Any suggestions or strategies for the (Democrats) in this upcoming 2024 midterm election?

Any suggestions or strategies for the (Democrats)
in this upcoming 2024 election?

Any suggestions or strategies for the (Democrats)
in this upcoming 2024 election?

Any suggestions or strategies for the (Democrats)
in this upcoming 2024 election?

Any suggestions or strategies for the (Democrats)
in this upcoming 2024 election?

Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed "most pro-union" American president, on Wednesday secured the United Auto Workers Union's endorsement as he ramps up his reelection bid, after the group had withheld backing him for months.

But the Michigan-based union's support -- which includes more than 400,000 active members and millions in political spending -- was not earned without courting by the president as his campaign says he's going "full steam ahead" toward a likely rematch against Donald Trump.

"I'm proud you have my back," Biden said at the UAW's conference in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday after union President Shawn Fain officially endorsed him. "Let me just say, I'm honored to have your back and you have mine -- that's the deal."

The UAW, which backed Democrats in the two previous presidential elections, was holding out in part because of some concerns among members about what Biden's electric vehicle policies could mean for their jobs.

Fain on Wednesday appeared to try to quell his members' fears.

"Advances in technology don't have to leave the plants closing or leave the remaining workers working harder than before," Fain said. "We should be the masters of technology, not let it master us and force us to work even more for less."

Later Wednesday, Biden upheld an administration waiver to allow EV chargers to be made using foreign components if final assembly occurred in the U.S.

Jonathan Hanson, a lecturer at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, told ABC News that having "vocal union leadership" embracing Biden's EV push can help prevent swayable members from again voting for Trump.

"To the extent that the union leadership is able to articulate a message that they're on board with this transition, because they've gotten assurances from the president, that could serve to weaken the power of those attacks that are going to be coming from Trump," Hanson said.

Biden has taken other big, even historic, steps to support union workers -- historically a core constituency for Democrats that had switched to Trump in 2016, helping elect him to the White House.

A person familiar with Biden's thinking told ABC News, of his work to win over the UAW, that the president always expects to have to earn such endorsements.

Biden in September became the first modern president to join a picket line when he traveled to Detroit to publicly back UAW members during their strike against America's three largest car manufacturers.

"Folks, stick with it because you deserve the significant raise you need and other benefits," Biden, donning a UAW baseball cap and speaking through a bullhorn, told strikers at the time.

He later traveled to Illinois to deliver remarks to an audience of UAW workers and applaud them for striking and securing a deal.

It was never likely that the UAW, which had backed Biden in 2020, would flip and support Trump. Fain, the union president, has been vocal in his stinging criticism of the former president.

In his speech on Wednesday, Fain called Trump a "scab" and said he did "not a damn thing" during the UAW strike against General Motors in 2019, when he was president, "because he doesn't care about the American worker."

Trump's campaign did not respond to a request for comment on Fain's criticism, but Trump has previously attacked Biden's union record as "nonsense" and said he is focused on protecting American auto labor, including from EV policies.

Fain, despite his clear distaste for Trump, had said last year that the group's endorsement must be earned -- raising questions if Biden would secure it.

"I really think they were flexing their muscles," Hanson, the public policy expert, told ABC News of the UAW's delay. "They knew that Biden needed this endorsement. They know the race is close."

Beyond being based in a critical swing state that helped decide the 2016 and 2020 elections, UAW has expansive resources.

The union and its local chapters have joined get-out-the-vote efforts in the past -- such as phone banking and door knocking -- and, according to tracking by OpenSecrets, their affiliated political group spent more than $14 million in campaign-related expenses in 2020.

Fain told his members on Wednesday: "We've said we'd stand with whoever stood with us in our fight, not because somebody was nice to us, and we want to be nice to them, but because we need to know who's gonna put up and who's gonna shut up."

Biden has leaned heavily on union support during his long career, including in his run in 2020, when he clawed back some Rust Belt blue-collar support that Democrats lost in 2016.

Exit polling in 2016 showed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faltered with union workers in Ohio and Michigan. Trump beat her in both.

In 2020, Biden narrowly won back Michigan and two other Rust Belt states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that Trump won four years earlier -- which had made up Democrats' so-called "blue wall" in the Midwest.

The Biden-Trump showdown for union workers came to a head when Biden joined the picket line last September.

The next day, across town, Trump spoke about the strike at a rally.

The Trump team slammed Biden's visit as a "PR stunt," while the Biden campaign hit Trump for holding his event at a non-union shop. (Many of the UAW attendees at Trump's event were not on strike.)

Fain, in his remarks on Wednesday, was critical of Trump's Detroit-area stop.

"He went to a non-union plant, invited by the boss, and trashed our union," Fain said of Trump. "That's right. And here is what Joe Biden did during our stand-up strike: He heard the call, and he stood up, and he showed up."

"Perhaps even more important for Biden was not just the support from the union, but the rather visceral attack that the union president, Shawn Fain, made on Donald Trump," Hanson said.

As Biden accepted the UAW endorsement on Wednesday, he also hit Trump for "attacking unions" and "leaving too many Americans behind" and said Americans "lost their sense of pride" during the Trump administration because jobs were going overseas.

That tone was no accident: The Biden campaign told reporters on Wednesday that they are putting their full focus and energy into challenging Trump, declaring the start of their general election campaigning even as Trump still faces challengers in his race for the GOP nomination.

"It's all hands on deck now," Quentin Fulks, Biden's principal deputy campaign manager, said. "We are full steam ahead heading into the general election."

In further signs the campaign is positioning itself for the general, Biden is moving two of his top advisers, Mike Donilon and Jen O'Malley Dillon, who managed his 2020 campaign, from the White House to his reelection team.

