Some insights shared by Arlie Russell Hochschild in her article, “My Journey Deep in the Heart of Trump Country,” reporting from Kentucky’s Pike County at The New York Times:

“In the 2024 election, 81 percent of Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District — the whitest and third poorest in the nation — voted with Mr. Ford for Donald Trump. Once full of New Deal Democrats, the region had suffered losses that its people felt modern Democrats didn’t care about or address. During World War I and II, the “black gold” dug out of their mountains fed industrial America. Then the coal mines closed, and the drug crisis crept in.

…What do things feel like, I wondered, to the people in Kentucky’s Fifth District? Are we approaching a tipping point when they might start to question Mr. Trump — either because of his threats to democracy, or because his economic policies will make their lives tougher? After all, experts predict Mr. Trump’s tariffs will raise prices, and his budget cuts will hit some of his strongest supporters the hardest. Meals on Wheels: cuts. Heating cost assistance: cuts. Black lung screening: cuts. One nearby office handling Social Security has closed. Even the Department of Veterans Affairs may have to pull back on the services it offers.

…These are services people need. More than 40 percent of people in the Fifth District rely on Medicaid for their medical care, including addiction treatment. Now, Mr. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is poised to cut benefits, which could lead to layoffs in the largest employer in eastern Kentucky, the Pikeville Medical Center. Meanwhile, many children in the district qualify for food stamps, and the administration’s chain saw is coming for those, too.

…James Browning, the drug counselor, had a different take on the Appalachian pain threshold: “A lot of people around here are living on the edge. If we start to see Trump policies lead to price hikes and benefit cuts — especially Medicaid and Social Security and food stamps — some people will begin to say, ‘Wait a minute. I didn’t vote for this.’”

…But now after months of Mr. Trump’s fevered talk of migrants “poisoning the blood” of America, the casual association of all migrants with “evil” gang members dispatched by Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, Mr. Ford’s views seemed to have hardened. Noncitizens, he told me, have no right to due process. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was guilty, Mr. Ford told me, of being a member of the vicious MS-13 gang — this, he concluded from the Homeland Security website — and he thought Mr. Abrego Garcia was rightly deported.

…Democrats are deeply unpopular. According to a March poll, only 27 percent of registered voters have a positive view of the Democratic Party, the lowest level since NBC News began asking the question in 1990, and my conversations with voters in the Fifth District distilled just how difficult it will be for the party to break through when Mr. Trump has so powerfully captured the bitterness and pain that has taken root in the hills of Appalachia. The last Democratic state senator from eastern Kentucky just registered as a Republican.

…Rob Musick explained: “Around here, Democrats come off as against this and against that — and not for anything. They need a big positive alternative vision. And they need to understand that in rural areas like this, the deeper problem is that we’re socially hollowed out. That happy buzz of community life? That’s not here. There are fewer meetings of the Masons, the Rotary Club, the Red Hatters. Our church benches are empty. In the mountains, there’s no safe place against drugs. One elderly woman told me, ‘I don’t open my door anymore.’ I’ve heard teens say, ‘There’s nothing to do.’ A lot of kids are alone in their rooms online with Dungeons and Dragons. I think MAGA plays to a social desert.”

…“I think Democrats need to get behind this kind of effort and initiate a campaign of grand civic re-engagement,” Mr. Musick said. Federal funds could support the best local initiatives, he added, and help start ecology, drama and music clubs — “good local things that lack funding.”

…For now, Mr. Trump’s support isn’t fading. So Democrats face a double task. America needs a firm hand on the wheel of democracy — defending the free press, universities, the judiciary. At the same time, Democrats need to begin taking steps to regain the basic trust of voters who once supported them.

That starts with confronting, up close and personal, the circumstances that have led red America into the angry fires of a stolen pride narrative: visit, listen, campaign everywhere, propose policies that could elevate local politicians whose stories resonate nationally and begin to restore the civic fabric of life in towns like Coal Run Village and Pikeville.

…In the meantime, James Browning, the addiction counselor, offered this important warning. “If people in Pike County or elsewhere get socked with higher prices, there might come a tipping point. But what happens then would hinge on how Democrats handle it, what better ideas they have to offer, their tone of voice. If the left starts scolding, ‘You Trump supporters brought this on yourselves,’ or ‘We told you so,’ people around here will get more pissed at the snarky left than they are at the hurtful right — and Trump will march on.”

The following article, “ICE: Crossing State Lines to Incite Riots. The only disorder the National Guard will find comes from the deporters” by Editor-at-Large Harold Meyerson, is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

Let’s be clear about who, exactly, the agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been arresting in and around Los Angeles. On Friday, they raided downtown L.A.’s fashion district, where seamstresses and retail clerks, some of them undocumented immigrants, are clustered. On Saturday, they made arrests outside a Home Depot in Paramount, a working-class L.A. suburb where day laborers, some of them undocumented immigrants, assemble daily to get work on small-scale construction projects.

The microscopically thin pretext behind the Trump administration’s deportation policies is that they’re targeting criminals and gang members. The problem is, groups of seamstresses and construction workers are not commonly construed as gangs. That’s why, despite having made hundreds of arrests, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security can only claim, without evidence, that five detainees are gang members. For now, what they have is a whole mess of seamstresses and odd-job construction workers in their lockups.

When ICE agents swarmed the downtown fashion district on Friday, there was no discernible protest. The same was true at a West L.A. Home Depot that received three ICE trucks on Saturday, something that has gotten no attention locally or nationally, but which my colleague David Dayen learned about from talking to laborers there. (The laborers scattered and the trucks left without incident.) But when ICE swarmed the Home Depot in Paramount on Saturday, there was a backlash.

