At Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson has an interview with Thom Hartmann, who reaches more Americans via radio every day than any other liberal political commentator. Some of Hartmann’s observations about the potential of radio for helping to build a pro-Democratic majority include:

….The number one talk radio show in America, in fact, prior to Limbaugh, was Alan Berg out of Denver. And he was doing a show that you could hear in 27 states. It was on a giant station, it was blowing a huge signal across the western states. And he was assassinated by a couple of skinheads in the parking lot of the radio station. And they made a movie out of it: Talk Radio….The number one show in America before he was assassinated was left-wing. And with the Alan Berg assassination, there was just this collective, oh my God, across America, where for several years nobody wanted to do talk radio. And then Limbaugh rolled out his show in, whenever it was—‘86, I think—and then there was this herd mentality that kicked in across broadcasting.

….when Air America [progressive talk radio network from 2004-2010] rolled out, I wrote the original business plan for Air America and when Air America rolled out, we leased stations, we leased time on—I think—54 Clear Channel stations around the country. And as I recall, when Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital took over Clear Channel, suddenly we started losing stations until basically it just bankrupted Air America.

On another occasion, there’s a another very large radio network with over 900 stations, and I met with the one of the two billionaires who owned that network in the offices of a United States Senator, and said “Why don’t you put”—and he had hundreds of right wing stations—and I said “Why don’t you put some left-wingers on?” I would offer myself, but just generically. And he simply said straight up, he said, “I’m never gonna put somebody on the air who’s gonna argue for raising my taxes.” This is a guy who owned 900 radio stations.

….we were on 54 Clear Channel stations. Clear Channel also had probably at that time 400 or 500 right-wing stations…..Every single one of the stations that we were on was part of a pod of stations owned by Clear Channel that also had a right-wing show. The right-wing shows had been on for years and years. So their sales guys had developed networks that were right-wing show friendly. They had gotten to know the movers and shakers in the local Republican Party. They had gotten in tight with the Chamber of Commerce. They’d gotten to know the car dealers who were big Republican donors. They even hired people out of that universe. So we were suddenly on 50 radio stations across the country. And every single one of those radio stations had a sales team that was almost entirely either made up of right-wingers or had a customer base that was largely right-wing friendly.”

Hartmann adds that “Half of America is Democrat, half are Republicans. It’s not like we’re wired differently in really major substantial ways. I realize there are arguments about authoritarianism and all that kind of stuff, but still, left-wing talk radio works. It worked before Limbaugh; it’s worked since Limbaugh.” Further

….what really made Limbaugh and what really made right-wing talk radio was the Bill Clinton presidency, when Bill Clinton got elected in 1992….They’re preaching a message of tax cuts and deregulation. And so, of course, the very, very wealthy and very powerful are going to be pouring money down their throats. And I’m preaching a message of “raise taxes on rich people.” And I don’t know how many rich people are therefore going to go out and buy a radio station to put me on.

That’s when they really took off. That’s when it became a multi, multi, you know, $100 million business rather than just a million dollar business. And left-wing talk radio never successfully went through that curve. It got halfway down the road. But when Air America started out, the guy who started it said that he had millions of dollars in funding and he had lied. The very first, you know, he was a con man. I did not know him. But it was a mess. And nobody has ever properly funded a progressive network in the United States.

….There are, at any given moment in the United States, hundreds of radio stations for sale, and they don’t sell for huge amounts of money, hundreds of 1000s to low millions at the very most. There’s also low-power FM, and there are increasing numbers of folks who are starting low-power FM stations. I’m on probably a dozen of them around the country right now….you can put together a low-power FM station for $25,000 and run it out of your basement for that matter, if somebody can get a decent antenna and tower location. So there is the possibility of growing a progressive network. It’s actually happening. We’ve been adding a couple of stations, four or five, six, or eight stations a year, every year steadily for four years.

Back around what must have been 2006 or thereabouts, Randi Rhodes and me and a bunch of other people from Air America went to DC to talk with a bunch of Senators, Democratic Senators, about talk radio, and we tried to convince them that that, you know, they’re raising billions of dollars every four years for elections, and with a fraction of that money, they could buy 400 or 500 radio stations or even 50 radio stations around the country. And it’s much more politically effective to have somebody 24/7 singing your praises on the radio in a way that has high credibility because people feel like they’ve built a relationship with you, than it is to buy ads every advertising cycle. And outside of Bernie Sanders, who totally understood what I was talking about, because for 11 years he had been on my show every Friday for an hour taking calls from listeners—outside of Bernie, we just got blown off, including by somebody who later became a candidate for president of the United States and lost. And I think they lost because right-wing talk radio just destroyed that candidacy.

….The Democratic Party constantly underestimated talk radio. And what’s happening right now is even more alarming. And I don’t recall if I got into that in the Nation article or not. But this is a phenomenon that has just been going on in the last four or five years. At any given moment there are a couple hundred radio stations around the country for sale, but there are also, at any given moment, probably 1,000 radio stations available for lease, where you just go in and say, I’ll rent your station for a year. This is how Air America did it with all the stations we leased from Clear Channel. And typically, on the lease stations, what you’ll hear is religious content or polka music or music that serves niche communities with niche advertisers just kind of hanging on. And what’s happening is that a group of deep-pocketed Hispanic right-wingers, mostly Cuban exiles, have been renting radio stations around the country, the best estimate is there might be 200 or 300 of them now, where they’re running some syndicated and some local Spanish language, right-wing talk radio, and in some cases, they’re playing music, but they’re hiring DJs who are delivering right-wing political messages, you know, snarky comments and things between songs. I saw an article like two weeks ago saying Democrats can’t figure out why the Hispanic vote has moved 7% towards the Republican Party in the last two years. And I’m yelling at the web page going, It’s the freakin’ radio, you know?

