The following article by Matthew Yglesias is cross-posted from slowboring.com:

Having written a nine-point Common Sense Democrat Manifesto, it now falls to me to explain in greater detail what I mean.

I chose to start the list with a point about economics, because I really think there is a profound and fundamental divide between the Slow Boring perspective, which is to complain about the Democratic Party’s positioning on cultural issues because I want to see Democrats win elections and help poor people, and the Free Press perspective, which is to complain about Democratic Party positioning on cultural issues because they want to see Republicans win elections and cut rich people’s taxes.

But I also put it first because I think some sectors of the left harbor weird fantasies about the possibilities of politics grounded in “populist” economics. One set holds to a sort of red-brown fantasy, in which they fuse with social conservatives and bring back the left wing of the Dixiecrats. Another set, the one that was more influential with Biden-era Democrats, holds that if you’re somehow just populist enough on economics, you can short-circuit people’s brains and they’ll stop noticing that you disagree with them on cultural issues.

Neither of these works, because the pure left-populist approach to economics is itself not a satisfactory answer to the economic question. Thus, the first point of the manifesto:

Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.

Democrats want and need to be a party that stands up for the little guy, for the person who, in Bill Clinton’s memorable phrase, works hard and plays by the rules. And that absolutely involves progressive economic policies. Conservatives are just way too eager to write off poor kids, sick people, and the elderly and disabled in pursuit of low taxes. They are also way too indulgent of businesses that pollute or perpetrate fraud. And they tend to stand with incumbents, the heirs to inherited wealth, and rent-seekers. But contrary to the attitudes of the hard left, a growing and dynamic private sector is really important. Americans are much richer than Europeans, and that matters. Middle-class people tend to leave San Diego for San Antonio in pursuit of bigger, cheaper houses, and that matters. It also matters that poor people can get Medicaid in San Diego but not in San Antonio.

You need an economic agenda that does both: a rapidly growing economy with a safety net that ensures people aren’t left behind.

The growth mindset

I think these tweets by Lee Hepner from the American Economic Liberties Project about why he hates YIMBYs are telling. He and Nathan Proctor, who works on right- to-repair issues at US PIRG, are not articulating a typical objection to new housing in a neighborhood, like “I’m worried about traffic” or “what if it creates problems for my kids’ school.” They are articulating a fundamental, principled disagreement with the idea that economic growth is important. They say American society has enough “energy, wealth, stuff, etc” and that all we need is a purely redistributive politics.

I think it’s important to note that Proctor and Hepner are not working on climate policy. Most readers here are familiar with the “degrowth” talking points in some climate activist spaces, and Democrats rightly reject that approach. But these guys work on competition policy, and here they are degrowthing. Not because YIMBYism conflicts with the right to repair or antitrust enforcement, but because the core principle of YIMBYism is that growth — more and better housing — is important, and they see this as antithetical to their views.

This is a tragedy, because antitrust law and competition policy are genuinely important.

It’s a real problem that right-wing politics has become too indulgent of businesspeople’s desire to engage in anticompetitive practices that raise prices and restrain output. We need aggressive enforcement of rules against cartels and anticompetitive mergers and abuse of dominant positions in low-competition markets to secure an advantage in more competitive spaces. This stuff is important precisely because it’s important to economic growth. And the same is true of plenty of other progressive ideas:

• Investment in basic science
• Good schools and good infrastructure
• Internalizing pollution externalities
• Transparent markets and rules against fraud
• Macroeconomic stabilization policy

These things are important for growth and prosperity. There is a warm and cuddly side to progressive economic policy that’s about caring for the vulnerable. But there is also a tough-minded side that’s about true public goods and securing the commons. And what you do not want to do is just be prog-maxing randomly. To say that vigorous antitrust enforcement is important is not to say that maximal levels of antitrust enforcement are optimal. And the same is true of environmental rules and spending on public goods and everything else. There’s a temptation to just throw growth under the bus to avoid making choices or exerting discipline. And there are people who sincerely (and wrongly) believe that growth doesn’t matter and that we can just redistribute our way to heaven.

The need to govern

The Biden Administration was not in the grips of hard anti-growth ideology.

But it has, in important ways, been adrift in the interest group fog since the passage of the American Rescue Plan. People can, and will, forever debate the wisdom of a demand-side stimulus that large. But it happened, and it happened very early in the Biden Administration. And while demand-driven growth is great, once you max out demand, you need to aim for supply-driven growth. And they just didn’t do that. The White House considered coming out for Jones Act repeal, but the president personally didn’t want to do anything that was anti-union. They took a look at the bipartisan permitting reform bill, and they weren’t exactly against it, but they also weren’t exactly for it, because they didn’t want to cross the environmental groups. They came out in favor of YIMBY principles, but they couldn’t come up with very much to do about it, because the federal government doesn’t run zoning.

And even while talking about housing costs, they raised tariffs on imported Canadian lumber. They reinterpreted the Waters of the United States rule in a way that homebuilders say is bad for supply. They put expensive rules in place to accelerate electric car adoption, even while alienating the owner of the world’s most important electric car company to please labor unions, while also alienating blue collar union members over cultural issues.

I remember getting a briefing in advance of the 2024 State of the Union. The administration team was, naturally, touting their various efforts to address struggles with the cost of living, and many of their ideas seemed plausible, but they all struck me as ideas that could have been on a progressive laundry list cooked up in 2017. So I asked what they had that I could say a Democratic administration wouldn’t typically propose, except for their recognition that Americans were struggling with inflation.

