The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of major works of political analysis and non-resident senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, is cross-posted from the Wall St. Journal, via A.E.I.:

“Noam Scheiber, a veteran labor reporter at the New York Times, wants you to believe in the college-educated working class. Many college-educated Americans, he contends, wind up in working-class retail and service-sector jobs that don’t use their education or in professional jobs that have become more “proletarianized” and therefore more working class. That claim is more supportable than the thesis Mr. Scheiber draws from it, namely the college-educated working class is becoming a dynamic force for progressive social change.

In “Mutiny,” Mr. Scheiber makes his case by telling a series of interwoven stories about Americans who’ve found themselves part of the college-educated working class. The stories range from workers at Starbucks, Apple stores and Amazon warehouses to aspiring screenwriters, videogame designers and adjunct professors. All are dissatisfied and all wind up involved with unions.

These stories are well told—Mr. Scheiber is a fine writer—and the precarity of these young workers’ lives is vividly evoked. It’s hard to graduate and find that your painfully acquired credentials don’t translate into anything like the job you were aiming for. Instead you’re at the whim of corporate overlords. Joining a union, or helping to create one, channels your disappointment into something concrete and potentially beneficial.

One graduate-turned-unionizer is Teddy Hoffman. Mr. Hoffman, who graduated from a prestigious liberal-arts college (Grinnell) in 2014, was awarded a highly competitive Watson Fellowship after college, traveled the world (“studying the intersection between disability activist groups and the performing arts”) and came back to pursue a career in the theater. He was a theater and English major at Grinnell and widely considered a star; his mentor at the college thought he’d become an artistic director of a theater or perhaps a theater professor.

It was not to be. After a lengthy attempt to make it in the theater in Chicago, he gave up and landed at Starbucks. He found the work boring, subject to arbitrary management dictates and not satisfactorily remunerative. He found meaning in forming a union. There he had success—Mr. Scheiber connects Mr. Hoffman’s story to that of overall unionization efforts at Starbucks.

So are graduates pouring out of elite colleges, joining the college-educated working class and responding with a thunderous “Union Yes”? For the most part, no. There will be some stories like Mr. Hoffman’s, but they are not representative. Coincidentally, my daughter also went to Grinnell and graduated in the same class as Mr. Hoffman. In her experience, and that of her friends, his trajectory is atypical.

That is not to say that a certain percentage of college graduates, from elite colleges and otherwise, don’t wind up in situations similar to Mr. Hoffman’s. Mr. Scheiber relates the story of Chaya Barrett, who graduated from Towson University in Maryland and aspired to a career in tech and marketing. The best she could do was work at an Apple store, where seemingly capricious management demands and scheduling took all the fun out of being a “Genius,” as Apple calls staff, and hardly paid the bills. She also went the unionization route.

Sydney Mitchel wanted to be a screenwriter and graduated from the dramatic writing department of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She had some initial success getting writing jobs in Hollywood, pulling down $180,000 one year and on track to earn more than $300,000 with a new promotion. But Covid-19 and structural changes in the Hollywood production system derailed her career, and soon she was running out of money. She became active in the writers’ union.

One can sympathize with the urge of these young, educated workers to rebel against their situations. The problem lies in assessing the political and cultural valence of this subset of college graduates. Mr. Scheiber believes these “mutinying” college grads’ rebellion contributes to a burgeoning movement against contemporary capitalism that could unite the college-educated and non-college-educated working class.

I’m not so sure. These college graduates are an idiosyncratic subset of college grads who wind up in frustrating working-class situations and translate their frustrations into union activities. This is not common. The private-sector unionization rate in the U.S. is still less than 6%, which incidentally is about the percentage of Starbucks stores now unionized. And even those that are unionized have a hard time getting contracts.

