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 Democrats have Trump right where they want him! Anti-racism didn’t work….anti-fascism didn’t work….so now it’s time for anti-feudalism. No kings! The Democrats are certainly right that anti-feudalism is popular. The June 14 “No Kings” demonstrations were very successful in turning out protestors with nationwide estimates in the 4-6 million range, compared to 3-5 million for the April 5 “Hands Off” protests.

Cue the rapturous “turning the corner” pronouncements from the usual suspects. The honest workers and peasants of America, led by their vanguard party, the (professionals-dominated) Democrats, are rising up to throw off the shackles of oppression! The #Resistance has been reawakened and a wave is gathering to sweep the hated Trump and his MAGA movement into the ashbin of history!

Well…maybe. But why should we believe this isn’t just the latest iteration of a failed strategy? For ten years, since Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, Democrats have tried over and over to turn a political strategy centered around Trump and his terribleness into a successful exorcism of Trump/right populism. It hasn’t worked.

But this time it will, we are assured. This time is different. This time, he’s gone too far. This time, voters will be roused from their stupor and massively reject the Bad Orange Man. If only it were that simple. Here are some reasons why it’s not.

Start with Trump’s and the GOP’s popularity. They’re not popular but then again neither are the Democrats. Trump’s approval has gone down since the beginning of his second term, now sitting at 46.5 percent in the RCP running average (a point lower in Nate Silver’s average). But Trump is still running ahead of his approval rating at this point in his first term. And at this point in his second term, he’s actually running slightly ahead of Obama and Bush at this point in their second terms.

In terms of favorability, Republican Party favorability still significantly outruns Democratic favorability (42 percent vs. 35 percent). The Democrats are a dreadful 24 points underwater (favorable minus unfavorable) while Republicans are net negative by a more modest 11 points. And Trump’s favorability is higher than that of his party and of course way higher than the Democrats’.

That’s a problem. To truly vanquish Trump and his movement, it won’t be enough to rely on their unpopularity; Democrats must work on making themselves much more popular and attractive than they are.

That won’t be easy given the scale of the challenge Democrats face in the current era. David Brooks put it well in a recent column:

For nearly a century, the Democrats have ridden on the grand narratives of previous eras. First, the welfare state narrative…Second, the liberation narrative…Those are noble narratives. They are not sufficient in the age of global populism.

The Democrats’ first core challenge is that we live in an age that is hostile to institutions and Democrats dominate the institutions—the universities, the media, Hollywood, the foundations, the teachers unions, the Civil Service, etc. The second is that we live in an age in which a caste divide has opened up between the educated elite and everybody else, and Democrats are the party of the highly educated.

Democrats recently had an argument about whether they should use the word “oligarchy” to attack Republicans. They are so locked in their old narratives that they are apparently unaware that to many, they are the oligarchy…(emphasis added)

Every society has a recognition order, a diffuse system for doling out attention and respect. When millions of people feel that they and their values are invisible to that order, they rightly feel furious and alienated. Of course they’ll go with the guy—Trump—who says: I see you. I respect you. If Democrats, and the educated class generally, can’t change their values and cultural posture, I doubt any set of economic policies will do them any good. It is just a fact that parties on the left can’t get a hearing until they get the big moral questions right: faith, family, flag, respect for people in all social classes.

It’s also just a fact that Democrats have done little or nothing to address this problem. To do so would be painful. That would annoy much of the educated class Brooks alludes to, not to mention “the Groups” who exert so much influence over the party. Much easier to just focus on Trump. No kings!

Let’s look at a concrete example: immigration. There’s no doubt Trump’s approach to deportation (as opposed to his program to deport illegal immigrants) has been unpopular. Many of the specific actions his administration has taken on deportations have landed poorlywith voters and given them a sense that many of the deportations are unfair and arbitrary. As a result, while immigration remains Trump’s best issue, he is now underwater in polling averages on the issue.

Voters clearly feel Trump has overreached on the issue and is not doing deportation right. But what about the Democrats? Do Democrats want to deport anyone? Do they have an immigration policy that goes beyond just opposing everything Trump does? Voters can be forgiven for not thinking so. That’s why Democrats have an incredibly abysmal rating on the issue. Trump may be slightly underwater on immigration (4 points in the Nate Silver average) but Democrats are an astonishing 58 points net negative (19 percent positive vs. 77 percent negative) on the issue in a recent poll of battleground districts from Impact Research.