….You know, guys working on construction sites, listening to the music with the DJ coming on and going, “Oh my god, do you see what Joe Biden just did?” Well, here’s a new song in Spanish. The people listening are Spanish speakers. I’m telling you, you’re going to see by the 2024 election, you’re going to see Spanish language radio stations in every community in America with a significant Spanish-speaking population, pushing right-wing politics, and they’re already halfway there.

As regards the reach of conservative talk radio, Hartmann notes that there are “1,500 right-wing radio stations in this country, and probably fewer than 100 left-wing stations” and “what political radio there is, is entirely right-wing. It’s not healthy.”

Hartmann adds, “if you live in Wyoming, I mean, you might drive an hour to work, what are you gonna do, you’re gonna listen to the radio. And podcasts are great, and they’re growing rapidly, but they’re also growing rapidly in the 40 and under demographic. If you look at the 50 and over demographic, they still very, very heavily use radio. And those folks are more likely to be voting.”

For an insightful read about the future of wingnut talk radio, check out The Daily Beast’s “Mike Huckabee Brings on Rush Limbaugh’s Decline” by former Bush II speechwriter David Frum. It seems that the 30 sponsors bailing in the wake of Limbaugh’s ‘slut’ tirade may not be his most worrisome concern, as Frum explains:

…On April 2, Limbaugh will face a more-serious challenge. That’s when the new Mike Huckabee show launches on 100 stations in Limbaugh’s very own noon-to-3 time slot.
Huckabee’s competition threatens Limbaugh not only because Huckabee has already proven himself an attractive and popular TV broadcaster, but also because Huckabee is arriving on the scene at a time when Limbaugh’s business model is crashing around him.
To understand the power of Huckabee’s challenge to Limbaugh, you have to understand the strange economics of talk radio. Most talk-radio programs offer radio stations this deal: we’ll give you three hours of content for free. (Some programs–cough, Glenn, cough, Beck–have actually offered to pay radio stations to accept their content.) Those three hours will include 54 minutes of ad time. That ad time is split between the radio station and the show: each gets 27 minutes to sell.

But Limbaugh, Frum notes, was able to charge for his content and rake in big bucks in advertising — until 2009, when his listeners began shrinking to the point where they are now about half as many as three years ago. Limbaugh responded by cranking up his “TSL” ratings, ‘time spent listening’ — by pandering to his hard core base, getting them to listen longer. Frum adds:

That imperative explains why Limbaugh kept talking about Sandra Fluke for so long. He was boosting his TSL to compensate for his dwindling market share. Few things boost TSL like getting the old folks agitated over how much sexy sex these shameless young hussies are having nowadays. (And make no mistake: Limbaugh’s audience is very old. One station manager quipped to me, “The median age of Limbaugh’s audience? Deceased.”)
……Limbaugh’s audience not only skews old; it skews male. It was already 72 percent male in 2009–more male than that of almost any other program on radio or TV. Advertisers are not nearly as interested in talking to old men as to middle-aged women. If Huckabee can draw such women to his new program, as he has drawn them to his TV show, he will reshape the market.
…Limbaugh’s advertisers and his stations had already begun to feel ripped off. To quote my station-manager friend again: “I don’t mind paying for content. But I do mind paying for trouble.” So advertisers revolted against the TSL strategy, with Sears, JCPenney, and many other sponsors dropping the show. Many of the local advertisers who buy their ads from the local stations rather than from the syndicators have been ordering that their purchased minutes be placed on some less-controversial program.

Enter Huckabee.

Limbaugh’s calculation that his core advertisers must return always rested on the assumption that there was nowhere else to go. Suddenly, in the worst month of Limbaugh’s career, somewhere else has appeared: a lower-priced alternative, with big audience reach and a host an advertiser can trust never, ever to abuse a student as a “slut” and “prostitute.”
The new Huckabee show’s slogan is “more conversation; less confrontation.” “I don’t want it to be a show that every day, every hour, pushes everyone’s buttons to raise their blood pressure,” Huckabee says. “I figure the cost of high blood pressure is enough already.”
Huckabee’s politics are emphatically conservative of course, both on social and economic issues. Yet his politics differ in important ways from those of the Limbaugh-influenced Republican electorate…The less-strident Huckabee approach arises both from his experience as a long-serving governor in a Democratic-leaning state and from Huckabee’s famously genial temperament. “I have to believe that there are people who are highly opinionated but who actually find it informative and engaging to find out what the other side is thinking,” he says. “And not through a shouting match, but through an adult-level, civil conversation.”

