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.

The recently published book, Rust Belt Union Blues, by Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol represents a profoundly important contribution to the debate over Democratic strategy.

Read the Memo.

The Rural Voter

The new book White Rural Rage employs a deeply misleading sensationalism to gain media attention. You should read The Rural Voter by Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea instead.

Read the memo.

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

December 9, 2024

Political Strategy Notes

“The hoary phrase “loyal opposition” still means something, and that loyalty is to the country and its Constitution, not to one person,’ E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his column at The Washington Post. “This is where thinking about how to contain Trump should start. Resisting his most egregious policies will remain appropriate, but defending, rebuilding and renewing should be the keynotes this time….The first priority must be to minimize damage to the nation, protect constitutional rights whenever they’re threatened and safeguard the institutions of democratic government. Next, his administration should be exposed whenever it uses lovely words such as “reform” and “efficiency” to disguise the wholesale dismantling of popular and necessary programs. And Trump must be held accountable to the working-class voters who helped him win….But his choices for so many key jobs already signal that Trump 2.0 is on track to be far more extreme than the original. That should call forth more activism, not less….The national Democratic Party should play its part by backing the state parties already doing effective organizing down to the precinct level — the Wisconsin and North Carolina parties are among the standouts — and embedding such efforts elsewhere, especially in places where the party is in tatters. Writing off nearly half the states is no way to win the Senate. To create models for rejuvenation, the party should start with Iowa, Montana, Nebraska and Kansas, all of which have Senate races in 2026….And a heretical thought: As they rebuild, Democrats should acknowledge that in places where their brand is badly broken, independent candidates, particularly for the Senate, might have a better chance of building an alternative coalition to Trumpism. Senate candidate Dan Osborn lost in Nebraska this year running as a pro-worker independent, but his nearly 47 percent of the vote should be seen as a prologue, not a failure….The seeds of progress will be planted by those who respond forcefully, creatively and fearlessly to Trump’s second act.”

Irie Sentner reports that “Democratic governors (and 2028 hopefuls) gather to chart path under a Trump administration” at Politico, and writes: “Democratic governors are preparing to thread a fine line between standing up to President-elect Donald Trump’s Republican trifecta in Washington and collaborating with the incoming administration….Immediately following the election, some Democratic governors launched plans to “Trump-proof” their states, and in a memo released this week, Meghan Meehan-Draper, DGA’s executive director, wrote that Democratic governors would be the “Last Line of Defense” against the incoming GOP trifecta in the federal government….Blue-state governors have been explicit that they intend to try to block some Trump policies — efforts that will also likely raise their own profiles. Pritzker and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis are leading an organization to “back against increasing threats of autocracy and fortifying the institutions of democracy that our country and our states depend upon” — and although the privately-funded group is non-partisan, the implications are clear….But with the election loss still smarting, the event implicitly raised the question of who might have the right formula for the next one. Inslee said the governors are “focused on the election cycle for governors right now.” Still, he acknowledged that “the day after every election is the beginning” of the next one.” And with congressional politics bogged down in  partisan divisions, Democratic governors will likely have more opportunities to distinguish themselves as presidential candidates.

Some astute observations from Ilyse Hogue’s “Are Those Young Men Gone Forever?” at Democracyjournal.org: “Like their female counterparts, white men voted at margins comparable to 2020, and Black men’s support for the Democratic ticket dropped off only slightly. The biggest swings were a massive 35-point shift by Latino men toward Trump, according to CNN exit polls, and a 13-point shift to Trump by voters under 30, powered overwhelmingly by young men….How the Trump campaign pulled off this victory—by sidestepping on abortion, redefining freedom, and aggressively courting men—not only explains what just happened. It tells us a lot about the state of the MAGA coalition and where they intend to go next….Trump’s backers voted for him in spite of his position on abortion, not because of it. Support for abortion rights remains strong in this country, with men tracking only slightly behind women in how highly they rank their importance. Ballot measures strengthening abortion rights won in seven out of ten states the day Trump won the election, including in Missouri, where Trump won with over 58 percent of the vote….In state after state where the ballot measures showed up, a significant number of voters split their tickets, voting for abortion rights and for Donald Trump….The future of GOP power, Trump’s team sensed, lay elsewhere. Part of that future is a subset of Latino men and women who historically supported Democrats but are more comfortable with traditional masculinity and patriarchy….The Trump campaign deeply internalized the seismic shift going on among men under 30….Millennial and Gen Z men went into COVID experiencing declines in educational outcomes, upended social status, and high rates of depression. They emerged from quarantine to record-high inflation, a bleak jobs outlook, and a vast surplus of time banked in online forums. There they discussed a liberal culture that had embraced an identity-based hierarchy of oppression that left them at the bottom and a #MeToo movement that many felt made them guilty until proven innocent.”

A bit of election postmortem wisdom from “Why Did Trump Really Win? It’s Simple, Actually” by Michael Mechanic at Mother Jones: “But why, you might ask, would someone living on the edge vote for Republicans, whose wage-suppressing, union-busting, benefit-denying policies have only tended to make the poor and the middle class more miserable?….And why in the name of Heaven would they vote for Trump, a billionaire born with a silver spoon in his mouth who has lied and cheated his way through life? A man whose latest tax-cut plans—though some, like eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security income, can sound progressive—will be deeply regressive, giving ever more to the rich and rationalizing cuts that will hurt the poor and middle class and accelerate global climate chaos….The reason, my friends, may well be that those on the losing end of our thriving economy don’t see it as thriving. Historically, every election cycle, when reporters fan out to ask low-income voters in swing states what they are thinking, the message has been roughly the same: Presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, come around here every four years and talk their talk, and then they leave and forget about us when it comes to policy….Now that’s not entirely fair, because the Biden administration actually has done a good bit for working people and families of color, and has proposed all sorts of measures to make the tax code fairer and reduce the wealth gap (both the racial one and the general one)—including increasing taxes and IRS enforcement for the super-rich. But one can only get so far with a split Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on your team, and a rival party that would just as soon throw you into a lake of fire as support your initiatives.”


When the Religious Views of Trump Nominees Are and Aren’t Fair Game

With Senate confirmation hearings of Trump’s motley crew of Cabinet-level nominees, one issue Democrats will need to confront right away is when and whether the appointees’ often-exotic religious views are an appropriate subject for discussion. I offered some simple guidelines at New York:

Amid all the hotly disputed allegations that he has a history of excessive drinking and inappropriate (or even abusive) behavior toward women, Donald Trump’s defense-secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, has another potential problem that’s just now coming into view: His religious beliefs are a tad scary.

Early reports on Hegseth’s belligerent brand of Christianity focused on a tattoo he acquired that sported a Latin slogan associated with the medieval Crusaders (which led to him being flagged as a potential security problem by the National Guard, in which he served with distinction for over a decade). But as the New York Times reports, the tattoo is the tip of an iceberg that appears to descend into the depths of Christian nationalism:

“’Voting is a weapon, but it’s not enough,’ [Hegseth] wrote in a book, American Crusade, published in May 2020. ‘We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must …’

“In his book, Mr. Hegseth also offered a nod to the prospect of future violence: ‘Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.’”

