The following article, “How About a Daily Democratic Message?” by Robert Kuttner, is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

There’s an interesting idea floating around on social media about how to rescue the Democrats from a wilderness of mixed messages and relentless media stories of Democratic disarray. But actually bringing this idea about sheds light on the thorny structural challenges that the opposition party faces.

The idea is that “the Democrats” should designate a single spokesperson, or perhaps rotating spokespeople, to give a daily press conference with a few clear talking points. That would presumably become the day’s main political story and give Democratic opposition to Trump more focus and clarity. So far, so good.

A number of the social media accounts have suggested Pete Buttigieg, who is deft at articulating a substantively progressive message as just plain common sense. Trump’s wrecking crew provides a target-rich environment, to say the least.

But let’s play out making this idea happen. For starters, who are “the Democrats”? Who would appoint this spokesperson or -people, and using what criteria?

There is a Democratic National Committee, with a talented new chair in Ken Martin, but the DNC does not make this kind of decision. The Senate and House leaders, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, are the closest thing to national leaders.

Let’s assume that Martin, Schumer, and Jeffries meet and decide that this is a good idea. Then begins the problem of herding cats.

Schumer and Jeffries would have to get buy-in from their respective caucuses. Multiple demands would surface. Lots of different people with presidential aspirations would want the role of daily spokesperson. All would agree on just one thing. It can’t be just Pete Buttigieg.

Then the further mixed blessing of diversity in all its forms would kick in. There would be pressure to pick spokespeople from different regions, races, genders, ideologies. Instead of clarity, we’d get a circus.

Let’s make the heroic assumption that the party leadership could somehow surmount this challenge and pick just three rotating spokespeople.

My nominees would be Jamie Raskin, Gretchen Whitmer, and Pete Buttigieg. See the superb extended interview with Raskin in Politico. He is the most eloquent and best-focused anti-Trump Democrat we have. But I digress.

There is the further challenge of message. Do we just leave that up to the messengers, or must they clear it with some kind of committee?

The anti-Trump talking points are clear enough. He is putting your health at risk with fringe appointees and wreckage of essential public-health agencies. He plans to take away some of your health insurance and Social Security to finance more tax cuts for his billionaire cronies. He is wrecking the economy and inviting a stock market crash. He is destroying America’s most reliable alliances and helping global adversaries.

I wish that his trampling of the rule of law, his vindictiveness, and his cruel separation of immigrant families with Gestapo-style ICE raids were at the top of the list. They surely are for Prospect readers. But for the general public, alas, the more powerful message is how Trump’s crazy actions harm you.

A further challenge is the Democrats’ affirmative program. Yes, we need a few bold commitments that would help ordinary people directly and provide a vivid contrast with Trump. Our friend Tom Geoghegan, writing in The Nation and urging Democrats to keep it big and simple, proposes a 50 percent increase in Social Security benefits and a law prohibiting the firing of wage and salary workers except for cause. At the top of my list would be canceling student debt.

But here’s the problem with that tactic. The press would quickly point out that none of this stands any chance of passage, and many elected Democrats would distance themselves from Hail Mary pass proposals.

If the Democratic leadership could agree on a small rotating cast to provide a consistent narrative on the personal menace of Trump to ordinary Americans, that would be a possible start.

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

Over time, Democrats have been hemorrhaging working-class voters, including and especially in the last election. A resolute, unconditional defense of government bureaucracies does not appear to be a promising route to getting them back in our current populist era.

But oddly, Democrats seem to have decided that hitching their wagon to government bureaucracies is just the ticket they need to storm back against Trump and GOP. Nothing illustrates this better than how they’ve mounted the barricades to defend USAID and each and every dollar it spends.

As was widely-reported, all USAID programs except for “life-saving humanitarian assistance programs” were paused on January 20^th and all agency employees, except for a tiny handful, were put on administrative leave (some have subsequently been reinstated through court order). These actions are follow-ons to Trump’s Executive Order on “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.”

Democrats were outraged as well they might have been. USAID does much useful and important work and most of its employees surely deserve something better than being summarily laid-off during an audit of the programs they administer. Democrats took that outrage to the streets in a signature #Resistance move, where House and Senate Democrats rallied outside the USAID headquarters building and demanded to be let inside (to do….something), at which point bored security guards politely told them to get lost.

Of course, this got a lot of publicity but to what end? The truth is most Americans know very little about USAID and could care less about the USAID as an institution. And if you told them that USAID basically administers foreign aid programs, they would care even less.

The fact of the matter is that foreign aid is one of the least popular parts of the federal budget. Indeed, skepticism about foreign aid is one of the most consistent and durable findings of public opinion research. In a 2023 AP-NORC poll, 69 percent of respondents thought U.S. government spending in this area was “too much”; 20 percent, “about right”; and just 10 percent “too little.” In contrast, support for more spending in most domestic areas (healthcare, education, infrastructure, Social Security, etc.) is very strong.

And unsurprisingly, anti–foreign aid sentiment runs highest among working-class voters, precisely the people who have been defecting from the Democrats to Trump, and without whose votes the party cannot recover. Cutting foreign aid spending is about ten points more popular among voters without college degrees than among the college-educated.

Given these realities, it makes sense for Trump and Musk to go after foreign aid spending, as an exemplar of misallocated government resources that need to be “reevaluated and realigned.” This is particularly the case since it isn’t hard to find examples of USAID programs that appear to have strayed far afield from standard priorities like food, medicine and technical assistance. One example of many is a $1,500,000 grant to a Serbian organization called Grupa Izadji “to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities, by promoting economic empowerment and opportunity for LGBTQI+ people in Serbia.”

In fairness, these kind of grants do not take up a large portion of USAID’s budget but even a small number of them is enough to raise hackles among voters who are already suspicious that much foreign aid is either wasted or could be better-spent elsewhere.

OK, let’s recap the situation for which the outraged masses of Senate and House Democrats have taken to the streets.

1. Democrats are blanket defending an obscure institution in an anti-institutional era, where most institutions are regarded with intense suspicion. As David Axelrod remarked to Politico, apropos of the USAID situation:

[How] did the party of working people become a party of elite institutions?…Part of the problem for the Democratic Party is that it has become a stalwart defender of institutions at a time when people are enraged at institutions (emphasis added). And they become—in the minds of a lot of voters—an elite party, and to a lot of folks who are trying to scuffle out there and get along, this will seem like an elite passion.

Call it the institutions trap. Trump attacks an institution Democrats are identified with; Democrats feel obliged—pretty much no matter what it is—to defend it tooth and nail. But that simply reinforces Democrats’ brand as the institutional, establishment party, which makes them even more vulnerable to populist attacks and even less capable of defending those institutions Then Trump goes after another institution and the cycle repeats.

