The following graph is cross-posted from ‘Data for Progress:

At Politico, Elena Schneider writes, “Rep. Greg Casar wants Democrats to “pick villains” in the GOP and drop purity tests in primaries…The Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, a 35-year-old Texas millennial who took over its leadership in December, thinks his party lost its working-class identity, while becoming too cautious and too boring in its fight against Republicans. He’s meeting privately with other members to discuss ways to steer the party toward a more populist economic message — being “known as the party of working people, first and foremost,” Casar said — and he’s mounting an aggressive public relations campaign to push it…Casar, along with Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-Penn.) and Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.), have been meeting informally with about a dozen Democratic members to talk about how best to shift the party into emphasizing economic populism..“Republican officials have figured out how to elevate social issues that impact only a small number of people and make them the dominant issues in elections,” Casar said. But after “knocking on thousands of doors” in Texas, even the most conservative voters “never opened the door and said, ‘Thank God you’re here. I want to talk to you about the appropriate level of testosterone for somebody to compete in the NCAA [sports].”…”If we’re willing to say…the richest people on the planet want to steal your Social Security check in order to enrich themselves and their friends, well, now you’re cooking with gas,” Casar said. “Be willing to explain that — to win a voter’s trust by telling people we are willing to actually go up against the villains that are screwing them over.”…“There’s a lot of different approaches to the economy that can appeal to working class voters, that involve honoring hard work, ensuring that everybody has an opportunity to earn a good life and that doesn’t involve ‘fighting the oligarchs,” [Third Way Founder Matt] Bennett said. “If that becomes their litmus test, then we’re right back in the same boat.”

 In her “Letters from an American” Substack post for March 30, Heather Cox Richardson notes that “the top seven donors to the 2024 political, cycle together gave almost a billion dollars to Republicans, with Elon Musk alone contributing more than $291 million. The list, compiled by Open Secrets, shows that Democratic donors don’t kick in until number eight on the list, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who gave slightly more than $64 million to Democrats. George Soros, the Republicans’ supervillain, didn’t make the top 25. As those wealthy donors wish, the Trump administration is shredding the post–World War II government and has prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations…Trump is digging into the position that some people are better than others and have the right to rule. Today he told NBC News that he is considering a third presidential term, although that is explicitly unconstitutional. “I’m not joking,” he said, “There are methods which you could do it.”

At The Bulwark, Lauren Egan shares some observations about demographic change that will have a big impact on Democratic strategy in the near future: “Thanks to a decades-long flood of cross-country migration from states like California and New York to states like Texas and Florida, the South has emerged as an economic, political, and cultural powerhouse. Tech companies are relocating to Austin; movies are increasingly being produced in Atlanta; and more students from the Northeast are attending SEC schools—and then staying in the South after graduating—than ever before. The region accounted for more than two-thirds of all job growth across the United States since early 2020, and it now contributes more to the national GDP than the Northeast does…All of that means that the South is on track to make historic gains in the 2030 census. Florida and Texas are projected to gain four or more congressional seats, while North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee could each gain a seat. Meanwhile, reliably blue states like California could lose as many as five; New York might lose three. Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin could also see declines…All told, nearly four in ten Americans could hail from the South by the next census, according to a recent Brennan Center analysis. That not only means the path to a House majority runs through the South—it also means the party’s reliance on the “Blue Wall” will no longer be viable in future presidential elections. (The number of Electoral College votes a state gets is determined by how many congressional districts it has.)”

“Bernie Sanders is not running for president. But he is drawing larger crowds now than he did when he was campaigning for the White House,” Lauren Gambino writes at The Guardian. “The message has hardly changed. Nor has the messenger, with his shock of white hair and booming delivery. What’s different now, the senator says, is that his fears – a government captured by billionaires who exploit working people – have become an undeniable reality and people are angry…The Vermont senator recalled Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the three wealthiest people on the planet – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – were seated in front of his cabinet nominees in what many viewed as a shocking display of power and influence”…For weeks, voters have been showing up at town halls to vent their alarm and rage over the president’s aggressive power grabs and the Musk-led mass firings of federal workers. But they are also furious at the Democratic leadership, charging that their party spent an entire election season warning of the threat Trump posed to US democracy, and yet now appeared either unable or unwilling to stand up to him…“This isn’t just about Republicans, either. We need a Democratic party that fights harder for us, too,” Ocasio-Cortez said in Arizona, drawing some of the loudest, most sustained applause of the evening. She urged the crowd to help elect candidates “with the courage to brawl for the working class”…According to a memo by Sanders’ longtime adviser, Faiz Shakir, the senator has raised more than $7m from more than 200,000 donors since February, and is drawing crowds 25% to 100% larger than at the height of his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. On Friday, more than 30,000 people attended a rally in Denver – the largest audience Sanders has ever drawn, his team said…Ocasio-Cortez offered a more personal touch, weaving elements of her biography into her speech – something Sanders is typically loath to do. She spoke of her mother, who cleaned homes, and her father, whose death from a rare form of cancer plunged the family into economic uncertainty…“I don’t believe in healthcare, labor and human dignity because I’m an extremist,” she said, pushing back on the rightwing caricature of her. “I believe in these things because I was a waitress.”

In “How the American Left Became Conservative,” Michael Kazin writes at The Nation: “We have to think anew about how to win the trust of Americans who have good reasons to be cynical and angry about the current state of the nation. Just repeating the same rhetoric from the past, while simply defending agencies they know little about, won’t respond to that mood or respond effectively to the current crisis…One approach would be to highlight programs like pre-kindergarten for all kids and tax credits for childcare that Republicans killed in the cradle when Biden was president. Another would be to champion ideas that would have wide appeal—but have never been attempted: class-based affirmative action and subsidies for rent in urban areas. And how many people not named Musk or Bezos would oppose Elizabeth Warren’s “wealth tax” on the 75,000 richest Americans which the Massachusetts senator predicts would raise close to $4 trillion in a decade?…Any chosen policy ought to offer a fresh approach to narrowing the gap between classes and be available, like Social Security, to everyone regardless of need…One can wish that nationalism would fade away, sometime in the future. But as long as most Americans identify with and want to be proud of their country, a nationalism of caring is the best alternative to the nativist scare-mongering of the MAGA mogul. Anyone whose embrace of Trumpism derives primarily from a hatred of immigrants or transgender people will be beyond the reach of this strategy. But surveys and exit polls from last fall’s election show that anxiety about the economy was far more common than fears about cultural displacement.”

