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

This just in: Americans love nukes! New Gallup data show attitudes toward nuclear energy doing a U-turn from negative views in the mid-teens to strongly positive views today. In less then 10 years, positive views have spiked by 17 points while negative views have plummeted by 19 points. That’s taken net support (favor minus oppose) from -10 to +27.

This is surprising but it’s worth asking why this is surprising. Nuclear power, after all, is a clean, carbon-free energy source in an era when the center-left is obsessed with eliminating carbon emissions. Moreover, nuclear can provide the necessary firm, baseload power to the grid that intermittent renewables (wind and solar) cannot. So where is—or has been—the love?

The answer goes back to the origins of the modern environmental movement and the apocalyptic strain that always lurked there, ready to be activated by an issue like nuclear power and, later, climate change. Here you need to make the acquaintance of a man named William Vogt.

Vogt was an ornithologist and ecologist whose experiences in the developing world had convinced him that economic growth and overpopulation would inevitably lead to civilizational collapse unless both growth and population were radically curtailed. He published his book-length polemic Road to Survival in 1948.

Vogt’s book had an enormous impact. It was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, condensed by Reader’s Digest for its 13 million subscribers, translated into nine languages and immediately adopted as a textbook by dozens of colleges and universities. It became the best-selling book of all-time on environmental themes until the 1960’s and the publication of Silent Spring.

Vogt argued that humans were worse than parasites, who lacked enough intelligence to be truly destructive. But humans had used their brains to rip up nature and compromised their own survival to become richer. Only drastic measures could prevent worldwide environmental disaster (sound familiar?).

Vogt argued that beliefs in progress were weighing humanity down and were actually “idiotic in an overpeopled, atomic age, with much of the world a shambles.” He concluded that the road to survival could only lie in maximizing use of renewable resources and accepting lower living standards or reduced population.

In his language and outlook, one can see all the strands of apocalyptic environmentalism that were brought to bear, first on nuclear power, then on climate change. This especially applies to his description of the United States and its economic system. He said:

Our forefathers [were] one of the most destructive groups of human beings that have ever raped the earth. They moved into one of the richest treasure houses ever opened to man, and in a few decades turned millions of acres of it into a shambles.

He continued:

’Free enterprise has made the country what it is!’ To this an ecologist might sardonically assent, ‘Exactly.’ For free enterprise must bear a large share of the responsibility for devastated forests, vanishing wildlife, crippled ranges, a gullied continent, and roaring flood crests. Free enterprise—divorced from biophysical understanding and social responsibility.

Vogt’s outlook was enormously influential. Historian Allan Chase observed:

Every argument, every concept, every recommendation made in Road to Survival would become integral to the conventional wisdom of the post-Hiroshima generation of educated Americans…[They] would for decades to come be repeated, and restated, and incorporated again and again into streams of books, articles, television commentaries, speeches, propaganda tracts, posters, and even lapel buttons.

More benignly, Vogt’s book marked the evolution of traditional conservationism into environmentalism. Stripped of the apocalyptic verbiage, he was arguing that conservation of nature was not enough. The interdependence of man and nature meant that human activities could not be isolated and instead were having negative effects on the entire planet—wilderness, settled areas, oceans, everywhere. The balance of nature was being destroyed, dragging down the natural world and humanity with it. Restoring that balance, not merely conserving parts of the ecosystem, was the new meaning of being an environmentalist.

Also key to Vogt’s analysis was the concept of “carrying capacity”—how much the environment/planet could sustainably bear of a species’ imprint before disaster ensued. This was not precisely defined but it is easy to see the relationship of this idea to how climate change is conventionally thought of today.

The modern environmentalist movement kicked off in the early 1960’s with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (as with Vogt’s book, a Book of the Month Club selection). Carson was directly inspired by Vogt and in fact was a friend of his. Her book was primarily focused on the impact of synthetic chemicals, especially DDT and other pesticides, on the natural environment. Her prognosis was dire; not only were these chemicals destroying the balance of nature by disrupting ecosystems but they were also destroying the ecosystem of the human body. These chemicals have “immense power not merely to poison but to enter into the most vital processes of the body and change them in sinister and often deadly ways.” Moreover, these chemicals would “bioaccumlate” and have enhanced effects over time. Perhaps eventually even the birds would not sing (producing a “silent spring”).

The serialization of the book in The New Yorker took the middlebrow educated audience by storm. The chemical industry fought back, which only raised the profile of the book. The public furor led to a report on pesticides by President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee which, in 1963 issued a report largely sympathetic to Carson’s analysis. The general issue of pollution of the natural environment by commercial processes and chemicals received a huge boost from the intense and prolonged public discussion and from this the modern environmental movement was born. Protecting the environment and natural systems now had a truly mass base.

Read more…

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

Trump’s “golden age” is presenting Democrats with a golden opportunity. The reason isn’t excesses around DOGE, deportation, DEI, universities, research funding, and the like—though all of these have been problems for the Trump administration. But they pale in comparison to current developments around Trump’s tariff regime and its economic effects. Put simply, while Trump’s populist working-class coalition was certainly animated by issues around cultural leftism, illegal immigration, and government waste, they also believed putting him in office would fix what they viewed as a broken economic system.

That does not appear to be happening. The chaotic rollout of Trump’s tariff regime has simply made voters more nervous about the economy rather than convincing them the economic system is being fixed. Trump’s average net approval rating (approval minus disapproval) on the economy is now -10 points and on inflation it is -13 points. Economic approval ratings were Trump’s great strength in his first term! No more.

