Listen to any presidential campaign speech over the last half-century. Everything the candidate is proposing will benefit “the middle class” or “the working class” or will pump up “small business.” And won’t voters please consider that children are our future?

There’s no universally agreed-upon definition of lower, working, middle, upper-middle or upper class. And that suits politicians just fine: They want as many voters as possible to think the policies they’re promoting will benefit them.

In 2026 America, that means promising the world to the “working class,” if a new poll from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center is any guide.

A warning from within, “Whistleblower claims USPS plan for Trump’s mail voting order could ‘derail’ midterms” by Hansi Lo Wang at NPR:

The U.S. Postal Service could “derail” the midterm election if it continues rushing out “untested” technology as part of President Trump’s push to restrict mail-in voting, a newly released whistleblower report warns.

With voting by mail for the midterms set to officially start this week, key parts of the USPS plan for carrying out Trump’s directives, including requirements for states to comply, remain blocked for now by a court order in the legal fight over the president’s executive order.

Still, the mailing agency has been preparing for months to launch an online portal that would allow state election officials to submit absentee voters’ names and ballot envelope barcodes required by the now-blocked rule.

Testing of that new system, however, has been insufficient, according to claims by a whistleblower, outlined in a disclosure that Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut submitted Monday to USPS.

“USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation — raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” said the disclosure, prepared by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit organization representing the anonymous federal government official with direct knowledge of the Postal Service’s development of the new system.

If courts allow USPS’ plan for Trump’s order to proceed for the midterms, problems with the online portal could lead to eligible absentee voters not receiving their mail-in ballots in time or at all.

One potential logistical hurdle, the whistleblower claimed, stems from an unusual “zero-percent failure policy” USPS has set for the process of verifying that the mail-in ballots states want to send out meet the requirements of its new rule…

More here.

The following stub for “Americans Are Patriotic. Why Aren’t Our Politicians?” by Karlyn Bowman and Ruy Teixeira is cross-posted from The American Enterprise Institute:

Simple appreciation for America, and a desire to build on its strengths, has become nearly impossible to find among today’s politicians and pundits. The loudest voices in politics today say there’s hope for America, but only if you empower them to save it from itself. On the right, Tucker Carlson announced a manifesto last week to free America from the clutches of the elite “Epstein class.” On the left, the leading Democrat in Wisconsin’s race for governor, state representative Francesca Hong, has declined to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at legislative hearings, and in 2020 urged the cancellation of Thanksgiving, which she said honors colonialism.

Since pundits and politicians alike tend to mirror the public, can we deduce that Americans have simply lost interest in patriotism? We don’t think so. On the contrary, we believe that there is an unmet demand in this country for a revival of patriotism that politicians of both parties appear incapable of meeting.

More here.

From “We surveyed 6,000 Americans. Here is the winning message for Democrats” by Dustin Guastella and Erica Etelson at The Guardian:

In “You Can Take This as Gospel: A new breed of political hopefuls is challenging the religious right’s theology of hate with a Christian message of love,” Robert Kuttner writes at The American Prospect:

When I first moved to the Boston area in 1979, my congressman was Robert F. Drinan, better known as Father Drinan. He was, of all things, a left-wing Catholic priest.

Father Drinan, a Jesuit, ran for Congress in 1970 on an anti-war platform, defeating the incumbent, Philip Philbin, a pro-Vietnam hawk who served on the House Armed Services Committee. Despite being a priest, Drinan was also a champion of abortion rights.

Exasperated church officials repeatedly tried to drive Drinan out of politics. Finally, Pope John Paul II issued an order in 1980 that no priests could hold elective office. Rather than exit the priesthood, Drinan left Congress. He was succeeded by Barney Frank.

More from Robert Kuttner

Few clergymen have served in Congress since then, but this year, one divinity student and one ordained minister have a shot at being elected to the U.S. Senate as Democrats. They would join the Rev. Raphael Warnock, senator from Georgia, who succeeded Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.

As Christians, both James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas are superb at reaching back, past the hatred preached by the religious right, to invoke the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Maybe this is some kind of harbinger.

Talarico, who is running ahead of his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, has a particular gift for shaming the hatred preached by the religious right. “Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people,” Talarico said in a sermon. “You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. You can’t love God and oppress the poor.”

He has also explicitly criticized so-called Christian nationalists for “the worship of social, economic, and political power in the name of Christ and a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.” Christian nationalists, he deftly observed, have a “greater commitment to the love of power than to the power of love.”

Talarico’s genuine commitment to a Christianity rooted in love has left the religious right and the Paxton campaign sputtering mad. For lack of a better rejoinder, the right has gone after Talarico’s “low testosterone.” In his victory speech after winning the Republican primary, Paxton said of his opponent, “Some people know him as Tofu Talarico. Some people call him Six-Gender Jimmy. I’ve even heard some people call him James Talafreako. And others refer to him simply as Low-T Talarico.”