Mike Konczal ruminates on “The Abundance Doctrine: How modern liberalism became too obsessed with saying no—and can learn to say yes again” at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and writes: “Bending the cost curve, getting health care to more people, and saving hundreds of billions of dollars is the definition of abundance. The efficiency of social insurance sits uneasy in the authors’ framework. In this light, the call for the expansion of Medicare and public options to save larger costs—with similar or better outcomes—might be the most important abundance intervention…Moreover, criticisms of administrative inefficiency and capture were top of mind when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform. Consumer protection had previously been split among at least five financial regulators, leaving no single agency with the incentive, staffing, or expertise to do it well. The CFPB’s structure and funding were purposely designed to protect it from capture, and it has successfully returned more than $21 billion to consumers and produced rules addressing issues such as abuses in mortgage markets and student debt. Precisely because of these successes, ones that reformers can learn from, dismantling the CFPB has been a central goal of President Trump and Elon Musk…These examples complicate the narrative that Democrats just can’t get anything done. But that doesn’t mean we should duck from a more serious conversation about government action. It remains unclear what comes next for liberals and progressives, and there is a desperate urgency to figure out what ideological frameworks might fill the void. The Trump Administration’s plans for retrenchment, isolationism, tariffs, and deportations risk putting us on a path to severe stagnation, akin to the one the UK has suffered since Brexit. Liberals must offer an alternative, and one path is to put forth a vision built around future-oriented growth. While it isn’t clear either way whether abundance is a good electoral strategy, the priorities it flags have gone missing in recent decades. And if we can’t offer a more prosperous future while also delivering on the things we promise, why should voters trust us?”

“Toward a Foreign Policy for the Working Class” by Mohammed Soliman and Andrew Hanna at The National Interest, argues “Despite the brightest minds serving at the highest levels of government, Washington offers little tangible to the American working class struggling with rising costs and increasing threats to their security…Meanwhile, the American working class—which is rapidly diversifying—has reshaped the country’s politics. Working-class voters have played a decisive role in the past three major presidential elections, realigning both major parties away from the post-Cold War consensus on free trade and military intervention overseas… The political center of gravity in America has shifted toward the working class on both sides of the aisle. This is a good thing. There is an opportunity now to make the bipartisan populist shift actually serve the American working class. To revive the American Dream, national security elites should reorient their efforts away from defending broken global institutions and toward relentlessly advancing the interests of the American working class…Our leaders must confidently express their faith in America as a force for good in the world. This new American faith is not blind patriotism or nativist jingoism but a deep, unwavering trust in the American experiment. It is a belief in the enduring promise of America as a beacon of hope, a place where individual liberty remains sacred and inviolable. It is the conviction that this nation, flawed yet striving, can still light the way for the world.”

“In just a few weeks, special elections will take place in Florida for two previously Republican-held House seats,” an email blast from actable says. “Let us explain why these campaigns are so important:…Republicans’ House majority is razor thin. Any Democrat we elect right now is another Democrat fighting against Trump and his allies’ extreme, harmful agenda…Like DNC Chair Ken Martin has said, part of his vision is to compete everywhere — and especially as Democrats continue to overperform in special elections throughout the country — we need to do our part to compete in Florida this April…Now, to tell you a little bit more about these races:…Gay Valimont for FL-1: Gay Valimont is running to fill a house seat that was vacated by Matt Gaetz. While navigating the terminal illnesses of both her husband and son at the same time, Gay saw firsthand how broken our health care system is for too many people. In Congress, Gay will fight to expand access to affordable health care and to bring down prescription drug prices…Josh Weil for FL-6: Josh Weil is a proud single father and public school educator who wants to help the people of Florida, protect schools, and make a brighter future for all of us. He wants to protect our environment, fix health care, lower prescription drug prices, keep up with inflation for seniors living on a fixed income, and make our economy work for working people — not just the rich.” Donate here.

“Could Low-Wage White Workers Spark Trump’s Undoing?,” Rob Okun asks at Ms. magazine, and writes: “If an unelected technocrat can delete the financial commitments of a government established for the people and by the people—and we don’t say anything—we betray our moral commitments to liberty,” [Bishop William] Barber underscored…Indeed, the Republican tax plan would attack those who are most economically vulnerable. The plan calls for cutting around $880 billion from Medicaid over 10 years, callously ignoring the 72 million people enrolled in the program and the seven million in the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Barber points to a new study, “The High Moral Stakes: Our Budget, Our Future,” to illustrate these consequences, detailing that, “about 39 [percent] of the enrollees in Medicaid are white, 18 [percent] are Black, 29 [percent] are Latino, 4.7 [percent] are Asian…”…Based on these statistics, 40 percent of everyone on Medicaid is white. So while Trump won with a significant portion of white, working-class voters, his policy in office may sway them to join a burgeoning resistance movement once they’ve absorbed the reality of his eviscerating cuts to Medicaid…Ultimately, having these white, working-class voters in the fight against Trump would be critical to further building up the movement. The next step, according to Barber, is to call this community and others to action. “We abdicate our own moral capacity if we walk away from this moment. And we’re not going to walk away from this moment,” Barber said. “The only way a king becomes a king is if you bow. And we cannot bow. Bowing is not in our DNA. We have to stand in this moment.”

