Boston College historian and sub stacker Heather Cox Richardson comments on the Musk-Trump budget resolution meltdown: “Passing continuing resolutions to fund the government is usually unremarkable, but this fight showed some lines that will stretch into the future….First of all, it showed the unprecedented influence of billionaire private individual Elon Musk over the Republicans who in 2025 will control the United States government. Musk has a strong financial interest in the outcome of discussions, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he had included Musk as well as President-elect Trump in the negotiation of the original bipartisan funding bill….Then Musk blew up the agreement by issuing what was an apparent threat to fund primary challengers to any Republican who voted for it. He apparently scuttled the measure on his own hook, since Trump took about thirteen hours to respond to his torpedoing it….Musk expressed willingness to leave the government unfunded for a month, apparently unconcerned that a shutdown would send hundreds of thousands of government workers deemed nonessential into temporary leave without pay. This would include about 800,000 civilian employees of the Pentagon, about 17,000 people from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and those who staff the nation’s national parks, national monuments, and other federal sites….Federal workers considered essential would have to continue to work without pay. These essential workers include air traffic controllers and federal law enforcement officers. Military personnel would also have to continue to work without pay.”

At Common Dreams, Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, the nation’s largest grassroots-funded progressive organization, argues that “The core of that reform message” Democrats deploy should being with: “Banning Dark Money in Primaries: Working-class voters have no reason to trust a party whose primaries are shaped by billionaire-funded super PACs. Eliminating dark money ensures that our candidates win based on voter support, not corporate influence. We’ve seen too many examples where races are flooded with big money to crush popular (progressive) candidates….Investing in State Parties and Grassroots Organizing: The first step to rebuilding working-class coalitions is investing in organizing infrastructure—direct voter outreach based on authentic solutions and supporting grassroots leadership in every state. A 50-state strategy means strengthening state parties and empowering organizers, not handing millions to out-of-touch consultants….Committing to a Progressive Platform: To win back working families, Democrats must champion and deliver on the issues that impact their lives—Medicare expansion, living wages, affordable housing, union rights, and climate justice, to name a few. These policies are not only popular; they are essential to solving the economic pain fueling Trump’s appeal….Increasing Transparency and Accountability: For too long, DNC resources have been squandered on expensive media buys and elite political insiders. A reformed DNC must be accountable to its base and transparent about how it spends its resources—resources that belong to grassroots Democrats.”

Dustin Guastella, research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623, writes at The Guardian  that “it will not be enough for the left to protest the billionaire economy. An honest assessment of progressive liabilities is in order. Those on the left must confront the cultural elite that has pushed the party away from workers on all sorts of non-economic issues. While Trump and his billionaires won’t be able to adequately represent the economic interests of the working class, liberals must recognize that their party doesn’t represent their values. The Democrats captured by highly credentialed clerics has led them to embrace the cultural values of an aristocratic elite. From crime, to climate, to gender politics, and the border, mainstream liberal opinion is much further from the views of workers than many liberals are willing to admit. And this too is a class story….s the Democratic party transformed itself from the party of the New Deal to the party of Nafta it embraced a new constituency: progressive professionals. Since Bill Clinton, liberals presided over the offshoring of high-wage blue-collar jobs in manufacturing. They watched as abandoned factories, and the towns that once relied on them, slowly oxidized. As the Rust belt stretched across the heartland, Democrats helped to subsidize the growth of a new elite primarily concentrated on the coasts. They pushed for policies that pulled the economy away from blue-collar industries and toward more “dynamic” sectors primarily in information technologies.”

Guastella continues, “They fashioned a “new economy” through public policy, and attracted a new constituency as a result. They hoped that as high-wage jobs disappeared, they would be replaced by new high-tech careers; as the party lost blue-collar voters, they invested in white-collar professionals. They got what they wished for….the folkways, mannerisms, and tastes of salaried high-income professionals have come to define the party, and now serve as a powerful repellent for working-class voters. Indeed, not only has the embrace of the knowledge class led to the economic neglect of the working class but the aggressive advocacy of professional class cultural values has played a major role in pushing working-class voters away….Simply put, progressive elites have remade the party to reflect the cultural and aesthetic preferences of blue-blooded liberals, and then made these preferences the priority. Ironically, some highly educated Democrats now embody the definition of “conservative” in their defense of these “woke” priorities: they defend the status of the affluent and the educated, the stand for the preservation of a profoundly powerful elite. If Democrats have any hope of winning back working-class voters they will need to confront this liberal aristocracy as much as they protest the corporate money grab of Republican plutocrats….There is promising evidence that workers may be more progressive on economic issues than in the recent past, and in relation to their professional-class peers. As a forthcoming analysis from the Certified Workers’ Compensation Professional program shows, workers do embrace progressive economic positions. Meaning, those on the left have an opportunity to develop an appealing populist economic program. Such a program would confront the very structure of the job market, ending mass layoffs, automation, and offshoring. It would advocate for rebuilding the industrial heartland, providing high-wage jobs for workers at all levels of education, not just for professionals in “smart” coastal hubs. And it would seek to strengthen union rights, revitalize social programs, lower costs and improve education.”

The following post, “MAGA Republicans Dodge Questions About Their Own Party’s Plans To Gut Social Safety Net” by Emine Yucel is cross posted from Talking Points Memo:

Some House Republicans in recent weeks have not exactly been shy about their interest in reviving the party’s longtime passion for gutting the social safety net in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection and the coming Republican trifecta.

Reports have surfaced indicating that some congressional Republicans are in talks with Trump advisers about making cuts to programs like Medicaid and food stamps to offset the cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Others are openly suggesting that Medicare and Social Security may be on the chopping block as part of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s performative venture into government spending cuts through the new Department of Government Efficiency.

But MAGA Republicans on Capitol Hill who recently spoke to TPM were unwilling to be pinned down on the issue.

