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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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