A CBS News poll taken right before “Liberation Day” (whose aggressive tariffs have only increased economic angst and uncertainty) found that views on whether Trump’s policies are making you financially better or worse off have flipped since January; the percentage believing Trump policies are making them better off has declined by about 20 points and now those who believe Trump’s policies are making them worse off far outnumbers the “better off” group. As for the tariffs specifically an overwhelming 72 percent believe they will make the prices they pay go up rather than down (a mere 5 percent).

And here’s the kicker: by more than 2:1 (64 percent to 31 percent) people believe the administration is not focusing enough on lowering the price of goods and services but the result is reversed for tariffs—they strongly feel the administration is focusing too much on this area. That marks a clear break between Trump and working-class priorities and a big—a golden—opportunity for Democrats.

But can they make the most of it? It seems doubtful at this point. Of course, they will pillory the Trump administration mercilessly for their economic mistakes and the pain and uncertainty voters are experiencing. That’s Politics 101: make the incumbent administration pay when the economy goes south.

The problem, however, is that Democrats are still struggling to find their way in the current populist era where they are the Establishment in the eyes of the working class and their brand therefore extremely unpopular—“toxic” as even many Democrats have put it. By definition, beating up on the Trump administration doesn’t do much to change that brand; you’re simply trying to make the other party more unpopular than you.

What would be better—much better—would be for Democrats to use this opportunity to craft a new image for themselves that connects to the populist zeitgeist. Otherwise their denunciations of Trump and the GOP, however hard-hitting and creative, will strike working-class voters as an implicit defense of the Establishment and the current system.

That’s not what these voters want, even those among them who are disconcerted with Trump’s actions and worry about their economic effects. As David Shor has documented, we live in a country where 78 percent of voters think change is more important than preserving America’s institutions and where delivering a “shock to the system” is preferred to a “return to basic stability.” Democrats need to make their sale in that populist environment not in deep blue, highly-educated America where anti-Trump sentiment easily outruns the populist impulse. Those voters are not the Democrats’ problem.

With that in mind, let’s look at what the Democrats have on offer to take advantage of Trump’s vulnerabilities. I’d put the approaches in three basic buckets:

1. Resist! This is the default option for most Democrats. EverythingTrump does must be resisted all the time. The latest economic problems are just one more manifestation of his unspeakable evil. The important thing is to Fight! Those like Chuck Schumer, who pursue practical compromises, should be pushed aside in favor of leaders who wave the blue flag of resistance high. Cory Booker’s 25-hour filibuster against the administration is precisely the right spirit. The nationwide “Hands Off!” demonstrations on April 5 show that the masses are rallying to the cause, etc.

Implicitly, “hands off” also means hands off all Democrats priorities, programs and interest groups—in other words a return to the status quo ante, which we already know populist working-class voters don’t want. This approach seems well-designed to rally the Democratic faithful going into the midterms but not to change the image of the Democratic Party.

2. Fight the Oligarchy! This is a close cousin of the Resist! approach, which essentially juices it with a heavy dose of naïve economic populism. Basically, not only is Trump doing all these terrible things but he is doing them to enrich the oligarchy and maintain their power. They twirl their moustaches and laugh (bwa-ha-ha) as Trump does their bidding! This approach is particularly popular on the left of the party and is currently on nationwide tour with the redoubtable AOC and the ageless Bernie Sanders. Perhaps coming soon to a theater near you.

I get why this seems like a good idea. As noted, it certainly makes sense that in our current populist era, Democrats need to be responsive to that populist mood. But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populist pitch by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats who don’t want to make hard choices.

To begin with, Democrats have plenty of oligarchs on their side that they seem much less interested in fighting (remember JB Pritzker, who proudly proclaimed himself a billionaire at the Democratic convention, and the countless other fabulously wealthy individuals in the Democratic orbit). Voters are not unaware of this fact.

They are also painfully aware that the professional-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power is overwhelmingly Democratic. To working-class voters, the professional upper middle class may not be the super-rich but they are elites just the same—junior oligarchs if you will.

This is a bitter pill for most Democratic elites to swallow. In today’s America, they are the Establishment even if in their imaginations they are sticking it to the Man and fighting nobly for social justice. The failure to understand that they themselves are targets of populist anger is a central reason their populist pitch fails—and will fail—to get traction among the working class. Call it the “old wine in new bottles” problem—these voters hear the economic populist words but they sense that behind them is the same old Democratic Party with the same old elites and the same old cultural priorities. So far, the Fight the Oligarchy! crowd has done nothing that would disabuse working class voters of this notion.

3. Abundance Now! This approach is gaining adherents in Democratic circles though it lags far, far behind the first two approaches. But it has the advantage of directly posing an actually different path for Democrats thereby mitigating the old wine in new bottles problem. The central idea of the approach is to radically reduce the barriers, bottlenecks, and regulations that prevent Democratic governance from meeting progressive goals in areas like housing, infrastructure, and public services. Their approach aims to make these things “abundant” and therefore tamp down the widespread anger at Democratic governing failures.

This is promising and, as Derek Thompson has pointed out, a sort of “centrist populism,” where the elites standing in the way of getting things done are targeted, is consistent with an abundance approach. That would speak to the populist moment in a way that is certainly fresher than just bashing the rich, which is well past its sell-by date.

However, the very elites that such a centrist populism might target are by and large Democratic, presenting an awkward problem for abundance Democrats. Are they willing to take on “the Groups” and entrenched interest groups that are likely to fight a drive for deregulation and efficiency tooth and nail? So far, I’m not seeing it. A failure on this front will undercut the whole abundance project and vitiate any populist appeal to working-class voters.