Commentators blithely bandy about the term “middle class,” and what it means context of national politics. But there are significant differences between regions and states. Nicole Spector explains “How Much Money Is Needed To Be Considered Middle Class in Every State?” at gobankingrates.com. Of course these figures reflect  the cost of living in each state to some extent. “How much money do you need to be considered middle class?,” Spector asks. “It might take more money than you think to reach this income tier. The Pew Research Center defines the middle class, or middle-income households, as those with incomes that are two-thirds to double the U.S. median household income…However, because the cost of living and average income vary so widely from state to state, the income needed to be “middle class” in one state could be much more or less than what it takes to be middle class in another.” Here’s the middle-class income for every state (Here’s our sample from the “A” states to provide a sense of the range):

Factor in mobility, and you have a helluva mess that makes you wonder about the value of “national” income data.

An excerpt from “2026 reset: How Democrats are plotting to regain power: Expect to hear a lot about Medicaid, Elon Musk, and the working class over the next two years” by Cami Mondeaux at Deseret News: “House Democrats are gathering in Leesburg, Virginia, this week for their annual policy retreat where party members discuss messaging and strategy for the upcoming year…Democrats are scrambling to regroup and pinpoint their messaging tactics before the 2026 cycle begins in earnest….Much of that message will focus on the Trump administration’s efforts to slash government spending, particularly multibillionaire Elon Musk’s role in purging the federal workforce. Democrats have already started their attacks by accusing Republicans of seeking to dismantle Medicaid and other welfare programs — and party leaders are hoping to make those concerns a top issue…“Our job over the next 21 months is to make sure that voters are hearing this message loud and clear, and we’re going to keep repeating it over,” Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., chairwoman of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, said on Wednesday…House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., reiterated those plans, telling reporters the party would focus their message on supporting the working class while accusing Republicans of working for the wealthy, with Musk as a prime example…Meanwhile, a few Democrats I spoke with said they want to hear more from party leaders about outreach tactics, noting that’s become a major discussion point in the aftermath of the 2024 election.“…I think a big reason we lost (in 2024) was around communications, and they’ve already really been talking a lot about that (and) what we did wrong,” Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., told me ahead of the retreat. “Republicans really outflanked us on the podcasts and those networks. They had all these top podcasters I’d never even heard of until the day after the election.”

Savannah Kuchar brings the bad news in “Democratic Party’s favorability hits record lows in two polls after 2024 losses” at USA Today: “The Democratic Party’s latest approval ratings hit record lows in a pair of polls on Sunday, coming after a bruising 2024 election for the party in which it lost control of the White House and Senate… An NBC News poll found 27% of registered voters say they view the party favorably − the lowest favorability rating for Democrats in NBC polls going back to 1990. Only 7% of survey respondents said they said they have a “very positive” view of the party…Another poll released by CNN similarly found 29% of voters view Democrats in a positive light, a low in CNN’s polling since 1992. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 63% said they have a favorable view of the party…In the CNN poll, 57% of Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents said they believe party leaders should focus on stopping the GOP agenda, compared to 42% who said they want to see Democrats work with their Republican colleagues…NBC found that, among self-identified Democratic voters, 65% said they want their party to “stick to their positions even if this means not getting things done in Washington.” Thirty-two percent said they want Democrats to “make compromises with President Trump to gain consensus on legislation.”…The NBC poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters in the U.S. from March 7-11. The margin of error is +/- 3.1 percentage points. The CNN poll surveyed 1,206 adults in the U.S. from March 6-9. It has a margn of error of +/- 3.3 percentage points.”

“For weeks, Donald Trump and Republicans have insisted that social security, Medicaid or Medicare would not “be touched,” Lauren Gambino writes in “Democrats train fire on Musk as unelected billionaire dips in popularity” at The Guardian. “Now Musk was suggesting the programs would be a primary target. Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, Democrats pounced…“The average social security recipient in this country receives $65 a day. They have to survive on $65 a day. But you want to take a chainsaw to social security, when Elon Musk and his tens of billions of dollars of government contracts essentially makes at least $8m a day from the taxpayers,” Hakeem Jeffries, the US House minority leader, said in a floor speech the following day. “If you want to uncover waste, fraud or abuse, start there.”…As the second Trump era comes into focus, Democrats have found a new villain: an “unelected billionaire” whose bravado – and sinking popularity – they believe may offer their party a path out of the political wilderness…“There’s nowhere in America where it is popular to cut disease research, to gut Medicaid and to turn off social security,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “So it’s hard to see a place where what Musk is doing for Trump doesn’t become an albatross for Republicans.”…Despite mounting criticism of Musk, the president has embraced his beleaguered ally, who spent close to $300m helping elect him to the White House…Public polling underlines Democrats’ interest in Musk. A new CNN surveyfound that just 35% of Americans held a positive view of the billionaire Trump adviser, a full 10 percentage points lower than the president. The poll also found that he is notably better known and more unpopular than the vice-president, JD Vance…More than six in 10 Americans said Musk had neither the right experience nor the judgment to carry out a unilateral overhaul of the federal government, though views broke sharply along partisan lines. Roughly the same share said they were worried the reductions would go “too far”, resulting in the loss of critical government programs.”

In “Democrats Have a Man Problem” John Hendrickson writes at The Atlantic:  “Chances are low that Joe Rogan will save your soul—or your party. Since Donald Trump’s election victory, countless Democrats have lamented their party’s losses among men, and young men, in particular. One refrain has been a yearning for a “Rogan of the left” who might woo back all the dudes who have migrated to MAGA. If the wishfulness is misplaced, the underlying problem is real: Trump carried men by roughly 12 points in November, including 57 percent of men under 30. …I recently spoke with Democrats across different levels of leadership to see how they were trying to address this electorally lethal gender gap. Two theories for how to win back men, I found, are bubbling up. One is to improve the party’s cultural appeal to men, embracing rather than scolding masculinity. The other is to focus on more traditional messaging about the economy, on the assumption that if Democrats build an agenda for blue-collar America, the guys will follow….These approaches are not necessarily in conflict, but they each present a challenge for the modern Democratic Party. And as pundits and consultants peddle their rival solutions, they highlight another risk: Even if Democrats can settle on a message, will voters believe they really mean it?…Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts is one of many Democrats who believe that the party has to make a serious, sustained outreach effort to connect with men. What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss, a former Marine, told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.” Read more here.

