The following article, “What Democrats Can Learn From Morena,” by Juan David Rojas, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

On June 2, 2024, Claudia Sheinbaum was elected Mexico’s first female and Jewish president. Her party, the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena), secured landslides at virtually all levels of government. Just five months later across the Rio Grande, former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party lost to Donald Trump and the GOP. Democrats’ 2024 loss culminated a post-pandemic backlash against incumbents—with the left-wing Morena representing a notable exception. The party, moreover, has bucked the trend of Brahminization among left-of-center parties that cater to college-educated professionals at the expense of a bygone working-class constituency.

Founded in 2014 by the political juggernaut Andrés Manuel López Obrador—known popularly as AMLO—Morena would become wildly popular in the ensuing decade. In 2015 following congressional midterms, the party held just 35 of 500 seats in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. By 2018, Lopez Obrador became the first self-described leftist to win the presidency in almost five decades, securing 55 percent of the vote. President Sheinbaum—AMLO’s successor and protege—won by a margin of 33 points, representing 61 percent of votes cast. A Gallup poll found that AMLO ended his term with an 80 percent approval rating while Sheinbaum has enjoyed even higher marks of 85 percent. Morena and its allies now control 24 of 32 state governorships, 530 of 1113 state legislative seats, and two-thirds of both houses of congress.

What explains the appeal of the most popular political movement in the Americas? Ask legacy media and you’ll find extended diatribes on Mexico’s purported “democratic backsliding” under Morena. Ask apologists of leftist tyrants—such as Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega—and they will explain that Morena’s success is the obvious result of its righteous anti-imperialism. In reality, the party maintains a meticulous commitment tofiscal responsibility, democratic governance, and material populism. In the same vein, AMLO’s 2018 victory was the culmination of decades of coalition building as well as the cumulative failings of his predecessors.

After 2000, the end of one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) spawned a competitive multiparty system centered around the centrist PRI, conservative National Action Party (PAN), and leftist Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD). Until AMLO’s election in 2018, no party won more than a plurality for either the presidency or congress. In 2000, AMLO was elected PRD Mayor of Mexico City, where Sheinbaum served as his environment secretary. He received widespread recognitionfor reducing poverty, expanding infrastructure and improving public security.

Lopez Obrador later ran for president in 2006 and 2012 in a coalition with the hard-left Labor Party (PT) and progressive Citizen’s Movement (MC). In 2006, AMLO lost with 36.06 percent of the vote to PAN-candidate Felipe Calderon’s 36.69 percent in an election marked by irregularities. In 2012, he secured 32.4 percent, losing to the PRI’s 39.2 percent under Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN).

Peña Nieto went on to reform welfare, education, and energy policy in a unity coalition with the PRI, PAN and PRD. The notorious 2013 energy reform allowed private firms to compete with the state oil and electricity giants Pemex and CFE. The nationalist wing of the PRD—including AMLO and Sheinbaum—denounced the betrayal by the party’s congressional leadership and founded Morena. For context, the Mexican left has championed state control of the country’s energy sector since its 1938 nationalization by President Lázaro Cárdenas—an idol within the governing coalition.

Having lost two consecutive elections to both the PAN and the PRI, Lopez Obrador cultivated a big-tent coalition in support of Morena, one that would promote ideological diversity on cultural issues while maintaining a shared, populist vision on material concerns. Lopez Obrador himself was widely regarded as traditionalist-to-conservative on moral and social matters. Ahead of congressional midterms in 2015, he stated that issues such as abortion and gay marriage were “not very important” to the newly formed Morena.

The party joined a coalition with the PT and the conservative Evangelical Social Encounter Party (PES); the rump PRD and progressive MC subsequently allied with the PAN in a comparable big-tent coalition. An indefatigable populist in the spirit of William Jennings Bryan, AMLO visited all 2,477 of Mexico’s municipalities ahead of the 2018 election where he promised to usher a “Fourth Transformation,” a reference to the preceding Mexican Revolution, Reforms of Benito Juarez, and War of Independence. The 4T—itself a shorthand for the governing coalition—would overturn 40 years of neoliberalism augured by the PRI and PAN.

Between 1976 and 1994, the minimum wage lost 75 percent of its inflation-adjusted value before stagnating until 2018. In the eyes of policymakers, low wages and weak labor rights would maintain Mexico’s comparative advantage under NAFTA and prevent a repeat of the spiraling debt and inflation of the 1980s. Morena rejected these paradigms and hiked the minimum wage from $2,650 pesos a month in 2018 to $8,400 (about $500 USD) in 2025—in real terms, a 150 percent increase. The administration also passed reforms promoting unionization and banning subcontracting, itself a convenient method for employers to avoid paying workers bonuses and other benefits.

The result was that real wages in Mexico rose 40 percent by the start of Sheinbaum’s term. Inflation, moreover, returned to pre-pandemic levels of 4 percent by 2023, with unemployment falling to a record low of 2.5 percent since 2024. All the more remarkable is the fact that GDP growth in Mexico has been mediocre, averaging less than two percent a year since 2018. And yet, wages under the PRI and PAN were so low that hikes have also benefited businesses large and small due to the subsequent boom in the country’s internal market. Unsurprisingly, both AMLO and Sheinbaumhave received high marks for their management of the Mexican economy.

A master in branding, Lopez Obrador also slashed government bureaucracy under the moniker of “Republican Austerity.” Unlike the oxymoronic Department of Government Efficiency, which has pursued destructive cuts for their own sake, Republican Austerity served the discrete purpose of streamlining redistributive efforts. Middlemen, including foreign NGOs, were axed from the distribution of means-tested cash transfers, which were reformed into universal programs such as an old-age stipend for seniors 68 and older.

The administration also executed a mass building spree, often using the military to circumvent red tape. Megaprojects such as the Maya Train, Tehuantepec Interoceanic Corridor, and Olmeca oil refinery were deliberately situated in poor southern states to attract jobs, tourism, and investment. Consequently, Mexico’s south has grown at a faster rate than other regions for the first time in decades.

None of this has compromised the country’s finances. Despite the pandemic, Mexico’s debt-to-GDP under Morena has remained stable at 50 percent, with the country’s cumulative budget deficit averaging just 3.5 percent. Refusing to also raise taxes, Morena enforced an aggressive crackdown on corporate tax evasion, with revenues from large firms doubling since EPN’s term. In contrast to the endless boom and bust of its Latin American peers, low but stable growth under the penny-pinching Morena has delivered lasting results. A 2024 report from the World Bank found that 10 millionleft poverty during AMLO’s term.

To tout these achievements, Lopez Obrador continued a tradition from his time as mayor: daily press conferences known as mañaneras. An avid admirer of the New Deal, the mañaneras served a similar function as FDR’s fireside chats, allowing AMLO to lash out at a mostly hostile media and set the government’s agenda. The three-hour affairs consisted of everything from history lectures to screeds against the corrupting influence of ‘el nintendo’ on Mexican youth.

While left-wing and materially populist in substance, much of the bible-quotingpresident’s rhetoric was moralistic and conservative in form. In his telling, privatizations and financial deregulation were part and parcel of rule by a cosmopolitan, technocratic elite that disdained workers’ traditional values. “[Mexican] cultural, moral, and spiritual values come from the people and the family, not from academia or the media—and especially not from politics or economic elites. It comes from the people,” he said during a 2021 mañanera.