His words aside, Hegseth has chosen to associate himself closely with Doug Wilson, an Idaho-based Christian-nationalist minister with a growing educational mission, notes the Times:

“[After moving to Tennessee two years ago] the Hegseth family joined Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a small church opened in 2021 as part of the growing Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. The denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a pastor based in Moscow, Idaho; his religious empire now includes a college, a classical school network, a publishing house, a podcast network, and multiple churches, among other entities …

“In his writings, Mr. Wilson has argued that slavery ‘produced in the South a genuine affection between the races,’ that homosexuality should be a crime, and that the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote was a mistake. He has written that women should not ordinarily hold political office because ‘the Bible does say that when feminine leadership is common, it should be reckoned not as a blessing but as a curse …’

“Mr. Hegseth told [a] Christian magazine in Nashville that he was studying a book by Mr. Wilson; on a podcast Mr. Hegseth said that he would not send his children to Harvard but would send them to Mr. Wilson’s college in Idaho.”

All this Christian-nationalist smoke leads to the fiery question of whether Hegseth’s religious views are fair game for potential confirmation hearings. Would exploration of his connections with a wildly reactionary religious figure like Doug Wilson constitute the sort of “religious test … as a qualification to any office or public trust” that is explicitly banned by Article VI of the U.S. Constitution? It’s a good and important question that could come up with respect to other Trump nominees, given the MAGA movement’s cozy relationship with theocratic tendencies in both conservative-evangelical and traditionalist-Catholic communities.

Actually, the question of the boundary between a “religious test” and maintenance of church-state separation came up conspicuously during the first year of Trump’s earlier presidency in confirmation hearings for the then-obscure Russell Vought, whom Trump nominated to serve as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (he later became director of OMB, the position to which Trump has again nominated him for the second term). Bernie Sanders seized upon a Vought comment defending his alma mater, Wheaton College, for sanctions against a professor who said that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Sanders suggested that showed Vought was an Islamophobic bigot, while Vought and his defenders (included yours truly) argued that the man’s opinion of the credentials of Muslims for eternal life had nothing to do with his duties as a prospective public servant.

This does not, to be clear, mean that religious expressions when they actually do have a bearing on secular governance should be off-limits in confirmation hearings or Senate votes. If, for example, it becomes clear that Hegseth believes his Christian faith means echoing his mentor Doug Wilson’s hostility to women serving in leadership positions anywhere or anytime, that’s a real problem and raising it does not represent a “religious test.” If this misogyny was limited to restrictions on women serving in positions of religious leadership, that would be another matter entirely.

More generally, if nominees for high executive office follow their faith in adjudging homosexuality or abortion as wicked, it’s only germane to their fitness for government offices if they insist upon imposing those views as a matter of public policy. Yes, there is a conservative point of view that considers any limitation on faith-based political activism in any arena as a violation of First Amendment religious-liberty rights. But those who think this way also tend to disregard the very idea of church-state separation as a First Amendment guarantee.

Critics of Christian nationalism in the Trump administration need to keep essential distinctions straight and avoid exploring the religious views of nominees if they are truly private articles of faith directed to matters of the spirit, not secular laws. It’s likely there will be plenty of examples of theocratic excesses among Trump nominees as Senate confirmation hearings unfold. But where potential holders of high offices respect the lines between church and state, their self-restraint commands respect as well.


How Democrats Can Win Union Member Votes in the Future

At The Pennsylvania Capital-Star, Kalena Thomhave interviews Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO and current president of the Organizing Group, a political consulting firm that helps labor unions get out the vote and win campaigns. An Excerpt:

On the union vote, there was a lot of media discussion about how union members are migrating to Trump despite the Biden administration doing so much for unions. 

First off, union members voted for Harris in pretty strong numbers. Across the three blue wall states, [there was a] significant performance by union members.

In Pennsylvania, union members made up 18% of the electorate. So, almost one out of five votes cast came from union households, and they voted 52 to 47 for Harris, which is better than the Biden vote was in 2020, [when] Biden lost union households to Trump 49 to 50 in Pennsylvania. So, she actually did better.

In Wisconsin, Kamala Harris won union voters 53 to 46 — better than Clinton did in 2016 and not quite as good as Biden did in 2020, but still a nine-point margin among union voters in the state. In Michigan, Harris won [union voters] 55 to 44 — not quite as good as Biden did in 2020, but much better than Clinton in 2016.

Trump has eroded the union vote a little bit, but not in substantial numbers. The media rush to judgment before the election based on some polls suggesting that union members had abandoned the Democrats, it’s just wrong.

What are your thoughts on unions like the Teamsters not endorsing Harris?

The Teamsters, as was well reported, stayed neutral. So did the firefighters. But there were 50 unions that supported Kamala Harris.

The Teamsters released a poll that said that [nearly] 60% of their members were supporting Trump, and [indicated] that’s why they decided to stay neutral. I’ve seen a lot of union member polls over the more than 40 years I’ve been doing this work. Unions might start off with their members behind 10, 15, or 20 points.

But then you put your program into gear and communicate with your members — in this case, for example, point out that Trump supports right-to-work and that Trump ran one of the most vehemently anti-union administrations in the history of the country. And then contrast that with Harris’ record and the fact that Harris cast the deciding vote on the legislation that saved the pensions for hundreds of thousands of union members, including Teamsters.

It was inexcusable that the union didn’t take the opportunity to communicate to their members and explain to them what was at stake in this election. Because if they had done that, they would have moved those numbers. No union leader could look at these two candidates and with any degree of honesty suggest that one of them wouldn’t be better for working people.

You said that Democrats need to be doing the work in the trenches with workers. What does that look like? 

I think it is walking picket lines. I think it’s showing up at union halls. I think it’s gathering groups of working people together and sitting with them and listening to them — doing town hall meetings around your district or state and hearing what people have to say. It means standing united with working people and letting them see who’s really on their side.

Over the next couple of years, it’s going to be standing strong against what’s going to be a vicious assault on a range of worker’s rights. There are going to be attacks on [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration], overtime pay, the National Labor Relations Board, funding the Fair Labor Standards Act, and federal workers’ unions.

What has been your approach to mobilizing union and working-class voters? 

With our voter engagement program, In Union, we provide voters with a year of information — we don’t just start talking to them around the election. We give them tips on their families saving money, we provide them with information about unions on the front lines, we give them ways to hold politicians accountable and to fight back. And then we gradually get into communicating about the election itself. We never make endorsements, but we provide people with good, sound information and well-documented citations.

Read the rest of the interview right here.


No, At the Moment Democrats Don’t Need a “New DLC”

In the swirling collection of suggestions for what Democrats ought to do to stage a comeback, one in particular caught my eye for obvious reasons, and I wrote a reaction at New York.

As is the case after every disappointing election cycle, we see multiple attempts underway to steer Democrats in a better direction. Most often, they involve timeworn Democratic factional advice, ranging from the hearty perennial progressive recipe of a sharpened economic “populist” message designed to freeze or reverse the decades-long working-class drift toward the GOP, to the equally well-known centrist prescription aimed at seizing a majority of persuadable swing voters, including some Republicans.

How, exactly, Democrats are supposed to incorporate and carry out such advice is usually left a little unclear. Presumably 2028 presidential candidates will test various strategies in the primaries, which is how ideological battles in the major political parties tend to get resolved.

But at least one group of centrist Democrats are planning to organize a more gradual and less top-down party makeover, or at least a force to push back against the strategies they deem futile or counterproductive. The New York Times reported:

“Seth London, an adviser to some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, wrote a private memo addressed to ‘Discouraged Democrats’ arguing that the party should ‘begin with a complete rejection of race- and group-based identity politics.

“The sweeping four-page memo, obtained by The New York Times and earlier reported by Politico, was both widely forwarded and a source of controversy in Democratic circles.