Moreover, the goals of an abundance approach tend to be linked to a concept of abundance that does not line up well with the preferences of actually-existing working-class voters who, quite simply, want to be richer and have more stuff. Abundance Democrats, on the other hand, seem to have in mind a socially liberal ecotopia that is highly appealing to educated, upper middle class liberals but much less so to the working class. As Josh Barro notes Democratic abundance advocates tend to support “policies that would make energy, and the aspirational suburban lifestyle, more expensive.” And that lifestyle, he points out, is what “abundance” means for most ordinary Americans. Arizona Democratic senator Ruben Gallego underscores the issue: “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck.”

Call it the “big-ass truck problem.” Any abundance approach in a populist era needs to reckon with this problem. Otherwise, like the other Democratic approaches, it will fall short among the populist working class.

Democrats who truly want to find their way in our current populist era need some new approaches. But first they should accept that they’re still lost. That is the beginning of wisdom and renewal.

Chris Matthews reports “Trump tariffs to hit working class the hardest, costing an average family $3,800 a year” at Marketwatch, and writes that “President Donald Trump has plunged the United States into a new phase of his trade war, and this time the economic casualties will be clear, immediate and, for many Americans, painful.” Further,

The new levies, combined with other tariffs already implemented this year, will raise costs for the average American family by $3,800, according to a new report by the Yale Budget Lab.

In the wake of Trump’s never-ending vacillations on tariffs, here are some excerpts from “Shawn Fain Is Right. America Needs to Rethink Trade” by Dustin Guastella at The Nation:

“United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain has many liberals scratching their heads. The longtime critic of Donald Trump who wore a “TRUMP IS A SCAB” T-shirt at the Democratic National Convention last year has come out in support of the president’s favorite economic policy: tariffs. Despite the fact that other leading progressives have expressed extreme alarm at Trump’s plans, Fain has insisted that tariffs are “a tool in the toolbox…to bring jobs back here, and, you know, invest in the American workers.

He’s right, and he’s not alone in thinking this. A group of self-proclaimed “economic patriots” on the left are making a similar case in Congress. Representative Chris Deluzio, a Democrat from Western Pennsylvania who won election in the state’s most competitive district, recently took to The New York Times to plead with his party not to embrace “anti-tariff absolutism” as a response to Trump’s policies. And Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat from a rural Trump-leaning district in Maine, recently made a similar case, arguing, “Tariffs are a first step in rewriting a rigged trade system.”

…Of course, Trump’s tariffs are erratic, and their intended purpose is unclear. They will likely do more harm than good. But that doesn’t mean protectionism is inherently a bad idea. In fact, if the left cannot offer a compelling exit from neoliberal globalization, it will be unable to effectively combat the GOP’s national populism with a social populism of its own. Rethinking trade must be a central part of a pro-worker agenda.

For many union members, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) marks the beginning of US decline. The agreement made it so that money, goods, and labor could flow more freely across the continent. Since it was enthusiastically signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993, manufacturing jobs have drained out of the United States to lower-wage corners of the globe. And NAFTA wasn’t even the worst of it; a succession of trade deals followed, including the admission of China into the World Trade Organization. This led to a collapse of manufacturing jobs in the United States.

In the 30 years since, around 90,000 US manufacturing plants have been shuttered. The impact on the labor movement has been disastrous. In 1990, around 20 percent of workers in the US belonged to a union; by 2024 that rate had plummeted to around 9 percent, a record low. The decline of manufacturing and union density combined with looser border restrictions that invited hyper-exploited foreign-born workers into the United States have crushed wages, which have been stagnant for non-college-educated workers.

By swapping high-wage often union jobs in manufacturing, for low-wage nonunion jobs in services, free trade has effectively robbed the working class of its social, political, and economic power.

Few industrial unions have been as affected as the UAW. Since the 1990s, the autoworkers have witnessed over 60 major plant closures among the Big Three automakers. Membership in the union peaked at around 1.5 million in 1979. Today, the UAW has around 390,000 members—a 74 percent decrease. Worse, even when the union manages to make inroads in new plants, companies always have an exit option. They can pack up and relocate to places where labor is cheaper.

…By 2016, the populist backlash had arrived. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders slammed the establishment for disastrous trade deals. And both won a larger share of working-class voters than their establishment counterparts. And the United States wasn’t alone. A recent meta-analysis by political scientists, led by Gábor Scheiring at Georgetown University, found that the surge in populism all over the world is driven by a reaction against the insecurity induced by globalization. While debate remains over whether workers were driven away from the left because of economic issues or cultural ones, with globalization the two phenomena are linked—the same market forces that drove manufacturing to extinction also helped to drive the increasing pace of cultural churn.

…Fain is right when he argues that auto manufacturers can afford to eat the tariffs without passing on price hikes. Consider that, despite labor-saving automation, manufacturers were charging record prices for a new car before tariffs—in some cases 10 points above the general inflation rate. Where is that money going? Into auto-industry profits that have grown over 50 percent since 2019—despite depressed sales. Fain is right that the industry has “excess capacity” and that tariffs “could bring work back in very short order” by reopening recently closed or underutilized plants. And he’s right that tariffs, combined with an effective industrial policy, could boost workers’ wages, not just in the auto industry but across the board. But more than all of this, Fain is right that we need to restore democratic sovereignty over our economy.

…Too many liberals are now rejoicing at Wall Street’s rejection of the tariffs as if “the markets” are a substitute for democratic input. But plunging stocks only prove what we already knew: that high finance is loath to get off the free-trade gravy train…

but the left can’t fall into the trap of letting Wall Street set the terms of the debate. To match Trump’s national populism, we need a social populism of our own. We should not retreat to advocating for free trade as a response to stock market panic but advance to a conversation about industrial planning. We need a program that seeks to repatriate American finance, claw back the trillions in taxes lost to offshore banking, and reinvest in US jobs.

