In most of the recent polls, Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke is running behind in his quest to win a U.S. Senate seat from incumbent Republican Ted Cruz. But, if O’Rourke wins next Tuesday, much of the credit will go to his unprecedented Facebook messaging. Alexis C. Madrigal explains at The Atlantic:

Through October 20, O’Rourke alone had spent $5.4 million advertising on the platform, according to Facebook’s Ad Archive Report. J. B. Pritzker, Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo, Claire McCaskill, and Heidi Heitkamp had spent $5.5 million total. O’Rourke’s opponent, Senator Ted Cruz, had spent only $427,000 on Facebook, about 1/13th as much as O’Rourke…Much of O’Rourke’s Facebook-ad buy seems to be going toward short videos of the candidate talking to crowds or directly to the camera.

Not that O’Rourke is neglecting TV and Google, as Madrigal notes:

The two Texas Senate hopefuls are relatively close in spending on television ads. While O’Rourke had spent more than $15 million on television ads through mid-October, Cruz and associated pacs had spent $12 million and were on pace to nearly catch up there. O’Rourke has also spent $1.3 million on Google ads, also top among all candidates, though by a much narrower margin (Rick Scott has spent more than $1 million). Cruz has spent little on Google—$181,000—according to the company’s political transparency report.

But O’Rourke’s online campaign has already proven to be a tremendous success in terms of fund-raising, and “his unexpected fund-raising success—pulling in $62 million through September 30—has catapulted the relatively unknown congressman from El Paso onto the national stage.”

Perhaps, even more importantly, O’Rourke’s campaign has also invested heavily in assembling a first-rate video production team.

But O’Rourke’s own video team has proved able to get and recognize hot footage, according to Kasra Shokat, a digital-media strategist at the consultancy Winning Mark. “He has invested a ton of infrastructure that can turn around and produce video on a dime and get those up quickly,” Shokat said. “That’s the kind of engaging content that works really well.”…Shokat said he’s begun to recommend that campaigns, especially those of charismatic talkers, hire full-time video help to create content.

Through widespread re-postings of his diverse videos, “it’s looking like O’Rourke’s total spending on Facebook has generated into the hundreds of millions of impressions,” notes Madrigal. It seems a wise bet. When a political campaign has a charismatic candidate, who is an underdog, maximizing face-time can only help.

“Facebook remains the primary platform for most Americans,” report Aaron Smith and Monica Anderson at pewinternet.org. “Roughly two-thirds of U.S. adults (68%) now report that they are Facebook users, and roughly three-quarters of those users access Facebook on a daily basis. With the exception of those 65 and older, a majority of Americans across a wide range of demographic groups now use Facebook.”

“O’Rourke’s remarkable fund-raising might not be duplicative by candidates with less star power or in less contentious races, “warns Madrigal. “But if O’Rourke’s Facebook-heavy campaign surprises, even with a closer-than-expected loss, his approach could be a blueprint for state-level candidates devoting more resources to the platform.”

Yesterday J.P. Green noted an article in Campaigns & Elections underscoring the high regard Repubican party political operatives have for Facebook as a media outlet for their ads — despite the efforts of Sen. John Thune (R-SD) to discredit Facebook as tainted by liberal bias.
But Thune’s record suggests more than a little hypocrisy, as Steve Benen noted at Maddowblog:

…John Thune says he’s concerned about Facebook’s “culture” and the integrity of its mission statement, but again, how in the world is that any of his business? Isn’t the Republican model based on the idea that the free market should decide and if online consumers don’t like Facebook’s “culture,” we can take our clicks elsewhere?
But even more striking still is Thune’s uniquely weak position. When the South Dakota Republican became Congress’ leading opponent of net neutrality, Thune made the case that any political interference in how the Internet operates is inherently unacceptable.
Worse, in 2007, Thune railed against the “Fairness Doctrine,” arguing at the time, “I know the hair stands up on the back of my neck when I hear government officials offering to regulate the news media and talk radio to ensure fairness. I think most Americans have the same reaction.”

For the sake of argument, so what if Facebook had more “liiberal” content? Fox News, Breitbart and the Drudge Report display relentless conservative bias every day, and no Senators are trying to intimidate them to change their polices to reflect a more liberal point of view. Not all media has to be nonpartisan.
But Facebook has 1.6 billion “users,” and dwarfs all other websites in some key metrics that measure influence, which explain Thune’s meddling.
In reality, however, the political content of Facebook is mostly determined by the public, as its “users” choose which articles, videos and other content to share with their FB friends. It’s different for every user, from moment to moment. Liberals see mostly liberal content, and the same principle applies for both conservatives and moderates. Facebook does provide a powerful forum for peer-to-peer political education. But everyone can choose what to read and view and what to ignore, and that includes content spotlighted by Facebook’s administrators and staff.
But Brian Fung’s Washington Post article, “Facebook is making some big changes to Trending Topics, responding to conservatives” raises a disturbing possibility that facebook is caving to political pressure. As Fung reports,