“’Democrats have increasingly focused on the priorities of core party activists over the common voters we claim to represent,’ wrote Mr. London, who has spent the last three weeks working with other Democratic strategists to build what he envisions as a ‘a party within the party’ of media companies, donors and advocacy groups that support charismatic, moderate officeholders.”

When you look at the “party within the party” London proposes to build, there is a very specific model he has in mind, and it’s focused more on elected officials than the Times take on it might suggests. The model is the Democratic Leadership Council, and the structure is a “leadership committee of federal and state elected officials” determined to act as a party faction in opposing identity-politics litmus tests and advancing “common sense” policies that are attractive both to swing voters and to the entrepreneurs who are essential partners in carrying them out.

The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), where I worked as policy director for over a decade in the late 1990s and early aughts, functioned from 1985 until 2011 as the kind of centrist pressure group London seems to envision recreating. Its initial goal (other than serving as a sort of clubhouse for Democratic politicians unhappy with the national party) was to create the conditions for a Democratic return to the White House at a time when pundits spoke of a Republican “Electoral College Lock.” But once that goal was accomplished under DLC co-founder and all-around star Bill Clinton, the group focused more on state-leadership development, and on burnishing its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (which still exists), as an idea lab for Democrats, particularly on issues that more orthodox progressive Democrats tended to ignore (including crime, education reform, and national security). The DLC had a large if diffuse influence on all sorts of Democrats, but the group faded after a period when it was mainly known for divisive lefty-bashing, and for pro-market views on the global economy that didn’t look so good after the Great Recession and the subsequent voter backlash against globalization.

So is something like a “new DLC” a good idea right now? It’s a question worth asking, but on balance I’d say no. We are in a very different political moment than the founders of the DLC confronted. In 1985, Democrats were reeling from a presidential election in which its nominee had lost 49 states and was beaten by over 18 percentage points in the national popular vote. It was the second straight landslide loss to Ronald Reagan, viewed by Democrats at the time as a conservative extremist. But at the very same time, Democrats did relatively well down ballot. They picked up two U.S. Senate seats despite the Reagan landslide and won a House majority of 35 seats. They controlled 34 of 49 partisan governorships after this terrible election, and also controlled 66 of 98 state legislative chambers. The problem, DLC founders agreed, was that a failed national party had become detached from a still-successful state and local party, and the first step toward recovery was to rebuild the national party on the shoulders of its more successful politicians, who were far more in touch with voters than the party-committee identity-group and ideological litmus-test commissars who wielded power nationally.

While there were isolated situations (particularly in a few Senate races) where down-ballot Democrats did significantly better than Kamala Harris in 2024, there just wasn’t the sort of wholesale return to ticket-splitting that suggests the only problem is in Washington, D.C. In all the elections of the Trump era, the top of the Democratic ticket was stronger than it was in the 1980s while the bottom was weaker. There is no obvious cadre of better-connected or more successful elected officials who can lead the donkey back to victory.

The prescriptions the DLC offered Democrats back in the day are also a bit obsolete. In the most prominent DLC-published diagnosis of the party’s problems, Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck’s The Politics of Evasion, the culprit identified was the refusal of Democratic elites to come up with credible policies on the economy and national security, leaving these urgent concerns to be dominated by the GOP. While you can argue that today’s Democrats have identified with the wrong economic policies and made some missteps in the White House regarding global threats to national security, there’s really no “evasion” going on. And for all the ancient talk of progressives only being interested in the party “base” while centrists care about “swing voters,” it’s pretty clear all Democrats hunger and thirst for all votes, but have different definitions of “swing” and “base” voters and different understandings of what makes them tick.

But the single biggest reason the time isn’t ripe for a “new DLC” goes to the heart of what Seth London seems to envision, as progressive critic David Dayen argues at The American Prospect:

“While much of the vision is laid out in vague platitudes — ‘a future-focused narrative,’ ‘rooted in hard work’ and ‘the pursuit of the American Dream’ — where he is most clear, London aligns his movement with the ‘abundance agenda,’ pushed by a series of groups favoring supply-side liberalism through removing regulatory barriers to a host of common needs, while rejecting the concept of ‘socializing’ the provision of health care and housing and education. (London has consulted for Arnold Ventures, a key funder of the abundance agenda, led by former Enron trader and hedge fund manager John Arnold.) The memo commits to ‘social insurance for those who need it,’ an unconcealed reference to means testing.”

I strongly object to the frequently heard lefty smear of the DLC as a brothel of “corporate whores,” but there’s no question its corporate funding base created a lot of perception problems for the group and for Democrats who aligned with it (even though the DLC went out of its way to defy donors on issues ranging from cap-and-trade to health care to tax cuts to “corporate welfare”). And there’s also no question their (our!) irrational exuberance about the New Economy and financial deregulation discredited key parts of what was otherwise a sensible policy portfolio. Similar problems, it must be admitted, afflicted other center-left “reform” efforts like Britain’s New Labour movement under Tony Blair, which was heavily influenced by Clinton’s New Democrats (the final and best brand for DLC Democrats, which alas, is probably not reusable).

To be very blunt about it, Democrats will not regain the White House or Congress under the conspicuous leadership of folks from Wall Street or Silicon Valley, however well-meaning they may be. You don’t have to be attracted to what passes for progressive economic “populism” these days (and generally speaking, I’m not) to recognize this is a moment in the history of the Party of the People when a focus on those very people should be paramount. Indeed, one of the DLC’s early slogans was that Democrats should represent “the values and economic aspirations of the middle class”; that’s not a bad starting point for revival.

Beyond the specific strategy chosen for that revival, it’s important to recognize that Democrats overall are in much better shape than they were in 1985. It’s as close to a scientific certainty as you can get that Republicans will lose their slippery hold on the U.S. House in 2026 and with it the governing trifecta that makes them so terrifying at present. Trump is more likely than any president in living memory to overreach and make mistakes that erode his base of support and (quite possibly) damage the living standards that were such a huge part of the problem facing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris this year. While it’s always healthy to discuss what went wrong in an electoral defeat and debate policies and political strategies, a descent into formal factional combat that London seems to contemplate is both unnecessary and counterproductive. For now, the best way to oppose Trump is to maintain a united opposition party prepared to exploit the mistakes that are sure to come.


Political Strategy Notes

Tom Vilsak on “Why Democrats Don’t Get Rural America” at Politico: “I think the challenge that we have in rural America is that we talk a lot about programs and not about vision. And I will, if you don’t mind, take you all the way back to my first race for governor in 1998. I ran and I was way behind and nobody thought I had a chance of winning. And I went out and I talked about making Iowa the food capital of the world. And I had a media guy who at the time was not well known [David Axelrod]. He and my pollster were not very happy with me for talking about the food capital. They basically said, nobody understands what it is and you should be talking specifically about class size reductions, property tax relief and expanding access to health care. I continued to talk about it. I won that race by 6.5 to 7 percent. I’m pretty sure that 7 percent were the people I was talking to who knew the vision. They didn’t quite understand what it was, but when you have a vision, it is what a leader does. A leader takes you from here to there, tells you where you’re going to go and allows you to fill in the detail….But if you want to be president of the United States, if you want to represent this country and you want to do what everybody says they wanna do which is to bring the country together and end this us-and-them thing, you’ve got to be able to reach out and reach across and be credible. But you can’t be credible if what you’re selling is a program. You’ve gotta be selling a vision and that vision has to not be what you think but based on what you know about these people, you know matters to them. And what matters to them is the ability to say to their kids: you don’t have to leave. You can come back. And you can have a good life here.”

