The following article by Matthew Yglesias is cross-posted from slowboring.com:

Having written a nine-point Common Sense Democrat Manifesto, it now falls to me to explain in greater detail what I mean.

I chose to start the list with a point about economics, because I really think there is a profound and fundamental divide between the Slow Boring perspective, which is to complain about the Democratic Party’s positioning on cultural issues because I want to see Democrats win elections and help poor people, and the Free Press perspective, which is to complain about Democratic Party positioning on cultural issues because they want to see Republicans win elections and cut rich people’s taxes.

But I also put it first because I think some sectors of the left harbor weird fantasies about the possibilities of politics grounded in “populist” economics. One set holds to a sort of red-brown fantasy, in which they fuse with social conservatives and bring back the left wing of the Dixiecrats. Another set, the one that was more influential with Biden-era Democrats, holds that if you’re somehow just populist enough on economics, you can short-circuit people’s brains and they’ll stop noticing that you disagree with them on cultural issues.

Neither of these works, because the pure left-populist approach to economics is itself not a satisfactory answer to the economic question. Thus, the first point of the manifesto:

Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.

Democrats want and need to be a party that stands up for the little guy, for the person who, in Bill Clinton’s memorable phrase, works hard and plays by the rules. And that absolutely involves progressive economic policies. Conservatives are just way too eager to write off poor kids, sick people, and the elderly and disabled in pursuit of low taxes. They are also way too indulgent of businesses that pollute or perpetrate fraud. And they tend to stand with incumbents, the heirs to inherited wealth, and rent-seekers. But contrary to the attitudes of the hard left, a growing and dynamic private sector is really important. Americans are much richer than Europeans, and that matters. Middle-class people tend to leave San Diego for San Antonio in pursuit of bigger, cheaper houses, and that matters. It also matters that poor people can get Medicaid in San Diego but not in San Antonio.

You need an economic agenda that does both: a rapidly growing economy with a safety net that ensures people aren’t left behind.

The growth mindset

I think these tweets by Lee Hepner from the American Economic Liberties Project about why he hates YIMBYs are telling. He and Nathan Proctor, who works on right- to-repair issues at US PIRG, are not articulating a typical objection to new housing in a neighborhood, like “I’m worried about traffic” or “what if it creates problems for my kids’ school.” They are articulating a fundamental, principled disagreement with the idea that economic growth is important. They say American society has enough “energy, wealth, stuff, etc” and that all we need is a purely redistributive politics.

I think it’s important to note that Proctor and Hepner are not working on climate policy. Most readers here are familiar with the “degrowth” talking points in some climate activist spaces, and Democrats rightly reject that approach. But these guys work on competition policy, and here they are degrowthing. Not because YIMBYism conflicts with the right to repair or antitrust enforcement, but because the core principle of YIMBYism is that growth — more and better housing — is important, and they see this as antithetical to their views.

This is a tragedy, because antitrust law and competition policy are genuinely important.

It’s a real problem that right-wing politics has become too indulgent of businesspeople’s desire to engage in anticompetitive practices that raise prices and restrain output. We need aggressive enforcement of rules against cartels and anticompetitive mergers and abuse of dominant positions in low-competition markets to secure an advantage in more competitive spaces. This stuff is important precisely because it’s important to economic growth. And the same is true of plenty of other progressive ideas:

• Investment in basic science
• Good schools and good infrastructure
• Internalizing pollution externalities
• Transparent markets and rules against fraud
• Macroeconomic stabilization policy

These things are important for growth and prosperity. There is a warm and cuddly side to progressive economic policy that’s about caring for the vulnerable. But there is also a tough-minded side that’s about true public goods and securing the commons. And what you do not want to do is just be prog-maxing randomly. To say that vigorous antitrust enforcement is important is not to say that maximal levels of antitrust enforcement are optimal. And the same is true of environmental rules and spending on public goods and everything else. There’s a temptation to just throw growth under the bus to avoid making choices or exerting discipline. And there are people who sincerely (and wrongly) believe that growth doesn’t matter and that we can just redistribute our way to heaven.

The need to govern

The Biden Administration was not in the grips of hard anti-growth ideology.

But it has, in important ways, been adrift in the interest group fog since the passage of the American Rescue Plan. People can, and will, forever debate the wisdom of a demand-side stimulus that large. But it happened, and it happened very early in the Biden Administration. And while demand-driven growth is great, once you max out demand, you need to aim for supply-driven growth. And they just didn’t do that. The White House considered coming out for Jones Act repeal, but the president personally didn’t want to do anything that was anti-union. They took a look at the bipartisan permitting reform bill, and they weren’t exactly against it, but they also weren’t exactly for it, because they didn’t want to cross the environmental groups. They came out in favor of YIMBY principles, but they couldn’t come up with very much to do about it, because the federal government doesn’t run zoning.

And even while talking about housing costs, they raised tariffs on imported Canadian lumber. They reinterpreted the Waters of the United States rule in a way that homebuilders say is bad for supply. They put expensive rules in place to accelerate electric car adoption, even while alienating the owner of the world’s most important electric car company to please labor unions, while also alienating blue collar union members over cultural issues.

I remember getting a briefing in advance of the 2024 State of the Union. The administration team was, naturally, touting their various efforts to address struggles with the cost of living, and many of their ideas seemed plausible, but they all struck me as ideas that could have been on a progressive laundry list cooked up in 2017. So I asked what they had that I could say a Democratic administration wouldn’t typically propose, except for their recognition that Americans were struggling with inflation.

They had nothing.

The one that has stuck in my craw for years is student loan cancellation. This policy was explicitly pitched by its architects as an economic stimulus measure.