Facebook said Monday it will stop relying as much on other news outlets to inform what goes into its Trending Topics section — a part of Facebook’s website that despite its small size has grown into a national political controversy amid accusations that the social network is stifling conservative voices on its platform.
Under the change, Facebook will discontinue the algorithmic analysis of media organizations’ websites and digital news feeds that partly determines which stories should be included in Trending Topics. Also being thrown out is a list of 1,000 journalism outlets that currently helps Facebook’s curators evaluate and describe the newsworthiness of potential topics, as well as a more exclusive list of 10 news sites that includes BuzzFeed News, the Guardian, the New York Times and The Washington Post.
…Facebook’s policy change Monday appears to be aimed at defusing the palpable tension between it and Republicans outraged over reports that Facebook’s Trending Topics could be biased against conservatives. Facebook’s announcement ending the scraping of news sites and RSS feeds for Trending Topics came in a response to Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the top Republican on the powerful Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. Thune demanded on May 10 that Facebook answer a series of questions in light of the mounting outcry over the perceived bias.

Facebook has reponded that “Suppressing political content or preventing people from seeing what matters most to them is directly contrary to our mission and our business objectives.” But the changes regarding the selection of ‘Trending Topics” content suggest otherwise.
Most Facebook users will probably not notice much change in political slant and tone. That will still be largely determined by user posts. But the possibility that Facebook’s content policy can be influenced by political intimidation, especially from the politician who leads the opposition to net neurtrality, is disturbing.

In “Republican Conundrum: Working-Class Base, Plutocratic Agenda,” Harold Meyerson writes at The American Prospect: “The anxiety among Republican elected officials is palpable, as well it should be…In the House, a number of their representatives from swing districts, confronted with the prospect of their constituents losing their health insurance on January 1, are still trying to craft some kind of legislation that both preserves government health insurance programs (required if they’re to be re-elected) and diminishes government health insurance programs (required to accord with basic Republican ideology). That this can’t be done merely confirms the Republican inability, after a decade and a half, to craft an alternative to the Affordable Care Act…A separate discharge petition, which reached the required number of 218 signatures via the backing of all House Democrats and a smattering of Republicans, compelled a House vote, also last Thursday, on a measure to restore the collective-bargaining rights of roughly one million federal employees, which President Trump had abolished by executive order, despite the ongoing contracts the government had with the workers’ unions. The measure passed by a 231-to-195-vote margin, with 20 House Republicans joining all House Democrats in the majority…Trump had justified the withdrawal of those rights by stating that unionization could impede work related to national security. No one actually believed that the workers who mop the floors in federal office buildings—the very kind of workers who lost their bargaining rights due to Trump’s orders—engage in work that would compromise national security if it’s unionized; indeed, workers at agencies that actually are related to national security, like the CIA, have always been expressly forbidden from unionizing.” More here.

Every country is unique. But what happens in the U.K. is of more than casual interest to American political analysts, when it comes to figuring out trends among working class voters. So, check out “English voters scatter from the center, strengthening extremes” by Mark Sappenfield, who writes at the Christian Science Monitor: “Britain is perched on the precipice of historic political upheaval. Half of Britons want “radical change,” according to a November poll by Ipsos. In its “Shattered Britain” study, opinion research firm More in Common says many British voters have reached a “roll the dice” moment. For a nation where the traditional political order – dominated by the Conservatives and Labour – has had the constancy of the cliffs of Dover, everything appears chaotically uncertain…For now, the Labour government retains a large majority in Parliament, thanks to its 2024 landslide election victory. But the speed of the party’s collapse in the polls is unprecedented, political scientists say. Its support among voters now sits at 18%, Ipsos finds…The biggest winner so far has been the far-right Reform UK Party, which is polling at 33%. But the story of England’s political transformation goes deeper. For the first time ever, five parties are polling at over 10%, with a sixth trying to elbow its way in. It speaks to a crumbling of the old order as voting blocs that have held firm for generations fracture into new configurations, desperately seeking change…The picture is broadly similar across the United Kingdom, but England’s political dynamics are distinct from those of the U.K.’s other nations, due to its lack of separatist parties such as Plaid Cymru in Wales and the Scottish National Party. Moreover, the rise of English nationalism points to a uniquely English element of these political trends…Similarly, Britain’s challenges are similar to those seen across Europe: a stagnant economy, rising stress on social services, and growing public debt. But Britain has a unique added variable: Brexit, which took effect just as the COVID-19 pandemic was beginning to wreak havoc on the world economy. Combine that with a puzzling and persisting drop in worker productivity, and the country has never recovered…Previous Conservative governments responded with cuts and austerity. The 2024 election was more a resounding rejection of that path than a true win for Labour, political experts argue. Now, Labour is largely treading water hoping for economic growth – which hasn’t come – and adopting tough anti-immigrant policies to try to attract centrist voters…But that appears to be part of the problem. Is Labour is trying to win over voters who are disappearing?”

