From “Johnson shifts strategy on Epstein files vote – as GOP leaders brace for mass defections” by Annie Grayer, Manu Raju and Kristen Holmes at CNN Politics:

House Speaker Mike Johnson decided to quickly schedule a House vote on an effort to force the release of all of the Jeffrey Epstein case files once the calculation was made that it couldn’t be stopped.

The decision marked a shift in strategy for Johnson and the White House, who had long sought to delay the process, ​three sources told CNN.

House GOP leaders are bracing for a significant number of Republicans to break from President Donald Trump and support the bipartisan bill led by GOP Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna calling for the Justice Department to release the Epstein files — as supporters push for a veto-proof majority.

Republican sources say there’s a broad cross-section of the conference willing to support the plan — and it will be hard to limit defections.

“No point in waiting,” one House GOP leadership source familiar with the strategy shift told CNN.

A House GOP lawmaker said of the speaker’s decision: “If you got to do it, might as well do it quickly.”

Massie told CNN on Wednesday that his hope is that a veto-proof majority will pressure the Senate to act over Trump’s opposition. It would require two-thirds of the House — or 290 votes if all members are present — for a veto-proof majority.

“If we get less than two-thirds vote when it comes up for a vote, I think it’s an uphill battle,” Massie said. “But if we are somehow able to get two thirds vote here in the House, [that] puts a lot of pressure on the Senate, and also, if the Senate does pass it, that’s a very serious step for the president.”

A Senior White House official told CNN that Trump was made aware ahead of time that Johnson was going to expedite the vote, and that the two had spoken about it.

“It was made clear to President Trump, and he understands that this is an inevitable reality,” the official said.

More here.

David Dayen explains “The Most Frustrating Thing About the Shutdown Cave” at The American Prospect:

My colleague Bob Kuttner has ably explained the particulars and the political dynamics of the sudden surrender on the government shutdown from eight Senate Democrats (with Chuck Schumer’s tacit support), what I’m calling the Cave Caucus. Senators dissatisfied with this deal are going to deny unanimous consent to draw out the conclusion, in part to let the situation sink in for the House, where the reaction has been sharply negative. But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) only needs his own party members to get the bill passed, and he has delivered tough votes throughout the year. I don’t think House Republicans will rescue the Cave Caucus.

I share a lot of the frustrations expressed all over social media. But the biggest one for me comes on page 12 of the continuing resolution that advanced in the Senate last night. There, the drafters demonstrated that they have every ability to constrain Donald Trump and OMB director Russ Vought’s desires and stop the consolidation of executive power. But they only did it in one area, to grab one necessary vote for passage, not because they care about Congress’s relevance as an institution. That this Senate knows how to restore the power imbalance in Washington and chose not to is almost worse than completely ignoring it.

On the details, I do agree that the existing dynamics, particularly with air travel chaos and the Trump administration losing ruling after ruling on food assistance (including one just last night), were actually pushing Senate Republicans to bow to their president and eliminate the Senate filibuster, or at least create some semantic carve-out for government spending that would end the filibuster in all but name. The Cave Caucus was likely mindful that their power to dictate events is tied to the rule by minority in the Senate, and they stepped in front of that process like human shields.

I also agree that for Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Dick Durbin (D-IL)—the two Cave Caucus members who are retiring next year—the real goal was to preserve their three-bill “minibus” appropriations package, which is objectively better than the usual work product and preserves some funding Trump wanted out. It in no way makes up for the cave, but it speaks to how parochial interests and turf wars in Congress often play an outsized role in outcomes. Shaheen and Durbin weren’t thinking about the national Democratic position of giving up on health care improvements right after a big electoral victory and Republican chaos; they wanted their little bill to pass.

But I have been arguing consistently throughout the shutdown that Democrats were running into problems by saying one thing in public and another in private. The public argument of the shutdown was about Affordable Care Act subsidies, and Democrats didn’t have much of a policy plan for what to do if Republicans just said no. Politically, they reset the conversation to friendly turf; getting Republicans to express their bonkers health care ideas out loud is where Democrats want to be. But it was easy to see where this impasse would lead. In fact, on October 6 I wrote that the endgame would look something like Republicans offering an “assurance” of negotiations or a vote as long as short-term funding passes, and Democrats deciding that was a real rather than a dubious offer. Of course, that’s what happened.

But there was a behind-the-scenes factor in the shutdown too, namely, that Trump was making a mockery of the appropriations process by withholding funds and dismantling agencies and rescinding programs. The Democratic counteroffer had provisions for a “No Kings” budget, to stop the withholding and rescinding of funds. But because that was largely in private, without any momentum behind it politically, that was destined to flounder.

