“No American ever did more to create an abundant economy that benefited the working class,”Harold Meyerson writes in “The Real Democratic Civil War: It’s not so much about ‘abundance’ as it is about how to reconnect with a justifiably angry working class” at The American Prospect, “or more to regulate the economy in ways that constrained capital and benefited the working class, than Franklin Roosevelt. So, forgive me if I think that the real divisions within today’s Democratic Party aren’t fundamentally those separating the “abundance” crowd and the pro-regulatory crowd. Those divisions are real enough, but I think they are largely stand-ins for a more fundamental set of differences about what the Democrats should do to regain the support of the American working and middle classes….The measure of a first-class mind, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, is the ability to hold two conflicting beliefs and not be paralyzed by the contradictions. In this instance, I don’t even think that the tenets of abundance-ism and those of a critique of American capitalism are necessarily or invariably counterposed. Jon Chait in The Atlantic and Molly Ball in The Wall Street Journal have both written that these differences have led to an intra-Democratic civil war. But that’s only because they’re proxies for the real internecine conflict…Both sides, I think, misunderstand the root causes of the working class’s estrangement from center-left politics, which now defines politics not just in the U.S. but throughout almost every nation with an advanced economy. The anger that the male working class in particular feels toward elites targets both cultural and economic norm-setters, but even as it’s most commonly expressed in cultural and racial antagonisms, its root cause is economic. At bottom, it’s the recognition that manual labor is no longer compensated at levels that can sustain a family or a stable work life, and the fear that this will only grow worse…It would be astonishing if these changes didn’t produce a rage at the established order, which has lost its capacity to provide the kind of broad-based prosperity of the post–World War II economy. As the reality and prospects of a sustainable, non-precarious working-class life have vanished, it’s completely understandable that rage at elites has soared. It’s characteristically been accompanied by a disdain for the liberal orders that are both out of reach economically and culturally alien to some working-class norms. It’s also been accompanied by a cult of hypermasculinity (often faux hypermasculinity, but the appearance can be all) as a form of compensation for the decentering of, and diminished value placed on, manual labor.”

The Daily Kos staff explains why “Why New Jersey primary turnout is a great sign for Democrats”: “Last week, Rep. Mikie Sherrill won New Jersey’s hotly contested Democratic gubernatorial primary with 34% of the vote in a six-way race. New Jersey is one of just two states holding off-year governor’s races in 2025, the other being Virginia…Sherrill immediately pointed to the sky-high Democratic turnout as both the key to her win and a preview of November…“We had almost 800,000 people voting in this primary. That’s unheard of,” she told the Washington Post. “It shows you the passion people have, shows you what’s coming in November here.”…This turnout is especially encouraging given New Jersey’s sharp rightward shift in the 2024 presidential election. Vice President Kamala Harris carried the state just 52-46, compared to President Joe Biden’s 57-41 win in 2020—a net 10-point swing to Republicans, largely driven by weak Democratic turnout. That’s clearly been fixed…Holding New Jersey’s governorship—and reclaiming Virginia’s—matters. But what’s really exciting is what this says about the 2026 midterms…Conventional wisdom says that the party in the White House gets shellacked in the midterms—especially with an unpopular president. But Biden and Democrats already broke that rule in 2022. Nothing’s carved in stone…Meanwhile, Republicans got obliterated in Trump’s first term during the 2018 midterms, when Democrats flipped 41 House seats and 7 governor seats. His second term is off to an even worse start, and with these early signs of hyper-engaged Democrats, the vibes are good.”

The notion that those who dislike the Trump administration’s immigration policies are all liberals and progressives is being shredded by management and conservatives almost every day. Paul Wiseman explains how “ICE raids and their uncertainty scare off workers and baffle businesses” at apnews.com: “The crackdown intensified a few weeks ago when Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, gave the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a quota of 3,000 arrests a day, up from 650 a day in the first five months of Trump’s second term…One ICE raid left a New Mexico dairy with just 20 workers, down from 55. “You can’t turn off cows,’’ said Beverly Idsinga, the executive director of the Dairy Producers of New Mexico. “They need to be milked twice a day, fed twice a day.’’…Claudio Gonzalez, a chef at Izakaya Gazen in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district, said many of his Hispanic workers — whether they’re in the country legally or not — have been calling out of work recently due to fears that they will be targeted by ICE. His restaurant is a few blocks away from a collection of federal buildings, including an ICE detention center…In some places, the problem isn’t ICE but rumors of ICE. At cherry-harvesting time in Washington state, many foreign-born workers are staying away from the orchards after hearing reports of impending immigration raids. One operation that usually employs 150 pickers is down to 20. Never mind that there hasn’t actually been any sign of ICE in the orchards…Jennie Murray, CEO of the advocacy group National Immigration Forum, said some immigrant parents worry that their workplaces will be raided and they’ll be hauled off by ICE while their kids are in school. They ask themselves, she said: “Do I show up and then my second-grader gets off the school bus and doesn’t have a parent to raise them? Maybe I shouldn’t show up for work.’’

Wiseman continues, “According to the U.S. Census Bureau, foreign-born workers made up less than 19% of employed workers in the United States in 2023. But they accounted for nearly 24% of jobs preparing and serving food and 38% of jobs in farming, fishing and forestry…“It really is clear to me that the people pushing for these raids that target farms and feed yards and dairies have no idea how farms operate,” Matt Teagarden, CEO of the Kansas Livestock Association, said Tuesday during a virtual press conference…Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, estimated in January that undocumented workers account for 13% of U.S. farm jobs and 7% of jobs in hospitality businesses such as hotels, restaurants and bars…“The reality is, a significant portion of our industry relies on immigrant labor — skilled, hardworking people who’ve been part of our workforce for years. When there are sudden crackdowns or raids, it slows timelines, drives up costs, and makes it harder to plan ahead,” says Patrick Murphy, chief investment officer at the Florida building firm Coastal Construction and a former Democratic member of Congress. “ We’re not sure from one month to the next what the rules are going to be or how they’ll be enforced. That uncertainty makes it really hard to operate a forward-looking business.”…Adds Douglas Holtz Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and now president of the conservative American Action Forum think tank: “ICE had detained people who are here lawfully and so now lawful immigrants are afraid to go to work … All of this goes against other economic objectives the administration might have. The immigration policy and the economic policy are not lining up at all.’’