The tariff is one of the tools we need to rebuild the economy in favor of the working class.”

Click here to read more of Guastella’s article in the Nation.

The following article, “House Democrats unveil 35 Republican targets for 2026 midterms” by Mary Ellen McIntire, is cross-posted from Roll Call:

House Democrats on Tuesday rolled out an initial list of 35 Republican-held seats they are targeting next year as the party looks to win control of the chamber.

The list from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee includes traditional swing seats but also districts that Donald Trump carried by up to 18 points in November, underscoring Democrats’ confidence in their chances of flipping the House more than eighteen months out from the midterm elections.

“House Republicans are running scared, and they should be. They’re tanking the economy, gutting Medicaid, abandoning our veterans, and making everything more expensive. In short, they’ve lost the trust of their constituents, and it’s going to cost them the majority,” DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene of Washington said in a statement.

While Democrats lost the White and House and Senate in last year’s elections, they had a net gain of one seat in the House, cutting into Republicans’ narrow majority. The party hopes that sets the scene to flip at least three more seats next year.

“The DCCC is already busy recruiting compelling, authentic candidates in these key districts who will serve their communities, not Elon Musk and Donald Trump,” she added.

Democrats are once again seeking to oust longtime targets such as GOP Reps. David Valadao of California, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Don Bacon of Nebraska. They’re also targeting four freshmen who flipped key seats last year: Michigan’s Tom Barrett, Colorado’s Gabe Evans and Pennsylvania’s Rob Bresnahan Jr. and Ryan Mackenzie.

But the party is also looking to expand its reach into districts that weren’t considered competitive last year. Those include Iowa’s 2nd District, where Republican Ashley Hinson won reelection by 16 points last year and voters backed Trump by 10 points, according to calculations by elections analyst Drew Savicki. Also on the list are Ohio’s 15th District represented by Republican Mike Carey, which Trump won by 9 points; and Kentucky’s 6th District, which Trump won by 15 points and whose GOP congressman, Andy Barr, is considering a Senate run this cycle.

That bullishness follows a pair of special elections for deep-red House seats in Florida last week, in which Democrats’ cut their losing margins by roughly half from November. Party officials have also sharply criticized Trump’s new tariff policies over the past week, which looks poised to be a significant messaging line in the midterm campaign.

Last month, the DCCC named 26 Democratic incumbents to its Frontline program for vulnerable members. That list heavily overlaps with the targeted members rolled out by the National Republican Congressional Committee last month.

Here’s the full list of Republican members included in the DCCC’s “Districts in Play” for 2026:

• Nick Begich of Alaska’s at-large district
• David Schweikert of Arizona’s 1st District
• Eli Crane of Arizona’s 2nd
• Juan Ciscomani of Arizona’s 6th
• David Valadao of California’s 22nd
• Young Kim of California’s 40th
• Ken Calvert of California’s 41st
• Gabe Evans of Colorado’s 8th
• Cory Mills of Florida’s 7th
• Anna Paulina Luna of Florida’s 13th
• María Elvira Salazar of Florida’s 27th
• Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa’s 1st
• Ashley Hinson of Iowa’s 2nd
• Zach Nunn of Iowa’s 3rd
• Andy Barr of Kentucky’s 6th
• Bill Huizenga of Michigan’s 4th
• Tom Barrett of Michigan’s 7th
• Open; Michigan’s 10th District
• Ann Wagner of Missouri’s 2nd
• Don Bacon of Nebraska’s 2nd
• Thomas H. Kean Jr. of New Jersey’s 7th
• Mike Lawler of New York’s 17th
• Max Miller of Ohio’s 7th
• Michael R. Turner of Ohio’s 10th
• Mike Carey of Ohio’s 15th
• Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania’s 1st
• Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania’s 7th
• Rob Bresnahan Jr. of Pennsylvania’s 8th
• Scott Perry of Pennsylvania’s 10th
• Andy Ogles of Tennessee’s 5th
• Monica De La Cruz of Texas’ 15th
• Rob Wittman of Virginia’s 1st
• Jen Kiggans of Virginia’s 2nd
• Bryan Steil of Wisconsin’s 1st
• Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin’s 3rd

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

The concept that Democrats have delusions about their current situation—that they are in denial about the implications of the 2024 election and other trends—is having a moment. No less a discourse arbiter than the Gray Lady has weighed in on the side that, yes, this is a thing. In an op-ed by the New York Times’ Editorial Board, the paper’s distinguished journalists lament:

In the aftermath of this comprehensive defeat [in the 2024 election], many party leaders have decided that they do not need to make significant changes to their policies or their message. They have instead settled on a convenient explanation for their plight.

That explanation starts with the notion that Democrats were merely the unlucky victims of postpandemic inflation and that their party is more popular than it seems: If Democrats could only communicate better, particularly on social media and podcasts, the party would be fine. “We’ve got the right message,” Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said while campaigning for the job. “What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.

This is indeed delusional. The scale of the delusion is underscored by data just released by David Shor and Blue Rose Research (see also the interviews with Shor by Ezra Klein and Eric Levitz). How anyone can go through these findings and conclude anything other than that Democrats need a radical course correction is beyond me.

In that spirit, the Times’ Editorial Board and Shor do urge Democrats to cast off their delusions and offer some suggestions for such a course correction. I mostly agree with their suggestions—indeed, I’d urge the need for even stronger medicine. But I think it’s important to be clear-eyed about the various factors that will make it all too easy for Democrats to ignore or soft-pedal the need for a decisive reckoning with their “toxic brand.” Their delusions, it is likely, will prove quite difficult to get rid of.

Here’s why.