In Mexico, opposition toward the former president came almost exclusively from middle- and upper-class professionals. An idiosyncratic friend of Donald Trump, AMLO was also universally hated by American centrists and progressives for policies deemed “problematic.” On energy, his government rejected the twin evils of market and climate fundamentalism. Under the PRI and PAN, market reforms and insufficient investment in state refineries led oil production to decline from four million barrels per day in 2004 to two million by 2013, ballooning Pemex’s debt and leading to a greater reliance on U.S. oil imports.

The subsequent privatization of Mexico’s energy market in 2014 led to an even greater fall in production, as the inefficient Pemex failed to adequately compete with foreign multinationals. As in California after the 1990s, the imposition of competition within CFE’s natural monopoly led electricity prices to jump 35 percent by 2017. AMLO subsequently rescued Pemex, increased oil production, and began construction of the aforementioned Olmeca refinery, though the latter has been plagued with delays and accidents.

Read more…

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:

In late October of last year, I published a piece called “The Progressive Moment Is Over.” I observed:

It wasn’t so long ago progressives were riding high. They had a moment; they really did. Their radical views set the agenda and tone for the Democratic Party and, especially in cultural areas, were hegemonic in the nation’s discourse. Building in the teens and cresting in the early ‘20s with the Black Lives Matter protests and heady early days of the Biden administration, very few of their ideas seemed off the table…As far as progressives were concerned, they had ripped the Overton window wide open and it only remained to push the voters through it. In their view, that wouldn’t be too hard since these were great ideas and voters, at least the non-deplorable ones, were thirsty for a bold new approach to America’s problems.

So they thought. In reality, a lot of these ideas were pretty terrible and most voters, outside the precincts of the progressive left itself, were never very interested in them. That was true from the get-go but now the backlash against these ideas is strong enough that it can’t be ignored. As a result, politics is adjusting and the progressive moment is well and truly over.

The 2024 election, held not long after, seemed to provide an exclamation point on my observations. But, to paraphrase President George W. Bush, “Is our Democrats learning?” Let’s revisit some of the points I made in that article on the end of the progressive moment and rate how well—or poorly—Democrats have responded.

1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hated it. Aside from the economy, no issue loomed as large in the Democrats’ 2024 election drubbing than the immigration issue. Voters thought Democrats had completely lost the plot on illegal immigration and utterly failed to control the border. Voters cast their ballots accordingly, clearly preferring a much tougher approach to illegal immigration, including not just closing the border but deporting illegal immigrants already in the country.

Since Trump’s election, the southern border has been mostly closed and illegal immigration over the border slowed to a trickle. Support for this development from Democrats has been tepid to non-existent. As for deportations of illegal immigrants, some Democrats have ventured support for deportations of illegal immigrants, at least those implicated in criminal activity.

But even here, enthusiasm has been notably lacking. Take the Laken Riley Act which has passed Congress and is now law. Laken Riley was the Georgia nursing student who was murdered by illegal Venezuelan immigrant Jose Ibarra (recall that Biden, under pressure from the left, apologized for referring to illegal immigrant Ibarra as “illegal” as opposed to the approved nomenclature of “undocumented”). The legislation named after her provides for the detention of illegal immigrants charged with theft-related crimes, assault on a police office or acts causing death or bodily harm to an individual. Just 12 Democrats in the Senate and 46 Democrats in the House were willing to vote for the Laken Riley Act, with the left of the party, heavily concentrated in blue states, conspicuous by its absence.

By a very wide margin, Democrats’ most conspicuous interventions in the immigration area have been on specific wrongful or unjustified deportations like that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Mahmoud Kalil. The former case in particular has become a cause celebre among Democrats, with Democratic politicians like Senator Chris Van Hollen traveling to El Salvador to protest his wrongful deportation. Certainly, it is not debatable that Garcia was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, even though he had entered the US illegally and even though there were some indications of gang affiliation and domestic abuse in his record, since there was a court order specifically against deporting him to that country. However, making him the focus of Democratic immigration activism is a dubious approach to refurbishing the Democrats’ image of laxness on illegal immigration.

Trump has certainly given Democrats plenty of fodder to register their indignation about wrongful or unjustified deportations. Most voters would assume that if Democrats got back into power, such wrongful deportations would stop. But they would probably be much less sure Democrats would proceed with justified and desirable deportations. And they would probably wonder if a future Democratic administration would actually keep the border under control or just revert to the chaos of the Biden years. Democrats are doing little so far to assuage such concerns.

My grade for Democrats on improving their immigration image: D

2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hated it. In the aftermath of the police killing 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 the opportunity by allowing the party to be associated with unpopular movement slogans like “defund the police” that did not appear to take public safety concerns very seriously. This was twinned to a climate of tolerance and non-prosecution for lesser crimes that degraded the quality of life in many cities under Democratic control.

Crime did not loom as large as immigration in the 2024 election, but it was still a significant drag on Democratic fortunes. In the lead up to the election, a Democracy Corps survey of battleground states and congressional district found battleground voters favored Trump and the Republicans over Biden and the Democrats by 12 points on “feeling safe” and by 17 points on “handling crime.” The survey also asked these 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.

Democrats have made some attempts to rehabilitate their image in this area but their biggest assist has come from the voters themselves who have tossed out excessively lenient Democratic public officials in a number of blue municipalities and replaced them with moderate Democrats who are more willing to enforce the law and crack down on public disorder. It’s slow going though and most Democrats are still reluctant to embrace an unapologetic law and order stance. Not for them former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s felicitous slogan: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” That’s too bad because voters really do want law and order—done fairly and humanely, but law and order just the same. Voters are still suspicious that Democrats are truly with the program.

My grade for Democrats on improving their crime and public order image: C-

3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hated it. In the last decade, huge swathes of a Democratic Party increasingly dominated by progressives became infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those engaging in them. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s justified or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized group or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

This doesn’t make much logical sense and it has led the Democrats to take a number of positions at odds with the concerns of ordinary voters. Voters overwhelmingly believe illegal immigration by anyone is wrong and should be deterred not indulged as Democrats have frequently done. They believe crimes should be punished no matter who commits them, public safety is sacrosanct and that police and policing are vital necessities not tools of oppression. They believe, with Martin Luther King, that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and therefore oppose discrimination on the basis of race no matter who benefits from that discrimination. They believe biological sex is real no matter who claims it isn’t, that spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved, and that medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available simply on the basis of declared gender identity, especially for children.

But Democrats don’t seem inclined to back down on their commitment to identity politics. Take their reaction to Trump’s efforts to dismantle DEI and affirmative action within the federal government and for federal contractors. Democrats appear willing to lie down on the railroad tracks on this one. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Trump’s actions with the disingenuous argument that DEI is merely an expression of the American values in the Constitution. That’s absurd. DEI is of comparatively recent vintage and the programs are now indelibly associated with racial preferences, oppression hierarchies, ideological indoctrination, and language policing. Those aren’t American values at all.

Tolerance, anti-discrimination and equal opportunity, on the other hand, are—precisely what Democrats used to advocate. Defending these principles against Trump and his inevitable tendency to encroach upon them as he pursues his agenda would be a worthwhile and popular stance for Democrats. But first they must recognize that Trump’s drive for a color-blind, merit-based society is extremely popular while affirmative action and DEI are not.