While it is gratifying to see Limbaugh tank, Dems should hold the high-fives for a while. Huckabee is a shrewder reactionary than Limbaugh, and may be even more aggressive about pushing the wingnut agenda in electoral politics, albeit with more subtlety. In addition, Huckabee does have a certain gift for the soundbite put-down, as evidenced by his “We’ve had a congress that spends money like John Edwards in a beauty shop” zinger (this and other Huck quips here) during the early ’08 campaign. It’s not hard to imagine Huckabee besting the four current GOP presidential contenders, had he decided to enter the fray. His comments to the contrary, he may be laying the groundwork for a 2016 run.
Huckabee’s Achilles’ Heel, however, is his tendency to blather, a weakness which has damaged many ‘shock jock’ careers, from Imus to Limbaugh and a host of lesser-knowns in between. Last fall, Huckabee ‘jokingly’ (wink, wink) suggested creating confusion about election day at a pancake breakfast/rally in Mason, Ohio, as Molly Reilly tells in her HuffPo report::

“Make a list,” said Huckabee, referring to supporters’ family and friends. “Call them and ask them, ‘Are you going to vote on Issue 2 and are you going to vote for it?’ If they say no, well, you just make sure that they don’t go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That’s up to you how you creatively get the job done…The crowd laughed at Huckabee’s remarks. In 2009, he made a similar joke in Virginia, saying, “Let the air our of their tires … keep ’em home. Do the Lord’s work.”

Whether Huckabee refrains from advocating voter suppression on the air waves in his new gig remains to be seen. It’s good that Limbaugh is beginning to fade away like Glenn Beck. But Dems have always had a weaker talk radio echo chamber than Republicans — and the GOP’s edge may soon get even sharper.

Excited as all Dems should be by recent reports of dramatic increases in voter registration benefitting our party, it’s time to give serious thought to GOTV strategies to maximize turnout of these new voters on November 4th. Registration percentage is the most reliable predictor of voter turnout — the more voters registered, the higher the turnout. So we have already gained a significant edge, assuming the Republicans don’t produce an equivalent uptick in registering their base in the months ahead. But that doesn’t mean we can’t gain an additional edge with a concerted effort to get more of these new voters to the polls.
We don’t know precisely who these new voters are. But many of the registration campaigns in different states have targeted young voters, particularly college students. Other registration campaigns have targeted African and Latino Americans. The motivated voters in all demographic groups are going to get to the polls without much encouragement. But if previous patterns prevail, as many as 40 percent of the newly-registered voters won’t vote — if nothing is done. In 2004, for example, nearly 60 percent of registered voters went to the polls, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. If we can increase their turnout/rv ratio up to 70-75 percent, it just might make the difference in a close race.
Many newly registered voters who may not vote on election day have transportation problems. The polls may be too far away and/or they don’t have a car. or they don’t know where the poll is located. Others may be time-challenged — having to pick-up the kids, fix dinner, work late etc. Some may be energy-challenged, just too dog-tired to make the effort.
Early voting can help get around such ‘convenience’ issues, provided the voters are informed about how they can do it with a minimum of hassle. There should be a major push — make that an unprecedented effort — to inform new voters in the 28 states that permit no-excuse absentee voting by mail about early voting opportunities.
The internet is a great medium for reaching many of these voters, especially college students. In a recent Pew poll, 42 percent of young people said they learn about political campaigns from the internet, up from 20 percent in 2004. Internet ad revenues are expected to surpass radio ad revenues for the first time this year, reports Rudy Ruitenberg of Bloomberg.com. Yet, television still rules as a source for political information, and 60 percent of respondents in the Pew poll said they get “most of their election news from TV,” although it’s down from 68 percent in ’04 and ’00.
But television time is expensive, and not all young people or low-income voters have daily access to the internet. Radio may be the most cost-effective medium for reaching newly-registered voters, not only for informing them about early voting opportunities in their communities, but also to motivate them to get to the polls on election day. Radio reaches more than 210 million voting age listeners every week, according to Jeff Haley, president of the Radio Advertising Bureau, and, more so than TV, it reaches voters at useful times — the wake-up alarm, driving to work, at work, at lunch and driving home — pretty much all day, until the polls close.
High as we all are on the power of the internet as a tool for transmitting political information and motivation, a more substantial investment in radio ads could hold the key to victory in November.

From “Is the Working Class Finally Turning on Trump?” by Eyal Press at The New Yorker: “In an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll published in early May, eighty-one per cent of respondents said that higher gas prices were straining their household budgets. Sixty-three per cent of those feeling the strain blamed the problem on Trump. In another recent poll, carried out by CNN, three-fourths of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, said that Trump’s policies have increased the cost of living in their communities…Until a generation ago, the majority of workers in steel plants and automotive factories voted Democratic, in part because their political identities had taken shape on picket lines and in union halls, where a sense of class consciousness was forged. These days, as the scholars Theda Skocpol and Lainey Newman document in “Rust Belt Union Blues” (2023), the disappearance of factories and the consequent decline in union membership have meant that workers in many Rust Belt towns are more likely to cross paths at gun clubs and megachurches…And, among this subset of blue-collar voters, support for Trump is tenuous, Jared Abbott, a political scientist and the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, which analyzes polling data to determine how Democrats can craft policies and messages that will resonate with the working class, told me…Although it is often assumed that Trump’s most loyal supporters are working-class people without college degrees, the opposite pattern emerged in the survey. Thirty-two per cent of respondents without high-school diplomas said they are now “wavering” on voting for a Republican; just eighteen per cent of respondents with four-year college degrees said the same. Black and Latino working-class voters made up a high share of those who are wavering, the survey found, suggesting that the multiracial coalition Trump cobbled together in 2024 could be coming undone. (In a New York Times-Siena poll conducted from May 11th to 15th, Trump’s approval rating with Hispanic voters had fallen to just twenty per cent; his approval among Black voters was fourteen per cent.)” More here.