When Biden first won the election and I thought he’d be struggling to secure adequate stimulus from Congress, I thought this was a good idea, because it could be done without a Senate majority. But then ARP passed — you don’t need stimulus anymore!

I get why the president didn’t want to say, “I promised student debt forgiveness and I understand that people will be angry at me if I break that promise, but the truth is the country is now wrestling with inflation, and I have to do the right thing.” But to pour extra fiscal stimulus on the fire when the country is struggling with inflation, just because you promised to do it back in 2019 when the situation was completely different, is wildly irresponsible. On the regulatory front, as I’ve written before, it’s not just that Biden didn’t want to tackle sacred cows like the Jones Act — he made Jones Act rules stricter. Politicians love to talk up Buy American in speeches, but Biden is a true believer who wrote the strictest-ever rules in subtle legal ways.

I’ve been accused of being a soulless monster who doesn’t believe in anything. But on core economic management, it was the Biden Administration that acted hyper-politically rather than genuinely prioritizing the biggest problem facing the country.

Caring for the needy

Taking this out of election retrospective territory, the other question here is what’s worth the risk. I’ll concede that a fully refundable Child Tax Credit is not great politics. But I do think that, if passed, it would prove quite durable, like the Affordable Care Act. If I were a House member being asked to risk my career over something, then I think a huge and probably durable cut in child poverty would be a reasonable thing to ask me to take a risk for. I’d be proud to stop Medicaid cuts. These are solid progressive issues that make sense as priorities.

But I also think it’s important to get means and ends straight.

I support certain policies that aren’t free market, because they’re necessary to ensure the interests of poor people. But it doesn’t make sense to turn all of these policies into a principled critique of free market economics. A lot of left intellectuals clearly find YIMBYs annoying because the idea of a capitalist solution to a major problem annoys them. But working people don’t need a principled debate about the role of the free market in society, they need higher material living standards. Regulations that limit the supply of health care providers are one way that the wealthy and powerful use their privilege to entrench their interests. The same is true of NIMBY rules. And the dockworkers opposing port automation earn significantly more than the average American. These are all leaky buckets of upward redistribution.

You can’t take the politics out of politics, and we’re never going to have a purely technocratic regime. But if you’re a Democrat and you’re trying to think things through on the merits, “How does this impact poor kids and struggling workers?” is a pretty good lodestar.

I think that leads us to see that the social safety net is incredibly important, but so are other things. Population movements to the red states are telling us something important about the cost of overregulation, especially but not exclusively, in the housing sector. Regulatory protections can be very important, but rigorous cost-benefit analysis is also important. Economic growth and consumer goods matter a lot. Stopping cartels from jacking up prices helps poor kids a lot. Trying to create a comprehensive price control regime so lawyers can get over on businessmen does not. Investing in effective educational institutions is great. Providing open-ended subsidies to college and universities and telling yourself it’s “neoliberalism” to demand any kind of measurable result is not.

And to deliver a common sense agenda of broad economic uplift, you also need to be in touch with common sense moral values. Which we’ll get to as we work our way through the manifesto’s remaining eight points.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and John B. Judis, a former editor of The New Republic and author of major works about contemporary politics, is cross-posted from The New York Times.

In his victory speech last week, Donald Trump declared that a “historic realignment” in American politics had occurred. His claim has been echoed by Republican intellectuals. In a podcast the day after, Michael Needham, the chairman of American Compass, said, “We are seeing the realignment come to mind.”

As writers who once made an argument for a potential emerging Democratic majority, we are especially curious when a new one comes up — and because of our own experience, we treat claims by Mr. Trump and others of a durable Republican realignment with some skepticism.

There are two meanings for a realignment claim. The first is that the parties’ coalitions have changed. This is undeniable, but the changes really began during the period from the 1970s through 1994. During that time, portions of the white working class began their journey from the Democratic to the Republican Party. They were originally called Reagan Democrats.

Alternately, many college-educated voters began leaving the G.O.P. for the Democrats. Geographically, the South, once solidly Democratic, came to lean Republican, while Northern states, once dominated by liberal or moderate Republicans, became more Democratic.

Politico is running a round-up, “11 Democratic Thinkers on What the Party Needs Right Now,” which is worth a red. Here is one segment, “Democrats must return to being the party that a majority of voters believes to be saner” by Matt Bennett, co-founder and executive vice president of public affairs at Third Way:

Let’s start with where Democrats should NOT go. We should not blame Vice President Kamala Harris or her campaign. Given the underlying challenges with the Democratic brand, Joe Biden’s unpopularity, the compressed time frame, some hangover from the 2020 primaries, and the need to be the “change” candidate, her task in retrospect looks like it was impossible. Blaming her or her team is wrong and myopic, and it elides the reckoning we must face — Democrats have lost a staggering amount of support across almost every demographic group. We must find a way to turn that around.

To do so, we must make sure our focus is our generational challenge: defeating right-wing populism. A century of global history makes clear that right-wing populists cannot be beaten with left-wing populism. Rather, you take on the right-wing demagogues and authoritarians through the center. That means Democrats must return to being the party that a majority of voters believes to be saner, more reasonable, more patriotic and more in touch with their lives.

Democrats won’t get there without letting go of some stale and spurious conventional wisdom about our politics. Demography is not destiny — no “rising American electorate” of people of color and young voters is coming to save us. Mobilizing low-propensity voters is not a viable campaign plan. You can’t build a winning coalition with college-educated voters alone. And we must avoid what the commentator Ruy Teixeira has dubbed the “Fox News Fallacy”: Issues like immigration and crime can be both inflated by right-wing media and be real and rational concerns for a lot of voters outside the MAGA base. And despite all the cruelty and bigotry of the Trump campaign, we cannot view the whole of Trump’s support solely through the lens of racism, misogyny and ignorance. Voters are telling us something vital about what matters to them: We had better listen carefully.