Frustrated career aspirations and economic dissatisfaction are common among college graduates, perhaps unusually so today. But a four-year college degree still pays off as an investment, on average, both in terms of annual and lifetime earnings, if slightly less so than at its peak in the 1990s. Moreover, there are clear differences between the prospects of those who graduate with STEM degrees and those with humanities degrees, who are likely to be especially frustrated if they want to live in expensive blue-state metros.

Also, who knows how many young college graduates translate their frustrations into political orientations other than the socialist ones so evident in Mr. Scheiber’s book? After all, 46% of white college graduate men under 45 voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Mr. Scheiber’s “working class” college graduates carry a lot of cultural baggage that will limit their ability to unite with the traditional non-college-educated working class. The views of the former are way to the left of the latter. Two of the most widely publicized activities of the Starbucks union related to gay-pride flags and Gaza—not exactly standard working-class issues.

Mr. Scheiber’s book is useful as a guide to unionization activities among recent college graduates. But it does not make a convincing case that the college-educated working class is a harbinger of broader social change. Maybe your next latte at Starbucks will be drawn by the new Walter Reuther or John L. Lewis. But I doubt it.”

Bernadette B. Tixon reports that “Trump’s net approval among white working-class voters turns negative for the first time” at msn.com:

“For the first time since Donald Trump returned to the White House, his net approval rating among white working-class voters has turned negative, according to a CNN/SSRS poll conducted between 26 and 30 March 2026. The survey recorded 49 per cent of white working-class voters approving of Trump’s performance, against 50 per cent who disapproved — a net rating of minus one. It is the first time that the figure has dipped below zero in his second term.

The pace of the reversal is equally notable. As recently as mid-February, CNN/SSRS polling had Trump at 54 per cent approval and 46 per cent disapproval among this group — a net positive of eight points — a cushion that evaporated in under six weeks.

A Year-Long Slide in the Numbers

The March result did not emerge in isolation. In late February 2025, two CNN polls showed Trump at 63-37 and 61-38 among white working-class voters. By July 2025, the split had narrowed to 54-45. By January 2026, it stood at 52-47 — still positive, but shrinking — before crossing into negative territory by late March.

Fox News polling pointed in the same direction. Among white non-college men specifically, a Fox News survey in March 2025 showed Trump at 58 per cent approval against 41 per cent disapproval. By March 2026, that had shifted to 48 per cent approval and 52 per cent disapproval — a swing of 21 net points over twelve months. The trajectory is consistent across different polling organisations, which makes it harder to dismiss as a single-outlet anomaly.

CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten has been among the most direct in his assessment. Drawing on CNN exit poll data, his own polling aggregate, and Pew Research Center figures, Enten described what he called a ’23-point switch’ — from Trump winning working-class voters by 14 points over Kamala Harris in 2024, to a current net approval of negative nine. ‘He is absolutely collapsing with the group of voters that helped put him into the White House,’ Enten said.

Jennifer Rubin puts Trump’s “Words and Phrases” and his disastrous Iran mess in context at The Contrarian. An excerpt:

No wonder Donald Trump is melting down.

The Iran war, more than any other Trump screw-up, perfectly illustrated the central truth at the heart of his presidential bluster: “The emperor has no clothes.” With the announcement of the half-baked ceasefire, the entire world could see that Trump, who fancies himself a great dealmaker (whom critics call a conman) and a winner, turns out to be an easy mark and a loser.

Trump came oh so close to grasping the extent of his humiliation in his Truth Social post: “The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways.” (One is tempted to respond: ‘Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?’)

“Short term extortion” is a preposterous phrase to camouflage “indefinite and overwhelming leverage.” Trump’s ostensible purpose for the war (other than fantasy regime change) was to reduce Iran’s ability to project power in the regime. Now Iran can project power internationally with a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz — while also maintaining its stockpile of enriched uranium and retaining “thousands of ballistic missiles in its arsenal that it could use by retrieving launchers from underground storage areas.”

Transporting us from tragedy to farce, Trump announced that the Iranians would not get away with blockading the Strait of Hormuz — HE would do it! As ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee Mark Warner (D-VA) said dryly on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “How blockading the strait gets it open suddenly — I don’t get that logic.” Neither does anyone else, Senator.

