“A left-wing alliance has won the most seats in the French parliament after tactical voting in Sunday’s second round election thwarted Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, but France will be left in political limbo after no party came close to winning an absolute majority.
In a surprise result, the New Popular Front (NFP) – a cluster of several parties ranging from the far-left France Unbowed party to the more moderate Socialists and the Ecologists – won 182 seats in the National Assembly, making it the largest group but short of the 289 required for an absolute majority, according to the French Interior Ministry.
President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble alliance, which had slumped to a dismal third in the first round of voting last Sunday, mounted a strong recovery to win 163 seats. Despite leading after the first round of votes, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) party and its allies won 143 seats.
The RN’s strong showing in the first round stirred fears that France could be on the cusp of electing its first far-right government since the collaborationist Vichy regime of World War II. But Sunday’s results come as a huge upset and show French voters’ overwhelming desire to keep the far right from gaining power – even at the cost of a hung parliament.”
“there are three reasons for Democrats to fear that slowing inflation will prove too little, too late.
For one thing, voters’ distrust of Biden’s economic management appears unshakeable. In a recent Gallup poll, just 38 percent of Americans expressed confidence in Biden to “do the right thing for the economy.” That is up a smidgen from Biden’s 35 percent mark in 2023, but it is still the worst economic approval that any modern president has suffered in Gallup’s polling, with the exception of George W. Bush immediately after the financial crisis. By contrast, 46 percent of voters have confidence in Trump’s economic management.
In RealClearPolitics’s average of recent surveys, Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy by a 17.6 point margin. And voters’ appraisal of Biden’s economic acumen has not substantially improved in recent months, even as inflation has declined. By the end of Trump’s term, on the other hand, voters approved of his economic management by a 7.8 percent margin.
Thus, the idea that Biden is personally responsible for the surge of inflation in 2022 — and that he cannot be trusted to effectively manage the economy for that reason — appears deeply rooted in voters’ minds. The fact that wages have been rising much faster than prices for more than a year has left no dent on this impression. Another few months of falling inflation could move the needle a bit, but there’s little reason to assume that such a development will dramatically change public opinion.
Second, relatedly, historical precedent suggests that the economy’s performance up to this point in Biden’s term will matter more than its performance from now until November. According to Democratic data scientist David Shor, when you examine the relationship between GDP growth and past incumbent presidents’ electoral outcomes, their economic records between inauguration and April of their reelection year count for much more than economic conditions in their campaigns’ final months.
Finally, if inflation has truly been defeated, victory has come too late to yield substantial interest rate cuts before November. The Federal Reserve declined to reduce rates after its meeting this week and forecast a single, quarter-percentage-point cut by year’s end. Investors predict that such a cut will come in September at the earliest. Even if the rate cut comes before Election Day, it would still leave Americans with dramatically higher borrowing costs than they faced when Biden was inaugurated.
It is conceivable that a small September cut may help the president a bit at the margins. Another possibility is that Biden will effectively shepherd the nation out of an economic crisis and deliver it into a low-inflation, high-employment economy and then promptly hand the White House back to Donald Trump, who will proceed to receive the lion’s share of the credit when the Fed slashes interest rates next year.”
“If the basic test of whether a country remains a democracy is that the party in power can still suffer a setback at the ballot box, India passed”
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“Results from the nation’s parliamentary elections — the largest in the world — indicate a shocking electoral setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“Setback,” to be clear, is a relative term here. At the end of the staggered six-week election, Modi will become only the second Indian prime minister to win a third consecutive term. As of this writing, the BJP-led National Democracy Alliance (NDA) has won 289 seats in the 543-seat parliament and is leading in one more. A majority requires 272 seats.
The BJP itself has won 240 seats. That’s more than any Indian party won between 1984 and 2009, when Modi first came to power, and in most elections, it would have been an amazing result. But the expectations game is real, and Modi and his party lost it.
During the campaign, the NDA had a stated goal of winning 400 seats: a supermajority that would have allowed them to push through major legislative and constitutional changes. They didn’t come close. And after winning an absolute majority on its own in the last election, the BJP will likely now have to rely on its smaller coalition partners in the NDA to form a government.
Exit polls over the weekend were also wildly wrong, with most incorrectly projecting around a 350-seat victory for Modi. (One of the more bizarre media moments on Tuesday was a prominent pollster breaking down in tears on Indian TV over his erroneous forecast and being comforted by his fellow panelists on camera. Not something you’re likely to see from Frank Luntz.)