Read all 11 essays right here.

Some political wisdom shared by Tara Suter in her post, “Ezra Klein says Democrats ‘need to take seriously how much scarcity harms them’” at The Hill:

Ezra Klein, a columnist with The New York Times, said that Democrats “need to take seriously how much scarcity harms them” in a Monday post on the social platform X.

In his post, the left-leaning Klein shared some of his “thoughts from the conversations I’ve been having and hearing over the last week,” including a “hard question” about “how to build a Democratic Party that isn’t always 2 points away from losing to Donald Trump — or worse.”

Klein said in another part of his post-Trump election post that “Democrats need to take seriously how much scarcity harms them.”

“Housing scarcity became a core Trump-Vance argument against immigrants. Too little clean energy becomes the argument for rapidly building out more fossil fuels,” he continued. “A successful liberalism needs to believe in *and deliver* abundance of the things people need most.”

Klein also said, “The Democratic Party is supposed to represent the working class.”

“If it isn’t doing that, it is failing,” he continued.

Klein’s words somewhat mirror those of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who said in a Sunday thread on X that a purer form of “economic populism should be” the American left’s “tentpole,” but also argued that “true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”

Back in February 2024, Klein was an early advocate for President Biden’s exit from the presidential race, saying Democrats “should help him find his way to that, to being the thing he said he would be in 2020, the bridge to the next generation of Democrats.”

“And then I think Democrats should meet in August at the convention to do what political parties have done at conventions so many times before, organize victory,” he said at the time.

Democrats should create a consensus economic reform package that is so good that hefty majorities of voters will support it. Not an easy task, but not as hard as losing another presidential election.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

The Republican Party, according to Democrats, has given rein to some of the darker impulses in the national psyche, has shown flagrant disregard for democratic norms and offers little to the American people in terms of effective policy. There is considerable truth to this indictment and Democrats have not been shy about making their case in uninhibited language, including the obligatory comparison of their opponents to “fascists” and “Nazis.”

Yet Democrats cannot decisively beat their opponents as this election has shown once again. The party is uncompetitive among white working-class voters and among voters in exurban, small town, and rural America. This puts them at a massive structural disadvantage given an American electoral system that gives disproportionate weight to these voters, especially in Senate and presidential elections. To add to the problem, Democrats are now hemorrhaging nonwhite working-class voters across the country.

The facts must be faced. The Democratic coalition today is not fit for purpose. It cannot beat Republicans consistently in enough areas of the country to achieve dominance and implement its agenda at scale. The Democratic Party may be the party of blue America, especially deep blue metro America, but its bid to be the party of the ordinary American, the common man and woman, is falling short.

There is a simple—and painful—reason for this. The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman. The priorities and values that dominate the party today are instead those of educated, liberal America which only partially overlap—and sometimes not at all—with those of ordinary Americans.

This election has made this problem manifest in the starkest possible terms, as the Democratic coalition shattered into pieces. Trump not only won, he won fairly easily, carrying all seven swing states and, much to Democrats’ shock, the national popular vote. Below I review the demographic trends driving this shattering.

Recall that before the election, there was much debate, bordering on denialism, about whether and to what extent demographic trends revealed by most polling data would actually undercut the Democratic coalition in the election. Now we have results and it is clear those trends were real and that they did massively weaken the Democratic coalition.

Here are some demographic comparisons using the AP VoteCast data—which I consider to be far superior to the exits. These are national comparisons using 2024 and 2020 VoteCast data. Comparisons of state level demographic patterns between the two elections generally follow the national pattern.

The gender gap: Contrary to much pre-election discussion, Harris’s margin among women was actually less than Biden’s in 2020, 7 points for Harris vs. 12 points for Biden. And the Trump margin was better among men, 10 points vs. 5 points in 2020. The overall gender gap went from 17 points in 2020 to….17 points in 2024. How about that. The Democrats invested so much hope in the women’s vote, especially the idea that the abortion issue would spike their margin among women, and it just did not pan out.

Even more startling, Democrats believed with an almost religious fervor that young women would move sharply in their direction given liberal trends among this demographic and, again, the salience of the abortion issue. And, again, it did not happen. Women under 30 supported Biden by 32 points in 2020 but supported Harris by just 18 points in this election, a 14-point shift toward Trump. Among young men, the swing was even harder: these voters supported Biden by 15 points in 2020 but supported Trump by 14 points in 2024. That’s a 29-point pro-Republican swing. As a result, the gender gap did widen among young voters, but it was because young men moved more sharply toward Trump than young women did. That’s not exactly what Democrats had in mind.

The working-class (non-college) vote: Among all working-class voters, Trump dramatically widened his advantage, tripling his margin from 4 points in 2020 to 12 points in this election. That included moving from 25 to 29 points among white working-class voters and radically compressing his deficit among nonwhite working-class voters from 48 points in 2020 to 33 points this election. Compare that margin to what Obama had in 2012: according to Catalist, he carried the nonwhite working class by 67 points in that election. That indicates that Democrats have had their margin among this core constituency more than cut in half over the last 12 years. Ouch. So much for the “rising American electorate.”

And it’s time to face the fact that the GOP has become the party of America’s working class. Democrats hate to admit that and mutter that they represent the “interests” of the working class. But the numerical pattern is now too powerful to be denied. Instead of denying the obvious—or, worse, blaming the dumb workers for not knowing their own interests—Democrats would be well-advised to accept this new reality and seek to change it.

