washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

There is a sector of working class voters who can be persuaded to vote for Democrats in 2024 – but only if candidates understand how to win their support.

Read the memo.

Saying that Dems need to “show up” in solidly GOP districts is a slogan, not a strategy. What Dems actually need to do is seriously evaluate their main strategic alternatives.

Read the memo.

Democratic Political Strategy is Developed by College Educated Political Analysts Sitting in Front of Computers on College Campuses or Think Tank Offices. That’s Why the Strategies Don’t Work.

Read the full memo. — Read the condensed version.

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy

The American Establishment’s Betrayal of Democracy The Fundamental but Generally Unacknowledged Cause of the Current Threat to America’s Democratic Institutions.

Read the Memo.

Democrats ignore the central fact about modern immigration – and it’s led them to political disaster.

Democrats ignore the central fact about modern immigration – and it’s led them to political disaster.

Read the memo.

 

The Daily Strategist

May 14, 2025

Judis: The Persistence of Lesser-Evil Politics

The following article stub, from “The Persistence of Lesser-Evil Politics” by John B. Judis, author of numerous works of political analysis, is cross-posted from Compact:

There have been five comprehensive surveys of public opinion in the last two weeks that attempt to assess President Donald Trump’s standing with the public at the end of his first hundred days. The polls are by The New York Times/SienaThe Washington Post/IpsosCBS News/YouGov, NPR/Marist, and The Economist/YouGov. Some of the results are unsurprising: Trump is in trouble with the public, but so are the Democrats. But nestled in the crosstabs are a few more noteworthy findings: Trump is losing ground among groups that have been faithfully Republican, but the Democrats continue to lose ground among groups they had relied on.

Based on the 60 questions asked by The Washington Post among ten different demographic and ideological categories, Trump’s greatest strength is among the overlapping categories of conservatives and white evangelical Protestants. A majority of these two groups (and no others) thought Trump’s economic plans would “put the United States on a stronger foundation for the long term.” They alone favored shutting down the Department of Education. Fifty-eight percent of conservatives and half of white evangelicals back ending birthright citizenship, while 49 percent of conservatives and 45 percent of white Protestant evangelicals think Trump’s tariffs will have a “positive” effect on inflation.

There were two other groups from which Trump has customarily received enthusiastic support that still appear to be on board. A majority of men without college degrees and rural voters were the only other groups that thought “Trump is in touch with most of the people in the United States.” But they weren’t willing to buy everything the president was selling. By 60 to 38 percent, white men without college degrees thought Trump’s tariff strategy would boost rather than stem inflation. Only pluralities of rural residents and men without college degrees thought that Trump’s plans would “put the United States on a stronger foundation for the long term.”

The best way to pick out Trump’s biggest detractors is to find out who opposes even White House policies that are generally popular. The New York Times survey found that 52 percent of voters back Trump deporting illegal immigrants, but in the Washington Post poll, 60 percent or more of liberals, the young, blacks, Hispanics, people with post-graduate degrees and city dwellers disapprove of Trump’s immigration policies. The same groups also disapprove by 60 percent or more of Trump’s overall performance and his closing down of federal agencies, and reject the idea that he is looking out for the interests of “average Americans.” These results are consistent with the other polls with two qualifications. Hispanics and the young are not quite at 60 percent disapproval of Trump’s policies in several of the polls, but within a few percentage points.

In the 2024 election, Trump gained support among the young, but that support seems to have dissipated. Of all the age groups, the young (18-29) are the most disapproving and by wide majorities of Trump’s handling of the presidency; according to the New York Times poll, they have the least favorable view of him, they think he has gone “too far” in making changes to the country’s political and economic system, and they think these changes are “bad for the country.”

Of white voters, disaggregated by sex and education, the most opposed to Trump are college-educated women. Since 1988, a majority of college-educated women have backed the Democratic presidential nominee, but the recent surveys suggest they are reaching new heights in their hostility toward a Republican president. Among whites, they are the only group to disapprove of Trump’s policies on curbing illegal immigration and to say that Trump’s attempt to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs has gone “too far.” In the NPR poll, 65 percent give Trump an “F” on handling the economy. (By contrast, 51 percent of college-educated men and 30 percent of men without degrees give Trump an “F.”) Sixty-nine percent of white college-educated women disapprove of his handling of foreign policy.

There are two groups that have backed Trump in the past that appear to have become critical of his second administration. A majority of seniors (aged 65 and over) backed Democratic presidential candidates in 1992, 1996 and 2000, but after that election, seniors have backed the Republican candidate every four years. In the last election, Trump edged Kamala Harris among this demographic, by 51 to 47 percent.

In the recent surveys, only the young exceeded seniors in their dislike of Trump. Seniors “strongly disapprove” of the way Trump “is handling his job as president” (Economist); they believe Trump “is tearing down the system completely” (New York Times); they “dislike” Trump  “a lot” (Economist); they are “very concerned” that Trump is reducing the size and role of government in US society (Washington Post); they believe Trump is making “major changes to how the US government works” and that these changes are “for the worse” (CBS). They like his policies on immigration, but not on the economy or on foreign policy.

The other group that may be turning on Trump is white women without college degrees.  In the 2024, Trump won these voters by a resounding 62 to 37 percent, but unlike their male counterparts, they do not appear to be in step with his administration. A majority are concerned that Trump is doing “too much” to reduce the size and role of the federal government. A plurality says that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs “help level the playing field for people who have been denied equal opportunity” (Washington Post). They are divided 47 to 47 on approval of his administration, with 41 percent “strongly” disapproving. And they disapprove of his handling of the economy, tariffs, and foreign policy (NPR).

These polls suggest that Trump’s electoral majority may be evaporating. He couldn’t have won in 2024 if he had to rely primarily on white evangelicals, self-identified conservatives, and working-class white men. His only policies that generally meet voters’ approval are his attempts to discourage illegal immigration. Some, like the reduction in funding for medical research, are opposed by all the different voting groups, including self-identified Republicans and conservatives.

Read more here.


Political Strategy Notes

“The Center for Labor and a Just Economy, in collaboration with the Columbia Labor Lab, commissioned a survey with over 1600 respondents that delved into the nature of union members’ relationship with the Democratic Party,” Sharon Block writes in “The Future of Labor and the Democratic Party” at Onlabor. “Our results found that unionized workers were significantly more likely to vote for Kamala Harris than their non-union counterparts. Analyses of the election results indicated that Democrats lost ground amongst some of their traditional support groups, in particular working-class Black and Latino communities. In our survey we found that more than 68% of Black union members reported voting for Harris, while 57% of Black non-union workers voted for the Vice President. Interestingly, roughly the same proportion — 24% — of Black union and non-union workers voted for Trump. The major difference was in turnout, with 7% of Black union members saying that they did not vote, compared to nearly      18% of Black non-union workers. Latino voters had a similar trend, as Harris’ support was higher amongst union members than non-union workers, but the major difference was in turnout…union members’ views on who to blame for inflation resonated much more closely with the Harris campaign’s position than the views of other workers.”

“Whether a worker was unionized,” Block continues, “did not impact how they experienced inflation, as 85% of respondents reported experiencing higher grocery prices and over 65% experienced higher gas prices. But unionized workers diverged in the way that they attributed blame for inflation: more than 48% of unionized respondents identified corporate greed as the main driver of inflation, compared to 40.5% of non-union workers…The only unions whose membership were more likely to blame the government, rather than corporate greed, for inflation were the Teamsters and members of the United Food and Commercial Workers, and interestingly these were the only unions whose membership were more likely to support Trump than Harris…Harris’ refusal to go on podcasts like Joe Rogan has been criticized as a strategic blunder and has led to calls for Democratic candidates to spend more time in more diverse media venues. But we found that younger union members were far more likely to rely on a variety of news sources than members aged 45 or older who were far more likely to rely on traditional news sources…Our research on the results of the 2024 election suggests that Democrats have much to gain from a stronger commitment to championing labor law reform to make it easier for workers to turn their desire for union representation into a reality.”

