In his latest column, “Democrats, Trump has given you a mission. Accept all of it. The republic is under siege. What can be done?,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes that “However, disoriented Democrats may be, they have to understand that Trump has given them a mission. They need to accept it — all of it….Which means that a lot of what once passed for strategy is useless now. Democrats cannot pretend that business-as-usual behavior is appropriate to this moment. They cannot “choose their battles” because what’s at stake is not just this or that policy but whether we will endure as a free republic in which presidents recognize they are not monarchs. It’s absurd to say of Trump “we will work with him where we can” when the project on which they’d be “working with him” involves shattering the rule of law and making it impossible for government workers to do the jobs Americans expect them to carry out….Democrats who want to save the nation — and their party — need to end their malaise, mobilize their supporters and fight for something that matters. If our constitutional democracy doesn’t matter, I don’t know what does….Franklin D. Roosevelt built the New Deal coalition by opposing concentrated economic power and highlighting the human costs of a form of capitalism with weak guardrails and a paltry safety net. Ronald Reagan unraveled the New Deal coalition with his three antis — anti-government, anti-tax, and anti-communism. In both cases, the power of negative thinking created paths to sweeping affirmative agendas….Trump’s firings have disabled the National Labor Relations Board by depriving it of a quorum. It now has no way of enforcing labor law and protecting workers’ rights. That’s his reward to the many working-class voters who helped elect him….Republicans who control Congress should also be up in arms about the Trump-Musk incursion on their authority. But since they’re falling into line behind a surrender to the executive branch, Democrats have no choice but to make the Trumpist GOP’s going as difficult as possible.”

Dionne continues, “Trump’s obvious indifference to rising costs should, as party strategist James Carville has argued, be at the center of Democratic accountability efforts. Trump, after all, promised to “slash your prices” and bring down “the price of everything.” But his priorities — revenge, political control of the administration of justice, the intimidation of civil servants, and, for that matter, takeovers of Greenland and Gaza — have nothing to do with lowering what consumers pay for groceries, gas or housing. His tariffs will only make inflation rise….An alert reader might say that much of what’s being proposed here sounds a lot like “the resistance” to the first Trump presidency. That is precisely what is needed now — more, even, than the last time around….Sure, the term was a little precious, but what’s forgotten is that the first resistance was effective. It helped save the Affordable Care Act, end Republican control of the House, flip seven governorships, and elect hundreds to legislatures and local offices. Legions of smart lawyers repelled many of Trump’s abuses — and this time around, the legal profession has been at the forefront of the early victories against his maneuvers, including Saturday’s ruling restricting the Musk group’s access to Treasury Department data….Theda Skocpol, a Harvard political scientist who studied the anti-Trump movement, noted recently in the New Republic that what worked the last time were the “persistent, community-based efforts by 2,000 to 3,000 grassroots Resistance groups in every town, city, and suburb across virtually all congressional districts.” The events of the past three weeks summon Americans again to diners, churches, libraries, union halls and taverns to organize, to pressure their elected officials (especially the 15 House Republicans who won last year by five percentage points or less), and to reach out to their friends and neighbors to warn them about what Trump is doing to their democracy.”

In “Former Sanders, Fetterman campaign consultants start new firm aimed at winning back working-class voters: They’re aiming to elect more nontraditional candidates with a populist, anti-establishment streak,” Holly Otterbein writes at Politico: “A group of Democratic strategists who worked for some of the biggest unorthodox names in liberal politics is launching a new firm….The consultants who helped guide Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and the winning Senate bids for John Fetterman and Ruben Gallego are branding their new company Fight Agency….They said they’re aiming to elect more nontraditional candidates with a populist, anti-establishment streak. They’re even open to fielding left-leaning independents who eschew the Democratic Party label altogether….POLITICO is first to report on their announcement….The strategists behind Fight Agency declined to share the names of any potential new clients, but said they expect to work in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential campaign….They have at points worked to elect more traditional candidates, including former President Joe Biden. But many of their past clients are known for their offbeat styles, willingness to speak off the cuff, and a propensity to ruffle the feathers of their own party leaders — an approach to politics the consultants plan to employ at their new venture….McDonald, who made ads for Dan Osborn, a left-leaning independent Senate candidate in Nebraska who lost but outperformed the top of the ticket in 2024, said “outsiders, working-class candidates, even a few independents — this is kind of what people want, and there should be a team that can help them.”….As Democrats grapple with how to win back blue-collar voters, Mulvey said Sanders, Fetterman and Gallego provide “clues” for their party. He said they “all have the ability to connect with working-class and independent voters” and represent “anti-establishment, economic messaging, populist messaging.”

According to Jennifer Bowers Bahney, writing at The Raw Story, a “Single Trump decision could be driving working-class Hispanics back to the Dems: analysis.” As Bahney explains, “Working-class Hispanic voters who turned their backs on Democrats to help elect Donald Trump may soon make a U-turn, according to an analysis in Tuesday’s New York Times….The report listed Trump policies that appealed to Hispanic U.S. citizens and which are currently being carried out: “raids and deportations; the opening of a migrant internment camp at the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; the president’s attempt to end automatic citizenship to babies born on U.S. soil; tariffs threatened, then pulled back, on Mexican goods; and the U.S. military dispatched to the border.”….But, the report claimed Trump’s embrace of billionaire Elon Musk and the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could be the catalyst that drives Hispanic voters back into the arms of the Democrats….Sylvia Bruni, a Democratic Party leader, agreed that the party needed to focus less on issues like abortion and gender “if it wanted to win back socially conservative Latinos.”….Bruni said, “The Republicans kept telling voters: I promise you, eggs are going to be down to $1 a dozen. Economics is what did us in.”

In “Here’s What Senate Democrats Should Be Doing to Fight Trump; Senate rules were explicitly designed to protect the minority. Democrats should exploit them mercilessly to slow Trump and Musk before they destroy the country,” Aaron Regunberg writes at The New Republic: “Democrats have additional tactics they can, and must, start deploying. As groups like Indivisible have been highlighting, the U.S. Senate is an institution designed to protect the rights of the minority party. That means Democratic senators have an arsenal of procedural tools they should be weaponizing to disrupt and delay Republicans’ agenda in protest of Musk’s infiltration of our federal payment systems….Perhaps the most significant tool Democratic senators could use to throw sand in the gears is the denial of unanimous consent. Unanimous consentis the framework by which the Senate operates. Technically, all of the basic day-to-day functions of the Senate—from scheduling votes to moving bills forward—require time-consuming procedural steps like roll-call votes and debates. But senators agree, or unanimously consent, to skip over these processes. If Democrats deny unanimous consent, they can grind Senate business to a crawl….Democrats in the Senate could use quorum calls to disrupt the flow of GOP business. Officially, according to Senate rules, business can’t be conducted without a majority of senators present on the Senate floor. Most of the time, nobody asks for a quorum, as there are rarely a majority of senators on the floor. But any senator can request a quorum check at any time, making the clerk do a full roll call of all the senators. If fewer than 51 respond, Senate business stops until there’s a majority….as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has argued, these actions can force the GOP to “fight for every single step” because “the slower they go, the less they can break.”