They had nothing.

The one that has stuck in my craw for years is student loan cancellation. This policy was explicitly pitched by its architects as an economic stimulus measure.

When Biden first won the election and I thought he’d be struggling to secure adequate stimulus from Congress, I thought this was a good idea, because it could be done without a Senate majority. But then ARP passed — you don’t need stimulus anymore!

I get why the president didn’t want to say, “I promised student debt forgiveness and I understand that people will be angry at me if I break that promise, but the truth is the country is now wrestling with inflation, and I have to do the right thing.” But to pour extra fiscal stimulus on the fire when the country is struggling with inflation, just because you promised to do it back in 2019 when the situation was completely different, is wildly irresponsible. On the regulatory front, as I’ve written before, it’s not just that Biden didn’t want to tackle sacred cows like the Jones Act — he made Jones Act rules stricter. Politicians love to talk up Buy American in speeches, but Biden is a true believer who wrote the strictest-ever rules in subtle legal ways.

I’ve been accused of being a soulless monster who doesn’t believe in anything. But on core economic management, it was the Biden Administration that acted hyper-politically rather than genuinely prioritizing the biggest problem facing the country.

Caring for the needy

Taking this out of election retrospective territory, the other question here is what’s worth the risk. I’ll concede that a fully refundable Child Tax Credit is not great politics. But I do think that, if passed, it would prove quite durable, like the Affordable Care Act. If I were a House member being asked to risk my career over something, then I think a huge and probably durable cut in child poverty would be a reasonable thing to ask me to take a risk for. I’d be proud to stop Medicaid cuts. These are solid progressive issues that make sense as priorities.

But I also think it’s important to get means and ends straight.

I support certain policies that aren’t free market, because they’re necessary to ensure the interests of poor people. But it doesn’t make sense to turn all of these policies into a principled critique of free market economics. A lot of left intellectuals clearly find YIMBYs annoying because the idea of a capitalist solution to a major problem annoys them. But working people don’t need a principled debate about the role of the free market in society, they need higher material living standards. Regulations that limit the supply of health care providers are one way that the wealthy and powerful use their privilege to entrench their interests. The same is true of NIMBY rules. And the dockworkers opposing port automation earn significantly more than the average American. These are all leaky buckets of upward redistribution.

You can’t take the politics out of politics, and we’re never going to have a purely technocratic regime. But if you’re a Democrat and you’re trying to think things through on the merits, “How does this impact poor kids and struggling workers?” is a pretty good lodestar.

I think that leads us to see that the social safety net is incredibly important, but so are other things. Population movements to the red states are telling us something important about the cost of overregulation, especially but not exclusively, in the housing sector. Regulatory protections can be very important, but rigorous cost-benefit analysis is also important. Economic growth and consumer goods matter a lot. Stopping cartels from jacking up prices helps poor kids a lot. Trying to create a comprehensive price control regime so lawyers can get over on businessmen does not. Investing in effective educational institutions is great. Providing open-ended subsidies to college and universities and telling yourself it’s “neoliberalism” to demand any kind of measurable result is not.

And to deliver a common sense agenda of broad economic uplift, you also need to be in touch with common sense moral values. Which we’ll get to as we work our way through the manifesto’s remaining eight points.

Jonathan Smucker urges “Democrats, next time try fighting for the working class: The Democratic Party’s decision to abandon working class voters is bearing the expected disastrous results” at aljazera.com. He begins by quoting his father: “I’m tired of feeling like I’m going to get jumped on for saying something wrong, for using the wrong words,” my dad confided, becoming uncharacteristically emotional. “I don’t want to say things that will offend anyone. I want to be respectful. But I think Trump is reaching a lot of people like me who didn’t learn a special way to talk at college and feel constantly talked down to by people who have.”….At 71 years old, my dad is still working full time, helping to run a delicatessen at a local farmers’ market. He didn’t go to college. Raised Mennonite and socially conservative, he is nonetheless open-minded and curious. When his cousins came out as gay in the 1980s, he accepted them for who they are….My father would never dehumanise and scapegoat transgender people, immigrants, or anyone else, but he understood a key ingredient of Trump’s rhetorical strategy: When Trump punches down at vulnerable groups of people, he presents himself as punching up at condescending cultural elites – the kind of elites strongly associated with the Democratic Party….Like me, my father has now voted against Donald Trump three times in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania. Like me, he was unhappy about all three Democratic nominees he felt obliged to vote for – and deeply disappointed by the party and its leadership….In the summer of 2016, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer smugly claimed that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin….The strategy failed spectacularly in 2016 and again in 2024….Ambiguous anti-elitism – again, focused primarily on cultural elites – is absolutely central to Trump’s narrative strategy. His populism is fake inasmuch as it lets economic power off the hook, “punching up” instead at cultural elite targets, like the news media, academia, Hollywood, and Democratic politicians….It works partly because economic power can feel abstract; people tend to feel resigned to it, like they do to the weather. Social elitism, on the other hand, has a human face and condescension is experienced viscerally.”