Paramount is one of the almost entirely Latino small cities abutting the Long Beach Freeway, which connects the port to East Los Angeles. A number of those cities consist almost wholly of immigrants, some naturalized, some documented, some not. Politically, these cities tend to elect moderate Democrats to the legislature and small-business owners to their local governments. As someone who chaired the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America during the last decades of the previous century, I can attest that we had few if any members from the Long Beach Freeway towns, and I suspect that those towns still don’t harbor a significant number of radicals.

At least during the first hours of Saturday’s protest, I think it’s highly likely that most of the protesters were simply residents who didn’t want to see their family members, friends, and neighbors seized and deported. The Los Angeles Times reported that passing motorists honked in support of the protests. To them, the guys who’d regularly turned out for day-labor work represented a significant share of their community. (On Sunday, the ranks of protesters swelled around L.A.’s Civic Center to include clergy, elected officials, and union activists. Thousands spilled along downtown streets and onto the 101 Freeway by Sunday afternoon.)

If you listen to Trump and his governmental and media minions, you’d think these protesters were rioters. Trump actually said they were rioters who were looting. Neither ICE nor any of the police agencies on the spot have reported a single instance of looting, however, and if this was a riot, it sure didn’t look like one. I led the coverage and did extensive on-the-ground reporting, for both L.A. Weekly and The New Republic, of the huge 1992 L.A. riots in the wake of the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King. Those riots continued for days, with or without the police. This, by contrast, is purely a protest of the presence of federal agents.

At Gov. Pete Wilson’s request, the National Guard was activated in 1992 to patrol riot-torn areas. But this time around, where will the National Guard—called in not by the governor but by the president—be activated to patrol? The resistance that’s being mounted only comes into existence when and where ICE pops up to make its catchall sweeps, in communities that will turn out to protest due to their relationships with those arrested. In other words, unlike virtually any previous riot, either real or imagined, in American history, the feds can turn them on and off at will, simply through their actions.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT TRUMP and his grand inquisitor, Stephen Miller, have worked assiduously to engineer. Their politics—in Miller’s case, his raison d’être—is based on demonizing the other. In this case, the object of Miller’s demonization are those immigrants he presumes to be unpopular, and, he hopes, the Democrats who defend them, or at least defend their right to a day in court. Trump and company have long argued that they’re responding to an invasion of some sort. To that end, they’ve highlighted the actual convicted felons or gang members they’re rounding up. When the invaders turn out to be seamstresses and roofers, they’ve felt an even greater need to fabricate an emergency. Deploying the National Guard helps to give the appearance of an emergency, perhaps sufficient to eclipse the absence of an actual emergency against which the Guard is supposed to defend.

In Los Angeles and California, they’ve certainly targeted terrains where there’s sure to be a backlash, including among the Democratic pols they so wish to demonize. Latino immigrants, both documented and not, have become an integral part of the L.A. economy and community over the past nearly 40 years; in some ways, the center, the established order. That’s why both the LAPD and Los Angeles County sheriffs have made clear they will do nothing to help the feds make immigration arrests. On Saturday, the LAPD released a statement that began, “Today, demonstrations across the City of Los Angeles remained peaceful, and we commend all those who exercised their First Amendment rights responsibly.” The cops would never have made that statement if they’d believed it ran afoul of L.A. public opinion. (Protesters are another matter, and the situation on the 101 Freeway is likely to result in substantial arrests.)

The LAPD’s Special Order 40, which forbids L.A. cops from cooperating with ICE and its ilk, was promulgated in 1979, for the simple reason that if contacting the cops brought with it the prospect of deportation, a lot of immigrants in need of assistance wouldn’t reach out, and a lot of crimes would go unreported. The LAPD chief under whom that order was promulgated, by the way, was the famously right-wing Daryl Gates, who led a brutal and racist department, but who nonetheless realized that crime suppression required no cooperation with the forces of deportation.

So it would require federal cops, as Trump and Miller understood, to provoke the confrontations from which they hoped to politically profit. If the predictable community backlash were to take the form of nonviolent civil disobedience as practiced by Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin, that would present them with a higher hurdle to credibly cry “riot!” That level of discipline in protest, of course, is hard to observe if it’s the protesters’ brothers and fathers who are being hauled away.

Even as demonstrators have assembled around the building where those seized for deportation are incarcerated, and their anger has reached the level of the occasional thrown rock, the protest is confined largely to that one area, and that one xenophobic, authoritarian policy. If these “paid troublemakers,” as Trump characterized them on social media, are to be quelled, it shouldn’t require thousands of National Guard troops—much less the Marines, whose deployment Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has considered—to police the roughly two-block area where they’re protesting.

Even when the resistance has come straight out of the King-Rustin playbook, that hasn’t deterred Trump’s cops from accusing the resisters of violence. At Paramount, ICE made 44 arrests of people they accused of being in the U.S. illegally, and one arrest of a citizen for allegedly forcefully obstructing them. In fact, that arrestee stood in front of one of their vehicles as it sought to move forward.

A day earlier in downtown L.A., a man was pushed to the ground by an ICE agent, hitting his head on the concrete pavement and requiring hospitalization. He turned out to be David Huerta, a veteran of SEIU’s storied janitorial locals who has since become the president of SEIU’s California State Council, which represents 750,000 California workers. They decided to arrest Huerta, either because they sought to transfer blame to the one protester whom they had actually injured, or because it’s Trump policy to arrest prominent Democrats (union leaders are close enough) in an attempt to associate them with the forces of disorder. Or both.

WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE. In the decade preceding the Civil War, the residents of Northern states resisted the efforts of the federal government to compel them to help Southern slave owners capture former slaves who’d escaped to the North. In 1850, the Southern-dominated Congress and a pro-Southern President Millard Fillmore enacted the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring not just Northern police officials but all Northern citizens to aid in the seizure of Blacks who’d successfully escaped chattel slavery.