Instead, Democrats are repeating their misguided, ineffectual response to the 2023 Supreme Court decision that barred race-based affirmative action in college admissions. At the time, Jaime Harrison, then-chair of the DNC, “condemned” the Supreme Court for what he described as “a devastating blow for racial justice and equality.” Jeffries said the ruling showed the court was “more interested in jamming their right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”

Jeffries could not have been more wrong that opposition to affirmative action is an expression of a fringe “right-wing ideology.” In fact, racial preferences are very, very unpopular with ordinary Americans and have been for a long time. In polling from Pew in 2022, an overwhelming 74 percent thought that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. A majority of all non-white racial groups agreed. Affirmative action also lost badly in a referendum in deep-blue California in 2020. Supporters of a measure to repeal the state’s ban on affirmative action outspent opponents by ten to one, but the measure still failed.

The usual overreach by the Trump administration is giving the Democrats cover as they circle the wagons on this one. But their inability to change their stance at all on these issues will probably lead voters to believe that everything they don’t like about affirmative action and DEI will come roaring back once Democrats get back into power.

Even more tone-deaf is the Democrats’ determination not to give an inch on trans issues. But voters, particularly working-class voters, hate the pronoun police, strongly disagree that trans-identified biological boys should be able to play girls sports and don’t support the easy availability of “gender-affirming care” (e.g., puberty blockers, hormones, surgery) for minors. A recent New York Times poll found that 80 percent of working-class (non-college) respondents opposed transgender birth males playing in women’s sports and 75 percent opposed allowing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to be prescribed for anyone under 18.

For all that, only two (2!) House Democrats—both conservative Hispanic Democrats from Texas—could find the wherewithal to vote for The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act which would prohibit the participation of biological men and boys in women’s and girls sports. Even Massachusetts Democratic representative Seth Moulton, who had raised questions about having biological boys in girls sports, did not vote for the bill presumably because of pressure from the left (they viciously attacked him for being a “Nazi”, transphobe, etc, etc.) And in the Senate, every single Democrat voted to kill the bill. Talk about being out of step with public opinion.

In the latest example of this madness, Maine Democrats in their House of Representatives voted to censure and then disenfranchised Republican representative Laurel Libby (i.e., wouldn’t count her votes in legislative roll calls) because of her social media post about a trans-identified male who had won a girls’ pole-vaulting competition.

My grade for Democrats on improving their identity politics image: F

4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it. Since the days of Barack Obama and an “all of the above” approach to energy production, Democrats have embraced quite a radical approach to energy issues. They have embraced the view that climate change is not a dynamic that is gradually advancing, but an imminent crisis that is already upon us and is evident in extreme weather events. It threatens the existence of the planet if immediate, drastic action is not taken. That action must include the immediate replacement of fossil fuels, including natural gas, by renewables, wind and solar, which are cheap and can be introduced right now if sufficient resources are devoted to doing so, and which, unlike nuclear power, are safe. Not only that, the immediate replacement of fossil fuels by renewables will make energy cheaper and provide high wage jobs.

This entire argument is highly dubious and voters, particularly working-class voters, don’t buy the policy claims here at all. They far prefer a gradual, “all-of-the-above” approach to transitioning the energy system to the frantic push for renewables and electric vehicles (not to mention heat pumps, electric stoves, etc.) that characterizes progressives’ Green New Deal-type thinking. In a survey conducted by YouGov, just a quarter of working-class (non-college) voters embraced the Democrats’ current approach, emphasizing ending the use of fossil fuels and rapidly adopting renewables. This was actually less than the number (29 percent) that flat-out supported production of fossil fuels and opposed green energy projects. The dominant position by far was an all-of-the above approach that called for cheap, abundant energy from many sources, including oil, gas, renewables, and nuclear, favored by 46 percent of voters.

The hard fact is that the standard Democratic hostility to fossil fuels is not widely shared by ordinary voters, who are fundamentally oriented toward cheap, reliable and abundant energy. In a 2024 result from the New York Times/Siena poll, two-thirds of likely voters said they supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” Or how about this remarkable result from an NBC poll. Testing a wide range of policy proposals to see whether voters would be more or less likely to support a candidate who espoused them, the most positive response among voters was to a proposal to expand domestic oil and natural gas production. By a very wide 67 percent to 15 percent margin, voters said they would be more likely, rather than less likely, to support a candidate who wanted to expand fossil fuel production!

Trump has taken steps that he says will increase fossil fuel production and make energy more abundant. He plans to eliminate many of the subsidies and regulations that are designed to accelerate the transition to green energy and electric vehicles. And he has restricted environmental review processes to reduce the costs of big energy and infrastructure projects.

Much of this has both merit and popular support. Democrats, however, have been unremittingly hostile. They are letting the usual suspects at environmental and climate change NGOs dictate their response. Alas for them, voters care more about cheap, reliable energy than fighting climate change. They are willing to consider electric vehicles, but resent any regulatory attempt to force them to give up gas-powered vehicles. And Trump is right: environmental regulations really have become a shocking drag on building practically anything in this country—be it energy-related projects, transportation infrastructure, or housing.

If Democrats can’t accept that much of this is both popular and necessary, they will be unable to mount a credible response to Trump’s energy plans where they overreach or go off the rails. Moreover, on current evidence, voters would not be unjustified in concluding that a Democratic return to power would mean a continuation of Democrats’ commitment to a rapid renewables-based energy transition which voters do not support and do not believe will deliver what they want: cheap, reliable and abundant energy.

My grade for Democrats on improving their energy policy image: F

I hate to be a tough grader on all this but that’s how it looks right now. The progressive moment is still over. It’s just Democrats don’t seem to realize it. When they’ll wake up is anybody’s guess.

The following article, “Kamala Could Have Won: She was poised to claim the presidency, but Joe Biden and a disastrous campaign defeated her” by Stanley B. Greenberg, founding partner of Greenberg Research, Democracy Corps, and Climate Policy & Strategy, American Prospect board member and New York Times best-selling author and co-author, with James Carville, of ‘It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!,’ is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

Kamala Harris was poised to win the 2024 presidential election when her message included America getting control of its border and her championing economic and political change.

In her campaign launch addressing the economy and in her DNC acceptance speeches, she made the cost of living singularly important, showed empathy, and offered concrete policy solutions. She promised that Congress would enact the bipartisan border control bill. She embraced President Biden’s expanded Child Tax Credit and attacked Donald Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires. Her speeches made the election a battle for the middle class. She was laser-focused on the cost of living, while portraying—correctly, as we are seeing today—Trump tariffs as an inflationary tax on imports. She made that the principal fight of the campaign.

And after her debate against Trump, Harris moved into a three-point lead nationally and, critically, ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

But it was not to be.

Two books, one by Chris Whipple, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, and the other by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, show the disastrous decisions that put Donald Trump in the White House. I will also describe my efforts with various participants to impact those decisions.

You need to read both these important books to understand the 2024 election. Harris could have won, but her campaign had so many 180-degree turns and was so burdened by Joe Biden’s continued presence in the campaign that she lost. The lessons for Democrats are painful.

Allen and Parnes had strong access to the managers and campaign operations for both Biden and Harris, making the book indispensable to understanding the campaign’s many turns. Harris kept on Biden’s campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon. That fateful decision contributed mightily to the disaster.

But Whipple’s will be the more important book because it had better access to the advisers closest to Biden, understands the implications of changes in message and strategy for the election, and effectively uses other research to tell a fuller picture.