In his essay, “A bad parade is a good sign” at The.Ink, Anand Giridharadas shares a hopeful idea: “The country that invented jazz was never going to be good at putting on a military parade. It was never going to be us…In the wake of Donald Trump’s flaccid, chaotic, lightly attended, and generally awkward military parade, a meme began doing the rounds. Its basic format was the juxtaposition of images of the kinds of parades Trump presumably wanted with the parade he actually got…Trump’s biggest mistake was wanting a military parade in the first place. The United States military is not a birthday party rental company. Any therapist will tell you that no number of green tanks on the street is enough to heal the deep void left by a father’s withheld love…But, setting aside the wisdom of wanting a military parade, there is the issue of execution. Even if you’re going to do the wrong thing, do it well. Do it with flair. With the most powerful military in history at his disposal, Trump couldn’t even pull off a decent parade…it’s not his fault alone. It’s hard to wring a military parade of the kind he dreamed of from a people free in their bones…No matter how much money and effort you throw at the parade, you cannot escape the fact that America is not the country of North Korean unity. We’re the country of Korean tacos…America is not the country of perfectly synced swinging arms. It’s the country of “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” That song, by the legendary Duke Ellington, belongs to a genre of music that could only have been invented in America — jazz…it seems to me societies that have the thing Trump wanted in his parade don’t got that swing, and societies that got that swing don’t have the thing he craved…Trump, in one regard, at least, faces steep odds. His project depends on turning Americans into something we are deeply not: uniform, cohesive, disciplined, in lockstep…But we are more hotsteppers than locksteppers. We are more improvised solo than phalanx. We are more unruly than rule-following…We don’t march shoulder to shoulder. We shimmy.”

Americans in general and the political commentariat in particular don’t pay enough attention to what is going on in the state legislatures, including the heroic contributions of the most productive members of those policy-making bodies. But there are exceptions, and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. once again leads the way with his column, “Melissa Hortman’s legacy is a ‘Minnesota Miracle’: Slain former state House speaker delivered big policy victories for Democrats,” in which he writes: “Hortman lived her highly constructive life in politics in the knowledge that achieving change democratically requires painstaking work: planning, coalition-building, persuasion, conciliation, vote-counting. She achieved far more using these humble, but ultimately exhilarating, tools of self-government than any violent fanatic ever will…I can’t do full justice here to all that Hortman and her colleagues achieved, but a lengthy partial list can give you a sense of just how much they got done. The miracle included legislation for paid family and medical leave, sick leave, transgender rights protections, driver’s licenses for undocumented residents, abortion rights and voting rights…Also on the list were background checks for private gun transfers, red flag laws, legalized recreational marijuana, expanded education funding, investment in affordable housing, big steps toward a carbon-free electric grid by 2040, new reading curriculums based on phonics, a $2.58 billion capital construction package, laws strengthening workers’ rights, unemployment insurance for hourly workers, a refundable child credit for lower-income Minnesotans; and free breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota K-12 students…She thus worked to bring together Democratic legislators from the metro Twin Cities, many on the left, and those closer to the center from rural and small-town areas. Preparing for efforts to enact progressive tax reform, Hortman told me, she appointed a staunch progressive from Minneapolis to chair one of the House’s tax committees and a moderate from the increasingly conservative Iron Range to chair the other. “If we couldn’t get both of them on board, then it wouldn’t be something our caucus could do.” That’s a practical politician speaking.”

“In the five months Trump has held office in his second term,” Thomas B. Edsall writes in “Trump Is Daring Us to Impeach Him Again” at the NYT, “the number of impeachable offenses legal scholars estimate that he has already committed range from three to eight or more…This is not to say Trump will be impeached. The current Republican-controlled House is far too subservient to even consider it…In pursuit of his agenda, Trump has sacrificed due process, gutted congressional authority, politicized the administration of justiceand run roughshod over the First Amendment.” Edsall quotes several legal experts who provide a long list of impeachable offenses and adds, “Winning a Senate conviction of Trump on House-approved impeachment charges, which requires 67 senators, would be a much tougher hill to climb, possible only if Trump suffers debilitating political setbacks over the next three years…A failure to achieve a Senate conviction does not, however, guarantee that Trump gets off the hook. A number of the impeachable offenses cited above would justify criminal inquiries, especially Trump’s cryptocurrency profiteering. The president’s ventures into digital currency clearly fall outside the standard of “official acts” that the Supreme Court exempted from criminal prosecution in its 2024 decision, Trump v. United States…So the man who once boasted “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters” may one day get his comeuppance. There is no guarantee that will happen, of course, but it may turn out that some sense of justice has survived Trumps multipronged assault on our legal system…If Trump does go scot free, untouched by either a third impeachment or criminal prosecution, it will be an extraordinary miscarriage of justice. Even so, if he is allowed to retire peacefully to enjoy his cryptocurrency wealth, his presidency will still go down in history as the embodiment of injustice, malfeasance, cruelty and transgression.”

Some observations from “Donald Trump’s Dirty Self-Dealing: The Audacity of His Rapacity: The first term was historically corrupt. But this time Trump has grabbed billions already—and by the time he’s done, he may make off with tens of billions” by Joe Conason at The New Republic: “The Trump family’s return to power turbocharged their drive for profit with the immense influence wielded by the president, who stood to benefit directly despite the nominal control of the Trump Organization and related entities by Eric and Don Jr. To describe their flurry of real estate deals, corporate startups, cryptocurrency ventures, and media shakedowns as “frantic” would grossly understate the pace and scale of Trump family dealmaking in the initial months of his second term. It’s hard to think of anything even remotely resembling their grab for cash in the history of U.S. government, not even when they first came to power…Tracking the conflicts of interest and coercive profiteering that have erupted in Trump’s orbit over the past several months is a massive challenge for media organizations and public interest groups. Nearly every day, a new and preposterous grift seems to materialize, especially since he and his family have inserted themselves so forcefully into the crypto industry. Many of these schemes emit a strong stench of bribery, extortion, or blatantly violate the emoluments clause, or both…In addition to Musk, whose hundreds of millions in campaign donations were rewarded with unprecedented authority to reshape government agencies that regulate his businesses (and that might award contracts to them), several of the world’s biggest corporate entities have delivered payoffs to Trump and his family since last November.”

The following article, “No Kings Day” protests turn out millions, rebuking Trump: Our unofficial estimate is that around 4-6 million people attended a protest event yesterday. Anti-Trump resistance is outpacing 2017″ by G. Elliot Morris, is cross-posted from gelliotmorris.com:

Dear readers,

The “No Kings Day” nationwide rallies against Donald Trump/for democracy on Saturday turned out millions of people.