Trump still does not understand — or will not admit — that if Iran refused to release the Strait of Hormuz when it was getting pummeled by U.S. and Israeli air power, it is unfathomable that it will give up control during a negotiation in which Trump is desperate to avoid resumption of fighting. (Watching inflation soar and consumer confidence tank no doubt makes him more frantic than ever to “end” the war for good.) And indeed, the marathon negotiating session over the weekend came to … nothing.

Why should Iran give up its most valuable bargaining chip? Iran surely grasps that Trump does not have the stomach for a mammoth military exercise to free the strait. If the Iranians had any doubt, Trump reassured them that he did not care if a deal was reached, since the United States had “already won.” (Translation: He will walk away with the strait in Iran’s hands.)

How did Iran wind up with all the cards (in Trump lingo, “short term extortion”)? Simple: Trump was “played,” as the New York Times illustrated in its account of how Trump plunged recklessly into a disastrous war. Unlike his predecessors, Trump got snowed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As former secretary of state John Kerry explained to Jen Psaki:

Kerry: I was part of any number of conversations with Netanyahu.

Psaki: Pitching the U.S. strike Iran?

Kerry: Yes, he wanted us to strike. He came to President Obama. He made a presentation to ask to strike. President Obama refused. President Biden refused. President Bush refused.

The only thing Trump refused was to appreciate or listen to aides who warned that Netanyahu was peddling the “farcical” (CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s description) notion that bombing Iran could expedite regime change. Whether you prefer Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s evaluation (“Bullshit”) or Chairman of the Joints Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine’s formulation (“They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed”), Trump’s addled brain could not process that the Iranian regime’s survival — coupled with its predictable seizure of the Strait of Hormuz and success in refurbishing missiles to hit Israel and the Gulf States — would leave Iran moredangerous. Narcissism coupled with utter ignorance of history, military strategy, and the Iranian mindset set up Trump (eager to repeat his success in knocking out Nicolás Maduro and in avoiding a robust Iranian response during the 12-day war) as an eager mark for Netanyahu’s farcical sales pitch.

More here.

Alexander Willis reports “Critics dumbfounded as Trump suffers ‘complete collapse‘ among his strongest voter group” at Rawstory, and observes:

A new CBS News poll published Sunday found that Trump has suffered an unprecedented collapse in support among what has historically been his single-strongest voter base, leaving critics stunned.

Conducted between April 8 and 10, the CBS News/YouGov survey was conducted with a “nationally representative sample” of 2,387 adults, and found that among white, non-college-educated voters, Trump’s support fell from 36 points in February of 2025 to minus 4, a staggering 40-point drop.

“Trump complete collapse amongst his original base: working class voters,” wrote Robert Barnes, a trial and constitutional lawyer, in a social media post on X Sunday to his nearly 370,000 followers.

ALSO READ: MAGA exodus support group soars as Trump devotees walk away: ‘One lie too many’

“This is the making of a party [realignment],” wrote Neera Tanden, a Democratic strategist and former Biden administration official, also in a social media post on X to her more than 330,000 followers.

More broadly, Americans overall disapproved of Trump’s job performance by a margin of 61%, with 39% approving. Additionally, 63% described the condition of the economy as “bad,” and 64% disapproved of Trump’s handling of the U.S. war against Iran, with 62% believing that Trump did not “have a clear plan” for the conflict.

Read more here.

And if that wasn’t bad enough news for Republicans, The Tampa Free Press reports, via msn.com, that “Trump’s approval plunges in GOP states,” and notes, “Quarterly tracking shows Trump now holds net-positive approval in only 17 states, down from 22 at the end of 2025. Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Ohio—all states he carried in 2024—flipped to net-negative ratings. Analysts link the drop to economic anxiety tied to military actions in Iran and resulting energy market volatility, with his national approval at 45% and disapproval at 52%.”