Yet Senate Democrats needed Tim Kaine’s vote, and Kaine represents a large number of federal workers in Virginia. So after the rest of the Democratic caucus balked on a straightforward cave, the Cave Caucus decided to reverse Trump’s firings of federal workers, in a way that reveals their options to use the power of the purse.

More here.

The following article, “The Big Tent Is Overrated” 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:

Democrats are famously in very poor shape these days. Despite the unpopularity of many of Donald Trump’s specific moves, Democrats’ popularity has not been rising. Indeed, in many polls it is mired at historic lows. Democrats’ lead in the generic congressional ballot for 2026 is alarmingly modest and the situation in the Senate is dire. And no, the Democrats’ strong showing in the idiosyncratic 2025 elections, boosted by favorable terrain, disapproval of the incumbent Trump administration, and their now-traditional advantage in lower turnout elections where their educated, engaged supporters flock to the polls, does not change these fundamental problems.

The Democrats’ current woes come on top of their decisive defeat in the 2024 election and the restoration of their nemesis, Trump, to power. Democrats as a result are at their wits’ end. They know they need to do something…but what? Many in the party want to fight, fight, fight. Hence the government shutdown and the unending stream of denunciations of each and every move Trump makes. But logically such truculence will do—and has done—nothing to change the party’s toxic image among wide sectors of working class and red-state voters the party desperately needs to turn around their electoral fortunes.

For such voters, the Democrats are out-of-step with their preferences on everything from crime and immigration to trans issues to patriotism and even the economy. They neither like nor trust the Democrats and, not without reason, feel Democrats view anyone who doesn’t share their priorities and blanket opposition to Trump as a hopeless reactionary if not an enabler of fascism. In short, they believe Democrats look down on them as the “deplorables” who must be “educated” by their betters to see the world correctly.

This doesn’t play well with these voters and why should it? Even if they are dissatisfied with Trump in some ways, they will naturally be reluctant to sign up with a party they perceive as denigrating them and their values. This reality has not escaped the notice of all Democrats; electorally realistic centrists and even some liberals have realized that the Democrats’ cause is fatally undermined in many areas of the country by this perception. The solution they seem to be gravitating toward is “the big tent.”

The theory here is that the Democrats’ problems stem not from the overall or dominant views within the party but rather from a lack of tolerance for those who dissent from party orthodoxy. To run successfully in more conservative districts and states, Democratic candidates must be able to adopt positions that fit these areas better without being read the riot act by their fellow Democrats.

At the margin, that would certainly be helpful. But would that really solve the fundamental image problem that bedevils the Democrats? We live in an era where politics is highly nationalized and voters’ views of local candidates are heavily influenced by these voters’ views of the party those candidates are affiliated with. Hence the decline of split ticket voting and the very high correlation between the partisan vote for president in a state/district and that for every other federal office. Candidates have a very hard time escaping the gravitational pull of their own national party.

This dramatically undercuts the payoff from a “big tent” approach. A Democrat in a conservative area can deviate from the party orthodoxy on, say, trans issues but—even if local Democratic activists and progressive commentators grit their teeth and don’t attack that candidate (difficult!)—voters in that area still see the D by the candidate’s name. They know the candidate’s party still thinks that transwomen are women, that biological boys should be able to play girls sports, that “gender-affirming” medical treatments for children are a great idea and should be easily available and that to question these ideas is to be on the wrong side of history itself.

In other words, voters will still know who’s running the tent even if Democrats let a few of the heterodox inside. This is especially the case since the welcoming mat for dissenters in the party has been mostly rolled out for progressive left heroes like Zohran Mamdani, the newly-elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, whose unorthodox positions on economic issues are forgiven, even as his profile on social and cultural issues simply deepens the problems with the party’s national image. The tent opens on the left, much less so on the right.

There’s a nice illustration of this in the recent Ezra Klein interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Klein has been beating the drums for the big tent approach. He ventures the following to Coates, in the process of trying to desperately convince him of the political necessity of Democratic big tent politics:

[A] huge amount of the country, a majority of the country, believes things about trans people, about what policy should be toward trans people, about what language is acceptable to trans people, that we would see as fundamentally and morally wrong…what politically…should our relationship with those people be?

Unsurprisingly, Coates doesn’t take this and the many other hints dropped by Klein about reaching those who dissent from liberal orthodoxy. As far as Coates is concerned all these people are on the other side of a line that must be drawn between those with the correct views and those who lack them: “If you think it is OK to dehumanize people, then conversation between you and me is probably not possible,” he remarks.