When asked if he was supportive of the cuts to federal safety net programs being discussed by members of the Republican conference and DOGE enthusiasts, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) told TPM that they would look at cuts at other programs first.

“The low hanging fruit is the DoD, which has failed an audit for the seventh year in a row,” Norman said last week. “Low hanging fruit is the DEI things in it.”

Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) expressed a similar sentiment.

“I think there’s so much fraud and abuse in health care, so we can have trillions of offsets for reconciliation just in healthcare,” Spartz told TPM.

The “fraud in health care” line has become a go-to for Republicans in recent weeks. When Trump announced that failed Republican Senate candidate and TV doctor Mehmet Oz would serve as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid in his incoming administration, he said Oz would “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency.” Since then, Republicans on the Hill have been using the rhetorically creative line to discuss potential spending cuts to tackle in the new Congress, emboldened by the supposed Musk/Ramaswamy mandate to cut down government spending by $2 trillion.

“You look at improper payments — that’s a big issue — where the government sends money to people fraudulently in Medicare, in Medicaid, where they send money fraudulently in unemployment insurance,” House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY) told CNN in an interview. “All of these improper payments are also on the table.”

“Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, you got to look at all that,” Norman told TPM when asked about the DOGE agenda. “Farm bill, you got to look at it.”

Read more…

If anyone needs further corroboration that Trump emphatically does not have a ‘mandate,’ this headline from The Hill should help: “Less than half of Americans say opinion of Trump is favorable: Poll” The article, by Tara Suter, says in part: “Less than half of Americans said their opinion of President-elect Trump is favorable, according to a recent poll….In a Reuters/Ipsos poll, about 41 percent stated their opinion of the president-elect is favorable. About 55 percent stated their opinion of the president-elect is unfavorable.” It’s only one poll, yada yada, and he hasn’t even taken office yet. In a saner political arena, however, the poll would buck up Democrats and maybe even discourage more groveling on the part of Republican elected officials. However, Suter also notes that “President Biden did not fare well when it came to public opinion in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, garnering an approval of 38 percent,” so let’s not all get on the high horse just yet. Suter notes, further, that “The Reuters/Ipsos poll took place Dec. 12-15, featuring 1,031 people and a 3 percentage point margin of error.” OK, not a huge sample, and it’s only one poll. Given all available polling evidence, Trump would be smart to pull off the political equivalent of a football reverse, and appoint Democrats to his inner circle, just to show that he is more bridge-builder than wall-maker. And he probably ought to give some serious thought to dumping his so yesterday dead weight staff and advisors, those charmers who are hell-bent on revenge and retribution, which are not  public priorities.

All of the GOP’s problems notwithstanding, “After the 2024 election, Democrats are at a steep disadvantage in the Senate: Polarization and incumbent losses make it harder for them to win the chamberr,” according to 538 writer G. Elliot Morris, who shares this grim outlook: “Much of the coverage of the outcome of the 2024 election has focused on how President-elect Donald Trump will wield executive power to pursue his political goals over the next four years. Trump, however, will not be alone in Washington: Voters elected Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate as well. The two chambers could help Trump levy taxes on imports, close the U.S. border and begin the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. And with 53 seats in the Senate, in particular, Republicans will be able to approve a long list of Trump’s judicial nominees, approve (or withdraw from) any treaties and, of course, sign off on his Cabinet nominees….The coming, sudden U-turn in the policy output of the U.S. government is a reminder that elections have serious consequences in the short term. But the impact of the 2024 election could be felt for years in another important way: It may have relegated Democrats to long-term minority status in the Senate. According to a new 538 analysis, barring significant changes in the party’s coalition, it will be tough for them to win a majority in coming elections — and implausible, verging on impossible, to win the 60-seat majority needed to overcome a filibuster (assuming that parliamentary maneuver isn’t abolished).” Of course, all bets are off if Trump flunks most of his major tests in his term ahead, which is not beyond the realm of possibility, given his self-defeating opposition to the notion of broadening his support, instead of shrinking it.

“The trickiest problem for Democrats and progressives in the coming months will not be finding a new electoral strategy,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his Washington Post column, “Progressives should defend Biden’s legacy to protect their future: Trump’s victory should not be used to erase Biden’s policy achievements.” Dionne, adds, “There’s plenty of time for that, and the 2024 outcome was close enough to allow multiple paths to the White House. A far more pressing imperative is to prevent Donald Trump’s victory from discrediting Biden’s genuinely impressive accomplishments and the course he set for the country, which was broadly correct….Legacies are not just about bragging rights or a politician’s self-esteem. How a president is judged can affect the direction of policy for decades. Public anger over Herbert Hoover’s mismanagement of the Great Depression opened the way for the dominance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism for a half-century — even when Republicans held power. Frustration over inflation under Jimmy Carter led to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 counterrevolution in favor of lower and less progressive taxes, regulatory restraint, and a celebration of the social role played by wealthy entrepreneurs…the truth about the Biden economy should not be lost in the mire of political defeat and messaging failure. It’s a reality that will make it much easier to defend his domestic policy legacy than it was to stand up for Hoover’s or Carter’s: The economy Biden leaves behind really is in good shape. Unemployment and, now, inflation are both low. The initial effects of Biden’s investment programs have been positive, and their impact will grow over time.”

