DA - Elections - MSDI 2024

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Biden will win a close election now – despite debate performance--more likely voters are favoring Biden over Trump
Chas Danner, staff editor at Intelligencer, June 29 2024 What the Polls Are Saying After the Trump-Biden Debate https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/what-polls-say-after-first-2024-trump-biden-presidential-debate.html
The poll, by 538 and Ipsos, was conducted (using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel) among likely voters before and after the debate. Biden clearly lost the debate, according to their responses, but the impact on how people will vote was less dramatic: [T]urning in the best performance in a debate only matters if it translates into votes — so we also asked poll respondents (both those who watched the debate and those who didn’t) which candidates they were considering voting for after the debate. And if there was any silver lining from the debate for Biden, this was it: The face-off doesn’t seem to have caused many people to reconsider their vote. That said, Biden did lose a small share of potential voters: Post-debate, 46.7 percent of likely voters said they were considering voting for him, which was 1.6 percentage points lower than before the debate. (Note that this was not a straight horse-race poll; respondents could say they were considering voting for multiple candidates.) Trump’s support, meanwhile, barely budged, perhaps a reflection of the fact that, while Biden performed poorly on Thursday night, voters weren’t especially impressed with Trump’s performance either. The share of likely voters who said they were considering voting for Trump after the debate climbed from 43.5 percent to just 43.9 percent. Despite not participating in the debate, third-party candidates actually gained more ground than Trump: Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gained 1.1 points in potential support, Green Party candidate Jill Stein went from 3.1 percent to 4.2 percent and Libertarian Chase Oliver went from 2.7 percent to 3.9 percent.
IPR reforms elicit controversy and the sides are backed by strong advocates and lobbyists
Cook-Deegan, et. al., June 2024 Robert Cook-Deegan, Janis Geary, Kara Hapke, Zuzana Skvarkova, Marina Filipek, Jillian Leaver Sorry you asked? Mayo, Myriad, and the battles over patent-eligibility Journal of Law and the Biosciences, Volume 11, Issue 1, January-June 2024, lsae010, https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsae010
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.
Thus, the plan is a GOP gift – it gets packaged as another example of “Bidenomics” --- a message that is failing to overcome voter anxiety over the economy
Cancryn and Otterbein, 9/29/23. Adam Cancryn is a White House correspondent for POLITICO, Holly Otterbein is a national political reporter who covers President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign , writing for Politico, 2023. “Dems pressure White House to change economic message.” https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/29/white-house-bidenomics-failure-00118949
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.”
Biden victory in 2024 necessary to solve warming --- regulations, investment, courts, and international leadership.
Robin Bravender 2023 Bravender, general assignment reporter for Greenwire. She was previously an editor at E&E, a senior correspondent at Insider, Washington bureau chief for States Newsroom and a reporter at Politico April 25 2023 E&E News by POLITICO, "Biden's unfinished climate business", https://www.eenews.net/articles/bidens-unfinished-climate-business/
2030 targets
Securing a second term in office would give the Biden administration the chance to shore up a series of high-profile environmental regulations, including many that it’s been rewriting after tossing out Trump-era rules. A win by Trump or another GOP candidate in 2024, on the other hand, would likely mean changing course yet again to redo policies on issues such as power plant regulations, tailpipe standards and endangered species protections. Another four years in office would give Biden more time to put his nominees on federal courts across the country and perhaps allow him to tip the ideological balance of the Supreme Court if a vacancy arose. Shifting the makeup of those courts would have long-lasting implications not just for environmental policies, but for every issue in their jurisdiction. A Biden reelection would also keep the administration in place almost until 2030, when Biden pledged to slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half from 2005 levels. “If he gets that other four years, that takes us close to the 2030 date that lots of people often talk about,” said Mustafa Santiago Ali, executive vice president with the National Wildlife Federation. “We’ll be able to measure, ‘Have we been able to get close to the goals that we’ve set or are there additional things that we need to do?’” Biden could also use another four years in office to advance his international climate agenda, Ali said, and “really solidify where America stands on these issues.” The president and his team could also use the extra time to oversee the continued rollout of the investments included in the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, and the research and manufacturing law known as the CHIPS and Science Act. The massive spending in each of those laws is set to continue beyond Biden’s first term. “There’s going to be continued and accelerated importance of a second term in continuing to make progress towards these decarbonization goals, especially those that President Biden has importantly set the country over the coming decade, by 2030,” said Sam Ricketts, who advised Jay Inslee’s 2020 presidential campaign. Ricketts now works with Evergreen Action and the Center for American Progress.
Warming causes extinction --- it’s also non-linear and turns every impact
David Spratt and Ian Dunlop May 2019 Spratt is a Research Director for Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration. Dunlop is a member of the Club of Rome. Formerly an international oil, gas and coal industry executive, chairman of the Australian Coal Association, chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and chair of the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading 1998-2000 Breakthrough — National Centre for Climate Restoration, " Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach", https://arnhemspeil.nl/nap/dok/2019-06-07-bt-paper-on-existential-climate-related-security-risk.pdf
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

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