The further I read in these books, the angrier I grew with the Biden advisers who failed to act as his senescence accelerated, while Biden’s deep personal insecurity and paranoia produced a preposterous campaign based on his accomplishments, in what was really a change election. I was also maddened by the apparent sexism of the Biden team that assumed his vice president could not win the presidency, disastrously delaying his exit from the race.

Now, 2024 was a tough year for incumbent parties all over the world. The highest inflation in 40 years rated 20 or 30 points above the next problem in polls. All saw surges in refugees and illegal immigration. Conservatives successfully whipped up a frenzy about the elite’s “woke” liberal policies.

They were all sinking Biden. James Carville and I still speak every morning, and we were depressed, certain Biden would lose. James went on every show to vent. Despite the daunting problems, both books portray Biden—as well as Trump—as men with few doubts. And the advisers and managers are depicted as “loyalists” helping the leaders achieve their goals. In particular, Ron Klain was depicted in both books as the adviser fighting the hardest and longest to keep the president in the race.

But that does not capture the reality of doubts, fractures, and debates that I saw personally. I sent regular emails to the White House and the Biden campaign, including Anita Dunn, Ron Klain, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, John Anzalone, and later, Ted Kaufman and Chris Dodd. After Biden withdrew, I wrote to David Binder, Harris’s chief pollster, and later, Lorraine Voles, Harris’s chief of staff.

As chief of staff early in Biden’s term, Klain pushed for economic messages that empathized with voters’ pain and promised to help lower prices. He tried to reverse the changes in immigration policies that were producing millions of new border encounters. He was not alone. And he too felt that President Biden’s legacy could be best achieved by him not running for re-election.

By late 2023, two-thirds of the country thought we were on the wrong track, so before Thanksgiving I wrote a report named “The Change Campaign That Can Contest America.” Klain wrote, “I agree with this 100% and have been pressing an argument similar to this with Jeff [Zients] and Mike [Donilon].” Feel “their pain and stand for change.” But “they are not there. You have to move Mike considerably.”

After watching President Biden praise the economy for two years straight, I responded ironically. How is it going? “You have conducted an experiment—speaking positively about the economy for two years. Your overall approval rating has only declined every month.” Klain agreed but added, “In 2020, Biden was a change candidate. But today, he is the incumbent preaching stability. And a lot of black people in our country want to shake things up.”

The Biden media firm ran ads on how the Inflation Reduction Act saved you money and raised taxes on big corporations. It got strong positive reactions from voters. But I also tested Biden declaring, “We are now living through the strongest—fastest—most widespread and equitable recovery in American history.” It brought Biden’s approval rating down further.

Finally, in December that year, I wrote a letter to share with the president, saying Biden has a historic domestic legacy and could have an international one as well. Trump will be difficult to beat, and “his sole mission will be the destruction of your legacy.”

Klain responded, “This has been my view for almost a year, but Michael [Donilon] sees it differently.” Who else in the team felt that Biden should retire? Maybe most.

Joe Biden

In February 2024, President Biden’s campaign organized a session at the Democratic House members’ retreat to discuss their election plans. The campaign put sheets listing “Biden’s Top Ten Accomplishments” on all the tables.

Usually, the president loved these meetings with members where he went back and forth on policy and politics, ran late, and did a rope line. But this year, the president took only three softball planted questions, and he answered from a prepared text.

What comes through powerfully in these books is a Joe Biden who is extremely personally insecure and constantly looking for evidence of his success and approval. Accordingly, he blocks out negative information, and therefore ended up out of touch with public perceptions in 2024.

As a result, his advisers could not give the honest reason for why he should not have run: He was one of the most unpopular presidents in history; he would certainly lose and take many of his Democratic friends with him. Instead, they pointed fingers, saying Biden had a “path to victory,” but not with a disunited party and so many major leaders saying he should drop out.

That in turn bred an atmosphere of paranoia, and an enemies-list dynamic where critics were booed in campaign offices. It led the president to feel frustrated and unappreciated, wanting to defend himself in public and demanding Harris speak positively of their shared accomplishments. He freely interrupted White House press briefings to talk about good economic news. Biden also wanted to exact retribution for those not loyal, particularly former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama. They were not viewed as patriots.

In reading the books, I wondered what the Obama advisers who had joined the Harris campaign were doing.

Allen and Parnes’s Fight depends heavily on reports by the Biden managers that treat that side of Biden as normal, while Whipple focuses more on Biden’s aging and ability to do the job.

Read more…

The following article stub, from “The Persistence of Lesser-Evil Politics” by John B. Judis, author of numerous articles and books of political analysis, is cross-posted from Compact:

There have been five comprehensive surveys of public opinion in the last two weeks that attempt to assess President Donald Trump’s standing with the public at the end of his first hundred days. The polls are by The New York Times/Siena, The Washington Post/Ipsos, CBS News/YouGov, NPR/Marist, and The Economist/YouGov. Some of the results are unsurprising: Trump is in trouble with the public, but so are the Democrats. But nestled in the crosstabs are a few more noteworthy findings: Trump is losing ground among groups that have been faithfully Republican, but the Democrats continue to lose ground among groups they had relied on.

Based on the 60 questions asked by The Washington Post among ten different demographic and ideological categories, Trump’s greatest strength is among the overlapping categories of conservatives and white evangelical Protestants. A majority of these two groups (and no others) thought Trump’s economic plans would “put the United States on a stronger foundation for the long term.” They alone favored shutting down the Department of Education. Fifty-eight percent of conservatives and half of white evangelicals back ending birthright citizenship, while 49 percent of conservatives and 45 percent of white Protestant evangelicals think Trump’s tariffs will have a “positive” effect on inflation.

There were two other groups from which Trump has customarily received enthusiastic support that still appear to be on board. A majority of men without college degrees and rural voters were the only other groups that thought “Trump is in touch with most of the people in the United States.” But they weren’t willing to buy everything the president was selling. By 60 to 38 percent, white men without college degrees thought Trump’s tariff strategy would boost rather than stem inflation. Only pluralities of rural residents and men without college degrees thought that Trump’s plans would “put the United States on a stronger foundation for the long term.”

The best way to pick out Trump’s biggest detractors is to find out who opposes even White House policies that are generally popular. The New York Times survey found that 52 percent of voters back Trump deporting illegal immigrants, but in the Washington Post poll, 60 percent or more of liberals, the young, blacks, Hispanics, people with post-graduate degrees and city dwellers disapprove of Trump’s immigration policies. The same groups also disapprove by 60 percent or more of Trump’s overall performance and his closing down of federal agencies, and reject the idea that he is looking out for the interests of “average Americans.” These results are consistent with the other polls with two qualifications. Hispanics and the young are not quite at 60 percent disapproval of Trump’s policies in several of the polls, but within a few percentage points.

In the 2024 election, Trump gained support among the young, but that support seems to have dissipated. Of all the age groups, the young (18-29) are the most disapproving and by wide majorities of Trump’s handling of the presidency; according to the New York Times poll, they have the least favorable view of him, they think he has gone “too far” in making changes to the country’s political and economic system, and they think these changes are “bad for the country.”

Of white voters, disaggregated by sex and education, the most opposed to Trump are college-educated women. Since 1988, a majority of college-educated women have backed the Democratic presidential nominee, but the recent surveys suggest they are reaching new heights in their hostility toward a Republican president. Among whites, they are the only group to disapprove of Trump’s policies on curbing illegal immigration and to say that Trump’s attempt to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs has gone “too far.” In the NPR poll, 65 percent give Trump an “F” on handling the economy. (By contrast, 51 percent of college-educated men and 30 percent of men without degrees give Trump an “F.”) Sixty-nine percent of white college-educated women disapprove of his handling of foreign policy.