Some comments from Joan C. Williams, founding director at the Center for WorkLife Law, UC San Francisco, during her interview by Meagan Day at Jacobin:  “Democrats should be featuring people who waited six hours at Social Security offices. They should be highlighting what the Trump administration is doing to veterans — a cross-class ideal of people who exhibited toughness, self-discipline, and manliness. It’s important to get the messaging right. With regard to Medicaid cuts, the Democrats’ impulse is to say, “Look what’s happening to poor people.” That’s true, but it’s not the best way to reach the target audience. Say instead, “Medicaid cuts mean closing more rural hospitals.”…If we want to really help poor people, we need to break the elite feeling rules that mandate empathy for certain groups and scorn for others — empathy for poor people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, but scorn for people who go to church, respect the military, and embody the basic culture of middle-status America. That’s a losing strategy that ironically puts a target on the backs of the aforementioned marginalized communities, as we are seeing…We need to stop asking “what’s the matter with Kansas?” and focus more on “what’s the matter with Cambridge?”…But we need to understand the people we’re trying to persuade: middle-status people who value traditional institutions and obsess over economic stability. Unless we rebuild relationships with them, our progressive values won’t materialize.”

In “‘Tis a Fine Old Conflict:  The Class Struggle Inside the Democratic Party, Stewart Lawrence writes at Counterpunch that Sen. Bernie “Sanders has been especially vocal in pointing out that the party’s strategy – despite its anti-Big Capital rhetoric – does not explicitly favor working class voters on such issues as expanding healthcare coverage through a “public option” or bolstering union organizing rights. And even where it does – for example – by calling for a “wealth tax” in addition to a more progressive income and higher corporate tax rate – the party, he argues, refuses to lead on these issues, hoping against hope that its public neutering of an openly working class agenda might appease moderates and swing voters, many of them Republican, who are genuinely alarmed at Trump’s excesses…Harris, despite much early fanfare, failed in the end to mobilize record numbers of Democratic base voters – but she managed to capture just 50% of wavering independents. For the Sanders/AOC faction of the party, this is strong evidence that Democrats should stop talking out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to class politics. Rally the country with a steadfast populism rooted in the unmet economic needs of the vast majority of working class and lower middle class Americans – while pointing the finger at the “billionaire class” that dominates the GOP and that continues to skew tax and regulatory policies in their favor –  and Democrats can win the White House again, their argument goes.”


Teixeira: The Dems’ Fork in the Road – Party of Restoration or Party of Change?

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Trump’s first hundred days are over. There is a blizzard of polling data indicating that American voters are not happy so far with their second ride on the Trump train. On RCP, Trump’s average net approval ratings (approval minus disapproval) are -6 overall, -13 on the economy, and -21 on inflation. Sad!

Any given poll these days is full of bad political news for the Trump administration. Take the latest CBS News poll, where Trump’s approval (45 percent) is right at the RCP running average. In the poll, most think the condition of the national economy is fairly or very bad and by almost 2:1 think that the economy is getting worse rather than better. They overwhelmingly believe the Trump administration is not doing enough on “lowering the prices of goods and services” but believe the administration is doing too much on “putting tariffs on goods from other countries.” On a personal level, respondents are far more likely to think Trump’s policies are making them financially worse off rather than better off and to believe his policies are making the prices they pay for food and groceries go up rather than down. Finally, most believe Trump’s policies are working against the interests of middle-class and working-class people while working for the interests of wealthy people.

Other polls are quite consistent with these data. This presents Democrats with an obvious opportunity to make up the ground they lost in the last election and perhaps shift the political terrain decisively in their favor. But will they—can they—do this? That is possible but hardly certain or even probable. In my view, Democrats currently are at a fork in the road to their political future and how that future turns out depends on which path they choose. Down one path lies the party of restoration; down the other lies the party of change. Let me explain.

Start with the party of restoration. Democrats’ first instinct in opposing Trump administration actions has been to denounce these actions in the most flamboyant terms possible. That’s understandable; many of Trump’s action have been very unpopular, from DOGE excesses to the chaotic tariff regime, and they are the opposition party. Fair enough.

But they’re also the party that comprehensively lost the last election and has been bleeding working-class voters for years. If the solution offered to the depredations of Trump is simply to restore the Democrats to power, that is unresponsive to the messages voters have been sending. Voters didn’t and don’t like the Democrats either; they don’t trust them to govern or manage the economy well and fear the party is obsessed with issues voters either don’t care about or actively oppose. They will not forget what they didn’t like about the Biden administration and the last 10 years of the Democratic Party so easily.

Yet Democrats are acting like this isn’t a problem. They seem to believe if they just turn up the volume high enough on how terrible Trump is, all will be forgiven and voters will re-embrace the Democrats. All voters really want, they assure themselves, is a Democratic Party that will fight hard enough against Trump and his evil minions and restore the good guys to power.

This may suffice to clear the low bar of taking back the House in 2026 but it is not remotely plausible as a longer term strategy to win back working-class voters and vanquish right populism. These voters do not want to see the status quo anterestored; they hated it! But what other than restoration are Democrats really offering at this point? Not much; it’s all fight, fight, fight with the implication that putting Democrats back in power will make everything dandy.

Indeed, the hottest political competition within the Democratic Party is who can call for fighting Trump and MAGA in the most exciting way. Bernie Sanders and AOC have cornered the market on the “fighting the oligarchy” approach. More recently, JB Pritzker, the Democrats’ designated “good” billionaire, has upped the ante on the anti-fascist approach in a New Hampshire speech to enthusiastic partisans:

It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once…Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box and then punish them at the ballot box…

Fellow Democrats, for far too long we’ve been guilty of listening to a bunch of do-nothing political types who would tell us that America’s house is not on fire, even as the flames are licking their faces. Today, as the blaze reaches the rafters, the pundits and politicians—whose simpering timidity served as kindle for the arsonists—urge us now not to reach for a hose.

Thank you Winston, I mean JB. Yes, you will fight them on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields, and in the streets, etc. The thought of the portly JB Pritzker leading the heroic anti-fascist fighters into the streets is nothing if not hilarious. But many Democrats treat this nonsense with the utmost seriousness. Up and down the party, calls to “Fight!” differ more in degree than kind from Pritzker’s performative rhetoric.

What all this conveniently forgets is that voters may be upset with many of the Trump administration’s bone-headed moves but they don’t like the Democrats either. Not at all. Indeed, despite all that has taken place since Trump took office, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating is still far below the Republican Party’s. And in a recent NBC poll, positive views of the Democrats hit a rock-bottom 27 percent, the lowest in the poll going back to 1990.



A recent Washington Post poll found that 70 percent of voters think the Democratic Party is out of touch with the concerns of most people in the country today. In a poll of swing Congressional districts by the pro-Democratic Navigator group, voters felt Democrats were “more focused on helping other people than people like me”. Most voters also felt Democrats don’t respect work, don’t share their values, don’t look out for working people, don’t care about people like them, and don’t have the right priorities. Polling for the new Democratic-oriented “Working Class Project” found working-class voters preferred Republicans to Democrats on representing their values, focusing on the issues they care about, valuing hard work and being patriotic. And so it goes.

What part of “voters just aren’t that into you” don’t Democrats understand? Voters want change. Big change. No amount of fulminating about Donald Trump is going to change that. Consider these data.