At Axios, Alex Thompson explains why “Why some Democrats are warm to Trump’s tariffs“:”Democrats across the Rust Belt and in several congressional swing districts, along with leaders of historically Democratic unions, have voiced support for many of Trump’s tariffs — even if they believe he’s haphazardly implementing them.

• Rep. Jared Golden of Maine introduced legislation to put a 10% tariff on all goods coming into the U.S. He told Axios: “The world is changing, and some Democrats haven’t quite caught up to that fact.”
• Golden, whose largely rural district voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, added: “I think Trump did identify the problem. In many ways, Democrats are doubling down [on free trade] in reaction to him.”

“Some have said that we have really healthy trade with Canada, and I don’t agree,” Golden added. “I’m not arguing we should embrace tariffs as part of a campaign strategy. I’m arguing we should do it based on the merits of the policy and what is good for working-class Americans.”

• The United Auto Workers union, which endorsed then-President Biden last year, said this month: “We are glad to see an American president take aggressive action on ending the free trade disaster that has dropped like a bomb on the working class.”

…Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) has criticized Trump’s “chaotic” implementation of tariffs, but argued that “the answer isn’t to condemn tariffs across the board.”

• “Democrats need to break free from the wrong-for-decades zombie horde of neoliberal economists who think tariffs are always bad,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed.”

In his NYT opinion column, “Even If Democrats Can Move to the Center, It May Not Help,”  Thomas B. Edsall writes: “There is, in fact, evidence that when Democrats moderate, they actually lose ground…Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford who has also examined the effects of candidate ideology, wrote by email that his research in “The Electoral Consequences of Ideological Persuasion” shows that

even substantial ideological shifts toward the center yield remarkably modest electoral benefits. Specifically, if a Democratic candidate were to shift their position from the median of the Democratic Party to a position as centrist as Joe Manchin, they would gain only about 0.6 percentage points in vote share through persuasion effects alone.

That persuasion benefit, Bonica continued, “must be weighed against the potential negative effects on turnout.”…When both factors are taken into account, “Democrats have achieved their greatest electoral successes precisely in cycles (2008 and 2018) when they did not moderate relative to Republicans,” while “in cycles where Democrats ran more moderate candidates (like 2010 and 2014), their electoral performance was notably weaker.”…Bonica’s bottom line:

The empirical evidence is increasingly converging around a clear conclusion: There appears to be very little electoral advantage from running to the center in contemporary congressional elections.”

Edsall writes further, “On Feb. 2, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, posted their paper “Renewing the Democratic Party.” In it, they wrote that the party must undergo an ideological “revolution” to win back even marginal support from the working class, which, they wrote, believes

that the Democratic Party is dominated by elites whose privileges do not serve the common good and whose cultural views are far outside the mainstream and lack common sense.

They believe that educated professionals look down on them and that the professional class favors policies that give immigrants and minorities unfair advantages at their expense.

They believe that educational institutions preach a set of liberal values that are out of the mainstream and that parents, not schools, should be teaching values. They reject the assertion that slavery and discrimination have made it difficult for Black Americans to work their way out of the lower class and believe that Black Americans can and should rise “without special favors,” as other groups experiencing prejudice have done.

Also, “In an email responding to my queries, Galston provided anecdotal evidence that the Democratic Party is changing in a favorable direction:

The Democrats’ shattering defeat last November has convinced many actual and aspiring leaders that to be competitive in future elections, their party must change. This opened the door to new ways of thinking and challenges to the status quo.

Some of Galston’s examples:

• “The party’s designated responder to Trump’s speech, Senator Elissa Slotkin, delivered a calm and moderate message, which was well received by Democrats.

• “The party’s likely candidates for this year’s high-profile governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia are moderates with impeccable records of service to the country.

• “Most Democrats have abandoned the extreme 2020 ideas — defunding the police, eliminating ICE, etc. — that their eventual presidential nominee, Joe Biden, opposed during his successful primary campaign.

• “Gavin Newsom — up to now, no one’s idea of a moderate — just decided to break with party orthodoxy on the hottest of hot-button issues — transgender rights.

• “Most Democrats have come to understand that Biden’s approach to immigration was a political as well as policy failure and are open to a discussion of alternatives. In a recent Pew poll, 40 percent of Black Democrats and 43 percent of Asian Democrats supported increased efforts to deport people living illegally in the U.S.”

In addition, Edsall notes, “From a different vantage point, Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at N.Y.U., wrote by email that he

would challenge the assumption that Democrats should be moving to the center. There is little evidence that running on progressive policies has hurt Democrats or, conversely, that abandoning those positions has been electorally profitable.

Continuing to protect the civil rights of all Americans while expanding economic opportunity is not just smart politics — it is the party’s duty to its core constituencies. But more important, in the current political moment, calls for Democratic centrism are a distraction.

American democracy is being systematically dismantled before our eyes by an administration that has no regard for the U.S. Constitution. Thus, we are no longer in an era of political competition between liberalism and conservatism, but between democratic values and authoritarianism. It is time for Democrats to steadfastly defend those values, which are so deeply cherished by most Americans.”

Moving to his conclusion, Edsall writes, “Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, replied to my inquiries by email, saying that he, too, would push back against the “twin premises that the Democrats need to moderate across the board as the Democratic Leadership Council did and that the prime reason they can’t is professional liberal voters.”…Democrats, Hacker acknowledged, “have certainly been out of step on some highly salient noneconomic issues — the border crisis chief among them — and they have correctly started moderating here already.”

