More Warnings From Alan Dershowitz

I'm at a point in my life where I'm ready to make a decision I never thought I'd ever have to make. and that is abandoning the Democratic party. Like Ronald Reagan said, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me. . . . I think a lot of people in America are going through an assessment. Many Democrats, people who voted for Democrats, are now saying I can't vote for Kamala Harris, I can't vote for Joe Biden, but they're also saying I can't vote for Donald Trump. They're looking for a third alternative, and there may be some third alternatives. Bobby Kennedy has been very strongly supportive of Israel, and we don't know who the candidate for No Labels will be.

He goes on to point out that the current election is likely to hinge on a few critical states, but

. . . it will not be Michigan. It will not be the Muslims and the Arabs of Michigan. They will not determine the outcome of this election. Why? Because we won't let that happen. I think the Biden administration and those who calculate the costs and benefits of alienating particular groups are making a dreadful mistake when they think they can shift over to pro-Hamas, pro-Arab, pro-Muslim, anti-Israel attitudes is cost free, that all it will do is give them more votes among those groups and young radicals. No!

He apparently made this presentation just before No Labels announced it wouldn't field a 2024 candidate at all:

After failing to recruit serious contenders to run on an imagined "unity ticket" in 2024, the "No Labels" organization announced that it would "stand down" from the current presidential cycle and end its efforts to offer an alternative to voters the group said were weary of the presumptive Democrat and Republican candidacies of Biden and Trump, respectively.

. . . Before the group decided to discontinue its search for a unity ticket candidate after spending millions in its recruitment push, individuals such as former New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), and former Maryland Republican Governor Larry Hogan had been eyed as potential candidates to run under the No Labels banner, but they — along with anyone else the group tried to recruit — declined to mount a bid.

Thus it's likely that the only third alternative for Dershowitz and other centrist Democrats for whom he speaks will be Kennedy Jr, and it's plain from current polling that Kennedy will be an effective spoiler -- but this is still as of April. But remarks from yesterday by former Clinton adviser Dick Morris suggest the trend may be more toward Trump:

He enumerates the astonishing changes in Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American, and Independent groups just in recent weeks away from Biden and toward Trump and concludes,

When you add all those up, you're talking about a gigantic victory and landslide by Trump. And I personally can't believe the Democrats are going to stay with Biden given the situaion. He's just getting wiped out, and frankly, he's dropping every week by a point or two, and the leakage is coming from his base. . . . this is becoming a rout and a landslide.

But whom can the Democrats fall back on? He mentions Michelle Obama, but she's already taken herself out of the running. The only serious alternative for now is Gavin Newsom, with other standbys including JB Pritzker and Gretchen Whitmer -- but for any replacement to succeed, at least with Dershowitz style centrists, they'd have to announce a reversal on Israel in particular, which would cost them the radical left but likely not bring in others disaffected by the range of other policies that likely wouldn't change under a replacement.

The problem is that the Democrats have managed to lose yet another member of the New Deal coalition, the Jews, having already lost labor, Catholics, and legal immigrants -- but as Morris enumerates, they're in the process of losing Hispanics and Asian-Americans as well. And the range of alternatives for the newly disaffected is rapidly shrinking. This is Dershowitz's dilemma.