There are two groups that have backed Trump in the past that appear to have become critical of his second administration. A majority of seniors (aged 65 and over) backed Democratic presidential candidates in 1992, 1996 and 2000, but after that election, seniors have backed the Republican candidate every four years. In the last election, Trump edged Kamala Harris among this demographic, by 51 to 47 percent.

In the recent surveys, only the young exceeded seniors in their dislike of Trump. Seniors “strongly disapprove” of the way Trump “is handling his job as president” (Economist); they believe Trump “is tearing down the system completely” (New York Times); they “dislike” Trump  “a lot” (Economist); they are “very concerned” that Trump is reducing the size and role of government in US society (Washington Post); they believe Trump is making “major changes to how the US government works” and that these changes are “for the worse” (CBS). They like his policies on immigration, but not on the economy or on foreign policy.

The other group that may be turning on Trump is white women without college degrees.  In the 2024, Trump won these voters by a resounding 62 to 37 percent, but unlike their male counterparts, they do not appear to be in step with his administration. A majority are concerned that Trump is doing “too much” to reduce the size and role of the federal government. A plurality says that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs “help level the playing field for people who have been denied equal opportunity” (Washington Post). They are divided 47 to 47 on approval of his administration, with 41 percent “strongly” disapproving. And they disapprove of his handling of the economy, tariffs, and foreign policy (NPR).

These polls suggest that Trump’s electoral majority may be evaporating. He couldn’t have won in 2024 if he had to rely primarily on white evangelicals, self-identified conservatives, and working-class white men. His only policies that generally meet voters’ approval are his attempts to discourage illegal immigration. Some, like the reduction in funding for medical research, are opposed by all the different voting groups, including self-identified Republicans and conservatives.

Read more here.

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

Trump’s first hundred days are over. There is a blizzard of polling data indicating that American voters are not happy so far with their second ride on the Trump train. On RCP, Trump’s average net approval ratings (approval minus disapproval) are -6 overall, -13 on the economy, and -21 on inflation. Sad!

Any given poll these days is full of bad political news for the Trump administration. Take the latest CBS News poll, where Trump’s approval (45 percent) is right at the RCP running average. In the poll, most think the condition of the national economy is fairly or very bad and by almost 2:1 think that the economy is getting worse rather than better. They overwhelmingly believe the Trump administration is not doing enough on “lowering the prices of goods and services” but believe the administration is doing too much on “putting tariffs on goods from other countries.” On a personal level, respondents are far more likely to think Trump’s policies are making them financially worse off rather than better off and to believe his policies are making the prices they pay for food and groceries go up rather than down. Finally, most believe Trump’s policies are working against the interests of middle-class and working-class people while working for the interests of wealthy people.

Other polls are quite consistent with these data. This presents Democrats with an obvious opportunity to make up the ground they lost in the last election and perhaps shift the political terrain decisively in their favor. But will they—can they—do this? That is possible but hardly certain or even probable. In my view, Democrats currently are at a fork in the road to their political future and how that future turns out depends on which path they choose. Down one path lies the party of restoration; down the other lies the party of change. Let me explain.

Start with the party of restoration. Democrats’ first instinct in opposing Trump administration actions has been to denounce these actions in the most flamboyant terms possible. That’s understandable; many of Trump’s action have been very unpopular, from DOGE excesses to the chaotic tariff regime, and they are the opposition party. Fair enough.

But they’re also the party that comprehensively lost the last election and has been bleeding working-class voters for years. If the solution offered to the depredations of Trump is simply to restore the Democrats to power, that is unresponsive to the messages voters have been sending. Voters didn’t and don’t like the Democrats either; they don’t trust them to govern or manage the economy well and fear the party is obsessed with issues voters either don’t care about or actively oppose. They will not forget what they didn’t like about the Biden administration and the last 10 years of the Democratic Party so easily.

Yet Democrats are acting like this isn’t a problem. They seem to believe if they just turn up the volume high enough on how terrible Trump is, all will be forgiven and voters will re-embrace the Democrats. All voters really want, they assure themselves, is a Democratic Party that will fight hard enough against Trump and his evil minions and restore the good guys to power.

This may suffice to clear the low bar of taking back the House in 2026 but it is not remotely plausible as a longer term strategy to win back working-class voters and vanquish right populism. These voters do not want to see the status quo anterestored; they hated it! But what other than restoration are Democrats really offering at this point? Not much; it’s all fight, fight, fight with the implication that putting Democrats back in power will make everything dandy.

Indeed, the hottest political competition within the Democratic Party is who can call for fighting Trump and MAGA in the most exciting way. Bernie Sanders and AOC have cornered the market on the “fighting the oligarchy” approach. More recently, JB Pritzker, the Democrats’ designated “good” billionaire, has upped the ante on the anti-fascist approach in a New Hampshire speech to enthusiastic partisans:

It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once…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 soap box and then punish them at the ballot box…

Fellow Democrats, for far too long we’ve been guilty of listening to a bunch of do-nothing political types who would tell us that America’s house is not on fire, even as the flames are licking their faces. Today, as the blaze reaches the rafters, the pundits and politicians—whose simpering timidity served as kindle for the arsonists—urge us now not to reach for a hose.

Thank you Winston, I mean JB. Yes, you will fight them on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields, and in the streets, etc. The thought of the portly JB Pritzker leading the heroic anti-fascist fighters into the streets is nothing if not hilarious. But many Democrats treat this nonsense with the utmost seriousness. Up and down the party, calls to “Fight!” differ more in degree than kind from Pritzker’s performative rhetoric.

What all this conveniently forgets is that voters may be upset with many of the Trump administration’s bone-headed moves but they don’t like the Democrats either. Not at all. Indeed, despite all that has taken place since Trump took office, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating is still far below the Republican Party’s. And in a recent NBC poll, positive views of the Democrats hit a rock-bottom 27 percent, the lowest in the poll going back to 1990.

A recent Washington Post poll found that 70 percent of voters think the Democratic Party is out of touch with the concerns of most people in the country today. In a poll of swing Congressional districts by the pro-Democratic Navigator group, voters felt Democrats were “more focused on helping other people than people like me”. Most voters also felt Democrats don’t respect work, don’t share their values, don’t look out for working people, don’t care about people like them, and don’t have the right priorities. Polling for the new Democratic-oriented “Working Class Project” found working-class voters preferred Republicans to Democrats on representing their values, focusing on the issues they care about, valuing hard work and being patriotic. And so it goes.

What part of “voters just aren’t that into you” don’t Democrats understand? Voters want change. Big change. No amount of fulminating about Donald Trump is going to change that. Consider these data.

In the AP/VoteCast survey of 2024 voters, 83 percent said they wanted either substantial change or a complete and total upheaval in how the country is run. In Blue Rose research from the 2024 cycle, they found that just 18 percent of voters thought preserving America’s institutions was more important than delivering change and that more voters preferred “a major change and a shock to the system from whoever becomes President” to stabilizing the system. In recent Navigator group polling, 74 percent said the country’s political and economic system needs either major change or to be torn down completely.