In the AP/VoteCast survey of 2024 voters, 83 percent said they wanted either substantial change or a complete and total upheaval in how the country is run. In Blue Rose research from the 2024 cycle, they found that just 18 percent of voters thought preserving America’s institutions was more important than delivering change and that more voters preferred “a major change and a shock to the system from whoever becomes President” to stabilizing the system. In recent Navigator group polling, 74 percent said the country’s political and economic system needs either major change or to be torn down completely.

In this situation, you don’t want to be the party of restoration. As Navigator’s chief pollster Ian Smith put it:

Most people don’t just want a system update. If you offer them a version 1.2 of America, they won’t see a difference in their day to day life. They’d rather see and feel change.

In other words, you want to be the party of change, not the party of restoration. Can the Democrats do it? I’ve got my doubts.

To be the party of change in our current populist era, when the party’s brand is in wretched shape and views of Democratic governance are so negative, you have to actually change the party. That’s not easy. Most partisan Democrats would be perfectly happy to just restore the previous regime and forget the Trump nightmare ever happened. As far as they’re concerned, things were pretty great when they were in charge! We really haven’t moved much beyond the infamous yard sign from the 2024 campaign, “Harris Walz Obviously,” except now it’s, “The Democrats Obviously.”

It wasn’t so obvious to voters in 2024 and it’s not so obvious to voters now. The truth is that Democrats will have to work really hard to convince voters, especially working-class voters, that they embody change, not the Establishment, and are worthy of an enthusiastic vote. The last Democrat to successfully do this was Barack Obama; that was a while ago and the party is more in need of reinvention than ever.

Yet the sense of urgency in Democratic ranks is lacking. They don’t realize that they are at a fork in the road. They’re content to hoist the anti-Trump flag high and hope for the best. Continuing down that road will make them the party of restoration in a change era—and ensure that the political breakthrough they are seeking will continue to elude them.


Top Priority for Dems: Winning Over Rural America

The following article, “Rural Trump Voters Won’t Regret Their Vote Until Democrats Fight for Them” by Anthony Flaccavento and Erica Etelson, is cross-posted from The Nation:

The damage done just in the Trump administration’s first three months could fill the National Archives—assuming that department still exists. Many of those moves, including the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran gulag, have been cruel and utterly unjust. Yet public support for Trump, though declining, remains stubbornly high among rural and working-class people. Some part of that support comes from his ability to couch everything he does as retaliation against liberal elites and a blow against the “rigged system” those elites helped create—a system that has undermined the values and livelihoods of ordinary working people.

What will it take to stop Trump? It’s hard to predict how many of the people who supported Trump will turn against him because of the deportation of Garcia, student activists, and others. Those fights absolutely must continue and, we hope, will awaken more and more Americans to the dismantling of democracy. But there will always be those who are moved more by negative impacts to their daily lives. Job loss, hospital and school closures, a huge spike in the cost of essential goods—these are perennial deal-breakers that outlive the daily news cycle.

As we suggested in our February column, reacting negatively to every radical idea Trump tosses out only solidifies the left’s position as defenders of the establishment—the very system tens of millions of Americans blame for their woes. We also believe that protesting the bad stuff only gets us so far, and that a positive vision for bettering the lives of rural and working people must be front and center.

That said, when it does come to complaining loudly about the impact of Trump’s chaotic nihilism, we should focus on actions that have hurt large numbers of people, many of whom voted for Trump. We need to empathize with and acknowledge their struggles and help channel it into buyers’ remorse: “Trump has betrayed us” gets to the heart of the matter, whereas “Hands off!” smacks of a desire to restore the status quo.

To stop Trump and reverse the assault on our economy and democracy, we need to redeploy some of our outrage to highlight how Trump’s actions are actually making the rigged system worse for the folks who put him in office: farmers, small businesses, coal miners, factory and blue-collar workers, consumers struggling with high prices and debt. Until our protest routinely includes the betrayal of folks like these, we have almost no chance of building the broad resistance coalition needed to reverse the disastrous course we’re on.

With that in mind, we offer a few examples of Trump’s betrayals of rural and working-class people that we urge the left to prioritize, while also highlighting policies that will reverse those betrayals.

Farmers, a core constituency for Trump, have been among the worst hit by his actions since taking office. For midsize and larger farmers, tariffs have prompted widespread anxiety that they are being squeezed from both ends: They’re facing higher costs on inputs like Canadian potash and steel for agricultural equipment, combined with a potentially dramatic loss of markets for soybeans, pork, and other commodities.

On top of that, the dismantling of USAID amounts to nearly $2 billion in lost sales for US farmers. For smaller farmers, the termination of the Farm to School program and the Local Food Purchase Program for food banks have eliminated more than $1 billion in markets for fresh produce, while undermining the effort to provide healthy food to kids and people in need.

And for farmers of all sizes, the suspension of contractual payments to farmers who’ve undertaken conservation, soil building, renewable energy, and other improvements to their farms is devastating. At least 30,000 of these farmers, who each expended tens of thousands of dollars based on USDA commitments, now find themselves in debt, unclear whether the promised reimbursements will ever materialize.

But farmers aren’t the only rural folks getting screwed.

Workers and small-business owners are increasingly worried about their livelihoods. Even before the latest round of tariffs, small-business confidence had declined for all three months of Trump’s presidency, with just one in five small business owners saying they expect sales and business conditions to improve in the near future. That uncertainty translates to less investment and hiring on the part of existing small businesses, and fewer new business start-ups.

For workers in bigger companies, the surge in union organizing seen under the Biden administration is running into a wall of anti-worker actions from Trump. These include the firing of pro-worker members of the NLRB such as Jennifer Abruzzo, replaced by Crystal Carey, a lawyer whose firm represents notoriously anti-union Tesla and Amazon. Trump has also eliminated the $17 hourly minimum-wage requirement for federal contractors while working to completely dismantle unions representing federal workers.

Veterans, who are more likely to live in rural areas, will be hurt especially hard by the double kneecapping of Medicaid and Veterans Affairs (VA). The New York Times reports that, in addition to layoffs, the VA has been rocked by DOGE’s abrupt return-to-work policy. VA psychiatrists who have, for decades, counseled veterans remotely, now suddenly have to conduct their sessions in open cubicles that lack privacy. Many of them are quitting in protest.

Fourteen million (nearly one in five) rural adults rely on Medicaid, a program Republicans aim to cut by $880 billion(roughly 20 percent of the program) over the next decade. Already struggling rural hospitals and clinics rely on Medicaid funds to stay afloat. Over the past 10 years, nearly 200 rural hospitals have closed, leaving their patients stranded a hundred or more miles from the nearest emergency room. Most of the rural hospitals that do remain open have eliminated their maternity wards. Slashing Medicaid spending will trigger further hospital closures and strain already paltry substance abuse, mental health, and Indian health services.

And then there are the millions of consumers just struggling to make ends meet. They’ve been hit not only by continued rising prices—the inflation rate has been between 2.4 and 3 percent since Trump took office—but by the elimination of protections from junk fees from banks and credit card companies. Joined by the Republican-controlled Senate, the Trump administration is eliminating the $8 late-fee cap instituted toward the end of Biden’s term, allowing companies to once again charge exorbitant fees to people who don’t pay on time. The lower average incomes of rural and working-class people make high prices and junk banking fees all the more difficult to manage.

Donald Trump carried rural America by a 40-point margin. He promised forgotten Americans he would unrig the system, address the opioid epidemic, and restore small towns to health and prosperity. Even more than most of his predecessors, Trump has betrayed those who placed their trust in him. Reversing the tidal wave of destruction he has unleashed requires that we on the left do something we should have done a long time ago: open our doors wide to the farmers, miners, truckers, house cleaners, automakers, and working folks—white, brown, and Black—who picked him over us. We don’t just need them to regain Congress in 2026. We need them to save our country.