The same could be said for a number of other issues—from DEI and transgender issues to energy policy and government bureaucracy—where Democrats are much more animated by opposing everything Trump and the Republicans stand for than by articulating what theystand for in a way that meets voters, especially working-class voters, where they are. In a profound way, too many voters just aren’t buying what they’re selling. Democrats need to sell voters something new; just yelling at (or in preferred Democratic jargon, “fighting”) Trump all the time and changing little else won’t cut it.

The scale of the challenge is well-illustrated by new data from Nate Silver. Silver took the Catalist data and did something I did a lot in the aftermath of the 2020 election. He calls it using the “net contribution to popular vote margin” or NCPVM to measure election-to-election change; in my earlier analyses I called it the CDM for “contribution to Democratic margin”. But it’s exactly the same concept and math.

The idea is very simple. To calculate the NCPVM/CDM for a given demographic in a given election, multiply the election’s proportion of voters in that demographic group (which reflects both that group’s underlying size and its election-specific turnout rate) by the group’s Democratic margin in that election. These results can then be compared across elections to see how demographic groups change in their contribution to the overall Democratic margin and therefore drive election-to-election margin change.

Silver has helpfully done this for a number of key demographic groups. His aim was to show “how the electoral math flipped against Democrats” and turned a winning coalition into a losing one. I think his results are quite illuminating and do indeed illustrate the startling change in electoral math and the scale of the Democrats’ challenge. (Frankly, I stopped using CDM because I worried it was a bit too arcane for most readers but I am hopeful that Silver’s analysis will help popularize this very useful metric.)

Here are some of Silver’s tables:

And finally:

The final column in Silver’s tables shows the net swing by demographic group 2012-2024. But of course you can use Silver’s data to compare any two elections (e.g., 2020-2024) to enrich the story. But generally the following is true, as Silver says:

[O]verall, Democrats look like a party that took for too much for granted: that Black voters would continue to vote for them at near-unanimous rates, that Hispanics and Asian American voters were solidly in their coalition rather than often being swing voters, that Gen Z voters (particularly Gen Z men) would be as liberal as the Millennials that came of age under Obama, and that the rising share of college-educated voters would offset any other problems. Democrats simply don’t have a coalition that adds up to 50 percent—plus whatever additional margin they need in the Electoral College—any longer. To the extent they see elections as a demographic numbers game, they need to go back to the drawing board.

Back to the drawing board indeed. “No Kings” is not enough; it’s just another Democratic mirage fooling them into thinking a new slogan and more anti-Trump demonstrations will get them to the promised land. It won’t so that land will continue to shimmer tantalizingly in the distance. But wake up Democrats, it’s just a mirage.

The following article by Democratic political consultant Douglas Schoen, is cross-posted from The Hill:

Immigration may be one of President Trump’s strongest issues, but recent polling data suggests that the administration’s tactics are facing growing opposition, potentially turning one of Trump’s strengths into a vulnerability.

Put another way, as protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement efforts rage in Los Angeles and other cities, Americans increasingly disapprove of Trump’s response, even if they also do not support the civil unrest.

Indeed, a plurality (47 percent) of Americans disapprove of Trump’s decision to deploy the Marines, versus 34 percent who approve, according to YouGov polling.

As it relates to the president’s decision to federalize the California National Guard and deploy them against the protestors, a similar 45 percent of Americans disapprove, while 38 percent approve, the same poll shows.

Those views, combined with the fact that it’s incredibly hard to argue, as the administration has, that the protests pose a credible threat to the United States, make it more likely that support for Trump’s approach will further decline.

After a U.S. District Court ruled that Trump’s use of the National Guard was illegal, an appeals court reversed that decision, letting the order remain in place for now.

To be sure, Americans also take a dim view of the protests themselves, something Axios described as a continuation of a historical trend.

By a 9-point margin (45 percent to 36 percent), Americans disapprove of the protests in Los Angeles, and there is a virtual tie on whether people believe the protests are “mostly peaceful” (38 percent) or “mostly violent” (36 percent).

Predictably, Democrats (58 percent) are more supportive of the protests than Republicans (15 percent), although a plurality of independents (41 percent) disapprove.

In some ways, the administration should have foreseen Americans’ hesitancy when it comes to using the military to enforce immigration policies, even those that had widespread support.

Immediately after Trump’s inauguration, 66 percent of Americans supported deporting illegal migrants, but only 38 percent supported involving the military, according to Ipsos.

To that end, despite mixed feelings over the protests, the administration’s recent hardline rhetoric and policies are beginning to weigh on perceptions of Trump’s handling of immigration more broadly.