“The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters,” Smucker continues, “requires showing that you are in their corner. For people to believe that you are really in their corner, you have to consistently name and pick visible fights with powerful culprits, like Wall Street, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, as well as the politicians in your own party who are in their pocket….Even as Biden broke from the prescriptions of neoliberalism in important ways early in his administration, we still see a lingering hesitancy among top Democrats to call out the culprits who have rigged our economy and political system and left America’s working class in the dust….The reality is that the Biden/Harris administration didn’t deliver nearly enough to help working people, especially to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis. And they didn’t effectively narrate what they did accomplish – and what more they attempted to do – primarily because they prefer not to name or pick open fights with the powerful people who stood in the way….Why are Democrats so resistant to naming powerful culprits and owning a popular economic narrative? The reasons go beyond familiar critiques of “Dems are just bad at messaging.” In short, the neoliberal era did a number on the fighting spirit of the party of the New Deal….Today’s Democratic Party holds mixed and contradictory loyalties, as it hopes to hold onto both the multiracial working class that constitutes its historical base of strength and power, and the donor class that is its current source of funding. In an era of historic inequality, when most Americans believe the system has been rigged by the few against the many, there’s not a message that will inspire the multiracial working class without also turning off at least some of the party’s donor base.”

In “Donald Trump’s Victory and the Politics of Inflation,” John Cassidy writes at The New Yorker: “In March, I was a guest at a dinner discussion organized by a progressive advocacy group in New York. As the talk turned to Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, another attendee brought up the skewed media coverage of the President’s economic record, which seemed to be a source of vexation for nearly everyone around the table. I readily agreed that positive news about jobs, G.D.P., and Biden’s efforts to stimulate manufacturing investment—of which there was plenty—wasn’t receiving as much attention as it deserved, particularly compared with the voluminous coverage of inflation. But I also pointed to governments from across the political spectrum in other countries, such as Britain, Germany, and France, that had experienced big rises in consumer prices. Inflation, it seemed, was poison for all incumbents, regardless of their location or political affiliation….At that juncture, I was still hopeful that, with the U.S. inflation rate falling back toward pre-pandemic levels, there was enough time for public sentiment to shift, and for Biden’s approval ratings to recover. It never happened, of course. According to the network exit poll, conducted by Edison Research, seventy-five per cent of the voters in last week’s election said that inflation had caused them moderate or severe hardship during the past year, and of this group about two-thirds voted for Donald Trump….Kamala Harris and the Democrats joined Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, and a number of other incumbents that have been punished by disaffected voters. According to the Financial Times, “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years.”….To be clear, I’m not arguing that economic factors were solely responsible for the U.S. result. Immigration, the culture war….But anger at high prices clearly played an important role, which raises the question of what, if anything, the Biden Administration could have done to counteract the global anti-incumbency wave….William Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in the Clinton Administration, said last week that Biden should have pivoted much earlier from emphasizing job creation to focussing on the cost of living. “He was trapped in a very traditional ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ mind-set,” Galston said. “It was a fundamental mistake.”….Ultimately, however, none of these things dislodged the public perception that over-all prices were still too high and that Biden and Harris, if not entirely responsible, were convenient vehicles for voters to take out their frustration on….The great irony, of course, is that the candidate who is promising to raise prices further by imposing blanket tariffs on imported goods emerged as last week’s victor.”

NBC News’s Alex Seitz-Wald reports in “After Democrats lost the working class, union leaders say it’s time to ‘reconstruct the Democratic Party” that “Defining the working class is tricky in a postindustrial economy. But whether they are measured by income or educational attainment, President-elect Donald Trump won working-class voters overall while he made strong gains among nonwhite working-class voters like Hispanics and Asian Americans…. As recently as 2012, non-college-educated voters were splitting their votes evenly or even slightly in favor of Democrats. This year, they broke 2-to-1 for Trump over Harris, according to NBC News exit polls. And while former President Barack Obama won 57% of people making $30,000 to $49,999 in 2012, Trump won that income bracket 53%-45% this year….“If you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on NBC News “Meet the Press.”….“The narrative that he was able to craft was almost right out of the labor unions’ playbook in terms of focusing on the economy and jobs, bringing manufacturing jobs back, getting tough on China, making sure that working families can put more money in their pocket,” said Liz Schuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the massive labor federation that includes 60 unions that together represent 12 million people….“If you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on NBC News “Meet the Press.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and John B. Judis, a former editor of The New Republic and author of major works about contemporary politics, is cross-posted from The New York Times.

In his victory speech last week, Donald Trump declared that a “historic realignment” in American politics had occurred. His claim has been echoed by Republican intellectuals. In a podcast the day after, Michael Needham, the chairman of American Compass, said, “We are seeing the realignment come to mind.”

As writers who once made an argument for a potential emerging Democratic majority, we are especially curious when a new one comes up — and because of our own experience, we treat claims by Mr. Trump and others of a durable Republican realignment with some skepticism.

There are two meanings for a realignment claim. The first is that the parties’ coalitions have changed. This is undeniable, but the changes really began during the period from the 1970s through 1994. During that time, portions of the white working class began their journey from the Democratic to the Republican Party. They were originally called Reagan Democrats.

Alternately, many college-educated voters began leaving the G.O.P. for the Democrats. Geographically, the South, once solidly Democratic, came to lean Republican, while Northern states, once dominated by liberal or moderate Republicans, became more Democratic.

It really doesn’t help Democrats recover from the 2024 election defeat to exaggerate its dimensions. So I issued a few cautionary notes at New York.

