In “What a Real DNC “Autopsy” of the 2024 Election Would Say,” Perry Bacon interviews Monica Potts at The New Republic. An excerpt: “Bacon: So what I want to talk about today is something that’s not in the news, but is embedded in the news all the time, which is this idea of the Democrats and the working class, or the working class in general. And this idea that the working class is who you have to win—that the Democrats have lost the working class. I want to come at that, and that gets into affordability and autopsies, and we’ll come back to those things in a bit. But let me start with this: I find it frustrating, and probably misleading, when working class has become synonymous with people who did not get a four-year college degree. Talk about why working class and not having a bachelor’s degree maybe should not be synonymous terms…Potts: Yeah, so the first thing to understand is the vast majority of people who are talking about the working class in their writing and their commentary are using it as a synonym for those who don’t have college degrees. So they’re not talking about a certain slice of the income—a certain income level necessarily. They’re talking just about people who don’t have college degrees, and they’re also treating it as a majority of the U.S. because it is true that a majority of people now, in this day and age, do go to college—although I think that’s slipping—but they don’t always finish. Only about a third—a little more than a third now—of American adults have college degrees…a little more than a third of the American public has a bachelor’s degree. The reason—the argument that people make about why these two things are synonymous—is that generally it’s true that people with a bachelor’s degree make more than people without one, but it’s not true all across the board. And it’s really not true when you zoom out and you look at different kinds of communities in the United States.”

Potts continues, “So if you live in one of the populous areas on the coasts, it’s definitely true that people who have college degrees or advanced degrees are much more likely to have higher incomes, but it’s just not true across a lot of rural America, which is where Trump wins—which is part of the reason that we talk about the working class these days is because of the rural-urban divide. Because in those areas, just generally, college attainment is much lower. And so you have people who maybe started a business or entered a trade after high school who, by the time that they’re in their thirties and forties, are making pretty good middle-class salaries…there’s another idea of working class, another definition that is much more socioeconomic, that means usually slightly below a middle-class salary. It means a certain kind of blue-collar job or a certain kind of job that doesn’t have the kind of security that we think of people with college degrees having in their jobs. It usually means physical labor of some sort. And so I think when people say working class, they often think in their minds—or they see in their minds—this kind of person who’s struggling economically…I personally think that saying working class kind of evokes this kind of blue-collar laborer who is struggling and is just trying to feed his family and wants to take a vacation every year… But it usually evokes a male head of household, and they’re mad because they don’t have the economic opportunities that their parents did when they just worked in a factory after college. And so the phrase working class evokes that, and it just doesn’t describe our reality right now.” More here.

Here’s an excerpt from E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s responses to a question by Robert Siegel in “The Trump Economy and America’s Bad Mood” in the New York Times: “E.J., you have written about Donald Trump losing what you call the reasonable majority. Is there a reasonable majority?…Dionne: I think there is a reasonable majority in the country. One of the reasons I use that phrase is because a lot of people out there who voted for Trump were not part of the MAGA base, were not “fooled” by Donald Trump…They were people who were mad about the cost of living and, in some cases, angry about immigration, particularly what was happening at the southern border. They weren’t necessarily sold on Trump…Most of those people have taken a look at what has happened in the last year and they have just moved away. They’ve said: This is not what we voted for…He ignores the primary issue that pushed him their way, which is the cost of living — and a billionaire regularly mocking affordability and, by the way, surrounding himself with billionaires, is not someone who’s going to appeal to that constituency…Some of the polls, Gallup, AP-NORC, have him down at 36 percent, and that up to a quarter of his own voters, if the high measures are right, have moved away from him…The last couple of months feel like that Afghanistan moment for Joe Biden. If you remember, after the chaos in Afghanistan, Biden never recovered from the sharp drop in the polls he had then.” More here.

At The Dispatch, Charles Hilu addresses a question of growing interest, “Will Congressional Republicans Stay Compliant in 2026?,” and writes: “Even for a president known for his disregard for norms and scathing attacks on his enemies, it was a bridge too far…After news broke last week that acclaimed film director Rob Reiner and his wife had been stabbed to death in their home, President Donald Trump reacted in a way that was unsurprising only in the degree of its callousness. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the death of Reiner, a longtime Democratic activist and strong critic of the president, was “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”…There’s not much congressional Republicans can do about a distasteful comment from the White House other than condemn it. But Trump’s actions in his second term have repeatedly tested the limits of Republicans in Congress, pushing the bounds of executive authority and  contradicting the professed beliefs of large swaths of the caucus. In response, Republicans have offered varying degrees of pushback, sometimes putting up no resistance at all and at other times expressing concern but not giving substantive opposition. Only on rare occasions have Republicans in Congress told Trump “no” or moved to block his actions…This deference to Trump is unsurprising, given that the president has not been afraid to threaten dissenting members of his party with a primary challenge. In the 2022 cycle, Trump-backed challengers succeeded in ousting multiple Republican members of the House of Representatives who voted to impeach the president following the January 6 Capitol riot. After Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina voted against advancing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump publicly declared that he would meet with primary candidates, and Tillis soon announced his retirement. Most recently, Trump has announced his intentions to back challengers to GOP members of the Indiana state Senate who voted against the state’s push to give Republicans a more favorable congressional map…Despite that history, congressional Republicans in recent months have shown more of a willingness to criticize Trump and buck his wishes—a trend that has coincided with a decline in his job approval ratings. Nevertheless, the country has yet to see the congressional GOP take a stand against Trump on an issue that is especially high-profile or of serious importance to his agenda as Republicans have worked to leverage their governing trifecta.”