From “Pushing Democrats to move beyond resistance: Rural Americans — and a Rural New Deal — could be the key to a new wave of economic populism” by Christopher D. Cook at Salon: “Although Donald Trump won a whopping 63% of rural American voters in the 2024 presidential election — up from 60% in 2020 — his approval ratings in the countryside are plunging amid the economic chaos and uncertainty caused by his tariffs, rising food prices and other concerns. Farmers are suffering huge losses even as their costs keep rising, and farm bankruptcies have increased by 56% from 2024…Working-class Americans, another key source of Trump’s presidency, are struggling under the weight of soaring costs, layoffs and manufacturing job losses, and his evisceration of worker protections. Unemployment keeps rising, now at its highest since September 2021 amid the Covid-19 meltdown. Rural coal miners, many of whom voted for Trump, protested the president recently for failing to enforce black lung protections even as more (and increasingly younger) miners die from the disease. Many rural Trump voters have expressed buyer’s remorse over the Department of Government Efficiency gutting protections for public lands, parks, wildlife and other conservation enforcement…Could these working-class and rural Americans be the key to toppling Trump’s reign of destruction — and delivering economic justice and equity? Could a movement of progressive populists, independents and rural communities go “beyond resistance” and help spur a new wave of economic populism?…there is surging evidence that voters are restless and hankering for mold-busting politics offering bold populist messages and discarding the party establishment’s dreary attachment to corporate power and the status quo…At the “Beyond Resistance” launch, Dustin Guastella, research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics, urged for a meaningful reconnection with rural and working-class America. “A lot of union and working-class voters who’ve drifted toward Trump won’t be won back by a message of resistance and how evil Trump is,” he said. Rural and working-class voters “want a better economic system that values the work they do.”

“House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Sunday he remains confident that Congress will extend expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits despite persistent opposition from Republican,” Jacob Wendler reports in “Hakeem Jeffries says Obamacare subsidy extension ‘will pass with a bipartisan majority‘” at Politico. “In a Sunday morning interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on “This Week,” Jeffries dismissed Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s remarks that a clean three-year extension of the credits would be dead on arrival in the Senate, saying Thune “is not serious about protecting the health care of the American people.”…“It will pass, with a bipartisan majority, and then that will put the pressure on John Thune and Senate Republicans to actually do the right thing by the American people: pass a straightforward extension of the Affordable Care Act tax credits so we can keep health care affordable for tens of millions of Americans who deserve to be able to go see a doctor when they need one,” Jeffries said…“As Democrats, we’re promising to focus relentlessly on driving down the high cost of living, to make life more affordable for everyday Americans, and to fix our broken health care system, which Republicans have been damaging in an extraordinary way throughout the year, including by enacting the largest cut to Medicaid in American history,” he said.”

From “Americans’ Social Media Use 2025” at Pew Research:

Even as debates continue about the role of social media in our country, including on censorship and its impact on youth, Americans use a range of online platforms, and many do so daily.

Which online platforms do Americans most commonly use?

YouTube and Facebook remain the most widely used online platforms. The vast majority of U.S. adults (84%) say they ever use YouTube. Most Americans (71%) also report using Facebook. These findings are according to a Pew Research Center survey of 5,022 U.S. adults conducted Feb. 5-June 18, 2025.

Half of adults say they use Instagram, making it the only other platform in our survey used by at least 50% of Americans.

Smaller shares use the other sites and apps we asked about, such as TikTok(37%) and WhatsApp (32%). Somewhat fewer say the same of Reddit, Snapchatand X (formerly Twitter).

This year we also asked about three platforms that are used by about one-in-ten or fewer U.S. adults: Threads, Bluesky, and Truth Social.

Center studies also find that YouTube is the most widely used online platform among U.S. teens, like it is among U.S. adults.

The post also includes this chart:

More here. Toplines here and here.

CQ-Roll Call’s Daniela Altimari explains why “2026 could be breakout year for blue-collar Democratic women,” cross-posted here via the Las Vegas Sun:

WASHINGTON — On the campaign trail in a southwestern Arizona swing district, Democrat JoAnna Mendoza often recounts her hardscrabble upbringing.

She began working alongside her farmworker parents, clearing weeds from the cotton fields, when she was still in grade school. Her family relied on government aid and food banks. She joined the military at 17, partly as a way to escape poverty.

“I carry that struggle with me to this day,’’ said Mendoza, a 49-year-old single mother who is challenging Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani in the 6th District. “I have not forgotten my roots and there are a lot of folks out there like me who have very similar stories.’’

As Democrats chart a course out of the wilderness following steep 2024 losses, the party is counting on candidates from blue-collar backgrounds to win back working-class voters anxious about the high cost of living and angry at a political class they view as indifferent to their day-to-day difficulties.

In fact, brawny guys with progressive politics, anti-establishment swagger and a toughness born of adversity — not to mention an affinity for tattoos, beards and flannel — are having a moment in the run-up to the midterm elections.

But on the other side of the gender divide, Mendoza and a handful of Democratic female candidates also are building campaigns around economic populism rooted in humble origin stories and blue-collar backgrounds.

“You don’t have to have a beard in order to connect with voters,” said Jessica Mackler, the president of EMILY’s List, which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights. Voters, she added, are looking for “people who understand their lived experiences and are ready to fight back.”