Unless they’re content to be primarily the party of America’s well-off. Harris lost voters under $50,000 in household income as well as voters from $50,000 to $100,000 in income. But she did carry voters with over $100,000 in household by 8 points, one place where Harris did improve over Biden in 2020. This is not, as they say, your father’s Democratic Party. Not even close.

The youth vote: The idea that the youth vote might bail out on the Democrats this election was strenuously resisted in Democratic-friendly quarters but happen it did. Democrat support among voters under 30 collapsed from a 25-point advantage in 2020 to a mere 6 points in this election.

This should be especially disturbing for Democrats since this is the first presidential election where this age group is overwhelmingly composed on Gen Z voters. This does not augur well for the future. Nor does their performance among voters 30-44, now dominated by the Millennials, where Harris’s advantage over Trump was only 4 points. The great generational replacement theory of future Democratic dominance is another theory Democrats would be well-advised to discard.

There is much more to be said about shifting voting patterns in this election (and it will be said!) But for now, these data do indicate that a lot of the trends the polls were picking up on the compression of Democratic margins among key groups was real. And that should be food for thought for Democrats as they sift through the wreckage of their shattered coalition.

As they do so, here’s an idea to start with: have every Democrat ostentatiously say they subscribe to the following principles. These principles would signal to normie voters, particularly working-class voters of all races, that Democrats’ values and priorities are not so different from theirs. That’s a prerequisite for getting these voters to listen to Democrats’ pitch and take it seriously.

• Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.
• America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country.
• Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society.
• Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.
• No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair.
• America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is hugely important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country.
• Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. However, more and better policing is needed to get criminals off the streets and secure public safety. That cannot be provided by “defunding the police”.
• There are underlying differences between men and women that should not all be attributed to sexism. However, discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong and should always be opposed.
• People who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right. However, biological sex is real and spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved. Medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available on demand, especially for children.
• Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Free speech is a fundamental American value that should be safeguarded everywhere.
• Climate change is a serious problem but it won’t be solved overnight. As we move toward a clean energy economy with an “all of the above” strategy, energy must continue to be cheap, reliable and abundant. That means fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will continue to be an important part of the mix.
• We must make America more equal, but we also must make it richer. There is no contradiction between the two. A richer country will make it easier to promote equality.
• Degrowth is the worst idea on the left since Communism. Ordinary voters want abundance: more stuff, more opportunity, cheaper prices, nicer, more comfortable lives. The only way to provide this is with more growth, not less.
• We need to make it much easier to build things, from housing to transmission lines to nuclear reactors. That cannot happen without serious regulatory and permitting reform.
• America needs a robust industrial policy that goes far beyond climate policy. We are in direct competition with nations like China, a competition we cannot win without building on cutting edge scientific research in all fields.
• National economic development should prioritize the “left-behind” areas of the country. The New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt did this and we can do it today. “Trickle-down” economics from rich metropolitan areas is not working.

A Democratic Party united around these principles would be a far more appealing party to those millions of voters who are leaving the Democratic Party behind. It’s time to start calling them back.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Next week, the election campaign will (finally) be over. It’s still basically a coin toss race. But it’s also clear that Trump is in a reasonably good position to win. The national margin for Harris has narrowed significantly; in Nate Silver’s average, it’s gone from 3.4 points around the time of the Walz-Vance debate to 1.1 points today. The same pattern can be seen in Silver’s swing state averages, where Harris’s margin has declined or Trump’s margin has increased over the time period. Or, in the critical case of Pennsylvania, flipped from a narrow Harris lead to a narrow one for Trump.

All this is good for Trump, even leaving aside the possibility that the polls are underestimating his support as they famously did in 2020 and 2016. And Silver’s forecast model currently leans slightly toward Trump (other models are closer to a flat 50-50 assessment). But as Silver himself emphasizes, even a 55-45 probabilistic assessment for Trump is closer to a coin toss than what people traditionally think of as a “favorite.”

So that’s where we are. How did this happen? How did Trump, widely-loathed and dramatically flawed candidate that he is, wind up with a coin-toss chance of winning his second presidential election? Put another way, how are Democrats falling short not just of recreating the Obama coalition but even the Biden coalition of four years earlier?

Examining the current demographics of the Harris coalition and comparing them to the demographics of Biden’s 2020 coalition provides a window into understanding how Trump has positioned himself for a possible victory. Here are four key points of demographic comparison, using the gold standard Catalist data from 2020 and crosstabs from the New York Times/Siena survey (rated A+ in Silver’s pollster ratings) and from the running demographic averagesmaintained by Cook Political Report (CPR).

(1) It’s still a working-class election. As I have previously noted, the key demographic to keep track of is the working class (noncollege) vote. How these voters move will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 election. They will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all seven key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average.

In 2020, according to the Catalist data, Trump carried working-class voters overall by four points but lost college-educated voters by 18 points. In the latest Times survey, Trump is carrying the working class by 13 points, a 9-point improvement over his 2020 performance. He is also losing the college-educated by 21 points, representing a 3-point slippage relative to 2020. But the net of these two changes is clearly in his favor. Indeed, given the preponderance of working-class voters in the electorate, to truly set off widening deficits among the working class Democrats would need margin gains among the college-educated that are 50 percent larger than their margin losses among working-class voters. That is not happening.

The Times data allow working-class performance to be broken down between whites and nonwhites. Among whites, Trump is carrying white working-class voters by 30 points, a 4-point improvement over his already-large 26-point margin in 2020 but losing college whites by 16 points, a 7-point deterioration relative to 2020 (CPR data show the same pattern but more muted). White college graduates are the major demographic where Democrats have consistently improved election-over-election since 2012. They look set to do the same in this election. If Harris is, in the end, able to overcome deteriorating working-class support it is likely to come from spiking support among these voters.