And,

“…A poll of 2024 Trump voters found 20% will not support the GOP in the midterms, and nearly 60% of Biden-to-Trump switchers are reconsidering Republican votes. The erosion is compounded by policy reversals on foreign wars and domestic spending cuts, alienating working-class supporters.”

You won’t have to google very long to find numerous similar reports from other recent polls. Could it be that former Republicans Geoff Duncan running for Georgia governor as a Democrat and George Conway running as a Democrat for a House of Reps seat (NY-12) are harbingers of an emerging trend?

From “Medicare for All Is an Electoral Winner” by Jared Abbott at Jacobin:

Working-class voters already back Medicare for All. Framed like Social Security — as a benefit earned from work, not a handout — it can reach two-thirds support.

From Politico comes a warning for Democrats, “Why Europe’s center left can’t stop losing” by Aitor Hernandez-Morales and Jacopo Barigazzi, who write:

Europe’s social democratic parties are collapsing — and their leaders don’t seem to know how to reverse the trend.

For much of the 20th century, center-left parties rooted in trade unions and industrial labor were among Europe’s dominant political forces.

But today, many of them are politically unrecognizable — or in dire straits.

The latest example is Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, which last week suffered a dramatic slump in national elections. Although the party scored the most votes overall, its results were the worst since 1903.

Working-class electors frustrated by the party’s inaction on cost-of-living issues gravitated to the far-right Danish People’s Party, while left-wing voters frustrated with Frederiksen’s willingness to partner with the center right and take a hard line on migration defected to the Green Left.

Giacomo Filibeck, secretary-general of the Party of European Socialists — the pan-European entity comprising all of Europe’s national social democratic parties — told POLITICO the poor results were attributable to “anger” over the governing center-left party’s handling of the affordability crisis. The issue had become more pressing “due to the war in Iran, which raised energy prices and more,” he said.

Vagn Juhl-Larsen, a local-level Social Democrat party chairman in Denmark, put it more bluntly. “Voters have no respect for a party that does not pursue its own politics,” he said, slamming the Social Democrats’ leadership for giving up on “red” political values.

The situation in Denmark is hardly unique.

After 35 years of uninterrupted rule, Germany’s Social Democratic Party lost its hold on the industrial state of Rhineland-Palatinate in last week’s regional elections, where debate over the stagnant economy dominated the campaign. That defeat followed a March 8 thumping in Baden-Württemberg, where the SPD got just 5.5 percent of the votes cast.

In France, meanwhile, the center left claimed key cities such as Paris and Marseille in this month’s municipal elections, but remains missing in action at the national level. Over the past decade the once-dominant Socialist Party has declined so steeply that it was forced to sell its historic headquarters to pay off debts, and today controls just 65 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly.

“The center left does not seem to know where it fits in Europe right now,” said political analyst Rodrigo Vaz, a former deputy attaché at Portugal’s permanent representation to the EU. “And that identity crisis has led it to defend policy programs that are indistinguishable from those of the center right — a strategy that is neither clear, nor appealing for voters.”

The centrist dilemma

Europe’s center left was built on industrial workers, union members and working-class communities — a base that once powered leaders like Willy Brandt and François Mitterrand.

But that world no longer exists. Since the mid-1980s, deindustrialization has shrunk the traditional blue-collar workforce, while union membership has declined across the continent. Europe’s social democratic parties have yet to find a coherent response to the changes in their traditional voting bloc.

“The center left has yet to come up with a new social contract, one that addresses the concerns of modern-day society,” Vaz said. “There’s no clear narrative on where social democrats stand on automation, artificial intelligence or the future of work.”

More here.

From “Bashing billionaires isn’t helping progressives win the working class” by Will Marshall, founder and president of Progressive Policy Institute, at The Hill:

The Working Class Project, which has extensively surveyed non-college workers’ attitudes, is skeptical that the left’s pitchfork populism will make it more receptive to Democrats. “They do believe that our political system is broken — and that it has been influenced by the rich and powerful to make things easier on those at the top while failing to deliver for those at the bottom.”

they really want us to crack down on corruption and those who abuse the system to benefit themselves.”