The opposition Congress Party, which very recently looked headed for political oblivion under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi, the much-mocked fourth-generation scion of India’s most prominent political dynasty, appears likely to double its tally from the last election.”
“the BJP held just 240 seats. They not only underperformed expectations, they actually lost their parliamentary majority. While Modi will remain prime minister, he will do so at the helm of a coalition government — meaning that he will depend on other parties to stay in office, making it harder to continue his ongoing assault on Indian democracy.”
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“after looking at the information that is available and speaking with several leading experts on Indian politics, there are at least three conclusions that I’m comfortable drawing.
First, voters punished Modi for putting his Hindu nationalist agenda ahead of fixing India’s unequal economy. Second, Indian voters had some real concerns about the decline of liberal democracy under BJP rule. Third, the opposition parties waged a smart campaign that took advantage of Modi’s vulnerabilities on the economy and democracy.”
“Forget election season; election denial season has officially kicked off.
Over the last few weeks, Republican legislators have held committee hearings as well as introduced and passed legislation preventing noncitizens from voting — something that is already illegal in state and federal elections, and very rare. Former President Donald Trump has ramped up his claims that the 2024 election will be stolen — even above and beyond his typical portending. The cast of the 2024 veepstakes have all been toeing the line on election denialism. And let’s not forget the hundreds of election-denying candidates running for election or reelection up and down the ballot.
“This effort has the effect, and perhaps has the intent, of planting the seeds of doubt about an election that some Trump supporters must think he might lose,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
There was a moment in the weeks following the 2022 midterm elections where it felt like maybe, just maybe, the election denial trend was starting to fade. Voters had roundly rejected election-denying candidates, including in some of the most high-profile races on the ballot, and the vast majority of candidates who lost their election conceded, including even some of the most dedicated election deniers. But it’s become clear over the past few weeks that Republicans are not yet ready to abandon the election denial narrative and are instead angling to make it a central issue come November.”
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“Roughly the same percentage of Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen today as did in 2021. Polling from YouGov and The Economist in April showed 36 percent of Americans said Biden did not legitimately win, similar to the 38 percent who said so in April 2021 — making it clear what kind of lasting impact this rhetoric can have on voters’ perception of an election’s legitimacy. It also raises the specter of a repeat of the violence we saw on Jan. 6; meanwhile, threats against election workers have continued in the four years since the last presidential election.”
“two other polls found that the verdict has made a small but significant share of potential Trump supporters less likely to vote for him. According to Ipsos/Reuters, 10 percent of Republican registered voters said they were less likely to support Trump after the conviction; HarrisX/Forbes put that number at 11 percent. Similarly, 25 percent of independents said they were less likely to vote for Trump in the Ipsos/Reuters poll, and 28 percent of independents said so in the HarrisX/Forbes poll.”
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“you should take more-or-less-likely polls with a grain of salt; some of those people who say they are less likely to vote for Trump may not have been very likely to vote for him in the first place, and even among supporters, “less likely to vote for” does not mean “definitely will not vote for.””
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“On average, the most recent national polls from the four pollsters who’ve polled since the verdict show a tied race.* That represents a 1-point average swing toward Biden from those pollsters’ pre-conviction surveys.”
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“Interestingly, at least according to these surveys, the shift toward Biden isn’t because Trump is losing support; it’s because Biden is gaining it. On average, Biden’s support went from 42 percent in these four pollsters’ pre-conviction polls to 43 percent after it. By contrast, Trump’s support stayed flat at 43 percent.”
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“Although the fact that three out of the four pollsters showed a shift toward Biden makes us more confident that this is, in fact, real movement, the shifts in both the Ipsos/Reuters and Morning Consult polls were within the margin of error — meaning they could have just been due to random chance. That said, Echelon Insights did something useful: It surveyed the same voters both before and after the conviction, removing the possibility that its 2-point shift toward Biden was due to getting a slightly more Democratic sample the second time around.
It’s also possible that these shifts are an illusion caused by something called (deep breath) differential partisan nonresponse bias. Basically, in the wake of bad news for Republicans and/or good news for Democrats, Republicans may be less excited about responding to surveys and Democrats may be more excited to — which can lead to polling numbers that are a bit better for Democrats than the true state of public opinion.”
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“Even if Biden’s improvement is real, though, another thing to bear in mind is that these are just four polls.”
“distilled down to its essence, the election is about one really big thing: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s democracy-threatening quest to revolutionize the Indian state.
If the polling is even close to right, he’ll win a mandate to finish what he started.”