Hacker emphasized the point, however, that

Democrats should also be embracing a more forthrightly left-populist stance on economics in response to the oligarchic takeover of American democracy. In short, the diagnosis for Democrats shouldn’t be moderation as such but a deeper embrace and prioritization of economic populism.

The biggest challenge, in Hacker’s view…is the longer-term party building that’s needed to address the party’s biggest problems, such as conservative dominance of social media platforms, poor governance in blue states and cities (which hurts the brand and causes voters to locate in more affordable precincts of red America), the party’s organizational weaknesses (which have a lot to do with the decline of its traditional mass base of organized labor) and the fact that Democrats are the party of government in an anti-system era.

The threat Trump poses, Hacker continued,

may create leverage for tackling these big problems without the internal pushback that has doomed such efforts in the past. Democrats have a chance to become the party of change, seeking to redemocratize the corrupt lawless system that Trump and Musk are creating.

For this to happen, there must be broader social mobilization, not just a Democratic elite response, and the party must revitalize its own aging leadership and adopt a strong, optimistic and economically forward-looking orientation. Very dark possibilities loom for Democrats — and democracy — otherwise.”

Michael Scherer sets the stage in his article, “The Democrats’ Working-Class Problem Gets Its Close-Up” at The Atlantic: “The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by…Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class anymore? What is that?” They spoke about the difficulty of buying a house, the burden of having kids with student loans, and the ways in which the “phony” and “corrupt” Democratic Party had embraced far-left social crusades while overseeing a jump in inflation.?…“It was for the people and everything, and now it is just lies,” one man said when asked how the Democratic Party has changed.”

In “Trump’s lies on tax cuts are another gut punch to America’s working-class,” Svante Myrick, President of People for the American Way, writes: “Trump’s numbers don’t add up. If he were getting a math grade for his speech to the joint session of Congress, he’d fail miserably… Trump is worse than a student who hasn’t done his homework. He’s a president who routinely lies to mislead the public, justify his wrongdoing and distract us from the real harm he’s doing to Americans and the lasting damage he’s doing to America… Trump made a lot of promises about a new “golden age” for America. But in reality, he and congressional Republicans are getting ready to sell out Americans and our future so he can deliver massive tax cuts to billionaires like Elon Musk… The budget bill House Republicans just approved is big, but it’s far from beautiful. Their top priority is providing $4.5 trillion in tax cuts whose benefits go overwhelmingly to the richest Americans. That will pile on even more national debt, leave us with less money to support families and communities who need it and force big cuts in Medicaid…Budget experts report that the Trump-Republican plan would give the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers an average tax cut of more than $300,000 — and that the richest 200,000 multimillionaires would get more money than 187 million families…  While the rich would get richer, lower-income households would be even worse off when you factor in cuts to Medicaid and food stamps that would be necessary to make his tax-cut boondoggle work….A majority of Americans who voted in the 2024 election voted for someone other than Trump. A third of eligible voters didn’t participate. Most Americans do not support a tax scheme that funnels most of the benefits to those who are already at the top of the economic pyramid. And the overwhelming majority of Americans want to preserve Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

“In the wake of the 2024 election, pundits and politicos have had much to say about the battle for the American “working class,” with their commentary—whether from the left, the right, or the middle—invariably accompanied by the same image: guys wearing hard hats, toiling away at a construction site or on an assembly line…”Two-thirds of those without a four-year college degree—the criterion that many demographers use to define the “working class”—are employed in services (including health care, retail, and hospitality), compared with one-third in manufacturing, construction, and related industries,” Rick Watzman and Erin Contractor write in “America’s working class barely scrapes by. An outdated image of them doesn’t help” at Fortune…We know this because one of us has been researching and writing about this topic for many years. The other helped to shape labor policy in the Obama and Biden administrations… Their needs are distinct, and they remain largely unmet…We know this because one of us has been researching and writing about this topic for many years. The other helped to shape labor policy in the Obama and Biden administrations—and, perhaps more to the point, has a mom who has worked as an hourly employee at Walmart since the late 1990s. (She currently makes $17.78 an hour as a floor associate.)…”

Tyler Stone writes in “Why Is Trump Relatable? Listen To Him Talk, This Is How Working-Class People Talk” at Real Clear Politics: “On SiriusXM ‘The Megyn Kelly Show,’ Host Megyn Kelly is joined by comedian Andrew Schulz, whose latest Netflix special is “Life,” to discuss the Democrats’ failed messaging and inability to connect with the working class, why Trump’s boldness resonates with Americans of all political persuasions, Trump’s ability to talk like normal people, and more.” Stoner quotes Schulz: “I find a lot of times with the Democrats, there is this pretentiousness. There’s this, like, Ivy League educated, second or third generation kind of trust fund nepo babies that are telling people how they should live and how they should vote. And it’s like, first of all, if you’ve never had a real job, you don’t get to talk… You don’t get to tell people how they should vote… We just despise that. So what I think they have to do is get back in touch with the working class is very much make this a class issue, and you’ve got to call out those people who are giving you money, which these young billionaires and these corporations that are donating, and they won’t do it, and that’s why they’ll probably lose. But the first person in that party that calls it out, you’re going to see the Bernie effect happen again…another thing Democrats don’t understand. They don’t understand like — why this like billionaire who was given money from his dad is so relatable. Well, why don’t you listen to him talk? I’ve had conversations with like rich people. Okay, they don’t talk like that. Yeah, they are incredibly buttoned up a lot of them and concerned publicly about their image and they’re very deliberate about what they say…” The problem didn’t originate with Trump. Something of the same dynamic was in play with Bush v. Gore in 2000. Democrats flipped that script in Obama vs. Romney in 2012. Like Bush II, Trump is every inch a preppie. But he has developed an ear for worker-speak, and it has served him well. It wasn’t all that long ago that nobody thought a New York City guy would do so well in the south. Even bogus class identification trumps regional kinship in winning voters.