1. The fool’s gold of Democrats’ low turnout advantage. The dirty little secret of Democrats’ current coalition is that it’s extremely well-engineered for low turnout elections. Democrats used to argue that they wanted really high turnout—ideally everyone voting—in elections because high voter participation is a civic good in democratic societies and because they believed that higher turnout would bring in masses of less engaged, pro-Democratic voters (younger, less educated, less affluent, nonwhite) that would benefit them politically.

No more. Now that the Democratic coalition is skewed toward the most educated, most engaged, high information voters, Democrats actually benefit when turnout is low and the voting pool is dominated by their highly engaged voters. Correspondingly, the more voters that show up, the worse it is for the Democrats. As a result, Democrats have become increasingly quiet about their commitment to high turnout and don’t talk much these days about the civic benefits of everyone voting. Maybe it’s not so bad if only the most interested citizens bother to vote!

You can’t blame Democrats from enjoying the electoral benefits of their current coalition. If they have a better chance of winning in relatively low turnout elections, they’ll gladly take it—and crow about their victories. But this presents a problem if Democrats do indeed need to get rid of their delusions and reform their party. Every time Democrats overperform in low turnout electoral contexts, that stiffens the spines of those who are resisting substantial change. Look at special elections X and Y, they’ll say, and how well Democrats did, vastly outrunning the underlying partisan lean of the state or district. There’s no need for big changes—we’re doing great!

You can see this dynamic playing out in the aftermath of last Tuesday’s special elections for a Wisconsin State Supreme Court seat and for filling House seats in Florida’s 1^st and 6^th congressional districts. Democrats did indeed overperform and the kvelling in Democratic circles was immediate and loud, especially about the victory of liberal Susan Crawford in the Wisconsin race by 10 points over her conservative opponent, preserving a 4-3 liberal majority on the court. That’s a good result for Democrats but it’s worth noting that last two Wisconsin State Supreme Court races in 2023 and 2020 were won by the liberal candidates with almost identical margins.

There may be less here than meets the eye. As Nate Cohn remarkedon the day these elections were held:

Nothing about today’s results will change that the Democratic Party has major problems, from big-picture messaging and policy questions to its struggles among specific demographic groups, like young men and nonwhite voters.

But even if the results don’t do much about these major problems, it is likely to divert Democrats’ attention from doing anything about them. Indeed, they are likely to focus instead on how their overperformance in Tuesday’s and earlier specials augurs well for their quest to take back the House in 2026.

And that could be a further problem. David Shor pointed out in his interview with Ezra Klein:

If Democrats do nothing, they’ll probably be OK in 2026. All of these voters who get their news from TikTok, who don’t care about politics—voters under 25—just aren’t going to turn out in the midterms.

But if we don’t fix this problem, then four years from now, we could be facing the same trust deficit on all these core issues. And the voters who didn’t turn out in 2026 will come back — but this time, we might be running against a candidate who is a lot less unpopular than Trump. And that could be a real pickle.”

A pickle indeed. This table from Shor illustrates how the dynamic for Democrats changes in a high turnout environment.

That should concentrate the mind.

2. The comfort food of thermostatic reaction against the GOP. It was predictable that Trump and the GOP would go too far in some respects after he got re-elected. Parties these days do tend to over-read their “mandates” and Trump is, well, Trump and inclined to do things to excess. I think it’s safe to say that he has exceeded expectations in this respect. As a result, the thermostatic reaction is setting in, as voters seek to turn the policy thermostat down to a more comfortable setting.

They are not happy with the antics of Elon Musk, how far the cuts in government have gone and their haphazard nature, the lack of attention to lowering prices and the chaotic pursuit of a tariff regime that may raise prices as well as having other negative economic effects. Voters’ discontent is a boon to the Democrats of course and Democrats do not have to change their party much, if at all, to reap the benefits. This is another factor militating against Democrats’ willingness to jettison their delusions. After all if Trump is so terrible and is royally screwing things up, why go to the big trouble of confronting fundamental problems when simply being not-Trump should allow the party to connect to thermostatic reaction? It’s a tempting—and comfortable—strategy.

3. The siren call of economic determinism. It’s no secret that economic issues loomed large in the last election and that Democrats were disadvantaged by that. It’s fair to say that economic issues will continue to be central to the party’s fate in the future.

But economic issues are not the only issues. Cultural issues are also hugely important to voters’ views of a political party and how likely that party’s actions are to be consistent with their interests and values. It is not the case that economic factors and issues will necessarily determine voters’ political preferences if only the proper approach can be found. Cultural inclinations are not so easily overruled.

But in truth this is what most Democrats seem to believe. They are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues realissues. They are typically viewed as politically motivated distractions or as expressions of something else entirely (i.e., racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, etc.) They are not treated as issues that need to be dealt with on their own terms, with the corresponding need to potentially change party positions to accord with popular, particular working-class, preferences.

I see the hand of economic determinism in much of what Democrats have offered since the 2024 election. Bernie Sanders and AOC think Democrats should talk more about the “billionaire class” and “fighting oligarchy.” Ro Khanna proposes a “New Economic Patriotism” that would emphasize promotion of American manufacturing and hi-tech development across all regions of the country. Chris Murphy thinks the key to a Democratic revival is advocating the breakup of corporate power. Other Democrats suggest a relentless focus on “kitchen-table” issues (ah, what would Democrats do without that fabled kitchen table…). Even the new kid on the block, the “abundance” liberals, who have more interesting ideas, still leave cultural issues completely out of their framework. The general idea across these approaches is that focusing on economic issues will win back the working class and obviate the need to change anything else.