As a white man from Texas put it in one of the project’s focus groups, “Politicians use billionaires as scapegoats for their own failures of not fixing the tax code, not fixing issues with this country.”

Nonetheless, progressives insist that Democrats can only reach non-college voters by amping up the volume on class warfare.

Jonathan Cohn reports in “Dems Quietly Start Their Next Big Health Care Effort: They want to undo the damage done by Trump—and some are laying the groundwork for bigger reforms,” in The Bulwark’s The Breakdown:

THERE ARE SIGNS that the deate about health care in America is about to get out of the rut it’s been in for about fifteen years—and that Democrats are preparing for the moment when it does.

Ever since 2010, the most high-profile fights in Washington have been about the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid. Mainly that’s because Donald Trump and the Republicans keep attacking those programs—as they did last year when they enacted the largest-ever cuts to Medicaid, then refused to extend lapsing “Obamacare” subsidies that had helped millions to get coverage, and reduced premiums for many millions more.

Democrats are determined to reverse those two steps, somehow, and you can expect them to make that a rallying cry in their campaigns for November’s midterm elections. But at least some Democrats don’t want to stop there. On March 19, a dozen of the party’s senators released an open letter announcing their intention to develop policies that would address a broader topic: The underlying increase in health care costs that is affecting everybody, not just people who are uninsured, on Medicaid, or buying coverage at HealthCare.gov.

The roughly 170 million Americans who get coverage through their employers are now paying (directly and indirectly) an estimated $27,000 a year on average for a family policy. “The American people need relief from rising premiums and deductibles that are forcing families into financial ruin,” the Senate Democrats wrote in their letter. “They also want an insurance system that doesn’t require them to jump through hoops and hack through red tape every time they need care.”

That may sound like a bunch of frothy boilerplate, given that the letter contained no specifics. But it’s not just these Democratic lawmakers who say it’s time to have a broader conversation, one that goes beyond undoing what Trump and the Republicans have just done. You hear the same thing from prominent analysts and advocates like Anthony Wright, president of the pro-coverage, pro-consumer organization FamiliesUSA.

“I do think people recognize that, as we wage the fight to defend coverage and consumer protection and specific communities under attack, that we don’t fall into a trap of defending the status quo that people thought rightly was broken,” Wright told me in an interview. “We need to show that we have a plan, not just to repeal bad stuff, or even to rebuild—but to reimagine what the health system should look like.”

That kind of reimagining can’t happen right away. Trump and the Republicans seem incapable of putting forward serious reform proposals, unless they involve hacking away at insurance coverage for people who need it. And the first chance Democrats might have to govern with a trifecta is nearly three years away. But it’s with an eye to that possibility that Democrats and their allies are starting to plan now—to make sure they are “prepared to take action on these issues the next time Democrats have an opportunity,” as the Senate Democrats put it in their letter.

And there’s an unmistakable parallel here, to a politically similar time when Democrats and their allies started laying the groundwork for future legislation. “This moment feels a bit like twenty years ago,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, told me in an interview, “when groups of policy experts, advocates, and politicians started to talk about health care ideas that ultimately coalesced into the passage of the Affordable Care Act.”

But the challenge is different this time, and in some ways more difficult. Reducing health care costs inevitably involves reducing the flow of money into somebody’s pockets, which just as inevitably angers powerful constituencies and industry groups. Democrats aren’t even close to having a consensus on what to do. And 2029 is a lot closer than it might seem.

Read more…

In his opinion essay, “Why Are So Many Democratic Politicians So Far Out of Touch?” at The New York Times, Thomas B. Edsall explains how Democrats sealed their own defeat in 2024 by bungling transgender issues:

Why don’t more Democrats explicitly moderate their stands on transgender rights, immigration and other issues? Those who maintain far-out positions are well to the left of the electorate and its emblematic median voter. The trans issue clearly weakened Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, leaving her open to devastating pro-Trump ads.