A decisive demographic

Every election cycle has its coveted demographic: The 2018 midterms during Donald Trump’s first term saw suburban moderates power a blue wave that propelled a group of centrist women with national security backgrounds to victory.

This time, it’s working-class voters. Long a core Democratic constituency, they drifted to the right in 2016. The shift ramped up in 2024, when Trump received the backing of 66% of white voters without college degrees, according to an analysis of exit polls conducted by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

Trump also performed particularly well among men, winning 55 percent of the male vote compared with his 46 percent support among women, a study by the Pew Research Center found.

The blue-collar Democratic men running in some of the nation’s most competitive House and Senate races are trying to break the GOP’s hold on working-class voters by playing up their unvarnished gruffness and embracing populist policies rooted in their lived experience. Many of them are political outsiders who have shown an eagerness to buck their party’s leaders.

There’s Graham Platner, an oyster farmer from Maine who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and is waging a populist campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins. There’s Bob Brooks, who held a series of low-wage jobs – delivering pizzas, tending bar and working in a warehouse among them – before becoming a firefighter and launching a bid to unseat GOP Rep. Ryan Mackenzie in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. And there’s Nathan Sage, a former mechanic and Marine and Army veteran who grew up in a trailer park and is seeking the Senate seat Iowa Republican Joni Ernst is vacating.

Others who fit the mold include Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic who led a strike at the Kellogg’s cereal plant and is running as an independent against Nebraska Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, and former Secret Service agent Logan Forsythe, a Democrat seeking an open Senate seat in Kentucky, who picked tobacco at age 7 and taught himself to repair engines at 13.

“We’re in this moment where there’s obviously a kind of a hypermasculinity to a lot of the messaging,’’ said Jean Sinzdak, the associate director at the Center for American Women and Politics.

A message that resonates

Just like their male counterparts, this cycle’s cadre of Democratic blue-collar women are aiming for authenticity while pushing a message that the economy is stacked against working people.

Francesca Hong is a Wisconsin state representative, a single mother and a restaurant worker who’s campaigning for governor on a populist plank. Known for her outspoken, and occasionally profanity-laced, social media posts, Hong said she’s running to “fix a rigged system that puts oligarchs over workers and small businesses.”

Across the state line in Minnesota, flight attendant, state representative and single mother Kaela Berg is striking a similar theme.

“I know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck, to worry about rent, to go through a global pandemic without health care, and to fight for my son in a school system stretched too thin,’’ Berg said in announcing House campaign for an open battleground Twin Cities district.

At a time of rising inflation and deep insecurity over the economy, such approaches are more likely to resonate with voters, Sinzdak said.

“Women from working-class backgrounds really speak to a particular set of voters in a big way, because they can speak authentically about their experience [and] their economic vision,” Sinzdak said.

And women are often the ones handling household budgets and arranging care for children and aging parents, “so they really understand these financial pressures,’’ Mackler said.

Or, as Mendoza puts it, “they’re pissed, and they’re scared, and they’re stressed out.”

Former Rep. Deb Haaland, who served as Joe Biden’s Interior secretary and is now running for governor of New Mexico, said economic concerns are front and center for voters.

“Affordability is one of the big issues, with all the tariffs and the price of groceries really going up,’’ she said. “I understand what it’s like for people when they say it’s hard to make ends meet. I understand what it’s like for them if they have to put groceries back at the checkout line because they don’t have the money to pay for them.”

Haaland is open about her own past economic struggles.

“I raised my kids as a single mom. I struggled to make ends meet. I know what it’s like to be on SNAP benefits, and I was able to give birth to my child because of Medicaid,’’ she said, adding that, at 64, she has yet to fully pay off her student loans.

Building their ranks

Working-class women remain underrepresented in Congress. But in recent years, two have found success, albeit from opposite points on the Democratic Party’s ideological spectrum: New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former bartender and server and an outspoken progressive, and Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, the co-owner of an auto repair shop and a political moderate.

Despite the growing prominence of working-class candidates, some Democrats say party leadership has been too cautious in their recruiting efforts — and too willing to reject those from unconventional backgrounds.

Democrats “do a lot of credentialing around who can raise the most money or what your networks are,’’ said Rebecca Cooke, a Democrat making her third attempt to flip a pivotal Wisconsin district currently held by Republican Derrick Van Orden, “when we should be asking what kind of candidates are most representative of the districts.

Cooke, who grew up on an Eau Claire dairy farm and paid for college by patching together tuition payments from Pell Grants and scholarships and holding multiple jobs, lamented the low numbers of candidates with blue-collar roots.

“Why don’t we have 50 candidates from working-class backgrounds?’’ she said. “We need more people who are going to stand up to the ultra-wealthy.”