In this situation, you don’t want to be the party of restoration. As Navigator’s chief pollster Ian Smith put it:

Most people don’t just want a system update. If you offer them a version 1.2 of America, they won’t see a difference in their day to day life. They’d rather see and feel change.

In other words, you want to be the party of change, not the party of restoration. Can the Democrats do it? I’ve got my doubts.

To be the party of change in our current populist era, when the party’s brand is in wretched shape and views of Democratic governance are so negative, you have to actually change the party. That’s not easy. Most partisan Democrats would be perfectly happy to just restore the previous regime and forget the Trump nightmare ever happened. As far as they’re concerned, things were pretty great when they were in charge! We really haven’t moved much beyond the infamous yard sign from the 2024 campaign, “Harris Walz Obviously,” except now it’s, “The Democrats Obviously.”

It wasn’t so obvious to voters in 2024 and it’s not so obvious to voters now. The truth is that Democrats will have to work really hard to convince voters, especially working-class voters, that they embody change, not the Establishment, and are worthy of an enthusiastic vote. The last Democrat to successfully do this was Barack Obama; that was a while ago and the party is more in need of reinvention than ever.

Yet the sense of urgency in Democratic ranks is lacking. They don’t realize that they are at a fork in the road. They’re content to hoist the anti-Trump flag high and hope for the best. Continuing down that road will make them the party of restoration in a change era—and ensure that the political breakthrough they are seeking will continue to elude them.

The following article, “Rural Trump Voters Won’t Regret Their Vote Until Democrats Fight for Them” by Anthony Flaccavento and Erica Etelson, is cross-posted from The Nation:

The damage done just in the Trump administration’s first three months could fill the National Archives—assuming that department still exists. Many of those moves, including the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran gulag, have been cruel and utterly unjust. Yet public support for Trump, though declining, remains stubbornly high among rural and working-class people. Some part of that support comes from his ability to couch everything he does as retaliation against liberal elites and a blow against the “rigged system” those elites helped create—a system that has undermined the values and livelihoods of ordinary working people.

What will it take to stop Trump? It’s hard to predict how many of the people who supported Trump will turn against him because of the deportation of Garcia, student activists, and others. Those fights absolutely must continue and, we hope, will awaken more and more Americans to the dismantling of democracy. But there will always be those who are moved more by negative impacts to their daily lives. Job loss, hospital and school closures, a huge spike in the cost of essential goods—these are perennial deal-breakers that outlive the daily news cycle.

As we suggested in our February column, reacting negatively to every radical idea Trump tosses out only solidifies the left’s position as defenders of the establishment—the very system tens of millions of Americans blame for their woes. We also believe that protesting the bad stuff only gets us so far, and that a positive vision for bettering the lives of rural and working people must be front and center.

That said, when it does come to complaining loudly about the impact of Trump’s chaotic nihilism, we should focus on actions that have hurt large numbers of people, many of whom voted for Trump. We need to empathize with and acknowledge their struggles and help channel it into buyers’ remorse: “Trump has betrayed us” gets to the heart of the matter, whereas “Hands off!” smacks of a desire to restore the status quo.

To stop Trump and reverse the assault on our economy and democracy, we need to redeploy some of our outrage to highlight how Trump’s actions are actually making the rigged system worse for the folks who put him in office: farmers, small businesses, coal miners, factory and blue-collar workers, consumers struggling with high prices and debt. Until our protest routinely includes the betrayal of folks like these, we have almost no chance of building the broad resistance coalition needed to reverse the disastrous course we’re on.

With that in mind, we offer a few examples of Trump’s betrayals of rural and working-class people that we urge the left to prioritize, while also highlighting policies that will reverse those betrayals.

Farmers, a core constituency for Trump, have been among the worst hit by his actions since taking office. For midsize and larger farmers, tariffs have prompted widespread anxiety that they are being squeezed from both ends: They’re facing higher costs on inputs like Canadian potash and steel for agricultural equipment, combined with a potentially dramatic loss of markets for soybeans, pork, and other commodities.

On top of that, the dismantling of USAID amounts to nearly $2 billion in lost sales for US farmers. For smaller farmers, the termination of the Farm to School program and the Local Food Purchase Program for food banks have eliminated more than $1 billion in markets for fresh produce, while undermining the effort to provide healthy food to kids and people in need.

And for farmers of all sizes, the suspension of contractual payments to farmers who’ve undertaken conservation, soil building, renewable energy, and other improvements to their farms is devastating. At least 30,000 of these farmers, who each expended tens of thousands of dollars based on USDA commitments, now find themselves in debt, unclear whether the promised reimbursements will ever materialize.

But farmers aren’t the only rural folks getting screwed.

Workers and small-business owners are increasingly worried about their livelihoods. Even before the latest round of tariffs, small-business confidence had declined for all three months of Trump’s presidency, with just one in five small business owners saying they expect sales and business conditions to improve in the near future. That uncertainty translates to less investment and hiring on the part of existing small businesses, and fewer new business start-ups.

For workers in bigger companies, the surge in union organizing seen under the Biden administration is running into a wall of anti-worker actions from Trump. These include the firing of pro-worker members of the NLRB such as Jennifer Abruzzo, replaced by Crystal Carey, a lawyer whose firm represents notoriously anti-union Tesla and Amazon. Trump has also eliminated the $17 hourly minimum-wage requirement for federal contractors while working to completely dismantle unions representing federal workers.

Veterans, who are more likely to live in rural areas, will be hurt especially hard by the double kneecapping of Medicaid and Veterans Affairs (VA). The New York Times reports that, in addition to layoffs, the VA has been rocked by DOGE’s abrupt return-to-work policy. VA psychiatrists who have, for decades, counseled veterans remotely, now suddenly have to conduct their sessions in open cubicles that lack privacy. Many of them are quitting in protest.

Fourteen million (nearly one in five) rural adults rely on Medicaid, a program Republicans aim to cut by $880 billion(roughly 20 percent of the program) over the next decade. Already struggling rural hospitals and clinics rely on Medicaid funds to stay afloat. Over the past 10 years, nearly 200 rural hospitals have closed, leaving their patients stranded a hundred or more miles from the nearest emergency room. Most of the rural hospitals that do remain open have eliminated their maternity wards. Slashing Medicaid spending will trigger further hospital closures and strain already paltry substance abuse, mental health, and Indian health services.

And then there are the millions of consumers just struggling to make ends meet. They’ve been hit not only by continued rising prices—the inflation rate has been between 2.4 and 3 percent since Trump took office—but by the elimination of protections from junk fees from banks and credit card companies. Joined by the Republican-controlled Senate, the Trump administration is eliminating the $8 late-fee cap instituted toward the end of Biden’s term, allowing companies to once again charge exorbitant fees to people who don’t pay on time. The lower average incomes of rural and working-class people make high prices and junk banking fees all the more difficult to manage.

Donald Trump carried rural America by a 40-point margin. He promised forgotten Americans he would unrig the system, address the opioid epidemic, and restore small towns to health and prosperity. Even more than most of his predecessors, Trump has betrayed those who placed their trust in him. Reversing the tidal wave of destruction he has unleashed requires that we on the left do something we should have done a long time ago: open our doors wide to the farmers, miners, truckers, house cleaners, automakers, and working folks—white, brown, and Black—who picked him over us. We don’t just need them to regain Congress in 2026. We need them to save our country.