At The Guardian, read “Here’s how Democrats should fight back against Trump” by Margaret Sullivan, who says: “Some Democrats in a new generation are punching back hard, and in so doing, showing their colleagues how to overcome their reputation for spineless dithering.” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy “has been relentless in calling out exactly what’s happening and why, especially in the shocking weeks since Trump took office….“We have days to stop the destruction of our democracy,” Murphy raged at a protest Tuesday in front of the US treasury building in Washington. “It’s the people who rule, not the billionaires….“Democrats need to throw every possible wrench into the plans of Trump, Musk and their Republican cultists in Congress,” argued scholar Norm Ornstein in the Contrarian newsletter. “Doing so will also underscore how serious the threat is to our system, thereby forcing media to cover it.” As the Virginia congressman Don Beyer suggested on Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast podcast from the New Republic: “Put those things that used to be routine and make them not routine until Trump stops breaking the law.”….In other words, attack on multiple fronts, including through leveraging the power of Democratic state governments. Most of all, prepare for the midterms elections next year by honing a strong, populist message….And lead with convincing voices that can motivate the public….if the public believes there is no determination to fight back, Trump’s destruction will continue unabated.”

“With just over a month until government funding expires,” Nicholas Wu and Mia McCarthy write at Politico, “Democrats remain divided on whether they should use the threat of a government shutdown as a political cudgel as they try to push back on President Donald Trump and billionaire ally Elon Musk….Key progressives want to use every point of leverage the minority party has at its disposal to push back against the slashing of federal agencies being undertaken by Trump’s budget office and Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”….“It is the Republican majority’s responsibility to gather the votes necessary for them to pass their agenda. I do not believe that Democrats should be helping,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “Given the Republican majority’s attempts to completely gut the federal government, any concession necessary for the Democratic Party to assist them in passing a CR must be incredibly substantial.”….“These guys are in charge, running around, bragging about a mandate, so they should put on their mandate pants and pass whatever they want to pass but if they want us [to help keep the government open], they have to work with us,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). This is about give and take — about a compromise. And if they don’t want to do that, then they’re on their own.”….“No House Democrat wants to shut down the government,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) told reporters Tuesday morning. But he added that there’s “very little appetite to help Republicans when we don’t trust that Donald Trump is going to spend the resources that we’ve allocated.”

At Salon, former congressman Tim Roemer shares “After the big loss, what’s next? An open letter to the Democratic Party: We can bring the party together — and win — if we’re willing to address inequality and advocate for radical change,” and writes: “We must improve our connection to and our communications with the middle class and blue-collar voters….We must be aggressive and tenacious once again, in the tradition of historic and inspirational leaders like Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., by advocating for radical change in housing, education, health and labor rights….Defending the overall status quo at a time when the American Dream is slipping away for so many working Americans is politically tone-deaf and dangerously out of touch. Defending the status quo on rental rates and home prices, especially if you want the votes of middle-class people or voters under 40, is insane….We did not convey a message of fresh and viable economic change for working people. …Democrats need to be the working-class voice of frustration and their hammer for change….most Americans desperately want to hear about what we will do to curb rising housing prices, reduce escalating egg prices, keep gas prices low and fix out-of-control college costs. Food, energy, housing and education are core voting issues, especially when you experience them as reducing your choices and chewing up your family budget….Voters want to hear what we will do to protect their current job and create new ones. They want lower prescription drug costs and less Medicare bureaucracy….Rebuilding our economic message is the key to winning. The American Dream remains achievable, but the ladder required to climb up and grab it requires modernizing and repairing. The rungs on that ladder have always been education, jobs, housing and health care. Let’s learn from this past election, fix the mistakes we have made through the past several cycles, and propose a positive economic agenda for reaching the American Dream.”

One of the central concerns of The Democratic Strategist has been to explore ways that Democrats can regain the support of a healthy majority of working-class voters, including white working-class voters, a group which accounts for about half of the electorate. Toward that end, Andrew Levison has a new TDS Strategy Memo entitled “Democratic Political Strategy is Developed by College-Educated Political Analysts Sitting in Front of Computers on College Campuses or Think Tank Offices . That’s Why the Strategies Don’t Work.” Levison, author of influential works of political analysis, including “The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support,” argues that nearly all of the previous political analysis of white working-class voters “is profoundly and painfully superficial” because “It essentially visualizes working people as if they were isolated individuals sitting in their living rooms watching TV or reading a newspaper and thoughtfully evaluating the political messages and policy proposals that they see presented.” Further, Levison writes: “What is entirely ignored in this way of conceptualizing how workers make political choices is the massive effect of social and community life, of neighborhood and community institutions and a voter’s personal history and experience on their political perspective – on how daily interaction with friends, neighbors, co-workers and others in a workers’ neighborhood, workplace and community shape that person’s political attitudes.”

This is a very different perspective than the common wisdom embraced and regurgitated by many political analysts. As  Levison notes further, “At first glance these articles appear to offer a vast range of distinct suggestions but when examined more closely can be seen to fall into three basic categories:

William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, two of the Democratic Party’s most astute strategists, make their case for ‘Renewing the Democratic Party,” cross-posted here from The Third Way:

A time comes for every political party when its policies and dominant assumptions no longer meet either the public’s expectations or the needs of the times. We believe that the Democratic Party has reached one of these moments and stands in urgent need of renewal.

This renewal involves more than communications, organization, and mobilization. It will require the party to ask itself hard questions about the reasons for its dwindling support among groups it has long taken for granted, to reflect on declining public confidence in government as a vehicle of progress, and to think anew about its policy agenda in an era of rapid change, at home and abroad. This process will be neither quick nor easy, which is why it must begin now.

The purpose of Democratic renewal is not only to win the next election. It is to build a party that can command a sustainable majority over a series of elections based on an agenda that successfully addresses the central issues of our time.

The Key Challenge to a Sustainable Democratic Majority: Losing the Working Class

As the 2024 election has made clear, the populist revolution that Trump has spearheaded within the Republican Party is reconfiguring the coalitions of both parties, to the Democrats’ disadvantage.

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 Hispanics¹ and an increasing share of African American men. Making matters worse, several groups of Asian Americans shifted to the right as their concern mounted about crime in public spaces and attacks on test-based admissions to elite public high schools.²

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 2020.³  And so, it appears, has the Democratic share of the college graduate vote (57% in 2020, 56% in 2024) even as the Republican share of the non-college vote surged from 51% to 56%. Meanwhile, non-college voters still make up 57% of the electorate, a figure that rises to 60% in the swing states.⁴

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% 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% or lower while prevailing in seven of the 10 states with college attainment between 36 and 39%.⁵ 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.

The new class-based politics is reinforced by the fact that prosperity in twenty-first century America is concentrated in metropolitan areas where the workforce is educated, innovation is strong, and the information economy dominates. Our Brookings colleagues looked at all the counties in America and found that in 2024 the richer counties voted for Harris while the poorer counties voted for Trump.⁶ As the table below, taken from their recent report, illustrates, this trend has been going on for some time. Today, 60% of America’s wealth is concentrated in only 382 of the country’s more than 3000 counties. These wealthy counties are densely populated, which explains why Harris’ popular vote was competitive, but they are found in either deep blue states or as islands of high education and prosperity in deep red states.