In “Employers are failing to insure the working class – Medicaid cuts will leave them even more vulnerable“ at The Conversation, Sumit Agarwal explains, “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 7.8 million Americans across the U.S. will lose their coverage through Medicaid – the public program that provides health insurance to low-income families and individuals – under the multitrillion-dollar domestic policy package that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025…That includes 247,000 to 412,000 of my fellow residents of Michigan…Many of these people are working Americans who will lose Medicaid because of the onerous paperwork involved with the proposed work requirements…They won’t be able to get coverage in the Affordable Care Act Marketplaces after losing Medicaid. Premiums and out-of-pocket costs are likely to be too high for those making less than 100% to 138% of the federal poverty level who do not qualify for health insurance marketplace subsidies. Funding for this program is also under threat…And despite being employed, they also won’t be able to get health insurance through their employers because it is either too expensive or not offered to them. Researchers estimate that coverage losses will lead to thousands of medically preventable deaths across the country because people will be unable to access health care without insurance.”

From Greg Sargent’s  “Trump’s Threat to Jail Enemies Darkens amid Brutal New Poll Slide,” at The New Republic: “President Trump’s Justice Department is now criminally investigating James Comey and John Brennan, apparently in retaliation for their rolein the Russia probe. Trump vowed that they may “pay a price”—a direct threat to try to jail them on no basis whatsoever. Meanwhile, Trump is ramping up the paramilitary presence in Los Angeles. All this comes as Trump’s approval is at a low point in polling averages and a striking new Gallup survey finds him plummeting fast on immigration, a remarkable indication of deep underlying weakness. We think all this is related: Trump’s displays are meant to scam us into thinking he’s fearsome and strong—making political resistance appear futile—yet all the authoritarianism is causing public backlash, weakening him in polls further. We talked to Talking Points Memo editor-at-large David Kurtz, who’s been sharply dissecting Trump’s threats. He explains how deep the abuses are running at DOJ, how Trump’s authoritarianism is meant to mask political weakness, and why this toxic downward spiral portends worsening lawlessness to come. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.”

You know it’s getting rough for the Adminstration when even the Financial Times has a headline like “Donald Trump’s Maga base split over handling of Jeffrey Epstein files.” By all appearances, the Epstein mess may finally attract some bull dog reporting. Or you could check out “Now Trump Says Forget Jeffrey Epstein: He urges MAGA to give up a conspiracy tale that he and his allies promoted” by the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal. Journal.  Then there is “A Timeline of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s Relationship as It Draws Renewed Attention” by Rebecca Schneid at Time magazine and “Playbook: Trump’s Epstein headache isn’t going away” by  Adam Wren and Dasha Burns at Politico, who note, “At what should be the height of his political powers — having racked up signature wins in enacting his sprawling GOP megabill, bending U.S. allies to his will on defense spending, launching a successful and limited attack on Iran with no meaningful reprisals on U.S. forces — President Donald Trump is instead facing a fast-metastasizing MAGA rebellion over his administration’s handling of the files from the criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein…WHAT MAKES THIS TIME DIFFERENT?: To a degree we have truly not seen over the past decade of Trump as a national political figure, his movement seems genuinely fractured. The Epstein case is fundamentally different from past divisions inside MAGA because it undercuts Trump’s self-styled brand as a speaker of uncomfortable truths, a slayer of sacred cows and a tribune of the people. This isn’t just a policy or ideological disagreement like, say, the MAGA unease over the Iran strikes; this cuts to the heart of his very political identity.”

On the other hand, as Dan Friedman reports in “Stop Taking the Epstein Bait, Dems: Democrats don’t need conspiracy theories. There are more than enough real Trump scandals” at Mother Jones: “MAGA world is melting down over the Justice Department’s recent conclusion that Jeffrey Epstein had no client list or history of blackmail, and that he wasn’t murdered. But the right isn’t alone. Some influential Democrats and left-leaning pundits have latched onto the controversy, too—succumbing to the temptation of suggesting that these findings are part of some grand conspiracy to cover up Donald Trump’s ties to the late pedophile…Here is the problem: There is no real evidence that Epstein—who died in 2019 while jailed on charges that included sex trafficking of minors—possessed any information incriminating Trump…Each day offers new and urgent evidence of the president’s expanding record moral and professional failure. He just signed a bill that cuts a trillion dollars in Medicaid and boots millions from their health care. He has swarmed Los Angeles with ICE agents, Border Patrol, and military troops and has sent innocent men to a brutal prison in El Salvador, apparently for having tattoos…His ever-changing tariffs are screwing up the economy. He tried to steal the 2020 election, pardoned the rioters whose violent attack on the Capitol he incited, and is using the Justice Department to harass political foes. He has leveraged the power of his office to extract gifts and payments for himself and his family, including recently forcing Paramount to pay $16 million to the foundation behind his “future” library to settle a meritless lawsuit as it seeks federal approval for a merger…That’s a lot of real stuff to fault. But at the same time, unverified speculation on the left that Trump might have been involved in Epstein’s crimes is reaching a crescendo—distracting from Democratic efforts to highlight overt Trump wrongdoing in other matters.”