That’s per a collective crowdsourcing effort led by Strength In Numbers, and involving many members of the independent data journalism community. We systematized reports from official sources, accounts from the media, and self-reported attendance from thousands of social media posts into a single spreadsheet. (Researchers, please take our data!)

As of midnight on Sunday, June 15, we have data from about 40% of No Kings Day events held yesterday, accounting for over 2.6m attendees. According to our back-of-the-envelope math, that puts total attendance somewhere in the 4-6 million people range. That means roughly 1.2-1.8% of the U.S. population attended a No Kings Day event somewhere in the country yesterday. Organizers say 5m turned out, but don’t release public event-by-event numbers.

Of course, crowdsourcing data isn’t perfect; some local reports may be inflated, and others undercounted. And the formula we use to project attendance in places where we don’t have data assumes they are similar to the places where we do. That’s a necessary assumption, but an assumption nonetheless.

So this is by no means an official tally. But we do think it’s the most comprehensive tally currently available. Hundreds of data-gatherers have been compiling accounts of event attendance and checking them against available sources since Saturday morning. From a journalism perspective, this approach at least standardizes measurement and provides references to check our math, even if it doesn’t completely avoid the usual pitfalls of estimating crowd size (or the assumptions above). But in this case, we’re interested in speed and thoroughness, not perfection.

According to organizers, over 2,100 events were held under the No Kings Day banner on June 14. Some events appear to have had well over 250,000 people in attendance. Officials report 1m people in downtown Boston yesterday, but some of those were attending pride festivities. There are reports of nearly 100,000 attendees in both San Diego and Minneapolis-St. Paul, and multiple hundreds of thousands in New York.

While no one can produce official data on the number of people attending yesterday’s protests (that would require some sort of controlled entry and check-in system), we do have nearly official counts of the number of protests being held.

We have that information for yesterday, and we also have it for every day since January 1, 2017. That’s thanks to data gathered and published regularly by the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut.

According to the CCC, there have been over 15,000 political protests since Donald Trump’s second inauguration this January. Over the same period in 2017, during Trump’s first term, there were barely over 5,000 protests.

Protests have been broad, and large.

With our preliminary counting, the turnout at yesterday’s No Kings Day events nationwide rivals, and may exceed, turnout for the 2017 Women’s March. The 2017 Women’s March drew between 3.3 and 5.6 million people, depending on the estimate, making it the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. Our early numbers suggest No Kings Day may be in that range.

Total turnout in the No Kings Day protests is likely to fall short of the famous 3.5% population threshold for forcing action via mass protest. But the cool thing about that work is that the scholars find that smaller mobilizations of 1-1.5% of the population still have a 40-60% chance of accomplishing their goals.

Both the number of protests and their massive size are warnings for the Trump administration, which has routinely trampled the limits of public opinion during the president’s second term. On immigration, deportations, Medicaid/social spending, and democracy, the president has pushed policy much farther right than sanctioned by the U.S. public. The mobilized resistance across the country on Saturday is a real-world sign of backlash to his unpopular agenda.

Trump’s approval in our polling average is 44% today, the worst for any president at this point in their term (except Trump during his first term) going back to 1935.

If this is what resistance to Trump looks like now, not even 5 months into his term, he’s in for a world of hurt in next year’s midterms.

Thanks to everyone who helped us collect the initial data for our tracking and estimates. Like I said, they are free for anyone to use, and I hope they are helpful to people doing formal research on this subject.

Elliott

If you were wondering what is going on in regard to the venerable tradition of political gerrymandering, read Kyle Kondik’s post, “A re-gerrymander of Texas?” at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, in which he writes: “Republicans will need a lot of breaks to hold their House majority next year. New gerrymanders could be their way of making their own breaks…Ohio is already slated to have a new congressional map next year, and Republicans should have the ability to produce a better map for themselves there than the one currently in place, which has produced a 10-5 Republican edge statewide in its two cycles of use. We might get more clarity on Ohio in August and September, per a report Tuesday from Gongwer, a publication that covers state government…Beyond that, J. David Goodman and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times reported on Monday night that the Trump White House is leaning on Texas Republicans to pick up the pen and more aggressively gerrymander their state. The Times reported that the Republicans hope to squeeze an extra 4-5 seats out of Texas. In a House where the majority party has only gotten a few seats over the majority-making line of 218 the past three cycles, one could see how an aggressive Republican remap in Texas that succeeds in its aims could decide the House in 2026…Mid-decade redistrictings—which occur when U.S. House district maps are drawn in cycles other than post-census national redistricting years—are a common feature of American politics. However, such remaps in recent years have typically come in response to court rulings: That was the case, to varying degrees, for the five states that drew new maps between 2022 and 2024 (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, New York, and North Carolina)…Frequent gerrymandering was a feature of late 1800s House politics, according to scholar Erik Engstrom in his history of partisan gerrymandering: Ohio had six different House maps from 1878-1890, and a Pennsylvania gerrymander helped Republicans win the House in 1888. There is no federal prohibition on mid-decade congressional redistricting, although some states do not allow it.” Read more here.

Americans probably don’t pay enough attention to the cost of Trump’s misguided leadership worldwide. But Oliver Willis does in “US approval plummets around the world thanks to Trump” at Daily Kos. As Willis explains, “Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, approval of the United States has fallen by double-digit percentage points in multiple countries, according to a Pew Research Center poll released on Wednesday…The drop in global support follows Trump’s decision to insult multiple nations by imposing tariffs on allies—and even threatening military action…In total, support for the United States fell in 19 of the 24 countries that Pew surveyed… “Majorities in most countries also express little or no confidence in Trump’s ability to handle specific issues, including immigration, the Russia-Ukraine war, U.S.-China relations, global economic problems, conflicts between Israel and its neighbors, and climate change,” the Pew report summarized…Support for the United States significantly declines from Pew’s 2024 poll, when President Joe Biden was in office. Notable declines occurred among the closest U.S. allies, including a 32% decrease in Mexico, 20% in Canada, 10% in France, 15% in Japan, and 16% in Germany…Only three nations view the United States more favorably than they did in 2024: Israel, Nigeria, and Turkey. Though support increased by just 7% or less…This loss of global support comes after Trump decided to unilaterally impose tariffs on a host of nations, increasing the costs for businesses worldwide.” But the real cost of Trump’s chaotic policies will come in the months ahead. Stay tuned.