National Trends

Donald Trump won a surprisingly broad-based victory in 2024. He received 3.1 million more votes than he did in 2020 and, contrary to the expectations of many, won the popular vote by 2.3 million. He bettered his share of the popular vote by 3.1 percentage points, coming within 0.1 point of winning an outright majority while sweeping all seven swing states, some by substantial margins. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’s share of the popular vote was 3 points lower than Joe Biden’s in 2020.

Compared to Biden’s performance in 2020, Harris lost ground in almost every demographic group, with especially severe losses among young adults⁷ and non-white voters, particularly Hispanics and Black men. Moreover, Harris’s non-stop efforts to mobilize women on the abortion issue fell well short of its goal, even though large majorities continued to vote for the pro-choice position on referenda. Indeed, Harris’s margin among suburban women, a major campaign target, was 4 points lower than Biden’s had been four years earlier.⁸

To be sure, Trump’s victory fell well short of the landslide he often claims. Kamala Harris won 48.4% of the popular vote, falling short of Trump’s share by just 1.5 points. Some Democratic leaders are trying to put a sunny spin on this result.⁹

But the fact remains that Trump has improved his vote total and vote share in both presidential elections since his surprise Electoral College victory in 2016, disproving pundits who spoke confidently about the “low ceiling” of his popular support. And he is winning the public argument about the issues on which he has run consistently for decades—trade, globalization, and immigration.

A single statistic sums up the Democratic Party’s decline. Between 1976 and 2020, Democrats consistently led Republicans as a share of the presidential electorate. Republicans won elections only when they garnered significant support from Democrats, as Ronald Reagan did in 1980 and 1984 and George H. W. Bush did in 1988. The 2024 election interrupted this longstanding trend: Republicans constituted 35% of the electorate compared to just 31% for Democrats. Donald Trump got only 4% of votes cast by Democrats, but this poor performance didn’t come close to costing him the election.¹⁰

This break with the past reflected more than the sharp 2024 decline in Democratic turnout. During the past three years, Republicans have led Democrats in party identification for the first time since 1991.¹¹ If they can mobilize their base and do reasonably well among independents, they now can win elections without reaching across party lines. Whether or not Donald Trump was aware of this trend, he sensed that turning out the party faithful would be enough to win. To this end, he pursued a relentless strategy of intensifying rather than broadening his support, and it worked.

The Swing States Versus the Rest of the Country

Drilling down below the national aggregates, we find that the 2024 election was actually two separate and very different contests—one in the seven swing states, the other in the rest of the country. In the latter, where advertisements and voter mobilization were scarce, support for Harris collapsed from the high-water mark Biden had established, especially in blue states. In the swing states, by contrast, the Harris campaign came very close to equaling Biden’s performance in the aggregate. This wasn’t enough, however, because Trump improved significantly from his 2020 showing.

In many of the blue states, Trump’s vote total expanded modestly if at all while Harris’s collapsed relative to Biden’s performance four years earlier. In Illinois and New Jersey, Harris received about 400,000 fewer votes than Biden. In New York, Harris fell short of Biden by 600,000. And in California, the shortfall reached an astonishing 1.8 million votes, a drop of 16.5% from 2020.

By contrast, Harris performed well in most of the swing states. She got more votes than Biden in three swing states (Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin), fewer than Biden in three swing states (Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania), and virtually tied him in Nevada. Her vote total in the swing states trailed Biden’s by just 47,000—three tenths of one percent. But fatally for her presidential prospects, Trump improved on his 2020 showing in the swing states by nearly one million votes—6.2%.¹² While Harris lost them all, it would be more accurate to say that Donald Trump won them, with a message strong enough to overcome the Harris campaign’s edge in funds and organization.

The implication of the swing state outcomes is clear: as Democrats ponder the way forward, their challenge is not only to repair their weaknesses but also to develop an agenda and message appealing enough to counter the strength that Republicans showed in 2024.

As President Trump began his second term, he enjoyed substantial support from the American people, and so did his party.  In contrast, the Democratic Party hit new lows in public approval. At the end of January 2025, only 31 percent of the people had a favorable opinion of the party, compared to 57 percent unfavorable.  Among Independents, the favorable/unfavorable split was 22/59; among men, 22/67.  After an intensive Democratic outreach throughout the Biden administration, the party scored only 39 percent approval among women, barely better than the Republicans’ 37 percent.  The party cannot hope to recover until unless it finds a way to improve its brand.¹³

Why Harris Lost

Optimists may argue that Kamala Harris’s defeat stemmed from a series of unfortunate events without broader significance for the future of the Democratic Party. If Joe Biden had not, in 2024, engaged in a presidential debate in which he appeared to have aged substantially, if he had honored what many Democrats thought was a tacit promise to serve only one term, if he had announced his intention not to run after the 2022 election, if there had been a presidential primary that gave the winner not only public exposure but also time to plan for the general election, if Harris had found more effective ways of distancing herself from President Biden and explaining why she had abandoned her past positions—the 2024 contest could well have turned out differently.

These arguments have merit—up to a point. For example, a wide-open primary in 2023 and 2024 may have attracted candidates free to tackle the key issues of inflation and immigration more aggressively and without the constraints that a sitting vice president faces.

But these might-have-beens do not absolve Democrats from the disagreeable but necessary task of facing their underlying weaknesses and their opponents’ strength. In 2024 an attractive if flawed candidate lost to a former president with legal woes and personality defects who had been impeached twice and defeated for reelection, allowing a former incumbent to return to the White House for the first time since 1892.

If President Trump fails to fulfill the promises that drove his campaign, Democrats could defeat his successor in 2028. But this would merely perpetuate the destructive status quo of narrow, ever-shifting majorities that undermine successful governance. Democrats must work to build a sustainable majority. This means more than playing better the cards they now hold. They need a reshuffled deck and a new deal.

A year after the Biden presidency began, the authors of this memo published “The New Politics of Evasion: How Ignoring Swing Voters Could Reopen the Door for Donald Trump and Threaten American Democracy.”¹⁴ In that article, we warned Hispanic voters could continue to move away from the Democratic Party. We noted Democrats’ weakness among working-class voters, especially in the swing states. We suggested that contrary to the belief of many Democratic leaders and activists, Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 did not herald a new progressive era in either economics or culture. “For reasons of education, income, and geography,” we argued, too many Democrats were “far removed from the daily experiences and cultural outlooks of non-college voters.” And we showed that Democrats’ weakness among working-class Americans threatened to overwhelm their gains among voters with college degrees.

The 2024 election results confirmed our fears and revealed structural weaknesses in the Democratic Party as serious as those that were revealed in George H. W. Bush’s victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988. They require an equally comprehensive response.

In this context, we turn to a more detailed analysis of the factors that undermined Kamala Harris’s chances.

Inflation and Immigration

There is wide agreement that inflation and immigration hurt Harris’s chances, but the administration’s defenders argue that both higher prices and mass migration were global phenomena over which President Biden and Vice President Harris had little control. We disagree. Several well-known economists who served in prior Democratic administrations—for example, Larry Summers and Jason Furman—argued that Biden’s stimulus bills were excessive and therefore inflationary, a point recently conceded by the president’s chief economic advisor.¹⁵ To be sure, these bills were passed in the shadow of a national trauma—the COVID-19 epidemic—and the impulse to spend money was powerful. The Biden administration acted quickly to ease the COVID-induced interruption of supply chains, the one concrete action they could take to ease inflation. But as President Jimmy Carter found many decades ago, the president’s toolbox for dealing with rapid inflation once it has begun is pretty bare.