“For years, Democrats have wrestled with declining support from non-college-educated voters, a demographic that once formed the party’s backbone,” Brianna Westbrook writes in “Why Democrats lost in 2024: Lessons from Phoenix and the working class” at The Arizona Mirror. “This trend was starkly evident in the 2024 presidential race, where turnout among working-class Democrats hit historic lows….While the party centered its campaign on social issues and climate initiatives, it failed to adequately address the economic struggles that dominate the lives of millions. The result was widespread alienation among working families, many of whom opted to sit out the election….

To win back this critical demographic, Democrats must:

  1. Focus on universal economic policies: Policies like Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage (adjusted for inflation) and robust labor protections remain immensely popular across the political spectrum. Democrats must make these initiatives central to their platform.
  2. Challenge corporate power: A bold stance against corporate monopolies, as championed by Warren, can galvanize voters frustrated by rising costs and stagnant wages. Breaking up monopolies and regulating Wall Street should be presented not as niche issues but as critical to the everyday lives of working families.
  3. Invest in grassroots campaigning: Hernandez’s victory underscores the importance of building trust through local organizing. Rather than relying on consultants and glossy ads, Democrats should empower community leaders to engage directly with voters.
  4. Reframe the narrative: The language of class struggle, long championed by Sanders, resonates with voters who feel left behind. Democrats must articulate a clear vision of economic justice, uniting voters around shared struggles rather than dividing them with identity-focused messaging alone.”

At Brookings, John J. Dilulio writes in “The 4 working-class votes,” “If Democrats are determined to fret and sweat about where they stand with working-class voters, the exit poll data would justify them worrying—not about some pro-Trump or pro-GOP multiracial working-class coalition, but about Latino voters….Trump was a landslide winner with working-class white evangelicals, but his single biggest gain in 2024 over 2020 was among white evangelical women with college degrees….Democrats who emphasize pro-worker/pro-family policies and messages do better with voters than otherwise comparable Democrats who don’t.”….exit polls show that working-class voters, defined as voters without a college degree, split 56% for Trump to 42% for Harris. The same polls tell us that white working-class voters favored Trump over Harris by 66% to 32%, and that Trump won a larger share of working-class Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020…..The white working-class electorate consists of two distinct voting blocs: white evangelicals without college degrees and all other whites without college degrees. The latter bloc, which encompasses working-class white catholics and other non-evangelical whites without college degrees, is slightly larger than the former bloc….As I have documented elsewhere, in 2016 and 2020, Trump won a majority of white evangelical working-class voters, but he lost a majority of white non-evangelical working-class voters. He lost them again in 2024….Among Latinos, the only subgroup that did not bolt from the Democratic fold was college-educated Latino women, who favored Harris 63% to 33%, a 30-point margin identical to the one they gave Biden in 2020….But Trump’s victory in 2024, his more than 76 million votes and his swing-states sweep, is owed the most to white evangelicals. White evangelicals voted for Trump more than four to one, constituting more than a third of his 49.9% share of the popular vote….his single biggest gain in 2024 over 2020 was among white evangelical women with college degrees…. Having suffered a double-digit drop in college-educated white evangelical women’s vote between 2016 and 2020, in 2024 he turned a 6-point spread in Trump’s favor against Biden (53% to 47%) into a 50-point spread in his favor against Harris (74% to 24%)….So, in the 2024 election, a majority of white evangelicals without college degrees once again favored Trump, but majorities of blue-collar Black, Latino, and non-evangelical whites did not.”

Dilulio adds, “Still, I believe that there are at least three things one can credibly say about the 2024 presidential election results at this stage. First, as we have already established, contrary to so much of the commentary, Trump won a vast majority of white evangelical voters without college degrees, but Harris won majorities among blue-collar Blacks, Latinos, and non-evangelical whites; second, Harris did better with the electorate as a whole than has hitherto generally been acknowledged; and, third, it would seem that, other things equal, Democrats who emphasize pro-worker/pro-family policies and messages do better with voters than otherwise comparable Democrats who don’t….Despite being the first Black woman to run for president as the nominee of a major party; despite running in place of a highly unpopular first-term sitting president whose record she could neither easily run on nor run from; and despite running what many observers judged to be a tactically mistake-ridden campaign yoked to easy-to-attack anti-majority opinion positions on hot-button issues such as transgender women being allowed to compete on women’s teams in sports; Harris won more than 74.3 million votes, constituting 48.3% of the national popular vote to Trump’s 49.9%; and lost Pennsylvania by 1.7%, Wisconsin by 0.8%, and Michigan by 1.4%….So, a less than 0.8% shift her way in the national popular vote would have tied Trump’s tally, and a less than 1% shift her way in the three “blue wall” states would have added 44 electoral votes to the 226 she received and made Harris the next president…. In addition to winning working-class majorities among non-evangelical whites, Blacks, and Latinos, Harris beat Trump among union workers 57% to 41%. As I have explained elsewhere, most Americans now see the decline in private-sector unionization (from about a third of all workers in the mid-20th century to 17% in the mid-1980s to just 6% now) as bad for America; 70% of working-class Americans approve of unions; and an estimated 60 million nonunionized workers would like to have the opportunity to join a union.”


‘Landslide’ Not, ‘Mandate’ Not Even

Nathaniel Rakich and Amina Brown explain why “The 2024 presidential election was close, not a landslide” at 538/abcnews.go.com. An excerpt:

As we’ve gotten more data and had the time to put the 2024 election in perspective, the truth has become clear: Yes, the 2024 presidential election was close. With more ballots counted, Trump’s national popular vote lead is down to 1.6 points, and Harris could have won if she had done just a couple of points better in just a few states. Any argument that the 2024 election was a “landslide” is misleading. It relies on a combination of recency bias and using the wrong measuring sticks.

High expectations for Democrats in the popular vote, along with the widely circulated maps showing big swings toward Trump in virtually every county in the country, may have played a big role in setting those early narratives that Trump had notched an overwhelming win. Another was probably the media’s repeated warnings before the election that it might take days to project a winner. While that very easily could have come to pass, we may have overemphasized the point. It was also always possible that a winner would be projected on election night, which is of course what happened.

After it took until the Saturday after Election Day for media outlets to project that Biden had won the 2020 election, the relatively early projection in 2024 (ABC News projected him as the winner at 5:31 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday) probably made Trump’s win seem more decisive. But once again, that’s recency bias at play. The 2024 election actually took longer to project than all but three presidential elections since 1976. Apart from the interminable 2000 (when the race came down to a recount in Florida that didn’t end until Dec. 12) and 2020 elections, only 2004 kept us in more suspense.

….All in all, the idea that Trump won an overwhelming victory in 2024 is less grounded in the data and more based on a sense of surprise relative to (perhaps miscalibrated) expectations.

Why perceptions of the 2024 election matter

The debate over the closeness of the 2024 election may seem academic — Trump won; who cares if it was a landslide or not? — but it could have a very real impact on the ambitiousness of Trump’s second term. Boasting about the scope of his win, Trump claimed in his victory speech that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate” to govern — a narrative that caught on in the media and with many voters, too. In a mid-November poll from HarrisX/Harvard University, 71 percent of registered voters said that Trump had a mandate to govern, including 50 percent who said he had a “strong mandate.”

Trump is just the latest in a long line of presidents-elect trying to convert electoral success into political capital to pass their agendas. There’s just one problem: Political scientists who have studied the idea of presidential mandatesgenerally agree that they’re made up. It’s basically impossible to ascertain what voters had in mind when they went to the ballot box and whether a candidate’s win was an explicit endorsement for a specific policy or approach to governing.