How Obamacare Undermined Republican Appetite for Medicaid Cuts

There’s a new and important problem facing Republicans as they seek to hammer Medicaid yet again, as I explained at New York:

In the long Paul Ryan era of Republican budget-cutting efforts (when Ryan was House Budget Committee chairman and then House Speaker), Medicaid was always on the chopping block. And when the program became a key element of Democratic efforts to expand health-care coverage in the Affordable Care Act sponsored by Republicans’ top enemy, Barack Obama, Medicaid’s status as the program tea-party Republicans wanted to kill most rose into the stratosphere. No wonder that the last time the GOP had a governing trifecta, in 2017, there was no single “big beautiful bill” to implement Trump’s entire agenda, but instead an initial drive to “repeal and replace Obamacare” along with measures to deeply and permanently cut Medicaid. Rolling back health coverage for those people was Job One.

So now that Trump has returned to office with another trifecta in Congress, an alleged mandate, and a big head of steam that has overcome every inhibition based on politics, the law, or the Constitution, you’d figure that among the massive federal cuts being pursued through every avenue imaginable, deep Medicaid cuts would be the ultimate no-brainer for Republicans. Indeed, the budgetary arithmetic of Trump’s agenda all but demands big Medicaid “savings,” which is why the House budget resolution being implemented right now calls for cuts in the neighborhood of $600–$800 billion. And it’s clear that the very powerful House Freedom Caucus, thought to be especially near and dear to the president’s heart, is rabid for big Medicaid cuts.

To be sure, the extremely narrow GOP margin in the House means that so-called “moderate” Republicans (really just Republicans in marginal districts) who are chary of big Medicaid cuts are one source of intraparty pushback on this subject. But the shocking and arguably more important dynamic is that some of Trump’s most intense MAGA backers are pushing back too. OG Trump adviser Stephen Bannon issued a warning in February, as The New Republic’s Edith Olmsted reported:

“Steve Bannon, former architect of the MAGA movement turned podcaster, warned that Republicans making cuts to Medicaid would affect members of Donald Trump’s fan club.

“On the Thursday episode of War Room, while gushing over massive government spending cuts, Bannon warned that cutting Medicaid specifically would prove unpopular among the working-class members of Trump’s base, who make up some of the 80 million people who get their health care through that program.

“’Medicaid, you got to be careful, because a lot of MAGA’s on Medicaid. I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are deeeeeead wrong,’ Bannon said. ‘Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.’”

Bannon didn’t comment on the irony that it was the hated Obamacare that extended Medicaid eligibility deep into the MAGA ranks (with voters in deep-red Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Utah insisting on taking advantage of it), making it a dangerous target for GOP cuts. But in any event, particularly given Trump’s occasional promises that he’d leave Medicaid alone (which didn’t keep him from supporting the deep 2017 cuts), there existed some MAGA sentiment for finding “savings” elsewhere.

The volume of this sentiment went up sharply when one of the flavor-of-the-year right-wing “influencers,” Trump buddy Laura Loomer (reportedly fresh from laying waste to the National Security Council staff) went after a conservative think-tanker who was advising HFC types on how to savage Medicaid, per Politico:

“In a social media post Monday, Loomer called Brian Blase, the president of Paragon Health Institute, a ‘RINO Saboteur’ for helping draft a letter circulated by 20 House conservatives that advocated for deep cuts to Medicaid in the GOP’s domestic policy megabill.

“’In a shocking betrayal of President Donald Trump’s unwavering commitment to America’s working-class families, and his promise to protect Medicaid, [Brian Blase] … is spearheading a dangerous campaign to undermine the Republican Party’s midterm prospects,’ Loomer said on X.”

Loomer’s blast at Blase was clearly a shot across the bow of the House Freedom Caucus and other Republicans who are lusting for Medicaid cuts and/or are focused on deficit reduction as a major goal. She called Medicaid “a program critical to the heartland voters who propelled Donald Trump to his election victories” and warned that Medicaid cuts could badly damage Republicans in the 2026 midterms.

The perpetually shrewd health-care analyst Jonathan Cohn thinks MAGA ambivalence about Medicaid cuts could be a game-changer. After citing data from Trump’s own pollster showing support for Medicaid among Trump supporters, Cohn noted this could have an impact in Congress:

“Trump himself has said he is going to protect Medicaid — although, as is always the case, it’s hard to know exactly what he means, how seriously he means it, or how much thought he has even given to the matter.

“But Trump’s own uncertainty here is telling, just like the pushback to Medicaid cuts from the likes of Loomer. Together they are a sign of just how much the politics around government health care programs has changed in the last few years — and why this piece of Trump’s big, beautiful bill is proving so tough to pass.”

It wouldn’t be that surprising if there’s a thunderbolt from the White House on this subject before the House budget reconciliation bill is finalized. If there isn’t, nervous House Republicans may be forced to read his ever-changing mind.

 


Political Strategy Notes

At Semafor, David Weigel addresses the question, “Trump’s falling in polls. Why aren’t Democrats benefiting?,” and answers: “Democratic leaders love talking about the president’s flagging poll numbers. Their own numbers, not so much…When House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries got asked recently to react to a colleague who worried that the party was too focused on El Salvador, he pivoted: “Our reaction is that Donald Trump has the lowest public approval rating of any president in modern American history.”…One day later, after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer boasted that “Trump has the lowest 100-day approval rating since they started polling 80 years ago,” CNN’s Manu Raju turned the question back on him. Schumer’s own approval rating was 17% in CNN’s poll, much lower than Trump’s…“Polls come and go,” said Schumer. “Our party is united.”…Polls nonetheless put Democrats in a notably weak position for a party aiming to win back Congress next year. In special elections held since Trump took office, Democrats have usually beat expectations, holding their Wisconsin Supreme Court majority and winning a slew of down-ballot races. But the party’s image has not recovered from 2024, and its marks in the spring of 2017 were higher than today.”

From the conclusion of “Who’s the Greatest Grifter of Them All?” by opinion essayist Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times: “For Trump, a critical determinant of his ability to continue to profit from cryptocurrency will be the outcome of the 2026 election…If, as appears possible if not probable, Democrats retake the House next year, the likelihood is that Trump might well be impeached for a third time, and crypto would almost certainly be a centerpiece of that proceeding…The prospects that two-thirds of the Senate would vote to convict Trump of any impeachment charges about crypto — or anything else — are, however, slim to none, even if Democrats surprise everyone and retake the upper chamber…So what Trump can look forward to is holding office through to Jan. 20, 2029, while he and his business partners continue to come up with new digital currencies and new marketing techniques to raise their potential profits…At that point, with Trump no longer in office, the Supreme Court will once again be able to rule that any pending complaints involving foreign or domestic emoluments are moot…In other words, Trump is well on his way to becoming the greatest grifter of all time.”