Ryan Cooper explains how “Democrats Lost the Propaganda War: The party used up about $5 billion on political ads in 2024. There’s a better way” at The American Prospect, and writes that “the Trump campaign was so badly overmatched money-wise that they found a clever technique to maximize their ad spending. There is no price regulation for political ads on streaming services, so super PACs pay the same as campaigns. Streamers, particularly the free ones like Tubi, are also disproportionately used by the working-class, less-white swing demographics, and unlike broadcast or cable, ads can also be microtargeted using the surveillance data the platforms collect. The Trump campaign went hard on this approach, and claims it was dramatically more efficient than Harris’s tsunami of spending. It’s hard to argue with the results….Once again, Trump’s governing approach will benefit his political project. Hollywood can’t wait to consolidate the space, reducing the number of streaming channels and magnifying the data each of the remaining ones has access to. Without congressional legislation—a good bet—the streaming loophole will make super PACs even more powerful, and conservative billionaires are eager to capitalize….Putting this all together: The typical Democratic approach of funneling billions through sporadic ad campaigns on traditional television channels is plainly not working. There are cheaper and more reliable ways to get the party’s messaging in front of persuadable voters, consistently. This would probably require at least partly cracking up the cartel of well-connected party consultants who cream off a large chunk of the spending, as Minnesota Democratic Party chair Ken Martin argues in a case for why he should be chair of the Democratic National Committee….In any case, business makes for an instructive comparison. Does Ford try to convince drivers that it makes trucks for rugged manly men in the American heartland for only a few months every four years? Of course not. They are doing that every minute of every day, on every conceivable communications medium. It’s a big reason why the Ford F-series has been the best-selling line of personal vehicles in this country for the last 47 years straight….The Democrats, by contrast, have not had the same consistency. It’s time to rethink things.”

After looking at various Democratic utterances about dealing with Trump 2.0, I wrote up a brief typology for New York:

The reaction among Democrats to Donald Trump’s return to power has been significantly more subdued than what we saw in 2016 after the mogul’s first shocking electoral win. The old-school “resistance” is dead, and it’s not clear what will replace it. But Democratic elected officials are developing new strategies for dealing with the new realities in Washington. Here are five distinct approaches that have emerged, even before Trump’s second administration has begun.

If you can’t beat ’em, (partially) join ’em

Some Democrats are so thoroughly impressed by the current power of the MAGA movement they are choosing to surrender to it in significant respects. The prime example is Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, the onetime fiery populist politician who is now becoming conspicuous in his desire to admit his party’s weaknesses and snuggle up to the new regime. The freshman and one-time ally of Bernie Sanders has been drifting away from the left wing of his party for a good while, particularly via his vocally unconditional backing for Israel during its war in Gaza. But now he’s making news regularly for taking steps in Trump’s direction.

Quite a few Democrats publicly expressed dismay over Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, but Fetterman distinguished himself by calling for a corresponding pardon for Trump over his hush-money conviction in New York. Similarly, many Democrats have discussed ways to reach out to the voters they have lost to Trump. Fetterman’s approach was to join Trump’s Truth Social platform, which is a fever swamp for the president-elect’s most passionate supporters. Various Democrats are cautiously circling Elon Musk, Trump’s new best friend and potential slayer of the civil-service system and the New Deal–Great Society legacy of federal programs. But Fetterman seems to want to become Musk’s buddy, too, exchanging compliments with him in a sort of weird courtship. Fetterman has also gone out of his way to exhibit openness to support for Trump’s controversial Cabinet nominees even as nearly every other Senate Democrat takes the tack of forcing Republicans to take a stand on people like Pete Hegseth before weighing in themselves.

It’s probably germane to Fetterman’s conduct that he will be up for reelection in 2028, a presidential-election year in a state Trump carried on November 5. Or maybe he’s just burnishing his credentials as the maverick who blew up the Senate dress code.

Join ’em (very selectively) to beat ’em

Other Democrats are being much more selectively friendly to Trump, searching for “common ground” on issues where they believe he will be cross-pressured by his wealthy backers and more conventional Republicans. Like Fetterman, these Democrats — including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — tend to come from the progressive wing of the party and have longed chafed at the centrist economic policies advanced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and, to some extent, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They’ve talked about strategically encouraging Trump’s “populist” impulses on such issues as credit-card interest and big-tech regulation, partly as a matter of forcing the new president and his congressional allies to put up or shut up.

So the idea is to push off a discredited Democratic Establishment, at least on economic issues, and either accomplish things for working-class voters in alliance with Trump or prove the hollowness of his “populism.”

Colorado governor Jared Solis has offered a similar strategy of selective cooperation by praising the potential agenda of Trump HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as helpfully “shaking up” the medical and scientific Establishment.

Aim at the dead center

At the other end of the spectrum, some centrist Democrats are pushing off what they perceive as a discredited progressive ascendancy in the party, especially on culture-war issues and immigration. The most outspoken of them showed up at last week’s annual meeting of the avowedly nonpartisan No Labels organization, which was otherwise dominated by Republicans seeking to demonstrate a bit of independence from the next administration. These include vocal critics of the 2024 Democratic message like House members Jared Golden, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Ritchie Torres, and Seth Moulton, along with wannabe 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Josh Gottheimer (his Virginia counterpart, Abigail Spanberger, wasn’t at the No Labels confab but is similarly positioned ideologically).

From a strategic point of view, these militant centrists appear to envision a 2028 presidential campaign that will take back the voters Biden won in 2020 and Harris lost this year.

Cut a few deals to mitigate the damage

We’re beginning to see the emergence of a faction of Democrats that is willing to cut policy or legislative deals with Team Trump in order to protect some vulnerable constituencies from MAGA wrath. This is particularly visible on the immigration front; some congressional Democrats are talking about cutting a deal to support some of Trump’s agenda in exchange for continued protection from deportation of DREAMers. Politico reports:

“The prize that many Democrats would like to secure is protecting Dreamers — Americans who came with their families to the U.S. at a young age and have since been protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created by President Barack Obama in 2012.

“Trump himself expressed an openness to ‘do something about the Dreamers’ in a recent ‘Meet the Press’ interview. But he would almost certainly want significant policy concessions in return, including border security measures and changes to asylum law that Democrats have historically resisted.”