Looking at nonwhites, it is here that declining working-class support is most dramatic. Among nonwhite working-class voters, according to the Times data, Harris is currently leading by 26 points. That may sound like a lot but Biden carried these voters by 49 points in 2020. And Obama carried these same voters by 67 points in 2012! Thus Harris is running an astonishing 41 points behind Obama among nonwhite working class voters, an absolutely core demographic for Democrats.

As I have previously observed:

Since the latter part of the 20^th century, the left has had a plan. Well, not really a plan, it just kind of….happened. Call it, to use Thomas Piketty’s term, the Brahmin Left. That is his characterization of Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites. The Brahmin Left has evolved over many decades and certainly includes today’s Democratic Party…

For Brahmin Left parties, the temptation is great to lean into their emerging strengths and just hope they can retain enough of their working-class base to make the political arithmetic work. That is the natural inclination of the elites and activists who now dominate the parties. But these parties have been increasingly battered by right populist competitors who are bleeding off more and more of the left’s working-class support. That calls the viability of the Brahmin Left model into question. There is a point beyond which the loss of working-class voters cannot be plausibly balanced by increased support among college-educated and professional voters and the model is fatally undermined.

We shall see if this is the election where that model finally breaks.

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(2) The rise of racial depolarization. There was already significant racial depolarization in the 2020 election, where Trump substantially improved his performance among nonwhites, especially Hispanics and, as noted above, the working class. We are seeing more of that in this election cycle, which should net out to Trump’s advantage. The Times data show Trump doing slightly worse among whites as a whole (an 11-point lead vs. 12 points in 2020) but much better among nonwhites (a 28-point deficit vs. 48 points in 2020).

Consistent with this, the Times data finds Trump trailing among Hispanics by just 10 points, 13 points better than his 23-point deficit in 2020 (which, in turn, was down from 39 points in 2016). Among blacks, Trump is being thumped by 69 points—but that is actually 12 points better than his 81-point gap in 2020. The CPR averages confirm this general pattern of gains from 2020, with Trump doing not quite as well among Hispanics but better among blacks.

(3) A declining age gap? A persistent feature of this election cycle has been relatively good performance for Trump among younger voters. In the Times poll, Trump is behind by 12 points among voters under 30 (this is identical to the CPR running average), an 11-point improvement over his 23-point deficit in 2020.

It is interesting to note that the 18-29 year old age group is now essentially a Gen Z group. Millennials are now almost all in the 30-44 year old age group. And here also Trump seems to be doing better. He is behind by only 5 points among this Millennial-dominated age group, compared to a 14-point deficit in 2020.

But among those 65 and over—now heavily dominated by Baby Boomers—Trump seems to have lost some ground, though not drastically. In the Times data, Trump is behind by a point among these voters, compared to a 4-point lead in 2020. The CPR average is slightly better for him, giving him a half-point lead, but still indicating a fall-off from 2020.

No matter which way you look at it, the data do seem to indicate a declining age gap. Comparing 18-29 year olds to those 65 and over, the age gap in 2020 was 27 points. Today in the Times data, it’s 11 points (13 points in the CPR data).

(4) A widening gender gap? There has been much talk about a widening gender gap in this election as women flock to support Harris’s candidacy and men seem to move toward Trump. This has generally been interpreted as a factor that favors Harris but that does not appear to be true. The simple math of a widening gender gap is that its political effect is determined by the relative movement of women and men in widening that gap.

In this case, the movement of men toward Trump is widening the gap not the movement of women toward Harris. In the Times data, Harris is carrying women by 12 points, actually slightly less than Biden’s 13-point advantage in 2020. But Trump is carrying men by 14 points, 8 points better than his 6-point advantage in 2020. Thus the gender gap has widened from 19 points in 2020 to 26 points today but this is entirely due to Trump doing better than before among men not a surge of support for Harris among women.

The CPR averages tell a similar story: a 12-point lead for Harris among women and an 11-point lead for Trump among men. Again: a widening gender gap (23 points) but entirely driven by increasing support for Trump among men. Indeed people seem to have forgotten that a key to Biden’s victory in 2020 was doing better among men while holding Clinton’s advantage among women. In that election, the gender gap was compressed but benefited Democrats. In this election, we may see the reverse, a widening gender gap that benefits Republicans.

This may seem strange in light of the extensive media coverage of very high margins for Harris among younger women, who appear to be leaning ever more strongly to the left. But it is not clear that women under 30 are giving margins to Harris that are much bigger than those they gave to Biden in 2020. And there is significant evidence that men under 30 may be poised to vote much more pro-Trump this election than they did in 2020. In any event, however the trends net out among young men and women they do not appear to be enough to change the overall story of a widening gender gap driven not by a pro-Democratic trend among women but rather a pro-Republican trend among men.

These data make clear how Trump may win. However, they do not mean he will win. As noted, the race is still basically a coin toss. If Harris wins, it would be no surprise if some of the demographic trends noted above turned out to be more favorable to her than they currently look: less deterioration among the working class; even higher support among white college graduates; a return of black and Hispanic support margins to close to 2020 levels and so on. This in turn could be driven by perhaps the Democrats’ best hole card: turnout. An excellent article by Nate Cohn lays out the contours of the Democrats’ potential turnout advantage:

As we’ve reported all cycle, Democrats excel among high-turnout voters, while Donald J. Trump is strong among relatively low-turnout voters. He’s made his biggest gains among low-turnout demographic groups like young men and nonwhite voters….but almost all of that strength is contained among those who sat out the midterms.

This is not simply about education: Even the college graduates who sat out the midterms were far likelier to say they backed Mr. Trump.