And according to research by 538 contributor Julia Azari, a professor at Marquette University, there is no relationship between how often a president-elect claims a mandate and how big their victory was. In fact, Azari even found that presidents are more likely to claim mandates when they are in a politically weak position, as a sort of act of desperation to claim that their policies have public support.

But research has also found that, much like Tinker Bell, mandates can exist if enough people believe that they do. According to political scientists Lawrence Grossback, David Peterson and James Stimson, when there is a media consensus that an election carries a mandate, Congress responds by passing major legislation. Azari and Peterson have further found that politicians themselves, like Trump, can push Congress to action as well, simply by insisting that they have a mandate. And per Azari, when a president-elect insists that he has a mandate, it is often accompanied by major expansions of presidential power.

In other words, regardless of how close the 2024 election was in reality, Trump’s claims to a mandate suggest that Republicans are planning to govern like they won in a landslide.

Democrats would also likely claim a mandate, had they won the popular vote by 1.6 percent. But that wouldn’t be true, either. And with a margin of victory that small, you can blame almost any issue for Harris’s loss.

Trump should have nominated more Democrats and Independents for his cabinet to give non-Republican voters at least some buy-in. That would have been the smart move. Instead, he went the other way, the “in-your-face, Dems” route, pushed by the hyper-partisan ideologues in his orbit. Any hope that having Musk and Kennedy in his inner circle might temper their influence appears to be unfounded.


How Should Dems Treat Progressive Groups?

As a red county Democrat, I have long wondered how many actual Democrats really advocate “open borders,” public funding of transexual surgery or “defunding the police,” to name just a few of the albatrosses that have been hung around Democratic candidates’ necks in recent elections.

In my more conservative county, the answer is ‘not many’. Yet polls tell us that these beliefs are held by significant numbers of Democrats. I guess they are in the cities and suburbs and disproportionately in California. At the same time, however, it feels like spotlighting such excessively ‘woke’ policies and their adherents may give the public a false impression of the breadth of such beliefs among Democrats. I still suspect it is a loud, but tiny minority that amplifies this ‘woke’ vibe among Democrats.

In reality, the term “woke” as currently used, provides yet another example of a slang word originating in the Black community, then distorted and amplified by whites to mean something else. As originally used, ‘woke’ means ‘educated.’ Now it is used by conservative critics to disparage crazier white liberal attitudes.

The net effect is to slime Democrats as crazy-ass wokesters. Apparently, it’s not a tough sell, especially when a billionaire is flooding the zone with thousands of TV ads pushing that message.

At Vox, Andrew Prokop addresses the harm done by forms of ‘wokism’ in his article “Are progressive groups sinking Democrats’ electoral chances?” Prokop writes:

What ails the Democratic Party? Since Kamala Harris’s defeat, several Democrats and center-left commentators have pointed the finger at one culprit: “the groups.”

Specifically, they claim, progressive interest and activist groups have both moved too far left and grown far too influential in the Democratic coalition, pushing the party to adopt stances out of step with the median voter on a range of different issues. This, they say, has backfired electorally and will ultimately hurt the people the groups claim to want to help.

“Many of today’s lawmakers and leaders have come up at a time when alienating the groups is seen as anathema, but they should start seeing it as both right and necessary,” former Democratic staffer Adam Jentleson wrote in the New York Times in November.

Other commentators — Jon Favreau, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Ruy Teixeira — have made similar points. Some, like Yglesias and Teixeira, have been criticizing the influence of such groups for years.

Yet this critique has been met with an impassioned backlash from progressives and leftists. Some, like Waleed Shahid, argue the blame is misplaced and the supposed power of these progressive groups has been exaggerated. “The Democratic Party has long been shaped by far more powerful forces — corporate interests, lobbyists, and consultants — whose influence has neglected the real crises facing everyday Americans,” Shahid wrote for The Nation.

Others argue that inflation — a global phenomenon — was the main reason for Harris’s defeat, so a groups-focused diagnosis misses the point. And yet others argue that progressive groups represent morally righteous causes that Democrats should not abandon — for instance, that moderation would amount to throwing marginalized groups “under the bus.”

This debate is now in full swing.

Further on, in his “What Comes Next?” conclusion, Prokop writes:

What does seem clear is that, for the time being at least, the leftward shift has stopped since Biden took office. A backlash to progressive activists’ preferred policies on several issues, including criminal justice and immigration, is in full swing.

And, of course, Harris lost. How much blame, if any, “the groups” should get for that has become a matter of intense debate. Progressive group defenders point out that Harris tried to pivot to the center and that the Biden administration’s record on inflation and immigration were her two biggest vulnerabilities. The groups’ critics say Harris’s group-influenced positions from the 2020 primary weighed her down, and Democrats ran into political trouble on inflation and immigration in part because of the groups’ bad advice.

How the Democratic world — its groups, donors, activists, media outlets, staffers, and politicians — responds to all this is yet to be seen.

There are past models. In the 1980s, after the landslide defeats of three successive Democratic presidential nominees, various reform factions tried to moderate the party, arguing that they’d gotten out of touch with the median voter and were too beholden to “special interests.” Some called for moderation on cultural issues, others for new pro-growth and pro-business policies. Bill Clinton became affiliated with these reformers, and won the presidency in 1992.

In contrast, the model of Democrats between 2004 (when John Kerry lost) to 2008 (when Obama won big) may suggest a sweeping overhaul of the party’s positions isn’t necessary. After all, Harris came pretty close to winning. Perhaps Trump will govern poorly and Democrats will return to power having changed little, avoiding a wrenching internal coalitional conflict. And perhaps the apparent end of the leftward opinion shift among liberal college graduates will be enough to effectively weaken the power of the groups.

Another model, oddly enough, is Trump. Before his rise, the Republican Party was tethered to an unpopular “free market” economic agenda involving Medicare cuts and free trade pushed by donor-financed advocacy groups. In 2016, Trump distanced himself from that agenda, and in doing so revealed those groups had little actual power. However, Trump also hugged other groups in the GOP coalition even tighter — promising, for instance, to pick his Supreme Court appointees from a Federalist Society list. Then, in 2024, it was the anti-abortion groups that looked to be a political millstone for Trump — so he distanced himself from them.

For Democrats now, there are some nascent attempts to challenge the group-dominated status quo. Yglesias recently pitched a new agenda for “Common Sense Democrats” that involves moderating on several issues. Klein has been more focused on how to make Democratic governance work better, and says his critique is more about the party’s “broader culture of coalitional cowardice” rather than “an anti-left-wing view.”

Yet others are skeptical of how much Democrats will — and should – change. “Democrats declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups can’t and likely won’t happen,” the commentator Michael A. Cohen (not Trump’s former lawyer) wrote on Substack. “For better or worse, these groups are the modern Democratic Party. If Democrats hope to retake political power in Washington, they must ensure that these groups are enthusiastic, mobilized, and remain firmly ensconced in the Democrats’ corner.”

Indeed, the politics of the war in Gaza may be a cautionary tale in this regard. Biden and Harris ignored progressive groups by remaining supportive of Israel — but as a result, Harris faced regular criticism from activists and negative coverage throughout the campaign. The groups might not be so effective at winning Democrats votes — but they still might be able to drive some away.

Read the entire article to get the full dimensions off Prokop’s argument.