In early March, Trump had a plus-13 net approval on immigration (53 percent to 40 percent) according to Economist/YouGov polling.

That same poll, conducted as the situation in Los Angeles deteriorated and Trump federalized the National Guard, shows Trump’s net approval on immigration shrinking to plus-4 (49 percent to 45 percent).

Moreover, the more recent poll reveals that a plurality (47 percent) of Americans, including a 44 percent plurality of independents, believe that Trump’s approach to immigration is “too harsh.”

Other polls are even more negative for the White House.

A recent Quinnipiac poll, also conducted as the protests in Los Angeles began in earnest, shows Trump’s approval on immigration actually underwater, with just 43 percent of registered voters approving, versus a majority (54 percent) disapproving.

To be clear, this is not to say that Americans are suddenly against tougher immigration policies. As the data shows, Americans remain broadly supportive of many of Trump’s policies.

For example, there is near-universal support (87 percent) for deporting migrants who commit violent crimes, and a plurality (47 percent) of Americans support deportations for migrants who commit non-violent crimes, per the aforementioned Economist/YouGov poll.

Rather, this is to make the point that when the administration takes an extreme approach or acts hastily, it does so without broader support among American voters.

The same poll reveals widespread opposition to deporting migrants married to U.S. citizens (66 percent) and those brought here as children (61 percent).

A majority (54 percent) of Americans also opposes deporting migrants with young children born in the U.S., even if the parents are in the country illegally.

Similarly, 57 percent believe the administration is making mistakes in who it is deporting, while 74 percent say the government should make sure no mistakes are made in who is deported, even if it drags out the process.

Taken together, the polling data should serve as a warning to both the administration and the Democrats.

For the White House and Trump, heavy-handed deportation policies risk undermining support for what is his strongest issue. They should recalibrate their approach and tailor it narrowly, so that not every single immigrant is in their crosshairs.

Few Americans, outside of the far left, would have an issue if the administration stuck to its policy of deporting migrants who commit crimes, and it would be a losing issue for Democrats to stand in the way.

At the same time, Americans do broadly support many of Trump’s policies, and he was elected in large part because of his promise to remove violent migrants.

Last Summer, a Democratic consulting firm published a survey which noted that, if former President Biden were reelected, the top two concerns Americans had were that the border would be wide open (51 percent), and crime would be out of control, threatening police and businesses (50 percent).

Instead of blindly opposing all of Trump’s immigration policies, Democrats should consider this their “Sister Souljah” moment. They can affirm their support for deporting violent criminals, advance their own pathway to citizenship for some migrants, and double down on support for law and order.

Ultimately, given the salience of this issue, it is likely that whichever side internalizes the polling data and adjusts its approach first stands to benefit politically. It just remains to be seen whether Trump or Democrats are willing to do so.

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:

As the riots in Los Angeles developed, one question kept going through my brain: Have Democrats learned anything?

The chaos in Southern California could have been designed in a lab to exploit Democratic weak spots, combining the issues of illegal immigration, crime, and public disorder. Yet their most visible response to the anti-deportation riots in Los Angeles has been to denounce President Trump for sending National Guard troops to quell the riots. The situation, they insist, is under control—or at least it was, until Trump intervened.

This view is not shared by some in charge of actually doing the quelling. As Los Angeles police chief Jim McDonnell admitted at a Sunday evening press conference:

We are overwhelmed…Tonight, we had individuals out there shooting commercial-grade fireworks at our officers…that can kill you…They’ll take backpacks filled with cinder blocks and hammers, break the blocks, and pass the pieces around to throw at officers and cars, and even at other people.

Meanwhile, California governor Gavin Newsom waved the bloody shirt of January 6, arguing that that was when the National Guard was needed and that therefore Trump is a hypocrite to call them in now. The state is now suing to stop the deployment while Newsom exchanges insults with Trump and White House “border czar” Tom Homan.

New Jersey senator Cory Booker echoed Newsom on Sunday, calling the protests “peaceful” while blaming Trump for “sowing chaos.” And Democratic commentators like former Labor Secretary Robert Reich saw the use of the National Guard as ushering in “the first stages of a Trump police state.” Congressional Black Caucus chair Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) declared that Trump’s actions were “unlawful” and that they constituted “impeachable offenses.”

In lonely contrast to these voices, John Fetterman, the maverick Democrat Senator from Pennsylvania channeled the normie voter reaction to violent street demonstrations:

My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement…I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration—but this is not that…This is anarchy and true chaos.