Reflecting this dynamic, congressional Democrats have rallied in several other places, including outside the Departments of Treasury and Education, implying that whatever auditing and attempted cost-cutting is taking place at these institutions is completely unjustified. That is their default assumption—the bureaucracies in question are doing a fine job. But the default assumption of the median working-class voter is that a good chunk of most bureaucracies are doing work that isn’t even needed and wasting considerable money in the process. Therefore, such voters are likely to have considerable initial sympathy for what Trump and Musk/DOGE say they’re trying to do.

Democrats should recall an important finding from New York Timespolling in the last cycle. Voters overwhelming believe that the political and economic system in America needs either major changes or to be completely rebuilt. Automatic, dogged defense of all institutional bureaucracies does not speak to that sentiment.

Not only that, Democrats are only succeeding in making themselves look ridiculous as they take to the streets in geriatric-led demonstrations to defend these bureaucracies….

….As Tim Ryan, former Ohio House member and Senate candidate put it:

Yes, it is a bit depressing and certainly altogether implausible that these antics will succeed in reaching the working class voters Democrats need.

2. In USAID, Democrats are not only blanket defending an obscure institution, it is an institution that does one of American voters’ least favorite things: provide foreign aid. How much sense does it make for Democrats to hit the streets to defend USAID and pump up the issue politically when most Americans are indifferent to hostile to the programs they administer?

Not much! Axelrod again:

My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight…When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.

Rahm Emmanuel adds:

You don’t fight every fight. You don’t swing at every pitch. And my view is—while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador—that’s not the hill I’m going to die on.

Words of wisdom, should Democrats care to hear them.

3. Finally, not only are Democrats blanket-defending an obscure institution that does something American voters don’t care about, they are defending without offering any hint of what they would preserve and what they would get rid of in terms of what USAID does. That implies that everything is working perfectly at USAID and all the programs are vitally needed, when clearly that is not the case.

Voters want big change in their institutions; it doesn’t make sense to insist that no change is needed, especially in an area like this. Bill Clinton once said: “Mend it, don’t end it” in a different context. That spirit of open reform is desperately needed here and elsewhere as Democrats try to resist Trump’s excesses.

And there will be many! Democrats should show some common sense in what they spend their political capital on as Trump ramps up his various institution-bending schemes. Given that even the most attentive political junkies are having trouble keeping track of all the things that are going on, we can safely assume that the typical working-class voter has very little appreciation for these intricacies—much less whether they amount to a “constitutional crisis”—and mostly knows Trump and Musk are shaking things up in government bureaucracies. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in their book, until and unless it starts to affect them personally.

That’s really the key and how Democrats can get out of the current “institutions trap” that brands them as the establishment party in an anti-institutional, populist era. Trump is pretty much guaranteed to do many things that are genuinely unpopular and impinge upon voters’ lives in a way that angers them in areas like health care, education, and the cost of living. Democrats should reserve their big guns for those situations. That should make them politically stronger over time and, paradoxically, make them better able to restore worthwhile USAID and other government programs over time and get many of those workers back to work.

In contrast, their current grandstanding on the USAID shutdown and other DOGE monkey business will likely do those programs and those workers no good. As that great American, Casey Stengel once remarked: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” We’re still looking Casey, we’re still looking.

The following article, “How the Left Can Win Back the Working-Class: In a new book Joan Williams says Democrats can win back ground lost to Trump without abandoning their values” by Adam Gabatt, is cross-posted from The Guardian:

Democrats can win back sections of the working class they lost to Donald Trump without compromising their commitment to equal rights and compassionate government, according to a new book.

They can do so by seizing control of rightwing talking points and reframing debate around issues like the climate crisis and LGBTQ+ rights.

The left can fight back, too, against how the right wing has claimed masculinity – offering an alternative to Trump’s bellicose interpretation of what it means to be a man.

Such is the verdict of Joan C Williams, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, whose work focuses on social inequality and race and gender bias. Her book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, is due out in May.

Democrats have too often talked about issues in abstract language or in ways that don’t resonate with people’s lives, Williams writes. On climate, some Democrats and liberal “elites”, Williams says, can talk too frequently about vague risks of global warming rather than discussing the real world impact on people’s lives.

When it comes to immigration, talking points about increasing cultural diversity in the US have found little appeal with the white working class, in particular. That’s a voting bloc which has found Trump particularly alluring, and Democrats, Williams said, have failed to make the case that immigrants may well be just as proud of living in America, if not more, than people who have lived here for generations.

Williams gave the example of how Democrats should present climate policies – an issue that Trump, Republicans and the rightwing media have categorized as a waste of money and inconsequential to Americans’ lives.

“Do you talk about climate change as: ‘There are climate deniers that deny science and in their ignorance, are taking us to a toasty future?’ Or do you talk about climate change as creating situations where farmers can no longer farm what their grandfathers farmed – how you have a situation where insurance companies are refusing to offer fire insurance to middle-class people?” Williams asked.

Similarly, Democrats can reclaim messaging over masculinity, Williams believes. Part of Trump’s appeal is his image as a tough, hyper-masculine guy, whether talking tough about confronting foreign leaders, bullying members of even his own party or telling crowds at his rallies to beat up protesters, or claiming that he would be among those marching to the Capitol ahead of what became the January 6 insurrection.

There’s little evidence that Trump is actually the strong figure he presents himself as: he’s nonconfrontational when firing people, often doing so by tweet rather than in person; he avoided the Vietnam draft because of alleged bone spurs; and he left the January 6 rally in a car as his fired-up supporters set off for the Capitol.

Still, his messaging has been effective. But Williams thinks it can be countered without simply mirroring Trump’s puffed-up rhetoric.

“You can characterize Trump’s behavior as not seemly for a grownup man. You can [say] that seemingly behavior for a grownup man is not whining, being strong enough to stand up for yourself, and those you love, and the values that you all share,” Williams said.

“That’s what being a grownup man is all about. That’s not selling out our values.”

The phrase working class is frequently interpreted as describing white, blue-collar workers in the US, despite Black people being more likely to be working class than white people – something historian Blair LM Kelley explained in her book Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class.

Black working-class voters have not followed the exodus from the Democratic party to Trump that the white working class or, to a much lesser extent, Latino working-class people have.

But Williams writes that despite consistent support for Democrats from Black Americans, that support should not be taken for granted. She believes that Democrats’ positions on some issues are more likely to reflect the positions of white elites rather than Black, Latino or white, working-class voters, who may hold conservative views on issues like abortion.

The left can appeal to working-class people of all races in similar ways, Williams said. In Outclassed, she quotes Ian Haney López, a scholar on race whose work on “race class narrative” suggests that the left can engage Black, Latino and white working-class voters by emphasizing that the right wing has deliberately set out to divide them in order to distract from economic policies that have created devastating income inequality in the US.

And despite some working-class voters holding conservative beliefs on social and cultural issues, Williams said Democrats do not have to abandon their principles on things like equal rights for LGBTQ+ people, support for women’s rights and commitment to racial equality in order to appeal to what she refers to as “middle-status voters”.

