Ronald Brownstein explains on camera how “Trump Is About to Betray his Rural Supporters” at Local 3 News. Brownstein also has a paywall article, “Many Trump voters still have doubts about him. Can he hold them?” at CNN Politics. And here’s a stub of another paywalled Brownstein article, “The Potential Backlash to Trump Unbound: A returning president who expects to govern without constraints leaves his opponents hoping to benefit from the blowback” at The Atlantic: “Donald trump will return to office facing far fewer constraints than when he entered the White House in 2017. The political, legal, institutional, and civic forces that restrained and often frustrated Trump during his first term have all palpably weakened. That will be a mixed blessing for him and for the Republican Party….There’s less chance that forces inside or outside his administration will thwart Trump’s marquee campaign proposals, such as mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, big tariffs on imports, and sweeping rollbacks of climate and other environmental regulations. But there will also be fewer obstacles to the kind of polarizing ideas that got stopped during Trump’s first term. On numerous occasions, his own aides intervened to prevent the president from, for example, deploying the military to shoot racial-justice protesters, firing missiles into Mexico against drug-cartel facilities without authorization from the Mexican government, or potentially quitting NATO. Republicans in Congress thwarted parts of his agenda, as when senators blocked his attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The courts ruled against some policies, such as separating the children of undocumented migrants from their parents at the southern border….This time, Trump’s fate will be much more in his own hands. If he can deliver greater economic stability for working families, while avoiding too many firefights on militant MAGA priorities, strategists in both parties agree that he will be in a strong position to consolidate the gains he’s made among traditionally Democratic constituencies, such as Black, Latino, and younger white men.”

An excerpt of “The Democrats Have a Crime Problem. Blame the Media. How news coverage fuels the widespread, misguided perception that crime is up and cities are unsafe” by John Pfaff at The New Republic: “In Democrats’ seemingly endless election postmortems—and in the postmortems on the postmortems—a persistent theme has been to blame the reddening of blue states like New York and New Jersey on crime in their big cities. On Pod Save America, the political commentator Ezra Klein emphasized the importance of taking crime seriously as a factor in voters’ decisions. To explain why he wasn’t surprised by blue states’ “sharp red shift,” he said: “Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them, they are furious. And this idea that, like … ‘Crime is actually down, this is all just Fox News’—like, shut the fuck up with that.” Klein argued that when it comes to crime and criminal justice policy, fact-checking is a political dead end for Democrats. Instead, Democrats need to “talk to some people who live near you” and grasp “the sense of disorder rising”—a disorder fueled by migrants, homeless encampments, turnstile jumping, and crime in general. In San Francisco, he noted, “the fury is overwhelming.” As evidence, he pointed to the losses of reform prosecutors and the defeat of San Francisco Mayor London Breed….At bottom, Klein’s claim was that it’s bad politics to respond to people’s fears about crime by saying that crime is actually down (even though it is) or by pointing out that their fears are the product of misleading press coverage (even though they are). In other words, facts don’t matter, the vibes do, and we need to govern in response to the vibes….Crime is not like inflation, a phenomenon everyone experiences because everyone buys stuff. Instead, crime is densely concentrated geographically and among certain people, in the areas that suffer the most from poverty, unemployment, and government disinvestment.” Read more here.

Laura Jadeed shares some insights regarding “How Democrats Can Win Back the White Working Class: Moving left on economic issues may be the key to winning over blue-collar voters of all races” at New Lines Magazine, including: “If rising enthusiasm for unionization is any indication, the white working class is already more progressive than most pundits think. Support for unions — which culture war proponents have tried to brand as “un-American” for their Marxist and socialist roots — has gone from 48% in 2008 to 70% this year. While Democrats are still more likely to support unionization than Republicans, the majority of low-income Republicans now believe that America’s decades-long trend of decreasing unionization is bad for workers. While the proportion of unionized American jobs has remained at around 10% since 2021, union election petitions filed increased by 53% — from 1,638 to 2,510 — between 2021 and 2022 alone, suggesting that it is anti-union regulations, not worker preferences, that keep the number of union jobs from rising higher. Recent surveys suggest that working-class voters support progressive economic policies when the proposals are stripped of liberal jargon; a July poll in swing states showed that 59% of voters without a college degree support free college education, 63% support single payer healthcare, and 76% support a cap on rent increases. This may help explain why a quarter of white voters for President Barack Obama without a high school diploma defected to Donald Trump in 2016. These candidates have little in common but both effectively used the language of economic populism.”

In “Teamsters president reveals how ‘arrogant’ VP Harris lost the party, and the vote,” Joe Dwinell writes at The Boston Herald: “Democrats have an ego problem, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien says….The head of the nation’s largest union said the party that once stood for the working class has “somehow lost their way” and it just cost them the election….He told the Herald Tuesday that the party of AOC — New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and VP Kamala Harris failed to grasp today’s political climate….“They feel it’s a birthright that they would get our support,” he said. “It’s troubling. They can’t dictate how voters should think….“It’s the fault of some Democrats who just forgot where they came from,” the Boston native added. “They need to be a little humble about it.”….The Herald reached out to O’Brien on Christmas Eve as his interview with Tucker Carlson was going viral. In that sitdown, O’Brien confirmed he was told by Harris pre-election that she wasn’t going to abide by the Teamsters’ full set of questions and answers….That roundtable, held after President Biden announced he wasn’t going to seek reelection, was cut short with the VP only answering a quarter of their 16 questions. Trump answered all of them, the New York Post added. ….“On the fourth question, one of her operatives or one of her staff slips a note in front of me — ‘This will be the last question.’ And it was 20 minutes earlier than the time it was going to end,” O’Brien told Carlson….“And her declaration of the way out was, ‘I’m going to win with you or without you,’’ O’Brien added….“Damn. I thought I was arrogant. That’s really arrogant,” Carlson responded.”