Given the lack of effective policy options, the administration was too slow to acknowledge the pain being felt by Americans beset by high grocery store and gasoline prices. Because so many Democratic voters now come from the upper middle class, the Administration overlooked the fact that inflation hits working-class voters, who live from paycheck to paycheck and spend most of their income on necessities, especially hard. In this context, the administration’s ill-conceived effort to sell “Bidenomics” was a fiasco that succeeded only in making the president and the party appear out of touch.

While there is some uncertainty whether Biden could have done more on inflation once it emerged, there is none on the question of immigration.

Between 2020 and 2023, migration and arrivals at the border surged.¹⁶ Several factors were no doubt responsible, but among the most important was that Democrats had been staunch critics of Trump’s border policies, especially his policy of family separation. In a world of instant communications, even in the poorest countries, the change in American leadership and policy after the 2020 election was not lost on people trying to escape poverty and violence, and they came to the United States in record numbers. As immigrants overwhelmed the border, opposition by progressive advocacy groups to tougher border enforcement or asylum reforms helped deter the president from acting until the political costs of inaction became prohibitive.

Unlike inflation, where President Biden’s policy tools were weak, he had plenty of authority to act at the border. The effective immigration restraints Biden implemented in 2024 could have been put in place years earlier.¹⁷ In fact, as the border was being overrun, Democrats in Congress, seeing the chaos and the effect on their constituents, agreed with Republicans on one of the toughest immigration bills ever. Once Trump torpedoed the bill, Biden’s insistence that he couldn’t act because he didn’t have the legal authority to do so only added to the public perception that he was weak, and his shift toward a tougher stance in 2024 undermined the claim that he lacked legal authority.

Democrats need to understand just how badly the Biden administration’s mishandling of immigration hurt Kamala Harris’s chances in 2024, not only among white voters, but across the board. Political scientist Michael Tesler has shown that between 2020 and 2024, the percentage of Hispanic and Black voters who agreed that “immigrants drain national resources” increased dramatically and that this shift moved voters of color to Trump.¹⁸ A Progressive Policy Institute survey found that by a narrow margin, working-class Hispanics actually preferred Trump to Harris on immigration.¹⁹ A Financial Times survey found that while 80% of white progressives believe that “immigration to the US should be made easier,” only 30% of Hispanics agree.²⁰ Even in deep-blue California, 63% of Hispanics now consider unauthorized immigrants to be a “burden,” contributing to the large shift of Golden State Hispanics toward Trump.²¹

Nowhere has the impact of shifting Hispanic opinion been more dramatic than in Florida, a former swing state. In 2012, Barack Obama carried Florida by 1 point. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost it by 1 point. In 2020, Joe Biden lost by 3 points. In 2024, Kamala Harris lost the Sunshine State by a stunning 13 points, 56-43, mainly because Hispanics deserted her for Donald Trump. In 2020, Joe Biden carried Florida’s Hispanics by 7 points, 53-46. This year, Harris lost them by 14 points, 56-42.

Without regaining an edge among Hispanics, who now constitute almost one-quarter of Florida’s voters, Democrats have no chance of recapturing Florida in the foreseeable future. But to do so, they must discard obsolete ideas about the interests and preferences of this increasingly influential bloc, the majority of whom are now native-born citizens. Years ago, we predicted that Hispanics would turn out to be the Italians of the 21st century, and now it is happening.

Read more…

In “Democrats Launch Plan To Win Back Working Class,” Kahleda Rahman writes at Newsweek: “The leading super PAC supporting House Democrats in next year’s midterms has launched a $50 million fund aimed at winning back working-class voters….The House Majority PAC’s investment, which it has dubbed the “Win Them Back Fund,” is “focused on ensuring that we win back working-class voters across the congressional battlefield,” according to a Monday memo. It comes two years after it began the 2024 election cycle with funds for House seats in New York and California….The memo said that one of the “major roadblocks we have faced as a party has been declining support among a multiracial group of working-class voters.”….But it noted that some House Democrats including Representatives Adam Gray, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Don Davis “continue to overperform with this crucial bloc of voters,” demonstrating that House Democrats “can win back this coalition of voters with the support of strategic investments in recruitment, research, and programming.”….The memo said, “the House Republican agenda—including tariffs and taxes that would raise costs on families and force steep cuts to programs like Medicare, Social Security, and veterans’ benefits, would hurt working-class voters and only benefit the ultrarich—and awareness of that reality is key to our success with these voters….The super PAC’s memo included a list of 14 Republicans the fund will initially target, saying they represent districts where working-class voters would be “especially hurt” by the Republican policies….Mike Smith, the president of the House Majority PAC, said in a statement to Newsweek: “We’re laying a marker down with our Win Them Back Fund—this is a priority. Crafting and developing a credible working-class message through an economic frame is the single best thing we can do as a party.”

Les Leopold explains “Why Working People Need a Political Movement of Their Own” at Common Dreams, and writes: “It would be suicidal, some argue, for the working class to abandon the Democrats. Better that they exert pressure so that the Democrats become genuine economic populists. For that to happen, realistically, it must be proven that Democrats can win elections on a populist platform in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin….But Sherrod Brown, a very strong economic populist, lost his Senate seat in Ohio in 2024. Did populism drag him down? Brown, who lost by 3.6 percent, certainly ran better than Harris, who lost Ohio by 11.2 percent. Brown believes, however, that he was done in by NAFTA, the free trade bill pushed for and signed by Bill Clinton in 1993….The power of NAFTA, not the working-class racism, is also what delivered the South to the Republicans, according to Nelson Lichtenstein in his new book on the Clinton years, A Fabulous Failure. Even after Nixon used his racist Southern Strategy to lure the South away from the Democrats, Lichtenstein notes that congressional representation in the southern states was still evenly split between the two parties. After NAFTA demolished the southern textile industry, however, most of the South abandoned the Democrats….The Democrats also have failed to redevelop decimated areas by directly creating jobs, as the New Deal did during the Depression. Job stability is not something either political party cares about, because corporate interests come first, but the issue hurts the Democrats more because of its historical claim as the party of working people….Working people, union and non-union alike, can still be mobilized through civic engagement to express their hopes and desires. Workers could join something new, like a new Workers Populist Alliance, to develop and put forth a working-class agenda….The billionaire class has two political parties. Working people need one of our own.”

Democrats should energetically publicize that military veterans are included in the Trump-Musk  seizure of data pertaining to all U.S. government payments. As Rebecca Kheel writes at military.com: “Over the weekend, Musk and his team gained access to the system that the Treasury Department uses to make all U.S. government payments. The system includes taxpayer data, such as Social Security numbers, for nearly every American, which naturally includes scores of veterans. On top of that, information about VA disability and retirement benefits, Medicare and Medicaid payments and any other government benefits veterans might receive would be swept up in the system….”Anyone who’s receiving payments from the federal government, first and foremost, is likely to be concerned that payments that they are obliged to receive might not show up, either intentionally because they’re getting blocked for some reason that’s not explained, or even unintentionally, because they’re giving admin access to a critical piece of our federal infrastructure to random coders off the street, which violates like every principle of cybersecurity and administration of these systems that exists,” said Alan Butler, executive director and president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit privacy advocacy group….”With this takeover, Musk can now access veterans’ personal data — from where they live, to their bank account info, and the amount of their earned VA benefits,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said in a statement. “Veterans risked their lives to defend this country, and they deserve more than to have unaccountable billionaires playing with the benefits they earned and rely on.” Read on here.