In “The three things Democrats must do to regain rural America’s trust,” Anthony Flaccovento writes at The Guardian: “When most liberals think of elites, they picture Wall Street executives and corporate CEOs. But where I live, the term reaches further – to academics, media figures and professionals who are seen as talking a lot but not understanding much, have never worked with their hands, and scold people for their supposed backwardness or tell them they “vote against their own interests”…Sometimes, it also extends to economists, health officials or other policy experts who aren’t always right. Bill Clinton promised that Nafta would create 1m net new jobs within five years of its passage. How should the workers who saw their textile mill close in North Carolina, or their auto parts plant leave Michigan for Mexico, feel towards the politicians who made it happen?…Or what of the people in Appalachia, who were assured by health professionals more than two decades ago that OxyContin was completely safe and non-addictive, only to see an opioid epidemic ravage their communities?…Anti-elitism here isn’t just about taking on the oligarchs. It’s about rejecting a professional class that many believe has helped sustain a system rigged against them…Clearly there’s a significant segment of Trump voters motivated by some combination of racism, homophobia and anti-immigrant hostility. But that explanation alone cannot account for the fact that an astounding 37% of working-class voters of color moved towards Republicans from 2012 to 2024; or that 13% of 2012 Obama supporters – nearly 9 million people – voted for Trump in 2016…What moved many of these voters to the GOP was that they felt seen and heard by some of its leading figures. Rightwing populists spoke directly to the millions whose jobs and communities had been shredded, telling them that they were right to be angry, right to rage against a rigged system that had failed them…Democrats, by contrast, largely dismissed their concerns or scolded them for “voting against their own interests”. More here.

AP’s Mike Catalini reports that “Democratic group launches ad campaign to help flip control of Congress in midterm elections,” and notes: “A Democratic group that previously focused on presidential races is wading into the midterms by targeting more than a dozen House and Senate contests, many of them on Republican turf, in a new advertising campaign that begins Tuesday…American Bridge 21st Century’s $50 million effort adds financial firepower to Democrats’ attempt to flip control of Congress in the midterm elections. The party has struggled to match Republicans’ fundraising, and it has lost ground in a nationwide redistricting battle that President Donald Trump initiated last year…American Bridge, known for its opposition research, has been escalating its own advertising efforts. During the last presidential election, it announced plans to spend $140 million in an attempt to siphon away Trump’s support among rural voters…”Trump made a big promise to these working-class voters that he was gonna bring down costs,” Beychok said. Now it’s clear, he said, “that Trump and Republicans really broke that covenant.”…The House seats American Bridge is targeting are in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. On the Senate side, they’re getting involved in races in Alaska, Iowa, Michigan and Mississippi…The group passed on Senate races in states like Maine, North Carolina and Texas because it doesn’t expect those to lack resources…The campaign will involve digital ads, streaming audio and television, social media, direct mail and radio…Beychok said the organization is learning to focus on issues at a “visceral level,” and featuring specific voters so they can offer firsthand accounts of their experiences with the economy.” More here.

At Mother Jones, Abby Vesoulis explains “Why the Scandal-Ridden Democrat With a Nazi Tattoo Won Maine’s Senate Primary,” and quotes Musa al-Gharbi, author of  the best-selling book “We Have Never Been Woke,” who said: “One thing that influenced how the primary shook out is that there are a lot of people within the Democratic coalition who recognize there’s a large cultural distance between them and the rest of society. Maine is a pretty rural state; it’s a pretty purple state, and so they were maybe thinking, hoping, that someone like Platner would send a different set of social signals than the typical Democrat…A lot of working-class voters, irregular voters, and so on, are often willing to overlook various types of indiscretions of politicians who represent them, as long as they have the sense that this person is on their side and not looking down on them—even if the candidate isn’t a saint, even if they have serious character flaws…In a world where a lot of voters have come to feel like neither party and almost no candidate is actually going to help them or improve their lives, then the main thing that they have left to vote on is basically, “Okay, well, if my life is not going to be meaningfully improved by these folks in Washington either way, then I can at least vote for the person who doesn’t hate me.”…That said, one thing you can clearly see in the polling is that a whole bunch of folks who drifted away from the Democratic party in recent cycles are now very frustrated with Trump. They still don’t hold the Democrats in high esteem, either. But it’s a two-party system, and Trump is the one in power, so if people are dissatisfied with the way things are going, that will probably benefit Democrats in these midterms.” More here.

The June 4 primary in Iowa showed that Donald Trump’s endorsement magic doesn’t always work, as I noted at New York:

Donald Trump has been a powerhouse in 2026 midterm primaries, purging alleged RINOs like Bill Cassidy in Louisiana and stubborn rebels like Thomas Massie in Kentucky. But the president’s late intervention in Tuesday’s Republican gubernatorial primary in Iowa didn’t work. Trump’s endorsed candidate was the long-time front-runner, U.S. representative Randy Feenstra. He managed to get over the 35 percent needed to avoid a nominating convention in Iowa. But unfortunately for Feenstra and the White House, his hard-core right-wing rival Zach Lahn won slightly more. Lahn had 37.8 percent of the vote to Feenstra’s 37 percent, with 99 percent reporting, per NBC News.

