There are two ways of legally winning elections. You can mobilize your current voting base and get them to the polls, or you can persuade voters who are not in your current voting base to go to the polls and vote for your candidate. It is no secret that Democrats have come to favor election strategies based on voter mobilization rather than persuasion over the last 10 years.

Democrats have enough trouble with Joe Biden’s dismal poll numbers and signs of a worsening economy. But being committed to a base mobilization strategy when the base is unstable or shrinking could spell serious trouble for Democrats in November. The factor that administers the coup de grace to their 2024 election plans could well be the fracturing of the college-age youth vote on the rocks of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

An increasingly restless college-age youth cohort exposes the Achilles heel of the Democrats’ mighty “nonpartisan” voter registration and mail-in ballot-harvesting cartels. These institutions are highly effective in mobilizing a fixed or growing voter base, but such practices become increasingly ineffective as the base becomes more unstable. In the meantime, Democrats have neglected the persuasion strategies needed to rebuild their base.

How Democrats Mobilize Their Base

The guiding lights of the Democrats’ voter mobilization strategies over the last decade have been scholars such as Cass Sunstein, Sasha Issenberg, and a growing army of young data scientists employed by think tanks and philanthropic institutions that provide intellectual and practical guidance to Democrats in managing elections.

When the Supreme Court announced its ruling last summer in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (the decision that effectively ended affirmative action), it seemed like the country was finally ready to move on from this unfair policy and recommit to excellence and merit.

No longer would white and Asian applicants be passed over because they didn’t meet an organization’s arbitrary criteria for diversity, nor would unqualified applicants be admitted or employed and immediately fail afterward because they lacked the prerequisite skills and experience.

As a high school English teacher, I had special reason to celebrate the decision. For years I witnessed so many students of mine with near-perfect SAT scores, hundreds of volunteer hours, and limitless creative potential all being denied admission to supposedly elite universities because they happened to have the wrong skin color. Meanwhile, I saw their good-but-not-great peers make it into those same schools and even qualify for scholarships — again, because of their race. This was the very opposite of equal opportunity, and after so many decades of fuzzy reasoning and legal fumbling, the highest court of the land weighed in and condemned it.

Sadly, affirmative action wouldn’t go away that easily. As a recent report from Renu Mukherjee at the Manhattan Institute shows, the American Bar Association (ABA) and New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) have flouted the SFFA by encouraging “law schools and law firms to ignore the Court’s holding” and “continue granting admissions preferences to

Since December, illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border are down more than 40 percent, and have been relatively stable thus far this year. It’s the first time in seven years that illegal border crossings did not increase from February to March.

In a May 10 interview, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told NPR: “We have also removed or returned an historic number of people more this year than I think in any year since 2011.” Economist Ernie Tedeschi meanwhile in an April report noted that the rise in the immigrant population since 2020 has accounted for about one-fifth of U.S. growth during that period.

Liberal pundits, unsurprisingly, are celebrating these seeming immigration-related victories for the Biden administration given recent historic highs in illegal border crossings. “GOP talking points are out of date. Border crossings have plummeted,” read the title of a May 8 op-ed by Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell. “Biden’s ‘border crisis’ is actually an economic success story,” was the title of an April 8 MSNBC op-ed by Zeeshan Aleem. Yet a closer look indicates more of a failure than a success when it comes to current U.S. policies on immigration.

Not Exactly an Immigration Triumph…

“And to be fair, April’s border apprehensions, at around 130,000, remain high by historical standards,” Rampell acknowledges in her WaPo column. Indeed, even the data cited by Rampell quite clearly shows that the number of illegal border crossings from January through April of this year has hovered between 125,000 and 140,000 per