As is inevitable in any losing presidential effort, a lot of the fingers being pointed at Democratic culprits are aimed at the Harris-Walz campaign, with a big negative assist from the former Biden-Harris campaign that was terminated in July. Some critics think Kamala Harris failed sufficiently to “pivot to the center” when the Trump campaign was pounding her as “radical communist”; others believe she erred by failing to go hard-core lefty populist. Still others seem to be certain she should have junked her billion-dollar ad blitz and instead appeared on a few dozen podcasts.

The reality is that while the Harris-Walz campaign was national in scope, its efforts (as were those of the Trump-Vance campaign) were concentrated to an extraordinary degree on the seven universally recognized battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that decided the election. So if her campaign had any positive net impact, you should be able to see it there. And as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump calculated a couple of days after Trump was declared the winner, you actually can see it if you compare these states to the country as a whole:

“The Post’s model estimates that, when all of the votes are counted, only one state, Colorado, will have seen its vote margin shift to the left. Every other state and D.C. will have shifted to the right.

“The last time an election saw that uniform a shift was in 1992, when all but one state shifted to the left as Bill Clinton was elected president…..

“On average, states are likely to end up having shifted about 4.6 points to the right since 2020….

“[T]he states where the shift toward Trump was the smallest included many of those that were the closest in 2020 — that is, the swing states. States that had a margin of 3 points or less in 2020 moved to the right by 3.4 points on average. States where the margin in 2020 was larger than that moved to the right by an average of 4.8 points.”

There are three significant implications of these patterns. First, the shift to Trump was indeed a national wave, albeit a limited one in most states (big exceptions being Florida, Texas, and New York, where Trump’s gains were supersize); his national popular vote margin has already fallen to 1.9 percent with votes still out. Second, the Harris campaign appears to have mitigated the swing to Trump precisely where it (and she) had the most intense activity. To the extent the campaign mattered, it was a net positive.

The third implication, which is more implicit than explicit in the numbers, is that the Democratic ticket was battling a national political climate that was fundamentally adverse, making the campaign a painful uphill slog that was disguised by slightly askew polling and the famous Harris “vibes.” As Cook Political Report editor-in-chief Amy Walter told my colleague Benjamin Hart in a post-election interview, for all the initial excitement, Harris began her late-starting campaign at a significant disadvantage:

“Fundamentally, it does come back to Biden and the administration. He’s an unpopular president, and an unpopular president doesn’t win reelection. The only thing possibly preventing the unpopular president from losing is that he’s challenged by a more unpopular candidate. Where Trump fits into this is that, yes, he’s still unpopular. But — and we noted this before Biden dropped out and then it started happening again in October — in retrospect, people think of Trump’s presidency more favorably than they did even when he was president. They may have not liked Trump and what he stands for or what he does, but as they put it in context now, thinking, Well, compared to what we have now, was it better or worse? — they say, ‘Well, at least stuff was less expensive.’

“And the only way you counter that is if you have a candidate on the Democratic side who’s not part of the incumbent party.”

Harris worked hard to depict herself as a “change” candidate, but that was always going to be a tough sell. With a little luck, she might have been able to squeak by in the Electoral College (she lost the three “Blue Wall” states by less than 2 percentage points) even while losing the national popular vote, just as Trump did in 2016. But nobody should blame her for failing to overcome the dead weight of an administration too many voters considered a disappointment if not a failure.

A lot of Democratic voters are feeling disappointed and drained with an inevitable sense of futility that accompanies an electoral defeat. Many are wondering if they should even bother with political activism going forward. It can be dispiriting, especially after losing one of the most important presidential elections in American history.

You will probably hear some political activist friends say they are quitting and getting focused on other things. But now is the wrong time for quitting Democratic politics. Now is the time to get involved in building a stronger, well-rooted Democratic Party. Now is time to admit the errors of the past, but not to dwell on them. Now is the time to open up new directions for party-building.

Sick of presidential disappointments? Check out local races. Democrats are still behind in state and local government representation. Let’s get more Democrats elected to our city councils, state legislatures and congressional districts. Let’s elect more Democratic judges and prosecutors. Let’s get involved in local leadership development. Let’s find more young people to run for office. Let’s give more money to beginners in Democratic politics. Let’s sink deeper roots in our communities.

As a red county resident, I’ve noticed that meetings of our local Democratic Party are very short on younger members. I suspect County Democratic parties all across the U.S. would say the same thing. There should be more conscious exploration of ways to attract  young people. Some creative thinking and activism is needed here. Every county and state party should have a hard-working youth recruitment committee.

Another much-neglected area of needed activism is rebuilding the labor movement. It is no accident that Republicans have worked so hard to crush unions. In addition to their wanting to keep wages low, they know that unions provide Democrats with manpower and money. Weakening unions diminishes both.

Every worker should have union representation, and that should be more of a priority for all Democrats. Democrats should educate themselves about the labor movement and its fascinating history, and then resolve to do something this year to promote union membership in his or her profession or former profession.

A third project that merits more Democratic support is fighting voter suppression, particularly in Mississippi and Louisiana. Georgia’s electorate is now about one-third Black, which was instrumental in Democrats winning two U.S. Senate seats –  and majority control of the U.S. Senate – in 2020-21. But Mississippi and Louisiana now both have an even higher percentage of eligible Black voters than Georgia. Rank and file Democrats nationwide, not just leaders, should make financial contributions to Democratic candidates and county and state parties in MS and LA.

These are just three possible new directions for Democratic party-building. There is plenty of room to explore other new paths for building local Democratic groups. Form issue-focused caucuses in local Democratic organizations for environmentalists, health care activists, anti-corruption projects, foreign policy concerns and many others.