Lahn appealed to a very grumpy Iowa-primary electorate by running as an abrasive outsider hostile to elites in both parties, much as Trump did in 2016. Like a lot of conservative extremists running for state offices this year, Lahn wants to abolish property taxes (which would, of course, demolish local governments and public schools). He also shrewdly came out for banning foreign ownership of Iowa farmland. He’s hardly hostile to Trump, but ran as more MAGA than the official MAGA candidate (he was endorsed by the PAC MAHA Action, probably because he’s a serious anti-vaxxer).

Feenstra ran an overcautious campaign; he dodged debates and didn’t secure Trump’s backing until very late in the day. And who knows, there may have been some lingering right-wing resentment of him for giving racist congressman Steve King the heave-ho in a 2020 primary.

In any event, Lahn’s victory could be good news for Democratic gubernatorial nominee (and state auditor) Rob Sand. Aside from his extremist views, the new GOP nominee’s habit of hopping between residences and careers in both Iowa and Kansas could be an issue for proud Iowans. And in general, Iowa Democrats are feeling their oats this year after a dreadful stretch of election losses dating back to 2014. It’s notable that despite the red-hot GOP gubernatorial contest nearly as many Democrats as Republicans participated in the primary (notably lifting Josh Turek to a comfortable win over Zach Wahls for the U.S. Senate nomination).

Trump won Iowa by 13 percent in 2024, his third and largest victory in the state. But his tariff policies and inability to get a grip on living costs has battered his popularity in Iowa and other heartland locales. As Feenstra’s demise illustrates, Republicans aren’t off to a good start in the Hawkeye State heading toward the November midterms.

An excerpt from “What 2024 Non-Voters Told Us About Why They Didn’t Vote – and What Democrats Can Do to Win Them Back” by and at The Working Class Project: “We’re back this week with another update from the largest research effort to understand why working class voters are trending away from Democrats...we want to share some unique insights from focus groups we’ve conducted specifically with working class Americans who did not vote in 2024…These working class Americans are folks that Democrats ought to be earning support from (and in many instances, used to vote for Democrats). But they aren’t. And while their disgust with the status quo hurt Democrats in 2024, there are signs this could shift in 2026 and 2028. They don’t really like what they’re seeing from Trump, like on his spending priorities or tariffs, but they need to see an authentic and believable alternative…Despite their defiance and disaffection, many of the non-voters we heard from wanted politicians to more squarely focus on getting more money into their pockets. They consistently said this was something that could get them to support a Democrat or other politician…It was striking how many of these voters named higher wages as one thing politicians could deliver that may change their mind. Democrats would be wise to make a higher minimum wage and lower working class taxes central to their economic plans going forward – but they cannot turn a blind eye to the harsh reality that most working class voters may not trust they would get it done. They’ll have to communicate these economic ideas with focus and intensity, but also make sure to actually follow through on what they say.” Listen to comments from the respondents in their own voices and read more here.

Scrolling down the page where the previous article is located, we find a link to the the irresistibly titled “Deep Dive: Where Working Class Voters Get Information, and How and When to Reach Them,” which notes: “The survey included more than 2,000 working class voters…At the end of the survey, respondents were invited to participate in a more in-depth 24-hour media usage diary, and nearly 500 working class voters took part…The diaries were filled out each hour, allowing both overall daily and more detailed time spent by part-of-day with different types of media…It’s important to note that this survey and diary sought to understand their overall media consumption – not just news. We wanted to learn more about the entertainment streaming services they use, the social media platforms they spend the most time on, and whether they listen to music or podcasts more, among other things…Working class voters are more likely to consume news via links on social media than the general population. Overall, they use YouTube and social media more than the general population (including more regular TikTok consumption), and only 1 in 20 ever read a print newspaper…Early morning is prime time for news consumption among working class voters. News readership spikes between 6:00 and 7:00 AM, and most working class voters (3 of 5) proactively read a news article at some point each day…Audio is a critical format for working class voters. From early morning to early evening, working class voters say they use audio throughout the work day, including streaming services like Spotify or Pandora as well as traditional AM/FM radio, more than the general population…There is some age variance in how working class voters get their news. Voters over 50 still overwhelmingly get news and information from TV. But the social media trend seen above is huge among voters under 50 – with 62% of those aged 18-49 saying they use social media and YouTube most for news…Working class voters also don’t really consume news throughout the day or in the evening. Their peak news consumption is first thing in the morning, likely before they go to work. Later in the day, they are more likely to be exposed to audio (streaming and radio, likely while they work), as well as nighttime entertainment media consumption like TV, streaming, and video games…”

The article continues: “Working class voters are more likely to listen to audio throughout the work day than the overall population. (More than 4 in 5 working class voters told us they listen to audio at some point during the day.) This may seem obvious on its face – working class voters may be more likely to commute to work, have workplace settings where they have a radio on, or have opportunities where they can put their headphones in and listen to streaming music or audio while they work.” Here is one of the article’s revealing graphs:

Matthew Yglesias shares some of his thoughts on “MAGA’s war on the American economy” at Slow Boring: “…Trump is obsessed with superficial indicators of success…He’s spinning economic numbers where he can and moving to suppress data where he can’t…And in addition to political meddling, he’s continuing a pattern of funding cuts that make it hard for statistical agencies to function. The tariffs aren’t going to blow up America’s biggest and most successful companies, but they will exert an ongoing drag on all kinds of businesses that don’t have the clout to successfully beg for exemptions…Last week’s bad jobs report, which showed anemic employment growth over the past several months, confirms this same trend: the economy is slowing…If you ignore economic data and look at immigration data (which, unfortunately, is not measured as precisely or as frequently), the White House is happy to brag that it has transformed immigration from a major source of labor force growth to a slight drag. MAGA fans get defensive when you point this out. But slow growth in aggregate employment and a negative hit to GDP growth are obvious results of this policy choice…Inflation is still running above the Fed’s 2 percent target level and has, in fact, gone up recently. Even if you think monetary policy should ignore the impact of tariffs, it’s hard to see the case for a cut…It’s true that job growth is slowing down sharply, but that’s not because of weak demand; it’s because the administration is strangling labor force growth. It’s never been clear to me what Trump’s team thought would happen if they pulled off their immigration policies. Grandma’s going to come out of retirement to pick up day labor gigs? Residents of depressed former manufacturing towns are going to move to coastal metro areas and work as nannies?…tariffs concentrate a lot of power in his hands personally. Trump is able to grant exemptions to politically connected companies, and this is good for his personal quest for power and enrichment. But it’s still a bad dynamic for America…Trump passed a regressive tax cut and offset part of the cost by cutting Medicaid and nutritional assistance. Now, he’s offsetting another part of that cost by raising taxes on the poor. After the initial tariff rollout was panned by financial markets, he put a lot of time and energy into negotiating deals that have safeguarded the interests of big technology and financial services companies, while continuing to harm lower-income consumers, small businesses, and manufacturing. And it only gets worse from here…Hopefully, a future administration will establish an immigration regime that is more humane and growth-friendly than Trump’s, but also more orderly and secure than Biden’s. It’s normal for policies to ping-pong a little as we try to reach sensible outcomes.”

From “The Psychology of Party Decline” by John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot: “A key aspect of groupthink is the suppression of dissenting voices and rejection of information that doesn’t fit the group’s consensus. Members of both parties and people in a multitude of different institutions are susceptible to this particular psychological malady. After 2020, Democrats didn’t want to hear about the effects of their party’s screwy cultural program on working-class voters, so they didn’t look for it or attacked people who made these arguments as insufficiently committed to the partisan cause. Democrats also didn’t want to hear about reams of polling data and qualitative studies showing that their core campaign themes around “Bidenomics” and threats to abortion rights and democracy didn’t resonate with key voting groups that would ultimately decide the election. So, the leading party members said decline wasn’t happening or told people to yell louder about how good the economy was doing and how much of a threat Trump was to reproductive choice and democracy. Both of these approaches proved to be losing strategies, as was predicted by many party dissidents and neutral analysts at the time…But if a party can’t or won’t confront its own debilitating psychological deficiencies, it will never improve. The road to recovery starts with Democrats learning how to accept and analyze the mounds of data and election results showing that large numbers of Americans no longer trust the party, don’t like many of its candidates, and disagree with much of the party’s recent economic and cultural agenda. Donald Trump figured out how to exploit these weaknesses, even with his own manifest problems accepting reality.”

In his New York Times opinion essay, “‘I Even Believe He Is Destroying the American Presidency’,” Thomas B. Edsall spotlights some troubling questions about America’s future because of Trump’s mismanagement: “Paul Rosenzweig, a deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and a lecturer in law at George Washington University, was even more pessimistic, writing in an email that he feared that…the damage is permanent. Not because it cannot be fixed — it can be with effort. But rather because nobody will ever trust the United States again that something Trump-like won’t recur. Would you as a young person take a federal job today? Would you as a foreign student trust that you could attend university in the United States safely? Would you as a European government trust the United States to maintain the security of your secrets?” Tough questions and good talking points for Democrats in making the case for voting against Republicans and for Democrats next year.

“With Republicans holding competitive, eat-their-own primaries in the midterms next year, Democrats in the South see an opening to court moderates who are souring on the GOP,” Liz Crampton writes in “Democrats are looking to make gains in the South next year. It could be their last shot. A new class of Democratic party chairs see repairing the party’s relationship with the working class as key to its political comeback” at Politico. “In Texas, state Attorney General Ken Paxton is challenging the establishment-aligned Sen. John Cornyn, and the Georgia GOP primary field is quickly becoming crowded as Republicans attempt to oust Sen. Jon Ossoff. While holding Georgia will be tough and flipping Texas even harder, there’s still an opportunity for the left…A new class of Democratic leaders in the South is pitching voters on their party’s proposals to lower costs and increase wages, while casting blame on Republicans for an unsettled economy under President Donald Trump. They say that strategy is key not just for the midterms, but part of solving an existential threat for Democrats if they want to stand a chance in coming years at regaining national power…Longer-term population shifts in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas that went to Trump in November mean those states are poised to gain congressional and Electoral College seats. Florida — which many Democrats concede is a solidly GOP state — could also expand its influence. Democrats in these states are now warning that failing to mount a comeback could mean that winning the White House after the 2030 Census would be far more difficult…The fix, according to a dozen Democratic leaders in the South, is to refocus the Democratic Party on the economy and border security — two areas of strength historically for the GOP. Kendall Scudder, a 35-year-old progressive who took over the Texas Democratic Party in March, said Democrats must “do everything we can to show that when we get out of bed in the morning, we eat glass to fight back and protect the working people of this state.”