At The Nation, read “Resistance Is Not Enough. The Left Must Address the Grievances of the Working Class” by Anthony Flaccavento, author of Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up: Harnessing Real-World Experience for Transformative Change and cofounder of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative.: “The deluge of antidemocratic, generally inhumane actions taken by the Trump/Musk presidency are fulfilling our worst fears. So what should we do in response?…For most left-leaning activists, the answer is resistance. Resistance to Trump’s cabinet nominees; resistance to his mass deportations; resistance to Elon Musk’s ongoing evisceration of critical federal agencies. Team Trump’s destructive plans and actions cry out for resistance—in the streets, the courts, and anywhere else we might have impact. One example of the resistance platform is Indivisible’s “Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink.” The essence of their strategy is encapsulated in one short sentence: “For the next two years, ‘no’ is a complete sentence.” This is “a time for defense,” they advise, rather than “proposing our own policies.”…the left’s almost singular focus on defense—without offering an equally compelling vision that addresses the grievances of rural communities and working-class people—is a grave mistake. If we don’t make our commitment to an economy and politics that serves everyday people loud and clear, we will undermine efforts to fight Trump and further solidify the estrangement of the working class. Our outrage and resistance must encompass the ongoing betrayal of farmers, unions, and workers and US manufacturers and small businesses…As New York Times reporters summarized their conversations with Black and Latino voters who went for Trump in 2024, “Democrats’ dire warnings about threats to democracy felt far less compelling compared with the urgency of their own struggles to pay the rent.” Pushed by some of the most prominent consultants and pundits on the left, that was an unforced error that may have cost Kamala Harris the election. We cannot afford to make that mistake again…the Trump/Musk onslaught of anti-worker, anti-farmer, pro-corporate actions are an opportunity to offer a plan of our own to unrig the system most Americans hate…We can begin by lifting up some of the Democrats who won in Trump-leaning districts, emphasizing their pro-worker or pro-farmer positions and pledges to confront corporate power. From Chris Deluzio in western Pennsylvania to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in rural Washington, to Pat Ryan in New York’s Hudson Valley, the Democratic tent includes people who know that fighting for the little guy against Wall Street’s housing grab or for farmers’ rights over John Deere’s profits is both the right policy and a winning politics…As Representative Khanna put it in a recent New York Times op-ed, “The alternative to Mr. Trump cannot be a defense of institutions as they are. We need to stand for national renewal driven not by nostalgia for some golden past or simplistic anti-system slogans, but by offering transformative solutions to deliver future prosperity for all Americans, rekindling our bonds as citizens and healing our divides in the process.”

Galen Druke of 538/ABC News conducted a discussion with Washington Post data scientist Lenny Bronner and New York Times polling editor Ruth Igielnik on the topic, “Democrats Aren’t Popular. What Should They Do about it?” It went like this:

Former Rep. Tim Ryan has an article worth reading at MSNBC.com, “The right way for Democrats to communicate about Trump,” subtitled “If Democrats want to reach working class voters, they must acknowledge, empathize and recapture the narrative from Donald Trump.” As Ryan observes, “When I reflect on November’s election, two glaring omissions are missing from the Democratic Party’s messaging: acknowledgment and empathy. The lesson Democrats should take away from Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump is the importance of meeting people where they are emotionally. If Democrats don’t do that, their message isn’t going to stick…Democrats should have acknowledged the tough spot a lot of Americans were in. They should have shown voters they’re empathetic. But we also can’t just look in the past and talk about what the Democratic Party should have done. Democrats in Congress have a real opportunity to right that ship and show voters what the party really stands for… There’s an analog element to this, members should be holding town hall meetings as often as they can. They need to get on the local news. It’s time to start building the case for the American people. But that doesn’t mean Democrats should run around with hair on fire over every issue…Don’t take the bait on everything coming out of this White House. Sometimes the smartest strategy is just to play possum. As Democratic strategist James Carville recently suggested in a guest essay for the New York Times, maybe the most daring political maneuver Democrats could implement right now is to “roll over and play dead.”

How would you rate Democrats response to Trump’s speech Tuesday night? It was a tough call, and they ended up playing it safe, maybe a bit too safe. Democratic Rep. Al Green (TX-9 ) was removed from the SOTU for standing up and protesting Medicaid cuts early on during Trump’s speech. There were a few other Democratic walk-outs, but most Democratic members just sat there and grumbled, sometimes loud enough to be heard. It was the “We must maintain decorum and civility” strategy, with some Democratic members waving little signs with protest messages that looked more like those personal fans people used to use when it got hot in D.C., back before air conditioning. That may have been the right strategy. People forget all about the last SOTU within a few days after it is delivered. Why risk anything, when no one cares that much, so shortly after the event? Then there is the strategic priciple, “When your adversary is making himself look bad, get out of the way.” When your political opponent is delivering a speech that history books will characterize as drenched with bile, pique and resentment, why turn a two-day story into a week of coverage that could backfire? But, what if all the Democrats walked out on cue, right after a personal insult directed their way?  We’ll never know if that would have been a better strategy. But it seems like a question worth considering before the next SOTU. There is something to be said for a dignified walk-out, when confronted with personal insults. Nothing wrong with modeling civility, while those across the aisle howl like demented cheerleaders, and their leader finishes his sour speech to a half-empty hall. That’s not such a bad look for Democrats either.

As we all watch the ongoing assault on the federal government, I keep asking myself: “Did Trump really campaign on this?” I looked into it at New York, and I think this should be a question Democrats ask regularly.