The North actively resisted these efforts. Boston abolitionists formed the Anti-Man-Hunting League, which hid escaped slaves and sought to impede the slave-hunters and the federal troops whom Fillmore deployed to help them out. But the resistance wasn’t confined to the abolitionist minority. According to historian H. Robert Baker, there were whole neighborhoods of Milwaukee, Chicago, and Boston that became “no-go zones for slave catchers,” so great was the level of local resistance. As I wrote in these pages seven years ago, “Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, and Wisconsin all enacted ‘personal liberty laws’ forbidding public officials from cooperating with the slave owners or the federal forces sent to back them up, denying the use of their jails to house the captives, and requiring jury trials to decide if the owners could make off with their abductees.”

In the 1850s, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act violated the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, which gave states the power to enact laws not specifically preempted by federal authority. What Trump and his troopers are engaged in now is the same kind of violent enforcement at complete variance with the local, state, and regional sentiment. The Tenth Amendment, however, doesn’t reserve immigration issues to the states; they clearly fall under the purview of the federal government, as does the president’s right to declare an emergency enabling him to employ troops domestically—a consummation for which Trump and Miller have long devoutly wished. If California Gov. Gavin Newsom is to take them to court, I suspect it will have to be on the grounds that there’s no emergency, or at least no emergency that Trump and his minions aren’t fomenting themselves.

Whether that argument will prevail in the courts is far from certain; my hope is that it prevails in the court of public opinion.

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:

It may be starting to dawn on at least some Democrats that their heavy bet on renewable energy and “net-zero” emissions has been a huge political loser.

Early last month, 35 House Democrats voted alongside their Republican colleagues to kill a law in California—a version of which has been adopted by 11 other states—mandating that all new car and truck models sold in the state would have to be “electric or otherwise nonpolluting” by 2035. The Senate later followed suit, with Michigan Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin breaking ranks to join the GOP in ending the mandate.

The Democratic response, at least outside California, was relatively muted. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer’s complaints about ending the EV mandate were mostly grounded in dull, procedural complaints about whether Congress had overstepped its powers. There wasn’t a lot of the screeching we’ve heard in recent years about how, as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it in 2019, the “climate crisis” was “the existential threat of our time.”

What a difference a few years makes. The “Green New Deal,” that much-ballyhooed proposal to essentially restructure the entire economy around renewable energy, is dead and buried. President Donald Trump is deregulating the energy sector, eliminating renewable energy subsidies as fast as he can, promoting fossil fuel production, and withdrawing from international energy agreements. And he’s doing so with little attention from the media or protests from Democrats.

So what gives? Why are Democrats retreating on an issue that was, until very recently, so central to their agenda?

I’ll tell you why: It’s because Americans, in poll after poll, and now election after election, have shown that their views on a rapid renewable energy transition oscillate between indifference and outright hostility.

Cost and reliability is what voters really care about when it comes to energy. Given four choices of their energy policy priorities in a 2024 YouGov climate issues survey, 37 percent of voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them. Another 36 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Meanwhile, just 19 percent thought that the effect of their energy consumption on the climate was most important.

These views are especially pronounced among the working-class (non-college) voters that Democrats are desperate to claw back from Trump. Given the four choices posed, 41 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them and 35 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Together, that’s a whopping 76 percent of the working class prioritizing the cost or reliability of energy over effects on the climate.

In a separate question, voters were most worried, by far, about the effects on energy prices from reductions in fossil fuels and increased use of renewables. And again, these concerns were more intense among working-class voters.

Unsurprisingly, given this pattern, it turns out that voters just don’t care very much about climate change, at least as a political issue. As part of that 2024 YouGov survey, voters were asked to assess their priorities for the government to address in the coming year. Among 18 options, climate change ranked 15th, beating out only global trade, drug addiction, and racial issues.

In fact, voters are deeply reluctant to put up with even minor changes to their energy bills to fight climate change.

When asked if they would be willing to pay $1 more to protect the climate, only 47 percent said yes, with a solid majority of the working class opposed to even paying that much. Raise the price to $20 and just 26 percent (21 percent among the working class) are willing to pony up the extra cash. Support keeps dropping as the price tag gets higher: Only 19 percent of voters said they were willing to spend an extra $40 a month, and a mere 11 percent said they’d be willing to pay another $100.

Consistent with these results, a September 2024 New York Times/Siena poll found that two-thirds of likely voters supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” And similarly, support for increasing fossil fuel production was particularly strong among working-class voters: 72 percent of these voters backed such a policy. Support was even higher among white working-class voters (77 percent).

And remarkably, the poll found support for fossil fuels was also strong among liberal-leaning constituencies: 63 percent of voters under 30 said they wanted more oil and gas production, as did 58 percent of white college graduate voters and college voters overall.

In fact, the Times survey found substantial majority support for more fossil fuel production across every demographic group they measured: among all racial groups, in every region of the country, in cities and suburbs and rural areas, and regardless of education levels.

So what have the Democrats gotten from their fervent embrace of climate catastrophism and renewable energy over the last decade? Not much.

Sure, they did manage to pass the misleadingly-named Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which pumped hundreds of billions of dollars—if not over a trillion—into the renewable energy and electric vehicle industries. But the share of renewables in the country’s primary energy consumption increased only very modestly under Biden, from 10.5 percent to 11.7 percent. And the share of energy consumption from fossil fuels remains over 80 percent, just as it does in the world as a whole.

It’s just very hard to bring that share down quickly while keeping an advanced industrial economy chugging along. That’s why, despite the Biden administration’s professed climate change commitments, energy realities forced it to preside over record levels of oil production, record natural gas production, and record liquid-natural gas exports. (The YouGov survey found that most voters were not aware that this actually happened during the Biden administration but, when informed that it did, there was a strongly favorable reaction.)

Democrats have not yet fully absorbed the implications of these shifts and how the tide has decisively turned against their energy policies. Sure, there is a modest cohort in the party that has bowed to political reality and supports scrapping EV mandates, but the overwhelming proportion of the party remains committed to the unrealistic and unpopular net-zero goals that drive its energy policy agenda. Blue-state governors continue to roll out ambitious renewable energy plans, along with lawsuits and legislation to recover “climate change damages” from fossil fuel companies.