Andrew Gumbel reports that “Troops and marines deeply troubled by LA deployment: ‘Morale is not great’” at The Guardian, and writes: “California national guards troops and marines deployed to Los Angeles to help restore order after days of protest against the Trump administration have told friends and family members they are deeply unhappy about the assignment and worry their only meaningful role will be as pawns in a political battle they do not want to join…Three different advocacy organisations representing military families said they had heard from dozens of affected service members who expressed discomfort about being drawn into a domestic policing operation outside their normal field of operations. The groups said they have heard no countervailing opinions…“The sentiment across the board right now is that deploying military force against our own communities isn’t the kind of national security we signed up for,” said Sarah Streyder of the Secure Families Initiative, which represents the interests of military spouses, children and veterans…“Families are scared not just for their loved ones’ safety, although that’s a big concern, but also for what their service is being used to justify.”…Chris Purdy of the Chamberlain Network, whose stated mission is to “mobilize and empower veterans to protect democracy”, said he had heard similar things from half a dozen national guard members. “Morale is not great, is the quote I keep hearing,” he said.”

“Compared to other states, North Carolina Democrats had a pretty good election cycle in 2024,” Thomas Mill writes in “Who’s voting and who’s not in North Carolina” at PoliticsNC. “While Kamala Harris lost the state by about three percent, the party won five of ten Council of State seats, including the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. They broke the veto-proof majority in the state house despite the heavily gerrymandered districts, and they held a Supreme Court seat despite Republican attempts to steal it…However, Democrats face structural problems that prevent them from becoming a stronger party. Turnout statistics show that they have difficulty turning out their base voters and their share of registered voters is shrinking. They will need to fix these issues if they want to make the state a bluer shade of purple…Overall, turnout was down very slightly from the 2020 presidential turnout of 75%. Just under 74% of registered voters showed up last November. For the first time in a presidential cycle in over a 125 years, more registered Republicans voted than registered Democrats. For the first time in North Carolina history, unaffiliated voters made up a larger portion than either major party…Turnout among Democrats was 73% while almost 80% of Republicans voted. Despite having the largest block of voters, unaffiliated turnout was only 67%…A look at demographics reveals the structural problems holding Democrats back. Turnout among African American voters, Democrats’ most consistent supporters, dropped two percent from 2020, despite having a Black woman at the top of the ticket. They made up less than 18% of the electorate, down to pre-Obama levels…Republican voters maintained their high presidential year turnout. Turnout among White voters was over 78%, close to their 2020 turnout of 79%. Voters over 65 years old turned out at a rate of more than 83%. Rural counties in the piedmont and west, areas that are predominantly white and older, had the highest turnout in the state with most seeing turnout between 75% and 80%. Most supported Republicans by double digits.”

From “‘Weak’ and ‘Woke’: Dems Seek to Improve Standing With Working Class Voters” by David M. Drucker at Dispatch: “Trump topped Harris by just 1.5 percentage points nationwide, failing to crack 50 percent of the vote. But underneath the hood, the demographic shifts away from the Democrats, and to the GOP, were startling…“Post-election polling by Navigator Research on the Democratic brand found that 58 percent of Americans believe the party ‘prioritizes other groups of people that don’t include me.’” Our Democratic brand was also seen as too elite and coastal. This election ran a freight train through the idea that demographics alone will determine our political destiny,” [former New Orleans Mayor Mitch] Landrieu wrote. “Population shifts could exacerbate our electoral disadvantages.”…The president lured them in part with populist proposals like eliminating income taxes on tips and overtime pay, but also by validating their views on cultural issues, such as opposing transgender girls’ participation in female sports.”

At The Nation, Chris Lehmann’s article, “The Democrats’ Class Trip to Nowhere: A sparsely attended forum about the working class held at a $40 million think tank—yep, sounds about right” described the CAP forum as little differently: “The fact that the enormously pressing question of Democrats’ loss of support and credibility among workers drew but a half-hearted trickle of knowledge workers was also telling. All three stories of the CAP meeting space had been filled a few months ago with people keen to see billionaire Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker auditioning man-of-the-people talking points ahead of an expected 2028 presidential run. Here, by contrast, a clutch of perhaps 30 attendees watched a prerecorded introduction from Action Fund chair Neera Tanden, who had hosted Pritzker but had a scheduling conflict for this discussion. As it happened, the gathering was scheduled against a far better attended gathering that bore vivid testimony to the challenges facing the revival of Democrats’ fortunes among working-class supporters: The WelcomeFest, the self-advertised “largest public gathering of centrist Democrats,” had convened just a few blocks away from CAP headquarters; any wonkish boulevardier monitoring both events would have no doubt about where the party’s organizing energy and resources abided.”

“Nearly one in five American workers earns less than $17 an hour, the latest minimum wage increase proposed in Congress, but raising the minimum wage has been shown to improve wages for up to a third of all American workers,” Gara Lamarche and Saru Jayaraman note in “Needed: A People’s Project 2029” at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. “And nearly half (45 percent) of American workers earn less than $25 an hour, which is less than the minimum needed to cover the cost of living if you have just one child even if you’re living in the least expensive county in the United States, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. But in the case of winning elections, it’s not just that raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do—it’s also popular. For instance, in the 2020 election, Donald Trump won the state of Florida easily, but a measure to increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 also won—and by a significantly wider margin. It’s a red flag when progressive policies are more popular than progressive and center-left candidates. It’s a sign that those candidates aren’t seen as championing those issues…There’s ample evidence that Republicans and the right realize this, too. Arguably that’s why Donald Trump pledged during the campaign to end taxes on tips—even though 60 percent of tipped workers don’t make enough money to pay taxes. And that’s why Trump and the GOP have that proposal in their “big, beautiful” budget bill that will slash taxes for the rich while gutting Medicaid, the latter of which will hurt far more low-wage workers than ending taxes on tips will help. And recently, social media lit up with claims that Trump was raising the minimum wage to $25 an hour—unfounded, but nevertheless enthusiastically spread by the MAGA universe…the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour hasn’t gone up in 16 years.”