But even more interesting is how Klein frames the question: those who don’t share his (and Coates’ and the general Democratic) view on trans issues are “fundamentally and morally wrong”. This language by Klein makes it clear that his idea of the big tent is that some Democrats, especially candidates running in more conservative areas, should be permitted to have wrong, immoral positions on various issues so as to entice the benighted voters in those areas to vote for Democrats—or, as Matt Yglesias has put it, to allow “bigots in the tent.” But the positions of the party on those issues will and should remain the same. You can come into the tent but the left will still be running the show.

This won’t work and, no, talking about the affordability crisis and the cost-of-living will not induce these voters to forget what the party actually stands for. Instead, advocates for a big tent need to face the facts: the party’s many unpopular and unworkable positions have to genuinely change to reach the voters they want to reach. Otherwise, holding their nose and letting a few candidates deviate from party orthodoxy will have little effect.

Another example: immigration. Democrats have had little to say about Trump’s successful efforts to close the southern border but much to say about his deportation efforts which are viewed as, well, wrong and immoral. That doesn’t add up to a change in party position, as Josh Barro points out:

To start to win back voters’ trust, the party must acknowledge that the Biden administration’s policy of laxity was a failure, and commit credibly to better enforcement—not only by preventing illegal border crossings and closing the loopholes in the asylum system, but also by enforcing immigration law in the interior of the country, by deporting people who weren’t supposed to come here during Biden’s term…If Democrats are only seen talking about how the government is doing too much enforcement, we’ll be seen as the anti-enforcement party, and that’s politically deadly.

And of course that’s exactly what’s happening. The Democrats do indeed seem like the anti-enforcement party that doesn’t want to deport anybody. That image means that a Democrat running in a conservative area can try to carve out a tough-on-illegal-immigration profile but—even assuming the activists leave him or her alone—the party’s overall stance on immigration enforcement will mostly negate any benefit from the candidate’s heterodox position.

One more example: climate. Trump has blown up the Democrats’ climate program by canceling or cutting back much of the IRA with remarkably little public protest. Democrats are starting to realize their net-zero, Green New Deal-type plans are out of step with both the physical realities of America’s thirst for energy in the age of AI andwhat American voters actually want from their energy system—chiefly low costs and high reliability. Their grand plans just didn’t and don’t have much support, outside of professional class liberals and climate NGOs. A recent Politico article reported on the vibe shift:

“There’s no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,” said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama’s White House. “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.”

It’s a strategy Freeman admitted she was “struggling” to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to more renewable power—an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration—finding “a new approach” for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support.

But if a Democratic candidate running in a conservative area responded to this vibe shift by saying that climate change is a problem, not an immediate crisis, that net zero is not practical as a near-term goal, and that fossil fuels will be in the energy mix for a very long time that would run smack dab into the overarching Democratic commitment to large-scale action on climate change. So even if the climate NGOs and activists left such a candidate alone, the candidate would still be linked to a party that sees his or her views as fundamentally wrong and immoral, fit only to be retailed among the rubes in flyover country.

There’s no way around it. The big tent is less important than who’s running the tent. Until and unless overall Democratic positions change and voters are convinced sensible people are in charge of the tent, a few more heterodox Democrats running in conservative areas will do little to change the party’s trajectory.

In his article, “Republicans didn’t have a chance Tuesday against the wave of voters’ anger” Paul Waldman shares his take on Tuesday’s election, and writes at MSNBC.com: “The most important takeaway from Tuesday night’s elections — the one that has real implications for 2026 and 2028 — is that Democrats won everywhere, in many cases improving their 2024 performance by striking margins.”

Waldman adds, “Democratic candidates didn’t just win the highest-profile races in Virginia, New Jersey and New York, but they also won judicial retention elections in Pennsylvania and a variety of down-ballot races. They even picked up seats in the Mississippi Legislature — which cost Republicans their supermajority — and ousted two Republican incumbents on the Georgia commission that regulates utilities.

“More moderate Democrats, more progressive Democrats, Democrats who were well-known and Democrats who weren’t, Democrats who ran explicitly against Donald Trump and those who barely mentioned him — they all did great…When we see a string of wins like the one Democrats put together Tuesday, we can’t attribute it to clever strategy, blistering attack ads or even attribute it to the skills of the candidates they nominated — but to widespread opposition to the party in charge of the country.”

Further, “When Trump is in office, the anger gets cranked up as far as it can go. The first year of his second term has been chaos, with his army of thugs terrorizing people in cities, erratic tariffs dragging down the economy, brutal cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and the evisceration of the federal government. Every Democrat benefited from the displeasure Trump produced, whether they campaigned on opposing him or not.”