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:

Judging from the early days of the Trump administration there should be no dearth of contenders for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. It definitely looks like a prize worth having. Trump’s approval ratings have dropped rapidly, including on the all-important area of the economy, formerly his greatest strength. Public support for his trade war is weak and the outcome potentially dire. While there’s a long way to go it does look like the GOP and whoever their nominee is in 2028 will be eminently beatable, even if the administration moderates from its current “shock and awe” approach.

Beatable, but hardly a sure thing. Democrats are quickly forgetting that we still live in a populist age and that there is a working-class sized hole in their coalition. It’s much more fun and emotionally satisfying to think and talk about how much you hate Donald Trump and everything he stands for. There’s certainly a lot to be upset about but that does not help you win elections—not just the presidency but all those Senate races in red-leaning working-class states where Democrats have been getting walloped and where, if they don’t improve, they will be a Senate minority indefinitely.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at possible Democratic presidential contenders for 2028 and how they are approaching this challenge. I’ll sort them into five general categories; I hesitate to call them “lanes” at this early date when differentiation is still so fuzzy.

Let’s do it all over again! The most prominent politician in this category is of course Kamala Harris. As the most recent Democratic presidential candidate, Harris has 100 percent name recognition among potential Democratic primary voters and residual good will among some of these voters for taking on Trump. Her average support in polling on the 2028 Democratic nomination is far ahead of any other potential candidate: 27 percent say they’d prefer her compared to 16 percent for Pete Buttigieg, 13 percent for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (AOC), 9 percent for Cory Booker, 7 percent for Gavin Newsom, and 5 percent for Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, and Tim Walz.

Harris also has a significant fan base in the party that could be activated on her behalf if she decided to enter the race. They and she would argue that she was a great candidate who was dragged down by Joe Biden and handicapped by her late entry into the 2024 presidential race. And wasn’t everything she said about Trump, the fascist, true? Give her the chance to have a proper campaign, they’ll maintain, and she’ll have the GOP on the run. Plus, did we mention that she’s a black woman?

Despite all this, Harris’s road to getting the nomination, much less winning the 2028 general election, would be quite difficult. A lot of her current advantage is just name recognition. And Democrats have not historically nominated losers to run again for president. Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis…the list goes on. The last loser who got run to again was Adlai Stevenson in 1956 and he lost.

If the historical record for election losers is not encouraging neither is the likelihood that Democrats will be absolutely desperate to defeat the Trumpian GOP in 2028 and turn the page from a generally losing era. That will predispose Democratic primary voters to look for a fresh face to finally vanquish their foe. Kamala will not qualify.

Others in this category: Pete Buttigieg, Tim Walz. Buttigieg has daringly suggested that perhaps diversity trainings have gone too far to the point where they are sometimes “like something out of Portlandia.” This seems unlikely to be enough to dissociate him from the Biden-Harris administration and its cultural and economic record. As for Walz, he recently averred in a town hall in Texas with repeat loser Beto O’Rourke:

We’ve been talking about this for years as a country of immigrants, and we let them define the issue on immigration. We let them define the issue on DEI, and we let them define what woke is….We got ourselves in this mess because we weren’t bold enough to stand up and say “you damn right we’re proud of these policies. We’re going to put them in, and we’re going to execute them”.

‘Nuff said.

All resistance, all the time. This will be a big category. Indeed, it will likely be the “Great Attractor” for the 2028 Democratic field. The level of animus toward the Trump administration is off the charts among college-educated Democratic partisans, exactly the voters most likely to show up in Democratic primaries. For many candidates, the temptation will be irresistible to cash in on these feelings by offering the most flamboyant possible denunciations of Trump and the GOP and downplaying more nuanced approaches.

A leading “resister” is California governor Gavin Newsom. After Trump was elected, he immediately declared a special session of the California legislature. His office said:

The special session responds to the public statements and proposals put forward by President-elect Trump and his advisors, and actions taken during his first term in office—an agenda that could erode essential freedoms and individual rights, including women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights…A special session allows for expedited action that will best protect California and its values from attacks.

A steady stream of denunciations of Trump administration actions from Newsom and the governor’s office has followed. Intriguingly, Newsom has tried to titrate his resistance persona will a little bit of outreach to the other side. He started a podcast, This is Gavin Newsom, where his guests have include conservative activist Charlie Kirk, head of Turning Point USA, and Steve Bannon. Famously, in his podcast with Kirk he agreed that trans-identified biological boys in girls’ sports seemed “unfair” to him. But under intense blowback he has since walked back any implication that he would back a policy to change that situation in California or any other place.

That dynamic will likely affect any other resisters who attempt to nuance their approaches. The intense push among fervent partisans to give no ground on any issue, not to mention being attacked by competitor candidates eager to position themselves as the “real” resistance, will herd these candidates toward all resistance all the time and nothing else.

Others in this category: JB Pritzker, Chris Murphy, Cory Booker. These candidates stand ready to push Newsom and anyone else who strays from strict resistance orthodoxy out of the way and take their place. They will not complicate their profiles even as much as Newsom has done. And, as noted, militant resistance is sure to suck more candidates in as time goes on because of the large potential payoff among likely primary voters.

There’s no such thing as being too progressive. There is a considerable part of the Democratic Party that does not believe Democrats moved too far left in any way. The problem instead was not being sufficiently progressive, especially about economics. Currently, Bernie Sanders and his heir-apparent, AOC, are out on their nationwide “Fighting Oligarchy” tour and drawing large crowds to their rallies. There’s clearly an appetite for unapologetic populist economics that sees the Democrats’ problem as not hitting the “billionaire class” hard enough.

Since Sanders is too old to run, the leading potential candidate in this category is of course AOC. She has a built-in national profile and legions of potential supporters ready to be activated should she declare. While her uncompromising progressive history on, well, everything would make her a fatally easy target for Republican attack ads in a general election, it’s much less of a liability for her in Democratic primaries where ultra-progressivism and blaming the rich sells a lot better than admitting progressive mistakes.

Others in this category: Ro Khanna. Khanna, a fellow member with AOC of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, also believes that the Democrats have not been progressive enough on economics and has a fairly substantive set of populist economic ideas to reach the left-behind working class that he retails as the “new economic patriotism.” He has also shown some interest in moderating his standard-issue progressive profile on cultural issues but has yet to venture a clear break with orthodoxy on these issues. If an appetite develops for more substance and less flash in this category he’d be well-positioned. But the intra-party dynamic shall we say is unlikely to trend in this direction.

Moderation is a beautiful thing. If there is to be a strong competitor to all resistance all the time, it would be a pragmatic strain that recognizes resistance is not enough. Voters want politicians that can govern well and, in a primary context, may especially value candidates who can win. This is an assignment that politicians with a moderate profile generally fit better than those who are all-in on resistance. It worked for Biden in 2020 and perhaps it can work for some other candidate in 2028.

Josh Shapiro is a good example of a candidate who fits this category. The popular governor of Pennsylvania, his tenure in that office has been marked by a well-publicized commitment to getting stuff done and fast. Shortly after taking office, he presided over the repair of a collapsed section of the vital I-95 highway artery in just 12 days. Other bread and butter governance tasks have received similar treatment. And he took aggressive action to eliminate college education requirements for many state government jobs.