Of course, just because Mr. Trump leads among irregular voters does not necessarily mean he will win the irregular voters who decide to show up. In the midterms, Democrats managed to draw a disproportionately Democratic group of voters out of the pool of voters who didn’t vote in primaries. This time, it’s possible they could draw a disproportionately Democratic group out of the Republican-leaning pool of those who didn’t vote in the midterms.

Imagine, for instance, that the infrequent Black or young voters who say they back Mr. Trump in the polls generally don’t show up, while those who back Ms. Harris really do come to the polls.

This is a plausible story about how Trump may lose. But it does not mean he will lose. That will be determined by, as they say, the only poll that really counts. Stay tuned and don’t forget to vote.

It’s horse-racey, but it is as good an update on Pennsylvania polls in these closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign as you are going to find. Sara Dorn and Antonio Pequeno write in “Pennsylvania 2024 Trump-Harris Polls: Race Virtually Tied In 6 New Surveys Of Vital Battleground (Updated)” at Forbes:

TOPLINE

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are within one percentage point of each other in a half-dozen new polls of Pennsylvania this week, as the race remains essentially even in the swing state that’s likely to decide the winner of the 2024 election.

KEY FACTS

Benjamin Hart interviews Ruy Teixeira on the topic, “Can Kamala Harris Win Just enough of the Working-Class” for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer. An excerpt:

You wrote a piece the other day that pushed back on the idea that Kamala Harris is reassembling the Obama coalition. But she is certainly doing considerably better than Biden was in polling just a couple of weeks ago. Would the loss of working-class voters among Harris voters matter if there are offsetting gains among college-educated voters? In other words, does the composition of her coalition matter so much?
If you gain among group A and those gains balance out your losses among group B, then it’s a net benefit. The question is always “What is the net?” I’m just trying to point out how different the Obama coalition was, and how relatively high the support rates were among working-class voters in general, including both whites and non-whites — that Obama’s coalition was much less dependent on white college-educated voters. It was just a different look.

Things weren’t as class-polarized under Obama as they are now. The Republican and Democratic coalitions haven’t exactly traded places, but they have certainly changed in some important ways. So what Harris is doing right now shouldn’t be confused with reassembling the Obama coalition. Really, what she’s been able to do at this point is push back against some of the losses that Biden was experiencing in his 2024 coalition, relative to the Biden 2020 coalition. In other words, Harris, with her recent success, is getting a little bit closer to where the Biden coalition was in 2020, but that in and of itself is quite different from the Obama coalition.

You’re talking about young and Black and Hispanic voters that she seems to be winning back to some degree, which had been Biden’s big weakness in polling relative to his 2020 results. 
It’s a little hard to tell exactly where the gains are coming from, but certainly I think what we’re seeing is that she’s doing a bit better among younger voters, a bit better among Hispanic voters, a little bit better among Black voters, but not necessarily much better among working-class voters. And it appears like she might actually be doing worse among white working-class voters. So that’s the nature of the beast at this point. How all that nets out in terms of building a coalition that can actually win is yet to be determined. Right now it seems to have brought her close to something like parity, but parity is not what you need. As Nate Silver has observed, you need about a two-and-a-half-point national popular-vote margin to actually be favored within the Electoral College, given the biases attended upon the Electoral College today.

She’s not there yet, but she’s getting there, and the question is, where is she going to make further gains? The thing that would bulletproof her coalition would be to bring those working-class numbers in general back at least closer to where they were under Biden in 2020, even if they won’t get to the Obama coalition level. In other words, to try to reduce some of the class polarization in her coalition. And also, critically, she’s got to stop the bleeding among white working-class voters in particular. Because if she does significantly worse than Biden did among these voters, that’s going to filter down to a lot of the key states she needs to carry. If you lose white working-class voters by ten points more in a state like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, that’s a big hill to climb.

There’s a lot of talk about the white working class, less about the Black and Hispanic working class. We know Harris is winning back some Black and Hispanic voters, but do you have any sense of how that breaks out in terms of education level and how she’s doing among that populace, or is that impossible to tell right now?
We really don’t know. But certainly if you look at where the non-white working-class share is in the Times poll — one of the few people to break it out — she’s clearly doing better than some of the recent Biden results. On the other hand, she’s still 20 points below where Biden was in 2020. So just because she’s making progress doesn’t mean she’s getting to where she needs to be. If she’s increasing the margin she has among Black and Hispanic voters, it would be unusual if she weren’t at least making some progress among the working-class component of those two groups, especially when they’re heavily working class.

It still could be the case that she’s making more progress among college-educated and working-class Blacks and Hispanics. That’s certainly possible. But one thing that people really don’t pay enough attention to, and it’s really important and interesting, is how class polarization has now come to Black and Hispanic voters. That didn’t used to be the case. As I pointed out in my article, if you go back to 2012, Obama does better among non-white working-class voters than the college-educated. Now it’s the reverse. So that’s important. And there was some Pew data that was released before Biden dropped out, which showed pretty big differences between Black and Hispanic working-class and Black and Hispanic college-educated voters. So I think that’s totally something to keep an eye on. Again, we don’t know. The energy and excitement about the Harris campaign is really somewhat skewed toward the more educated, engaged parts of those populations.

To read the entire interview, click here.