Presidential races may be where big media is focused. But it’s not where the seeds of lasting change are sown. Democrats understandably focus much time, money and effort on presidential elections. But that’s not the most effective way to strengthen the party. Tall trees with shallow roots are the most likely to fall.

When I visited an Amish farm many years ago, I remember the tour guide saying that Amish farmers grew more produce per square foot than farmers anywhere else. One of the primary reasons was that they dug a little deeper than other farmers, which gave the roots a head start and more nutrients. The same is likely true for politics.

Lets dig a little deeper as Democrats, so that one day in the not too distant future, we will reap a bountiful harvest with a durable working majority that can move America forward.

Politico is running a round-up, “11 Democratic Thinkers on What the Party Needs Right Now,” which is worth a red. Here is one segment, “Democrats must return to being the party that a majority of voters believes to be saner” by Matt Bennett, co-founder and executive vice president of public affairs at Third Way:

Let’s start with where Democrats should NOT go. We should not blame Vice President Kamala Harris or her campaign. Given the underlying challenges with the Democratic brand, Joe Biden’s unpopularity, the compressed time frame, some hangover from the 2020 primaries, and the need to be the “change” candidate, her task in retrospect looks like it was impossible. Blaming her or her team is wrong and myopic, and it elides the reckoning we must face — Democrats have lost a staggering amount of support across almost every demographic group. We must find a way to turn that around.

To do so, we must make sure our focus is our generational challenge: defeating right-wing populism. A century of global history makes clear that right-wing populists cannot be beaten with left-wing populism. Rather, you take on the right-wing demagogues and authoritarians through the center. That means Democrats must return to being the party that a majority of voters believes to be saner, more reasonable, more patriotic and more in touch with their lives.

Democrats won’t get there without letting go of some stale and spurious conventional wisdom about our politics. Demography is not destiny — no “rising American electorate” of people of color and young voters is coming to save us. Mobilizing low-propensity voters is not a viable campaign plan. You can’t build a winning coalition with college-educated voters alone. And we must avoid what the commentator Ruy Teixeira has dubbed the “Fox News Fallacy”: Issues like immigration and crime can be both inflated by right-wing media and be real and rational concerns for a lot of voters outside the MAGA base. And despite all the cruelty and bigotry of the Trump campaign, we cannot view the whole of Trump’s support solely through the lens of racism, misogyny and ignorance. Voters are telling us something vital about what matters to them: We had better listen carefully.

Read all 11 essays right here.

If you want to know “Why Democratic Turnout Cratered and Why It Won’t Be Easy to Fix“,” check out Andrew Perez’s Rolling Stone article on the topic. As Perez writes, “On Monday, Rolling Stone spoke with Michael Podhorzer, former longtime political director for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, to gain more insight into what went so wrong for Democrats….Podhorzer, who chairs the Analyst Institute and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is an expert in data-driven politics. In a blog post Monday, he writes that the election results were not about Americans embracing Trumpism — but rather a continuation of a trend in U.S. politics: Elections are consistently “change elections,” because “Americans are simply fed up with the system not working for them.” That was the case before the Covid era — and even more so now….Further, he says, the election was no MAGA mandate: “If the exit polls are roughly accurate, about 19 million people who had voted for [Joe] Biden in 2020 just stayed home,” Podhorzer writes. “And, again, if the exits are roughly accurate, nearly all of those who stayed home had said they were voting against Trump when they cast ballots in 2020.”….Podhorzer suggests the 2024 election results were in part about media coverage that didn’t capture Trump’s threat, as well as Americans’ discontent with an economic system and job market that are more precarious than ever — with neither major political party interested in solving those issues….Rather than ask what Democrats can do to win back working-class voters, Podhozer says the better question is: “What do working people have to do to get a Democratic Party?” The other related and necessary collective project, he says, is taking on a Supreme Court that has deemed itself Washington’s only “actual functioning legislative body,” and has fundamentally rewritten the rules of our democracy. ”

In Perez’s interview,  Podhorzer says, “The big difference, what was most alarming this fall, was how much less alarmed everyone was in the media and civil society than they had been four years ago. Four years ago, we had honestly forthright coverage of how bad Trump was, and very much less this time around. And although there were excellent side pieces on that, it was as if the people doing the daily reporting about the election didn’t bother to read it, and just covered it like it was a normal election. People were just not as alarmed….In nine of the last 10 elections, they’ve thrown out either the president or the party controlling the House or the Senate. That never came close to happening with that regularity before. Americans are just fed up with a political system that’s not responsive to their actual needs, or understands the challenges in their lives, or speaks to them, and they’re caught between two bad alternatives, in their minds, and this is the politics we get. All this stuff about, after the fact, doing a head count on this demographic group and that demographic group and all of that is confusing what the effective cause is….A very disproportionate share of those 2020 noncollege Biden voters stayed home. They didn’t move right; they moved away from the political process altogether. The inevitable effect of that is that the noncollege voters in 2024 were more Republican, simply because fewer noncollege Democrats bothered to vote. To be clear — I’m not saying that there were no conversions — there were, but that’s hardly the biggest part of the story. And to be clear this is not meant to suggest that Democrats have nothing to answer for — if anything they have more to answer for, since all they had to do was get them out to vote again.”