This is madness. As the great Vaclav Smil has observed:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

What is really needed is a program for energy abundance that prizes cost and reliability over maximalist climate change goals. Yet most Democrats still seem blithely unaware of the fundamental lack of support from voters for their current approach. You’d think the massive April 28 blackout of Spain and Portugal’s renewables-dependent electricity grid would encourage them to hit the pause button on those plans before such a disaster hits the United States, which would completely discredit the renewable energy push.

There is, however, a politically sound way for Democrats to fight climate change. And it involves taking a page from the Obama administration, which adopted the “All-of-the-Above” energy strategy, aimed at achieving “a sustainable energy-independent future” through “developing America’s many energy resources, including wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, hydropower, nuclear, oil, clean coal, and natural gas.”

The YouGov survey shows that 71 percent of voters still approve of this approach, strongly favoring the U.S. using a mix of energy sources including oil, coal, natural gas, and renewable energy. Only 29 percent preferred a strategy that looks to phase out fossil fuels completely.

What voters want—and need—is abundant, cheap, reliable energy. So when Democrats advocate for something that seemingly runs counter to that, they will lose elections. No amount of effort to tie every natural disaster to climate change is likely to generate the support needed for what is sure to be a lengthy energy transition.

Climate change is a serious problem, but it won’t be solved overnight. As we move toward a clean energy economy with an all-of-the-above strategy, energy must continue to flow into American homes. That means fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will continue to be an important part of the mix.

Democrats, hopefully, are starting to get the message: that it’s time to cast off the party’s delusions and meet energy realities—and voters—where they are.

The following article, “Polling Conundrums: Activist Government, Sí; Democrats, No!” by Harold Meyerson, is cross-posted from, The American Prospect:

There’s good news for liberal economics today, as well as bad news for Democratic Party economics, and all-around confusion about the public’s take on economics. The good news comes from some polling analysis released today by the Center for American Progress (CAP). The bad news, along with a smidgen of good, comes from a new poll conducted for CNN. The confusion comes when you try to reconcile the two, though I’ll take a stab at it at the end of this On TAP.

The CAP study looked at responses to questions about economic policy from voters both with and without college degrees—from both sides, that is, of the increasingly paramount gap in American politics—and found cross-class support for a number of liberal economic positions. (The surveys they studied included those of both pre- and immediately post-2024-election voters.) Fifty-eight percent of working-class voters and 61 percent of the college-educated believed the decline of unions had hurt American workers; 67 percent of working-class respondents and 58 percent of college grads supported a $17 federal minimum wage; 63 percent of the working class and 64 percent of graduates favored higher taxes on those making at least $400,000 a year; and roughly 75 percent of each group supported expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income Americans.

But this cross-class concurrence didn’t have much effect on the actual voting of these two classes. Fifty-six percent of college grads cast their votes for Kamala Harris, while 56 percent of the non-grads (who greatly outnumbered the grads) voted for Donald Trump. At minimum, this suggests that despite voters having ranked the economy as their number one concern, the economic policies listed above didn’t figure very much in their economic assessments (at least, when compared to the cost of living), or weren’t identified as policies that Democrats favored and Republicans opposed, or, very probably, both.

This weekend’s CNN-sponsored poll highlights the Democrats’ inability to brand themselves as the party with economic policies that benefit the working and middle classes. To be sure, the public is not in a libertarian mindset: Asked whether they believe that “the government is trying to do too many things” or that “government should do more to solve problems,” they opt for more problem solving by a hefty 58 percent to 41 percent margin. So, advantage Democrats? No.

When asked which party better reflects their view on handling the economy, they prefer Republicans over Democrats by a 7 percent margin. That’s down from a 15-point Republican margin in 2022, when prices were soaring, so the Democrats’ disadvantage may still reflect public discontent with prices. Still, when you contrast Americans’ support for activist government with their discontent with the party that’s historically been the party of activist government, you’re almost compelled to reverse a venerable and fundamental rule of American public opinion: As propounded by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril in 1967, it asserts that Americans are philosophically conservative but operationally liberal. For the moment, that seems to have been flipped on its head.

This topsy-turvy moment comes with some caveats, however. First, since Trump took office again, there’s no question that Republicans in general and Trump in emphatic particular have been the activists, while Democrats have scrambled to find ways to respond and counter him. Asked which is the party that can get things done, 36 percent said the Republicans, while just 19 percent said the Democrats. The GOP, of course, has trifecta control of government, while the Democrats lack even a recognized leader—and their last leader, Joe Biden, wasn’t up to the task of promoting even widely popular policies like building new factories, roads, bridges, and broadband.

In a larger sense, though, Democrats have yet to make a compelling story of the economic shifts of the past half-century—the shift of income and wealth to the upper classes and the mega-rich in particular, at the expense of everybody else. Public support for discrete policies that stand little chance of enactment—labor law reform, higher minimum wages, paid family leave—won’t have much effect on voting habits unless there’s a plausible chance for their becoming law, and until they’re fitted within a credible and compelling story of the changes to American life. What stands out about the efforts of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, what makes their talks different from those of most Democrats, isn’t their “radicalism” but rather their ability to place the thousand unnatural shocks that Americans regularly experience within an explanatory narrative about the shift in wealth and power that’s dominated the past 50 years of American life.