In “How Harris Can Win Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania… and the Presidency,” John Nichols writes at The Nation that “Harris’s closing argument should be about more than the fact that Trump sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has since embraced an increasingly authoritarian, even fascistic, politics. It has to include a strong pro-choice appeal and a loud defense of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And it must also feature potent messaging about the threat that Trump poses to working-class Americans and the communities where they live….United Auto Workers union president Shawn Fain says he knows what can bring absolute clarity to the debate about that threat—Trump’s disastrous missteps on trade policy, an issue that has been central to the Republican’s many campaigns for the presidency….“We’re calling out Trump’s NAFTA,” Fain explained during an extensive interview with The Nation. “Trump said he renegotiated NAFTA [during his presidency], that he ‘fixed it.’ Well, everything we’ve seen since he supposedly ‘fixed it’ [has headed in the wrong direction]. The trade imbalance in auto went up 20 percent. The imbalance with Mexico went up 30 percent in auto parts.”….Working-class voters in the manufacturing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—all 2024 battlegrounds—are well aware of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that was approved in the 1990s by Democrats and Republicans. Back then, both parties claimed the deal would benefit American manufacturing. It didn’t. In fact, NAFTA was a train wreck, which produced widespread plant closures, daunting trade deficits, and manufacturing job losses so extensive that it has been difficult to track the precise numbers….Trump was wrong. And Harris was right. She’s said as much this fall on the campaign trail. “As one of only 10 senators to vote against USMCA, I knew it was not sufficient to protect our country and its workers,” she explained in a September statement, where she argued that “it was Trump’s trade deal that made it far too easy for a major auto company like Stellantis to break their word to workers by outsourcing American jobs.”….in the battleground states that could well decide the presidential race, an attack on “Trump’s NAFTA” could be just what’s needed to tip the balance to the Democrat.”

From “To win, Kamala Harris must handle tough questions: Here are the answers” by Bill Curry at Salon: “On Wednesday, Kamala Harris held a televised town hall meeting on CNN. She should do one every day for the rest of her campaign, but differently….Voters in focus groups say over and over they want two things from Harris: direct answers to questions and a better explanation of how she’ll fix problems they face in their daily lives. She should indulge them….The good news is that her campaign doesn’t need a gut rehab — it only needs to focus….Harris must answer every question as clearly and specifically as she can. The doubts voters express pertain to her character as well as her vision. Nothing conveys character quite like answering a question….To beat Trump, Harris must tell the truth as boldly and relentlessly as he lies. Providing clear answers to “tough” questions is one way to start. She may find that the answers actually favor her, and that some are political gold. Here are some examples: “Do I wish we’d moved faster on immigration? Yes, I do. But after 20 years of failure and frustration — and Donald Trump was president for four of those years — our administration was the first to put a tough bipartisan bill in front of Congress. Trump killed it because he’d rather exploit an issue than solve a problem. He betrayed us all. Do not pretend it didn’t happen or doesn’t matter….    I will secure and defend our borders — but I will also stop consigning many who are here to a permanent underclass. Did you know that undocumented immigrants pay $96 billion a year into a Social Security system from which they get no benefit? Without them, Social Security would collapse. Our immigrants are one reason why, during the pandemic, our economy outpaced the entire developed world. Rounding them by the millions and dumping them in internment camps would bring our economy to its knees. They harvest our food, staff our restaurants and care for our elders. They also design new technologies and discover new medicines. I won’t spread lies; instead, I’ll fix a broken system we should have fixed decades ago so it works for all of us.” Read the article for more examples.

If you were looking for a more optimistic view of recent polling, check out Quynn Martin’s take at Daily Kos: “If you look at the seven battleground states, they’re all essentially tied….“But Quynn,” you say, “If the polls are tied, how can you possibly see a landslide? You really shouldn’t be drinking this early on a Sunday morning.”….Well, maybe not, and perhaps it is too early to celebrate. But the thing is, with the swing states all so close to one another and close to even (I think the worst one is Arizona with Trump +2), that means that if Kamala Harris outperforms the polls by just 3 points she could easily win all of the swing states….“What makes you think she’ll outperform the polls by 3 points?” you ask….Look at the early voting….In Georgia, for example, women are outvoting men by 10 points, 55% to 45%. And the trend is similar in other states….I know we’re not supposed to unskew the polls and I haven’t been looking at any cross tabs, but I doubt any of them have their electorate weighted as 55% F and 45% M….And women are way more likely to vote for Harris than for Trump:

In the latest USA TODAY/Suffolk University national poll, women decisively backed Democrat Kamala Harris, 53% to 36%.

That’s a 17 point advantage. And I know those don’t add up to 100%, but if you compare just those two numbers it’s a 19 point difference….If things stay this way through Election Day, it seems like Harris has a really good chance of beating the polls by a big enough margin to take all the battleground states, giving Team Blue a total of 319 electoral votes vs. 219 for the Reds.”

“There is still a lot to be done in the days remaining in this contest, and especially in the fraught days that will follow, when Trump and Trumpism will utilize both law and journalism to pollute the vote count and question the election process,” Dahlia Lithwick writes in “The Newspapers Were Never Going to Save Us” at Slate. But that in turn demands that we in the press remain true to the things we already know how to do: investigate, report, bear witness, question, take our time, and admit that we don’t know what we don’t know. There is one side in this election that intends, as it has done for the past two presidential contests, to flood the zone with shit: to lie fluently and constantly in the knowledge that destabilizing confidence in the media and the courts is fascism’s own special Christmas miracle. We owe it not just to journalism and to the rule of law but to democracy itself to persist in believing in and also fighting for our centuries-old systems of truth-seeking, just as we recognize that they are suffering under the greatest stress test of our lifetimes. It is uniquely possible, this time, that journalism isn’t coming to save us any more than the courts are coming to save us, and that we therefore need to rally to save them both. While we are at it, we need to recognize that the moment has come to save ourselves, and the time left to us can be measured on hours and minutes, not years and decades.”