“I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it. I mean, the debate in the United States now is that [some Democrats] are saying: ‘Just talk about the economy. Don’t talk about culture at all.’ And that’s because they assume that if they talk about culture, they have to appeal to these middle-status voters in the same way the far right does – by, for example, bullying trans kids, and they don’t want to do that.”

Williams says “that’s a failure of imagination” and that the left needs to “find our own ways of connecting with these middle-status voters.”

Something telling, Williams notes, is that the Gadsden flag, a yellow flag emblazoned with a coiled snake and the words ‘Don’t tread on me,’ has been co-opted by the right as a stance against government interference and is frequently flown at Trump rallies.

“This is a standard flag among Trump-voter types. Well: ‘Don’t tread on me, butt your nose out of my family.’ Are we talking there about abortion? Or how parents can raise their kid, if the kid is gender non-binary? We don’t talk about that,” she said.

“It’s a process of imagination, of understanding what the values are of the folks who are flocking to the far right and rethinking how we can build bridges, respectful bridges to them, without becoming the far right.”

The following article, “Polls Keep Showing Americans Want Elon Musk and DOGE Out of Government” by Julianne McShane, is cross-posted from Mother Jones:

Yet more evidence shows Elon Musk and his cronies at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are unpopular with many Americans.

Nearly half of people who responded to a new CBS/YouGov poll out today said they want Musk to have less influence over government spending and operations, including nearly a third who think they should have none at all. The poll found that 18 percent of respondents said that Musk and his DOGE acolytes should have “not much” influence on government operations and spending, while 31 percent said they should have none at all. Predictably, the support differed along partisan lines: Nearly three-quarters of Republicans surveyed said Musk and DOGE should have “a lot” or “some” influence, whereas more than two-thirds of Democrats said they should have “not much” or “none.”

This comes as the latest bit of mounting evidence showing many Americans don’t want Musk running the government: Just this week, a poll from the Economist/YouGov also showed that 51 percent of Americans believe Musk has a lot of influence in the government, while only 13 percent want him to have that much influence; 46 percent, on the other hand, don’t want him to have anyinfluence. Another poll released this week from progressive advocacy groups Groundwork Collaborative and Public Citizen in partnership with Hart Research found 54 percent of voters have an unfavorable opinion of him, with a majority also saying he has too much influence and involvement in the government and that they have less favorable opinions after learning about the lack of oversight regulating potential conflicts of interest with his companies as well as the ability of DOGE to access unclassified information.

Last month, a Quinnipiac University poll found 53 percent of respondents disapprove of Musk’s prominent role in the Trump administration, and another January poll, from the Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center, found that a majority of Americans don’t want Trump relying on billionaires or family members for policy advice and have an unfavorable opinion of Musk.

All in all, this is not surprising, given that, as Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery wrote earlier this week, nobody voted for Musk, an unelected tech billionaire. The latest data offers a clear rebuke to the hurricane of chaos that Musk and his cronies at DOGE and across the federal government have unleashed since President Trump’s inauguration.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, that chaos has included trying to pay federal workers to quit their jobs; attempting to gain access to US Treasury data; threatening to shutter USAID, a federal agency tasked with supporting critical humanitarian and development work around the world; taking over the Education Department, which Musk claimed on X the other day “doesn’t exist”; and threatening reporters who report critically on DOGE. (And given that the department is reportedly staffed by Gen Z fanboys and former staffers of Musk—one of whom, Marko Elez, resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal unearthed openly racist posts on an account linked to him, before Musk promptly rehired him the next day—there has been plenty to cover.)

The CBS/YouGov poll released Sunday showed other Trump policies that are also unpopular: 52 percent of respondents said they oppose building large detention centers to house people awaiting decisions on whether or not they’ll be deported; only 13 percent said the US trying to take over Gaza, as Trump proposed this week, would be a good idea (47 percent called it a bad idea, and 40 percent said they’re unsure); 66 percent said Trump is not focused enough on lowering prices; and large majorities said they oppose new US tariffs on goods from Mexico, Europe, and Canada (economists have said those tariffs will likely raise prices for American consumers).

But in a news release from the White House Sunday, responses to those data points were invisible. “Americans Are Loving the New Golden Age,” the press release claimed, touting Trump’s 53 percent approval rating, the 70 percent of poll respondents who said Trump is doing what he promised on the campaign trail, and the majority approval for his mass deportation plan and his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict. (Never mind that those assertions would seem to be in conflict with some of the other findings mentioned above—such as the limited support for his floated plan to take over Gaza.)

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt shared the headline from CBS on X: “Trump has positive approval amid ‘energetic’ opening weeks; seen as doing what he promised,” it read. Leavitt’s enthusiastic promotion of it was curious given that, just a few days ago, her boss said in a post on Truth Social that CBS should “lose its license” over a 60 Minutes interview the network did with former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. (Trump filed a lawsuit against the network, alleging that the 60 Minutes interview was deceptively edited to make Harris look better; CBS denies those allegations and this week released the raw footage and transcript of the entire interview, which it also provided to the Federal Communications Commission upon request.)

The White House’s promotion of the latest CBS poll—and its refusal to seriously engage with public criticisms of Musk, along with other points of contention—offers a clear example of its hypocrisy regarding its attacks on journalism and truth: What Trump’s acolytes see as favorable to him get labeled as legitimate, whereas anything more critical gets branded “fake news”—or simply ignored.

When it comes to Musk, they’ve continued to defend him—and showed how unseriously they seem to be taking his position in the highest levels of government. At a press briefing this week, Leavitt said that Trump was clear on the campaign trail about the role Musk would play in his administration. Separately, when a CNN reporter asked Leavitt what kind of security clearance Musk has, if he passed a background check, or if the DOGE team members raiding the Treasury Department or USAID had security clearances, she said she didn’t know and would have to check. The White House does not appear to have clarified those points yet.

But if Democrats continue attacking Musk and the role of oligarchy in the Trump administration, as they did this week, the White House may have no choice but to confront the discontent around Musk and DOGE head-on.

Correction, Feb. 9: This story originally misstated the proportion of Democrats in the CBS poll who said Musk and DOGE should have not much or no influence in government.

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

Three months after the Democrats’ electoral drubbing, the party is still reeling—leaderless, rudderless, and historically unpopular. Only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, the lowest rating since CNN first asked the question in 1992. Republicans have led in party identification for three straight years, which hasn’t happened in nearly a century. And the GOP is outregistering Democrats in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina.

Think party pooh-bahs realize it is time for urgent change? Think again.

Viral video clips from the Democratic National Committee’s election for a new chair this past weekend seemed like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college. In one, outgoing DNC chair Jaime Harrison explains how the presence of a gender nonbinary candidate affected the committee’s gender-balance rules. (“The nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.”) In another, every candidate for chair blamed Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump on racism and misogyny.