This attempt to magic away the influence of culture has not worked and will not work. To borrow a term from the Marxists, culture is not a part of the “superstructure” which is subservient to the “base.” Culture has a mind and dynamic of its own as Democrats should have learned by now, considering how much it’s hurt the party politically. But the siren call of economic determinism is powerful and remains a key obstacle preventing Democrats from casting off their delusions.

For all these reasons, it seems likely that Democratic delusions and, consequently, their “toxic brand” will be with us for quite some time. Those seeking to reform the party have their work cut out for them.

If you were looking for a solid indictment of the Trump Administration’s disastrous policies, which can also serve as a template for writing a first-rate opinion column about current politics, E. J. Dionne, Jr. has it in “The night the tide turned against Trump and Musk,” cross-posted here from The Washington Post:

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

Unless you have been living without an internet connection for the last few weeks or so, you have certainly encountered a book called Abundance, which argues that Democrats must face up to the failures of liberal governance and embrace a politics of plenty. I note somewhat immodestly that I was for an “abundance agenda” before it was cool.

Back in 2022, when I was exasperated at the direction of my lifelong political party, I wrote a three-point plan to fix the Democrats.

The second point was precisely that “Democrats must promote an abundance agenda.” It would be good politics and good policy, I argued, for the party to take steps to increase the supply of essential goods and services. They should embrace regulatory reform, efficient governance, and the rapid completion of public and private projects—things that had been the purview of Republicans and the center-right. And they should back technological innovation and productivity rather than settling for the redistribution of scarce resources.

In other words: more stuff people actually want, more of the time.

More and more people seem to agree.

With Abundance, the OGs of the abundance movement, journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, have aimed to write a definitive mission statement. But they aren’t alone. An ever-growing number of organizations, networks, blogs, and other initiatives are devoted to aspects of an abundance agenda, from housing to energy to transportation infrastructure to technological progress.

More and more, liberal analysts now lament Why Nothing Works, as the title of Marc J. Dunkelman’s new book puts it, and elicit widespread nods of agreement, rather than howls of denial. Brian Deese, Joe Biden’s director of the National Economic Council and a paid-up member of the Democratic economic establishment, just published a lengthy essay in Foreign Affairs on “Why America Struggles to Build”—the clear implication being that the Biden administration failed to do so.

Given my belief that without an abundance agenda this country is more likely to limp along than to soar, I can only applaud these developments. From the profound shortage of housing where America needs it most, to our shockingly expensive and slow infrastructure projects, this country is not delivering what its people need.

One infamous example—and one the new Abundance book focuses on—is California’s failure to build a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. “Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America,” said then–President Obama the year after Californians voted in favor of the new line. It was supposed to cost $33 billion and be up and running by 2020. The cost is now expected to be more than triple that figure. The first tracks were laid only this January, and the first third of the line is not projected to open any sooner than 2030. As Klein noted in a recent New York Times piece, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail since 2008, when Californians voted to approve a plan to build the new line.

Why the delay? A big part of the answer is an overly burdensome environmental review process. As Klein explained, “Trains are cleaner than cars, but high-speed rail has had to clear every inch of its route through environmental reviews, with lawsuits lurking around every corner.”

But while the abundance agenda is badly needed, how likely is the actually existing Democratic Party to embrace it? In some alternative universe there may be a Democratic Party for whom this would be an easy sell. But this Democratic Party in this universe? I have my doubts.

Let’s start with an awkward reality: The Democrats were just in power for four years and did absolutely nothing that would recognizably be part of this agenda. Their revealed preference was to spend money on popular party priorities like the massive American Rescue Plan and the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Actrather than reform the system so things actually got done and money was not wasted.

Stories of Biden’s boondoggles are already passing into legend: the failure of a $42 billion allocation for rural broadband in the 2021 infrastructure bill to connect anyone at all so far; the absurdly slow build-out of EV charging stations from a $7.5 billion allocation in the same bill—only a few dozen chargers are now operational from the 2021 bill.

There are countless examples of such inefficiencies and delays. The culprit is a Democratic Party that puts ideology and special interests ahead of good governance. It is committed to ensuring that development is not socially harmful in any way, and does not transgress the interests of any “stakeholders.” In reality, that amounts to a promise that nothing will get done. The result is endless paperwork and litigation by those stakeholders—or, more accurately, interest groups that claim to represent those stakeholders. This includes countless environmental and “social justice” NGOs, local NIMBY groups and, of course, the army of lawyers who make their living from this sort of thing. Costs balloon and projects are delayed.

Nothing demonstrates the problem more clearly than the ongoing effects of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations. These environmental review laws, first passed in 1970, have become a major obstacle to progress and prosperity. As the liberal economist Noah Smith points out:

NEPA and other environmental review laws (like California’s CEQA) are the most important kind of regulation holding back American development, be that housing, green energy, or reindustrialization. These are procedural requirements—even if a development project obeys every single substantive environmental law, NEPA allows NIMBYs to sue to force the developer to complete years of onerous paperwork for the courts before proceeding. This exerts a massive chilling effect on new projects, because developers know they’ll get sued and might have to spend years on paperwork….

America went way too far with anti-development regulation in the 1970s, and left itself utterly unprepared to deal with the new challenges of the 21st century—the housing shortage, Cold War 2, the green energy transition, and re-industrialization. We froze our built environment in amber in the 70s.

Progressives had the chance to change all that when it become apparent that a 1970s-style world was no longer sufficient. They passed on that chance.”

And what do progressives have to say about fixing this issue? Almost nothing. Their ideology, “the groups,” the nonprofit-industrial complex, and the priorities of liberal, educated voters to whom so many Democratic politicians are beholden all make it extremely difficult for the party to tackle this kind of problem—or embrace many other parts of the abundance agenda.