For their part, Republicans do have a story, whose implausibility hasn’t meant it’s ineffective. It’s the immigrants’ fault, and that of welfare cheats (never mind that welfare, as such, has dwindled to a trickle). The particulars of a progressive populist story are there for the taking, with the added benefit that the culprits—Wall Streeters and other wielders and champions of financialized capitalism—are already widely and justifiably loathed. But building a progressive populist movement requires Democrats to talk about the role that finance and kindred institutions have played, which most Democrats are still reluctant to do. If they’re going to benefit from the public’s anti-libertarian, anti-oligarch turn, however, they’re going to have to Bernie-fy themselves. That doesn’t mean they have to support Medicare for All, but they do have to go after the corporatization of medicine, the pernicious role of private equity, the pricing practices of pharma, and the way those institutions’ money dominates politics—and then invite the public to draw its own conclusions. If Democrats are ever going to reclaim the advantage that once came to them as the champions of pro-working-class economics, they’re going to have to go big.

The following article, “What Most Concerns Working Class Voters About the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” – and What Dem Message Works? In open-ended online discussion boards, working class voters expressed serious concerns with the bill’s impacts on Americans’ health care” by Ian Sams and the Working Class Project, is cross-posted from The Working Class Project:

We’re back this week with another update from the largest research effort to understand why working class voters are trending away from Democrats.

We have shared a lot in recent weeks about what people in our in-person focus groups have had to say about the Democratic Party – for example, Latinos in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, or Black voters across five states. Give those a read if you haven’t yet.

But this week we’re sharing brand-new data about the so-called “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” being pushed by President Trump and Republicans in Congress.

For months, as part of our comprehensive efforts to listen to working class voters across the country, we’ve been conducting online research known as “Qualboards.”

What is a “Qualboard,” you might understandably ask? Simply put, it’s an online discussion forum. Think of it as similar to an interactive message board like Reddit.

A moderator posts written questions on different issues and topics, and participants respond by posting comments with their thoughts in their own words. Participants can also respond to each other’s comments. It’s a great way to get working class voters’ unvarnished and personal views on stuff.

So last week, as the House was on its way to passing the GOP spending bill, we asked 27 working class voters in our Qualboard about it. All 27 voted for Trump in 2024.

Here’s some of what we learned…

TOP CONCERN FOR WORKING CLASS VOTERS: MILLIONS LOSING HEALTH INSURANCE

Participants were provided 11 facts about the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” and asked to choose three things that concerned them most.

Their top concern was that the bill could kick as many as 13 million Americans off their health insurance. It wasn’t just people getting booted from insurance that ranked highly. The bill’s impacts on health care were consistently rated as top concerns, including others like:

• Raising health insurance premiums for millions of middle-class Americans by ending tax credits that help people afford health insurance,
• Raising out-of-pocket health care costs for millions by increasing copays for most health services, and
• Cutting billions of dollars in funding for rural hospitals and nursing homes, potentially forcing many to close.

Combined, no issue raised as high a concern as health care.

These sentiments echoed what we have heard from voters in our in-person focus groups, where participants were also unaware of the potential cuts and upset to learn about them. Many immediately launched into personal stories about how the cuts would harm them or someone close to them.

ANOTHER MAJOR CONCERN: CUTTING TAXES FOR THE RICH, WHILE CUTTING INCOMES FOR WORKING PEOPLE

They largely believe that the system is rigged against regular working people just trying to make a decent living and move up the economic ladder. They aren’t looking for handouts, and in fact, express frustration that political leaders don’t focus enough on helping the working class gain upward economic mobility. They aspire to and don’t vilify wealth, but they simply do not think the already-wealthy need more tax breaks.

SO WHAT DEMOCRATIC MESSAGE ABOUT THE BILL WAS MOST CONVINCING TO WORKING CLASS VOTERS?

Here’s how voters reacted to hearing this message:

Other messages that more intensely emphasized corrupt special interests or leaned on personal resentment toward billionaires were less resonant.

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

The release of the new data and report from Catalist has underscored the extent of Hispanic defection from the Democrats over the last two presidential cycles. We’ve seen massive drops in Democratic support from pretty much every subgroup of Hispanics, albeit with some variation: working-class Hispanics more than the college-educated, women (interestingly) more than men, younger Hispanics more than older ones, and urban residents more than those in the suburbs. But all the defections have been substantial—at least 22 margin points and usually much more between 2016 and 2024.

The Catalist data are confined to standard demographic subgroups so can’t tell us about variation among Hispanics by factors such as ideology. But the Blue Rose Research data, released just prior to the Catalist data, can and the results are astonishing. According to their data, Democratic support dropped by a gobsmacking 46 points among Hispanic moderates, from +62 to +16, between 2016 and 2024. As David Shor has pointed out, Hispanic moderates’ political behavior is now quite close to that of white moderates.

What’s going on here? Here’s Patrick Ruffini’s take:

In 2020 and 2024…realignment came for nonwhite voters. A basic tenet of the Democratic Party—that of being a group-interest-based coalition—was abandoned as the party’s ideologically moderate and conservative nonwhite adherents began to peel off in a mass re-sorting of the electorate…[T]hese voters were now voting exactly how you would expect them to, given their ideologies: conservatives for the party on the right, moderates split closer to either party.

This explanation for political realignment should concern Democrats deeply, because it can’t be fixed by better messaging or more concerted outreach. The voters moving away from the Democrats are ideologically moderate to conservative. Their loyalty to the Democratic Party was formed in a time of deep racial and inter-ethnic rivalry, when throwing in with one locally dominant political party could help a once-marginalized group secure political power. The system worked well when local politics was relatively insulated from ideological divides at the national level. But this wouldn’t last forever—and national polarization now rules everything around us.

This seems exactly correct to me and makes it easier to see why Hispanic moderates increasingly resemble white moderates politically. They are voting their ideology and political views not their group identity. This is further illustrated by examining Hispanic moderates’ more specific political views.

1. Hispanic moderates think the Democrats have moved too far left. In a 2024 YouGov survey for The Liberal Patriot and Blueprint, three in five Hispanic moderates agreed the Democratic Party had moved too far left on economic issues and about the same felt they’d moved too far left on “cultural and social issues.”