Some notes and a map from Kyle Kondik’s “Notes on the State of the Senate: The Post-Kemp Battlefield” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Republicans missed out on a top recruiting target earlier this week, as Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) decided not to challenge Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA)…Georgia remains a Toss-up in our ratings even as Ossoff’s reelection path got clearer… Another place where Democrats are playing defense, Michigan, remains a Toss-up, while a couple of other open Democratic seats in Democratic-leaning states, Minnesota and New Hampshire, are developing better for Democrats than Republicans…While there have already been many key developments in the race for the Senate in 2026, history shows that key candidate decisions may still be months away in some places…Republicans remain favored to retain control of the Senate in 2026, and we are not changing any ratings in this update.” Here’s the map:

WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. probes the reasons why “Trump boomerang sinks Australia’s right wing,” and writes that “voters Down Under offered a potent lesson about the boomerang effect to Donald Trump and his MAGA faithful. The president hoped his dominance of the world stage would inspire an international swing toward the nationalist far right. Instead, Australians — angry and mystified by Trump’s tariffs — gifted their center-left prime minister, Anthony Albanese, whose Labor Party trailed in the polls only a few months ago, a landslide victory few predicted…Labor’s triumph came less than a week after Canada’s voters, in an election even more clearly defined by Trump, rescued the center-left Liberal Party from the polling wilderness and ratified Mark Carney as their prime minister…Wayne Swan, president of the Labor Party and former deputy prime minister, told me that Albanese won because “the economic imperative overrode the cultural imperative.”…Yet on Thursday, another center-left leader, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, suffered a real electoral setback at the hands of the far-right Reform UK party, which took a parliamentary seat from Labor on a huge swing in a special election. Reform UK also marched across Britain in local elections that dealt serious defeats to Labor and, even more dramatically, to the traditionally center-right Conservative Party. You can bet that Trump will try to ignore the triumphs of Albanese and Carney and instead talk up Nigel Farage, Reform UK’s leader and a Trump ally.” In Australia, “A signal moment came when Dutton, during a debate, accused Albanese of being “weak.” Albanese shot back: “Kindness isn’t weakness.” Dionne concludes, “Trump’s tariffs can’t stop good questions from crossing borders or oceans. Importing that one would not affect our balance of payments, but it could alter the balance of decency in our politics. Voters in Australia and Canada would like us to think about it.”


Trump’s Marginal Voters Souring On Him

It’s well-known that Donald Trump did really well in 2024 among low-information voters. As I discussed at New York, they’ve turned against him just as they turned against Joe Biden:

One of the more fascinating political trends of 2024 was the inversion of an ancient truism. In the old days, “marginal voters” — the typically younger, poorer people who are disengaged from political news and disinclined to vote without direct encouragement — leaned left. This made voter mobilization a greater priority for Democrats than for Republicans, whose older, higher-income, and better-educated supporters were more likely to vote. But that all flipped last year. Donald Trump held far greater appeal to non-college-educated voters, and to those who didn’t access or didn’t trust mainstream media information, than his Republican predecessors ever did. Thus he was able to outperform expectations in the high-turnout environment of an intensely competitive presidential election.

Democrats can console themselves that their new status as the party of high-information voters could help them in the lower-turnout environment of non-presidential elections — special and off-year elections in 2025 and the 2026 midterms, when marginal voters will be tuned out to an unusual degree. But according to public-opinion analyst G. Elliot Morris, something else is going on right now: Trump’s popularity among marginal voters is dropping like a rock:

“New polling shows that the very voters who powered Trump’s return to office are now abandoning him. And if that trend holds, it could upend assumptions about how much campaign messaging and elite discourse really matter. Because it turns out the people who don’t read the Times, don’t watch the Sunday shows, and don’t care about the policy details… still care when the economy sours and their lives get harder.”

Using data from YouGov surveys, Morris finds a “massive 33 percentage point decline in Trump’s net approval rating over the last 3 months with people who consume the least news.” That dwarfs a “14-point drop in Trump approval, from +3 to -11, among people who say they pay attention to the news ‘most of the time.’”

It stands to reason that people who haven’t been paying much attention to the media-borne clamor over Trump’s first 100 days in office — much as they didn’t pay attention to media-borne messaging during the 2024 presidential campaign — are forming their political attitudes from their own real-life experiences of the direction of the country, particularly in terms of the economic factors affecting them most immediately. That made them hostile to incumbent policymakers in 2024 and again in 2025, Morris suggests:

“These voters reacted to inflation in 2022-2023, were primed to vote for Trump because of the good economy in 2018-2019, and for the most part the little information that reached them during the 2024 campaign did little to persuade them. Ideology drove their vote less than in 2020.

“Now, with 401ks sinking, goods getting more expensive, shelves emptying, and the president saying kids should have just three dolls instead of 30, they have moved against the president again.”

Because they are largely immune from the partisan “messaging” conveyed through media outlets and are not really attached to either party, marginal voters may be more rational than their media-savvy counterparts, at least in terms of their own perceived interests. And if nothing else, their changing allegiances may be a better barometer of political trends to come. Morris goes a step further by arguing that since objective conditions are undermining approval of Trump’s stewardship of the economy, Democratic messaging can profitably focus on noneconomic issues where persuasion is more of a factor.

While the turn of marginal voters against Trump could be very bad news for Republican prospects in 2028 — assuming the economic Golden Age they keep trumpeting fails to appear – the impact between now and then is more debatable. Falling Trump approval ratings among the people least likely to show up for non-presidential elections may be the proverbial tree falling in the forest that no one hears. It will be interesting to see if the Republican Party chooses to leave them in unmobilized peace going forward or tries to get them back to the polls, even if they’ve soured on Donald Trump.

 


Yglesias: Business Leaders Need More Spine Vs. Trump

The following article, “The most disturbing aspect of Trump’s first 100 days: Too many American businesses are acting like he’s already a dictator” by Matthew Yglesias, is cross-posted from slowboring.com:

But precisely for that reason, it’s important to remember that “normal” aspects of politics continue to be incredibly relevant to understanding Trump-era politics.

Barack Obama’s single most effective line of attack on Mitt Romney focused on Republican plans to privatize Medicare, and the boring fact that Trump backed away from the GOP’s least-popular idea was an important factor in his rise to power. Similarly, the 2022 midterms were heavily influenced by public backlash to abortion bans, and a crucial strand of the 2024 campaign was Trump backing away from GOP policy commitments in this regard.

Like most newly elected presidents, Trump enjoyed a honeymoon of positive approval ratings after he won the election.

He also had strong political winds at his back. The inflation of 2022-2023 had broken the public’s faith in the Democratic Party’s economic stewardship. A lot of people were upset about the volume of immigrants who’d arrived through irregular channels and exploited loopholes in the asylum system. Trump had largely restored the Republican Party’s traditional status as the preferred political ally of big business. Even though the sharp rise in shootings and murders of 2020-2021 had already faded, crime — a perennially good issue for Republicans — had become salient as a topic of public debate. As I wrote last November in “How Donald Trump Could Succeed,”there was a clear path for him to become a popular and successful president. And as I wrote on Inauguration Day in “Nobody Knows What Trump is Going to Do,” there was an extraordinary lack of clarity regarding the policy agenda he would actually pursue, because he was constantly contradicting himself.

What Trump ultimately decided to do is what most contemporary presidents have done: He’s interpreted a backlash against the other party’s most strident policy activists as an endorsement of his side’s most strident activists.

The response has been predictable, with thermostatic backlash on the issues and plummeting approval ratings for Trump.

This does not, on its own, solve all of the Democrats’ political problems, especially in the Senate, but those problems too are a pretty normal part of politics. Having lost the prior election, Democrats seem leaderless because they literally are leaderless. Being in the minority in Congress leaves you whining on the sidelines, which looks weak and ineffectual because, again, it literally is weak and ineffectual. Democrats now need to do the basic blocking and tackling work of recruiting midterm candidates, writing a policy agenda, and holding a presidential primary, all of which will play out in time. There’s no guarantee that any of this will turn out well, but there are also plenty of obvious opportunities for it to do so.

But despite much of this having broadly normal contours, I think there’s one under discussed way in which it has been not normal.

Trump is making economic policy decisions that have not only engendered backlash from the mass public, they’ve been bad in specific ways for business. There’s obviously nothing inherently wrong with a politician making a call that’s bad for a particular company or industry. But normally when that happens, the leaders of the companies that are harmed complain vociferously and try to mobilize political support for their own interests. Under Trump, though, corporate America is acting like they absolutely agree with all the darkest warnings about democracy being on the ballot in 2024. They seem to have decided that America is now a dictatorship, where if you publicly complain about Trump you’ll be sent to the gulag.