The DNC settled on 24-year-old school-shooting survivor David Hogg as one of its new vice chairs. Here is Hogg’s take on why Democrats did badly among Gen Z voters:

We had to grow up worrying about dying in a school shooting today, or dying of climate change tomorrow, and then being crushed by student debt and the housing crisis in between. . . and I think on the issue of Gaza in particular, it was emblematic of the fact that people felt like we were not listening to them—that we didn’t care.

Hogg is almost as out of touch as the winning candidate for DNC chair, Minnesota’s Ken Martin. He confidently asserted: “We’ve got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”

In short, all the early signs point to a party that has learned nothing from defeat. If only the Democratic Party were wearing lapels, because then someone could grab them, shake hard, and yell: “What part of ‘the voters just rejected your fixation on identity politics’ do you not understand?”

Yet the simple recognition that they lost in November for a reason still seems inadmissible in the party’s deliberations about how to deal with Trump 2.0. Instead, they give every indication of doubling down on their least popular policy agenda items and the resist-everything-all-the-time strategy that yielded disastrous results for them last time.

Unless Democrats acknowledge that much of what Trump says and does is not only popular but also, here and there, good policy, they can never recover. They should seek compromise on issues where Trump holds the policy and political high ground, reserving hard opposition for the areas where voters are least likely to agree with him—such as blanket tariffs on U.S. trading partners, which are neither justified nor popular.

The party should heed the acerbic advice of the great Democratic congressman Barney Frank: “If you care deeply about an issue, and are engaged in group activity on its behalf that is fun and inspiring and heightens your sense of solidarity with others, you are almost certainly not doing your cause any good.”

In other words, if it feels good, don’t do it.

With that advice in mind, here are four rules of the road to help Democrats navigate the next four years.

1. Avoid the name-calling

Let’s start with something easy: Don’t drop the F-bomb. Democrats must resist the urge to characterize Trump or his policies as “fascist”—as Kamala Harris did in the home stretch of the presidential race. Why? For a start, it’s not true. Trump may have authoritarian tendencies. But—if the term is to retain any meaning—that is very different from being a fascist. A cursory acquaintance with twentieth-century history should make that clear. (If you have any further doubts, please consult Richard Evans’ three-volume history of the Third Reich.)

If Trump is a fascist then all that he does must be part of his heinous fascist plot, and all of it must be resisted all the time. California House Democrat Robert Garcia demonstrated this approach last week when he ruled out any compromise: “I think the idea that we’re talking about holding hands with Donald Trump and extremist Republicans and like, kumbaya, I think is a huge mistake. We know what he’s going to do. We should oppose that and be very vocal and tough and push back.” The F-bomb has another political disadvantage: It disparages everyone who voted for Trump by implication.

It is my sad duty to remind the gathering legions of anti-fascist fighters: it didn’t work last time and it won’t work this time. “Trump, Trump, Trump, fascist, fascist, fascist, Trump, Trump, Trump, racist, racist, racist” has repeatedly failed to stem the populist tide—most recently just a few months ago in the Harris campaign. This time is not different.

The path to durable victory is what it was before: convincing voters you are a moderate and reasonable alternative to Trump.

2. Moderate—starting with immigration

That moderation should start with a decisive issue in the last election: immigration. Voters want a secure border and an end to runaway illegal immigration. They believe Democrats don’t. In his first days in office, Trump tightened border security with a series of executive orders; his administration has started to implement deportations targeted at criminal immigrants; and he signed the Laken Riley Act, which is named after the Georgia nursing student murdered by illegal Venezuelan immigrant Jose Ibarra in 2024. (It provides for the detention and possible deportation of illegal immigrants charged with certain crimes, as Ibarra was. In a chemically pure example of what is wrong with the Democrats, Joe Biden apologized for referring to illegal immigrant Ibarra as illegalrather than the approved undocumented.)

So far, Democrats have done little to address voters’ suspicions that they don’t take border security seriously. The Laken Riley Act passed the House and the Senate with the support of only a handful of Democrats. They have offered close to no support for Trump’s executive orders tightening up border security and ongoing deportation actions. An honorable exception is Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, who not only voted for the law but attended the Act’s signing ceremony. He has said it is “common sense” that violent illegals “all need to go.”

The party could twin a serious, unapologetic commitment to border security with opposition to inhumane treatment of detainees, excessive deportation (e.g., of the Dreamers), and unpopular steps like eliminating birthright citizenship. But that would require meeting Trump halfway—something most Democrats still refuse to do.

3. Partner with Trump when he’s right—like on DEI

It’s a similar story with DEI and affirmative action. In a series of executive orders, Trump has set about dismantling DEI and affirmative action within the federal government and for federal contractors. Democrats appear willing to lie down on the railroad tracks on this one. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Trump’s actions with the disingenuous argument that DEI is merely an expression of the American values in the Constitution. That’s absurd. DEI is of comparatively recent vintage and the programs are now indelibly associated with racial preferences, oppression hierarchies, ideological indoctrination, and language policing. Those aren’t American values at all.

Tolerance, anti-discrimination and equal opportunity, on the other hand, are—precisely what Democrats used to advocate. Defending these principles against Trump and his inevitable tendency to encroach upon them as he pursues his agenda would be a worthwhile and popular stance for Democrats. But first they must recognize that Trump’s drive for a color-blind, merit-based society is extremely popular while affirmative action and DEI are not.

Instead, Democrats are repeating their misguided, ineffectual response to the 2023 Supreme Court decision that barred race-based affirmative action in college admissions. At the time, Jaime Harrison, then-chair of the DNC, “condemned” the Supreme Court for what he described as “a devastating blow for racial justice and equality.” Jeffries said the ruling showed the court was “more interested in jamming their right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”

Jeffries could not have been more wrong that opposition to affirmative action is an expression of fringey “right-wing ideology”. In fact, racial preferences are very, very unpopular with ordinary Americans and have been for a long time. In polling from Pew in 2022, an overwhelming 74 percent thought that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. A majority of all non-white racial groups agreed. Affirmative action also lost badly in a referendum in deep-blue California in 2020. Supporters of a measure to repeal the state’s ban on affirmative action outspent opponents by ten to one, but the measure still failed.

Most voters, especially working-class voters, believe, like Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” A 2022 University of California Dornsife survey found that more than 90 percent of Americans agree that America should strive for color-blind tolerance. But many Democrats dismiss the idea of color blindness as either hopelessly naive or itself a racist dog-whistle.

4. Embrace energy abundance

Democrats also need to show more pragmatism on energy. Trump has taken steps that he says will increase fossil fuel production and make energy more abundant. He plans to eliminate many of the subsidies and regulations that are designed to accelerate the transition to green energy and electric vehicles. And he has restricted environmental review processes to reduce the costs of big energy and infrastructure projects.