Read more…

The following article, “What’s Missing in Democrats’ Economic Debate?” by Dustin “Dino” Guastella is cross-posted from The Center for Working-Class Politics newsletter via substack.com:

Liberals are in the middle of an economic debate over the “abundance agenda,” and whether the electorate wants an “angry moderate” or a “combative centrist” to deliver a sensible pro-growth economic program. But what’s missing in all of this, at times generative, debate is discussion of the very thing the economy needs so badly: more power for workers.

A new consensus has emerged, (or rather, an old consensus has reemerged) among liberals. From populists to self-declared neoliberals, all have agreed to leave the culture war behind. They, by and large, agree that the Democrats need to win back the working class. And they agree that delivering real economic gains in policy, with a laser focus on economic rhetoric, is the way to do it.

Some on the Left have been banging this drum for a long time. Others have returned, like the prodigal son, to their old-ways. “It’s the economy stupid!” was once the unofficial slogan of the 1992 and 1996 Clinton campaigns. And true to form, today the Clintonian think-tank Third Way again insists that every time Democrats open their mouths they ought to say something about the economy. Prominent liberal writers like Matthew Yglesias have made the same case. And now New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have released a book “Abundance” which make the positive case for exactly how Democrats can talk about the economy.

This is a good development, and the debate has generated some good ideas. But for all the newfound attention given to economic issues, moderate liberals seem surprisingly silent on the question of working-class jobs and wages. For all their talk about the need to win them back, the emerging Democratic economic consensus seems really short on an agenda for workers. And that’s a problem. After all, the Democratic brand is underwater among blue-collar workers specifically on the question of work itself. As POLITICO recently reported:

Just 44 percent of those polled said they think Democrats respect work, while even fewer — 39 percent — said the party values work. Only 42 percent said Democrats share their values. A majority, meanwhile — 56 percent — said Democrats are not looking out for working people.

Many moderates are under the impression that working-class voters are helplessly conservative on economic questions. And so, much of the new policy agenda for centrist Democrats looks a lot like the old policy agenda for centrist Democrats. That is, its what economists call a “supply-side solution” to economic hardship. It’s about lowering costs. Not raising wages.

Cut red tape, incentivize growth, unleash the awesome power of the market to bring costs down, down, down.

There is, of course, some usefulness in this approach. It’s obscene, for instance, that almost every infrastructure project is mired in bureaucratic and legal hangups that result in insane delays and astronomical costs. But loosening supply-side constraints, as helpful as they might be, probably isn’t enough to fix whats really broken.

The fundamental problem in the economy can be summed up as follows: the rich have too much money and workers have too little power to force them to invest it.

Even preeminent neoliberal economist Larry Summers has, belatedly, recognized this. He complains of an “investment death” and a “savings glut.” In other words, the hoarding of wealth by the über-rich has become a huge drag on global economic growth. Billionaires just won’t invest their money at the scale needed to promote broad economic prosperity. And even when they do, their outsized social and political power ensures that wages remain stagnant. By removing supply-side constraints we could induce more investment but, given the falling costs of capital goods and the downward pressure on wages posed by automation, supply-side solutions won’t do much to prevent even more money accumulating at the top.

What’s needed, then, is more power for workers, so they can demand higher wages and increase the general rate of effective demand.

Now, some moderates may reply: ‘Okay, okay, but no one has any appetite for that!’ It’s true that many working-class voters aren’t interested in traditional tax-and-redistribute welfare programs. That’s why Third Way’s big economic idea is “middle-class tax cuts.” But is this really the horizon of progressive economics? Hardly.

It turns out workers have a number of good (and popular!) ideas for tilting the economy away from the power of the rich. As we noted a few months ago:

Our analysis of a host of questions from the 2021–22 waves of the ANES, GSS, and CES indicates strong working-class support for progressive economic policies, ranging from the 87.9 percent of working people who support lowering prescription drug prices to the 67.9 percent in favor of increasing taxes on the wealthy. The list goes on: 69.1 percent of working-class Americans favor import limits to protect US jobs, 64.8 percent prefer greater investments in state education spending, and 54.8 percent even have a positive view of a federal jobs guarantee. Likewise, substantial majorities of working-class Americans support policies to strengthen workers’ economic leverage, including 70.5 percent who support raising the minimum wage, 68.8 percent who favor putting workers on corporate boards of directors, and 54.8 percent who favor labor unions (a figure on the low side of other credible estimates).

In a forthcoming analysis, the Center For Working Class Politics, finds broad support for a number of populist economic programs that increase the power and leverage of workers and promote a more equal economy. What’s more, we believe that new policy proposals to stop stock buybacks that induce mass layoffs, legislation to speed up first contracts for newly unionized workers, and means to trigger big investments in high-wage industries, are no less likely to have popular support if only there were progressive tribunes to champion them.

Crucially, these policies all have a lot to do, not just with economic fairness, but with jobs and work. And as Sherrod Brown recently noted, to win back workers, progressives must put “the dignity of work at the center” of all they do.

Populist policies built around that goal are one means to do that.