In the case of one of the most disputed rights claimed by some parts of the transgender activist community — transgender women’s participation on women’s sports teams — Democrats have clear liberal grounds to challenge that claim, by asserting that they are protecting a woman’s right from unfair competition.

But this phenomenon — drifting far from the median voter — is hardly limited to the left. There are many factors behind the reluctance of both Democrats and Republicans to shift to the center.

For one thing, donors, especially the growing legions of small donors, prefer more extreme candidates. Adding additional pressure, what have come to be known as “the groups” — advocacy organizations on the left and the right — demand fealty to policies that are sometimes politically costly; they threaten to support primary challengers to run against those who defy their authority. On a psychological level, Democrats and liberals are morally committed to protecting marginalized groups from harm and defending racial and sexual minorities.

Before exploring these pressures, let’s go to the dominant political fact of life working against moderation, which is that there are decisive majorities in both the House and the Senate that have no interest in abandoning more extreme stands. Many Democrats and Republicans won their seats with the promise to fight the partisan opposition until hell freezes over.

Edsall has much more to say about Democrats bumbling into extremist stereotypes, and he quotes TDS frequent contributor Ruy Teixeira extensively, and adds:

The one issue that has rapidly gained salience in the Democratic debate over moderation is transgender rights.

There is overwhelming evidence from polling that strong majorities of the electorate oppose discrimination against trans men and women in employment and education, reinforced by a firm conviction that trans people should be treated as equal members of society.

At the same time, majorities of voters oppose allowing trans women to join women’s sports teams, to allow trans men and women to use bathrooms based on their gender identity and to allow the assignment of criminally convicted trans women to women’s prisons.

Victor Kumar, a professor of philosophy at Boston University, argued in a July 2025 essay published on his Substack Open Questions that the backlash against the trans movement was

exacerbated by tactical errors. It was a mistake to insist that any concern about youth medical transition is transphobic. To habitually take the bait on marginal issues like trans-inclusive sport, particularly at elite levels. To deny that cis women can reasonably desire sex-segregated spaces in locker rooms, shelters and prisons. To adopt a maximalist politics of pronouns that shames people for honest mistakes.

Going into the midterm elections and the presidential contest two years from now, there is what can best be called a widespread churning in Democratic and liberal circles over transgender issues.

The Searchlight Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank founded last year, published “The Path Forward for Transgender Rights” on Thursday, a call for retrenchment on trans issues by Mara Keisling, the now retired founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality and a senior fellow at Searchlight. Keisling wrote:

There is broad support for protecting trans people from discrimination in housing, access to credit, employment and for ensuring that adults have access to the health care they need.

That said, Americans hold conservative attitudes where certain policies related to gender identity and transgender rights are concerned. Voters are especially focused on kids — from the bathrooms they use to the sports teams they may join, and access to hormone treatments and other forms of health care.

What, then, should the transgender movement do? Keisling:

We need to reset our approach to advocacy, public education and policy development regarding the rights and acceptance of transgender Americans. This means shifting our primary focus to education while continuing to try to enshrine core civil rights protections into statute.

On issues such as sports participation and kids’ access to health care, we should accept that we have more work to do to win hearts and minds, and focus on pursuing the smartest possible approach to bring more Americans over to our side.

The intense desire among Democratic voters to win puts some wind behind Keisling’s views, especially in the 61 competitive (or at least somewhat competitive) House districts, 28 of which are currently held by Democrats. Those races will determine which party controls the House in 2027. But given the power of the forces against moderation in the 374 safe districts, her agenda will be easier to admire than enact.

Read more here.

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: 

Last July, I wrote a piece asking, in the wake of Democrats’ catastrophic defeat in the 2024 election and the obvious need for serious party-wide change, “Is Our Democrats Learning?” At the time, I saw little evidence that Democratic learning was, in fact, taking place.