Much of this has both merit and popular support. Democrats, however, have been unremittingly hostile. They are letting the usual suspects at environmental and climate change NGOs dictate their response. Alas for them, voters care more about cheap, reliable energy than fighting climate change. They are willing to consider electric vehicles, but resent any regulatory attempt to force them to give up gas-powered vehicles. And Trump is right: Environmental regulations really have become a shocking drag on building practically anything in this country—be it energy-related projects, transportation infrastructure, or housing.

If Democrats can’t accept that much of this is both popular and necessary, they will be unable to mount a credible response where Trump’s energy plans go off the rails. For example, pausing wind but not other energy projects makes no sense from an “all-of-the-above,” energy abundance perspective. And just gutting the energy provisions of the IRA wholesale is neither wise nor necessary. Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath note:

Somewhere between half and three-quarters of projected Inflation Reduction Act spending over the next decade will be for wind, solar, and electric-vehicle subsidies. These are all mature, cost-competitive technologies that don’t need further subsidization. Cutting their subsidies could amount to somewhere between $300 billion and $650 billion in savings.

But Congress should maintain federal incentives for promising less-mature technologies, such as nuclear and geothermal energy and natural-gas plants with carbon capture. Doing so would rebuild the bipartisan consensus for energy innovation that prevailed in congressional politics for decades.

That would be a worthy goal for Democrats to promote. And in the end it might do more for emissions reduction than a quixotic attempt to defend renewables and EV subsidies to the death.

More generally, Democrats don’t need to—and shouldn’t—ignore climate change. But a winning message must be embedded in, and subordinate to, voters’ overriding priorities: energy abundance and prosperity. Polling clearly shows that this is the mainstream view—but among Democrats it is still, at best, a niche position.

What’s true of immigration, DEI, and energy is true in many other areas. The trick is knowing when to say “okay” to Trump, and when to say “no.” Democrats sometimes seem to understand this. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a recent interview, “Trump will screw up,” urging his colleagues to be patient. Even Jeffries seems to appreciate the point of this, at least in theory. “We’re not going to swing at every pitch,” he said last week. By Monday, though, he sounded a lot less restrained, unveiling his plans to push back against “far-right extremism that is being relentlessly unleashed on the American people.”

Amid all the denial that dominated the contest for DNC chair, there was a breath of realism from Adam Frisch, a Democratic former Congressional candidate in a rural Colorado district who over-performed the top of the ticket but still lost his 2024 race. “Twenty big cities, Aspen, and Martha’s Vineyard—that’s what’s left of the Democratic Party,” he told The Wall Street Journal recently.

If Democrats want to rebuild their shattered party, they have no choice but to exercise restraint and choose their fights with Trump wisely. The alternative is four years of garment-rending, continued isolation on a few islands in Blue America—and, in 2029, a fresh batch of candidates for DNC chair blaming the latest electoral disaster on racism and misogyny.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is now a contributing writer.

Here’s the stub of “Trump is giving Elon Musk an unprecedented amount of power: The Department of Government Efficiency could wind up hurting Trump politically” a 538/abcnews chat, featuring Nathanial Rakich, Julia Azari and Cooper Burton:

Welcome to 538’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior editor and elections analyst): One of President Donald Trump’s core campaign promises was to cut government spending and dismantle the federal bureaucracy — and two weeks into his presidency, he’s attempted to consolidate an extraordinary amount of power in order to do just that. Last Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave the Department of Government Efficiency — a unit of Trump advisers led by billionaire Elon Musk — access to the federal payment system, giving DOGE a huge amount of oversight and power over how government money is spent. Over the weekend, two top officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development were also placed on leave for refusing to give DOGE access to classified information at the agency, which Musk now says he and Trump are shutting down. And on Monday, the Small Business Administration also gave DOGE access to all its systems.

All this has greatly alarmed independent watchdogs and Trump critics, who argue that DOGE is operating without oversight and point out that Musk, the world’s richest man and an owner of several businesses that work with the government, could use the data he now has access to for personal gain. But do Americans share that alarm, or are they just interested in getting results? In today’s installment of the 538 politics chat, we’ll talk about whether this weekend’s events — as big of a story as they have been inside the Beltway — will matter to the general electorate.

So, team: I know this story is still developing, but do we have any sense yet about how much Americans care about Musk’s heavy-handed attempts to cut the government?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political scientist at Marquette University and 538 contributor): The story really seemed to bubble over on Monday when Musk announced that he and Trump were trying to shut down USAID. This might be less true among the broader public, which may or may not have much of an opinion about USAID, and more among members of Congress (who gathered outside the agency to protest its dismantling) and the press.

nrakich: Well, it may be breaking through with the broader public too. Google Trends data is imperfect, but it does show that, over the weekend, Google searches related to USAID exceeded those related to the upcoming Academy Awards. And on Monday morning, Americans were Googling USAID more than they were Googling the search topic “pizza” at dinnertime on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights!

cooper (Cooper Burton, researcher and copy editor): It’s too early to have polling data about Musk’s attempted dismantling of USAID, but we have seen surveys ask more generally about DOGE and its mission, and that data has been mixed. For example, in late January, Data for Progress found that likely voters supported the creation of DOGE, 46 percent to 36 percent. And an AP-NORC poll found that wide majorities of Americans think that issues like corruption, inefficiency and red tape are major problems in the federal government.

But they don’t really like any of DOGE’s proposals to fix those issues. Out of four proposals that the AP-NORC poll asked about, only one was above water: requiring federal workers to return to the office five days a week. Other ideas, like eliminating a large number of federal jobs or eliminating federal agencies, were quite unpopular, though large shares said they didn’t have an opinion either way.

I think these latest actions with USAID and the SBA will probably provoke a similar response from the public: People like the abstract idea of eliminating waste and bureaucracy in the government, but usually dislike it when specific cuts have to be made.

Read more here.

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

The Democrats’ electoral problems have received a lot of attention—as they should! Whatever the commitments of a political party, they’ve got to be elected to pursue them. But that can distract attention from what they do when they are elected. Typically that underlies electoral problems that come to the fore and explains why it’s rarely enough for a party to tout their allegedly wonderful values or continually disparage their nefarious political opponents to fix their problems.

In other words, governance is key. You’ve got to run the government well and get things done voters care about if you want those voters to stick with you. And that’s where Democrats have been running into problems—big problems.

Think about it. If you wanted safe streets and public order would your first impulse be to turn to…a Democrat? Or if you wanted a secure, actually-enforced border? How about efficient, effective delivery of public services? Or rapid completion of public projects and infrastructure? Or nonideological public administration?

I don’t think on any of these fronts the reaction of a typical voter would be: “Democrats! Of course, I need Democrats to do all these things because they’re so good at them!” On the contrary, it seems like over time Democrats—both nationally and in many localities where they dominate—have become worse and worse at delivering in these areas. That’s a huge problem because why should voters take Democratic plans to improve their lives seriously if Democrats persist in running government so poorly? Democratic governance is their advertising and the advertising makes the Democratic “product” look pretty bad. So voters don’t want to buy it.