It’s not going to happen and it’s just a distraction from the Administration’s barrage of unpopular recent initiatives. But Kevin Liptak, Alayna Treene and Jeff Zeleny explain “How Trump arrived at his stunning idea to ‘take over’ the Gaza Strip” at CNN Politics: “President Donald Trump’s idea — announced Tuesday evening at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — was formulated over time, people familiar with the matter said, and appeared to originate with the president himself. It was only the latest reminder that policy ideas often start with Trump, rather than slowly build through national experts before ultimately reaching the Oval Office for discussion….“The president has said he’s been socialing this idea for quite some time. He’s been thinking about this,” his press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday….The proposal for Gaza has not come up in private meetings Trump has held with GOP members of the Armed Services Committees, aides said, even though the ceasefire and broader challenges across the Middle East were key points of discussion as late as last week….Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was traveling in Guatemala, heard the idea for the first time as he watched Trump’s news conference with Netanyahu on television. The Middle East has been dramatically reduced from his portfolio, with Witkoff, the president’s longtime friend, serving as the US envoy to the region….A day after Trump made his comments, [national security advisor Mike] Waltz suggested it had been in the works for some time….“We’ve been looking at this over the last weeks and months, and frankly he’s been thinking about it since October 7,” Waltz said Wednesday on CBS….In public and private conversations over the last year, Trump has repeatedly highlighted the value of Gaza’s seaside location, suggesting it was prime real estate for development….Sending US troops to the region would be in stark contrast to Trump’s long-held critique of nation building and foreign entanglements. He was among the sharpest critics of Republican orthodoxy of national building during the George W. Bush administration.”

In “What Is Donald Trump’s Mandate? Voters want big changes from Biden’s failed policies, but many are not in Trump’s plan,” Stanley B. Greenberg, one of America’s most respected pollsters and poll analysts, writes at The American Prospect: “Democratic leaders sound understandably cautious when talking about whether President Donald Trump has a mandate, or what steps Democrats should take now. They are respecting the voters who put Trump back in office, and they recognize the elites have gotten a lot of hot-button issues wrong….We will have no clue about the Trump mandate or what Democrats should do, of course, unless we are frank about what happened with Joe Biden and what changes voters want. Major parts of the mandate will help Trump, but failure to deliver change will hurt. And other parts of Trump’s agenda insult voters in ways that will push down his already unimpressive approval ratings….Knowing what happened starts with knowing voters were more fearful of “Biden continuing as President” than “Trump winning a second term.” A 53 percent majority in a Democracy Corps survey felt that. And that majority grew to 54 percent after seeing all the Trump attacks….President Joe Biden gave an upbeat account of his progress, but he was deeply and singularly unpopular. About 60 percent disapproved of his presidency in our November election poll. And other polls have shown his approval and favorability decline further as he left office in January.”

Greenberg explains further, “Kamala Harris ran much worse with working-class voters than Biden did in 2020, but his approval in our November poll was below her vote. His support was eroding further. And how do you get a strong vote in the base when 37 percent of Blacks, 56 percent of Hispanics, and 59 percent of white millennials disapproved of Biden on Election Day?….According to Gallup, 3 in 5 Americans thought the country “lost ground” under Biden on debt, immigration, crime, the economy, “the gap between the wealthy and less well-off,” and “United States’ position in the world.”….What is so difficult for all of us to process is that Trump has a mandate to fix where Biden failed on the border, the economy, crime in cities, and certain aspects of the woke agenda. Those actions will help Trump….But voters’ disappointment with Biden also included not helping the middle class enough or addressing inequality. Trump has no mandate to exploit all energy sources and reverse Biden’s climate policies. He has no mandate to put the oligarchs in the White House. And contrary to Trump’s actions, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is very popular with the public.”

Greenberg goes on to share the results of poll questions he posed. Here is one example: “Trump’s top mandate is to secure the open border and deport undocumented immigrants in our cities. We examined many possible reasons to vote for Trump, but nothing came close to support for his commitment to “secure the border and deport illegal immigrants.” The same is true in the reasons to vote against Harris. Nothing is close to the “open border and illegal immigrants in all our cities.” These are each 10 to 20 points above the next reason cited….Over 70 percent of white working-class men, women, and union households give it as the top reason to vote for Trump—about 20 points above the next reason….Democratic leaders need to understand that this mandate is also the very top reason Hispanics voted for Trump and against Harris. They are not looking for “comprehensive immigration reform” or policies that “solve the problem.” Fully 64 percent chose that Trump would “secure the border and deport illegal immigrants,” and 54 percent rejected Harris because of the “open border and illegal immigrants in our cities….Blacks and Hispanics were angry that non-citizens were competing for housing, schools, and health services in their cities. And they were already much more likely to say that “crime and homelessness in the cities” should be a top priority….Democrats may be paying a price already. They get their most Fs from voters on “prioritizing citizens over non-citizens.” Additional issue attitudes explored in the poll and Greenberg’s analysis include: inflation; taxes; crime; abortions; tariffs; and transgender identity, and others. Read Greenberg’s entire American Prospect article right here.

From “Trump Caves On Tariffs After Getting Virtually Nothing From Canada” by Jason Easley at Politicususa: “As markets started getting shaky and outrage was growing over his tariffs, Donald Trump needed a way out. Mexico gave Trump an escape hatch by staging a little performance on the border, and Canada got the tariffs postponed by continuing to implement their already passed border plan….Trump got some Mexican troops to go to the border and parade around, and Canada is going to keep doing what it was already doing, plus a new intelligence directive and a fentanyl czar, whatever that is….Trump settled for getting nothing because he is so poorly informed that he thinks he is getting something in the deal.” Clearly, the president needs some better economic advisors. At Daily Kos, The Critical Mind saw it this way in “Promises? What promises? Trump folds as Canadian/Mexican tariffs are postponed – likely permanently”: “Trump will spin this as a victory. ‘I got what I wanted and more — much more. It was the best deal ever.’ The reality is otherwise. Both Mexico and Canada made vague promises. But there will be no real change — or money spent. Trump had seen the polls — and realized people knew his tariffs would slam their pocketbooks….Even he had to admit that his ill-considered nationalism was financially catastrophic. It would spur inflation. And the promised income to the treasury from tariffs would prove far less than the federal subsidies he would have to send to American farmers and manufacturers to keep them onside. So he caved.” However, nobody should be surprised if Trump argues that his tariffs initiative was mostly a successful negotiating tactic designed to tighten up the border and reduce fentanyl smuggling. His tariff on China is a bigger gamble, with larger potential for disaster.