Also at Politico, check out “Dems roll out ads hitting Republicans on Medicaid,” in which Elena Schneider writes: “Democrats are preparing to launch an ad war against Republicans over President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”…House Majority Forward, the nonprofit affiliated with House Democratic leadership and House Majority PAC, will start running digital ads next week attacking House Republicans voting to cut Medicaid spending, according to a spokesperson for the group. The ads will appear in 25 battleground districts in California, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin…Protect Our Care, another Democrat-aligned group, has already spent $10 million on Medicaid-related TV ads in swing seats, and they’re planning to expand on that ad buy next week, according to a person directly familiar with the decision who was granted anonymity to speak freely. Unrig Our Economy, another Democratic group, is already airing a radio ad attacking Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) for her vote to move the bill out of committee, and they’re expected to run more ads like it against Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-N.J.) and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.)…“The core argument in the midterms and the TLDR on this budget is it’s the largest cut to Medicaid in history,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “As people find that out, they know it’s not a nipping or tucking of the program, it’s a fucking of the people on it.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Democrats are roaming in the political wilderness and seem bewildered on how to find their way out. More resistance? More moderation? More lawfare? More denunciations of fascism/authoritarianism/lawlessness? Look for ways to compromise? Don’t look for ways to compromise? Shut down the government? Don’t shut down the government? Better messaging of Democratic positions? Actually change Democratic positions? It’s all so confusing!

It needn’t be. There’s one simple question—a sort of test—that would illuminate the path forward for Democrats.

What would the working class say (WWWCS)?

Let me explain.

The WWWCS test is not so hard to do but it does entail getting outside of the liberal college-educated bubble so many Democrats live within, particularly as experienced on social media, in activist circles and within advocacy, nonprofit, media and academic institutions. Look at actual public opinion data—not as summarized by someone you know or something you read. Look at focus group reports. Talk to actual working-class people—there are lots of them! Listen to your intuitions about how working-class people would likely react to policies and rhetoric currently associated with the Democrats —not how you think they should react. Think of family members or people you grew up with who are working class. Try to get inside their heads. They are less ideological, more focused on material concerns, more likely to be struggling economically, less interested in cutting edge social issues, more patriotic and generally more culturally conservative. All this makes a difference.

The “what-would-the-working-class-say” test can tell you a lot about whether Democrats are on track with their approach. If the test indicates that Democrats are advocating or saying something that is likely unpopular, off-putting and/or just lacks salience with working-class people, that policy or rhetoric is probably on the wrong track. Conversely, if the test indicates that working-class people are likely to view what Democrats are advocating/saying as desirable, in tune with their values and actually important to their everyday lives, that is a very good sign.

So that’s the test. Here’s why it’s so damn important.

As noted in an excellent new report by Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck:

For the first time since the mid-20th century, the central fault line of American politics is neither race and ethnicity nor gender but rather class, determined by educational attainment. But in the intervening half century, the parties have switched places. Republicans once commanded a majority among college-educated voters while Democrats were the party of the working class. Now the majority of college educated voters support Democrats. Meanwhile, the troubled relationship between the Democratic Party and white working-class voters that began in the late 1960s now includes the non-white working-class as well, as populist Republicans are expanding their support among working-class Hispanics and an increasing share of African American men….

The sorting of partisan preferences based on educational attainment is bad news for Democrats, demographically and geographically. Fewer than 38% of Americans 25 and older have earned BAs, a share that has plateaued in recent years after increasing five-fold between 1960 and 2020. And so, it appears, has the Democratic share of the college graduate vote (57 percent in 2020, 56 percent in 2024) even as the Republican share of the non-college vote surged from 51 percent to 56 percent. Meanwhile, non-college voters still make up 57 percent of the electorate, a figure that rises to 60 percent in the swing states. [Note that the figures for eligible voters are actually quite a bit higher—RT]

If Democrats cannot build a broader cross-class alliance, one that includes a larger share of non-college voters, their future is not bright. At the presidential level, they could end up confined to states with high densities of college-educated voters, leaving them far short of an Electoral College majority. Although Democrats won all the states with shares of BA degree holders at 40 percent or higher in 2024, there were only 12 of them, none swing states. By contrast, Democrats won only one of the 29 states with BA shares at 35 percent or lower while prevailing in seven of the 10 states with college attainment between 36 and 39 percent. [Note that the only swing state in the 36-39 percent group, North Carolina, was carried by Trump—RT] And because ticket-splitting between presidential and senatorial races has become more infrequent, the new class-based politics bodes ill for Democrats’ U.S. Senate prospects as well.

Here’s the visual on the difference between high and low education states:

Notice anything different about the two maps? The point about Senate implications cannot be emphasized enough. My Liberal Patriot colleague Michael Baharaeen recently did a crackerjack job of running down the Senate maps for 2026-2030. The Republicans have abundant pickup opportunities in low-education, working class heavy states while Democratic opportunities are slimmer and generally involve knocking off Republicans in the same kind of low-education states. This is daunting to say the least.

Read more…

This has been quite the chaotic week or so, and one of the byproducts of the nihilistic conduct being displayed by Donald Trump and his allies has been a decided end of Democratic cooperation, and I welcomed that development at New York:

Following the time-honored ritual of giving a new president a “honeymoon,” a good number of prominent Democrats made friendly noises about their nemesis after Donald Trump’s November election victory. Some, like Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, seemed inclined to cross the partisan barricades whenever possible, praising Trump’s dubious Cabinet nominations, calling on Joe Biden to pardon Trump to get rid of his hush-money conviction, and even joining Truth Social. Others, notably Bernie Sanders, talked of selective cooperation on issues where MAGA Republicans at least feigned anti-corporate “populism.” Still others, including some Democratic governors, hoped to cut deals on issues like immigration to mitigate the damage of Trump’s agenda. And one congressional Democrat, the normally very progressive Ro Khanna, promoted cooperation with Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, at least with respect to Defense spending.