Let’s look at some specific areas. Take safe streets and public order. The Democratic-leaning commentator Noah Smith admits:

In the late 2010s, blue cities brought [a] problem on themselves: urban disorder. Crime rates began rising in 2015, fueled by national unrest. But blue cities didn’t respond by cracking down on crime as they did in the 90s and 00s. Progressives in the late 2010s reviled and rejected “stop-and-frisk”, “broken windows policing”, and other tools that blue cities had used to keep order in previous decades. Instead, they elected a bunch of progressive prosecutors, enacted more permissive policies toward public drug use, passed laws that made it hard to use violence against shoplifters, and sometimes even reduced penalties for minor crimes.

The result was entirely predictable. Blue cities became increasingly afflicted by pervasive, low-level urban disorder—drug needles in children’s parks, epidemics of car break-ins, and so on. Female friends of mine in San Francisco started to report being followed for blocks, harassed on the train, or even slapped in the head by street people on their way to work. The housing crunch made the disorder much worse, of course, by exacerbating homelessness.

Then the pandemic and the riots hit, and the trend got turbocharged. Without “eyes on the street” to deter crime, and with police cowed or disgruntled by the protests of summer 2020, progressive cities became increasingly lawless, chaotic zones. Violent crime soared in 2020-21, with waves of attacks on vulnerable populations like Asian elders….

Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder—restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on—represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.

Opinions vary about how much things have improved in blue cities since their nadir. But the fundamental problem is: this never should have happened in the first place. And the culprit is well-articulated by Smith in the last paragraph of the quote above. Blue city Democrats have adopted a philosophy that is antithetical to good governance—it is not surprising it does not produce good governance; it is not intended to. Public order is treated as optional, subordinate to ideological goals Democrats wish to pursue. Until that philosophy changes in a big way and Democrats unapologetically and aggressively enforce public order, voters will continue to view Democratic governance negatively in this area. And they’ll be right to do so.

Voters also see de facto open borders and uncontrolled immigration on Democrats’ watch as symptoms of public disorder and poor governance. In their view, illegal (Democrats cannot even bring themselves to use the word) immigrants are in fact breaking the law by making unauthorized entry to the United States and creating a chaotic situation at our nation’s border. And they were shocked that almost all candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination endorsed decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

And then, even more astonishingly to the typical voter, these law-breakers were rewarded for their behavior on the Democrats’ watch. Consider what happened when Biden came into office in 2021. He immediately issued executive orders dramatically loosening the rules for handling illegal immigrants. His party’s left wing and various immigration advocacy groups rapturously applauded this. As TheNew York Times’ David Leonhardt summarized:

Biden tried to pause deportations. He changed the definition of asylum to include fear of gang violence. He used immigration parole—which the law says should be used “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons”—to admit hundreds of thousands of people. The parole programs alone amounted to “the largest expansion of legal immigration in modern U.S. history,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News wrote.

Would-be migrants, as well as the Mexican cartels that run transit networks, heard a clear message: Entering the United States had become easier. The number of people attempting to do so spiked almost immediately.

And continued to spike throughout the first three and a half years of the Biden administration until they finally took some steps to stanch the tide. But by that time the country had experienced truly mind-boggling levels of immigration. Indeed, the Biden immigration surge, driven heavily by illegals, was the largest in US history, surpassing even the immigration surges of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Read more…

At The Bulwark Tim Miller has a revealing interview with top political journalist Ronald Brownstein, who pegs the most compelling data points from the presidential election. A paywall kicks in at the end for the “full episode.” But some of Brownstein’s nuggets from the first part of the interview include:

“Trump won a substantial number of votes from people who still expressed  significant doubts abut him and his agenda. Between 1/5 and 1/6 of his voters would agree with sentiments like he was too extreme.”

“Roughly 60 percent of Americans disapproved of Biden’s job performance and 80 percent of those  disapprovers voted for Trump.”

“He won a higher share of women who identified as pro-choice in 2024 after Dobbs, than he did in 2020 before Dobbs….More than a quarter of Latinos wo said they opposed mass deportations voted for him.”

“Among white women without a college degree – they are just crucial to how these [swing] states turn out – who supported legal abortion, broke 2 to 1 for Trump.”

“All of these data points tell me that the dissatisfaction, primarily over inflation, and to some extent the border simply outweighed at this moment voters’ hesitations and concerns about Trump.”

“A considerable majority of the country was dissatisfied with the results they got from the Biden presidency, and, in the normal hydraulics of American polling, voted for the party that was not in the White House.”

The first portion of Miller’s interview of Brownstein did not address cultural issues. But it can be safely concluded that being perceived as fully embracing cultural ‘wokeness’ did not help Harris, although she did well in light of the economic opinions cited by Brownstein.

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

The left isn’t dead yet. But it’s getting there.

That’s a shame because the self-identified left played a leading and productive role in the 20^th century. The various socialists, social democrats, and radicals that made up this loose aggregation pushed unions and government policy that benefited the working class, helped tame the excesses of capitalism and provided the shock troops for efforts to end discrimination, ensure equal treatment for all, and protect the environment. On all these fronts, the left made important contributions.

But the left came into the 21^st century beaten down. From the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s to the rise of the Third Way in the 1990’s to the first Bush term and War on Terror that started the century, it didn’t seem like anyone really wanted to hear from the left any more. Political contention between the parties and within American politics generally had passed the movement by.

And then: a sort of revival, sparked initially by the backlash to the Iraq war. The revival was strengthened by the Great Recession of 2008-09 and Obama’s historic first election, gathered force through his second term with the rise of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, and then was turbocharged by Bernie Sanders’ insurgent candidacy and, of course, the norm-busting election of Donald Trump and his chaotic first term in office. Suddenly, being on the left was cool again. The moribund Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) spiked to 100,000 mostly young members from a few thousand aging veterans of the 20^th century left.

And it wasn’t just the DSA. In many circles, a radical critique of American society as structurally racist, hostile to marginalized communities, and embedded in a rapacious capitalist system that will destroy the planet became a sort of conventional wisdom. In this view, opposing Trump had to be joined to a struggle against all these aspects of oppression (the “omnicause”) and to social transformation. Otherwise, the oppression would remain even if Trump himself was removed.

This view spread through sympathetic cultural milieus where it already had a considerable presence—universities, media, the arts, nonprofits, advocacy groups, foundations, and the infrastructure of the Democratic Party itself—redefining what it meant to be on the left. In opposing Trump, who was himself so radical, it seemed only reasonable to be radical in return.