Click on the link above for more of Waldman’s analysis. Also check out Wldman’s “The Real Reason Reporters Won’t Talk About Trump’s Mental Decline” at his blog site, The Cross Section.

The following stub for the article, “The Working Class Project: 2025 Report,” is cross-posted from the Executive Summary and the Summary of Research of the report:

Executive Summary

Working-class voters perceive Democrats to be woke, weak, and out-of-touch, too focused on social issues and not nearly focused enough on the economic issues that impact everyone, every day. But Democrats can win back these working-class voters, in 2026 and beyond.

Nearly one year since Trump was reelected, a solid majority of working-class voters remain frustrated, anxious, or struggling with their financial realities – and they aren’t optimistic any of that will change. They are worried about inflation, and about their paychecks keeping pace; about the price and attainability of both housing and health care; about the job market, Trump’s chaotic tariff policies, and their sense of stability. These Americans define themselves by their hard work and self-sufficiency, but feel like neither trait is rewarded in our economy. They’re angry – not necessarily at the wealthy, but at an unfair and rigged system where politicians give the rich and powerful all the breaks. And they’re disappointed Trump and Republicans aren’t helping them, viewing them as more focused on picking fights and looking out for themselves than on reducing how much everything costs.

This provides Democrats with an opening. To earn back the votes of working-class Americans, our Party needs to make clear it values people who work hard. Instead of denigrating or contrasting ourselves with Republicans, Democrats need to advocate for our own policy agenda, one that first-and-foremost rewards hard-working, fair-playing people – an agenda that helps them get ahead, not just get by; an agenda that ensures health care is affordable, homeownership is obtainable, and retirement is possible. And because the status quo feels broken, Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge we need big, bold, aggressive changes, across the board.

There’s no one perfect model for Democrats to follow as we try to earn back working-class votes and work our way out of the political wilderness. But Democrats who are authentically relatable, clear, and respectful in how they communicate connect most with the working class.

Finally, when and where we reach these voters also matters. They still increasingly get their information from, and form their opinions on, non-traditional platforms – particularly YouTube and TikTok – and Democrats need to build up their presence on these channels.

Summary of Research

The Working Class Project conducted:

• 39 focus group discussions with nearly 400 collective working-class voters across 21 states, from February to August.
• A two-phase media consumption study among working-class voters across 21 states in the spring. This included an online survey of 7,555 voters, of whom 2,179 self-identified as working class, and media-usage diary research, in which survey respondents were asked to complete a detailed diary of their media usage over 24 hours. A total of 474 working-class voters participated in this diary research.
• Weekly longitudinal qualitative research over 13 weeks from March to June, among a fixed group of 28 self-identified working-class swing voters across battleground states who voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Participants responded to and discussed new questions each week, focused on Trump’s actions in office, party brands, and current events.
• Monthly longitudinal quantitative research in April, May, and June. Each wave included 1,000 interviews via an online panel among self-identified working-class voters, who were asked a series of tracking questions to measure movement, and new questions to capture reactions to unfolding national events.
• A benchmark messaging survey of more than 3,000 working-class voters across 21 states. This survey consolidated the most resonant message frames borne from focus group discussions and longitudinal qualitative boards to assess how they moved voters on a generic ballot and congressional vote. Messages covered issue areas focused on the economy and rising costs, tariffs, health care, corruption, immigration and LGBTQ+ issues, specifically focused on trans issues that continued to arise in each focus group.
• Ad testing in September and October that assessed messages that performed well in the benchmark survey, integrated into various ad treatments, and tested in Virginia as well as the remaining 20 states in which we conducted research.

More here.

The following article, “Forecast for Democratic Party Renewal: Cloudy with a chance of rain” 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:

There seems to be general agreement that Democrats need to radically transform their party image. The second election of Donald Trump and the subsequent failure of the party to gain favor in voters’ eyes even as many of Trump’s actions are notably unpopular suggests that Democrats have a “yuck” factor that just isn’t going away.

Can the Democrats accomplish such a renewal of their party’s brand? On the plus side there are a number of Democratic-aligned organizations focusing on the party change imperative and promulgating useful analyses and suggestions. These include the new Searchlight Institute, the new Majority Democrats group of Democratic officeholders, the Welcome Party (whose terrific new data-driven report, “Deciding to Win,” is cited below) and the more venerable Progressive Policy Institute and Third Way. Their ideas are not without support in significant sectors of the Democratic party, including House moderates, some Senators, and some who appear to be intent on contending for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

This is promising, but of course the pushback has been fierce from those in the party who believe the party’s image merely needs a few strategic tweaks to become enticing to voters. This includes a huge contingent of Democrats who are not really interested in anything that distracts from the party line that Trump-is-a-fascist-and-everything-he-does-is-wrong. And there are those who, astoundingly, believe the solution lies in the Democrats becoming even more progressive! It’s just a fact that energy in the Democratic Party seems to be coming preponderantly from these quarters, not from the reformers.