To gain a better understanding of how Americans view and relate to our two dominant political parties, give a read to “The Partisanship and Ideology of American Voters” at the Pew Research Center, which was published a bit less than one year ago,  An excerpt: “The partisan identification of registered voters is now evenly split between the two major parties: 49% of registered voters are Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, and a nearly identical share – 48% – are Republicans or lean to the Republican Party…Four years ago, in the run-up to the 2020 election, Democrats had a 5 percentage point advantage over the GOP (51% vs. 46%)…The share of voters who are in the Democratic coalition reached 55% in 2008. For much of the last three decades of Pew Research Center surveys, the partisan composition of registered voters has been more closely divided…About two-thirds of registered voters identify as a partisan, and they are roughly evenly split between those who say they are Republicans (32% of voters) and those who say they are Democrats (33%). Roughly a third instead say they are independents or something else (35%), with most of these voters leaning toward one of the parties. Partisan leaners often share the same political views and behaviors as those who directly identify with the party they favor…The share of voters who identify as independent or something else is somewhat higher than in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As a result, there are more “leaners” today than in the past. Currently, 15% of voters lean toward the Republican Party and 16% lean toward the Democratic Party. By comparison, in 1994, 27% of voters leaned toward either the GOP (15%) or the Democratic Party (12%)…While the electorate overall is nearly equally divided between those who align with the Republican and Democratic parties, a greater share of registered voters say they are both ideologically conservative and associate with the Republican Party (33%) than say they are liberal and align with the Democratic Party (23%)…A quarter of voters associate with the Democratic Party and describe their views as either conservative or moderate, and 14% identify as moderates or liberals and are Republicans or Republican leaners.”

“Will Democrats finally start to place class issues at the center?,” Michael Sean Winters asks at The National Catholic Reporter, and writes: “There’s a very clear correlation between how many immigrants there were in a county and how much Trump’s vote share increased,” Shor said. “In counties like Queens, N.Y., or Miami-Dade, Fla., Trump increased his vote share by 10 percentage points, which is just crazy.”… How crazy? “Our best guess is that immigrants went from being a Biden plus-27 group in 2020 to a group that Trump narrowly won in 2024. This group of naturalized citizens makes up roughly 10% of the electorate.”…When Trump and Elon Musk portray themselves as blowing up “the establishment,” working-class voters love it. The establishment hasn’t done a lot for them in the past 40 years of neoliberal economics practiced by both parties. They aren’t as scared of tariffs as college-educated people because free trade decimated their towns in the 1990s and they do not have robust 401(k)s taking a hit in the markets today…The establishment — the term was coined by the late, great Henry Fairlie — is disconnected from the working-class…Trump seized on the disconnect. He may be selling snake oil, but at least he pays attention to working-class people and does not disrespect them or their choices publicly. He shows up at wrestling matches. He never speaks in academic jargon. He identifies working-class grievances and offers up a simplistic explanation or enemy as the source of those grievances… It worked in 2024 and it will keep working unless the Democrats learn what’s on the mind of the people who shower after work.”

In “The Emerging Democratic Minority,”John Judis writes at Compact: “Democrats began to lose support within the working class (defined roughly in polling terms as voters without a college degree) as far back as the 1960s, but they reached a new low in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost this demographic by three points—and the white working class by 27 points. (In citing poll numbers, I give precedence to Catalist post-election compilations when comparing 2016 and 2020, AP/VoteCast on 2024 numbers, and the Edison Exit polls on any trends that go back before 2016.  Where there is a wide disparity, I will try to explain the difference.) Biden gained back some of these votes in 2020, but Kamala Harris lost them by 13 points and the white working class by 31 points. Harris lost 16 percentage points among Latinos without a college degree and three points among blacks without a degree…The Democratic share of the rural and small-town vote began falling in 1980, but the big decline, as political scientists Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea demonstrate in The Rural Voter, began with the 2010 midterm election, when the Republicans flipped 31 House seats in rural districts and 20 in districts that mixed rural and urban. Democrats reached a new low of 34 percent among rural voters in 2016. Biden rebounded slightly, but Harris dropped back to Clinton’s level of support…Beginning in 1980, Democratic presidential candidates began enjoying more success among female than male voters. That is what the term “gender gap” referred to. In the 1992, 1996, 2008, 2012, and 2020 presidential elections, Democratic victories were attributable to this gender gap. But when Republicans won elections, they enjoyed rising success among male voters that overcame the Democratic gender gap. In 2016, Clinton’s margin among women allowed her to win the popular vote, but she did worse among men than Barack Obama had. In 2024, male voters went over to Trump by 13 points, easily overcoming Harris’s six-point margin among women. Key male constituencies included black males, among whom Trump gained 12 points from 2020, Latinos, among whom he gained 19 points, and young (18–29-year-old) men, among whom he gained 14 points…In the 2024 election, Democrats’ opposition to strict border security and support for a transgender-rights agenda that went far beyond protection from discrimination, including the participation of biological males in women’s sports, proved to be part of the party’s undoing.  Trump’s most effective ad in wooing swing voters cited Harris’s support for state funding of sex-change operations for detained illegal immigrants.

Judis continues, “The most important single issue in the election cycle was the Biden administration’s lax stand on illegal immigration…In a poll of voters in factory towns in swing states, Lake Research found that the single greatest “negative perception” of the Democrats was that they “were obsessed with LGBT transgender issues instead of focusing on kitchen table economic issues.” In a post-election poll of swing voters conducted by YouGov, Greenberg Research found that the top reason voters opposed Harris was they believed she was for “open borders.” That was followed by prices being too high and by Harris and the Democrats’ assumed support for transgender athletes and for “ultra-left and woke Democrats.”…According to a Brookings study, 45 percent of the men aged 18 to 29 say they face discrimination as men. According to a Pew poll, 38 percent of men who identify as Republican say “women’s gains have come at the expense of men.” As the “mommy party,” the Democrats were sure to invite the wrath of many male voters. Many of these voters were also working-class and many lived in rural areas and small towns, but Harris also lost young men with college degrees—a group that was formerly in the Democratic corner…It may take another defeat or two in national elections to convince leading Democratic politicians that they have to listen to the public rather than to their activist lobbies or their billionaire donors. For me, that represents a looming disaster. For all their faults, the Democrats remain the party of constitutional adherence and of a government dedicated to overcoming the failures to which a society is prey if it lets the market run free.”