John Fritze reports that the “Supreme Court rejects Trump’s plan to limit mail-in voting in midterms” at CNN Politics: “The Supreme Court on Monday rejected President Donald Trump’s controversial plan to change how mail ballots are sent to voters across the country, rebuffing a proposal that election officials warned would have had catastrophic consequences if allowed to take effect for this year’s midterms…In one of the most significant cases to appear on the court’s quick-turn docket in years, a majority of the justices blocked the procedure that would have given the US Postal Service the unprecedented power to withhold potentially millions of mail ballots. Even some GOP election officials cautioned that the proposal could lead to chaos and mass disenfranchisement…The court said that the administration “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge” but offered little explanation in its three-sentence, unsigned order. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented…The decision is a significant loss for the president, who for years has railed against mail voting with false allegations of extensive fraud, while continuing to vote by mail himself…The administration had framed its proposal as a “modest” change to postal regulations intended to protect against that alleged fraud. Trump’s critics, however, described the maneuver as an unconstitutional power grab that the US Postal Service wasn’t even fully prepared to carry out.” More here.

The editors of Jacobin present a “Report: The Working-Class Vote Is Not Lost.” They write “In an extensive new study supported by Jacobin, more than 40,000 voters evaluated nearly 800,000 candidate profiles. The results show how progressives could rebuild their working-class support…A new survey experiment from the Center for Working-Class Politics and Joan C. Williams finds that a six-part formula can lift Democrats’ working-class vote share by nearly 11 points. It also adds nearly 8 points among the party’s affluent, college-educated base. More than 40,000 respondents evaluated nearly 800,000 hypothetical candidate profiles, making the study one of the largest of its kind. The project was supported by Jacobin and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. The formula boils down to two imperatives: lead with working-class economics and connect with working-class values…Earlier this summer, Jared Abbott of the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) and Joan C. Williams of the Equality Action Center (EAC) released “The Left’s Coalition Crisis,” a study of working-class and college-educated voters that showed how Democrats could hone their policy messaging to win back working-class voters without losing their college-educated base…Their second study, produced by Jacobin and fielded between April and June 2026, moves beyond testing messages in isolation and puts voters in a virtual voting booth. Respondents worked through a series of head-to-head matchups and chose which candidate they would vote for, or neither. Because every trait — demographics, class background, rhetoric, issue priorities, and economic and cultural positions — was assigned at random, the researchers can isolate how much each one moves the vote. The design also does something surveys rarely do: every matchup pits a complete Democratic candidate against a completeRepublican one. Since party identification decides the large majority of votes, building partisanship into the experiment makes the estimates far more realistic, and more conservative, than those of most studies of this kind…The result is the Working-Class Win-O-Meter: a data-driven road map for winning back working-class voters, accompanied by a candidate tool kit and an online tool to allow people to better dig into our results.” More here.

In his “Exclusive/Researchers probe how Democrats could win working-class voters,” David Weigel reports at Semafor: “Democrats need to employ more populist rhetoric, run candidates perceived as non-elite, and steer away from progressive rhetoric like “abolish ICE” if they want to capture more working-class voters in future elections, according to new data shared first with Semafor…Researchers at the Center for Working-Class Politics talked to 40,000 adults from April to June to determine how Democrats can win more working-class voters without compromising other support…The strategy should also include leading with “working-class economics” and explicitly prioritizing members of the working class, the research found. Working-class voters moved away from Democrats if the candidates endorsed defunding police (by 5.7 points), letting transgender girls play girls sports (by 5.6 points), or gun control (4 points)…These voters were interested in economic populism, but a candidate’s background couldn’t overwhelm cultural concerns: On those, said Jared Abbott, the center’s director, “it’s better for you to say something that actually connects with those voters and that you agree with than to say nothing.”

In “Instead of a working-class reckoning, Democrats got the DSA | Opinion,” Ruy Teixeira writes at USA Today: “Democrats’ catastrophic 2024 defeat exposed a yawning gap between the cultural and policy priorities of a party dominated by liberal professionals and the priorities of the median working-class voter. The logical response was to close that gap and bring the party back toward the voters it was losing…There was a brief moment right after the 2024 election when a real reckoning seemed possible. That didn’t last. #Resistance fever gripped the party, the usual suspects fought off any revision of party positions, and momentum shifted to the energized progressive left instead…The trend has only accelerated. Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 New York City mayoral win kicked off a surge of Democratic Socialists of America primary victories that continued through the 2026 midterm primaries. Most notably, Mamdani and the DSA backed three Democratic candidates for New York City House seats – Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander and Claire Valdez – and all three won, including Chevalier’s ouster of Adriano Espaillat, the sitting chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Given how deep-blue these districts are, all three are all but certain to win in November…The wave kept building. Chris Rabb won the Democratic nomination for a Philadelphia House seat, Melat Kiros ousted a 30-year incumbent for a Denver seat, and Donavan McKinney knocked off a sitting Michigan congressman for a Detroit-area seat. All three districts are safe blue seats. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination, and Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic nomination for DC mayor – all but guaranteeing she becomes the city’s first democratic socialist mayor…These are remarkable developments. But do they mean DSA is about to “take over” the Democratic Party? I don’t think so. What they do mean is a serious hit to Democrats’ ability to rehabilitate their image and win back working-class voters…Start with the takeover question. DSA just hit 120,000 members, making it the largest socialist organization in American history. But it’s a big country. To match the Debs-era Socialist Party’s membership on a per capita basis, DSA would need closer to 400,000.” More here.