On a broader front, the New York Times has found significant support among Democratic governors to selectively cooperate with the new administration’s “mass deportation” plans in exchange for concessions:

“In interviews, 11 Democratic governors, governors-elect and candidates for the office often expressed defiance toward Mr. Trump’s expected immigration crackdown — but were also strikingly willing to highlight areas of potential cooperation.

“Several balanced messages of compassion for struggling migrants with a tough-on-crime tone. They said that they were willing to work with the Trump administration to deport people who had been convicted of serious crimes and that they wanted stricter border control, even as they vowed to defend migrant families and those fleeing violence in their home countries, as well as businesses that rely on immigrant labor.”

Hang tough and aim for a Democratic comeback

While the Democrats planning strategic cooperation with Trump are getting a lot of attention, it’s clear the bulk of elected officials and activists are more quietly waiting for the initial fallout from the new regime to develop while planning ahead for a Democratic comeback. This is particularly true among the House Democratic leadership, which hopes to exploit the extremely narrow Republican majority in the chamber (which will be exacerbated by vacancies for several months until Trump appointees can be replaced in special elections) on must-pass House votes going forward, while looking ahead with a plan to aggressively contest marginal Republican-held seats in the 2026 midterms. Historical precedents indicate very high odds that Democrats can flip the House in 2026, bringing a relatively quick end to any Republican legislative steamrolling on Trump’s behalf and signaling good vibes for 2028.

An excerpt from “What Happened to the Democratic Party? The squalid state of our present political institutions points to a failure of not just individuals but the system as a whole” by Chris Lehman at The Nation:

Two new books make this crisis of institutional atrophy and ideological entropy their central theme. In Left Adrift, the historian Timothy Shenk chronicles the Democratic Party’s path to a working-class dealignment—perhaps the single greatest demographic shift that sparked the rise of Trumpism as a bogus brand of right-wing “populism.” Meanwhile, in The Hollow Parties, the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld examine the broader drift of both major parties from their traditional mandates of building mass coalitions, promulgating policy agendas to serve their grassroots bases, and recruiting and cultivating leaders with material connections to those bases.

Both books ask how our political parties, which once represented somewhat coherent and wide-ranging coalitions and political ideas, morphed into zombie-like institutions that fundraise and battle over shrinking segments of the electorate while stage-managing random culture-war contretemps in each new election cycle. Both books also wonder if the return to an era of majoritarian party politics has become an unrealizable dream in the blighted 21st century. In past eras of modern liberalism’s history, the central protagonists would have been party leaders, such as Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson, or pivotal movement figures, such as Sidney Hillman or Martin Luther King Jr. But in our own age of retreating governing ambitions and malleable party messaging, it makes a grim kind of sense to foreground the thinking of hired-gun political strategists like Greenberg and Schoen, who have played an outsize role in the steady miniaturization of our public life.

For Shenk, these two men—bitter rivals for clout and clients in the retooling Democratic Party of the Clinton era—understood better than many traditional New Dealers in the party’s leadership caste that a massive, if slow-moving, political realignment was under way: the party’s abandonment of its traditional working-class base and its embrace of a professional, highly educated elite. This turn to a new breed of voters—“Atari Democrats,” as the journalist Chris Matthews called them—marked an ideological transformation in the party as well as a social one: Democrats began to preach a gospel of cultural tolerance and demographic diversity, even as they broke from basic issues of economic fairness. The party’s activist base, now broadly maligned as a backward-looking congeries of “special interests,” were replaced by a cadre of Ivy Leaguers weaned on the fables of a new information economy and avowing a politics of free trade, cheap labor, and a financialized model of national prosperity.

Greenberg, who came of political age during Eugene McCarthy’s incendiary anti-war presidential campaign in 1968, accepted this political shift as it gained traction in the Reagan era. But he did so from a defensive posture, seeking to persuade candidates and clients to echo vintage Democratic populist appeals in a last-ditch bid to arrest the dealignment of working-class voters from the party. Meanwhile, Schoen, a scion of Manhattan privilege, cheerfully welcomed the shift as the new consensus delimiting future Democratic agendas, policy goals, and political campaigns.

Using data gleaned from polls, Greenberg laid out his case for a more social-democratic path to winning back the working-class and suburban “Reagan Democrats” who had helped deliver Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980. In a series of focus-group studies in the suburban Detroit communities of Macomb County, he found many of these voters still receptive to universalist appeals to economic fairness and social-democratic equality—but wary of the racialized remedies and social-engineering planks of the Great Society. Writing in The American Prospect in the early 1990s, Greenberg divined the lineaments of a new “mass party, encompassing the needs of the have-nots and working Americans,” even as Democratic leaders pursued the interests of a new base of professionals and suburbanites. What was needed, Greenberg argued, was a party that “can speak expansively of broad, cross-class issues, such as full employment, tax relief, and health care.” But for that message to come through loud and clear to its target voters, Democrats had to purge “the demons of the 1960s.” As Shenk sums up Greenberg’s prescription for a renewed majoritarian platform in the pinched realities of the Reagan era:

Disillusioned white voters would not listen to what Democrats had to say about economics until the party showed respect for their values. A shift to the center on polarizing social issues was the price of admission for resurrecting the New Deal coalition. [Greenberg] had seen time and again in his work that class wasn’t just a matter of economics. It was an identity, and a fragile one at that. Getting voters to hear its call required turning down the volume in the culture wars.

Greenberg’s analysis was steeped in the anxious postmortems that the party launched after Reagan’s powerful new coalition made strong inroads among Democrats in the 1980s. But the presuppositions behind his counsel reflected a constrained and fast-obsolescing view of working-class politics and interests—and even of who was and who was not in the working class. While plenty of white workers fit into the Macomb model, the country’s working class was also composed of many groups who benefited from the Great Society’s programs. Likewise, the work of the working class was shifting as the service economy grew; the financialization of key sectors caused wage and wealth inequality to spike; and rural Americans were laid low by the farm crisis—a calamity compounded by the deregulation of the savings-and-loan industry. These other constituencies—far more complex and diverse than the ones found in a place like Macomb County—loomed large in the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s insurgent presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. They also served as a reminder that Greenberg’s version of a retrenched New Deal politics risked overlooking the actual makeup of working-class America.

