Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The Ron DeSantis campaign is sinking like a stone

Politico:

DeSantis lets go of more than a third of campaign staff as reset continues

The cuts, which were confirmed by advisers, will amount to a total of 38 jobs shed across an array of departments.

During a donor retreat in Deer Valley, Utah, last week, [campaign manager Generra] Peck acknowledged that the campaign had overspent in some areas and that further adjustments would need to be made.

To be honest, those of us who thought DeSantis was more Scott Walker/Fred Thompson than a juggernaut feel a bit vindicated by the news cycle.

Monmouth:

DeSantis Message Falls Flat

Half of Republican voters identify as a supporter of the MAGA movement (31% strongly and 21% somewhat). Trump commands the backing of 3 in 4 strong MAGA supporters and about half of those who support MAGA somewhat. In a head-to-head race, DeSantis (47%) has more backing than Trump (39%) among the 4 in 10 Republicans who do not support MAGA. However, the Florida governor loses about half of his non-MAGA vote share to others when the race involves a multi-candidate field.

“DeSantis has not made any headway. The arguments that he’d be a stronger candidate and a more effective president than Trump have both fallen flat,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

And then there’s Ron DeSantis fires staffer who shared video with fascist imagery from Semafor.

In other news, Cliff Schecter on the Ohio reproductive initiatives:

And speaking of Florida and Ohio Republicans, Washington Post:

Vaccine rejection may be linked to excess deaths among Florida, Ohio Republicans

The political maelstrom swirling around coronavirus vaccines may be to blame for a higher rate of excess deaths among registered Republicans in Ohio and Florida during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published yesterday.

The report in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine underscores the partisan divide over coronavirus vaccines that have saved lives but continued to roil American politics even as the pandemic waned.

Perry Bacon, Jr/Washington Post:

The left needs to win, not duck, the immigration debate

The Democratic Party and the broader left need to forcefully defend the idea that immigration is good for the United States. Otherwise, conservatives will keep winning on this issue — pushing policy to the right and bludgeoning Democrats electorally whenever immigration is in the news.

Greg Sargent/Washington Post:

Striking new data about young voters should alarm Trump and the GOP

Something is happening among young voters in America — even if, to

paraphrase the old Bob Dylan song, we don’t know what it is.

New data supplied to me by the Harvard Youth Poll sheds light on the powerful undercurrents driving these developments. Young voters have shifted in a markedly progressive direction on multiple issues that are deeply important to them: Climate change, gun violence, economic inequality and LGBTQ+ rights.

Watch the Republicans try to raise the voting age to 65.

New York Times:

Education Dept. Opens Civil Rights Inquiry Into Harvard’s Legacy Admissions

An inquiry into admissions preference for family of alumni and donors began after the Supreme Court’s decision last month limiting affirmative action.

The inquiry into one of the nation’s richest and most prestigious universities will examine allegations by three liberal groups that Harvard’s practice of showing preference for the relatives of alumni and donors discriminates against Black, Hispanic and Asian applicants in favor of white and wealthy students who are less qualified.

The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights has powerful enforcement authority that could eventually lead to a settlement with Harvard or trigger a lengthy legal battle like the one that led to the Supreme Court’s decision to severely limit race-conscious admissions last month, reversing a decades-long approach that had increased chances for Black students and those from other minority groups.

Max Burns:

Casey Newton/”Platformer” on Substack:

The democracies turning against online speech

New laws in Europe and Brazil threaten to knock social platforms offline

A nice thing Twitter used to do for users, on occasion, was to fight for their speech rights. Last year in India, for example, when the Modi government began ordering the platform to remove a large number of posts and accounts that had been critical of the prime minister, Twitter sued in an effort to restore them.

Under Elon Musk, though, the company now called X has acceded to more and more of the Modi government’s demands. And one of the original promises of social media — that it could help citizens of repressive countries make an end run around speech restrictions — is now a little more broken.

As worrisome as Twitter’s abandonment of its Indian users has been, another set of developments this summer threaten to expand issues like these around the globe. Fueled by distrust in (and disdain for) social networks generally, more countries are exploring laws that would make it illegal or even impossible to post all sorts of speech online. And while Modi’s challenge to platforms came from the right, more recently the pressure is coming from the left.

Gary Abernathy/Washington Post:

Why are Republicans so afraid of confronting America’s racial past?

In targeting how public schools teach about race, some Republican lawmakers seem determined to downplay or ignore the tribulations suffered by Black Americans throughout our nation’s history. Why?

Is it because they fear that by acquiring such information, the next generation of White Americans might gain a fuller understanding of why racial equality has yet to be achieved, as well as why remedies such as affirmative action and reparations for descendants of enslaved people are not so unreasonable?

As a conservative on most issues, I seldom agree with much of what Vice President Harris says. But when she traveled to Florida last week to criticize the state’s new education guidelines on race, I found myself nodding along. “Let us not be seduced into believing that somehow we will be better if we forget,” she said. “We will be better if we remember. We will be stronger if we remember.”

From a very conservative columnist, this is welcomed. And while VP Harris might not be covered extensively in the press, she’s being heard.