As a result as the teens drew to close, punctuated by the COVID pandemic and the George Floyd summer of 2020, the left was both larger than it had been in a long time and very different from earlier iterations. This was a left that believed America was a white supremacist society, fully bought into climate catastrophism, prized “equity” above social order, good governance and equal opportunity and thought “no human being is illegal” was a good approach to immigration policy. And they were perfectly willing to shout you down if you didn’t believe all this stuff or even if you didn’t use the right language when referring to these issues. Not coincidentally this was also a left with almost no connection to the working class, in stark contrast to the 20^th century left’s origin story.

But this left did have quite a lot of influence on Biden administration staffing and policies, down to the language officials used to describe their initiatives. To their shock, however, American voters were not delighted with the results, especially the working class, and the left’s preferred party, the Democrats, are out on their ear.

So this would be a great time for the left to recalibrate its approach, right? But are they? To paraphrase George W. Bush: “Is our leftists learning?”

Sadly, that does not appear to be the case. Neither in the evolving intraparty strategic debate after the November election nor in reactions to GOP priorities and Trump’s executive orders is there much evidence of a desire for compromise on the part of the left. Instead, there are signals that there are hills—many hills!—they are willing to die on rather than give ground. Here are three of the most important hills they are willing to die on—and probably will.

1. Immigration/border security/deportations. Outside of the economy, no issue hurt the Democrats more in 2024 than immigration. And the laxness on border security and quasi-open borders policy that resulted in massive waves of illegal immigration was very much a priority and product of the left. You’d think they’d be rushing to correct that mistake. Nah.

Take the Laken Riley Act which just passed Congress. Laken Riley was the Georgia nursing student who was murdered by illegal Venezuelan immigrant Jose Ibarra (recall that Biden, under pressure from the left, apologized for referring to illegal immigrant Ibarra as “illegal” as opposed to the approved nomenclature of “undocumented”). The legislation named after her provides for the detention of illegal immigrants charged with theft-related crimes, assault on a police office or acts causing death or bodily harm to an individual. Just 12 Democrats in the Senate and 46 Democrats in the House were willing to vote for the Laken Riley Act, with the left, heavily concentrated in blue states, conspicuous by its absence.

Outside of Congress, left reaction was predictable and vitriolic. Sarah Dohl, chief campaigns officer of the movement organizing group Indivisible had this to say:

Spineless. That’s the only word for the..Senate Democrats who handed MAGA Republicans a gift they didn’t deserve…The Laken Riley Act is a racist, xenophobic attack on immigrants that shreds constitutional rights and hands power to extremists like [Texas attorney general] Ken Paxton to hijack federal immigration policy. It’s not just cruel—it’s a train wreck of chaos and bad faith. And yet, Senate Democrats caved.

And that’s just the Laken Riley Act! That Act is merely the opener for a variety of Trump administration moves to drastically tighten up border security and deport many of the illegal immigrants who are currently here, focusing initially on those with criminal records. The left will oppose all these moves, with appropriately inflammatory rhetoric, despite their general popularity. Indeed, deporting those illegals with criminal records is stunningly popular; a new New York Times poll finds 87 percent overall support for deporting such illegal immigrants including overwhelming support among surprising groups like Democrats (83 percent) and Hispanics (85 percent).

The simple fact of the matter is that it is impossible to solve the illegal immigration problem without changing the incentive structure for prospective immigrants by: (a) making it much tougher to enter the U.S. illegally, and (b) making it much tougher to stay in the country once you are here illegally. The public understands this while the left evidently does not or (more plausibly) just does not want to solve the problem. They are determined to die on this hill and die they will, perhaps dragging the rest of the Democratic Party down with them.

2. Identity politics/equity/”trans rights.” The contemporary left is deeply invested in these issues and shows little sign of backing down or compromising on any of them. Take the statement of Ben Wikler, the left’s favorite candidate for chair of the Democratic National Committee:

We unite our coalition by making sure everyone’s at the table.

As DNC Chair our leadership team will lift up our full coalition—Blacks, Latino, Native, AANHPI, LGBTQ. Youth, Interfaith, Ethnic, Rural, Veteran and Disability representation.

This does not seem like the statement of someone even willing to entertain the idea that identity politics is past its sell-by date. Or consider that it is Trump, not anyone on the left, who ringingly called for unrestricted free speech and for a society that is “colorblind and merit-based.” That’s because all these principles have become right-coded in the last period of time and are therefore verboten for anyone on the left to endorse. That’s crazy! As Jeff Maurermemorably puts it, these statements by Trump

hurt not because I disagree, but because I can’t believe that the left has fucked things up so badly that free speech, color blindness, and meritocracy are now issues that the right feels they own. In fact, those issues are so right-coded that they made the list of Things To Throw In Democrats’ Faces At The Inauguration Speech. A little more than a decade ago, those were bedrock liberal ideals. How did we screw this up?

That wasn’t the only challenge in Trump’s inauguration speech to left shibboleths and there are even more in his spate of executive orders. The left is inclined to fight each and every one of them because they believe history is on their side. But is it? I am doubtful the median working-class voter is going to greet the demise of DEI programs in their workplace, public institutions, or community with anything but delight.

Nor will they miss the pronoun police, the insistence that trans-identified biological boys should be able to play girls sports or the easy availability of “gender-affirming care” (e.g., puberty blockers, hormones, surgery) for minors. The Times poll mentioned earlier found that 80 percent of working-class (non-college) respondents opposed transgender birth males playing in women’s sports and 75 percent opposed allowing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to be prescribed for anyone under 18.

For all that, only two (2!) House Democrats—both conservative Hispanic Democrats from Texas—could find the wherewithal to vote for The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act which would prohibit the participation of biological men and boys in women’s and girls sports. Even Massachusetts Democratic representative Seth Moulton, who had raised questions about having biological boys in girls sports, did not vote for the bill presumably because of pressure from the left (they viciously attacked him for being a “Nazi”, transphobe, etc, etc.)

The left is determined to die on this hill and is willing to call out their army of enforcers to defend it. But the clear shift in public sentiment against their agenda makes defeat far more likely than victory here. Meanwhile, Democrats’ ability to adapt and move to the center on these issues will be seriously compromised while the left is busy dying on that hill.

3. Climate catastrophism/renewables uber alles/net zero. Trump has thrown down the gauntlet to the left on climate and energy issues. In his speech and in his executive orders he has made clear his intention to untether domestic energy production from regulatory and permitting obstacles and de-emphasize Biden administration policies centered around renewables and electric vehicles. He promises energy abundance and low energy prices. The left hates this but the fact of the matter is that such an approach is far closer to what the public wants—especially what the working class wants—than the left’s quasi-religious commitment to a rapid renewables-based clean energy transition.

This can be easily seen by reviewing public opinion data on climate and energy issues. Here’s a refresher:

A recent YouGov survey designed by myself and Roger Pielke found that, by 74 percent to 26 percent, working-class voters prefer an energy approach that uses a mix of energy sources including oil, coal, and natural gas along with renewables to an approach that seeks to phase out the use of oil, coal, and natural gas completely.