Even in Texas, you have to believe that the actual message of the Gospels will prove more powerful than Paxton’s pathetic name-calling.

More here.

From “Working-Class Voters Are Winnable for the Left. Here’s How.” by Ned Rust at Jacobin:

In a new report from the Equality Action Center, Joan C. Williams and Jared Abbott lay out a sensible, pragmatic approach to what has always seemed a Sisyphean task: explaining to progressives how they can turn more people on to their politics than they turn off. In so doing, Williams and Abbott offer a means to block one of the misanthropic right’s signature moves: playing populist and turning the working class against a college-educated left that wants to address our system’s fundamental injustices.

The report is essentially a “For Dummies” coalition guide for progressive smarties (especially social justice advocates, political candidates, and funders) that shows how to recognize and redirect the antisocial, prejudicial habits of their class and channel them toward the common goal of taking populism back from the Right.

Much of the guide’s wisdom comes down to the broad working class’s perception that college-educated voters are too focused on problems that don’t affect workers’ lives. Citizens scrabbling just to get by are turned off when they see elites focusing on issues that may be real and significant but that they perceive are at a distance from the pressures they face to put food on the table, collect a paycheck, and pay the rent.

Wage-earners certainly are not mostly anti-LGBT, anti-international, anti-immigration, anti-art, anti–gun control, anti-abortion, anti-democracy, or anti-environment. But they do prioritize issues directly connected to their economic and social precarity. This is not hard to understand, and progressive and the Left — if they hope to win the trust of working-class voters — need to remember it.

This is exemplified by the biggest priority gap in the survey: the 40-point delta (90 percent versus 50 percent) between liberal college-educated voters and no-four-year-degree working-class voters on “defending democracy.” The issue was the second-highest priority for the college set, but just the nineteenth (of the twenty-five priorities Williams and Abbott tested) for the working class. Food, jobs, health, wages, and safety outpoll any four-syllable word used by a group that’s uphill from you.

More here.

A couple of charts from “CNN Data Guru Exposes Huge Drop in Trump’s Core Supporters” by Cameron Adams at yahoo! news:

More here.

From “Voters Think Billionaires Earned Their Wealth Through Exploitation, Not Hard Work‘ at Data for Progress:

This summer, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire. Yet, in 2025, nearly 2 in 5 Americans could not afford a $400 emergency expense. As the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and voters are recognizing how extreme wealth not only exploits the working class, but also negatively influences politics.

New polling from Data for Progress finds that voters think they are more likely to become homeless than a millionaire or billionaire, and reject the idea that billionaires obtain their wealth through innovation and hard work, instead seeing them as exploitative and a sign of a dysfunctional, anti-working-class economy.

Voters are unfavorable toward both trillionaires (54%) and billionaires (52%), and are closely split on their favorability of millionaires. Voters become more intensely unfavorable as the amount of wealth increases, while positive intensity does not change.

…In a split test, respondents were asked if they think they are personally more likely to become homeless or to become a millionaire (Split A) or a billionaire (Split B).

Around 3 in 5 voters say they are more likely to become homeless than to become a millionaire, including 71% of Democrats, 55% of Independents, and 48% of Republicans.

…Voters are even more likely to say they are closer to homelessness than to becoming a billionaire, including 67% of Democrats, 54% of Independents, and 65% of Republicans…

More here.

The following article, “Introducing The Long View with Ruy Teixeira and Michael Baharaeen,” is cross-posted from welcomestack.org. Baharaeen is editor in chief of the Long View and former chief political strategist of the Liberal Patriot. Teixeira is senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, former politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of  Where Have All the Democrats Gone?:

“One of the defining features of modern American politics has been nonstop change. Across 12 federal elections since the turn of the century, ten have produced a change in party control of at least one of the House, Senate, or presidency. By comparison, just six of the prior 20 elections produced any change at all. And after three back-to-back, two-term presidencies between 1992 and 2016, each of the last three elections has ended with a new winner.

A series of major events and disruptions to daily life has further hastened the political instability of this era. The “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed the 9/11 attacks and the financial crisis led trust in government to crater. Massive technological changes gave us new filters through which to see the world and others in it, helping to precipitate popular uprisings and social movements but also generating growing estrangement from our fellow citizens, worsening political and cultural polarization and tribalism, and a crisis of shared epistemology. The Covid pandemic exacerbated all of this.

The consequences have been grim. Americans have grown less trusting of their institutions and each other. Politics, increasingly informed by cultural attitudes, has become a more salient part of many people’s identities. The two parties have each become more ideologically homogenous, more tribe-like. All this has put even greater pressure on the country’s political system. Fewer people trust election results or view their political opponents as legitimate. Meanwhile, growing numbers believe election outcomes matter “a great deal” and that the other “side” represents a threat to their values and way of life. (And dissent or criticism from one’s own side is rarely considered cause for self-reflection and instead often viewed as heresy.)