I don’t want to defend Trump on this score, because he really is a madman who enjoys abusing power. But this is still the United States of America, and the appropriate response to his actions is for business leaders to act normally, which in this case would mean standing firm in defense of their own interests rather than bandwagoning with a leader who is erratic, impulsive, and deeply unpopular.

The mystery of Amazon’s tariff surcharge

Amazon recently considered attaching a visible “tariff surcharge” to goods when their prices rise as Trump’s trade policies go into effect. The administration got mad about this, yelled at them, and Amazon immediately backed down.

I could take or leave the tariff surcharge as a gambit.

But the tariffs are obviously bad for Amazon’s business. Not only is the increase in the cost structure for goods they sell as a retailer bad for them, but the larger concepts underpinning Trump’s trade ideas are bad for Amazon. Amazon Web Services is a major exporter of services globally, for example, and part of Trump’s fuzzy thinking about trade deficits is a belief that services exports don’t count. Amazon also employs a large blue collar workforce in its warehouses and other facilities, and one of the premises of MAGA economics is that for some reason, these jobs (like construction jobs) don’t count and the only acceptable path forward is for blue collar workers to work specifically in factories.

You would expect a company to speak up about something like this.

That doesn’t mean Andy Jassy or Jeff Bezos needs to start talking like a highly partisan Democrat. These are rich businessmen, and if they want to shower praise on Trump for trying to cut their taxes or for appointing business-friendly regulators to various posts, then by all means do it. But Trump is simultaneously hurting their company in tangible ways, while also deriding its contributions to the American economy. That’s the kind of thing people normally complain about.

Similarly, the entire pharmaceutical industry made the bizarre decision not to oppose RFK Jr.’s nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services, even though RFK himself quite openly says that he hates this industry and wants to injure their interests.

Whatever calculus went into that immediately failed to pay off, as Trump inaugurated a broad attack on medical research. Some of this seems to be about Kennedy’s bizarre views on health, and some of it is about DOGE’s eccentric ideas about government spending. But a lot of it is using medical research grants as a weapon to pursue unrelated culture war grievances. Politicians are allowed to decide what fights to pick, but normally, if you were to make a business segment collateral damage in an unrelated political dispute, the leaders of those businesses would complain about it. What I’ve heard instead from medical researchers is that pharma executives are “afraid” to get on Trump’s bad side.

And we’re seeing this across the board. Homebuilders, like all industry segments, are inclined to praise some of the Trump administration’s policies. But the combination of tariffs and higher budget deficits, plus an immigration crackdown, is straightforwardly bad for the industry in ways that are also straightforwardly bad for the country.

Why don’t these guys speak up for themselves?

Why is it left to Slow Boring to point out that there are win-win ways to create high-wage blue collar jobs in the construction sector rather than wrecking the global economy to try to turn carpenters into garment manufacturers? Part of the normal give and take of a democratic society is that if you try to screw people over, they complain vocally, and then the public might hear certain criticisms that don’t come from partisan Democrats or even people who are anti-Trump.

Worse than silence

Of course, the business leaders who remain silent are not the worst of the lot.

Even as Jeff Bezos says he wants the Washington Post to mount an intellectual defense of personal liberty and free markets, Amazon has paid tens of millions of dollars to Melania Trump for a vanity documentary. ABC paid $15 million to Trump to settle a bogus defamation lawsuit rather than fighting in court, and Paramount has compromised the integrity of 60 Minutes and is now prepared to fork over its own giant settlement fee in a case most people think that they could win in court.

Companies’ concerns about Trump are not totally misguided.

During his first term, Trump tried to yank a defense contract that Amazon had won in order to punish the Washington Post for its reporting. He had the Justice Department try to block AT&T’s merger with Warner Bros in order to punish CNN for its reporting. Donald Trump is genuinely a bad person who tries to use the powers of his office in inappropriate ways. But it’s worth remembering that the Trump administration lost in court on both counts. There is a cost to litigating, but the way to address it is to fight and win and then complain to the public and to your fellow rich businessmen and make sure the politicians who are messing with you pay a political price.

The United States has existed as a democratic republic for over 200 years now, and this is not really a new scenario or a new playbook.

The most shameful actors of all have, strikingly, been several major law firms, which decided to reach preposterous settlements with Trump in response to extortion rather than putting their faith in the rule of law and their ability to litigate. The law firms that are fighting Trump in court seem to be winning, and Microsoft recently gave one of them a vote of confidence.

Again, to be clear, I am not insisting that every sane person needs to believe that every single thing Trump says and does is wrong. As I’ve written before, Harvard is right to fight Trump’s coercion, but rather than cave with an ignominious settlement, they should fight him with the one hand while acknowledging the legitimacy of some conservative critiques with the other. The Princeton faculty just took a vote to bar the idea of issuing campus-wide statements on political issues, saying they should limit themselves to commenting on university administration. That’s a smart idea and an example of institutions trying to show that they are responsive to trends in society. But there is no basis for this belief that every company and business lobby in the country needs to be cowering in terror of Trump.

A noteworthy counterexample is the behavior of certain genuinely Trump-friendly institutions, like the Wall Street Journal editorial page and The Free Press.

These are right-of-center outlets, but they’re also run by human beings who have eyes and ears and the capacity for independent judgment, so they occasionally run blistering articles taking issue with Trump over some particular policy or action. Because that’s how politics works! Throughout my career, I have written articles criticizing administrations I voted for and defending administrations I voted against.

To an extent, I think a strength of Rupert Murdoch’s stewardship of the Wall Street Journal is precisely that he is committed to the view that Democrats’ dark warnings about Trump as a dictator are wrong. If you think he’s not a dictator and you think he’s worth supporting because he’s right on the majority of issues, then you act like a normal person living in a democracy and criticize him when you think he’s wrong.

The only way for Trump to actually become a dictator is for everyone to stop the normal political process of speaking up when they disagree with him and ensuring that his overreach generates backlash.

Obviously, when liberals complain about Trump as an authoritarian menace to the rule of law, their intention is not for business leaders to respond this way! What they want to do is recruit people into the resistance. Which would be great. But we do also seem to be giving people, especially business leaders, either a reason or an excuse to cave to illegitimate demands or downplay normal criticisms of Trump’s actions. And I think that’s the single most disturbing thing that I’ve seen over the course of the first 100 days.

Of course, Trump has done plenty that is directly horrifying and harmful in a first-order way. At the same time, “he’s going to do terrible things that harm people” was baked into the cake the moment he won the election. He’s done terrible things, Democrats have criticized the terrible things, he’s become unpopular, and now Democrats mostly need to focus on self-help and improving their public image.

But what ought to be happening is that as his approval rating sinks, frontline Republicans start distancing themselves from him.

That’s what would actually check his power and run the risk of him facing real legislative defeats. And yet despite the big shift in public opinion, I still don’t see stakeholders in the health care industry complaining vocally about the harms of Medicaid cuts. This is putting a bit of a floor under Trump and also ensuring that he’s not being treated like a toxically unpopular president by Congress.

I don’t really know what’s going on here. But Ryan Petersen of the shipping company Flexport has been quite publicly outspoken about tariffs and recently came to DC to lobby. And I think he smartly wrapped that up with a patriotic post celebrating the First Amendment.

There is obviously something a bit odd about someone feeling like he has to note that he didn’t fear being locked up for criticizing the president’s policies. But he is correct on the merits, and I also think that encouraging people to lean in to the first amendment and the proud American tradition of free speech is tactically shrewd here. This is America, and it’s pathetic for powerful business leaders to be whining about how they’re afraid to anger the president.