An excerpt from “100 days, 100 ways Trump Has Hurt Workers” by “Celine McNicholas, Samantha Sanders, Josh Bivens, Margaret Poydock, and Daniel Costa at the Economic Policy Institute: “During the first 100 days of his administration, Trump has taken actions that reduce workers’ wages and deteriorate their labor conditions. Most directly, Trump reduced the minimum wage for federal contractors, which could cost these lower-wage workers anywhere from 25% to 60% in pay cuts. He also repealed an order directing agencies to prioritize “high road” employers—i.e., employers that agree to pay workers the prevailing wage and provide benefits like paid leave and health insurance—in awarding federal contracts. Trump also eliminated federal incentives for programs that provide workers on federal projects with training opportunities for higher-wage skilled trade occupations…Further, Trump and DOGE have attacked critical worker protection agencies including those responsible for worker health and safety standards. Specifically, Trump fired nearly two-thirds of the staff (roughly 870 employees) at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), an agency created to ensure safe and healthy working conditions. This reduction essentially eliminated divisions of the agency focused on the health and safety of miners, firefighters, and health care workers. Trump also stalled the implementation of a rule that would protect miners from silica exposure, leaving miners less safe and at greater risk for black lung disease. And Trump fired 90% of the staff at an office in the Department of Labor (DOL) who ensure that federal contractors abide by anti-discrimination laws and canceled grants for programs to combat forced and child labor around the world, which also protect jobs and workers in the U.S. by deterring unfair competition from imports produced with forced labor.”

“The results of an initial round of research shared exclusively with POLITICO — including 30 focus groups and a national media consumption survey — found many young men believe that “neither party has our back,” as one Black man from Georgia said in a focus group,” Politico’s Elena Schneider writes in “Democrats set out to study young men. Here are their findings. A widely mocked project to get under the hood about why Democrats are losing young men has sobering results.”  Schneider adds, “Participants described the Democratic Party as overly-scripted and cautious, while Republicans are seen as confident and unafraid to offend…They also said they now feel overwhelmed by economic anxiety, making “traditional milestones,” like buying a home or saving for kids’ college, “feel impossible,” an analysis of the research said…“The degree to which those economic concerns are also impacting how they think about themselves and quote-unquote success of being a man, and living up to their own expectations or the expectations of their family or society,” [pollster John] Della Volpe said. “There’s another layer of economic anxiety that I don’t think I fully saw until now.”…Young men’s feelings of crisis are connected to their exodus from the party, SAM’s research suggests. SAM’s national survey found that just 27 percent of young men viewed the Democratic Party positively, while 43 percent of them viewed the Republican Party favorably. The polling sample included 23 percent self-described Democrats, 28 percent Republicans and 36 percent independents…In last year’s presidential election, the gender gap leapt to 13 percentage points nationally, up from 9 percentage points in 2020, the Democratic firm Catalist found in its final 2024 analysis that men’s support for Kamala Harris dropped by 6 points, winning just 42 percent of men — the lowest on record in recent elections.”

Alex Gangitano reports on the GOP split in “Musk calls for killing House’s ‘big, beautiful bill’” at The Hill: “Elon Musk on Wednesday called for killing the House’s “big, beautiful bill” and for a new spending bill to be drafted after he threw a wrench into GOP leadership’s plans to pass President Trump’s bill of legislative priorities by July 4…“A new spending bill should be drafted that doesn’t massively grow the deficit and increase the debt ceiling by 5 TRILLION DOLLARS,” Musk said on his social platform X…He later added on X, “Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL.”…Musk, who was at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), called the legislation passed by the House “pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination” on Tuesday. His stinging criticism doubled down on his previous comments that the bill undermines the cost-cutting efforts of DOGE…Musk’s criticism gave political cover to the fiscal hawks in the Senate who were already critical of the legislation, including GOP Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.), Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.)…Paul said Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that if four conservatives band together, they could force Senate GOP leaders to agree to bigger spending cuts and possibly “separate out” language to raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion…Similarly, Lee called for the Senate to “make this bill better.”…The group wants to see deeper spending cuts while other Republicans, like Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Jerry Moran (Kan.), are worried that House language to cut Medicaid spending will hurt their constituents.”

“Most companies are already raising prices or plan to because of tariffs, data shows,” Alex Harring reports at CNBC.com: “Data from the New York Federal Reserve shows a majority of companies have passed along at least some of President Donald Trump’s tariffs onto customers, the latest in a growing body of evidence indicating the policy change is likely to stretch consumers’ wallets…In May, about 77% of service firms that saw increased costs due to higher U.S. tariffs tariffs passed through at least at least some of the rise to clients, according to a survey conducted by the New York Fed that was released Wednesday. Around 75% of manufacturers surveyed said the same…In fact, more than 30% of manufacturers and roughly 45% of service firms passed through all of the higher cost to their customers, according to the New York Fed’s statics…Price hikes happened quickly after Trump slapped steep levies on trading partners, whether large or small. More than 35% of manufacturers and nearly 40% of service firms raised prices within a week of seeing tariff-related cost increases, according to the survey…The New York Fed’s survey is the latest in a salvo of data releases and anecdotal reports that have shown companies’ willingness to pass down cost increases despite pressure from Trump not to do so…Nearly nine out of 10 of the 300 CEOs surveyed in May said they have raised prices or planned to soon, according to data released last week by Chief Executive Group and AlixPartners. About seven out of 10 chief executives surveyed in May said they plan to hike prices by at least 2.5%…“The administration’s tariffs alone have created supply chain disruptions rivaling that of Covid-19,” one respondent said in the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing survey published Monday.”