2. Hispanic moderates are hawkish on illegal immigration. In the same survey, more of these voters thought “America needs to close its borders to outsiders and reduce all levels of immigration” than believed “people around the world have the right to claim asylum and America should welcome more immigrants into the country.” Most Hispanic moderates endorsed a combination of border security and more legal immigration.

Also in that survey, net support (support minus oppose) among Hispanic moderates for a proposal to “use existing presidential powers to stop illegal migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border” was 59 points (63 percent to 4 percent). Similarly, Hispanic moderates supported by 36 points restricting “the ability of migrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum.” And they backed deputizing “the National Guard and local law enforcement to assist with rapidly removing gang members and criminals living illegally in the United States” by 34 points.

3. Hispanic moderates are tough on crime and supportive of law enforcement. Hispanic moderates supported by 53 points a proposal to “increase funding for police and strengthen criminal penalties for assaulting cops.” These voters even supported by 17 points a draconian proposal to “change federal law so that drug traffickers can receive the death penalty.”

4. Hispanic moderates are opposed to Democrats’ stance on transgender issues. In a 2023 YouGov survey for The Liberal Patriot, voters were offered the following three choices:

• States should protect all transgender youth by providing access to puberty blockers and transition surgeries if desired, and allowing them to participate fully in all activities and sports as the gender of their choice;
• States should protect the rights of transgender adults to live as they want but implement stronger regulations on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors; or
• States should ban all gender transition treatments for minors and stop discussion of gender ideology in all public schools.

The first position here, emphasizing availability of medical treatments for trans-identifying children (euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming” care) and sports participation dictated by gender self-identification, is unquestionably the default position of the Democratic Party. Indeed, to dissent in any way from this position in Democratic circles is still enough to earn one the sobriquet of “hateful bigot”—or worse. Yet less than a fifth of Hispanic moderates (19 percent) endorse this position. Nearly twice as many of these voters endorse the strictest position: that medical treatments for transgender children should simply be banned, as should discussion of gender ideology in public schools. And 45 percent favor the second position, advocating stronger regulation on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors. Together, the latter two positions make it four-to-one among Hispanic moderates against the Democratic position.

5. Hispanic moderates want cheap, reliable energy not a renewables revolution. Cost and reliability is what Hispanic moderates really care about when it comes to energy. Given four choices of their energy policy priorities in a 2024 YouGov climate issues survey for AEI’s Center for Technology, Science and Energy, 49 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them. Another 25 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Together that’s 74 percent of Hispanic moderates prioritizing the cost or reliability of energy. In contrast, just 21 percent thought the effect on climate of their energy consumption was most important. (Another 4 percent selected the effect on U.S. energy security).

Unsurprisingly given this pattern, it turns out that Hispanic moderates just don’t care very much about the climate change issue. In the survey, voters were asked to assess their priorities for the government to address in the coming year. Among 18 options, climate change ranked 14th, beating out only global trade, drug addiction, racial issues, and the problems of poor people.

In terms of general energy strategy, when presented with a choice among three options—a rapid green energy transition, an “all of the above” energy policy, and emphasizing fossil fuels—Hispanic moderates strongly prefer an “all of the above” approach to energy policy including oil, gas, renewables, and nuclear. Only a fifth support a rapid transition to renewables—actually less than support flat-out stopping the renewables push. Hispanic moderates’ preference for an “all of the above” energy strategy is reinforced by their answers to a binary question asking if they preferred using a mix of energy sources versus phasing out fossil fuels. The overwhelming judgement: 71 to 29 percent against eliminating fossil fuels.

No wonder these voters favor by 34 points more domestic production of fossil fuels like oil and gas.

Consider that moderates are the dominant ideological group among Hispanics, far larger than either liberals and conservatives. These views are the views of the Hispanic median voter. Democrats ignore that at their peril—they will either adjust or risk losing even more support among Hispanics who are no longer content to vote their identity.

The following article, “What Do Black Working Class Voters Say About the Democratic Party? What we’ve heard in seven Black voter focus groups across five states” by Ian Sams and the Working Class Project, is cross-posted from the Working Class Project:

We’re back this week with another update from the largest research effort to understand why working class voters are trending away from Democrats.

Last week, we shared new focus group data from Latino voters in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas that found serious concerns with Democrats’ priorities.

This week, we are sharing insights we’ve gathered in focus groups with Black working class voters across five states.

Catalist’s new report analyzing 2024 voter data found that Democratic support among Black voters nationally dropped 11 points from 2012 to 2024 – and even larger, 16 points among Black men.

Among young Black voters, the erosion is even greater – with Democratic support dropping 12 points overall, and nearly 20 points among young Black men.

While Black voters still overwhelmingly back Democrats, this slippage raises questions about why their support is eroding – and what Democrats can do about it.

To better understand, we held focus groups with Black men and women in five states – Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Of the 52 voters we heard from, 11 switched from supporting Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024, 8 voted third party in both elections, and two didn’t vote at all. Anyone who was screened into the groups had expressed negative feelings towards Democrats, indicating they were persuadable voters in the 2026 midterms.

Here’s some of what we heard…

DISILLUSIONMENT WITH THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR NOT DELIVERING RESULTS

Relatedly, many of the Black men we heard from seem to believe that Democrats pander to their racial identities as Black men but fail to speak to their economic identities, which alienates them from the party. As one man in North Carolina succinctly put it, “At my age, I don’t care if I’m not included. I wanna make my money. I wanna be able to support my family.” Similarly, some voters, especially the men, expressed concern that Democrats were more focused on what they saw as helping poor Black people with handouts than on helping Black working people gain upward economic mobility.

And like we have heard in almost all our working class focus groups so far, many Black voters, especially Black men, believe that the Democratic Party has become too “woke.” They viewed Democrats as overly focused on liberal cultural wars that, at best, they don’t feel impacted by and, at worst, they deeply disagree with.