Posing this question again in early spring 2026, it is my sad duty to inform you that our Democrats continue not to learn. If anything, they are increasingly adamant that such learning is not even necessary. Their mantra now might be, paraphrasing that old joke about the British: “No learning please, we’re Democrats.”

The proximate reasons for this complacency are not hard to discern. Trump and many of his administration’s actions are very unpopular and voters’ views on the economy, their most important issue, are dire. Consistent with these sentiments, Democrats did well in the 2025 elections, continue to clean up in special elections, and appear poised to have a very good election this coming November.

These favorable political winds have made it a great deal easier for Democrats to ignore the need for change. Surely the American people have now woken up, are rejecting Trump and Trumpism once and for all and will never be seduced by right populism again.

But we’ve heard all that before haven’t we? In 2018. In 2022. And now in 2026 with gusto. How quickly they forget.

There was a brief shining moment right after the 2024 election when it did seem like the scale of the debacle would force a real reckoning within the party. But that trend quickly dissipated as #Resistance fever gripped the party, the usual suspects mounted stiff resistance to any revision of party positions and momentum shifted to the energized progressive left within the party.

Currently, the desire for change seems to be hovering around zero, as more and more Democrats have convinced themselves that their problems have essentially been solved. Here at The Liberal Patriot, we know all about that. Funding for our modest enterprise, always precarious, has now completely dried up. Our view that the party has neither solved its problems nor is even very close to doing so has tanked our appeal among partisan Democratic donors, even reform-oriented ones, who now tend to regard us with suspicion. A little heterodoxy is fine but there’s a limit! Hence: no money.

So we are forced to close our doors. The Liberal Patriot, alas, will be no more. “[P]assed on…no more…ceased to be! [E]xpired and gone to meet [its] maker!…Bereft of life…rests in peace!…kicked the bucket…shuffled off [its] mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!” You get the idea: we are now an ex-site.

To wrap things up, let’s review some of those Democratic problems that have not been solved. This is but a selection from a broader rogues’ gallery of problems that continue to bedevil the party.

The culture problem. This is a big one. The yawning gap between the cultural views of the Democratic Party, dominated by liberal professionals, and those of the median working class voter is screamingly obvious. One approach to this problem would be to actually change some of the Democratic Party positions that are so alienating to those voters.

Nah! That would be way too simple plus would create fights within our coalition plus…we’re on the right side of history aren’t we so why the hell would we change our correct, righteous positions? Democrats have instead chosen a different path, aptly summed up by Lauren Egan:

It didn’t take long after the 2024 election—in which their party lost the White House and the Senate—for Democratic leaders to identify the problem: The party had drifted too far to the left on social and cultural issues.

It also didn’t take them long to come up with a solution: simply to shut up about it…

[I]n my conversations over the past few weeks, strategists and campaign staffers I’ve talked to across the country have argued that in order to win back working-class voters, Democrats just need to jiu-jitsu uncomfortable cultural questions about race or gender into criticism of the billionaire class…

The shut-up-and-pivot approach is not without merit. As its proponents see it, people vote largely on economics…But the dismissiveness of cultural issues as not ‘real issues’ that actually matter to voters—and therefore not worthy of formulating an opinion on—has left some party operatives on edge. They worry that by not engaging, Democrats will continue to be perceived as condescending and untrustworthy. They fundamentally don’t believe that the party can win back working-class voters and prevent a lasting GOP majority by pretending these issues simply don’t exist.

Those unnamed party operatives are correct. The shut-up-and-pivot approach won’t solve the underlying problem, even if in the short-term it may be adequate for leveraging thermostatic reaction against the Trump administration. It is trading short-term gain for long-term pain.

The working-class and rural voter problem. This brings us to the Democrats’ working-class and rural voter problem, also screamingly obvious from long-term trends and the results of the 2024 election. Of course, Democrats take comfort from the copious evidence that many of these voters are now having second thoughts about their support for Trump and the GOP. This can be seen both in low Trump approval and future Republican voting intentions relative to those voters’ 2024 levels of Trump support.