Political Strategy Notes

From “Good Jobs, Strong Families In Working-Class America” by Grant Martsolf at ifstudies.org: “The last 50 years have been difficult for many working-class Americans. Beginning in the late 1970s, the U.S. economy entered a period of rapid deindustrialization, leading to a significant decline in manufacturing jobs—jobs that had long provided reliable, well-paying employment for Americans without a college degree (a common definition of the “working class”), especially men. Economic prospects for this group have suffered considerably. Between 1979 and 2019, real wages for workers without a college degree declined by 11%, while wages for the median college graduate increased by 15 percent…The challenges facing working-class Americans extend beyond economics. They have also seen a broad erosion of key social institutions traditionally associated with a flourishing life. One institution arguably hit hardest is the family…In a new IFS/PRRUCS report, Brad Wilcox and I show that, in 1980, working-class men ages 25–54 were actually four percentage points more likely than college-educated men to be married with children at home. However, that changed rapidly over the following decades. While all men experienced significant declines in marriage and family formation, working-class men were hit especially hard. By 2021, only 34% of working-class men were married with children at home, compared to 44% of college-educated men…There are certainly many factors driving these trends, but the worsening economic prospects of working-class men are clearly among the most important. We know that marriage and work are closely linked. For example, women are more likely to be attracted to potential partners that can reasonably provide for a family—men with well-paying, stable jobs that offer benefits. Likewise, men with families are more likely to work and to pursue stable, higher-quality employment.” Read more here.

For a peek at what political leaders can do at the state level to help working-class families and gain support from them, check out “New Blue Collar Caucus Aims to Support Connecticut’s Working Class” by Karla Ciaglo at ctnewsjunkie.com. An excerpt: “HARTFORD, CT — A new coalition of legislators made its debut earlier this week as the 30-member Blue Collar Caucus held its first press conference to lay out an agenda…State representatives Kara Rochelle, D-Ansonia, and Rebecca Martinez, D-Plainville, the caucus co-chairs, outlined the group’s priorities: expanding job training, enforcing wage laws, ensuring access to affordable healthcare, protecting labor rights, advancing tax policies that prioritize the middle class, and taking legislative action to confront corporate greed…Martinez pointed to the economic hardship in her own district, where nearly one-third of households fall below the ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) threshold…“No one should have to choose between rent, medicine, safety, and survival,” Martinez said. “I am committed to affordability, education, collective bargaining, and senior dignity. It’s time we put our working families first.”…The representatives, joined by labor leaders and community advocates, spotlighted a slate of bills backed by the caucus, including measures to provide healthcare support for paraeducators, combat wage theft, protect residents in manufactured homes and bills expanding child tax benefits…A key focus was Senate Bill 8, An Act Concerning Protections For Workers and Enhancements to Workers’ Rights. That bill would provide unemployment insurance benefits to striking workers…State Rep. Kate Farrar, D-West Hartford, celebrated the inclusion of a new child tax credit in the state’s revenue package — $150 per child, up to three children, with income-based phaseouts — and said she’s optimistic about the caucus’s impact moving forward…“We know that meaningful tax relief isn’t just common sense,” Farrar said. “It also addresses our broken tax code, which for too long has favored the wealthy. This puts dollars in the hands of families who need them most.”

Jake Johnson rolls it out in his Common Dreams article, “A Disgrace’: Trump Budget Gives $1 Trillion to Military While Slashing Programs for Working Class,” and writes: “The budget blueprint that U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled Friday would give a record $1.01 trillion to the American military for the coming fiscal year while imposing $163 billion in total cuts to housing, education, healthcare, climate, and labor programs…The proposal, released by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought, was viewed by Democratic lawmakers and other critics as a clear statement of the White House’s intent to gut programs that working class Americans rely on while pursuing another round of tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and bolstering the Pentagon, a morass of waste and abuse…”President Trump has made his priorities clear as day,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “He wants to outright defund programs that help working Americans while he shovels massive tax breaks at billionaires like himself and raises taxes on middle-class Americans with his reckless tariffs…This president believes we should shred at least $163 billion in investments here at home that make all the difference for families and have been essential to America’s success—but that we should hand billionaires and the biggest corporations trillions in new tax breaks,” Murray added. “That is outrageous—and it should offend every hardworking American who wants their tax dollars to help them live a good life, not pad the pockets of billionaires.”

Gabriel Thompson says it well in “Trump Promised to Fight for Workers — Instead, He’s Undermined Them: 100 days in, the self-styled champion of the working class has delivered layoffs, trade wars and an erosion of worker protections” at Capital and Main. As Thompson explains, “Trump campaigned on fighting for the working class, and exit polls found that he won 56% of the blue-collar vote, defined as voters without a college degree, while making gains among working-class Black and Latino voters. Shortly after the election, Trump nominated Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a pro-union Republican, for labor secretary. On Inauguration Day, Trump promised his administration would “protect American workers.”…The administration has fired tens of thousands of federal workers, stripped a million more of collective bargaining rights, axed higher minimum wage requirements and gutted programs and agencies that enforce labor and safety standards and protect workers’ rights to organize…“This regime of billionaires has launched an all-out assault on working people,” said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which has joined the American Federation of Government Employees in lawsuits to block a number of Trump’s executive orders. “They’ve brought to a halt the very agencies that help workers negotiate strong contracts, investigate unfair labor practices and hold employers accountable.”…Trump has also hollowed out agencies and programs that protect workers from physical harm, harassment and discrimination. In April, cuts to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, which researches workplace hazards, led to a workforce reduction of more than 90%…In early April, J.P. Morgan raised the likelihood of a recession to 60% and has maintained that forecast, even after Trump suspended some tariffs.”


Teixeira: Your 2028 Democratic Presidential Contenders! I am underwhelmed.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Judging from the early days of the Trump administration there should be no dearth of contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. It definitely looks like a prize worth having. Trump’s approval ratings have dropped rapidly, including on the all-important area of the economy, formerly his greatest strength. Public support for his trade war is weak and the outcome potentially dire. While there’s a long way to go it does look like the GOP and whoever their nominee is in 2028 will be eminently beatable, even if the administration moderates from its current “shock and awe” approach.

Beatable, but hardly a sure thing. Democrats are quickly forgetting that we still live in a populist age and that there is a working-class sized hole in their coalition. It’s much more fun and emotionally satisfying to think and talk about how much you hate Donald Trump and everything he stands for. There’s certainly a lot to be upset about but that does not help you win elections—not just the presidency but all those Senate races in red-leaning working-class states where Democrats have been getting walloped and where, if they don’t improve, they will be a Senate minority indefinitely.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at possible Democratic presidential contenders for 2028 and how they are approaching this challenge. I’ll sort them into five general categories; I hesitate to call them “lanes” at this early date when differentiation is still so fuzzy.

Let’s do it all over again! The most prominent politician in this category is of course Kamala Harris. As the most recent Democratic presidential candidate, Harris has 100 percent name recognition among potential Democratic primary voters and residual good will among some of these voters for taking on Trump. Her average support in polling on the 2028 Democratic nomination is far ahead of any other potential candidate: 27 percent say they’d prefer her compared to 16 percent for Pete Buttigieg, 13 percent for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (AOC), 9 percent for Cory Booker, 7 percent for Gavin Newsom, and 5 percent for Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, and Tim Walz.

Harris also has a significant fan base in the party that could be activated on her behalf if she decided to enter the race. They and she would argue that she was a great candidate who was dragged down by Joe Biden and handicapped by her late entry into the 2024 presidential race. And wasn’t everything she said about Trump, the fascist, true? Give her the chance to have a proper campaign, they’ll maintain, and she’ll have the GOP on the run. Plus, did we mention that she’s a black woman?

Despite all this, Harris’s road to getting the nomination, much less winning the 2028 general election, would be quite difficult. A lot of her current advantage is just name recognition. And Democrats have not historically nominated losers to run again for president. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis…the list goes on. The last loser who got run to again was Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and he lost.