DEMOCRATS ARE SEEN AS WEAK

Many of the Black voters we heard from who were inclined to support Democrats were frustrated by their sense that Democrats were “soft,” seeing them as failing to fight for – or stand for – anything.

This overall sense of Democrats’ weakness almost certainly feeds into the perception that Democrats aren’t delivering results.

MANY STILL BELIEVE SOME POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES ABOUT DEMOCRATS – OFFERING A BASELINE FOR REGAINING TRUST

RESULTS ARE KEY TO REBUILDING TRUST AND REGAINING SUPPORT

Encouragingly, many of the working class Black voters we heard from were not as hardened against the Democratic Party as many other groups we’ve heard from so far. Some still expressed optimism that they can find reasons to support Democrats in the future. Yes, they’ve become disillusioned by Democrats’ ineffectiveness, and like many of the other groups we’ve heard from, they are growing concerned with Democrats’ priorities. They think Democrats don’t deliver, but still beg for their vote come election time. But they still maintain some positive associations with the party and primarily express a desire to see Democrats be strong and focused on tangible results, especially on economic issues.

With so many Black working class voters saying they don’t see Democrats making an impact to improve their lives, it’s clear Democrats need to do better at showing real deliverables to help them. And we’ve consistently heard from Black voters that they want Democrats to focus more on upward economic mobility and a little less on social issues, even if they agree those are important. Democrats also should make Black men’s economic aspirations a higher priority.

It’s clear that, with these voters – like many others we’ve heard from – it is important for Democrats to articulate bolder visions of what they are for and demonstrate more grit in fighting for it.

Some excerpts from “The Democratic Party Is Literally Dying” by Jeet Heer at The Nation:

The following article, “The Democrats’ Great Debates: How to contain Trump and defend democracy? What to stand for affirmatively as an opposition party?,” by Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School, is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

There are now two parallel debates about the role and future of the Democratic Party. One has to do with how fiercely and by what means Democrats should resist Trump. The other is about what Democrats should stand for going forward.

For a time, the accommodationists in the party had a modicum of credibility. Maybe there were areas of common ground?

That posture was undermined by Trump’s increasing destructiveness and his habit of making a deal and then demanding more. Advocates of having the Democrats stand back and let Trump destroy himself, such as James Carville, now look silly.

The coup de grâce was the extraordinary April 27 speech by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a man known more as a liberal than a radical but now sounding like Bernie Sanders on steroids. Space precludes my quoting the entire speech, but you owe it to yourself to watch it. In part, Pritzker said:

I understand the tendency to give in to despair right now. But despair is an indulgence that we cannot afford in the times upon which history turns. Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.

These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact—because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.

Cowardice can be contagious. But so too can courage.

After that speech, I don’t know how any self-respecting Democrat can say we need to seek common ground, or argue as Carville does that Democrats should just get out of the way and wait for Trump to fail.

The other great debate among Democrats is over what Democrats should stand for affirmatively. And that ideological debate is substantially a proxy for the fight over how much influence Wall Street Democrats should have in dictating the party program.

The ideology of neoliberalism—deregulation of finance, globalization on corporate terms, fiscal conservatism—ruined the Democrats as a credible tribune of working people and set us on the road to Trump. There was a real-time test of neoliberalism as economic policy for all but the rich, and it failed. But neoliberalism is the zombie that won’t die.

We see that on an intellectual level with forays like that of Jason Furman, the sidekick of Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, with a widely quoted piece in Foreign Affairs magazine attacking Biden’s industrial policy as ineffective and inflationary. The piece, which could win some kind of award for sheer intellectual dishonesty, was demolished by several point-by-point rebuttals, most effectively by Jared Bernstein.

The New York Times, in an appalling roundtable piece titled “How Four Democrats Who Saved the Party Before Would Do It Again,” gave space to four architects of the Clinton neoliberal strategy to argue that the road back to power for the Democrats was to learn from Clinton’s “New Democrat” success. Please. Clinton, in the words of the title of a definitive book co-authored by Nelson Lichtenstein was a “Fabulous Failure.” Aided by Rubin and Summers, Clinton brought us financial deregulation, which in turn brought us the 2008 financial collapse.

And then Obama, having fatally brought back the Rubin-Summers-Furman economic team, understimulated a deeply depressed economy, bailed out the banks rather than cleaning them out, pivoted to deficit reduction in 2009 long before the economy was back to full employment, and tried to double down on corporate free trade. Obama was admirable in many ways, but his economic program was not one of them. And the economic wreckage for regular people led directly to Trump.

The kindest thing this crew could do would be to just shut up. But of course they are not going away. For them, Biden’s interventionist program was a temporary anomaly, and the task is to get back to the true path of neoliberalism.

Of course, that sort of program will not inspire voters. It would have little credibility, except for the fact that it serves the interests of immensely powerful people. And behind the ostensible battle of ideas is a raw battle of power—how much sway will Wall Street Democrats have in defining what the party of the people stands for?

The curtain was pulled back on the real debate last week on a shameful bipartisan bill called the GENIUS Act, giving even more license to crypto. This piece by our colleague David Dayen tells the full story. Several Democrats have signed on to the crypto bill, not out of principle but because the crypto industry has spread around so much money to so many legislators of both parties. The bill was greased for quick passage in the Senate.

But then Trump, with unerring timing, unveiled his latest stablecoin, called USD1, a grotesque example of the conflicts of interest that permeate the crypto industry. And so several embarrassed Democrats, with a helpful push by Dayen’s investigative reporting, got off the bill, which is stalled—but only for the moment. It is likely to pass, with Democrats only getting an amendment on stopping Trump’s corruption that is designed to fail.

Unfortunately, this useful and instructive fiasco is the exception. Corporate influence on Democrats remains widespread and substantially hidden.

If the party of the people is to regain credibility with the people, it needs to escape this corporate captivity. Democrats need to sponsor policies that are more persuasive as measures to improve the lives of regular people than Trump’s policies. Should that be so hard?