….Meanwhile, class dealignment continued at a prodigious pace during Clinton’s two terms in the White House. Greenberg charted this baleful process closely, but he was largely left exhorting Democratic campaign gurus from the sidelines as Schoen and Penn’s argument won the day and Clintonite neoliberalism became the party’s savvy insider consensus. As the 2016 Trump campaign drew greater and greater support from disenchanted white working-class voters, Greenberg told John Podesta, the head of Hillary Clinton’s campaign that year, “You sound clueless in blue-collar America,” and later announced in The American Prospect that “the Obama years were the critical juncture when Democratic leaders stopped seeing the working class.” As Shenk observes, “Bill Clinton had managed to hold off the shift in the 1990s, but a gap had opened after his presidency that turned into a chasm in 2016.”

Even as the Democrats continued to lose more and more of the working class, Shenk tracks how the Greenberg-Schoen battle went abroad. The consultants’ own practices became global as they took on electoral clients in Israel (Labor and Kadima leader Shimon Peres and his embattled successor, Ehud Barak), Britain (New Labour’s lead apostle Tony Blair), and South Africa—where Greenberg worked with African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, before defecting in the face of mounting ANC corruption and ruling-class complacency to represent the first Black candidate fielded by the country’s traditional white rival party, Democratic Alliance.

Read more here.

In “Is This How Democrats Win Back the Working Class?Embracing populism could help the party build a lasting political coalition—if the Republicans don’t do it first,” Tyler Austin Harper writes at The Atlantic: “The politics of the average American are not well represented by either party right now. On economic issues, large majorities of the electorate support progressive positions: They say that making sure everyone has health-care coverage is the government’s responsibility (62 percent), support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour (62 percent), strongly or somewhat support free public college (63 percent), and are in favor of federal investment in paid family and medical leave  (73 percent). They also support more government regulation of a variety of industries including banking (53 percent), social media (60 percent), pharmaceuticals (68 percent), and artificial intelligence (72 percent). Yet large majorities of this same American public also take conservative positions on social issues: They think the Supreme Court was right to overturn affirmative action (68 percent), agree that trans athletes should compete only on teams that match their gender assigned at birth (69 percent), believe that third-trimester abortions should be illegal in most circumstances (70 percent), and are at least somewhat concerned about the number of undocumented immigrants entering the country (79 percent).” There is not a lot of “buyer’s remorse” on the part of Trump supporters quite yet, but he hasn’t even been inaugurated. Democrats should now focus on getting their own ship in shape, and not waste a lot of time gloating about Trump’s troubles.

Dustin Guastella and Bhaskar Sunkara argue that “The US needs more working-class political candidates” at The Guardian, and write that “there is evidence that people want to vote for workers across the country. A study by the Center for Working-Class Politics found that among working-class voters, hypothetical candidates with elite or upper-class backgrounds performed significantly worse than candidates from humbler backgrounds….Yet, in reality, there were few working-class candidates to vote for. Only 2.3% of Democratic candidates worked exclusively in blue-collar jobs before entering politics. Even if we broaden out the category to professionals like teachers and nurses, the number is still under 6%. Why? Mainly because it’s extremely expensive to run for office. Most workers simply do not have the fundraising networks or the ability to take time away from their jobs to run for office….The lack of working-class representation in government is also one major factor in explaining the dysfunction in our politics and the persistence of economic policies that seem to only benefit the rich. Working-class voters have been cut adrift. Their views and voices are invisible in Washington, and they see no real champions for their interests. One reason these voters are likely to prefer working-class candidates is that these candidates are much more likely to advance an economic agenda that benefits them.” The authors add that Dan Osborne, an independent U.S, U.S. Senate candidate who lost in Nebraska “outperformed Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points, is “starting a new political action committee, Working Class Heroes Fund, to support working-class candidates, something our national politics direly needs.”

Zachary B. Wolf explains “Why hasn’t the US been trying to fix its health insurance problems?” at CNN Politics: “A Gallup poll released this week but conducted before the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, found that most Americans, 62%, think it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that all Americans have health care coverage. A minority, 36%, said it’s not the government’s responsibility….Gallup has been asking this question for years, and this new data reflects a gradual reversal from 11 years ago, during the troubled rollout of private health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Back then, a minority, 42%, said it was the federal government’s responsibility to make sure people have health coverage, and a majority, 56%, said it was not….There’s a partisan story behind those numbers, since nearly all Democrats, 90%, now say the government is responsible, compared with a little more than two-thirds in 2013. Just about a third of Republicans hold the same view today, although that is up from just 12% who said the government had a responsibility in 2013….The upward shift in Americans who say the government has a responsibility to make sure its citizens have coverage has tracked with a downward shift in satisfaction with the health care system overall in Gallup’s polling….Any number of studies say similar things, that the US pays a lot more per person and as a percentage of its gross domestic product, or GDP, to cover a much smaller portion of its population and achieve a much lower life expectancy – although life expectancy in the USis also affected by gun deaths, suicides and drug overdoses.”

