From “Working Class Weekly: Cracks Emerge Among White Working Class Voters in North Carolina” at The Working Class Project: “In late April, we conducted two virtual focus groups with white working class swing voters in North Carolina– one with women, one with men. Most participants voted for Trump in 2024…As one of two Republican-held U.S. Senate seats rated “tossup,” North Carolina is a top-tier battleground in the midterms. And following Senator Thom Tillis’ retirement, the state is one of Democrats’ best pickup opportunities. The race is between former Gov. Roy Cooper and RNC Chair Michael Whatley after both secured their nominations. The state also boasts several competitive House races and several that are on the cusp of being competitive if conditions continue to shift against President Trump and Congressional Republicans…Working class voters in the state will tip the scales in either direction…What we heard should give Democrats both real cause for optimism and a clear-eyed sense of the work still ahead…If you’ve been following this newsletter and our work the past year, none of this will surprise you. Working class voters in every state we’ve visited lead with the same concern: everything costs too much, wages aren’t keeping up, and life feels unsustainable…North Carolina is no different.” More here.

“Donald Trump can now claim a trifecta of restoring white privilege in a siege smoldering with all the grievance of George Wallace’s segregation now, tomorrow, and forever,” Derrick Z. Jackson writes in “Trump’s Appalling Racial Legacy” at The American Prospect…While Trump has not brought us all the way back to “Whites Only” water fountains and packing Black folks in the back of buses, the ghost of Bull Connor floats above Trump’s vicious federal police crackdowns on Latino immigrants and the military occupations of racially diverse cities under lies that crime was out of control…With both iron fist of police brutality and blunt leveraging of federal agencies and the Supreme Court, Trump has assured that for the foreseeable future, white folks will maintain a disproportionate share of front-row seats to orchestrate the future of this country…The trifecta began with the 2023 Supreme Court ban on race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. The Court, packed into a conservative supermajority by Trump in his first term, said colleges must now be colorblind. That means willfully blind to the fact, as stated bydissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, that the United States remains largely “an endemically segregated society.”…Next in the trifecta is Trump’s bleaching the government of any concern about racial disparities. He has transformed divisions of government created to enforce civil rights into agencies to destroy Black advancement. It is no secret that in the richest nation in the world, Black people still suffer from grievous gaps in health care, housing discrimination, and proximity to pollution, just to name a few. A central accompaniment to the Trump administration’s termination of disparity data collection across agencies is his slew of executive orders, beginning on the first day back in office, that ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government.”

In “Redistricting Makes the House Map a Bit Redder, but Not By Enough to Protect Republicans from a Wave” by Kyle Kondik at The Center for Politics: “The overall national redistricting fight clearly tilted toward Republicans following their twin legal victories in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Callais case and in the Supreme Court of Virginia’s Friday decision to overturn a Democratic gerrymandering effort there on process grounds…Five House ratings move toward the Republicans following a sharpened GOP gerrymander in Tennessee and as Virginia reverted to its old map. Democrats do still have targets on the old Virginia map, though…The House map has taken on a larger GOP bias as a result of redistricting, although when it’s all said and done, the bias by one measure may essentially be the same as it was in 2018, when Democrats easily won the House…Let’s say that median seat ends up 4 points to the right of the nation (so voting for Trump by 5.5 points). Interestingly, if the median House seat was 4 points to the right of the nation compared to the 2024 presidential results, that actually would be the same Republican bias as when Democrats won the House in 2018, at least based on this measure…Back then, the median House seat was the Omaha-based NE-2, which had backed Trump by about 2 points in the 2016 election while Trump had lost the national popular vote by about 2 points, a roughly 4-point Republican bias…Under such circumstances, and using their own analysis and assumptions about where the map ends up, analysts such as Nate Cohn and G. Elliott Morris suggested over the weekend that Democrats probably would need to win the House popular vote by 4 points to feel good about flipping the House. Democrats’ lead in House generic ballot polling now is more like 6 points, and Republicans face a number of big-picture headaches as Trump’s approval rating has dipped a bit under 40% and economic pessimism reigns…This helps explain why the House still seems quite winnable for Democrats despite their significant recent setbacks in redistricting. Republicans have on balance improved their position on the House map, but not yet in such a way that they could reasonably be expected to defend the House majority in the event of a 2018-style Democratic performance (or a performance that is still strong for Democrats but not as strong)…Republicans, however, could defend the House if the environment is more like 2022, when they won the majority, but not by much.”

Rep. Ro Khana outlines “AI for the People: A manifesto for an AI revolution that works for the many, not just the billionaires” at The Nation: “The AI revolution is destined to transform human society in ways that most of us cannot begin to fathom. The changes to come will be every bit as daunting as what the world saw in the industrial and digital revolutions. Yet our policymakers are ill-prepared—and, in the case of our president, dramatically unwilling—to ensure that these changes benefit everyone rather than a tiny cabal of hyper-wealthy tech oligarchs…To meet this challenge, we must develop a new social contract that begins with the basic premise that artificial intelligence must serve humanity, not the bottom line of a billionaire class that seeks to become a trillionaire class at our expense. We cannot allow technological overlords to build a society where AI “progress” is defined by their wealth rather than by our democracy…I make this argument as a member of Congress who represents Silicon Valley, the home of companies with more than $18 trillion in market capitalization—more than one-quarter of the entire US stock market—and five that are worth more than $1 trillion each. I know tech billionaires, I know the people who are benefiting from the AI revolution’s massive upward redistribution of wealth, and I know that more than a few of them believe they have a divine right to lead and rule. But that cannot be our future…We need to tax extreme wealth in order to meet human needs, which is why I support the proposed onetime 5 percent wealth tax on California billionaires (while not taxing voting shares or illiquid gains) and have proposed federal legislation to raise $4.7 trillion in revenue by taxing billionaires and another $2 trillion by making corporations pay their fair share.” More here.