Greg Sargent, author of An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics, has some valuable insights for Democrats in his post, “Trump’s First Big Fiasco Triggers Stephen Miller’s Rage—Take Note Dems: The Democrats finally started to find their legs after Trump’s spending freeze. The key lesson? Making sheer political noise about something does make a difference.” at The New Republic. Some nuggets from Sargent’s article:

Admitting failure is anathema to the authoritarian leader, who is perpetually in danger of being diminished by those who are resentful of his glory—which is why White House adviser Stephen Miller is frantically searching for scapegoats to blame for the unfolding disaster around President Donald Trump’s massive freeze on federal spending….

What Miller is actually angry about is that the media covered this fiasco aggressively and fairly. Miller insists that the press glossed over the funding pause’s supposed exemption for “aid and benefit programs.” But this is rank misdirection: The funding freeze, which is likely illegal, was indeed confusingly drafted and recklessly rolled out. This is in part what prompted the national outcry over the huge swath of programs that it threatened, Medicaid benefits included—and the media coverage that angered Miller.

All of which carries a lesson for Democrats: This is what it looks like when the opposition stirs and uses its power in a unified way to make a lot of what you might call sheer political noise. That can help set the media agenda, throw Trump and his allies on the defensive, and deliver defeats to Trump that deflate his cultish aura of invincibility.

….Until this crisis, the Democratic opposition has mostly been relatively tentative and divided. Democrats were not sufficiently quick, forceful, or unified in denouncing Trump’s illegal purge of inspectors general and his deranged threat to prosecute state officials who don’t comply with mass deportations. Internal party debates suggest that many Democrats believe that Trump’s 2024 victory shows voters don’t care about the dire threat he poses to democracy and constitutional governance, or that defending them against Trump must be reducible to “kitchen table” appeals.

But the funding-freeze fiasco should illustrate that this reading is highly insufficient. An understanding of the moment shaped around the idea that voters are mostly reachable only via economic concerns—however important—fails to provide guidance on how to convey to voters why things like this extraordinary Trumpian power grab actually matter.

Democrats need to think through ways to act collectively, to utilize something akin to a party-wide strategy, precisely because this sort of collective, concerted action has the capacity to alert voters in a different kind of way. It can put them on edge, signaling to them that something is deeply amiss in the threat Trump is posing to the rule of law and constitutional order.

Generally speaking, some Democrats have several objections to this kind of approach. One is that voters don’t care about anything that doesn’t directly impact them and that warnings about the Trump threat make them look unfocused on people’s material concerns. Another is that if Democrats do this too often, voters will stop believing there’s real cause for alarm.

The funding-freeze fiasco got around the first objection for Democrats because it did have vast material implications, potentially harming millions of people. But Democrats shouldn’t take the wrong lesson from this. A big reason this became a huge story was also that it represented a wildly audacious grab for quasi-dictatorial power. Democratic alarms about this dimension of the story surely helped prompt wall-to-wall coverage. Democrats can learn from that.

Sargent notes that Democratic activist Faiz Shakir has called for a quick response messaging strategy, in which Democrats regularly comment on all the ways Trump betrays “working-class values and your working-class interests.” Also,

Shakir also suggests an intriguing way for the party to act in concert. As chair, he’d aggressively encourage as many elected officials as possible to use the video-recording studio at the DNC in moments like these, getting them to record short takes on why voters should care about them, then push the content out on social media….The goal, Shakir said, would be to provide Democrats with research and recording infrastructure enabling elected officials to find their own voices and flood information spaces with civic knowledge. This also would give Democrats who want to stick to a “kitchen table” approach a way to shape their own warnings around that.

….Nobody denies that the Democratic Party is a big, sprawling, highly varied organism with elected officials facing a huge spectrum of different political imperatives. Of course there will be variation in how they approach each Trumpian abuse. But as Brian Beutler puts it, the answer to this cannot be to “lodge passing complaints about Trump’s abuses of power, but turn every conversation back to the cost of groceries.” This incoherently implies that the abuses themselves are not serious on their own terms.

Of course, it’s not all about messaging. Democrats have to make some major policy changes, as well, particularly regarding immigration and inflation and they must ditch the sillier cultural issue excesses. But Sargent’s TNR column offers a nuanced discussion of possible Democratic messaging strategies in response to Trump’s scorched-earth grand strategy. Read the whole article right here.

In “Trump’s grant gambit threatens to wreck the goldilocks economy he inherited,” Allison Morrow writes at CNN Politics: “A two-page memo, totaling less than a thousand words and packed with right-wing rhetoric, threw the fate of the US economy into uncertain territory late Monday as the Trump administration ordered the suspension of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants and loans….The document from the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget states explicitly that federal funds should align with Trump administration priorities and focus on “ending ‘wokeness.’”….It’s difficult to overstate the chaos that the directive, with its ambiguous wording, unleashed within organizations across broad swaths of the economy that rely on federal funds — including programs that provide essential medical services, emergency aid for farmers, cancer center support and even a program covering the cost of caskets for deceased veterans with no next of kin, my CNN colleagues Jennifer Hansler, Andy Rose and Tami Luhby reported….By Tuesday evening, a federal judge had temporarily blocked part of the freeze on federal aid….And while there were still countless questions left unanswered — a White House spokesperson initially couldn’t say whether Medicaid funding would be paused, for instance — what was clear is that any disruption to the flow of federal funds would have undeniable ripple effects throughout the US economy….The gambit is part of Trump’s stated desire to wrest control over spending from Congress, and is, according to legal experts, almost certainly illegal.” As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse put it, “Trump’s power grab was plucked directly from the Project 2025 playbook….It’s hard to tell if this is incompetence or mischief, but this funding freeze is illegal and unconstitutional, and every single American has a stake in getting it undone.”

“‘He’ll stiff you’: Senator warns federal workers Trump’s ‘buyout’ offer is bogus,” Matthew Chapman writes at The Raw Story, quoting Sen. Tim Kaine: “….Kaine issued his warning on the Senate floor on Tuesday, following reports of the buyout proposal. “The President has no authority to make that offer,” said Kaine. “There’s no budget line item to pay people who are not showing up for work … If you accept that offer and resign, he’ll stiff you.”….Trump has been accused of not paying workers what he promised, dating back to his days when private contractors said he ripped them off, and even attorneys he hired who said he stiffed them for legal services. ….The buyout offer, which reportedly extends to every worker in the entire federal civil service, does not appear to actually entitle government employees to a compensation package without work; rather, it lets them take a “deferred resignation,” where they can remain in their job for up to 8 months and be exempt from Trump’s new executive order mandating federal employees return to full-time in-office work.” As Ed Mazza notes, further, at Huffpo, via Yahoo News: “Don’t be fooled,” Kaine said. “He’s tricked hundreds of people with that offer. If you accept that offer and resign he’ll stiff you just like he stiffed the contractors.”