Moreover, it’s not even clear that the reformers are offering stern enough medicine to cure what ails the party or, even if they were, that sympathetic politicians would actually be willing to push for truly decisive breaks with party orthodoxy. This can be illustrated by referring to recent work that demonstrates just how steep a hill Democrats have to climb and how, therefore, half-measures will likely be inadequate.

1. The Democrats’ image isn’t as bad as you think—it’s worse! The treasure trove of data in the new “Deciding to Win” report clarifies just how bad things are. Here’s a chart on what voters think Democrats do prioritize versus what voters think they should prioritize. At the top are issues Democrats vastly underprioritize (securing the border, lowering everyday costs, lowering the rate of crime, creating jobs and economic growth); at the bottom are issue Democrats vastly overprioritize (protecting the rights of undocumented immigrants, protecting the rights of LGBT+ Americans, raising taxes to increase spending on social programs, promoting DEI). Ouch.

Further illustrating this problem, take a look at this chart of unpopular Democratic policies. Some have not had really serious support within the party but quite a few have—indeed, some have become closely associated with what it means today to be a Democrat.

Read more here.

In “These are the blue-collar voters the GOP needs to worry about,’ Ronald Brownstein writes at Bloomberg, via the Anchorage Daily News:

“In the 2024 election, Donald Trump mapped an escape route for Republicans from the greatest long—term challenge facing the party. Less than a year later, that path looks much more precarious.

The core demographic challenge facing the GOP is that the party’s most reliable bloc of voters — white people without a four—year college degree — is shrinking. Trump’s solution in 2024 was to markedly improve his performance among non—white voters without a four-year college degree. But polling through his second term consistently shows those voters cooling on his performance and priorities. If that trend continues, the math for Republican candidates — especially in presidential races — will grow much more complicated.

For decades, white voters without a college degree were the nucleus of the dominant New Deal coalition forged for Democrats by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the cultural and racial storms of the 1960s shattered that coalition; during the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, millions of blue-collar white voters moved right, largely around racially tinged issues such as school busing, crime and welfare, but also because of social issues, taxes and national security. Democrats have struggled with those voters ever since, but Trump widened the GOP advantage to a commanding level not seen since the “Reagan Democrats” era in the 1980s. The major data sources on how Americans vote — including exit polls, the AP/VoteCast survey and the Pew Research Center’s Validated Voters study — agree that Trump carried nearly two-thirds of white voters without a college degree in each of his three campaigns.

But although working-class white people remain the largest single bloc of voters, their presence in the electorate has steadily declined as the US has grown both more racially diverse and better educated. In 1980, white people without a four-year degree comprised 68% of voters, according to an analysis of Census data provided exclusively to me by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Metro think tank. By 2008, Frey calculates, their share had fallen below half, to 48%, for the first time. Though Trump inspired very high turnout among these blue-collar white people, that hasn’t overcome their continued decline in the overall population: Their share of the total vote fell from 42% in 2016 to slightly over 37% in 2024, the Census reported. Blue-collar white voters remain a bigger share of the electorate in the pivotal Rustbelt swing states, but even there they have already fallen below a majority in Pennsylvania and are likely to do so in Michigan in 2028.

College-educated voters, of all races, have mostly filled this gap. In 2004, Frey found, white adults with at least a four-year degree cast just under 28% of all ballots nationwide, and college-educated non-white adults about 5%. In 2024, those numbers rose to 33% for white adults and about 12% for non-white adults. The share of Non-white adults without a college degree has grown, too, but only from 16% in 2004 to about 18% last year. (The Census data puts the total share of college-educated voters slightly higher than the other leading data sources on voting behavior, but they all show the same trends.)

Pervasive disappointment in Joe Biden’s record allowed Trump in 2024 to improve with virtually every group, including college graduates of all races. But in the long run, a party recast in his image is likely to struggle with well-educated voters, who mostly hold liberal positions on social issues and express the greatest concern about Trump’s assaults on constitutional safeguards. September surveys by the New York Times/Siena College and the Washington Post/Ipsos each found that about 7 in 10 college-educated people of color, and between 55% and 60% of well-educated white people, disapproved of his performance as president.