"Put simply, Trump's party is divided and now he's about to face the only politician who has ever beaten him and who did so with more votes than any presidential candidate in history: President Joe Biden," Fulks told reporters.

He argued that while the primary race shows Trump continues to be dominant with the GOP base, there are signs he is "struggling to make himself palatable" to some key constituencies, such as independents and college grads, who will help decide the race in November.

Asked by reporters about head-to-head polling that a Biden-Trump matchup would be a tight race, with Trump leading in some surveys, campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond tried to brush off the numbers while stressing, "We're going to run like we're behind," before adding, "Are we going to win? Absolutely."

But Biden has faced persistently low approval numbers for months, with many Americans sour on his handling of issues like the economy and immigration.

He has drawn particular ire from some young Americans and Arab Americans over his handling of the Israel-Hamas War, as evidenced by protests on Tuesday at a campaign rally in Virginia.

"I think what you saw [Tuesday] was a president who understands and respects Americans fundamental First Amendment rights to peacefully protest," communications director Michael Tyler told ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Selina Wang on Wednesday. "I think that stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump and the Republicans who don't seem to understand the same thing, who only want to use these situations to fan the flames and further divide people."

Any suggestions or strategies for the (Democrats)
in this upcoming 2024 election?

To beat Trump, we need to know why Americans keep voting for him. Psychologists may have the answer
George Monbiot

US culture is an incubator of ‘extrinsic values’. Nobody embodies them like the Republican frontrunner

Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.

Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.

People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.

Trump exemplifies extrinsic values. From the tower bearing his name in gold letters to his gross overstatements of his wealth; from his endless ranting about “winners” and “losers” to his reported habit of cheating at golf; from his extreme objectification of women, including his own daughter, to his obsession with the size of his hands; from his rejection of public service, human rights and environmental protection to his extreme dissatisfaction and fury, undiminished even when he was president of the United States, Trump, perhaps more than any other public figure in recent history, is a walking, talking monument to extrinsic values.

We are not born with our values. They are shaped by the cues and responses we receive from other people and the prevailing mores of our society. They are also moulded by the political environment we inhabit. If people live under a cruel and grasping political system, they tend to normalise and internalise it, absorbing its dominant claims and translating them into extrinsic values. This, in turn, permits an even crueller and more grasping political system to develop.

If, by contrast, people live in a country in which no one becomes destitute, in which social norms are characterised by kindness, empathy, community and freedom from want and fear, their values are likely to shift towards the intrinsic end. This process is known as policy feedback, or the “‘values ratchet”. The values ratchet operates at the societal and the individual level: a strong set of extrinsic values often develops as a result of insecurity and unfulfilled needs. These extrinsic values then generate further insecurity and unfulfilled needs.

Ever since Ronald Reagan came to power, on a platform that ensured society became sharply divided into “winners” and “losers”, and ever more people, lacking public provision, were allowed to fall through the cracks, US politics has become fertile soil for extrinsic values. As Democratic presidents, following Reagan, embraced most of the principles of neoliberalism, the ratchet was scarcely reversed. The appeal to extrinsic values by the Democrats, Labour and other once-progressive parties is always self-defeating. Research shows that the further towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum people travel, the more likely they are to vote for a rightwing party.

But the shift goes deeper than politics. For well over a century, the US, more than most nations, has worshipped extrinsic values: the American dream is a dream of acquiring wealth, spending it conspicuously and escaping the constraints of other people’s needs and demands. It is accompanied, in politics and in popular culture, by toxic myths about failure and success: wealth is the goal, regardless of how it is acquired. The ubiquity of advertising, the commercialisation of society and the rise of consumerism, alongside the media’s obsession with fame and fashion, reinforce this story. The marketing of insecurity, especially about physical appearance, and the manufacture of unfulfilled wants, dig holes in our psyches that we might try to fill with money, fame or power. For decades, the dominant cultural themes in the US – and in many other nations – have functioned as an almost perfect incubator of extrinsic values.

A classic sign of this shift is the individuation of blame. On both sides of the Atlantic, it now takes extreme forms. Under the criminal justice bill now passing through parliament, people caught rough sleeping can be imprisoned or fined up to £2,500 if they are deemed to constitute a “nuisance” or cause “damage”. According to article 61 of the bill, “damage” includes smelling bad. It’s hard to know where to begin with this. If someone had £2,500 to spare, they wouldn’t be on the streets. The government is proposing to provide prison cells for rough sleepers, but not homes. Perhaps most importantly, people are being blamed and criminalised for their own destitution, which in many cases will have been caused by government policy.

We talk about society’s rightward journey. We talk about polarisation and division. We talk about isolation and the mental health crisis. But what underlies these trends is a shift in values. This is the cause of many of our dysfunctions; the rest are symptoms.

When a society valorises status, money, power and dominance, it is bound to generate frustration. It is mathematically impossible for everyone to be number one. The more the economic elites grab, the more everyone else must lose. Someone must be blamed for the ensuing disappointment. In a culture that worships winners, it can’t be them. It must be those evil people pursuing a kinder world, in which wealth is distributed, no one is forgotten and communities and the living planet are protected. Those who have developed a strong set of extrinsic values will vote for the person who represents them, the person who has what they want. Trump. And where the US goes, the rest of us follow.

Trump might well win again – God help us if he does. If so, his victory will be due not only to the racial resentment of ageing white men, or to his weaponisation of culture wars or to algorithms and echo chambers, important as these factors are. It will also be the result of values embedded so deeply that we forget they are there.

Any suggestions or strategies for the (Democrats)
in this upcoming 2024 election?