Amid the chaos of federal hiring freezes, grant freezes, the wild DOGE effort to arbitrarily slash federal payrolls and cancel programs and contracts, and congressional Republican efforts to cut trillions of dollars in spending to pay for tax cuts, you frequently hear that Americans are getting what they said they wanted in November. Even if you laugh, which you almost have to do, at Donald Trump’s absurd claims of an incredible, unprecedented landslide victory and an unlimited mandate to do anything he wants, laws be damned, there remains an underlying sense that he told voters what he’d do and they either supported it or weren’t paying attention.

But that’s just it: Trump didn’t do that. Yes, he promised the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, pledged to melt down the polar caps with a “drill, baby, drill” energy policy, and made it pretty clear any sort of anti-discrimination efforts are as doomed as U.S. support for Ukraine. Trump told voters a lot of things; some of it was dead serious, and other bits were probably for entertainment value. But he did not promise a slash-and-burn austerity budget and a radically downsized federal government. And Trump certainly didn’t reveal that he would give Elon Musk, his campaign’s chief funder, personal power to take over federal agencies and terrorize their personnel, mugging and laughing like a cartoon villain the whole time.

It wasn’t in the Trump campaign platform

There were 20 planks in the Trump-Vance 2024 campaign platform. None of them involved gutting the federal budget and firing tens or hundreds of thousands of federal employees.

• Plank No. 6 promises “large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!” but says nothing about the high-end and corporate tax cuts Trump is now pushing or, even more crucially, how to pay for them.

• Plank No. 9 pledges to “end the weaponization of the government against the American people” (a pretty clear hint that the new administration regards Trump supporters and only Trump supporters as “the American people”). Perhaps that suggests forced turnover in the Department of Justice, but nowhere else.

• Plank No. 15 pledges to “cancel the electric car mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations,” but again, this is a million miles away from reductions across federal agencies.

• Plank No. 16 calls for ending “federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” Instead of this very specific pledge, we’re getting a governmentwide demolition of anything related to gender or race and the firing of any employees who dare utter a list of ideologically forbidden words.

There’s nothing in the platform remotely resembling DOGE, the Office of Management and Budget’s effort to wrest the spending power away from Congress, or the radical shifts in resource allocations necessary to implement a radical federal budget by Congress.

It wasn’t in the RNC platform, either

Was there anything like what we are now seeing in the (more detailed) Republican National Convention platform? There is this one sentence in the section on inflation: “Republicans will immediately stabilize the Economy by slashing wasteful Government spending and promoting Economic Growth.” Okay, that’s in the ballpark, but every candidate in either party opposes “waste.” That doesn’t suggest the arbitrary $2 trillion savings goal Musk has advanced or the $1.5 to $2 trillion of spending cuts contained in the draft House budget resolution under consideration right now. For the most part, the party platform (and Trump’s campaign rhetoric) suggests that “unleashing” energy production is the real key to controlling inflation and growing the economy. And the document includes both a variety of new spending initiatives and redundant promises to leave Social Security and Medicare alone (Medicaid is not mentioned in either the campaign or party platforms).

Trump didn’t talk about it on the trail

How about Trump’s own utterances? His acceptance speech in Milwaukee was a 90-minute presentation of his case for returning to the White House. Again, there was no real hint that massive federal spending cuts would be deployed to deal with inflation or reduce budget deficits; instead, Trump plainly said wildly increased energy production would slay inflation and that tax cuts would pay for themselves through increased growth. In accordance with his focus on energy policy, Trump did make one specific spending cut promise: “They’ve spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the Green New Scam. It’s a scam … And all of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, we will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams and we will not allow it to be spent on the meaningless Green New scam ideas.” So yes, he did warn us about that, though again, there was no sense that federal spending was at crisis levels requiring radical austerity budgeting; it was more a matter of spending being directed to ideologically unacceptable goals.

Trump and his campaign spilled many millions of words via speeches, ads, and surrogate appearances without giving any real indication that a pre-Trump tea-party-style attack on federal spending, programs, and personnel was in the offing. But you know who did provide some pretty clear warning signs of the chaos to come? The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint.

Decimating the federal government is a Project 2025 plan

One of the four major “promises” addressed in Project 2025’s main report (Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise) is “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.” The foreword to this document argues for executive-branch usurpation of congressional authority over federal spending with this justification of power grabs to come: “The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its turf.”

Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, penned a chapter on the office of the president that treats as paramount the goal to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” by any means possible. A subsequent chapter on “Managing the Bureaucracy” calls bluntly for an end to the civil-service system as we have known it, and other chapters envision radical reductions in federal involvement in domestic-governance areas ranging from education to housing to transportation. The entire document faithfully reflects a pre-Trump conservative austerity agenda as old as the original opposition to the New Deal and as recent as George W. Bush’s and Paul Ryan’s assaults on entitlement programs. But it’s not what Trump campaigned on; indeed, he repeatedly disclaimed any knowledge of or agreement with Project 2025’s work, notably in this July 2024 Truth Social post:

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Yet a Politico analysis of early Trump executive orders found 37 separate Project 2025 recommendations embedded in them, some lifting language directly from its published recommendations.