Some observations from “Resurrecting the Rebel Alliance: To end the age of Trump, Democrats must relearn the language and levers of power” by Barry C. Lynn at Washington Monthly. “The task ahead for Democrats is not merely to resist and slow the predations and destructions of President Trump. It is not merely to knock the Republicans out of power in 2026 and 2028. It is to establish a new political economic regime which ensures that our liberty and prosperity are never again threatened by any homegrown oligarch or autocrat. And Democrats must do so in a world filled with great enemies, eager to exploit the chaos sown here in America by Trump and the oligarchs, to topple us…None of this will be possible until Democrats first fully recover America’s original language of liberty. Doing so is the only way to relearn the wisdom about power and political economic structure baked into this language. It’s the only way for Democrats to convince the American people they actually understand how to make their lives better, and have the courage to act. And the only way Democratic elites can prove they understand their own responsibility for today’s crisis, and fully grasp the threats to their own lives and the lives of their own children…Reformers tend to blame political cowardice on cupidity and corruption. What I’ve learned over the past 25 years is that fatuousness, especially when combined with lack of imagination, often plays a much bigger role…Yes, Democratic Party elites’ failure to recognize the continuing bite of inflation played a big role in Harris’s loss. But the Democrats’ inability to speak honestly about the threats posed by concentrated power left much more than prices unaddressed…When voters turned to the Democratic Party, by contrast, they heard the treacly language of charity—of condescension—delivered in the tones of a courtier class that itself stands on unfirm ground…Since the election, Democrats have been presented with three options for retaking power. The first, courtesy of James Carville, is to play possum till the hillbillies miss us. Second, championed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is to oppose everything Trump does, everywhere, all at once. Third is to cozy up to good oligarchs, so they can shelter us until the MAGA storm blows over. This thanks to Ezra Klein and the “abundance movement.” …The better path is to honestly admit the radical nature and full immensity of the political threat we face, which is the direct merger of the power of the private monopoly and the state. And our own complicity in creating this crisis. And all the ways the old libertarian thinking continues to lead us back into darkness, superstition, and savagery.”

“You wouldn’t know it if you limited your reading to The Liberal Patriot,” Harold Meyerson writes in “The One Type of Democratic Identity Politics That Will Actually Work: If they want to win back the working class, they need to get in touch with its justifiable anger,” at The American Prospect. ” but the action these days in identity politics is all on the right. By importing white South Africans while expelling immigrants of color, by sacking the Black and female leaders of our armed forces while putting the Pentagon in the hands of a white nincompoop, by stripping the government’s archives of records of Black achievement and heroism while retaining the stories of pre-desegregation whites, Donald Trump has worked mightily to restore the white identity politics that was the norm in America before the 1960s…Electorally, the Republicans’ white identitarianism, both abetted and mitigated by their attacks on cultural elites, enabled them to capture enough working-class votes to put Trump back in the White House and win both houses of Congress. The groups benefiting (both actually or supposedly) from the Democrats’ identity politics fell short of constituting an electoral majority, while the moderately populist economics the Democrats preached and sometimes practiced didn’t put them over the top, either. Despite its failure to deliver any tangible benefits, the Republicans’ one-two punch certainly resonated with angry and frustrated electors who understood that the economic prospects—i.e., the life prospects—they confronted were far more limited than those of their parents’ generation. Nothing that mainstream Democrats had on offer touched any of that anger, or even came close…The shift of income over the past half-century from wages to investment, the decline of unions, the increasingly plutocrat-friendly character of the tax code, the corporate-and-bank control of trade policy, the ever-rising political clout of the rich—these are the real causes of the working class’s distress, and shouldn’t be all that hard for the Democrats to address, and legitimately and powerfully connect to working- and middle-class anger…It’s not as if there hasn’t been a ready-made slogan for this form of Democratic identity politics. I think “We are the 99 percent” will do quite nicely. As both policy and politics, that’s the Democrats’ road back to power.”

In “What Caused Democrats’ No-Show Problem in 2024? New data sheds light on the policy preferences of nonvoting Democrats in the last election. It may disappoint some progressives,” Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella write at The Nation: “Democrats are still trying to figure out what went wrong in the 2024 election. Did the party swing too far to the left or not far enough? Was the Democrats’ defeat due to a failure to turnout base voters or a failure to persuade swing voters?…Answers to these questions typically fall on factional lines. Center-Left analysts,like Nate Cohn or David Shor, favor the “persuasion” theory. They have long argued that Democrats failed because of the party’s inability to convince non-Democrats to vote for them, chiefly because their messaging and political positions were too progressive. Moderation or placing a greater emphasis on bread-and-butter economic issues is their suggested medicine…On the other side, progressives like The Nation’s Waleed Shahid and Kali Holloway have argued that Trump’s victory is owed to Democratic voter malaise. Because the party didn’t give their base anything to be excited about, Democrats stayed home. As Holloway concluded, “The people who really decided the 2024 election are the ones who didn’t vote at all.” These commentators’ preferred solution is to energize the base with more progressive appeals…So who’s right? It’s complicated. But new data from the Cooperative Election Study (CES) can get us closer to an answer. The CES is a high-quality survey with a sample-size large enough (60,000 respondents) to permit fine-grained comparisons between subgroups in the US adult population.

“With it,’ Guastella and Abbott continue, “we’re able to get a clearer picture of who voted and how they felt about the issues…To begin, it seems likely that the plurality of nonvoters in the 2024 presidential election were indeed Democrats, as the political scientist Jake Grumbach and his coauthors have recently shown. Here is a point for the progressives…But while “energize the base” advocates are right that more Democrats stayed home than Republicans, they assume that these nonvoters abstained because Democrats didn’t run a sufficiently progressive campaign. To get a sense of whether Democrats who sat out the 2024 presidential election might have been moved to participate if the party had offered a more left-wing policy agenda, we can compare the policy preferences and demographics of voting and nonvoting self-identified Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents…Contrary to what left-wing optimists had hoped, Democratic nonvoters in 2024 appear to have been less progressive than Democrats who voted. For instance, Democratic nonvoters were 14 points less likely to support banning assault rifles, 20 points less likely to support sending aid to Gaza, 17 points less likely to report believing that slavery and discrimination make it hard for Black Americans, 17 points more likely to support building a border wall with Mexico, 20 points more likely to support the expansion of fossil fuel production, and, sadly for economic populists, 16 points less likely to support corporate tax hikes (though this group still favored corporate tax hikes by a three to one margin). Overall, nonvoting Democrats were 18 points less likely to self-identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Here is a point for the centrists…But wait, does all this mean that nonvoting Democrats stayed home in 2024 because Democrats’ policies were tooprogressive? Not necessarily; while the CES data gives us the ability to judge issue preferences, we can’t use it to determine issue salience. That is, we don’t know which issues were most important to voters nor even if candidates’ issue positions were important factors in nonvoters’ decision to sit out the election.”

