Readers of TDS know that America’s working-class provides a hefty majority of all votes cast in recent presidential elections and a pivotal majority of votes cast for Trump and Republicans in 2024. Yet there is some evidence that “The Working Class Is More Left Than You Think,” as Timothy Noah’s article at The New Republic is entitled. Here is part of his argument: “Looking at American political history over the past decade, it’s tempting to conclude that the electorate—and especially the working class that represents 57 percent of it, according to 2024 exit polls—has gotten more conservative. (I’m defining “working class” here conventionally as those who lack a college degree.) After all, this country elected Trump president twice. But according to the Center for Working Class Politics survey, when you compare political attitudes during the period from 1990 through 2007 and the period from 2008 to 2022, you find that working-class Americans moved leftward on economic and social issues, with the biggest leftward shift since 2007 on immigration and civil rights—Trump’s two biggest bugbears. (The survey defines “working class” as those lacking a college degree but also excludes any who are situated in the top one-third of the income distribution.)…The reason nobody noticed the working class’s leftward shift was that it was dwarfed by a much bigger leftward shift among middle- and upper-class Americans. Thus, relative to these groups, a leftward shift by the working class registers as a growing gap, with the working class ever more conservative than the middle and upper classes. Paradoxically, “the same working-class coalition that elected Obama is now likely even more progressive than it was eighteen years ago.” But it’s also more alienated from the college graduates whose views have changed more rapidly, and who dominate the Democratic Party more than they did in 2008. The biggest gap, unsurprisingly, is on immigration, with “social norms” (i.e., wokeism) coming in second…To woo Trump’s working-class voters, obviously, the trick for Democrats is to base an appeal on economic issues. But the survey suggests a substantial portion of that theoretically gettable 20 percent of Trump voters isn’t actually gettable because it’s too socially conservative. Weeding out that group, the survey finds, conservatively, that about 10 percent of working-class Trump voters are gettable. That translates into 2.5 percent of all voters, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it “exceeds the margin by which Harris lost both the national popular vote as well as several key swing states.” Read more here.

From, “Lisa Murkowski Suddenly Realizes She Got Played on Trump Budget Bill” by Lisa Olmsted at The New Republic: “Remember all of those hefty handouts Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski won in exchange for sealing the deal on Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill? It looks like the president has found a way to get out of delivering…“I feel cheated,” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News Friday. “I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.”…Ahead of the bill’s passage earlier this month, Murkowski had co-sponsored an amendment to ease the phaseout of tax credits for solar and wind energy under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act. Her measure would ensure a 12-month window for clean energy projects, which would end in 2027. These tax credits would help to alleviate a looming energy crisis along Alaska’s Railbelt, the electrical grid that serves roughly 75 percent of the population, due to declining resources of natural gas…Trump threw a wrench in that agreement Friday when he issued an executive order to “end market distorting subsidies” for green energy projects. The order directs Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to take actions to “strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits.”…Now Murkowski claims that she and her pals were duped. “Do I feel like the administration was not being up-front with us? Yes,” she told the Anchorage Daily News.” Murkowski is not the first Rep[ublican to get betrayed by Trump, and she won’t be the last.

Our chart of the day, from “Ground Beef prices at an all time high” by Annieli at Daily Kos:

: An excerpt from “Critics say Trump trying to distract from Epstein by talking about everything but that” by Meredith Deliso at abcnews.go.com: “Critics of President Donald Trump are accusing him of trying to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein files as the administration faces pushback for more transparency regarding the case…Among a recent flurry of wide-ranging posts on his social media platform, Trump on Sunday demanded that the Washington Commanders reverse the team’s name change, claiming that there is “a big clamoring for this.”…He then followed up several hours later, saying, “My statement on the Washington Redskins has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way,” and threatened to not facilitate a deal for the football team’s new stadium in Washington, D.C., if it does not change its name…In response to the post, Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who ran against Trump for president in 2020, said on social media, “Trump is scared to death of the Epstein files.”…The Department of Justice and FBI’s announcement in a July 6 memo that they would not release any additional files on Epstein, after the Trump administration earlier promised to do so, has angered many of the president’s supporters. The memo also said they determined that there is no Epstein “client list,” which has been the subject of conspiracy theories boosted by the FBI’s Kash Patel and Dan Bongino prior to joining the Trump administration, further angering some of Trump’s most vocal supporters.”