The fact that he is virtually the only prominent Democrat to say something like this speaks volumes.

There might very well be a universe where it makes sense for Democrats—already saddled with a dreadful image on crime and immigration—to train their fire on Trump and the National Guard instead of anti-deportation rioters. However, it is not the universe we currently inhabit.

As David Ignatius, a pro-Democratic but moderate Washington Postcolumnist, notes:

Democrats have gotten the border issue so wrong, for so long, that it amounts to political malpractice. The latest chapter—in which violent protesters could be helping President Donald Trump create a military confrontation he’s almost begging for as a distraction from his other problems—may prove the most dangerous yet.

When I see activists carrying Mexican flags as they challenge ICE raids in Los Angeles this week, I think of two possibilities: These “protesters” are deliberately working to create visuals that will help Trump, or they are well-meaning but unwise dissenters who are inadvertently accomplishing the same goal.

The Democrats’ own goals on the L.A. disorder are the mirror image of the mistakes made by the president himself in recent months. Just as Trump has overread his electoral mandate—going further and faster than many of his voters wanted and pursuing many unpopular policies—now the Democrats have assumed they have an “anti-mandate” to oppose more or less everything the president does.

Democrats do not have to cheer on every ICE raid, but they have to be seen to prioritize law and order and not deny the reality on the ground of violent protests.

Missing from their calculus is how popular many of the president’s policies remain. And that’s especially true on the two issues in question on the streets of L.A.: law and order, and illegal immigration.

Sure, President Donald Trump’s approval rating has declined some, and many of the things he has done are very unpopular. But the public still generally approves of Trump’s deportation program for illegal immigrants. Support is overwhelming when the focus is narrowed to those who have committed violent crimes. And the Republican Party is still preferred to the Democrats on crime, policing, and immigration, with particularly wide margins among the working class.

The Democrats risk going back to square one on the key issues undermining their brand. Recall that in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide movement sparked by it, the climate for police and criminal justice reform was highly favorable. But Democrats, taking their cue from progressive activists, blew it by allowing the party to be associated with toxic movement slogans like “defund the police.” Meanwhile, many Democratic officials declined to prosecute lesser crimes, degrading the quality of life in many cities under Democratic control.

It’s also worth recalling that prior to the election, a Democracy Corps survey asked voters what they would worry about the most if Biden won the election. Topping the list was “the border being wide open to millions of impoverished immigrants, many are criminals and drug dealers who are overwhelming America’s cities.”

But a very close second—just a point behind—was “crime and homelessness being out of control in cities and the violence killing small businesses and the police.” Among black, Hispanic, and Asian voters—as well as among white millennials, moderate Democrats, and political independents—crime and homelessness worries actually topped the list.

Since that low point in the immediate post-Floyd period, Democrats have made some modest progress in rehabilitating their image. They’ve had a big assist from the voters in this regard, particularly those in deep-blue municipalities like San Francisco, where excessively lenient progressives, like prosecutor Chesa Boudin, have been replaced with more moderate Democrats who are more willing to enforce the law.

But most Democrats are still reluctant to embrace an unapologetic law-and-order stance, as their reaction to the Los Angeles unrest demonstrates. Former British prime minister Tony Blair, while trying to rehabilitate his Labour Party at a time when voters saw it as implacably and hopelessly leftist, used to talk about being “tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime.” Something along those lines would be a good Democratic mantra at the moment, as voters are still suspicious that the party is truly serious about tackling crime and quality-of-life issues.

The events in California are only accentuating those suspicions. Again, Democrats do not have to support every ICE raid, but they have to be seen to prioritize law and order and not deny the reality of violent protests.

Politico recently noted that “ambitious Democrats…are in the middle of a slow-motion Sister Souljah moment,” a reference to President Bill Clinton’s famous repudiation of his party’s left during the 1992 campaign. The Politico article cited gestures like that of Maryland governor Wes Moore’s veto of a reparations bill and Newsom’s admission that it seemed “unfair” for trans-identified boys to participate in girls’ sports. Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel cut to the chase and characterized the Democrats as generally “weak and woke.”

All of these men are likely contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 and are making modest gestures to the center because of that. But what’s unfolding in California should make it glaringly obvious that Democrats aren’t yet ready for a real reckoning with the party’s toxic brand on immigration, crime, and public order and the fight with the party’s left that would inevitably produce. Voters are noticing and will penalize the Democrats accordingly.

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.