Fredreka Schouten reports that, “Shut out of power in Washington, Democrats grapple with how to win over young men and working-class voters” at CNN Politics, and notes: “One effort from a group of veteran Democrats envisions a $20 million project to woo young men. Another liberal organization is on a 20-state listening tour to reach working-class Americans…The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, is in the throes of what its new chairman, Ken Martin, calls an extensive “postelection review” — examining not only the missteps of the party and the campaign of 2024 presidential nominee Kamala Harris but also the broad Democratic-aligned ecosystem that he said spent more than $10 billion in the last election, only to be shut out of power in Washington…Nearly seven months after Republicans won the White House and both chambers of Congress, Democrats are still coming to terms with the reasons behind their stinging defeats and looking for ways to claw back some power in next year’s midterm elections. Intraparty debates are raging about the words Democrats use, the policies they should promote and even the podcasts they join…The Democratic Party’s standing has fallen dramatically, with its favorability rating hitting 29% in March, a record low in CNN’s polling dating to 1992. That’s a drop of 20 points since January 2021, when President Donald Trump ended his first term…And a CNN poll released Sunday shows Americans are far more likely to see Republicans than Democrats as the party with strong leaders. In a further sign of trouble for the party, the CNN survey shows the dim view of Democrats’ leadership is driven by relatively weak support from their own partisans. Republican-aligned adults, for example, are 50 points likelier than Democratic-aligned adults to say their own party has strong leaders…The nonprofit arm of American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic opposition research group, has heard similar concerns from voters as part of a $4.5 million “Working Class Project” that’s taking its team to 20 states…A common perception among those in the American Bridge focus groups “is the idea that ‘Democrats don’t care about people like me, that their first, primary goal is for other groups they consider at risk, who are not like me,’” said the organization’s president, Pat Dennis.'”

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

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

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

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

Joseph O’Sullivan notes that “Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is on a quest to bring back the Blue Dogs: The Democratic congresswoman’s strategy of appealing to working-class rural moderates won her Washington’s 3rd District,” and asks. “Will it work anywhere else?” at cascadepbs.org. As O’Sullivan explains, “Standing beneath towering shelves of kegs in the back of Vancouver’s Loowit Brewing, U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has just given a thank-you talk to her supporters after squeaking through another tight election. As she wraps up her remarks in that December gathering and pauses for questions, a man in the crowd speaks up: “I’d like to see you expand the Blue Dog Coalition … I think that’s exactly what we need at the broader level.”…The Blue Dog Coalition, an ever-shifting group of moderate and independent House Democrats, might not be a household name. But it’s not the first time the auto-mechanic-turned-congresswoman, who won reelection even as her southwestern Washington District voted for President Donald Trump, has heard a comment like this… “I have had so many people come up to me in D.C., and be like, ‘Hey, you know, I think we should, like, maybe start something that’s oriented around people in the trades and who are working for a living,” Gluesenkamp Perez said to the crowd. “And I’ll slowly put on my Blue Dogs hat, ‘Like you mean what we’ve been doing?’”…In 2022, Gluesenkamp Perez’s first win shocked the political world. A young mother, auto-shop owner and Latina from rural Skamania County with little political support managed to win an open seat that had been held by a Republican for a decade…As the Democratic Party struggles to respond to its November losses, aging leadership and the Trump administration’s aggressive attempts to expand executive power and impose its will, Gluesenkamp Perez and the handful of Blue Dogs are offering a different brand of politics to expand the party’s tent…The congresswoman and her colleagues are also trying to do something more ambitious than next year’s elections: They want to deliver a policy agenda that serves working people and brings more rural voters back to the Democratic Party for the long term.”

O’Sullivan adds, further, “Retaking the House might be the easiest of Democrats’ challenges, with the party needing to pick up just three seats in a midterm cycle – when the president’s party often loses seats…But as population growth has shifted toward big, Republican-leaning states and the GOP’s redistricting efforts have made it harder for Democrats to win, the party faces a steep challenge in expanding their appeal. One need only look at the U.S. Senate, where on paper, Democrats have little discernible path to a majority in the near future…It remains to be seen whether Gluesenkamp Perez’s political approach will translate beyond Washington’s 3rd Congressional District – which includes all of Clark, Cowlitz, Lewis, Pacific, Skamania and Wahkiakum counties as well as a nibble of Thurston County. Meanwhile, when the representative defends her seat again next year, she’ll face a new dynamic…Late last month at a Vancouver town hall, the congresswoman drew protests and anger from constituents upset about her vote for the SAVE Act, a Republican-sponsored bill aimed at securing elections from voter fraud. Gluesenkamp Perez will have to hold together her fragile coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans against what is likely to be a fresh GOP opponent…In a phone interview a few hours after she questioned Bessent, the congresswoman said that “Tariffs are one tool, but to actually bring back domestic manufacturing is going to require, you know, some of the antitrust work.”…”It’s gonna require permitting reform,” she added. “It’s gonna require shop class in junior high.”…That Gluesenkamp Perez and other Blue Dogs, like Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, don’t necessarily reject some Trump policies might leave some Democrats with heartburn – but that’s part of their appeal to voters in conservative-leaning districts.”…Today, there are 10 Blue Dogs, hailing from Texas, New Jersey, California, Maine, Washington and Georgia.” Make this entire article your must-read for the day.

In “How Trump’s megabill transfers wealth in the US,” Tami Luhby and Zachary B. Wolf report at CNN Politics: “Here’s a look at how the “one big, beautiful bill” takes benefits from lower-income Americans in order to cut taxes, primarily for the wealthy…But CBO’s initial estimates found that the package’s tax measures would increase the deficit by $3.8 trillion over a decade, while other provisions would cut nearly $1 trillion in federal support for Medicaid and food stamps over that period…Medicaid, which provides health insurance to low-income Americans, would face the largest cuts in the package, with CBO projecting a nearly $700 billion reduction in federal spending. Meanwhile, food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, would face a $267 billion cut in federal support…The bill would also increase spending for defense, immigration enforcement and homeland security, while pulling back on federal spending in some other areas…Overall, the bill would add $3.1 trillion to the nation’s debt, including interest, over the next decade, according to an early independent analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget…Cuts to Medicaid and food stamps would decrease government support for low-income Americans, while tax reductions would benefit high-income households in the coming years, according to a Congressional Budget Office report…Currently, if Congress doesn’t act, most Americans would see their taxes increase because the individual income tax cuts from the 2017 bill are set to expire at the end of this year. The House package would make permanent essentially all of those provisions.” Read more here.