Steve Liesman reports “Majority of Americans are ready to support Trump and large parts of his agenda, says CNBC survey,” but notes that “the public is flashing yellow and red warning lights on some parts of the Trump agenda.”: Despite public support for Trump’s plan to deport large numbers of undocumented immigrants and cutting taxes, “Where the potential agenda gets more contentious is most obviously in President-elect Trump’s plans to pardon those convicted of crimes from the Jan. 6 protest. Just 43% support the move, with 50% opposing it, including 87% of Democrats, 46% of independents and 18% of Republicans. It’s the issue with the single largest Republican opposition. Support for tariffs is also more lukewarm with 27% backing them outright and 24% saying it can be done later in the term. It’s opposed by 42% of respondents….Americans overall are more upbeat about the economic outlook for the second Trump presidency than they were the first. More than half, or 51%, say they expect their personal financial situation to improve, 10 points higher than when he was elected in 2016; the same percentage, 51%, also say they expect the U.S. economy to improve, up 5 points from 2016….There were also gains in the percentage believing they’d be worse off, suggesting Trump is even more polarizing now than he was in his first term.”

The following article, “The Democrats’ Hispanic Voter Crash: It’s not as bad as you think—it’s worse” by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

It’s been widely noted that the Democrats fared very poorly with Hispanic voters in the November election. But I believe that the scale of the Democrats’ crash among Hispanic voters has not yet been fully processed nor the extent to which this crash undermines Democrats’ plans for the future.

Let’s start by looking at some data on the scale of the Democratic Hispanic voter crash. Here are a dozen illustrative findings:

1. According to AP VoteCast data (the best data currently available), the national Democratic margin among Hispanics crashed by 16 points, from a 28-point advantage to just 12 points. This comes on top of another 16-point margin crash between 2016 to 2020, according to the gold standard Catalist data. Compare that to the overall national shift to the right across the entire time period, 2016-2024, which goes from Hillary Clinton’s 2-point advantage in 2016 to Trump’s point and a half margin in this election. That’s a total overall shift of just 3 and ½ points toward Trump, a shift that is simply dwarfed by the massive shift among Hispanics.

2. The Democratic margin among Hispanic working-class (non-college) voters declined by 18 points between 2020 and 2024. That is after a 19-point decline between 2016 and 2020, as measured by Catalist.

3. Hispanic men were a particular trouble spot for the Democrats this election. VoteCast data have the Democratic advantage dropping by 20 points in this election, down to a slender 1-point margin. But Hispanic women also shifted 14 points right in this election. And if you look back to the last election, the decline in Democratic margin between 2016 and 2020 among Hispanic women was actually twice as large (20 points) as it was among Hispanic men (10 points). So across the two elections, the decline in Democratic support among Hispanic men and women may have been quite similar.

4. The Hispanic shift to the right was concentrated among the younger generations of Hispanics who of course are the future of the Hispanic vote. Among Hispanics under 45, the Democratic margin dropped by a shocking 26 points. Trump actually carried working class Hispanic men in this age group by 7 points.

5. Turning to geographic patterns, here’s a New York Times chart illustrating the shift to the right in Hispanic-majority counties. Compared to Native American- and black-majority counties, the shift to the right in 2024 was larger in Hispanic-majority counties (13 points) and has been continuous since 2016 so these counties wind up way to right of where they were in that election.

6. Similar findings come from Jed Kolko, who analyzed counties using a typology developed by the American Communities Project, which groups counties using a variety of demographic, economic and other factors. The counties grouped into the “Hispanic Centers” category had the largest shift of any county group, shifting to the right by 14 points.

7. Drilling down to specific geographic areas, there is no dearth of vivid examples of big Hispanic shifts. As Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis Research, a Democratic-oriented firm specializing in Hispanic voter research, observed somewhat ruefully:

The New York Times, for example, mapped precinct level shifts in 11 cities—Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix and San Francisco. A continuing theme of their analysis was the strikingly large shifts toward Trump in Latino neighborhoods across this diverse basket of cities.

8. A vivid illustration of this dynamic comes from Philadelphia via a terrific Philadelphia Inquirer analysis of precinct results. Note the sharp rise in Hispanic support for Trump compared to other racial groups.

9. Staying in Pennsylvania—the tipping point state in this election—AP VoteCast indicates a 16-point pro-Trump margin shift across the state among Pennsylvania’s Hispanics. In a fascinating analysis by Charles McElwee, “Main Street of the Realignment” that follows the 2024 vote along historic route 309 in Pennsylvania, he finds some amazing trends in Latino-heavy areas:

Route 309 begins around the northeast’s Wyoming Valley, continues through Luzerne County then past the Blue Mountain ridge and onward to the Lehigh Valley, where it passes Pennsylvania Dutch communities and enters suburban Philadelphia’s Bucks County before terminating at the state’s biggest city… This highway long ran through reliable Democratic territory. This trend dates back to a day in October 1960, when John F. Kennedy’s campaign caravan traveled on Route 309 as it targeted working-class Catholic voters in small industrial cities and towns.

The Latino shift in Republicans’ favor was dramatically evident in Luzerne County’s Hazleton, a small city where Route 309 runs through the downtown and past the old Altamont Hotel, the site of a [John F.] Kennedy stump speech before 12,000 on that October 1960 day…Trump won every ward in Hazleton, where Trump’s overall vote share—62 percent—matched Latinos’ share of the city population. Even in 2016, when Luzerne’s voting margins fueled Trump’s narrow statewide victory, Hazleton still favored Hillary Clinton, though Joe Biden handily lost the city in 2020. This Election Day, the enthusiasm for Trump was hard to miss in Hazleton, where I spent the evening watching returns with friends. In the city’s Nanny Goat Hill section, an historically Italian neighborhood once reliably Democratic, residents displayed Trump regalia outside their homes. In that neighborhood alone, Trump carried nearly 65 percent of the vote….

Last week, Republicans overperformed in Lehigh County while flipping Northampton County. According to a Morning Call analysis, some of Trump’s biggest gains came in Allentown—Pennsylvania’s Latino-majority, third-largest city—where some wards saw a 25-point swing in the incoming president’s favor compared with 2020.

10. How about New York and New Jersey? In New Jersey, AP VoteCast reports a statewide Hispanic swing toward Trump of 26 points. And check out these massive swings in heavily Hispanic cities and towns in the state.