The following article, “A Comprehensive New Data Analysis Into Why Harris Lost in 2024” by Amy Walter, is cross-posted from The Cook Political Report:

After every major presidential and midterm election, the Democratic data firm Catalist releases a comprehensive analysis of the composition and partisan leanings of the electorate. What distinguishes their analysis from election night exit polling is that it integrates data like vote history, Census data and Catalist’s own polling and modeling, which can give us a more fulsome view of who joined the electorate, and — as importantly — who dropped out of it.

The Catalist “What Happened” report, shared first exclusively with The Cook Political Report, finds that Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 loss was due to two key factors: She lost roughly two points of support among those who turned out in 2020, and new and infrequent voters failed to materialize for Democrats as they had in previous elections.‬ For the first time in Catalist’s dataset, both infrequent and new voters — groups that tend to be younger and more diverse than the electorate at large — fell below 50% support for a Democratic presidential candidate.

What Happened

The Obama Coalition Turned Into the Trump Coalition

Back in 2012, Barack Obama’s campaign had a mantra — a younger, more diverse electorate was the key to reelection. Had the 2024 electorate been in place in 2012, the team in Chicago would’ve been over the moon. The electorate last fall was three points less white than it was 12 years ago. What’s more, the youngest cohort of voters by generational breakdown made up 36% of the electorate (compared to 18% in 2012), while the oldest cohort was just 39% (down from 57% in 2012).

And, yet, that coalition was much friendlier to Donald Trump than to any other GOP nominee.

So what happened?

Men — Especially Men of Color — Shifted Towards Republicans

Overall, Harris performed six points worse among men than Biden did. But that falloff was significantly more pronounced among Latino men (-12) and Black men (-7). Among white men without a college degree — a group that is traditionally the least friendly to Democrats — the slippage was least dramatic (-3).

Women Didn’t Rally for Harris, and Latina Women Moved Right

Despite the historic nature of her candidacy as the first woman of color to be nominated for president, women greeted that fact with more of a shrug. Harris’ vote share among women was basically the same as the share Biden got in 2020, except for a noticeable decline in support from Latinas. She also slightly underperformed Biden among Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women (-4) and failed to do any better with Black women than Biden did.

Younger Voters, Especially Voters of Color, Shifted Right

Even as many in the TikTok generation embraced Harris’ “coconut tree” meme, she failed to capture the imagination or support from young voters that Biden enjoyed in 2020. Among all young voters, Harris underperformed Biden by six points, but the gap was much larger among younger Latino (-12) and AAPI (-9) voters. Among Black and white younger voters, the drop-off in support from 2020 was less severe (-4).

How it happened

For much of the 2024 election, the Harris campaign was convinced that they could win if the electorate looked similar to 2020, while the Trump campaign was eager to expand the electorate. In other words, Harris wanted an electorate heavily populated with frequent voters, while the Trump team wanted an electorate filled with voters who have not participated as much in major elections.

According to Catalist, the electorate was indeed more populated with frequent voters than at any point in the last three presidential elections. The share of the electorate that were so-called “super voters” — those who voted in all of the last four major elections — was 47%, compared to just 38% of the electorate in 2020. More importantly, Harris did better among these voters than any previous Democratic nominee since 2016, capturing 50% of the vote, compared to Biden’s 49% and Hillary Clinton’s 47%.

The least frequent voters also made up less of the electorate overall in 2024 (11%) than in 2020 (16%) and 2016 (15%).

Both of those data points — the large share of “super voters” and the smaller share of less frequent voters — suggest that Harris should have been successful in 2024.

So why wasn’t she?  Because Harris not only underperformed Biden among those who were brand new to voting, but also among people who had voted in anywhere from one to three of the last four elections.

Super Voters Were Older, Less Racially Diverse, and Less Urban

So why did Harris underperform with all types of infrequent voters, not just those who hadn’t voted in any previous election? The Catalist data shows that less frequent voters are more likely to be younger, live in an urban area, be a person of color, and not hold a college degree. In other words, there is a direct correlation between Harris’ underperformance with younger, urban and voters of color and the fact that they make up a disproportionate share of infrequent voters.

For example, in 2024, 78% of the voters who voted in the last four elections were white, compared to 67% of those who voted in two of the last four elections and just 62% who voted in none of the last four elections.

A Lot of Biden Voters Stayed Home, and New Voters Were the Least Democratic Ever

For the last 12 years, Catalist analysis has found dropoff voters (those who voted in the previous presidential election but don’t show up in the current one) have been disproportionately Democratic-leaning. But in the last three presidential elections, Democrats made up for that loss by replacing them with brand new voters, who also leaned heavily Democratic. This is how Democrats were able to win the popular vote in every one of those elections.

In 2024, however, that “churn” in the electorate didn’t benefit Harris. According to Catalist, 30 million 2020 voters didn’t cast a ballot in 2024. That 30 million was also a very Democratic-leaning group, giving Biden an estimated 55.7% of the vote in 2020. Harris was unable to make up for those lost votes with new voters because 1) there were only 26 million new voters; four million fewer than those who dropped out and 2) the new voters gave Harris just 48.5% of the vote, falling below 50% for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in Catalist’s dataset.

It’s these “churn” voters that Catalist concludes both parties should be focused on in 2026 and beyond.

“The Republican playbook has historically counted less on refreshing these rotating marginal voters,” writes Catalist, “but these data suggest that may become a more important part of their electoral coalition.”

And, while they suggest that “future Republican candidates may not be able to replicate Trump’s performance,” future Republican campaigns now have a roadmap to victory — something they didn’t have before Trump re-imagined the GOP coalition.

Note: Catalist is a Democratic organization, but its data and analysis is trusted across partisan lines and among election data experts. Their partisanship does mean that their data is delivered entirely in terms of Democratic vote share rather than a comparison of the two parties. For more on Catalist’s methodology, click here.