However, Democrats do have an opportunity to exploit divisions among Senate  Republicans, as Ed Pilkington reports at The Guardian: “Donald Trump has been warned by fiscal hawks within his own party in the US Senate that he must “get serious” about cutting government spending and reducing the national debt or else they will block the passage of his signature tax-cutting legislation known as the “big, beautiful bill”…Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin who rose to prominence as a fiscal hardliner with the Tea Party movement, issued the warning to the president on Sunday. Asked by CNN’s State of the Union whether his faction had the numbers to halt the bill, he replied: “I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.”…Trump has invested a large portion of his political capital in the massive package. It extends the 2017 tax cuts from his first administration in return for about $1tn in benefits cuts including reductions in the health insurance scheme for low-income families, Medicaid, and to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) food stamps….The bill squeaked through US House by just one vote on Thursday. It now faces a perilous welcome in the upper legislative chamber…Sunday’s admonitions from prominent senators angered by the failure to address the budget deficit bodes ill for Trump’s agenda given the tightness of the Republicans’ congressional majorities. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, can afford to lose only three votes from among his party’s 53…Thune has indicated that changes to the bill might be needed to bring refuseniks on side. That in turn could present the House speaker, Mike Johnson, with a headache.”

In “Majority of US companies say they have to raise prices due to Trump tariffs,” Lauren Aratani writes at The Guardian: “A majority of US companies say they will have to raise their prices to accommodate Donald Trump’s tariffs in the US, according to a new report…More than half (54%) of the US companies surveyed by insurance company Allianz said they will have to raise prices to accommodate the cost of the tariffs. Of the 4,500 companies across nine countries, including the US, UK and China, surveyed by Allianz only 22% said they can absorb the increased costs…The unpredictability of US trade policy has also dented exporters’ confidence. The survey found 42% of exporting companies now anticipate turnover to decline between -2% and -10% over the next 12 months, compared to fewer than 5% before 2 April “liberation day” – when Trump unveiled his tariff policy…Though Trump has pulled back on many of the levies he initially proposed, key tariffs remain in place, including a 10% universal tariff on all US imports, a 30% tariff on Chinese imports and extra tariffs on specific industries like metal and auto parts…Inflation data from April showed that US price increases remained roughly level for the month. Economists say that it will take a while for tariff-related price increases to show up in data and companies have started to say they will pass some of the cost of tariffs onto consumers…“Monthly business surveys … do indicate that companies will eventually pass on most of the tariff increases by the summer,” said Maxime Darmet, a senior economist at Allianz Trade.”

“New studies show what’s at stake if Medicaid is scaled back,” Leslie Walker reports at npr.org, and shares some good messaging points for Dems: “Two research studies published this month add important data to the fierce political debate over Medicaid in Washington, D.C.Each study — one published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the other released as a working paper from the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research — offers evidence that Medicaid, the public insurance program that covers more than 70 million low-income and disabled Americans, is saving people’s lives.,,As Congress considers major changes to the program, these findings underscore the importance of treading carefully, said Harvard University economist Amitabh Chandra, who was not involved in either study…The National Bureau of Economic Research paper, by Angela Wyse, an economist at Dartmouth College, and Bruce Meyer, a University of Chicago economist, focused on the millions of low-income adults who gained Medicaid coverage in states that expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act. After examining a dataset of 37 million people, the authors found:

• People who gained Medicaid coverage via the ACA expansion were 21% less likely to die in a given year of enrollment than peers who did not get the health coverage.
• States that chose to expand Medicaid saved 27,400 lives between 2010 and 2022.
• States that declined to expand Medicaid in 2014 missed the chance to save 12,800 more lives.

…Together, the two research papers highlight a tough reality for congressional Republicans as they continue to consider a slate of possible Medicaid cuts to fund their other policy priorities…No matter how they shrink the program, whether by making federal funding less generous or paperwork more onerous, this new evidence suggests that some people are likely to get hurt.” For more information about both studies, read the rest of the article right here.

If you haven’t paid much attention to the Republican’s tax bill and wonder who it helps, check out Matt Egan’s CNN Politics report that “The 10 richest Americans got $365 billion richer in the past year. Now they’re on the verge of a huge tax cut.” As Egan writes, “Despite a brief market scare, the richest 10 Americans got $365 billion richer over the past year, according to a new analysis from Oxfam…The stunning increase in wealth amounts to a gain of roughly $1 billion per day for those billionaires…By contrast, the typical American worker made just over $50,000 in 2023. Oxfam found that it would take a staggering 726,000 years for 10 US workers at median earnings to make that much money…The findings put an exclamation point on the nation’s wealth inequality and come as Republicans debate a costly bill that nonpartisan experts say will make the rich even richer and deeply cut nearly $1 trillion from key safety net programs…“Billionaire wealth has increased astronomically while so many ordinary people struggle to make ends meet,” Rebecca Riddell, senior policy lead for economic and racial justice at Oxfam America, said in the report…Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and CEO of Tesla, accounts for just over half of the total wealth gains, with his net worth spiking by $186.1 billion over that span. An analysis last fall found that Musk, a pivotal figure in President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire.”

At Mother Jones, in “For Trump, le Grift, C’est Moi: The White Tablecloth Theory of Dirty Politics applies here,” David Corn outlines the extent of Trump’s corruption: “Trump has engaged in record-setting levels of corruption, as he mixes his business interests with his day job. It’s as if the presidency is a mere side hustle to his main gig of maximum personal enrichment. His trip to the Middle East this past week was more a venture of Trump, Inc. than a presidential mission. His Trump Organization is developing projects in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—the three nations on his Mideast tour—while hooking up with firms tied to these Arab governments…His family business is also cutting lucrative crypto deals with Arab partners. As my colleague Russ Choma recently reported, Eric Trump, who runs the Trump Organization now, was recently in Dubai and announced that MGX, a UAE-based investment fund, would invest $2 billion in crypto exchange Binance using a “stablecoin” created by the Trumps’ crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. The deal could net the Trump family hundreds of millions, as the transaction lends enormous credibility and liquidity to their crypto business. MGX isn’t just any UAE-based investment fund. It’s chaired by Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and brother of the Emirates’ ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.” Corn continues, “Let’s not forget the Saudi investment fund that kicked in $2 billion when Jared Kushner started his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, which subsequently attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in backing also from Qatar and the UAE…Never has a president been so financially intertwined with foreign governments. No wonder he praised Mohammed bin Salman, the murderous ruler of Saudi Arabia, as a “gentleman.” After all, he’s helping Trump and his family make millions. And, as we all know, Trump agreed last week to accept a $400 million gift airplane from Qatar. Any slice of this would have been unthinkable for an American president in the past. But not with Trump. The latest grift is just another drop on an already huge pile of grift.”