Podhorzer observes that “both parties completely ignore the value of job security and the security about the expectations that you need to think about raising a family or having a reasonable, good life. These are all things that the people in the leadership of both parties don’t experience at all. They’re blind to that aspect of what’s going on. And instead, they just look at data like GDP growth or unemployment or all of that, and don’t understand what’s important to them in their own minds — quality of life and relationships, how your kids are doing, their schools — is increasingly cut off for many voters. Instead, it’s then: “Well, why don’t they understand they just got a 10 percent raise after inflation? And they don’t know how good it is.”….in terms of [Supreme Court justices] putting their thumb on the scales, I think that really understates what’s going on. What was going on is that you had a portion of the business community, along with the wealthy, who never wanted to accept the New Deal, and who did not want to accept government intervention in their businesses at all, combined with the Southern, theocratic approach that never accepted the challenges to the social and racial hierarchy. They understood that they were in a position where undoing any of it couldn’t happen through a democratic process. You could not pass a bill in Congress to say, let’s let billionaires spend as much money in the elections as possible, and then when they get favors back from the government, that’s not corruption. You couldn’t get a bill in Congress that says, let everybody have firearms. The Supreme Court has been the actual functioning legislative body in this country for the last 16 years, and it’s because they keep grabbing cases to use as pretexts to legislate, and we’re just sort of standing by and letting it happen….I’ve been asked like 10 billion times how do Democrats win back the working class. Probably until I say it to you, you haven’t even heard someone say: What do working people have to do to get a Democratic Party? The unexamined us and them in that sentence is the problem. [Democrats are] like, “What do we give them off the table?” The answer is a seat at the table….”

Here’s some revealing nuggets by Zachary Bass at Axios: “….Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who campaigned for Vice President Harris, was unsparing in his critique this week of a party that he believes “has abandoned working-class people.”….”While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” Sanders wrote, citing failures to tackle wage inequality and costly health care….

• Some critics say it doesn’t matter what Biden did: The Democratic brand is toxic because it’s associated — fairly or unfairly — with sneering elites and activists whose language alienates working-class Americans.
• “The fundamental mistake people make is condescension. A lot of elected officials get calloused to the ways that they’re disrespecting people,” Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.), who won re-election in a rural Trump district, told the Times.

….Post-election polling by the Democratic strategy group Blueprint found that swing voters’ top reason for not choosing Harris was a belief that she was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”

• Harris and Democrats barely talked about trans issues during the campaign — but Republicans spent nearly $123 million on TV ads referencing trans athletes.
• “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” a narrator declared in what the Trump campaign and Harris allies both found to be one of the most effective ads of the cycle, including with Black and Latino voters.

….Some Democrats say there’s a far simpler explanation for the working-class shift: the ferocious headwinds of inflation, which have fueled incumbent losses around the world since COVID.

• Compounding the pain of high prices was the insistence that the U.S. economy is “the envy of the world” — a claim backed by data, but clearly irrelevant to personal perception.
• “People are putting their groceries on their credit card. No one is listening to anything else you say if you try to talk them out of their lived experiences with data points from some economists,” Gluesenkamp Perez said.”

Some political wisdom shared by Tara Suter in her post, “Ezra Klein says Democrats ‘need to take seriously how much scarcity harms them’” at The Hill:

Ezra Klein, a columnist with The New York Times, said that Democrats “need to take seriously how much scarcity harms them” in a Monday post on the social platform X.

In his post, the left-leaning Klein shared some of his “thoughts from the conversations I’ve been having and hearing over the last week,” including a “hard question” about “how to build a Democratic Party that isn’t always 2 points away from losing to Donald Trump — or worse.”

Klein said in another part of his post-Trump election post that “Democrats need to take seriously how much scarcity harms them.”

“Housing scarcity became a core Trump-Vance argument against immigrants. Too little clean energy becomes the argument for rapidly building out more fossil fuels,” he continued. “A successful liberalism needs to believe in *and deliver* abundance of the things people need most.”

Klein also said, “The Democratic Party is supposed to represent the working class.”

“If it isn’t doing that, it is failing,” he continued.

Klein’s words somewhat mirror those of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who said in a Sunday thread on X that a purer form of “economic populism should be” the American left’s “tentpole,” but also argued that “true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”

Back in February 2024, Klein was an early advocate for President Biden’s exit from the presidential race, saying Democrats “should help him find his way to that, to being the thing he said he would be in 2020, the bridge to the next generation of Democrats.”

“And then I think Democrats should meet in August at the convention to do what political parties have done at conventions so many times before, organize victory,” he said at the time.

Democrats should create a consensus economic reform package that is so good that hefty majorities of voters will support it. Not an easy task, but not as hard as losing another presidential election.