That leaves blue-collar non-white voters as the crucial source of potential long-term growth for a Trump-stamped GOP. And, in fact, both the exit polls and the AP/VoteCast survey calculated that he won about one-third of them last year, while Pew (in a new analysis provided to me) put his total even higher, at nearly two-fifths. In each case, that was a big improvement from the roughly one-fourth support among those voters that all three surveys recorded for Trump in 2020.

Those gains prompted exuberant predictions among some Republican strategists that Trump had constructed a stable, cross-racial, working-class majority coalition. Even if the party lost votes from the continued shrinking of the white working class, the thinking went, Trump had proved the GOP could add enough votes from the non-white working class to offset those losses.

But Trump’s grasp on those voters is already slipping. Like polls earlier in his term, the New York Times/Siena College and Washington Post/Ipsos surveys found that only about one-fourth of non-college non-white voters approved of his job performance. In the Times/Siena survey, four times as many of those blue-collar racial minorities said his economic policies had hurt rather than helped the economy, and two-thirds said he has gone too far both with his immigration enforcement policies and in deploying the National Guard to major cities. In the Washington Post poll, three-fourths of them said his tariffs were raising prices. These results all diverged sharply from Trump’s continued strong support among working-class white voters.”

More here.

From “US Senate passes bill with Republican support to rescind Trump’s tariffs on Brazil: Republicans break ranks as vote passes 52-48 in rare bipartisan rebuke of US president’s trade policies” by Lauren Gambino and Chris Stein at The Guardian:

“The US Senate on Tuesday approved a measure that would terminate Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on Brazilian imports, including coffee, beef and other products, in a rare bipartisan show of opposition to the president’s trade war.

The legislation passed in a 52-48 vote, with five Republicans – senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and the former Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky – joining all Democrats in favor. The vote took place on day 28 of the federal government shutdown with both sides at loggerheads over spending legislation.

The resolution, led by Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat of Virginia, would overturn the national emergency that Trump has declared to justify the levies, though it is all but certain to stall in the US House, where the Republican-controlled chamber acted to pre-emptively shut down any attempt to block the president’s tariffs. In the unlikely event the measure were to reach the president’s desk, it would meet Trump’s veto.

“Tariffs are a tax on American consumers. Tariffs are a tax on American businesses. And they are a tax that is imposed by a single person: Donald J Trump,” Kaine said in a floor speech.

While Congressional Republicans have largely declined to rein in the president, Tuesday’s vote revealed an underlying discontent with Trump’s tariffs.”

More here.

The following article, “Democrats Could Learn a Lot from the Progress Movement”  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:

Last week, I wrote about the Democrats’ lack of a compelling vision for the country that goes beyond not being Trump. Even the nascent abundance movement, which has only modest buy-in from party actors, has shortcomings that undercut its ability to play that role. I noted that I would be attending the Progress 2025 Conference in Berkeley—a gathering of the tribes that make up the loosely-organized “progress movement”—to see what that movement might offer a party in search of a vision.

Here are my impressions:

1. There was more political diversity than among abundance advocates who tend to lean a bit left and mostly aspire to be a faction within the Democratic Party. The progress movement/studies umbrella includes such people but also many who lean right and/or libertarian and don’t have much use for the Democrats.

2. There was an entrepreneurial, as opposed to technocratic, feel to the crowd and many of the discussions, not least because there were quite a few startup founders and VCs present. That’s not to say there weren’t quite a few policy wonks too, but the entrepreneurial vibe helped give a sense of people creating progress, rather than twisting policy dials to help it along.

3. There was a fierce and generalized techno-optimism to the crowd that far surpassed what you see in Democratic-oriented abundance circles where it tends to be focused on favored goals like clean energy. These are people who deeply believe in the potential of technological advance and the process of scientific discovery that leads to such advance—”the endless frontier” if you will.

4. There was a great deal of talk about AI and how it might fit into progress goals. Not surprising I suppose, given that the conference was in the Bay Area where AI research and companies are concentrated. Also not surprisingly there was also a considerable amount of dreamy hand-waving about all the wonderful transformations AI will bring to the economy and society. But they’re not wrong that the potential is immense if AI is, in fact, a new general purpose technology (GPT).

5. There was a notable proximity to economic power, in that a figure like Sam Altman came and spoke to the conference. Whatever one thinks of Altman and OpenAI, this added a certain heft to the proceedings. The tech sector is now regarded with suspicion in Democratic circles but it is enormously rich and powerful and must be reckoned with.