Former U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown has a must-read article at The New Republic entitled “Democrats Must Become the Workers’ Party Again: Reconnecting the Democratic Party to the working class is an electoral and a moral imperative, and it will be my mission for the rest of my life.” Some excerpts: “Democrats must become the workers’ party again. It is an electoral and a moral imperative, and it will be my mission for the rest of my life. To win the White House and governing majorities again, Democrats must reckon with how far our party has strayed from our New Deal roots, in terms of both our philosophy toward the economy, and the makeup of our coalition….We cannot solve this problem without an honest assessment of who we are. How we see ourselves as the Democratic Party—the party of the people, the party of the working class and the middle class—no longer matches up with what most voters think….Joe Biden was inarguably the most pro-labor president of my lifetime. He talked about the dignity of work. He ushered in a new era of industrial policy, making dramatic investments to create jobs and move production of crucial technologies home to the United States. He hired economists for top jobs who prioritized worker power in the labor market. He had the most pro-worker U.S. trade representative likely ever. He presided over rising wages and low unemployment. He walked a picket line….But he was horribly unpopular. Americans repeatedly told us that they hated the economy, thought the country was on the wrong track, and feltworse off than ever….So what happened?….The march away from the Democratic Party among working-class voters—now including nonwhite workers—began long before inflation hit. And the road back is going to require more than just waiting for Trump to fail and voters’ memories of inflation to fade….The more that’s been written, the less we seem to have learned. It’s not that complicated. We have an economy today that does not reward work and does not value the work of Americans without four-year college degrees.”

Brown continues, “Over the past 40 years, corporate profits have soared, executive salaries have exploded, and productivity keeps going up. Yet wages are largely flat, and the cost of living keeps getting more expensive….Productivity and wages used to rise together. That changed in the late 1970s. Since then, workers produce more and more, but they enjoy a smaller and smaller share of the wealth they create….And when work isn’t valued, people don’t see a path to economic stability, no matter how hard they work. A couple of years of modestly rising wages are not going to make up for decades of Americans working harder than ever with less and less to show for it….Most people in Ohio believe the system is rigged against them. They’re right. Today, income and wealth inequality rival the Gilded Age. Using one of the most classic definitions of the American dream—that children will be better off than their parents, moving up the economic ladder with each generation—we are going backward. More than 92 percent of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents did. For children born in 1984, it’s only 50 percent….These changes hit working-class kids particularly hard. Children born to parents without college degrees are less likely to get a four-year degree, setting them back in nearly all aspects of life….College graduates have four times the net worth and four times the retirement savings of Americans without degrees. Americans with a bachelor’s degree live eight years longer than those without a bachelor’s degree….In the 1960s, about one in four members of Congress only had a high school degree. Today 96 percent of members are college graduates….If Democrats continue to be seen by voters in places like Ohio as the defenders of a system that rewards a minority of coastal elites at the rest of the country’s expense, we will continue to lose ground among the very people we claim to represent….Today in the Mahoning Valley, I still hear about NAFTA. One member of my Senate staff who grew up in the valley told me last year that, to this day, Clinton is not to be spoken of in his family’s steelworker household, so deep runs the sense of betrayal….People in Youngstown and Dayton and my hometown of Mans­field expected Republicans to sell them out to multinational corporations.

Brown notes, further, “But we were supposed to be the party that looked out for these workers—to be on their side, to stand up to corporate interests….young staffers in the Clinton administration became the seasoned experts in the Obama administration, attempting to ram through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and confidently pushing a vision of an ever-more-interconnected global order. To people in Ohio, that sounded like a recipe for more of the same: more shuttered storefronts, more kids moving away, and more good-paying careers replaced by dead-end jobs at big box stores that have few benefits and opportunities for upward mobility….Most people don’t wantwhat they view as government handouts. Nor do they want to be left to fend for themselves in an unfair market, rigged by multinational corporations, that only benefits the people at the very top….They want a level playing field so their hard work can actually pay off. And they want a government that will actually fight to create that level playing field, which means taking on corporate interests….But instead, the message they’ve heard from party elites, over and over, has been: We know better than you do. Voters sense it. They hate it. And until we fix it, working-class voters will continue to abandon us….Most families at all income levels feel squeezed by soaring housing costs, unaffordable childcare, rising insurance prices, stubbornly expensive health care—not to mention trying to save for retirement, higher education for their kids, and care for aging parents. Life feels unaffordable even for workers whose incomes put them well ahead of their working-class neighbors….And most people get their income from a paycheck, not an investment portfolio. Work unites all of us….We’re all trying to do something productive for our family and our community and our country. We want to develop skills and take pride in them, and we want our work to be valued, and for our paychecks to be enough to provide for our families….That should be our party’s North Star, the foundation on which we build….None of this will be a project measured in months, or in one or two election cycles. We need a generational effort to transform our party, with the dignity of work at the center.”

In “The Democrats’ Working-Class Problem Gets Its Close-Up: A group that spent heavily to defeat Trump is now devoting millions to study voters who were once aligned with the Democratic Party but have since strayed,” Michael Scherer writes at The Atlantic: “The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by….Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class anymore? What is that?” They spoke about the difficulty of buying a house, the burden of having kids with student loans, and the ways in which the “phony” and “corrupt” Democratic Party had embraced far-left social crusades while overseeing a jump in inflation.” Read more here (paywall).