In New York, VoteCast estimates a 23-point statewide shift toward Trump among Hispanics. Notably big shifts took place in New York City, particularly in Queens. Matthew Thomas has analyzed the precinct data and here’s what he finds. In precincts that are 50-75 percent Hispanic the margin shift toward Trump is a whopping 36 points and in precincts that are more than 75 percent Hispanic the rightward shift since 2020 is an astonishing 48 points.

11. Massachusetts? Sure. VoteCast shows a 32-point (!) statewide shift toward Trump among Massachusetts Hispanics. As it happens, this is exactly the size of the shift that took place this election in the historic industrial town of Lawrence. Steve Kornacki explains the significance of the result:

This was a disastrous result for Democrats in Massachusetts’ most heavily Hispanic city. When Trump ran in 2016, he was crushed in Lawrence, an old mill city on the Merrimack River, by 66 points. Four years ago, he brought it down to 49 points. His 57%-40% defeat this time around is the first time a GOP presidential candidate has cracked 40% here since 1988, back when the city was still majority white. Dominicans are the largest Hispanic subgroup in Lawrence, demonstrating the breadth of Trump’s gains.

12. Florida and Texas, of course. In Florida, VoteCast shows a 21-point margin shift toward Trump, including a 31-point rightward shift among Puerto Ricans. The latter explains how Trump was able to flip heavily Puerto Rican Osceola county into his column.

In Texas, VoteCast records a 27-point rightward shift among the state’s Hispanics between 2020 and 2024. This comes of course on top of sharp rightward Hispanic shifts in the state between 2016 and 2020. Indeed, according to a Washington Post analysis, 13 of the 15 hardest right-swing counties in the country between 2016 and 2024 were majority-Hispanic counties in Texas. And the king of rightward-swinging is Texas’ Starr county, which is close to 100 percent Hispanic. In 2016, Clinton carried the county by 60 points; this election Trump carried it by 16 points. That’s an almost unbelievable swing of 76 points across the two elections!

These are big, big shifts. And Democrats seem at a loss on how to deal with this, outside of hoping for the ever-popular “thermostatic reaction” against Trump where Hispanic voters finally “come home” to the Democrats. That’s not much of a strategy. Paraphrasing Dylan, we might say: “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is….do you, Mr. Democrat.”

They’d better figure it out since these trends undermine what has been Democrats’ default plan for their political future. Consider that most Democrats like to believe that, since a relatively conservative white population is in sharp decline while a presumably liberal nonwhite population keeps growing, the course of social and demographic change should deliver an ever-growing Democratic coalition. It is simply a matter of getting this burgeoning nonwhite population to the polls.

But consider further that, as the Census documents, the biggest single driver of the increased nonwhite population is the growth of the Hispanic population. They are by far the largest group within the Census-designated nonwhite population (19 percent vs. 12 percent for blacks). While their representation among voters considerably lags their representation in the overall population, it is fair to say that voting trends among this group will decisively shape voting trends among nonwhites in the future since their share of voters will continue to increase while black voter share is expected to remain roughly constant.

It therefore follows that, if Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not cancelled out entirely, and this very influential Democratic theory of the case falls apart.

They’d better start planning for a very different future. And soon. To quote Dylan again: “Let us not talk falsely, the hour is getting late”.

It probably won’t matter to Donald Trump how many Democrats show up at his inauguration, but I think it’s important to distinguish between honoring the wishes of voters and fighting like hell once the 47th president is in office, and I wrote about that at New York.

Democrats and others who fear or despise what Donald Trump has in store for us over the next four years have many decisions to make about how to cope with the new regime. There are plenty of legitimate reasons (especially given the plans and appointments he has already revealed) for a posture of total opposition. Something approaching an actual “resistance” may arise once the 47th president takes office and it all becomes very real.

But prior to January 20, it’s all potential rather than actual, which is one reason the talk of Democratic elected officials boycotting the inauguration, as USA Today reports some are considering, seems like a bad idea, one that signals the opposition’s weakness, not its resolution:

“Should Democrats skip the inauguration, as more than 60 members of Congress did in 2017, or would it be wiser for them to attend and show that after a divisive contest, America’s democratic norms remain secure? After all, Trump didn’t attend Biden’s inauguration after the now-president defeated him in 2020.”

The following article is cross-posted from stevenrattner.com:

President-elect Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with the goal of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. (While none of the protagonists have been specific, they appear to be suggesting that the $2 trillion would be annual reductions, not cumulative savings over a number of years.) This will likely prove impossible to effectuate.

The challenge is that much of the federal government’s expenditures are off limits for cutting for one reason or another. For example, Trump has declared Social Security and Medicare off limits (although he has been conspicuously silent about Medicaid, which represents about 10% of outlays. As for defense, while some savings could probably be achieved, most experts believe the overall defense budget needs to become larger, not smaller. And of course, interest on the national debt is sacrosanct — the federal government can’t default. All of that leaves just 25% of the budget — $1.5 trillion of annual expenditures – available for cutting.

Undaunted, Musk and Ramaswamy have identified a list of government programs totaling $516 billion of annual expenditures that they believe could be eliminated without congressional approval due to a questionable legal quirk. Topping this list would be health care for veterans, which costs $119 billion a year, and the National Institutes of Health, which receives funding of $47 billion a year.

But consider the consequences. As of 2021, the most recent year for which there is complete data, the federal government provided health care to 6.2 million veterans, up from 5.4 million in 2010. That number is almost surely larger now because the bipartisan PACT act passed in 2022 expands and extends health care for veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic substances. The PACT Act is a good example of what DOGE will be up against: It passed both houses of Congress with broad bipartisan support.

Then there’s the NIH, which conducts and funds early stage research that the private sector has historically not been willing to support. All told, the NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world and has made particularly substantial contributions to reducing death rates for cancer. While the decline in lung cancer relates principally to smoking cessation, the NIH deserves significant credit for the fall in deaths from many other forms of cancer such as colon, breast and prostate.

