In “Will Democrats Learn from the Establishment’s Loss?” at Boston Review, David Austin Walsh writes: “Elite deference politics breeds elite political entitlement, often defended by explicit appeals to identity. This was a strong part of the rationale for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid—it was Clinton’s turn after Obama to be president, the line went—and it animated the fury of so many Clinton stalwarts at Sanders’s candidacy. The left’s antipathy for Clinton was dismissed first as the misogyny of the so-called “Bernie Bros” and then as racism, a refusal to listen to Black voters in the primaries. Later, in 2020, concerns about Biden’s age and fitness for the presidency were brushed aside—even by people who raised similar concerns about Sanders—again on the grounds of ageism. The point is that centrist bloviating about “The Groups” misses the most consequential case of elite deference politics. The form practiced by the party establishment itself is vastly more responsible for the party’s plight in 2025 than environmental and racial justice nonprofits…And as Mamdani’s dramatic upset makes clear, his is the path forward for Democrats and the left: a robust, big-tent grassroots political organization that incorporates the populism rather than shutting it out and speaks to the need of younger generations of voters fed up with a sclerotic party establishment.”

Zachary B. Wolf reports that “Trump is losing support among independent voters. Who are they?” at CNN Politics, and writes: “Here’s how CNN’s polling team put it in their report: “It’s an obvious rule of US politics that independent voters are generally the ones who might, as their opinions shift sway, tilt power in the country. And on a range of issues, they have been turning against Trump…CNN’s Aaron Blake looked last week at numerous polls on Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill… “Independents opposed the bill by around a 3-to-1 margin … The KFF and Fox News polls – the ones with the fewest undecideds – showed 7 in 10 independents opposed it,” Blake wrote…On what may be Trump’s signature issue, deportations and immigration policy, CNN’s polling editor Ariel Edwards-Levy wrote about a CNN poll in April, “more than half of independents now say they have no real confidence in him to deal with the topic, with 56% now saying he has gone too far on deportations.”…On tariffs, the economy and government cuts, Trump has failed, at least so far, to convince Americans who don’t identify with either party, that his agenda is the right thing to do…I went to CNN’s chief data analyst, Harry Enten, who has been tracking this trend for some time…“It’s pretty clear that independents and independent voters have turned against Trump,” he told me…Back in April, Enten’s analysis said that Trump had the worst approval rating on record with independents at that point in a presidency…“His issue is he has completely lost the center of the electorate,” Enten said, offering two very obvious and simple reasons why…Independents don’t like what Trump is doing on the economy…They don’t seem to like the bulk of his agenda otherwise (see the “Big, Beautiful Bill”)…This will present major problems for Trump and the GOP going forward.”…“Now, it’s possible that Trump and the GOP can do well going forward without independents breaking overwhelmingly for them,” Enten said, pointing out that independents broke for Trump in 2024…“The problem is you can’t be losing independents 20+ points and survive in American politics,” he added.”

Democratic office-holders and candidates looking for some sharp message points should read “Transcript: Trump Is Screwing His Voters in “Mind-Boggling” New Scam: An economist explains how the sum total of Trump’s policies are hitting working-class voters, especially his own, with a mix of deception and upward redistribution that constitutes something new and unprecedented” by Greg Sargent at The New Republic. An excerpt of Bernstein’s comments from Sargent’s interview: “There have been lots of calculations trying to assess the damage here. There’s never been a budget bill that redistributes income more aggressively from the bottom to the top. This is Robin Hood in reverse on massive doses of steroids. They’re literally taking money from poor people and giving it to rich people. And anyone who knows anything about what it’s like to try to get by.… And [when] we talk about an affordability crisis—trust me—that’s a crisis for the bottom 20 percent, not for the top 0.1 percent. If you just combine the negative impact on the incomes of low-income people from this bill with the tariffs—which also disproportionately fall on middle- and low-income people because more of their consumption basket, more of what they buy falls under that import tax—this tax and service cut regime is incredibly punishing to low-income people…I want to be clear about one thing because it’s important: It actually takes a while for the price effects of tariffs to work their way from the ports to the shelves. When an import comes into this country, whether it’s a T-shirt or a washing machine, the immediate payment there—the tariff payment, the import tax payment—is from the importer. That’s the U.S. company. This stuff about other countries eating the tariffs is BS. The U.S. importer pays the tariff. And then eventually some portion of that tariff—I think it’s well north of half—finds its way to the shelf. And we’re just now starting to see that.”

Bernstein continues, “You cannot live—that is, survive—in this country on social benefits alone. They are too low—too miserly, if you will—to feed yourself [or] your family, to house yourself. You have to work in order to get by. Now, there’s no question that health coverage and nutritional support are essential parts of the lives of many low-income people, but they can’t live on that alone. Food stamps literally is a couple of dollars per meal. So this notion that you can somehow live in Paul Ryan’s hammock or be housed on the kinds of benefits we provide is completely false. And that’s why the vast majority of working-age low-income people work, because many have to. What we’re doing here is actually making it harder for them to work. It has been shown in many really, I think, high-quality studies that if you take health care coverage away from somebody, they’re actually less able to stay in the workforce. So this is really some upside-down stuff…the really important relatively new think tank, The Budget Lab, has done exactly what you just asked for. They summed it up. They summed up the impact of the tariffs and the service cuts. They even netted out any tax gains from both the big bill and the tariffs. And what they found is that incomes fall not just at the bottom but from all the way at the bottom to the 80th percentile. Now, once you get up to 80 and 90, they’re flat. They don’t fall very much. But at the bottom, you’re talking about thousands of dollars of losses. At the middle, you’re talking about, I think, around $1,500 or so. You don’t see gains until you get up to the 90th percentile…So that’s an exercise in exactly what you just asked for. The cumulative effect of the tariffs and the budget bill is to make 80 percent of households less well-off. As someone who’s been observing politics and budgets and international trade for many decades, I’ve never seen anything like this where a budget bill combined with tariffs [and] deportation is taking a strong economy that this administration inherited and cutting it off at the knees…”