As the political stakes have risen, America’s two parties have become myopic, rarely looking more than two years ahead at any given time because the next election is always “the most important of our lifetime.” This has created bad incentives for them and their supporters. Republicans, who currently control both chambers of Congress and the presidency and have an ideological majority on the Supreme Court, have won the latest battles. Yet their embrace of Donald Trump and MAGA, who practice a deliberate politics of division rather than addition, has turned off a generation of young people—especially young women—who may never vote for them.

Democrats, meanwhile, made clear that they are okay with shedding the support of more culturally conservative (or even moderate) white working-class voters—many of whom had voted for Obama, twice—in exchange for a new base that is more affluent, educated, culturally progressive, and politically active, sometimes called the “Brahmin left.” While this exchange has brought them increased success in lower-turnout, off-year elections, it also contributed to the movement of both the Electoral College and Senate toward Republicans and enabled Trump’s comeback in 2024.

In this environment, it often seems political actors are incapable of seeing the bigger picture and making decisions that are strategically sound. Though some partisans on both sides still understand the wisdom and value of persuasion—of winning converts and meeting voters where they are—many others have concluded that they simply don’t want to build coalitions that include people who might be more sympathetic to some of the other side’s views or policies. They believe those people are suspect, and that closing ranks with other like-minded people will make “our side” stronger.

To be sure, one advantage of these changes is that both parties now have higher floors of support than they once did, as more voters have been polarized into one camp or the other. But the trade-off has been a cap on how large their coalitions can ever really grow. Neither one enjoys landslide victories anymore, and national elections are increasingly decided by the thinnest of margins, raising the stakes of election outcomes. It’s an unstable system in which turnover is constant and majorities are rarely around long enough to affect lasting change.

In essence, we have a “politics without winners.” (In fact, the biggest winners in modern politics are the polarizing forces selling rage bait. To support our work to build something better, please fully join our community by becoming a paid subscriber today.)

But we also know that most Americans disapprove of this type of politics and want a change. They’re exhausted by political tribalism and the two parties’ inability to work together on behalf of the country. As a sign of their displeasure, many have shed party affiliations together: the share of Americans identifying as independents sits today at its highest point ever. This has left fertile ground for either party to build a dominant, enduring electoral majority—if one of them is willing to take the long view of politics.

Which brings us to the purpose of our new publication. Cards on the table: we lean more toward the left side of the spectrum, and much of our analysis and commentary will thus be focused on Democrats and the liberal tradition. In that way this project will serve as something of an intellectual successor to the Liberal Patriot, where both of us previously wrote.

We will also dive into related themes that the two parties—and Americans more broadly—will hopefully find worthwhile, including:

• Politics without winners. The gist of this idea, mentioned above, is that neither Democrats nor Republicans appear at this juncture concerned with doing the hard work of building a broad, ideologically and demographically heterodox coalition capable of winning an era, not just the next election. They are instead more concerned with mollifying their respective bases, staying on the right side of interest groups, and winning with as few members of the “other side” as possible. If neither party is willing to forge a different path, the constant churn of political change will endure for the foreseeable future.
• Structure of the shadow parties. “The groups” (or the “shadow party”) and other forces have taken advantage of weak formal party structures—especially on the Democratic side. Though they are not well-understood, they have immense power in shaping the party’s policy agenda and messaging. Yet, their priorities and views are often at odds with not just the median American but with the very constituencies they purport to represent. If the Democrats hope to reclaim that power for themselves, they must first understand who these groups are and how they have come to play such an influential role in the party.
• The median voter. Though the term has been invoked often enough in some spaces that it has become a punch line, it’s still a good reminder to political elites not to lose sight of what ordinary Americans believe and care about—to be willing to meet them where they are and not get too far out of step with them or tell them that their views are “unacceptable.” We appreciate the sentiment expressed by our friends at Welcome, who saythey “work for the center of the country, not the center of the [Democratic] party.”
• Political moderation. There is a great deal of misunderstanding in American politics surrounding the term “moderate.” Lately, some seem to think it’s simply a synonym for the “establishment.” Others believe it means “landing in the exact middle” or having no real convictions. But it’s actually a guiding framework for ensuring our politics are governed not by the extremes but in between them. The inclusion of political moderates in our parties is important because most Americans themselves are not strong partisans, and it remains vital to have effective guardrails against more extreme factions that would, if given the chance, lurch the country in a direction the overwhelming majority disagree with.
• (De-)polarization. Political divisions have existed in virtually every society ever, and we would never suggest it’s possible or even desirable to completely avoid them. But toxic political and cultural polarization clouds our judgment and makes us more tribal, which in turn stresses our experiment in self-government. The worse these trends grow, the harder it will be to build a healthier politics.
• Patriotism. America has its faults, just like every society throughout history. But it has also done an immense amount of good in the world and made great progress over time toward fulfilling its founding ideals, and it’s important to acknowledge this. However, there is a growing strain of anti-Americanism at home that is not only bad, per se, but unproductive as a way of improving life here. Reformers cannot fix a country they do not love. While reflexive or coerced patriotism is not healthy either, a strong national and civic identity can benefit all citizens.
• Prosperity and growth. Voters have lost faith in the ability of either party to deliver prosperity and growth. Worse still, some prominent figures, particularly on the political left, have questioned whether the goal of growth is even worthwhile. Yet, few things are more important to the average voter than strong economic growth and the opportunities it presents for upward mobility and a prosperous life. As we confront the momentous economic transformation driven by AI, this challenge to the parties will only grow in importance.
• Civic culture. An underrated factor behind America’s political malaise is the decline of shared activities, spaces, and culture. As technological advances have made it easier to live life on screens at home, Americans have been spending less time in groups and more time alone. There are fewer opportunities to truly know our neighbors, making it more likely that our understanding of them will be filtered through the distorted lens of social media. The country desperately needs a revival of its civic institutions to help bring people of different backgrounds together and break down superficial barriers.
• The working class. There has been much debate recently about what it means to be “working class” in America: is it tied to income, education, both, or something else entirely? No matter how one defines it, this cohort clearly has an immense amount of influence on the country’s politics. It is thus worth trying to better understand working-class Americans and their concerns, beliefs, and voting habits.
• The Democratic Party. We have previously written at length about our thoughts on the state of the Democrats, and that will continue in this publication, especially in the lead-up to the 2028 presidential primary. What will the party stand for in the post-Trump era? Who will lead it? Which factions will have the most influence? And are they setting themselves up for long-term success or succumbing to short-term thinking again?