The DOGE leaders also talk about trimming the federal workforce; Ramaswamy has talked about cuts of 50% to 75%. Doubtless, there are cuts that can be made. But the number of civilian federal employees today is only slightly higher than when Ronald Reagan took office while the population of the U.S. has risen by 47%. Note also that the size of the civilian workforce has grown under every Republican president since Reagan while it fell precipitously during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Nor is the pay of federal workers out of line. Back in 2011, the average civilian federal worker made about 6% more than a similarly qualified private sector employee. But political pressure has kept raises for federal workers below those awarded to private sector workers so as of 2022, the average federal worker made 8% less than his civilian counterpart.

Amid all the conflicting takes on how Donald Trump won the presidency after losing it in 2020, there’s a strong consensus that gains among Latino voters mattered a great deal. I examined this CW at New York:

Definite judgements about how the 2024 presidential election turned out should await voter-file based data that won’t be available for some time. But it’s pretty clear one of the biggest and most counter-intuitive shifts from 2020 was Donald Trump’s gains among Latino voters. Yes, there’s a lot of controversy over the exact size of that shift. Edison Research’s exit polls (which have drawn considerable criticism in the past for allegedly poor Latino voter samples) showed Kamala Harris winning Latinos by a spare 51 to 46 percent margin, while Edison’s major competitor, the Associated Press VoteCast, showed Harris’s margin at a somewhat more robust 55 to 43 percent. Other estimates range up to the 62 to 37 percent win claimed for Harris in the American Electorate Voter Poll.

But most takes showed sizable Republican gains from 2020, and for that matter, Trump did measurably better among Latinos in 2020 than in 2016 (Pew’s validated voter studies showed Trump winning 28 percent in 2016 and 38 percent in 2020). As Equis Research puts it, “this looks and sounds like a realignment.” And while close elections lend themselves to exaggerated focus on specific voter groups, the size and potential future magnitude of the Latino vote make it a natural source of deep concern for Democrats and optimism for Republicans. A New York Times analysis of the startling losses in vote share by Democrats in urban core areas in 2024 concluded that the most consistent pattern was significant Latino populations, which also showed major Republican gains in non-urban areas as well.

To state the obvious, it’s surprising that a politician so associated with nativist rhetoric and policies as Donald Trump is setting records for support in what has traditionally been a Democratic “base” constituency. Is this a trend that would have occurred without Trump leading the GOP, and if so, could it actually intensify once he’s left office for good?

It’s important to understand that this isn’t the first time a pro-GOP Latino “wave” seemed to be developing. While there was immense controversy over the exact numbers (in part because of uniquely flawed exit polls in that particular year), George W. Bush appears to have won about 40 percent of this vote, beating Ronald Reagan’s earlier record of 37 percent in his 1984 reelection landslide. According to the more reliable exit polls in subsequent elections, the GOP share of the Latino vote dropped to 31 percent in 2008 and then to 27 percent in 2012. Some reasons for this reversal of the trend that appeared in 2004 weren’t that hard to discern: the Great Recession that appeared late in Bush’s second term hit Latino households really hard, even as Republicans retreated rapidly from Bush’s support for comprehensive immigration reform (by 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney was promoting policies to make life so unpleasant for undocumented immigrants that they would “self-deport”).

But it’s possible that what we are seeing now is the resumption of a slow drift towards the GOP among Latinos that was temporarily interrupted by the Great Recession and a nativist uprising among white Republicans. Whatever unhappiness Latinos felt towards Trump’s immigration views was pretty clearly offset by economic concerns, especially among younger Latino men, who broke towards Trump most sharply. As happened during the Great Recession, the economy mattered most, and the combination of inflation (especially in housing costs) with tight credit eroded already-thin Democratic loyalties. As the above-mentioned Times analysis showed, defections to Trump happened all across the landscape of the Latino electorate, not just among more traditionally Republican-prone groups as Cuban Americans or South Americans. The question as to whether this is a party accomplishment rather than a personal accomplishment by Trump is an open one; Democrats did significantly better among Latinos in down-ballot races in 2024.

A general trend towards a more politically diverse Latino voting population makes some intuitive sense. As former immigrants slowly give way to native-born citizens, particularly those who are entering the middle-class en masse, it’s logical that identification with “the party of immigrants” will decline. Latinos who embrace conservative evangelical–and especially hyper-conservative pentecostal–religious practices also has helped intensify right-leaning cultural attitudes. We may never return to the days of reliable two-to-one Democratic advantages in this community, particularly as young voters who are especially alienated from traditional party loyalties move into the electorate.

While Democrats should be worried about the future of Latino voting behavior, Republicans have no reason for complacency. It’s now Trump and the GOP who are fully responsible for economic conditions which could turn out to be much worse than vague positive memories of the first Trump administration might suggest. And while (as some polling indicates) Latino citizens may have a negative attitude towards the recent surge of migrants that has become so central to Trump’s grip on his MAGA base, it’s less clear the mass deportation regime Trump has pledged to undertake immediately is going to go over well among Latinos, even those who voted for him. A recent Pew survey showed that Latinos were significantly less supportive of a major deportation program than other voters. And if the Trump administration pursues deportation round-ups in a cruel and ham-handed way (which elements of Trump’s base would welcome as a virtue rather than as a vice), or by methods that affect Latino legal immigrants and native citizens (most likely via ethnic profiling by law enforcement officials), we could see a pretty significant Latino backlash.

In other words, while some Latino trend towards the GOP may be inevitable all things being equal, it’s hardly guaranteed and could be sharply reversed. For their part Democrats need to get more serious about Latino voter outreach (particularly among young men) and identify (and learn to explain!) an economic agenda that prioritizes the practical needs of middle-class folk from every background.