Are there any lessons for U.S. Democrats in the experience of Europe’s left-center political parties? To help address this question, read Justus Seuferle’s “How the Right Hijacked the Working Class for Culture Wars: The alliance between reactionary forces and the working class is not built on shared economic interests but on a manufactured sense of cultural identity” at Social Europe. As Seuferle writes, “Unlike the post-war era’s material politics—marked by fair wages, strong social safety nets, and democratic expansion—the culturalisation of politics does not lead to tangible material change….This transformation recasts political issues as cultural ones, not only diverting attention from material concerns like wages and social security, but also reshaping fundamentally economic matters into cultural narratives. The latest casualty of this shift is the worker—once defined by economic conditions, now reimagined as a cultural identity….Two competing ideas about the worker dominate contemporary discourse. The first—predominantly found in the United States—is cultural; the second, once prevalent in Europe, is material. The cultural definition, often reflected in self-identification surveys, hinges on the colour of one’s collar. It distinguishes between blue-collar and white-collar workers—those who work with their hands versus those in bureaucratic or intellectual roles. Under this framework, even a small business owner can be considered a worker. The only criterion is a sense of cultural belonging tied to one’s type of work….The misconception that the political right represents the working class stems from the confusion caused by the cultural definition. When identity becomes the central axis of political classification, the struggle for economic justice is reduced to a battle for recognition. The fact that the term “worker” originally denoted a structurally disadvantaged position is now lost in the shallow glow of tribal belonging….In reality, what would materially benefit workers are strong unions, high wages, robust labour protections, good public infrastructure, and universal unemployment insurance to give workers the ability to refuse exploitative jobs—forcing employers to raise wages. Instead, Vance offers only the hollow currency of recognition….The outcome is a hollow anti-elitism, reduced to performative opposition, with no substantive policies to improve workers’ lives.”

In “Trump’s Historically Bad First Month of Polls Should Terrify Republicans,” Bill Scher writes at The Washington Monthly: “President Donald Trump’s net job approval average, in both the Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight averages, has slid about 7 points over the first month of his second term, leaving his approval rating just barely above his disapproval….This is a historically bad beginning for a presidency. The only worse example is Donald Trump’s first presidency….Who cares about poll numbers anymore, you might ask. Congressional Republicans should. They are on the ballot next year, and the GOP could easily lose control of the House. If Trump does not defy political gravity, he could drag them down, as he did in his first term….Presidential polling honeymoons always end, but rarely so fast….Trump’s numbers are sinking because he has swiftly implemented radical policies many people do not want. According to the Washington Post-Ipsos poll, the public opposes mass civil service firings, shutdowns of federal agencies, including the foreign aid conduit USAID, banning transgender people from military service, and scrapping diversity programs. Only 34 percent of respondents approved of Elon Musk’s involvement in the administration, while 57 percent believe Trump has “gone beyond his authority as president.”….Trump’s hold on Republican officeholders remains strong. I doubt many of them support Trump’s echoing of Russian narratives about Ukraine or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan for annual 8-percent cuts in the military budget over the next five years. But they are afraid to say as much and risk the president’s wrath and a primary challenge….Yet a continuing presidential poll slide with a midterm election on the horizon could, and should, focus the mind not just on the president’s temperament but the voters. Trump could become a dead weight to the GOP. Congressional Republicans in swing districts and those not necessarily seen as vulnerable today should think about what has been unthinkable: creating some distance between themselves and Trump.”

From “Americans voted for Trump, but don’t support his agenda: Our look at nearly 300 poll questions finds Trump is more popular than Trumpism” by G. Elliot Morris at 538/abcnews: “Looking at all the polls that have been released since Trump took office, we find that while Americans express support for some of Trump’s immigration policy and broad government reform in principle, they oppose most of what he has done in his first month as president….I began by combing through every publicly available political poll that has been released since he took office on Jan. 20. Specifically, I was looking for any question that asked respondents if they supported* an action that Trump had taken or promised to take. As of Feb. 25 at 2 p.m. Eastern, this review yielded over 270 questions from 49 different polls. 538 has made the data for this analysis publicly available here ….I found 63 questions asking about Trump’s immigration policies, ranging from such topics as the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have been accused of committing violent crimes (supported by 89 percent of voters, according to an Ipsos/Washington Post poll conducted Feb. 13-18) to the removal of undocumented immigrants who arrived to the U.S. as children (44 percentage points underwater, 70-26 percent, according to the same poll) to whether immigrants removed from the country should be held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, while they await transfer to their home countries (average support of just 37 percent across three polls)….Generally the broadest policies possible, such as “deporting all immigrants” and “sending the military to the border to help with immigration,” score rather well with the public (52 percent approve and 36 percent disapprove of using military force at the U.S.-Mexico border in the average poll)….But as pollsters get more specific, net approval of those policies tends to fall and go underwater. The AP found, for example, that deporting all undocumented immigrants “even if they will be separated from their children who are citizens” has just 28 percent of Americans in support and 55 percent in opposition. And arresting immigrants while they are at church or school is opposed by more than half of Americans. Excluding questions that ask about the military or Trump’s declared state of emergency on the southern border, the public opposed Trump’s immigration policies by about 1 point on average….Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants (a power he does not have) is underwater by 12 points on average, with 39 percent of adults approving and 50 percent disapproving of the order.”

Morris adds further, “According to an AP-NORC poll conducted shortly before Trump took office, 67 percent of adults think the U.S. government spends too little on Social Security; 61 percent say too little on Medicare; 65 percent too little on education; 62 percent too little on assistance to the poor; and 55 percent too little on Medicaid. Yet these are the programs Republicans are targeting for cutting in order to offset reduced revenues from lower taxes on corporations and richer Americans….Trump’s allies and conservative commentators have run into a classic finding in political science: Voters are “symbolically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” That is, they support liberal social programs and government spending at higher rates than they identify as liberals; to put it in inverse terms, people are more likely to call themselves conservative than they are to support the average conservative policy. It is also generally easier to sell people on vague language and abstract goals (“Reduce the size of government! Make programs more efficient!”) than it is to sell them on the steps it would take to accomplish them (“Fire a ton of people! Make benefits harder to get!”)….A related divide is how people feel toward Trump the man versus how they feel toward his agenda. According to 538’s average of presidential job approval polls, 48.1 percent of adults currently approve of Trump and 47.4 percent disapprove. However, in our new dataset of Trump issue polls, average support for his agenda is 7 points underwater, with just 38 percent supporting his policies and executive orders and 46 percent opposing them….Our new data sheds light on the question of whether the American people voted for everything they’re getting under Trump or whether they supported him for other reasons. Given his agenda is currently 11 points lower than the vote share he won in the 2024 presidential election (49.8 percent), the most likely answer is that this isn’t what Americans had in mind when they voted for him.”