As we write about these themes and more, we will be guided by old-school liberal values. We will maintain a commitment to ideological pluralism, free speech, and civil discourse, and no topic will be off-limits. We will strive to approach our analysis and commentary in a manner that is pragmatic, intellectually curious, and open to a good-faith exchange of ideas. At the same time, we will reject extremism, purity, dogma, and reflexive partisanship. We will also bring a data-driven approach to everything we do, and do our best to engage with information that may contradict or complicate our priors.

For now, The Long View will be a two-year project with Welcome that will go through the final night of the 2028 Democratic National Convention. We hope you will join us as we embark on this new venture.”

Click on the article link in the introductory paragraph to subscribe.

Some excerpts from “The Red Scare Returns to America. This time, though, it is pure farce” by Katherine Stewart at The Contrarian:

“With their party’s popularity in freefall, leading Republicans have identified a new message to unite around. The Democrats, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson, will lead America down “the dark road of death to communism.” President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with religious right leaders such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s spiritual leader Doug Wilson, have made equally histrionic claims. The Red Scare has returned to America, only this time it is pure farce. Still, this is dangerous stuff and will appeal to some voters. The pro-democracy coalition must confront it directly and forcefully.

…Republicans point to the candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America who have won their races — never mind that others have failed. Notwithstanding the presence of some noisy individuals on the fringes whose years-old tweets have received extraordinary amounts of attention, the politics of the Democratic Party remain, on balance, closer to the center than even those modest proposals…it’s about distracting from the current administration’s corruption and incompetence, criminalizing dissent, and laying the groundwork for authoritarianism.

What to do? This is no time for Democrats, progressives, and others in the pro-democracy coalition to return to the familiar defensive crouch. Rather, they must blow the whistle on this effort to distract from the failures and corruption of the worst administration in American history…Welcome to Trump’s America! We are now a country where dear leader and his friends use every lever of government to direct money away from you and into their pockets.

…In America today, we have a Cabinet, with a collective net worth around $7.5 billion, making policy for the benefit of billionaires; we have major AI investors “regulating” AI; and defense contractors overseeing defense contracts (especially when one of the president’s sons is involved). And we have sectors of the corporate world supplying Trump with free legal services, ballrooms, and whatever else he craves at any given moment. The difference between this and state socialism is that, under the Trump administration, profits are privatized while the costs are spread out among the population.

…The fear that powers the Red Scare is just the fear that American might one day become the free, fair, and democratic society that it has always promised to become.”

McCarthyism played out decades ago, and this twisted version will be a tough sell to the centrist Democrats, Independents and swing voters they want to get. It’s hard to see much value added for Republicans here. Voters who would buy into such infantile hysteria while Republicans rob the U.S. treasury blind were probably already set against Democrats. And after all, Trump and his GOP enablers are the ones who support Russia. Expect Republican midterm candidates to squirm like greased snakes when they ‘splain why they oppose giving Ukraine what it has asked for to defend their country against Russia.