The big buzz continues about former Ambassador Caroline Kennedy’s warning about her cousin, RFK, Jr.’s nomination to head HHS as hearings begin. Aria Bendix writes at nbcnews.com: “In a letter Tuesday urging the Senate to reject Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for health and human services secretary, Caroline Kennedy referred to her cousin as a “predator.”….Caroline Kennedy, a former U.S. ambassador to Australia and the daughter of President John F. Kennedy, said RFK Jr. was unqualified to lead HHS, which oversees 13 federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services….Among her many criticisms in the letter to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Kennedy said that “siblings and cousins who Bobby encouraged down the path of substance abuse suffered addiction, illness and death.”….“Bobby is addicted to attention and power,” Caroline Kennedy said, using her cousin’s nickname. “Bobby preys on the desperation of parents of sick children — vaccinating his own kids while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs.”….“Bobby is willing to profit and enrich himself by denying access to a vaccine that can prevent almost all forms of cervical cancer,” Caroline Kennedy wrote….“Bobby expropriated my father’s image and distorted President Kennedy’s legacy to advance his own failed presidential campaign, and then groveled to Donald Trump for a job,” she said….“Bobby continues to grandstand off my father’s assassination and that of his own father,” she added. “It’s incomprehensible to me that someone who is willing to exploit their own painful family tragedies for publicity would be put in charge of America’s life and death situations.”

It’s pretty clear now that Trump’s grand strategy for invoking his imagined imperial authority is to “flood the zone” with so many outrages that Democrats won’t have time to unite behind an effective strategy for defending democracy. As Sahil Kapur explains at nbcnews.com: “Less than 48 hours after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries held a closed-door meeting with Democratic lawmakers to issue a warning and a clarion call….The new administration was going to “flood the zone,” and Democrats couldn’t afford to chase every single outrage — or nothing was going to sink in for the American people, Jeffries told them….Jeffries, D-N.Y., urged members to focus their message on the cost of living, along with border security and community safety….Burned by their failures to end the Trump era the first time, Democrats are crafting a new playbook for his second administration that departs from the noisy resistance of his first presidency. The new approach, according to more than a dozen party leaders, lawmakers and strategists, will be to zero in on pocketbook issues as they lay the groundwork for the 2026 midterm elections and beyond. And they plan to focus less on his cultural taunts and issues that don’t reach the kitchen table….The strategy will test Democrats’ ability to break through in a cluttered and rapidly evolving information environment….Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who was in many ways the face of the first resistance to Trump, agreed with the approach. “I think we have to pick our fights and not chase after every crazy squirrel,” Schiff said in an interview….the stuff that really matters — the trade wars that are going to raise costs on people, the mass deportations that are going to raise food prices and cause suffering among huge numbers of families, the pardoning of criminals who beat police and now the focus on tax cuts for really rich people that will do nothing for working families. These are the big fights that we need to focus on.”….Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, a member of the Democratic leadership team, begrudgingly admitted Trump is talented at distracting his critics by making them chase shiny objects. This time, he said, the resistance needs to focus on the GOP economic agenda….“We are going to talk every day and every week about what a rip-off this whole enterprise is,” Schatz said in an interview….“One of the things that congressional Democrats have done poorly, frankly, is that we talk about one thing one week and then something else the following week,” he said. “And I think that’s especially the dynamic with Trump in charge, because he’s extraordinarily skillful at commanding attention. And so one of the things that we’re going to make a conscious effort to do is: Whatever else is going on, our message is going to be: They are ripping you off.”

Mary Radcliffe, Nathaniel Rakich, Tia Yang, and Cooper Burton write in “What do Americans think of Trump’s executive actions? “They support Trump’s immigration policies, but not much else” at 538/abcnews: “Before this week, the modern record for most executive orders signed on a president’s first day was nine (set by Trump’s predecessor, former President Joe Biden). And Trump is moving much faster to enact his agenda than he did in his first term:….But how will these sweeping policy changes sit with the American people? We dug up recent polling on 15 of the policies Trump has already issued. While Americans as a whole support some of them, particularly the ones cracking down on immigration, most of the other executive actions he took on Monday are unpopular among the public….In a Beacon Research/Shaw & Company Research/Fox News poll from January, 59 percent of registered voters said they would favor not just detaining but deporting “illegal immigrants who have been charged with crimes” while allowing law-abiding immigrants to “remain in the U.S. and eventually qualify for citizenship.” Another 30 percent said they would support deporting all illegal immigrants in the country…..Building a wall at the southern border: Popular….In the latest poll for The Wall Street Journal from Fabrizio, Lee & Associates/GBAO, voters….”strongly favor” building a wall….After the recent surge in migration, Americans’ opinions have evolved on this issue, which used to be quite unpopular. For example, just after Trump’s first election win in 2016, a Politico/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health pollshowed only 35 percent of Americans said they supported building the wall, while 62 percent opposed it.”

Further, the authors note: “Using the military to secure the border: Popular….Citing the national emergency, Trump also issued an executive order directing the military to help stop “unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking” at the border. According to a December poll by Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies for CNBC, 60 percent of Americans thought deploying the military to the border to stop illegal drugs and human trafficking should be a top priority for the Trump administration. Only 24 percent opposed it….Ending birthright citizenship: Unpopular….However, at least one of Trump’s executive orders on immigration may not meet with such a warm reception from Americans: his order attempting to end birthright citizenship for people whose parents are in the U.S. illegally. (This action will likely get blocked in court, as the Constitution states that people born in the U.S. are automatically citizens.) An Ipsos/New York Times poll from Jan. 2-10 found that Americans oppose ending birthright citizenship for children born to immigrants who are here illegally, 55 percent to 41 percent….Reducing costs: Popular….One of the actions that Trump signed with great pomp and circumstance during his inaugural parade was a memorandum ordering all executive departments and agencies to “deliver emergency price relief … to the American people and increase the prosperity of the American worker.” Trump probably did this because he knows it’s exactly what Americans want: Per a Cygnal poll earlier this month, 85 percent of likely 2026 voters said reducing inflation and lowering the cost of living was extremely or very important to them, making it far and away their top policy priority.”

In addition, the authors write: “Jan. 6 pardons: Unpopular….Trump also issued a blanket pardon Monday for anyone convicted of offenses surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. That includes more than 1,500 individuals who have been arrested since the attack, over 80 percent of whom had already been convicted. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to do this, but it’s not likely to play well with the public. In a recent Marist College survey for NPR and PBS News, 62 percent of Americans said they disapproved of Trump taking such an action, and a similar share (57 percent) were opposed in the latest Fabrizio, Lee & Associates/GBAO poll for The Wall Street Journal. The pardons are almost certain to please Trump’s base, though: 64 percent of Republicans in the Marist/NPR/PBS News poll approved of them….Withdrawing from the Paris accord: Unpopular….In another hit to sustainable energy, Trump began the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, an international commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Americans may not be too happy about this move, as the AP/NORC poll found 52 percent opposed to the withdrawal and only 21 percent in favor (with 26 percent undecided or neutral). That does leave a lot of room for convincing, especially among Republicans, who continue to believe policies to mitigate climate change hurt the U.S. economy….But opinions on this issue have actually remained pretty consistently in favor of the Paris agreement since its inception: 62 percent of Americans were opposed when Trump withdrew from it for the first time back in 2017, and the same share supported Biden’s decision to rejoin in 2021.”

