This fully Trumpian GOP has “turned gotcha melodrama into a campaign strategy,” Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote this week. Republicans have forced Columbia University’s president to testify to Congress, blamed President Biden for campus protests, and introduced an overreaching antisemitism bill. Biden can still win, but if he wants to attract voters with the “impactful incrementalism” of his economic policies, he first needs “to get out of his own way and shift course” when it comes to Israel and Gaza. After all, as Jeet Heer reminded us, when confronted with student protesters, who will make up a large part of the youth vote, “Biden’s rhetoric was clearly anti-student.”

The polls are looking too close for comfort, but as Lehmann wrote later this week, Biden’s strategists are claiming that the election surveys are simply wrong. But it’s not just campus and foreign policy issues that Biden has been doing poorly on; he is failing to galvanize potential voters around economic issues—despite strong wage growth and low unemployment during his presidential tenure. There is an answer to this problem, though, according to Lehmann—class war. If “politics is the organization of hatreds,” then “economic messengers need to round up some targets of economic populist rancor pronto.”

-Alana Pockros

Engagement Editor, The Nation

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