Some messaging points from Frank O’Brien’s “Progressives: We Have to Drive Efforts to Confront the Working Class Disconnect” at progressivesonmessage.substack.com:  “People living paycheck to paycheck and feeling unheard and unseen by many Democrats aren’t wrong. In November, their frustration boiled over triggered by inflation….No messaging shift will work unless Democrats back it up with action. We must push for an economic populist agenda and against policies that stack the deck against hard-working people….We need Democrats who can give voice to the needs and aspirations of people struggling with economic uncertainty as easily as they represent people worried about climate change or the spread of authoritarianism. And they need to talk about economic hardship in a much more visceral, emotional way….We have to advance steps that don’t ask people to wait around for years before feeling the impact. And we have to aggressively sell that agenda….We didn’t lose by standing with trans kids dealing with outrageous harassment and heartbreak. We lost because we didn’t demonstrate the same kind of empathy and concern for working-class families worried sick about how to pay their bills, feed their family and carve out a brighter future for their children….Sure, standing up for peoples’ rights doesn’t mean taking the bait every time our opponents try to draw us into crazy conversations.”

At Roll Call, Daniela Altimari, Mary Ellen McIntire and Niels Lesniewski share some insights from recent polling, including “A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday brought bleak news for congressional Democrats: Just 21 percent of voters approve of the way they are doing their jobs. Democratic lawmakers are underwater even with their own base, notching a 49 percent disapproval rating among registered partisans….Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are enjoying a honeymoon of sorts, the Quinnipiac survey found. In the early days of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the GOP governing trifecta, 40 percent of voters give Republicans in Congress positive marks. Among Republicans, that number shoots up to 79 percent….Democrats in Congress have been here before. They endured a shellacking in the 2010 midterms and saw Republicans win full control of Washington in 2016. But since March 2009, when Quinnipiac first asked this question, their job approval rating has never dipped this low….The former leader of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party [Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin] released a blueprint this week for fighting Trump and regaining momentum. The plan relies heavily on winning back working-class voters by painting the president as an out-of-touch advocate for the ultra-rich.”

“Post-mortems of Democrats’ performance consistently referenced a political realignment in U.S. politics, which included a rightward shift in voting patterns, notably among working-class men of all demographics,” Tanner Stening writes in “Can progressives and moderates bridge the growing divide in the Democratic Party?” at Northeastern Global News. ” That shift is certain to have an effect on the losing party. Looking at global patterns, Johnson says that center-left parties generally slide further to the right as right-wing parties do well in elections….“I imagine they will primarily focus on economic issues and specific federal programs and be wary of focusing on the sorts of dramatic proposals or social issues with which the party’s progressive wing is associated,” she says…. But there is also the danger in overstating the Republican victories in 2024, says Costas Panagopoulos, distinguished professor of political science at Northeastern and co-author of “Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era.”….Panagopoulos and Beauchamp note that the momentum swings over the last several cycles still point to a narrowly divided electorate — and a sense that “anything can happen” over the next four years….In the 22 midterm elections from 1934 to 2018, the incumbent’s party lost 28 House seats and four Senate seats on average, data shows. Should the Democrats perform well in the midterms, it will help them build back a coalition capable of challenging the Republicans in 2028.”

In “To stop Trump, Democrats must reinvent themselves,” at The Hill, Will Marshall writes “Democrats, yoked to the status quo, are extraordinarily unpopular. Less than a third of Americans view the party favorably, while 57 percent disapprove. Independents are even more likely to express negative views. During the Biden years, Republicans also erased the Democrats’ longstanding advantage in party registration….Progressive activists nonetheless are pressuring party leaders to make a show of resisting the Trump-Elon Musk blitzkrieg on the federal government. This is tricky: Democrats are duty-bound to speak out against Trump’s unconstitutional usurpation of legislative power. But they must also avoid falling into the trap of defending a federal bureaucracy most Americans believe is badly broken….   The same risk applies to other key issues voters trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle — what to do about the economy, immigration, crime, energy and climate, schools and cultural friction around race and gender….Non-college voters far outnumber college grads. That’s why the Democratic coalition is shrinking and retracting into its urban bastions, conceding vast swaths of the country to Trump and the Republicans. Trump won 31 states last year, to Kamala Harris’s 19….Democrats should forge a new agenda for economic and social reform that puts ordinary working Americans first….They don’t want handouts; they want abundant economic growth and opportunity that expands the middle class, not the upper class. They want policies that are pro-worker and pro-business, reward hard work, support stable families, encourage entrepreneurial risk-taking and keep America on the cutting edge of innovation.”