Political Strategy Notes

In “The key voter shifts that led to Trump’s battleground state sweep,” Steve Kornacki writes at nbcnews.com: “For President-elect Donald Trump, there’s a clear story that runs through each of the seven battleground states that he swept on his way to recapturing the White House….He managed to drive up even further what were already sky-high margins with his white, blue-collar base while harnessing historically broad nonwhite voter support to erode the Democratic base in cities and diversifying suburbs….And for Vice President Kamala Harris, the battleground picture is one of regression — a widespread failure to match Joe Biden’s 2020 performance, with her gains largely isolated to areas centered on the wealthier, college-educated white voters who increasingly make up her party’s backbone.” Kornacki surveys the seven swing states, and writes of Pennsylvania: “Overall, Pennsylvania shifted 3 points to Trump between 2020 and 2024. But the movement was most pronounced in the eastern part of the state, where Trump posted seven of his 10 biggest county-level improvements compared to four years ago….Key to this: Deep inroads with Latino voters that helped Trump erode the massive advantage that Democrats depend on in cities throughout the region….In Philadelphia itself, Harris won by 59 points, 79%-20%. But that was down from Biden’s 81%-18% win four years ago, amounting to a net reduction in the Democratic margin of around 50,000 votes. That drop-off alone effectively erased more than half of Biden’s 81,000-vote statewide margin. Sixteen percent of Philadelphia residents are Latino, and a review of precinct-level results from NBC News’ Decision Desk found that Trump’s gains in the city were heavily concentrated in majority-Latino neighborhoods

“In smaller, Latino-heavy cities in eastern Pennsylvania,” Kornacki continues, “Trump made big strides, including double-digit improvements in the state’s three Hispanic-majority cities….Puerto Ricans are the main Hispanic subgroup in Allentown and Reading, while Dominicans are heavily concentrated in Hazleton, a city that was less than 5% Hispanic just 25 years ago….Trump also flipped Bucks County, which has a larger share of white voters without college degrees than the other three Philadelphia collar counties. And he drove up what were already robust margins in Pike County, where growth has been fueled by in-migration from New Jersey and New York residents….Democrats, meanwhile, were banking on even deeper support in the giant, higher-end Philadelphia suburbs. While Chester and Montgomery counties each went for Harris by double digits, her margin fell several points short of Biden’s in both. Her campaign had also identified emerging suburbs in the south-central part of the state, near Harrisburg, as growth targets. Instead, Harris merely treaded water in them.”

it looks like we are stuck with the Electoral College, which has given Republicans a significant edge in recent presidential elections, for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, Democrats should pay close attention to shifting demographics between the 50 states. Toward that end, James Cirrone cites “The five states Americans are moving to in droves” at The Daily Mail, and notes: “Americans are increasingly being pulled to the southern United States, with five states in particular attracting the most transplants….Florida and Texas had the most people move within their borders in 2023, according to a new migration survey from the National Association of Realtors (NAR)….Florida saw a net inflow of 372,870 people last year, while 315,301 went to Texas, according to the report, which analyzed US Census data….North Carolina welcomed 126,712 new residents in 2023, and has been established previously as another fast-growing state….Home to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina gained 91,853 more people last year….Georgia rounded out the top five, adding 88,325 people to its growing population….Tennessee came in at number six with a net migration of more than 76,000, followed by Arizona (57,814), Alabama (36,128) and Oklahoma (31,967)…. Ohio came in tenth and was the only state north of the Mason-Dixon Line to make the list, after drawing in a net migration of 28,718….Much of the dialogue around Americans moving south assumes they are searching for warmer temperatures and sunnier skies, but that isn’t the entire picture….According to the report, only one percent of those who moved said they did so because of climate-related reasons….The most common things that got people to pack up and go were ‘housing reasons’ (42 percent), ‘family reasons’ (26 percent) and ’employment reasons’ (16 percent)….The South has become the most populous region in the US, thanks almost entirely to Florida and Texas.”

In similar vein, read “Wealthy millennials are flocking to Florida and Texas—and no one wants to live in New York or California” by Jane Their at Fortune. As Their writes, “With no state income tax at all, Florida and Texas are the No. 1 and No. 2 destinations for high-earning millennials on the move, according to a report from SmartAsset. Using data from the IRS and the 2021 tax year, SmartAsset measured net migration patterns (the inflow of new high earners minus the outflow) among young professionals ages 26 to 35 bringing in at least $200,000 a year. Florida gained a net 2,175 people in this cohort; Texas gained a net 1,909….Meanwhile, the nation’s biggest economies, New York and California, withstood the biggest net losses at 5,062 and 4,495 young high earners, respectively. But they aren’t exactly desperate for young blood, as the two states are still home to the most young high earners by a vast margin….None of this may come as much of a surprise if you’ve listened to any of the anecdotal narratives that Florida and Texas have become the new New York and California as remote workers left their cramped urban apartments during the pandemic. The two southern states boast year-round warm weather, ample open space, and (of course) no income tax—ideal for young earners who are first and foremost focused on saving and contributing to their retirement accounts. It’s made the states enduringly ideal locations for those who don’t have to show up in their Manhattan or San Francisco offices to earn their hefty paychecks….Here are the top 10 cities where young professionals are moving, ranked by net gain:

  1. Florida (2,175)

  2. Texas (1,909)

  3. New Jersey (1,048)

  4. Colorado (754)

  5. North Carolina (721)

  6. Connecticut (660)

  7. Washington (464)

  8. Tennessee (441)

  9. Arizona (321)

  10. South Carolina (318)”


Political Strategy Notes

Some Nuggets from E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s latest Washington Post column: “Whereas Trump’s apostasy on abortion was out in the open, it was barely noticed that the GOP platform also dropped its opposition to same-sex marriage — because roughly 7 in 10 Americans now support it. The right turned to highlighting transgender issues precisely because there is now broad support for so much of the rest of the LGBTQ+ rights agenda….Yes, the GOP succeeded in using the transgender issue to paint Harris as the “they/them” candidate. But on so many questions, the broad liberalizing trends of the past three decades are alive and well, and understanding how far progressive positions have advanced is central to recognizing that Trump’s narrow victory did not represent a sharp movement to the right akin to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 triumph. Trump’s combined margin in the decisive swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin was, as of Friday’s tallies, just around 231,000. That number does not justify apocalyptic electoral analysis….Of course, reproductive rights activists don’t feel like winners. Even after Missouri’s vote, 12 states, including populous Texas, still have broad abortion bans, and four more, including Florida, have bans after roughly six weeks of pregnancy. In conservative states, Republicans will continue to push restrictions, including new barriers to medication abortions…./Being mindful of the largely hidden liberal victories of 2024 does not mean downplaying the challenges Democrats face — or the dangers Trump’s genuinely radical agenda presents. But to acknowledge the gains is to see that the country Trump will lead is neither as supportive of his agenda as he claims nor as allergic to progressive change as many of his adversaries fear. One defeat, however stunning, does not discredit the value of persuasion and coalition-building. They take time. They still work.”