From “Despite presidential headwinds, these Senate Democratic candidates won states Harris lost” by Arit John at CNN Politics: “As of Monday afternoon, Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin – who won the race to replace retiring Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow – had won 24,000 fewer votes than Harris in the state, but her Republican opponent received 123,000 fewer votes than Trump. In Wisconsin, Sen. Tammy Baldwin won roughly 500 more votes than Harris, while Republican Eric Hovde missed out on 57,000 votes Trump received. And in Nevada, Sen. Jacky Rosen trailed Harris by 3,000 votes, while Republican Sam Brown had received 70,000 fewer votes than Trump….In some races, the differences between the Senate candidates’ and Harris’ performances were more pronounced among subsections of the Democratic coalition. In Nevada, Rosen won 50% of the Latino vote, while Brown won 43%, according to exit polls. Latino voters in the state, however, were evenly split between Harris and Trump, with both candidates winning 48%. While Trump won independents by 2 points, Rosen won the group by 6….This year’s most endangered Democratic incumbents – Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio – were seeking reelection in states Trump won in 2020 by 16 and 8 points, respectively. Tester lost his bid for a fourth term to Republican Tim Sheehy, trailing by about 7 points as of Monday afternoon (Harris lost the state by 20 points). Brown, who lost to Republican Bernie Moreno, was trailing by 4 points as of Monday, while Harris trailed Trump by 11 points….“They ran respectable races and damn near pulled it off, but it’s so hard to do, even in a closely run swing state,” said Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank. “Doing it in a red state is now probably impossible.””

“Overall,” John continues, “Democratic Senate candidates received more votes than Harris in about half of this year’s races, including in less competitive states such as Minnesota, Virginia and Missouri. Republican Senate candidates across the country ran behind Trump in about 80% of states. A notable exception was Maryland, where Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan ran nearly 9 points ahead of Trump and received more than 200,000 more votes. (Hogan lostto Democrat Angela Alsobrooks.)….In addition to Tester and Brown, Republicans are also counting Pennsylvania as a flip. CNN has not yet projected a winner in the race, where Democratic Sen. Bob Casey is trailing Republican Dave McCormick by 0.6% with 95% of the vote in….Even before Harris became the Democratic nominee, Senate candidates were running ahead of President Joe Biden. Candidates in battleground states sought to distance themselves from the president while also running on key parts of the Biden-Harris agenda, such as the provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that capped the cost of insulin at $35 for Medicare patients and new projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law….In one ad, Baldwin noted that both Biden and Trump signed bills she introduced to bolster American manufacturing. On costs, candidates from Rosen to Casey vowed to take on “price gouging” from corporations….After the change atop the ticket, Democrats were more willing to campaign with Harris, who energized the party base in the early days of her 107-day campaign. Slotkin, Casey, Baldwin and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego, the Senate nominee in Arizona, all spoke at the August Democratic National Convention. (Tester, Brown and Rosen skipped the convention altogether.)”

Geoffrey Skelley opines on the same topic in “How Democrats won Senate seats in states that Trump carried” at 538:,” and writes, “the 2024 election represents a notable uptick in split-ticket results and downturn in same-party outcomes. Based on the results as they stand right now, different parties won the presidential and Senate contests in 12 percent of the states that had both contests on the ballot, the highest share since 18 percent of 2012’s presidential-Senate races had split-ticket outcomes….Naturally, this has led to easy headlines about split-ticket voting making a comeback. And there’s some truth to that, both in split-ticket outcomes and in relatively larger differences in the vote margins between presidential and Senate races in the same state. If we look at contemporaneous presidential and Senate races in which both a Democrat and Republican were on the ballot (including independent Sens. Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont as Democrats), 2020 saw the narrowest gap in the margin of victory between the two major parties in these types of races since at least 1992 — 2.8 points in margin. Based on the present results, the median gap in 2024 will be higher, around 4 points — though still historically quite low, roughly half the almost 8-point mark in 2016….Yet only one of the four likely split-ticket outcomes appears to have come about because a big percentage of voters cast ballots simultaneously for Trump and the Democratic Senate nominee. In Arizona, which remains unprojected, Gallego has won nearly 6 percent more raw votes than Harris has, while Republican Kari Lake has won almost 10 percent fewer raw votes than Trump — a signal that a not-insignificant group of Trump voters backed Gallego….Now, a few other states did see sizable amounts of split-ticket voting between the presidential and Senate races that, potentially, stood to affect control of the Senate. In Montana, Democratic Sen. Jon Tester significantly outperformed Harris, winning 19 percent more raw votes than she did, while in Ohio, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown won about 5 percent more. In Maryland, former Gov. Larry Hogan gave Republicans an unusually strong candidate in a blue state, and he won a whopping 24 percent more raw votes than Trump did.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

The Republican Party, according to Democrats, has given rein to some of the darker impulses in the national psyche, has shown flagrant disregard for democratic norms and offers little to the American people in terms of effective policy. There is considerable truth to this indictment and Democrats have not been shy about making their case in uninhibited language, including the obligatory comparison of their opponents to “fascists” and “Nazis.”

Yet Democrats cannot decisively beat their opponents as this election has shown once again. The party is uncompetitive among white working-class voters and among voters in exurban, small town, and rural America. This puts them at a massive structural disadvantage given an American electoral system that gives disproportionate weight to these voters, especially in Senate and presidential elections. To add to the problem, Democrats are now hemorrhaging nonwhite working-class voters across the country.

The facts must be faced. The Democratic coalition today is not fit for purpose. It cannot beat Republicans consistently in enough areas of the country to achieve dominance and implement its agenda at scale. The Democratic Party may be the party of blue America, especially deep blue metro America, but its bid to be the party of the ordinary American, the common man and woman, is falling short.

There is a simple—and painful—reason for this. The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman. The priorities and values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated, liberal America which only partially overlap—and sometimes not at all—with those of ordinary Americans.

This election has made this problem manifest in the starkest possible terms, as the Democratic coalition shattered into pieces. Trump not only won, he won fairly easily, carrying all seven swing states and, much to Democrats’ shock, the national popular vote. Below I review the demographic trends driving this shattering.

