“You wouldn’t know it if you limited your reading to The Liberal Patriot,” Harold Meyerson writes in “The One Type of Democratic Identity Politics That Will Actually Work: If they want to win back the working class, they need to get in touch with its justifiable anger,” at The American Prospect. ” but the action these days in identity politics is all on the right. By importing white South Africans while expelling immigrants of color, by sacking the Black and female leaders of our armed forces while putting the Pentagon in the hands of a white nincompoop, by stripping the government’s archives of records of Black achievement and heroism while retaining the stories of pre-desegregation whites, Donald Trump has worked mightily to restore the white identity politics that was the norm in America before the 1960s…Electorally, the Republicans’ white identitarianism, both abetted and mitigated by their attacks on cultural elites, enabled them to capture enough working-class votes to put Trump back in the White House and win both houses of Congress. The groups benefiting (both actually or supposedly) from the Democrats’ identity politics fell short of constituting an electoral majority, while the moderately populist economics the Democrats preached and sometimes practiced didn’t put them over the top, either. Despite its failure to deliver any tangible benefits, the Republicans’ one-two punch certainly resonated with angry and frustrated electors who understood that the economic prospects—i.e., the life prospects—they confronted were far more limited than those of their parents’ generation. Nothing that mainstream Democrats had on offer touched any of that anger, or even came close…The shift of income over the past half-century from wages to investment, the decline of unions, the increasingly plutocrat-friendly character of the tax code, the corporate-and-bank control of trade policy, the ever-rising political clout of the rich—these are the real causes of the working class’s distress, and shouldn’t be all that hard for the Democrats to address, and legitimately and powerfully connect to working- and middle-class anger…It’s not as if there hasn’t been a ready-made slogan for this form of Democratic identity politics. I think “We are the 99 percent” will do quite nicely. As both policy and politics, that’s the Democrats’ road back to power.”

In “What Caused Democrats’ No-Show Problem in 2024? New data sheds light on the policy preferences of nonvoting Democrats in the last election. It may disappoint some progressives,” Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella write at The Nation: “Democrats are still trying to figure out what went wrong in the 2024 election. Did the party swing too far to the left or not far enough? Was the Democrats’ defeat due to a failure to turnout base voters or a failure to persuade swing voters?…Answers to these questions typically fall on factional lines. Center-Left analysts,like Nate Cohn or David Shor, favor the “persuasion” theory. They have long argued that Democrats failed because of the party’s inability to convince non-Democrats to vote for them, chiefly because their messaging and political positions were too progressive. Moderation or placing a greater emphasis on bread-and-butter economic issues is their suggested medicine…On the other side, progressives like The Nation’s Waleed Shahid and Kali Holloway have argued that Trump’s victory is owed to Democratic voter malaise. Because the party didn’t give their base anything to be excited about, Democrats stayed home. As Holloway concluded, “The people who really decided the 2024 election are the ones who didn’t vote at all.” These commentators’ preferred solution is to energize the base with more progressive appeals…So who’s right? It’s complicated. But new data from the Cooperative Election Study (CES) can get us closer to an answer. The CES is a high-quality survey with a sample-size large enough (60,000 respondents) to permit fine-grained comparisons between subgroups in the US adult population.

“With it,’ Guastella and Abbott continue, “we’re able to get a clearer picture of who voted and how they felt about the issues…To begin, it seems likely that the plurality of nonvoters in the 2024 presidential election were indeed Democrats, as the political scientist Jake Grumbach and his coauthors have recently shown. Here is a point for the progressives…But while “energize the base” advocates are right that more Democrats stayed home than Republicans, they assume that these nonvoters abstained because Democrats didn’t run a sufficiently progressive campaign. To get a sense of whether Democrats who sat out the 2024 presidential election might have been moved to participate if the party had offered a more left-wing policy agenda, we can compare the policy preferences and demographics of voting and nonvoting self-identified Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents…Contrary to what left-wing optimists had hoped, Democratic nonvoters in 2024 appear to have been less progressive than Democrats who voted. For instance, Democratic nonvoters were 14 points less likely to support banning assault rifles, 20 points less likely to support sending aid to Gaza, 17 points less likely to report believing that slavery and discrimination make it hard for Black Americans, 17 points more likely to support building a border wall with Mexico, 20 points more likely to support the expansion of fossil fuel production, and, sadly for economic populists, 16 points less likely to support corporate tax hikes (though this group still favored corporate tax hikes by a three to one margin). Overall, nonvoting Democrats were 18 points less likely to self-identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Here is a point for the centrists…But wait, does all this mean that nonvoting Democrats stayed home in 2024 because Democrats’ policies were tooprogressive? Not necessarily; while the CES data gives us the ability to judge issue preferences, we can’t use it to determine issue salience. That is, we don’t know which issues were most important to voters nor even if candidates’ issue positions were important factors in nonvoters’ decision to sit out the election.”

Fredreka Schouten reports that, “Shut out of power in Washington, Democrats grapple with how to win over young men and working-class voters” at CNN Politics, and notes: “One effort from a group of veteran Democrats envisions a $20 million project to woo young men. Another liberal organization is on a 20-state listening tour to reach working-class Americans…The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, is in the throes of what its new chairman, Ken Martin, calls an extensive “postelection review” — examining not only the missteps of the party and the campaign of 2024 presidential nominee Kamala Harris but also the broad Democratic-aligned ecosystem that he said spent more than $10 billion in the last election, only to be shut out of power in Washington…Nearly seven months after Republicans won the White House and both chambers of Congress, Democrats are still coming to terms with the reasons behind their stinging defeats and looking for ways to claw back some power in next year’s midterm elections. Intraparty debates are raging about the words Democrats use, the policies they should promote and even the podcasts they join…The Democratic Party’s standing has fallen dramatically, with its favorability rating hitting 29% in March, a record low in CNN’s polling dating to 1992. That’s a drop of 20 points since January 2021, when President Donald Trump ended his first term…And a CNN poll released Sunday shows Americans are far more likely to see Republicans than Democrats as the party with strong leaders. In a further sign of trouble for the party, the CNN survey shows the dim view of Democrats’ leadership is driven by relatively weak support from their own partisans. Republican-aligned adults, for example, are 50 points likelier than Democratic-aligned adults to say their own party has strong leaders…The nonprofit arm of American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic opposition research group, has heard similar concerns from voters as part of a $4.5 million “Working Class Project” that’s taking its team to 20 states…A common perception among those in the American Bridge focus groups “is the idea that ‘Democrats don’t care about people like me, that their first, primary goal is for other groups they consider at risk, who are not like me,’” said the organization’s president, Pat Dennis.'”