6. Very interestingly, there was a presence of “American Dynamism” figures and sympathizers at the conference. ChatGPT provides this summary:

“American Dynamism” is a relatively new term and movement/investment thesis championed by the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (often “a16z”) that calls for a renewed focus on large-scale technology and infrastructure development in the U.S., particularly in sectors tied to national interest.

Key points:

• It’s not just about software startups. It emphasizes “hard tech” (e.g., manufacturing, aerospace, defense, physical infrastructure) as essential.
• It frames this work as patriotic and foundational: “innovation, progress, and resilience that drives the United States forward.”
• The movement sees the U.S. as needing to rebuild its capacity to “make things,” be resilient in supply chains, and maintain technological leadership.

This unabashed patriotism, emphasis on the national interest, and commitment to hard, real world achievements harks back to the midcentury era of vast American accomplishment in competition with the Soviet Union.

There is much Democrats can learn from these varied aspects of the progress movement and incorporate into their own vision for the country. I would include:

• Appeal across the political spectrum
• An emphasis on entrepreneurialism and creativity rather than technocracy
• A generalized techno-optimism and promotion of the endless frontier of scientific achievement
• Treating AI seriously as a GPT that could increase economy-wide productivity
• Positive engagement with, rather than simply trying to regulate, new loci of economic power
• Melding technical advance, infrastructural development and economic growth with the patriotic imperatives of geopolitical competition.

These points could help the Democrats move beyond a technocratic abundance framing to a broader vision of scientific achievement and national development that could capture the imagination of ordinary Americans in a way the space race did but current Democratic priorities do not. Consider the story of October Sky, aka Rocket Boys, for an example of the spirit Democrats need to cultivate:

It was 1957, the year Sputnik raced across the Appalachian sky, and the small town of Coalwood, West Virginia, was slowly dying. Faced with an uncertain future, Sonny Hickam (aka Homer Hickam, Jr.) nurtured a dream: to learn how to build a rocket so he could work in the space business. The introspective son of Homer Hickam, the mine superintendent, and Elsie Lavender Hickam, a woman determined to get her sons out of Coalwood forever, Sonny gathered in five other boys and convinced them to help him. Along the way, the boys learn not only how to turn scraps of metal into sophisticated rockets but manage to give the people of Coalwood hope that the future will be brighter, at least for their children. As Sonny’s parents fight in different ways to save their sons, and the people of Coalwood come together to help their Rocket Boys, Sonny and the Big Creek Missile Agency light up the sky with their flaming projectiles and dreams of glory.

I cannot recommend the book (and the movie based on it) too highly. If Democrats are to have a prayer of breaking the right-populist spell on American politics they need to leave their cultural obsessions and dead-end leftism behind and figure out how to kindle the entrepreneurial spirit and sense of mission from October Sky in tens of millions of Americans, especially young people. The alternative is continued stasis in American politics or, worse, that Republicans will do the same thing in their own way. Democrats discount this possibility at their peril.

The following post, “Argentina and Rural America’s Awakening: Suddenly, Trump’s contempt for his base is showing” by Paul Krugman, is cross-posted from paulkrugman.substack.com:

Is rural America starting to fall out of love with Donald Trump?

Policy wonks like me have spent decades pointing out that if rural Americans voted based on their informed self-interest, they would be supporting Democrats, not Republicans. Republicans are constantly trying to eviscerate Democrat-supported programs that benefited rural states like Medicaid spending, SNAP (the supplementary nutrition program formerly known as food stamps), and school lunches. Trump is also cutting subsidies for green energy programs like solar farms and wind turbines – subsidies that disproportionately went to red states. Iowa gets 63 percent of its electricity from wind!

Moreover, these programs in effect subsidize rural areas with dollars earned in urban areas: because rural areas have lower incomes than urban areas, rural Americans pay relatively little of the taxes that finance these programs. So Democratic “big government” is highly beneficial to the heartland.

Yet economic self-interest has been swamped by “rural consciousness.” This consciousness rests on a belief that highly educated urban elites don’t understand or value rural culture and rural lives. And I will admit that this belief contains a grain of truth. Urban elites are unlikely to fully understand the attachment of rural Americans to a particular place and its time-worn rhythms of life. Ensconced in salaried jobs, urban dwellers are unfamiliar with the constant anxiety of being a farmer or a small business owner in the heartland. Decades of being battered by the economic changes — deindustrialization, farm consolidation and corporatization, depopulation, loss of community ties, along with the loss of jobs, particularly “male-coded” jobs – have left rural Americans feeling adrift, marginalized and resentful.