In terms of the energy they consume, cost and reliability are way, way more important to working-class voters than possible effects on the climate. Given four choices, 41 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them and 35 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Just 17 percent thought the effect on climate of their energy consumption was most important and 6 percent selected the effect on U.S. energy security.

In terms of proposals to mitigate the effects of climate change, getting to “net zero” as quickly as possible is relatively unimportant to working-class voters. Asked to consider proposals to reduce the effects of global climate change, these voters were least likely to say “getting the U.S. to net zero carbon emissions as quickly as possible” was very important to them personally (26 percent), fewer than said “limiting the burden of regulations on business” was very important (33 percent). Working-class voters were most likely by far to say keeping consumer costs low (66 percent) and increasing jobs and economic growth (60 percent) were very important aspects of climate mitigation proposals.

Consistent with many other surveys, the YouGov survey found that climate change as an issue has very low salience to working-class voters. Voters were asked to evaluate a list of 18 issue areas and rate their priority for the president and Congress to address in the coming year. As a “top priority,” dealing with global climate change ranked 16^th out of these 18 areas among working-class voters, well behind strengthening the national economy, fighting inflation, defending the country from terrorist attacks, and keeping Social Security financially sound—and also behind reducing health care costs, dealing with immigration, improving the educational system, keeping energy costs low, reducing the budget deficit, reducing crime, improving how the political system works, improving the job situation, strengthening the military, dealing with the problems of poor people, and dealing with drug addiction. The climate issue only ranked above global trade and issues around race.

Finally, by 30 points (59 to 29 percent) working-class voters flat-out favor more domestic production of fossil fuels like oil and gas. But only 15 percent of these voters are aware that the Biden administration increased oil production on federal lands. However, when informed that the U.S. has, in fact, increased domestic production of oil and gas in the last several years, they are delighted. Almost three-quarters (73 percent) of working-class voters said “this is a positive development, which brings good jobs for U.S. workers, ensures our energy supply and helps the U.S. support our allies who need similar resources” compared to 27 percent who thought “this is a negative development, which brings more pollution, climate change, and continued reliance on fossil fuels.”

In short, Trump is likely to shore up his base, rather than lose support, with his energy proposals. Meanwhile, the usual suspects on the left have already denounced his moves as undercutting the sacred quest to stop climate change, lining the pockets of evil fossil fuel companies and even (somehow) raising grocery prices. This hill, too, is evidently one they are willing to die on rather than compromise in any way on what is likely to be an extremely popular quest for energy abundance. And here too the left is likely to be decisively defeated as they expend vast amounts of money and effort defending the indefensible and kneecapping the ability of their party to come up with an alternative that can actually compete with Trump and his party.

Such is the nature of today’s left—divorced from the working class but intimately connected to the leftist strongholds of the professional class. The latter connection has kept them blissfully unaware of how far outside of the public opinion mainstream their current commitments are and therefore how quickly the hills they are defending could be overrun. That’s happening right now but the left seems determined to fight on to the bitter end.

So be it. Perhaps out of the ashes of this left, a better 21^st century left may arise that channels the best aspects and universal principles of the 20^th century left. But in the meantime, Democrats would be well-advised to craft an approach that ignores the left as much as possible. Just because the left is willing to die on all their various hills doesn’t mean Democrats have to as well.

In “Democrats grapple with their own message in Trump 2.0,” Sarah Ferris and Lauren Fox write, ” President Donald Trump is already testing the limits of Hill Democrats who have vowed to be less antagonistic the second time around….Privately, Democrats have largely agreed it’s time to end the capital-R resistance to the newly sworn in president. Then on Trump’s first 24 hours in office, he freed those who violently attacked police officers protecting the Capitol four years ago.”

Elected Democrats know that the chances or reversing Trump’s pardons and commutations of the January 6 perpetrators are nil. But they also know that Trump’s credibility is damaged every time the public is reminded that five police officers died as a result of the insurrection and 140 officers were injured by the rioters. Honest conservatives can’t support ganging up on police officers who were doing their job protecting our elected officials of both parties. The pardons and commutations, on top of Trump’s own convictions, make a mockery of the GOP’s pretense of being the party of law and order.

However, as Ferris and Fox note, “The natural inclination is to fight, fight, fight, fight,” said Rep. Tom Suozzi, a centrist Democrat who represents a Trump-won district on Long Island. Suozzi stressed that Democrats need to be more disciplined in their politics to avoid their more reactionary tactics: “That’s what’s got us to this point.”….Even so, he and others acknowledge they can’t ignore when Trump allows January 6 rioters to go free at the same time he is pushing to deport other violent criminals. “I mean, come on,” an exasperated Suozzi said.”

“On the pardons specifically, [Democratic House Leader] Jeffries privately told Democrats on Wednesday that they should hammer Trump’s decision to free January 6 rioters in a way that makes clear how it risks the safety of the American people, according to two people in the room. And the focus was less on Trump but on the complicity of House Republicans — the ones who will be on the ballot in two years.”

“Democrats have also tried to contrast how what Trump is doing isn’t actually helping the Americans who voted for him,” they write. The flood of executive orders is like Trump’s mass announcement of cabinet appointments, designed to confuse and distract his opponents.

“I think he’s trying to flood the zone,” with executive orders, Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said. “Trump got hired because he thought he was going to help bring grocery prices down, what does pardoning literally hundreds of criminals who attacked police officers have to do with bringing grocery prices down?”

With respect to the confirmation hearings, “While a hearing for Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth saw blistering questioning about Hegseth’s personal life, including one particularly tough exchange with Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia on Hegseth’s marriages and an unexpected pregnancy, other hearings — including those for Treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent and Department of Homeland Security pick Kristi Noem — were relatively civil by partisan standards, and focused far more on policy disagreements than personal animus.”

This is understandable. The Department of Defense is the big prize. It involves 3 million armed services members and workers and a budget of 841 billion dollars, and the potential for contractor corruption is a kleptocrat’s dream. In the modern era, at least, the Secretary of Defense has been headed by a leader who has some gravitas. Those days may be over. The Democrats now need two Senate votes to defeat the Hegseth nomination.

“This guy is clearly not qualified,” Warner said of Hegseth. “I’m supporting a number of Trump’s nominees. I voted for (Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA John) Ratcliffe, I voted for Bessent, but there are some of these that are way beyond the bounds.”

However, “We’ve gone back to our playbook which is, ‘attack him,’ instead of actually dealing with the fact that the party doesn’t have a message, doesn’t really have a spokesperson,” one senior House Democrat said of the strategy. “We’re just going back to the shrill attacks.”

“They have a permanent information ecosystem. We don’t,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, said following the lunch. “They define us and we don’t get to define them. No matter how good our messaging is here, it doesn’t get reflected, reverberated and amplified like theirs does.”

That sounds like something that can be fixed.