If the historical record for election losers is not encouraging neither is the likelihood that Democrats will be absolutely desperate to defeat the Trumpian GOP in 2028 and turn the page from a generally losing era. That will predispose Democratic primary voters to look for a fresh face to finally vanquish their foe. Kamala will not qualify.

Others in this category: Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz. Buttigieg has daringly suggested that perhaps diversity trainings have gone too far to the point where they are sometimes “like something out of Portlandia.” This seems unlikely to be enough to dissociate him from the Biden-Harris administration and its cultural and economic record. As for Walz, he recently averred in a town hall in Texas with repeat loser Beto O’Rourke:

We’ve been talking about this for years as a country of immigrants, and we let them define the issue on immigration. We let them define the issue on DEI, and we let them define what woke is….We got ourselves in this mess because we weren’t bold enough to stand up and say “you damn right we’re proud of these policies. We’re going to put them in, and we’re going to execute them”.

‘Nuff said.

All resistance, all the time. This will be a big category. Indeed, it will likely be the “Great Attractor” for the 2028 Democratic field. The level of animus toward the Trump administration is off the charts among college-educated Democratic partisans, exactly the voters most likely to show up in Democratic primaries. For many candidates, the temptation will be irresistible to cash in on these feelings by offering the most flamboyant possible denunciations of Trump and the GOP and downplaying more nuanced approaches.

A leading “resister” is California governor Gavin Newsom. After Trump was elected, he immediately declared a special session of the California legislature. His office said:

The special session responds to the public statements and proposals put forward by President-elect Trump and his advisors, and actions taken during his first term in office—an agenda that could erode essential freedoms and individual rights, including women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights…A special session allows for expedited action that will best protect California and its values from attacks.

A steady stream of denunciations of Trump administration actions from Newsom and the governor’s office has followed. Intriguingly, Newsom has tried to titrate his resistance persona will a little bit of outreach to the other side. He started a podcast, This is Gavin Newsom, where his guests have include conservative activist Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA, and Steve Bannon. Famously, in his podcast with Kirk he agreed that trans-identified biological boys in girls’ sports seemed “unfair” to him. But under intense blowback he has since walked back any implication that he would back a policy to change that situation in California or any other place.

That dynamic will likely affect any other resisters who attempt to nuance their approaches. The intense push among fervent partisans to give no ground on any issue, not to mention being attacked by competitor candidates eager to position themselves as the “real” resistance, will herd these candidates toward all resistance all the time and nothing else.

Others in this category: JB Pritzker, Chris Murphy, Cory Booker. These candidates stand ready to push Newsom and anyone else who strays from strict resistance orthodoxy out of the way and take their place. They will not complicate their profiles even as much as Newsom has done. And, as noted, militant resistance is sure to suck more candidates in as time goes on because of the large potential payoff among likely primary voters.

There’s no such thing as being too progressive. There is a considerable part of the Democratic Party that does not believe Democrats moved too far left in any way. The problem instead was not being sufficiently progressive, especially about economics. Currently, Bernie Sanders and his heir-apparent, AOC, are out on their nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour and drawing large crowds to their rallies. There’s clearly an appetite for unapologetic populist economics that sees the Democrats’ problem as not hitting the “billionaire class” hard enough.

Since Sanders is too old to run, the leading potential candidate in this category is of course AOC. She has a built-in national profile and legions of potential supporters ready to be activated should she declare. While her uncompromising progressive history on, well, everything would make her a fatally easy target for Republican attack ads in a general election, it’s much less of a liability for her in Democratic primaries where ultra-progressivism and blaming the rich sells a lot better than admitting progressive mistakes.

Others in this category: Ro Khanna. Khanna, a fellow member with AOC of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also believes that the Democrats have not been progressive enough on economics and has a fairly substantive set of populist economic ideas to reach the left-behind working class that he retails as the “new economic patriotism.” He has also shown some interest in moderating his standard-issue progressive profile on cultural issues but has yet to venture a clear break with orthodoxy on these issues. If an appetite develops for more substance and less flash in this category he’d be well-positioned. But the intra-party dynamic shall we say is unlikely to trend in this direction.

Moderation is a beautiful thing. If there is to be a strong competitor to all resistance all the time, it would be a pragmatic strain that recognizes resistance is not enough. Voters want politicians that can govern well and, in a primary context, may especially value candidates who can win. This is an assignment that politicians with a moderate profile generally fit better than those who are all-in on resistance. It worked for Biden in 2020 and perhaps it can work for some other candidate in 2028.

Josh Shapiro is a good example of a candidate who fits this category. The popular governor of Pennsylvania, his tenure in that office has been marked by a well-publicized commitment to getting stuff done and fast. Shortly after taking office, he presided over the repair of a collapsed section of the vital I-95 highway artery in just 12 days. Other bread and butter governance tasks have received similar treatment. And he took aggressive action to eliminate college education requirements for many state government jobs.

Shapiro has also shown a willingness to bend pragmatically on some issues that the progressive wing of his party feels strongly about. In deference to Pennsylvania voters, he has been generally pro-police and tough on public safety, as well as unapologetic in his support of the fracking industry and opposition to the bans pushed by progressives. However, like other moderates, he has been very careful not to stray much from party orthodoxy on cultural issues that hurt Democrats among swing voters but are dear to the hearts of party progressives. Whether he can continue this dance all the way through the Democratic primary process is an open question. He’s a skillful politician but there are limits.

Others in this category: Gretchen Whitmer, Andy Beshear. Whitmer in particular has a similar profile to Shapiro in terms of pragmatic governance. But if anything she is probably even more reluctant than Shapiro to test the limits of Democratic orthodoxy. And as with Shapiro the danger is real that she will be herded toward the all resistance all the time camp by the exigencies of intra-party competition. The flack she recently took for temporizing about tariffs rather than just denouncing what Trump has done illustrates this dynamic.

Let’s try something different. This is an under-populated category for the simple reason that the Democrats most likely to participate in the primary process are those least likely to want to do anything really different. So there is not much demand there for Democratic politicians to respond to.

One politician who could fit into this category is Ruben Gallego. His support in the 2024 Arizona Senatorial election far outran Harris’s performance in that swing state, both overall and among key problem demographics for the Democrats. Gallego has been outspoken in his opposition to ridiculous locutions like “Latinx” and has clearly separated himself from the party mainstream on immigration where he criticized the Biden administration for lax border enforcement and immigration advocacy groups for convincing Democrats that Latinos supported illegal immigration when they did not. One Latino analyst went so far as to describe this as Gallego’s “Sister Souljah moment.”

Gallego is also unafraid to highlight the non-woke priorities of Latino working-class men who all want, as he put it, a “big-ass truck”. It remains to be seen if his apostasy on the priorities of the Latino working class could extend to questioning the Democratic approach writ large to the working class.

Others in this category: Rahm Emmanuel, Jared Polis. Emmanuel has been particularly vociferous in denouncing the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics and tolerance of social disorder to the point where they have become the “party of permissiveness.” His sojourn in Japan during the Biden-Harris administration gives him some distance from the foibles of that administration which otherwise might undermine the credibility of his critique.

It is possible others like Buttigieg, Shapiro—even the consummate opportunist Newsom—will start leaning toward this category if the political payoff appears higher than it is now. But the “Great Attractor” of all resistance all the time seems likely to be more powerful than any demand for a different kind of Democrat. That will tend to make all candidates in all categories resemble each other over time, rather than stand out.

That may not matter in the end if the Trump administration becomes unpopular enough. Any Democrat, even AOC, might be able to beat the Republican nominee in such as situation. But the Democrats should be looking for a candidate who could maximize their chances of victory in any situation and rehabilitate their image among working-class voters and in vast areas of the country where their brand is currently toxic. I am not optimistic that is happening or is likely to happen.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is a contributing writer.