And this created an opening to be exploited by the right wing. Much like how Trump peddled fantasies of a manufacturing resurgence or the return of coal-mining jobs, MAGA leveraged the deep discontent within rural America to inculcate the belief that only Republicans, and Trump in particular, respect rural voters. But this is false: MAGA actually holds its most loyal voters in contempt.

And the reality of this contempt is starting to show through — not, at least so far, via the One Big Beautiful Bill’s savage cuts to health care, which will be especially devastating to rural areas, but via the Trump administration’s bizarre fixation on aiding President Javier Milei of Argentina.

The truth is that rural America is even more dependent than urban America on the programs now on the chopping block. The nonpartisan Economic Innovation Group has mapped out where in America people depend for a large share of their income on government transfers: the counties where a lot of income comes from government programs, indicated in yellow, are overwhelmingly in rural areas, while the places where such aid plays a relatively small role (light blue) mainly correspond to major metropolitan areas:

Source

Why has rural America become increasingly dependent on government aid? The main answer is declining economic opportunity, which has led to an exodus of young people, leaving behind an older population that relies on Social Security and Medicare. Even younger rural residents have low incomes that make them eligible for mean-tested programs, above all Medicaid and food stamps.

There shouldn’t be any shame about the fact that rural America is subsidized by more affluent parts of the nation. That is, after all, what a national social safety net is supposed to do. But it should make rural voters oppose politicians who support Project 2025-type plans to rip up that safety net, which will deeply impoverish already poor regions and degrade life even for those not personally receiving aid — for example, by leading to the closure of many rural hospitals, making health care inaccessible even to those who still have health insurance.

Yet rural voters went overwhelmingly for Trump last year. Why?

Many clearly felt that educated urban elites don’t understand their lives and values — which is true. Most people in New York or Los Angeles don’t have a good sense of what life is like in rural America. But the reverse is also true: Many, perhaps most rural Americans imagine that the surprisingly safe and livable city where I’m writing this is a crime-ridden hellscape, that Chicago and Portland are “war zones,” and so on.

Rural voters may also have imagined that they would be protected from the harsh treatment being meted out to blue cities. After all, our political system gives rural voters disproportionate influence. Wyoming and the two Dakotas combined have roughly the same population as Brooklyn, yet they have 6 senators while Brooklyn has to share two senators with 16 million other New Yorkers.

For both reasons, rural voters either tuned out or refused to believe warnings that a Trump victory in 2024 would be catastrophic for the heartland, that crucial programs would be eviscerated and the agricultural economy would be devastated by Trump’s trade wars.

I thought that rural voters might finally start to realize that they have been taken for a ride when the cuts began kicking in. This will begin to happen next month, when the 22 million Americans, many of them in rural areas, who receive subsidies to help buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act will see their premiums soar, on average by more than 100 percent. It will happen even more dramatically late next year (after the midterms), when the big cuts to Medicaid and food stamps kick in.

An aside: When I went to the relevant government page to look up food stamp data, I was confronted by this banner:

Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.

This is not how government for the people is supposed to work, and we shouldn’t lose our sense of outrage.

But back to a possible rural awakening: It may be starting ahead of schedule, thanks to, of all things, the Trump administration’s efforts to bail out Argentina’s Javier Milei.

The attempt by Trump and Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, to rush $20 billion to Argentina isn’t a big deal compared with the planned savage cuts to crucial programs. But it’s a graphic demonstration of the administration’s hypocrisy. After all the America First rhetoric, all the insistence that spending must be slashed, suddenly we’re sending lots of money to a foreign nation in which we have no real interest except for the fact that its president is a MAGA favorite. I don’t know how many voters are aware that these moves are in large part an attempt to bail out Bessent’s hedge-fund buddies, but I think the sense of something wrong and corrupt is leaking through.

Furthermore, from farmers’ point of view, Argentina is a rival — a big soybean exporter at a time when Trump’s trade war has locked our own farmers out of China’s market.

And as emphasized in a recent conversation between Greg Sargent and a rural Democratic activist, farmers have been shocked and outraged by Trump’s casual suggestion that he might start buying Argentine beef to sell in the U.S. market. That conveys the impression that Trump doesn’t care at all about his most loyal followers — an impression that is completely correct.

We shouldn’t expect rural America to suddenly do a 180 and abandon Trump. Sargent sends us to a lament from one rancher who calls the idea of buying Argentine beef an “absolute betrayal” — but begins by saying to Trump, “We love you and support you.” The sheer extent to which rural Americans have been hoodwinked will make it hard for them to admit their error.

But there are at least hints of a rural awakening. And for the sake of the nation urban and rural Americans share, it can’t come fast enough.