Recall that before the election, there was much debate, bordering on denialism, about whether and to what extent demographic trends revealed by most polling data would actually undercut the Democratic coalition in the election. Now we have results and it is clear those trends were real and that they did massively weaken the Democratic coalition.

Here are some demographic comparisons using the AP VoteCast data—which I consider to be far superior to the exits. These are national comparisons using 2024 and 2020 VoteCast data. Comparisons of state level demographic patterns between the two elections generally follow the national pattern.

The gender gap: Contrary to much pre-election discussion, Harris’s margin among women was actually less than Biden’s in 2020, 7 points for Harris vs. 12 points for Biden. And the Trump margin was better among men, 10 points vs. 5 points in 2020. The overall gender gap went from 17 points in 2020 to….17 points in 2024. How about that. The Democrats invested so much hope in the women’s vote, especially the idea that the abortion issue would spike their margin among women, and it just did not pan out.

Even more startling, Democrats believed with an almost religious fervor that young women would move sharply in their direction given liberal trends among this demographic and, again, the salience of the abortion issue. And, again, it did not happen. Women under 30 supported Biden by 32 points in 2020 but supported Harris by just 18 points in this election, a 14-point shift toward Trump. Among young men, the swing was even harder: these voters supported Biden by 15 points in 2020 but supported Trump by 14 points in 2024. That’s a 29-point pro-Republican swing. As a result, the gender gap did widen among young voters, but it was because young men moved more sharply toward Trump than young women did. That’s not exactly what Democrats had in mind.

The working-class (non-college) vote: Among all working-class voters, Trump dramatically widened his advantage, tripling his margin from 4 points in 2020 to 12 points in this election. That included moving from 25 to 29 points among white working-class voters and radically compressing his deficit among nonwhite working-class voters from 48 points in 2020 to 33 points this election. Compare that margin to what Obama had in 2012: according to Catalist, he carried the nonwhite working class by 67 points in that election. That indicates that Democrats have had their margin among this core constituency more than cut in half over the last 12 years. Ouch. So much for the “rising American electorate.”

And it’s time to face the fact that the GOP has become the party of America’s working class. Democrats hate to admit that and mutter that they represent the “interests” of the working class. But the numerical pattern is now too powerful to be denied. Instead of denying the obvious—or, worse, blaming the dumb workers for not knowing their own interests—Democrats would be well-advised to accept this new reality and seek to change it.

Unless they’re content to be primarily the party of America’s well-off. Harris lost voters under $50,000 in household income as well as voters from $50,000 to $100,000 in income. But she did carry voters with over $100,000 in household by 8 points, one place where Harris did improve over Biden in 2020. This is not, as they say, your father’s Democratic Party. Not even close.

The youth vote: The idea that the youth vote might bail out on the Democrats this election was strenuously resisted in Democratic-friendly quarters but happen it did. Democrat support among voters under 30 collapsed from a 25-point advantage in 2020 to a mere 6 points in this election.

This should be especially disturbing for Democrats since this is the first presidential election where this age group is overwhelmingly composed on Gen Z voters. This does not augur well for the future. Nor does their performance among voters 30-44, now dominated by the Millennials, where Harris’s advantage over Trump was only 4 points. The great generational replacement theory of future Democratic dominance is another theory Democrats would be well-advised to discard.

There is much more to be said about shifting voting patterns in this election (and it will be said!) But for now, these data do indicate that a lot of the trends the polls were picking up on the compression of Democratic margins among key groups was real. And that should be food for thought for Democrats as they sift through the wreckage of their shattered coalition.

As they do so, here’s an idea to start with: have every Democrat ostentatiously say they subscribe to the following principles. These principles would signal to normie voters, particularly working-class voters of all races, that Democrats’ values and priorities are not so different from theirs. That’s a prerequisite for getting these voters to listen to Democrats’ pitch and take it seriously.

• Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.
• America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country.
• Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society.
• Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.
• No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair.
• America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is hugely important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country.
• Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. However, more and better policing is needed to get criminals off the streets and secure public safety. That cannot be provided by “defunding the police”.
• There are underlying differences between men and women that should not all be attributed to sexism. However, discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong and should always be opposed.
• People who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right. However, biological sex is real and spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved. Medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available on demand, especially for children.
• Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Free speech is a fundamental American value that should be safeguarded everywhere.
• Climate change is a serious problem but it won’t be solved overnight. As we move toward a clean energy economy with an “all of the above” strategy, energy must continue to be cheap, reliable and abundant. That means fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will continue to be an important part of the mix.
• We must make America more equal, but we also must make it richer. There is no contradiction between the two. A richer country will make it easier to promote equality.
• Degrowth is the worst idea on the left since Communism. Ordinary voters want abundance: more stuff, more opportunity, cheaper prices, nicer, more comfortable lives. The only way to provide this is with more growth, not less.
• We need to make it much easier to build things, from housing to transmission lines to nuclear reactors. That cannot happen without serious regulatory and permitting reform.
• America needs a robust industrial policy that goes far beyond climate policy. We are in direct competition with nations like China, a competition we cannot win without building on cutting edge scientific research in all fields.
• National economic development should prioritize the “left-behind” areas of the country. The New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt did this and we can do it today. “Trickle-down” economics from rich metropolitan areas is not working.

A Democratic Party united around these principles would be a far more appealing party to those millions of voters who are leaving the Democratic Party behind. It’s time to start calling them back.