Caroline Vakil and Julia Mueller spotlight “5 pivotal 2025 contests that could also be Trump litmus tests” at The Hill, and write: “New Jersey Reps. Mikie Sherrill and Josh Gottheimer, former state Senate President Steve Sweeney, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, former Montclair Mayor Sean Spiller and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka are among the Democrats who have jumped into the race….In Virginia, where Trump also improved upon his 2020 showing this year, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is limited to a single term…On the Democratic side, Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) launched her campaign late last year. Though there’s still time for other candidates to crowd into the race, a Spanberger match-up against Earle-Sears would be historic, potentially paving way for Virginia’s first female governor.” In the New York City Mayor’s race, “The declared Democratic candidates include New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani, state Sens. Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos, former New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama White House aide Michael Blake and Democratic donor Whitney Tilson….New Yorkers are watching to see whether state Attorney General Letitia James (D) or former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) will also enter the ring…..Democrats flipped control of the Virginia House of Delegates two years ago, giving them a narrow 51-49 majority. But Trump’s performance across the state and elsewhere during the 2024 election is raising questions about whether that favorable political environment for Republicans will carry into the next elections….Biden carried the state by 10 points in 2020, with Harris only carrying it by 5 points earlier this month….Partisan control is on the line in the upcoming Wisconsin Supreme Court election….The state’s high court currently has a 4-3 liberal tilt, but Justice Ann Walsh Bradley’s retirement will bring it to an even 3-3 split….The last Wisconsin Supreme Court election in 2023, which also determined partisan control on the high court, shattered records in spending as groups threw tens of millions of dollars into advertising. Experts say they won’t be surprised if the same is true again this cycle.”

In “Trump voters feel very differently about things now that he’s won, our new poll shows,” Jessica Piper writes at Politico: “Donald Trump’s supporters thought voter fraud could determine the election outcome — until he won. Heading into Election Day, nearly 9 in 10 Trump voters said fraud was a serious issue. Afterward, just a bit over one-third said so….his supporters were also more likely to feel good about the economy after the election — while Harris supporters adopted a more negative outlook….Those are among the results of a new POLITICO|Morning Consult poll, designed to measure change in public opinion before and after the election. The results largely track with recent consumer sentiment data and comments from Republican leaders …The first poll (toplines, crosstabs) was conducted from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, the week before the election, while the second (toplines, crosstabs) was in the field from Nov. 20 through 22, two weeks after Trump’s victory. Both surveys sampled more than 4,000 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points….In polling just days before the election, Trump supporters expressed little confidence in the election outcome, with a whopping 87 percent substantially or somewhat agreeing with the statement that voter fraud was a “serious issue” that could determine the outcome of the election. Among Harris supporters, roughly half expressed similar worries….That partisan divide disappeared after Election Day….A week before the election, just 8 percent of self-identified Trump voters described the economy as on the “right track,” the polling found. But after Trump’s victory, that number swung to 28 percent — still a minority, but a substantial swing in a span of just a few weeks when economic conditions did not change dramatically….Trump supporters were also far more optimistic than Harris supporters across a range of policy areas, with some of the greatest divides coming on national security (75 percent of Trump voters were optimistic compared with 30 percent of Harris voters) and public health (73 percent of Trump voters optimistic compared with 33 percent of Harris voters).”

Robert J. Shapiro argues that “Kamala Harris’s Policy Agenda Kneecapped Her Chances” at the Washington Monthly. As Shapiro notes, “Ultimately, her heaviest burden was being nominated without a normal primary process that would have allowed her to hone a winning agenda. In a closely fought election, it’s incumbent on the lesser-known candidate to offer a compelling policy agenda, especially for weak partisans and independents….But the Harris campaign never came to grips with the three issues that voters cared about most—the continuing pain of inflation, the disappointment of voters without college degrees about their narrowing prospects, and the anxieties Americans feel about immigrants crossing the border without a legal right to do so. According to polls and surveys, substantial majorities expected and demanded that the candidates address those three concerns meaningfully….That’s how democracy works. Yet, the strategists who Harris inherited from Joe Biden’s campaign—which was faltering even before his unfortunate debate performance—tried to convince voters to focus on abortion rights and threats to democracy. They didn’t appreciate how downplaying the voters’ most pressing concerns could align Harris with the status quo. Worse, Harris’s team didn’t fully appreciate how the context for the issues they considered more important had changed….By making abortion access the touchstone of her closing argument, Harris also may have sent a message to persuadable voters that their frustrations about the economy and immigration were secondary….More importantly, in the end, the Harris campaign didn’t make a persuasive case that she had the ideas and strength to address voters’ real concerns, given her difficulty separating herself from an administration that voters believed hadn’t done enough about those concerns….The Harris campaign completed their self-damaging trifecta by missing the mark on immigration. Their approach was to trumpet the administration’s support for immigration reform on “day one” and the bipartisan compromise on immigration earlier this year. But since neither passed Congress, she ended up boasting about the administration failing to make a difference for the voters’ third hot-button concern….In a populist era, voters demand that a candidate offer concrete actions that could plausibly change the conditions and circumstances that frustrate and anger them and then display the personal strength to carry them out. Kamala Harris has that strength, but it wasn’t enough because her campaign never provided a convincing blueprint.”


Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez on How She Won in Trump Country

In “The Democrat who won in Trump country,” Noel King interviews Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez, cross-posted here from Vox:

The Democratic Party struggled in the 2024 elections, losing control of the Senate and the presidency, and failing to regain the House. The party is still assessing what went wrong in those defeats — but one bright spot is in southwestern Washington, where Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez pulled out a win in Trump country for the second election in a row.

In 2024, Gluesenkamp Perez, a moderate Democrat and member of the House’s Blue Dog Coalition, defeated her 2022 opponent in a rematch and widened her margin of victory in the process. She credits her win to her working-class, rural roots and authentic connection to her home district, as well as a focus on issues with bipartisan support, such as “right to repair” laws.

Gluesenkamp Perez and her husband live in unincorporated Skamania County, a wooded region with a population of about 12,000. She co-owns an auto repair and machine shop with her husband, Dean, which he still runs.

Gluesenkamp Perez sat down with Today, Explained to discuss her win, where she thinks her party went wrong, and what she hopes to focus on in the next Congress. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Noel King

Tell me a bit more about yourself.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

I live in a really rural part of a rural county. We get our internet from a radio tower. We get our water from a well. My family’s been in Washington state for generations. My dad immigrated here from Mexico and met my mom at Western Washington University. I’m just incredibly honored to have a heritage of people who believe in making things that last and who understand the value and the necessity of what we have in Washington state and southwest Washington and a loyalty to a place that is so necessary, and that we’re increasingly alienated from culturally.

Noel King

What inspired you to go into politics?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

I was not inspired by politics. My predecessor was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. And I knew everybody that had her yard signs up like clockwork. And they started putting up this guy Joe Kent’s yard signs. And I started watching his YouTube and was like, “This guy’s got good hair and bad ideas.” I remember watching a Republican primary candidate forum on YouTube and somebody asked all of the candidates to name just three lakes in southwest Washington, and he couldn’t do it. If you’re not doing this because what we have is precious and worth fighting for, why are you doing it? Having a political agenda imported from somewhere else that is so far from our values and our community and our priorities…

Noel King

Let’s talk about the place. Washington’s Third is a swing district. It was held by a Republican for 12 years before you won in 2022. Donald Trump backed your opponent, Joe Kent, in a big way. Why do you think you won?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

What we want in southwest Washington is to see our priorities and our culture reflected in Washington, DC. We don’t want a national agenda or a culture from somewhere else, imported and replacing our community, our values, our priorities. And so just a real focus on what my community needs, what our values are, who we are. You know, the district went for Trump by 7 points in 2016. And last time I won by two votes in each precinct. And this time we were able to point to my record. I’m in the top 3 percent of most bipartisan voting members of the US House and I’m not here to play partisan football. I’m here because I see and value what we have, and I know it’s worth fighting for. I’ve never felt entitled to people’s votes. I’m not here for an agenda from a think tank somewhere.