This made some sense at the time. After all, Democrats, having lost control of both Congress and the White House, didn’t have much power of their own, and there was always the chance that having achieved his improbable comeback, Trump would calm down and try to become a normal chief executive in his final term in the job.

Now it is extremely clear that is not the case. The past chaotic week or so has convinced most Democrats that Trump has zero interest in compromise, bipartisanship, or even adherence to the law and to the Constitution. Musk and his Geek Kiddie Corps are ravaging agency after agency without the slightest legal authorization; OMB is preparing its own unilateral assault on federal benefits that don’t fit the Project 2025 vision of a radically smaller social safety net; and congressional Republicans are kneeling in abject surrender to whatever the White House wants. Democrats are resigning themselves to the mission of becoming an opposition party, full stop, making as much noise and arousing as much public outrage as they can. They shouldn’t be credited all that much for courage, since the new regime has given them little choice but to dig in and fight like hell.

OMB’s January 27 memo freezing a vast swath of federal programs and benefits, inept and confusing as it was, kicked off the current reign of terror. It reflected (and was likely dictated by) the belief of Trump OMB director nominee Russell Vought that the president can usurp congressional spending powers whenever he deems it necessary or prudent. Yet Congressional Republicans went along without a whimper. House Appropriations Committee chairman Tom Cole, who would have gone nuts had a Democratic president threatened his role so audaciously, said he had “no problem” with the freeze. The federal courts stepped in because OMB’s order was incoherently expressed, but there’s no question the administration will come back with something similar. As a sign of belated alarm over OMB’s direction, Senate Budget Committee Democrats boycotted Vought’s confirmation vote in reaction to this challenge to the constitutional separation of powers. After Republicans gaveled him on through without a whisper of dissent, Senate Democrats held an all-night “talk-a-thon” to recapitulate past and present concerns about Vought, a self-described Christian Nationalist and one of the principal authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a radically diminished federal government. He will be confirmed by the full Senate anyway.

Musk’s guerrilla warfare on the federal workforce and the programs they administer made the OMB power grab unfolding at about the same time look like a walk in the park. Even as his landing teams of 20-something coders took control of multiple agency IT systems and fired anyone who got in their way, Musk himself was on X making wild charges about the programs he was short-circuiting and all but cackling like a cartoon villain over his unlimited power. When Ro Khanna upbraided him for his lawlessness, he responded as you might expect, tweeting at Khanna: “Don’t be a dick.”

Khanna’s centrist Democratic colleague from Florida, Jared Moskovitz, had actually signed up for service on the DOGE oversight panel Mike Johnson created, despite its clear purpose as an ongoing pep rally for Musk. Now he’s out, as Punchbowl News reports:

“I need to see one of my Republican colleagues in the caucus explain the point of the caucus, because it seems that Elon doesn’t need them, because it seems what Elon is doing is destroying the separation of powers. And I don’t think the DOGE caucus at this moment really has a purpose … Whether I stay in the caucus, I think is questionable. I don’t need to stay in a caucus that’s irrelevant.”

Meanwhile, as all this madness was unfolding from the executive branch and its outlaw agents, congressional Republicans have been laboring through the process of putting together budget legislation to implement whatever portion of Trump’s agenda that wasn’t rammed through by fiat. Democrats are not being consulted at all in these preparations to produce a massive bill (or bills) that is expected to pass on a party-line vote and that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because of the immense leverage of the House Freedom Caucus over this legislation, the plans keep shifting in the direction of deeper and deeper domestic spending cuts at levels never discussed before. Per Punchbowl News:

“Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican committee chairs initially proposed between $500 billion to $700 billion in spending cuts as part of a massive reconciliation package. Yet conservative GOP hardliners rejected that, saying they wanted more. They’re seeking as much as $2 trillion to $5 trillion in cuts.”

Democrats can’t really do anything other than expose the extent and the effect of such cuts in the forelorn hope that a few House Republicans in particularly vulnerable districts develop their own counter-leverage over the process. But whatever emerges from the GOP discussion will have to be approved by OMB, where Russell Vought will soon be formally in charge. There’s just no path ahead for Democrats other than total war.

They do have their own leverage over two pieces of legislation Trump needs: an appropriations bill to keep government running after the December stopgap spending bill (which Musk nearly torpedoed in an early demonstration of his power) runs out, and a measure increasing the public debt limit. These bills can be filibustered, so Senate Democrats can kill them. There are increasing signs that congressional Democrats may refuse to go along with either one unless Trump puts a leash on Vought and Musk and perhaps even consults the Democratic Party on the budget. If there’s a government shutdown, it couldn’t be too much worse than a government being gutted by DOGE and OMB.

Republicans hope that Trump’s relatively strong popularity (for him, anyway) will keep Democrats from defying him. But they may not be accounting for the 47th president’s erratic character. On any given day, he may do something completely bonkers and deeply unpopular, like, say, suggesting the United States take over Gaza, expel its population, and build a resort development.