking autoworkers and other voters in the critical battleground state of Michigan this week highlighted Biden’s troubles: Many of them had voted for him in 2020 and appreciate that he joined the picket line Tuesday. But several were frustrated with his handling of high prices and other economic issues — and not yet sold on voting for him again next year. Darnay Curry, a Black United Auto Workers member striking at a plant in Warren, Mich., said he isn’t sure whether he’d back Biden or Trump if the election is a rematch between them. “Neither one has said anything that actually gets to me just yet,” said Curry, who said he cast a ballot for Biden in 2020 Tone Woods, a Black building trades worker from Detroit, said he is also undecided after voting for Biden in 2020. He attended Trump’s speech Wednesday in the Detroit area. “Gas is high. Inflation. So that’s why I’m stuck in the middle,” he said. He is considering Trump because “the economy was a little better when Trump was in office, to be honest with you.” Faced with sentiments like these, some Biden allies have advocated for a more empathetic approach that scales back on boasting about accomplishments in favor of greater acknowledgment that rising prices remain a challenge. Even as inflation cools, the shock of higher prices for basic needs like groceries and housing still appears to outweigh improvements in the abundance of jobs in the eyes of voters. Horsford, for one, has directly urged Biden’s inner circle to focus more on selling specific policy wins by highlighting the businesses and individuals better off because of them instead of touting a broader Bidenomics vision that he said simply “isn’t cutting through.” Trying to package Biden’s range of accomplishments under one umbrella risks obscuring the individual policies that polls show are wildly popular, like capping insulin costs and boosting domestic manufacturing, he and others argue. It asks voters to buy into an overarching economic philosophy they may not be totally sold on, rather than focus on more concrete improvements in their communities. And crucially, they worry that christening Biden’s legacy well before it’s finished is plain old risky. “There’s a difference between the actual thing working and the message landing with people,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), who praised Biden’s recent focus on touting specific policies and values, such as visiting the UAW picket line and creating a new gun violence office, as encouraging signs the administration is honing its message. “I’ve told this to the president and the administration, [and] the campaign: You’ve got to make people feel like they’re along for the battle, like they’re part of the battle.”

Efforts to revise §101 are also apt to elicit strong conflict among constituencies, similar to the inability to find common ground regarding the recommendation for an exemption from infringement liability for second opinions and verification testing. Stakeholders in the fight—firms with starkly different business models and patent preferences, the patent bar, and disease advocacy groups—all have armies of advocates and lobbyists at their disposal. A carefully crafted exclusion from patent-eligibility might be possible to craft that would improve the status quo, but the proposed statutory language does not address the core concerns about patents affecting molecular diagnostics that gave rise to Mayo and Myriad in the first place. Instead, the proposed language in S. 2140 would revert to pre-Mayo-Myriad standards. Fervent disagreement about optimal policy will likely translate to political conflict in restoring patent-eligibility, and invite future litigation should the law revert to pre-Mayo status. The future thus seems destined to entail continued disagreement, litigation, debate in Congress, and perhaps incremental change on one or more fronts.