Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

The Unraveling of Nancy Mace
The tumultuous inside story of the thirstiest member of Congress.

These days, Congress is full of show horses who are less interested in a gradual, heads-down rise in the ranks than in rocketing to viral celebrity, however many enemies they may make along the way. But only three and a half years in, Mace has established herself as one of the thirstiest members of Congress in her unceasing quest for attention. She has kept everyone from lay congressional watchers to reporters to her staff to the speaker of the House and Donald Trump on their toes about her next move. What she may do on any given day feels downright random, even to the people closest to her.

But it isn’t quite random. In interviews with eight former Mace staffers—of which there are several dozen, because Mace’s Washington office has an exceptionally high turnover rate—the politician’s obsession with getting press was described as her sole motivational force. (The former staffers were granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. Mace’s office ignored repeated interview requests for this story and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.) The former staffers described how every move, however incongruous it may seem, is part of a larger effort for Mace to build her brand as a “caucus of one,” as Mace herself puts it.
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New Polls Show Potential for a Sane Majority
The Republican rejection of the rule of law may be disqualifying. And then there’s the increasing GOP creepiness.

In their zeal to martyr Trump, Republicans have dismissed the notion that the center of the electorate may have a limit. Trump and his party are behaving as if they already have won the power that swing voters will have to give them on November 5.

Naturally Trump is talking up revenge and how it can be “justified.” And he’s all but begging to be jailed, as incarceration would break fundraising records, even though—he threatened—it would bring the public to the “breaking point.”

From trashing the jury and the judge to blaming the executive branch for convicting Trump in New York—a blatant lie—Republicans are displaying contempt for the rule of law.
How Joe Biden Can Improve Perceptions Of The Economy
It's a tall order given early mistakes, but it's doable, and it starts with challenging false conventional wisdom.

Presidents who serve through periods of rapid productivity and job growth are supposed to become more popular, not less so. And typically they do. The pattern of incumbents reaping the political spoils of strong economies is at the root of a pre-Biden assumption that voters will know they’re living in a strong economy whether their news outlets tell them so or not. This assumption, we now see, is false. And it should rattle the many Democratic Party strategists who’ve outsourced so much of their critical thinking to academics and analysts selling a worldview in which politics is mostly mechanistic: Make the economy hum and most of your political problems will solve themselves.

Disabusing Democrats of this formulaic view is surely an essential step toward turning Biden’s fortunes around. But it still leaves the biggest question unanswered: What can Biden do to change the perceptions of a stubborn electorate?

I gestured at a few ideas a couple weeks ago, but it’s worth establishing how we got here, and what the nature of public opinion today is, to make the nature of the challenge clearer.
Trump and Biden are tied in 538's new election forecast
Trump has a slight edge in the polls, but the fundamentals favor Biden.

At launch, our forecast shows President Joe Biden locked in a practically tied race with former President Donald Trump, both in the Electoral College and national popular vote. Specifically, our model reckons Biden has a 53-in-100 chance of winning the election, meaning he wins in slightly more than half of our model's simulations of how the election could unfold. However, Trump still has a 47-in-100 chance, so this election could still very much go either way. The range of realistic* Electoral College outcomes generated by our forecasting model stretches from 132 to 445 electoral votes for Biden — a testament to how much things could change by November (and how off the polls could be).
Young men and women are diverging politically. That could shape the 2024 election.
Both younger men and women are broadly discontented with the economy and Biden’s job performance, polls show. But the anger and frustration over the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the federal right to abortion provides Biden a powerful tool to expand his support among young women unhappy with him on other fronts, strategists in both parties agree. For many younger women, pollsters say, the loss of abortion rights has become not only a threat in itself, but a symbol of a broader attempt to reverse women’s gains in economic status and pressure them back into more traditional gender roles.

Meanwhile, Biden faces a dual challenge with younger men: Not only is abortion less of a motivating issue for them, but there’s evidence that many of them are receptive to the messaging of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, with its implicit promise to restore traditional racial and gender hierarchies. In a striking new Pew Research Center national survey, for instance, fully two-fifths of the men younger than 50 who are supporting Trump agreed that women’s gains in society have come at the expense of men. That was not only more than double the share of younger Biden-supporting men who agreed with that sentiment, but considerably larger even than the share of older Trump-supporting men who agreed.
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The Biggest Lie Trump–Biden 2024 Rematch Voters Are Telling Themselves
The system will not inevitably “hold.”

In general, the mainstream media have shrugged at these overt plans and troubling actions, and most voters either have not focused on them or have dismissed them as exaggerations or impossibilities. After all, our constitutional system has endured for almost 250 years, and the web of checks and balances is strong. There is evidence to support that optimism. We have just seen a historic moment in the rule of law: A unanimous jury of his peers found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying financial documents to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. This was huge news for about three days, or maybe a thousandth of a news cycle as measured in Hunter Biden units. For a good two days, however, proponents of democracy and the justice system took to the airwaves with a message that was equal parts yogurt, mayonnaise, and vanilla: The criminal justice system works! The system held!

But conviction notwithstanding, there is reason to be alarmed—deeply alarmed. This one felony conviction was hardly a vindication of the American justice system. The system “held” only insofar as it was capable of somewhat muzzling the ongoing threats leveled by the defendant against the presiding judge and his family, the jurors and the witnesses, and the team of prosecutors who brought the case. The system held only insofar as efforts to bully and terrorize and bribe witnesses who have helped Donald Trump commit crimes with impunity for decades didn’t quite manage to silence all of those witnesses.

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