But there is little evidence that declining enthusiasm for Trump has been matched by increased enthusiasm for the Democrats among these voters. Indeed, a careful recent study by Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams for the invaluable Center for Working-Class Politics finds that “waverers”—those Trump supporters who now say they are not planning to vote Republican in 2028—are overwhelmingly not supporting the Democrats but rather supporting neither party or generally disengaging from politics.

In short, Democrats have not yet made the sale among these voters even if they do bank some improvements in working-class support in 2026 as seems likely. They are still viewed with suspicion among these voters and not regarded as “their” party. Current Democratic efforts to reverse that perception are limited by the party’s preference for candidates who simulate a populist working-class affect while still having the “correct” positions on cultural issues—in other words, a liberal professional’s idea of what a rural or working-class person should be like.

The candidacy of Graham Platner for the Democratic Senatorial nomination in Maine is a good illustration of this dynamic. As James Billot notes:

Platner likes to present himself as a gruff, no-nonsense prole who, like Cincinnatus abandoning his plow, felt compelled to enter the race by the sheer weight of national misery. After bouncing between several schools in Maine, he enlisted in the Marines in 2004 and served in Iraq and Afghanistan. A brief spell at George Washington University, a stint tending bar, and another War on Terror tour (this time with the private military company formerly known as Blackwater) followed before he returned home to become an oyster farmer. It was only after Democratic consultants “discovered” him—in a video for a local group opposing a Norwegian company’s plan to build a large salmon farm off his hometown of Sullivan—that he entered the political arena.

What tends to be omitted from this narrative is that his upbringing wasn’t quite so hardscrabble. Platner’s grandfather was a renowned architect, known for his work in modernist interior design; his father, Bronson, is an Ivy-educated lawyer and Democratic donor; his mother, Leslie Harlow, is a local activist and entrepreneur runs a restaurant in Bar Harbor, which happens to be the main client for Platner’s oysters. Thanks to the family largess, he enrolled at the elite Hotchkiss School before moving to another private school six months later—a fact he tries to play down.

OK, from an affluent professional family, attended Hotchkiss, sells his oysters to his mom’s upscale restaurant—now that’s a proletarian. Albeit an exemplary proletarian who wants to abolish ICE, supports biological boys in girls sports and generally sees debate about Democrats’ unpopular cultural positions as a “billionaire-funded distraction.” That’s the kind of working-class dude that gives liberal Democrats the warm fuzzies; actually-existing rural and working voters less so as polling data from the primary race indicates.

No wonder that, as Billot summarizes:

For all the campaign’s talk of winning over Trump voters and bringing back the popular classes, his coalition is composed mostly of #Resistance liberals, college students, and crunchy retirees. That may be enough to win the primary, and perhaps even the general. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for a durable re-realignment, or evidence that Democrats have rediscovered a winning formula for 2028.

Even in a rural town that had supported Trump, Billot could not find any Republicans at a rally for Platner.

Everyone I spoke to was a lifelong Democrat, their first rally likely predating Jimmy Carter. They were less worried about finding common cause with the other side than about Trump putting them in concentration camps. Others even asked Platner, hopefully, if the army might consider mutinying.

We’ll likely see more of these faux working-class candidates who strike a populist tone but are otherwise culturally compatible with the priorities of professional class Democrats, whose formidable infrastructure and fundraising clout can make or break them. That will ensure that Democrats remain mostly uncompetitive in the red rural and working-class states Democrats need to carry to have a prayer of taking and keeping the Senate and, increasingly, to prevail in the Electoral College where voting strength is flowing away from high education blue states.

The trans “rights” problem. Every once in a while, some Democratic politician ventures a mild dissent from the trans activist agenda. Without exception, they are met with a brick wall of intense intra-party opposition which typically results in a hasty retreat by said politician. It is truly a litmus test issue.

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