Extending a pattern that stretches back decades, White voters without a college degree, the cornerstone of the modern GOP coalition, have declined by a little more than 2 percentage points as a share of eligible voters since 2020, falling below 40% of the eligible voting pool for the first time ever, according a new analysis of the latest Census Bureau data by demographer William Frey shared exclusively with CNN.

While those working-class Whites are shrinking, Frey found that both Whites with at least a four-year college degree and voters of color have each increased since 2020 by about a single percentage point as a share of eligible voters. Those increases also continue long-term trends that have seen well-educated Whites grow to represent more than 1-in-4 eligible voters and people of color rise past 1-in-3.

These trends help explain why the former president has devoted so much effort to reaching beyond his traditional base of White voters without a college education to attract more Black and Latino voters, especially men. And, in turn, the trends help explain the emphasis the vice president is placing on attracting more college-educated White voters who have previously leaned toward the GOP — a priority she underscored by barnstorming across populous white-collar suburbs outside Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee with GOP former Rep. Liz Cheney on Monday.

The impact of these incremental shifts in the composition of the major voter groups can easily be outweighed by changes in the preferences of those groups. Trump, for instance, is counting on gains among Latino voters, especially men, to neutralize the anticipated benefits for Democrats as Latinos increase their share of the vote, particularly in closely contested Arizona and Nevada.

But the cumulative impact of these shifts in the electorate’s basic composition is undeniable. Trump, for instance, in each of his two presidential campaigns won nearly as big a share of White voters without a college education as Ronald Reagan did in 1984, according to exit polls. Yet because those working-class Whites had fallen from about two-thirds of voters in 1984 to around two-fifths now, Trump only won about 47% of the total vote in each of his two campaigns, while Reagan captured nearly 59%.

Even this year, in a race so close, small shifts in the electorate’s composition across the most competitive states could make a difference. For instance, the fact that non-college Whites, according to Frey’s analysis, have fallen as a share of the eligible electorate since 2020 considerably more in Michigan and Wisconsin than in Pennsylvania may help explain why most analysts consider the Keystone State more difficult than the other two for Harris.

Shifts in racial and educational levels are not the only important changes Frey, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank, has tracked in the make-up of eligible voters between 2020 and 2024. He also found that women will comprise nearly 52% of all eligible voters, which should help Harris. But his analysis shows that number actually represents a very small shift in the eligible electorate since 2020 toward men, which at the margin might benefit Trump. Frey also finds that Generation Z will make a big jump in their share of eligible voters, from about 1-in-10 last time to more than 1-in-6 this year. That increase underscores the stakes in Harris’ attempt to max out her support among younger women and Trump’s determined attempts to court young men.

Frey’s analysis finds that the White voters without a college degree are declining as a share of eligible voters not only in the nation overall but specifically across almost all of the seven battleground states. (North Carolina is the sole swing state where he found that they had increased as a portion of eligible voters since 2020.)

That decline is rooted in an ongoing process of generational replacement. Compared to younger generations, America’s older cohorts are much more heavily White and also much less likely to hold at least a four-year college degree. As those older Whites age out of the electorate, and more diverse and better-educated generations grow into it, the composition of the eligible voter pool inexorably transforms.

“Whites are a shrinking part of the population and a part of that population which is shrinking even more are the people who don’t have college education,” said Frey.

While these blue-collar Whites are receding in both the Rustbelt and Sunbelt electorates, different kinds of voters are replacing them across the two regions, Frey found.

These blue-collar Whites represent a much larger share of the total electorate in the Rustbelt than the Sunbelt: Frey found that in 2020 they comprised around half of eligible voters in both Michigan and Pennsylvania and nearly three-fifths in Wisconsin.

But Frey found that since 2020, they have declined more rapidly than almost anywhere else in Michigan (falling by nearly 3 percentage points) and Wisconsin (dropping by more than 3 percentage points). In Michigan, he found a slight increase in minority voters among the eligible voter pool, while in Wisconsin those non-White voters, who were already a smaller share of eligibles than in the other Rustbelt battlegrounds, actually declined even further.

In both states, the big gainers since 2020 are Whites with at least a four-year college degree: Frey found they increased more than 2 percentage points as a share of eligible voters in Michigan and over 4 points in Wisconsin.

In Pennsylvania, the shift isn’t as dramatic: Frey found that the non-college White share of eligible voters dropped since 2020 by about 1.5 percentage points, about half as much as in the other two former “blue wall” states. A small increase in the minority population made up most of that difference, with college-educated Whites increasing only very slightly.

Across the Sunbelt battlegrounds, blue-collar Whites are a smaller share of the eligible voters: about 1-in-3 in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada and just over 2-in-5 in North Carolina. Arizona and Georgia saw big increases since 2020 in the minority share of their eligible voter population, Frey found, while non-Whites actually declined somewhat in North Carolina and remained almost unchanged in Nevada. College-educated Whites increased as a portion of eligible voters in Nevada and Arizona, while falling slightly in Georgia and essentially holding steady in North Carolina.

After these shifts, the minority share of the eligible voting population will remain much higher in the Sunbelt than Rustbelt states, with voters of color representing about one-third of the eligible voter population in North Carolina, a little more than two-fifths in Arizona and more than 45% in both Nevada and Georgia.

In both the Rustbelt and Sunbelt, the winning modern demographic formula for Democrats since the 1990s has been to maximize their support among non-White voters and grow their support among college-educated Whites, while holding down their losses among the blue-collar Whites, with a particular focus on women in each group. In the Trump era, the dominant GOP demographic strategy has been to maximize their support among working-class voters without a college degree, particularly men. That strategy has broadened from a nearly exclusive focus on White working-class voters in Trump’s 2016 race to his more panoramic attempt this year to attract non-college-educated Black and Latino voters as well, especially men.

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