Two of the surest ways to fail in national politics are to preside over high inflation or high unemployment. President Biden gave us an object demonstration in the political danger of inflation. Now, Trump seems to be maneuvering into position to do both. Ironically, he will likely get more benefit from Biden’s infrastructure initiatives than Biden got, because the employment bump will kick in in during the months and years ahead. But with his rash of government lay-offs, Trump-Musk have awakened new fears  of unemployment much larger than the actual danger of it. When sudden mass layoffs in any industry, including government, become the lead news story, the fear spreads and then the market trembles. He would be in much deeper trouble without the infrastructure upgrades Biden secured. It’s a bit early to blame Trump for rising inflation, since, in his own words, “I’m only here for two and a half weeks….I had nothing to do with it.” However as Ed Mazza reports at HuffPo, Trump bragged that “I will immediately bring inflation down on Day 1….Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down.” And it seems a safe bet that Trump’s mass deportations and blanket tariffs are not going to help keep prices down. We are not going to see a lot of guys in red maga hats bringing in the harvest. Nor will adding a surcharge on Canadian lumber help reduce housing prices. One of the post-it notes often seen on the desks of successful small business people says “Under-promise, Over-deliver.” For years Democrats have done the reverse and have paid dearly for it. Now it is the Republicans’ turn.

At The Guardian, Lauren Aratani reports that “A quarter of US shoppers have dumped favorite stores over political stances: A new poll also found that four in 10 Americans have shifted spending to align with moral views in recent months,” and writes: “Americans are changing their shopping habits and even dumping their favorite stores in a backlash against corporations that have shifted their public policies to align with the Trump administration, according to a poll exclusively shared with the Guardian….Four out of 10 Americans have shifted their spending over the last few months to align with their moral views, according to the Harris poll.

• 31% of Americans reported having no interest in supporting the economythis year – a sentiment especially felt by younger (gen Z: 37%), Black (41% v white: 28%) and Democratic consumers (35% v 29% of independents and 28% of Republicans).

• A quarter (24%) of respondents have even stopped shopping at their favorite stores because of their politics (Black: 35%, gen Z: 32%, Democratic: 31%).

More Democrats (50%) indicated they were changing their spending habits compared with Republicans (41%) and independents (40%). Democrats were also more likely to say they have stopped shopping at companies that have opposing political views to their own – 45% of Democrats indicated so, compared with 34% of Republicans….It is a sign that consumers with liberal views are starting to use their wallets in response to politics in the private sector.”

John L. Dorman reports at Business Insider: “When [Sen. Reuben] Gallego was asked why many voters concerned about the economy seemingly had little issue with an administration filled with the ultrawealthy, the Arizona lawmaker said personal wealth is aspirational for many voters….”People that are working class, poor, don’t necessarily look at the ultrarich as their competitors,” he said. “They want to be rich someday.”….He said those voters would give Trump, Musk, and their allies the benefit of the doubt until they were personally impacted by governmental actions….Gallego also predicted that Trump would face political backlash over the GOP’s long-sought tax bill, which could include $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and potential spending reductions for programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program….”That’s when you’re going to see people saying, ‘No, no, no, that’s not what I want,'” he said….Gallego defeated Lake last November even as Trump flipped Arizona red in his victory over then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the key swing state….The first Latino to represent Arizona in the Senate, Gallego outpaced Harris with Latino voters and male voters. The lawmaker attributed his success to his work to engage with voters everywhere, especially as it related to their economic concerns.”

In “America Needs a Working-Class Media: Catering to rich audiences is not serving us,”  Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, writes at the Columbia Journalism Review: “America needs a working-class media. It’s something that has preoccupied me for years. If we thought of it as precariat media, we would also include the falling middle class that I have called the middle precariat (including most freelance writers right now). After the 2024 election, the punditocracy has seemingly rediscovered the working-class voter for the second time—following Donald Trump’s first victory, when J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy emerged to “explain” the rage of those left behind economically. Neither time, however, did they “rediscover” the value of working-class journalists…. The identity crisis of the Democratic Party—and debate over the extent to which the party should identify with the working class—unfolds as I write this; see Bernie Sanders’s, Faiz Shakir’s, and other progressive politicians’ and media figures’ refrain that the party pursued donors and ignored the working class in the 2024 electoral campaign. And if that balance of power must change, the media should be similarly realigned….What would that media look like? It would be one where economic reporters are embedded in blue-collar communities and neighborhoods rather than financial districts, and source networks built around people with direct experience instead of outside analysts. Centering inflation coverage around wage stagnation rather than the stock market and written for people who live paycheck to paycheck. Healthcare reporting would be conducted by those who have experienced medical debt. Labor reporting that represents workers not as mute sufferers but as true experts. Housing that is considered from the perspective of the renter, not the landlord or developer….As Christopher Martin, author of the 2019 book No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, told me: “Media has increasingly centered on a class audience rather than a mass audience.”

Echoing some of the themes developed by Andrew Levison, Ruy Teixeira and Stanley Greenberg at this website and others, here is a 17+ minute Ted Talk video clip by Joan C. Williams, Distinguished Law Professor and Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings:

For a discussion of Williams’ latest book, click here.