Noel King

Why do you think bipartisanship played so well back in Washington Third District? What were you pointing to exactly?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

I was talking to the director of one of our largest labor and delivery wards, and she told me that right now 40 percent of the babies born in her hospital have at least one parent addicted to fentanyl. Forty percent — this is generational carnage and it’s everywhere. People want to stop the flow of fentanyl. I think a lot of us have felt like if this was a thing in the lives of people with more money and influence, it would have been addressed sooner.

Noel King

And so [you’re talking about] immigration, right?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

We’re talking about border security. For so long they’ve been married, but together there’s two issues: immigration and border security. And we’re saying we cannot wait for a perfect immigration policy to have a secure border to stop the flow of fentanyl. And so that was a big point for me.

You know, on the student student loan forgiveness, I looked at the data. My district only holds 3 percent of the federally issued debt. This was a regressive tax policy. If you support progressive tax strategies, you should do that consistently, not just when there’s party favors. And I had people protest our auto shop.

Noel King

Just to clarify, you voted against President Biden’s student debt relief. People looked at you and said, “You’re a Democrat, how dare you?” Talk to me about how that affected you back home.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

They were really aggressive on our online reviews. We take real pride in the quality of work we do. People were just bombing it who’d never been customers. But I was hearing from my community, “We don’t want the trades to be considered an afterthought. We don’t want to be second fiddle” — really challenging the idea that academic intelligence is the thing that we should be supporting. We want a level playing field for the trades, for all of the forms of intelligence. We want good jobs that don’t require a college degree. We want honors-level shop class in junior high. Those are the things that reflect our values and our priorities. And so that’s how I vote.

Noel King

This is where the pushback comes in, when you’re in national office and you vote on something that affects everybody in the country. Not many people in your district ended up in a lot of college debt. But all across the United States, many, many, many young people did. You’re in national office. You don’t just vote for this little corner of Washington because your vote — as one of 435 — affects the whole country. How do you respond to that?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

My job is to represent my community. And I think the way that you arrive at good policy is by having everyone show up at the table with the unique perspectives of their community and loyalty there. And that is how you end up with better policy in the end. You don’t get good legislation without having people who are driving trucks and changing diapers and turning wrenches at the table — not as an afterthought, but in the inception of the legislation. There are ways that that proposal could have been much more progressive. You know, things like Pell Grants or focusing on the bigger, systemic issue of why college tuition has increased 481 percent since I was born. That’s the systemic solution that I think we need to be considering and evaluating, like how are we going to provide a level playing field for everyone?

Noel King

Let’s talk nationally. There’s another two years to look forward to, in which Democrats will be in the minority in both the House and the Senate. They lost the presidency. How do you think the party moves forward? People are looking at you as the face of a new kind of Democratic politics. Whether you like that or not, people say, “We should look at this gal because she seems to be saying something. She won in a Trump district. She seems to be saying something that people who voted for Donald Trump can get behind.” Where do the Democrats go?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

Well, again, look, I’m not a strategist, but I think 90 percent of Americans agree about 90 percent of the issues. And they have found the 10 things we disagree about to drive a stake through the heart of our community.

Noel King

Like what?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

Pick anything. Anything that’s in the national ads and instead, say, it is not partisan to want to be able to fix your own car; “right to repair” laws are not partisan; wanting to own a home, not partisan. One of the things I really love about living where I live — we don’t have trash service. So every six weeks, we go to the dump and take our stuff, and so you have to see everything you bought. There is nowhere else, right? You should have to see all of the tiny little yogurt cups you bought, and have accountability, and not have an idea of the woods as a terrarium or as something that’s just a recreational asset, but as something that is living, breathing and relevant. I think we’re consuming like half the lumber per capita that we were in the ’70s. And the reality is a lot of that has been replaced by petroleum-based products. By thinking about things in this hyper-local way, by seeing the trash that you bought, you are able to arrive at a better national and global solution.

Noel King

Do you think that’s what Republicans did in 2024? Because whether you support Donald Trump or you’re a critic of his, one thing that you can say he successfully did is he turned local issues national. Springfield, Ohio, was struggling with an influx of immigrants. There is no reason that somebody in Maine or Florida or Texas should have cared at all about Springfield, Ohio. That was a local issue. Donald Trump took that little local issue, made it a national issue. Some analysts say that is what helped him win. It seems counter to what you’re saying, which is that a local issue is a local issue, and we shouldn’t make it national because it won’t let us win.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

People want to be heard. I had a lot of people, colleagues, saying, “How do we get people to understand that the economy’s actually great?”

Noel King

This was a Democratic line.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

Don’t do that. People are putting their groceries on a credit card. You go to Albertsons or whatever, your grocery store, and you feel like you’re in a game of chicken with the CEO. Nobody cares about your spreadsheets. I don’t know that any political party is doing this very well. But I think there’s a lot of work to be done on conveying cultural respect and regard for the people that are building our country, that are growing our food, that are keeping the wheels on the bus and conveying that respect sincerely and thinking and listening with curiosity. That is how we get our country back, how we build community again.

We are all very lonely and feeling isolated. Some people think it’s their civic duty to unfriend somebody on Facebook [over how they voted] — that is such an impoverished view of the world. It’s isolating, and it’s lonely. I think getting back to a place where we are finding nonpolitical ways of conveying our values — that’s progress, that is how you grow the field of people who feel real, that is how you build a coalition that can actually pass useful legislation.

Noel King

Do you think there’s a kind of snobbery within the Democratic Party where maybe the heroes that the party is choosing are the wrong heroes?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

It feels like everybody [in Washington, DC] is under 40 and has at least two degrees. And, you know, that’s not what the country looks like. That’s not what the value system is everywhere. There are fewer than five members of Congress who actually have a child in day care. That’s why there’s not a sense of urgency around the affordability crisis. I was talking to a constituent. She works in child care. She told me she is not legally allowed to peel a banana or an orange, [because] that is considered food prep. They are not a licensed food prep facility. So they can open a bag of chips [but] can’t peel a banana. And I went round and round and round for like four months and I had my office talking to local regulators and licensors and elected officials. And they kept saying, “She’s dumb, she doesn’t understand the rules.”

Noel King

Does she understand the rules?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

Yes. Their licensors said they would need six more sinks before they were legally allowed to be engaged in food prep. And I don’t think this is a small thing. I have a toddler. I know how durable food preferences are. So I introduced a bill that creates a positive right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables. It says, if your state is taking federal dollars for child care, you will not infringe on the right to serve fresh fruits and vegetables. And this is the long work of building strong local agriculture and national health.

Noel King

It is also, if we’re being honest, in a tradition that more closely hews to what Republicans think. You’re pointing to overregulation and you’re saying this is ridiculous. And I can imagine Democrats saying, but what about listeria? Every time you turn on the news these days, there is listeria in something, there’s E. coli in something, you’re going to give it to the kids. How do you square the party that you’re in and the historical positions that it’s taken on things like regulation?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

I don’t know if it’s necessarily partisan. Parents know that food preferences and children are very durable, so my experience as a young mom is what’s driving that, not a partisan agenda. But I think that this is absolutely one of the reasons that there’s one licensed day care facility in my entire county. Think about the overhead of installing six different sinks.

Noel King

Do you look at legislation like that legislation as something that bridges a partisan divide? The thing that you’re looking at for the next two years is Democrats either work with Republicans or get nothing done. And I’m wondering if what you’re saying here is that, if we have some compromise ideas, at least we can get some things done.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez

Yeah, I think these issues are too urgent to be delayed. We have got to find some common ground here to work and deliver value to our communities. And so I think there’s a lot of work that can be done that is not partisan. That’s good for the country.