Much of what the Trump administration is doing right now is an amalgam of Project 2025’s goals achieved initially through the patented chaos tactics of Elon Musk and subsequently by Trump appointees under Russ Vought’s direction. If it can get its act together, the Republican-controlled Congress is expected to rubber-stamp legislation that decimates the federal government in part to finance tax cuts and in part for the sheer ideological hell of it. Some Trump voters may be happy with this massive bait-and-switch. But for others, it will come as a nasty surprise.

“The Democratic Party begins 2025 with several looming questions about its future,” Stephen Fowler writes in “After major 2024 defeats, the Democratic Party searches for a new direction” at apr.org. “Among them: how to recover from losing the White House and the Senate, in an election that saw Democrats lose ground across nearly every demographic group; who will lead its national party apparatus; and how it will handle President-elect Donald Trump’s second term….But as Trump prepares to retake the White House Monday, Democratic leaders have highlighted other results that show November’s losses are not fatal….For example, many down-ballot Democrats outperformed the top of the ticket in competitive races, with the party managing to gain one seat in the House. That shrunk the margin for an already-tight GOP majority that struggled with infighting during the last Congress….Democrats also saw record fundraising last year, and point to years of behind-the-scenes investment in voter data and campaign resources that they say has created a more coordinated and robust party infrastructure for future election cycles….At an in-person forum in Detroit Thursday, candidates seeking to help run the DNC largely agreed on the path forward for Democrats to regain power and the trust of voters who stayed home or supported Trump: year-round organizing efforts, more resources for state and local parties and spreading the Democratic message beyond traditional and friendly media sources.”

In “Democrats’ future crisis: The biggest states that back them are shrinking” Jonathan J. Cooper reports at AP, via pbs.org: “With America’s population shifting to the South, political influence is seeping from reliably Democratic states to areas controlled by Republicans. Coming out of a presidential election where they lost all seven swing states, Democrats are facing a demographic challenge that could reduce their path to winning the U.S. House of Representatives or the White House for the long term….If current trends hold through the 2030 census, states that voted for Vice President Kamala Harris will lose around a dozen House seats — and Electoral College votes — to states that voted for President-elect Donald Trump. The Democratic path to 270 Electoral College votes, the minimum needed to win the presidency, will get much narrower….“At the end of the day, Democrats have to be able to win in the South or compete in the South” if they want to control the levers of government, said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Otherwise, it’s a really uphill battle every time.”….The Brennan Center, which is left-leaning, projects Democratic states in 2024 would lose 12 seats in the next census. The right-leaning American Redistricting Project forecasts a similar blue-to-red shift but pegged the loss at 11 seats, not 12.”

Cooper continues, “To control the White House, House or Senate, Democrats will likely need to do better in the three southern swing states. Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina lean conservative but have elected Democrats at a statewide level….Alternatively, they could try to achieve their long-elusive goal of turning Texas blue or reverse the recent trend toward Republicans in Florida, once a swing state that has shifted hard to the right…. And while Harris won more than half of Hispanic voters, that support was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 Hispanic voters that Biden won, according to AP VoteCast. Roughly half of Latino men voted for Harris, down from about 6 in 10 who went for Biden….Democratic resurgence will require much more investment in state parties and a frank assessment of how to appeal to parts of the country that supported Trump, said James Skoufis, a New York state senator running to be chair of the Democratic National Committee….“It requires a reorientation of how we speak with voters,” Skoufis said. “It requires emphasizing our working class values again. And if we’re being honest with ourselves and we’re owning some of what just happened two months ago, we need to shed this perception that we are an elitist party.”

From “2024 Election Post-Mortems: The Elephant Under America’s Political Rug” by Washburnb at Daily Kos: “The oligarchs have acquired and weakened the ability of legacy news media icons like the WaPo and LA Times to warn their readers about the corporate takeover of the US government. The oligarchs and their theofascist allies have also built a modern, think-tank-driven media ecosystem designed to push RW propaganda and misinformation 24/7 for 52 weeks a year. That media ecosystem includes corrupted and shrunken social media platforms like Facebook and X(Twitter). Even TikTok is vulnerable because of its ownership by a Chinese oligarch with ties to the Chinese government—not to mention the national security issues that ownership raises….President Biden’s January 15th farewell address sounded a clear alarm about the corporate/oligarch takeover of American democracy. His labeling of this authoritarian movement as a new tech industrial complex echoed President Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the threat of a rising military industrial complex to American democracy….The Democratic Party and its progressive allies must build a progressive,grassroots-based media/think tank ecosystem that can effectively counter the RW narrative of fear-based cruelty and domination. This work must be done as the Dems mount an effective 50-state/12-months-a-year campaign to reclaim the White House, Congress, and SCOTUS….It’s time for all of us to reclaim and rebuild our American democracy. Let’s agitate, educate, and organize our communities to build the future that we want for our children and their descendants….No one is going to save American democracy from oligarch-financed theofascism but We the People. President Biden made this point perfectly clear at the conclusion of his January 15th farewell address.”