Also, “Ending DEI programs in the federal government: Mixed….Trump issued an executive order ending diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the federal government that were primarily begun under the Biden administration, including, among other things, environmental justice programs and equity-related employment practices and initiatives….But polls are mixed on whether Americans support such a move, and the result seems to depend quite a bit on the question wording: In a Harvard/Harris poll from January, for example, voters supported “ending hiring for government jobs on the basis of race and returning to merit hiring of government employees,” 59 percent to 41 percent. But in a Pew Research poll conducted in October, a majority of voters (52 percent) said that “focusing on increasing diversity, equity and inclusion at work” is “mainly a good thing,” while just 21 percent said it’s “mainly a bad thing.”….Declaring there are only two sexes: Popular….Another culture-war-oriented executive order declared that it is now U.S. government policy that there are only two sexes: male and female. The order also bans the use of federal funds for gender-affirming care for inmates and urges the protection of single-sex spaces and facilities, including the assignment of transgender people to prisons that match their sex “at conception.”….This one is likely to go down well with a majority of Americans: According to a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute in 2023, 65 percent of Americans believed there were only two gender identities, and only 34 percent said there were more than two. And a May 2024 survey from McLaughlin & Associates/America’s New Majority Project found that registered voters supported a law that “forbids taxpayer dollars from being used to pay for gender reassignment surgery,” 59 percent to 30 percent. (However, because America’s New Majority Project is a Republican sponsor, it’s possible those numbers are too favorable for the conservative side.)”

According to a new “CNN Poll: Most Democrats think their party needs major change, while the GOP coalesces around Trump” Ariel Edwards reports at CNN Politics. As Edwards writes, “In the wake of the 2024 election, most supporters of the Democratic Party say it needs to make significant changes and that they feel “burned out” by politics, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. The party faces its lowest ratings in more than 30 years….Donald Trump’s return to office is also remolding the GOP, with a majority of the party’s backers now saying that support for the president-elect is central to being a Republican….Those shifts are playing out against a broader backdrop of political unhappiness, with even Republicans far more likely to say they’re disappointed and frustrated by politics than to express optimism, inspiration, or pride….A 58% majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say that the Democratic Party needs major changes, or to be completely reformed, up from just 34% who said the same after the 2022 midterm elections, when the party retained control of the Senate but lost the House. Over that time, the share of Republicans and Republican leaners who feel the same way about the GOP has ticked downward, from 38% to 28%….Only 49% of Democratic-aligned adults say they expect their party’s congressional representatives to be even somewhat effective at resisting GOP policies, while more than 9 in 10 Republican-aligned adults expect their party’s congressional representatives — who now control both chambers of Congress — to be at least somewhat effective at passing new laws to enact their agenda….But across party lines, the predominant political mood is one of discontent. Most adults in the US describe themselves as disappointed (70%) and frustrated (64%) with the nation’s politics today, with nearly half calling themselves burned out. About 4 in 10 say they’re angry, rising to 52% among Democratic-aligned women. Fewer than 20% say they’re optimistic, fired up, inspired or proud.”

“We don’t need to waste time trying to parse the differences between the last three elections. In all three, he won—and lost—with historic vote tallies,” Robin D. G. Kelley writes in “Notes on Fighting Trumpism” at The Boston Review. “The message has been clear since 2016, when Trump, despite losing the popular vote to Hilary Clinton, still won the electoral college with nearly sixty-three million votes, just three million fewer than what Obama got in 2012. Trump lost in 2020, but received seventy-four million votes, the second-largest total in U.S. history. For an incumbent presiding disastrously over the start of the Covid pandemic, that astounding number of votes should have told us something. And if we were honest, we would acknowledge that Joe Biden owes most of his victory to the uprisings against police violence that momentarily shifted public opinion toward greater awareness of racial injustice and delivered Democrats an unearned historic turnout. Even though the Biden campaign aggressively distanced itself from Black Lives Matter and demands to defund the police, it benefited from the sentiment that racial injustice ought to be addressed and liberals were best suited to address it….Yet in all three elections, white men and women still overwhelmingly went for Trump. (Despite the hope that this time, the issue of abortion would drive a majority of white women to vote for Harris, 53 percent of them voted for Trump, only 2 percent down from 2020.) The vaunted demographic shift in the 2024 electorate wasn’t all that significant. True, Trump attracted more Black men this time, but about 77 percent of Black men voted for Harris, so the shocking headline, “Why did Black men vote for Trump?” is misdirected. Yes, Latino support for Trump increased, but that demographic needs to be disaggregated; it is an extremely diverse population with different political histories, national origins, and the like. And we should not be shocked that many working-class men, especially working-class men of color, did not vote for Harris. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is right to point to the condescension of the Democrats for implying that sexism alone explains why a small portion of Black men and Latinos flipped toward Trump, when homelessness, hunger, rent, personal debt, and overall insecurity are on the rise. The Democrats, she explained on Democracy Now, failed “to capture what is actually happening on the ground—that is measured not just by the historic low unemployment that Biden and Harris have talked about or by the historic low rates of poverty.”

Kelley concludes that “If we are going to ever defeat Trumpism, modern fascism, and wage a viable challenge to gendered racial capitalism, we must revive the old IWW slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Putting that into practice means thinking beyond nation, organizing to resist mass deportation rather than vote for the party promoting it. It means seeing every racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic act, every brutal beating and killing of unarmed Black people by police, every denial of healthcare for the most vulnerable, as an attack on the class. It means standing up for struggling workers around the world, from Palestine to the Congo to Haiti. It means fighting for the social wage, not just higher pay and better working conditions but a reinvestment in public institutions—hospitals, housing, education, tuition-free college, libraries, parks. It means worker power and worker democracy. And if history is any guide, this cannot be accomplished through the Democratic Party. Trying to move the Democrats to the left has never worked. We need to build up independent, class-conscious, multiracial organizations such as the Working Families Party, the Poor People’s Campaign, and their allies, not simply to enter the electoral arena but to effectively exercise the power to dispel ruling class lies about how our economy and society actually work. The only way out of this mess is learning to think like a class. It’s all of us or none.”

In “The single most unconstitutional thing Trump did yesterday, explained: The president cannot unilaterally repeal parts of the 14th Amendment,” Ian Milhiser argues at Vox: “The most alarming of these immigration orders seeks to strip millions of future Americans of their citizenship….There isn’t even a plausible argument that this order is constitutional. The Constitution is absolutely clear that all people born in the United States and subject to its laws are citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The Supreme Court recognized this principle more than 125 years ago…. Nevertheless, Trump’s order, labeled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” purports to deny citizenship to two classes of Americans. The first is children born to undocumented mothers, whose fathers were not themselves citizens or lawful permanent residents at the time of birth. The second is children whose fathers have similar immigration status, and whose mothers were lawfully but temporarily present in the United States at the time of birth….Almost immediately after this executive order was released, pro-immigration advocates started naming prominent Americans who might not be citizens if this order were in effect when they were born — including former Vice President Kamala Harris. That said, the order does not apply to current US citizens, and is not retroactive: It only attempts to deprive “persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order” of citizenship….It is likely that immigration advocates will obtain a court order blocking Trump’s executive order soon — a group of civil rights groups, including the ACLU, already filed a lawsuit seeking such an order. And, because the Supreme Court has already ruled that birthright citizenship is the law of the land, any lower court judge hearing that lawsuit should be bound by the Court’s 125-year-old decision.” Trump knows that this executive order is toast. But he doesn’t really care because he still gets credit for playing hardball on immigration and that adds to his image as the great warrior against open borders.