Shapiro has also shown a willingness to bend pragmatically on some issues that the progressive wing of his party feels strongly about. In deference to Pennsylvania voters, he has been generally pro-police and tough on public safety, as well as unapologetic in his support of the fracking industry and opposition to the bans pushed by progressives. However, like other moderates, he has been very careful not to stray much from party orthodoxy on cultural issues that hurt Democrats among swing voters but are dear to the hearts of party progressives. Whether he can continue this dance all the way through the Democratic primary process is an open question. He’s a skillful politician but there are limits.

Others in this category: Gretchen Whitmer, Andy Beshear. Whitmer in particular has a similar profile to Shapiro in terms of pragmatic governance. But if anything she is probably even more reluctant than Shapiro to test the limits of Democratic orthodoxy. And as with Shapiro the danger is real that she will be herded toward the all resistance all the time camp by the exigencies of intra-party competition. The flack she recently took for temporizing about tariffs rather than just denouncing what Trump has done illustrates this dynamic.

Let’s try something different. This is an under-populated category for the simple reason that the Democrats most likely to participate in the primary process are those least likely to want to do anything really different. So there is not much demand there for Democratic politicians to respond to.

One politician who could fit into this category is Ruben Gallego. His support in the 2024 Arizona Senatorial election far outran Harris’s performance in that swing state, both overall and among key problem demographics for the Democrats. Gallego has been outspoken in his opposition to ridiculous locutions like “Latinx” and has clearly separated himself from the party mainstream on immigration where he criticized the Biden administration for lax border enforcement and immigration advocacy groups for convincing Democrats that Latinos supported illegal immigration when they did not. One Latino analyst went so far as to describe this as Gallego’s “Sister Souljah moment.”

Gallego is also unafraid to highlight the non-woke priorities of Latino working-class men who all want, as he put it, a “big-ass truck”. It remains to be seen if his apostasy on the priorities of the Latino working class could extend to questioning the Democratic approach writ large to the working class.

Others in this category: Rahm Emmanuel, Jared Polis. Emmanuel has been particularly vociferous in denouncing the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics and tolerance of social disorder to the point where they have become the “party of permissiveness.” His sojourn in Japan during the Biden-Harris administration gives him some distance from the foibles of that administration which otherwise might undermine the credibility of his critique.

It is possible others like Buttigieg, Shapiro—even the consummate opportunist Newsom—will start leaning toward this category if the political payoff appears higher than it is now. But the “Great Attractor” of all resistance all the time seems likely to be more powerful than any demand for a different kind of Democrat. That will tend to make all candidates in all categories resemble each other over time, rather than stand out.

That may not matter in the end if the Trump administration becomes unpopular enough. Any Democrat, even AOC, might be able to beat the Republican nominee in such as situation. But the Democrats should be looking for a candidate who could maximize their chances of victory in any situation and rehabilitate their image among working-class voters and in vast areas of the country where their brand is currently toxic. I am not optimistic that is happening or is likely to happen.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is a contributing writer.

The following article, “AJC poll: Trump’s support sinks in Georgia as economic fears rise,” by Greg Bluestein is cross-posted here from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Georgia voters are sharply divided over President Donald Trump’s second-term agenda, with many opposing key pieces of his economic and policy platform as he marks his 100th day back in power, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll found.

Trump’s approval rating sits at just 43%, with one-third of supporters saying they “strongly” support his record so far. Of the 55% who disapprove of his performance, almost two-thirds are independents and about 12% are Republicans.

Though Trump’s standing is low for a president this early in a term, it echoes some of his ratings in previous AJC polls — a polarizing perception that didn’t stop him from carrying Georgia in 2016 and 2024 or sweeping battleground states last year.

Still, the poll spotlights deep anxieties about Trump’s leadership and agenda in a battleground state that helped the Republican sweep to a comeback victory, particularly involving his pledge to fight inflation and boost the economy — the top concern for many Georgians.

About half of Georgians say they expect the economy to worsen over the next year and say they’re against his pursuit of widespread tariffs. And 55% of voters disapprove of how he’s managed the economy.

The skepticism extends to other key parts of Trump’s platform. Roughly 52% of voters oppose his administration’s immigration policies, which center on calls for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and a pledge to end birthright citizenship. Immigration has long been one of Trump’s strongest issues as worry has grown over security at the southern border.

But the president has faced a barrage of negative headlines over his administration’s deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a prison in El Salvador, including one man officials have said was mistakenly removed.

Voters are also divided over Trump’s plans to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs. About 39% support the Republican’s plans to dismantle DEI initiatives — including 10% of Black voters — while 57% disapprove.

In all, roughly 55% of Georgians worry the nation is headed down the “wrong track” with Trump back in office. That could signal an end to his postelection honeymoon period in Georgia, long-considered a “must win” for Republicans.

“I’m sad to say, we’re in a really tough place. It’s a tumultuous time,” said Adam Zarett, an Atlanta medical logistics executive who didn’t vote for Trump. “It’s just gotten worse than I thought. Maybe I should have read the writing on the wall more, but the swiftness and scope of his changes surprised me.”

The findings mark a sharp erosion from just three months ago, when 56% of voters said they expected the economy to improve under Trump’s leadership and a majority described themselves as “excited” or “optimistic” about his return.

Now, voters have a noticeably more pessimistic outlook — especially women. In January, 54% of women disapproved of how Trump handled the transition. At the 100-day mark, nearly two-thirds now give him poor reviews.

ExploreVoters may not approve of Trump’s policies, but Georgia GOP members still do

While his approval has hardly budged, his negative rating jumped by 10 percentage points to 55%. His support has also slipped with younger voters, independents and even fellow Republicans.

“His record so far is complicated. Some of it is good. Some of it is bad,” said Clint Myers, an elementary school teacher in Walton County who said he “begrudgingly” voted for Trump. “I’m still glad I backed him. I’m not second-guessing him. But I’m not a fan of the man.”

Even as his support among independent voters plummets — his approval rating among middle-of-the-road voters is at just 36% — Trump’s loyal Republican base is still solidly behind him. About 85% of Republicans and 90% of those who voted for him in November give him positive reviews.

“He’s doing great, despite facing a lot of obstacles in front of him,” said Jesse Bennett, a Valdosta engineer. “He’s stopped the flood of illegal immigration. He’s trying his best to stop World War III before it gets started. And he’s putting America first.”

But there are warning signs in his base. An overwhelming majority (82%) of voters say he should obey federal court orders, even if he disagrees with them or believes they are illegal. That includes nearly two-thirds of Trump voters.

There is similar frustration over his foreign policy moves. About 56% of Georgia voters oppose Trump’s efforts to distance the United States from the NATO security alliance, part of a broader strategy to reshape the global order.

“He’s alienating our foreign allies,” said Daniel Austin, a security contractor in Warner Robins who didn’t vote for Trump in November. “He thinks he’s some master negotiator, but instead, in 100 days, he’s managed to ensure in the next 100 years the U.S. won’t even be third place.”

The poll, conducted by the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs, was conducted between April 15-24 and involved 1,000 registered Georgia voters. The margin of error is 3.1 percentage points

An excerpt from “Reclaiming the Democratic Party for Working Families” by Bruce Raynor, former president of UNITE and and current president of the Sidney Hillman Foundation and Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union, at The Nation:

A New Challenge: Republicans Competing for Working-Class Votes

One needs to look no further than these current Republican initiatives to appreciate an emerging shift by some elements of the Republican Party.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced labor law reform legislation addressing captive audience speeches and first-contract arbitration—two critical issues for union organizing.

Vice President JD Vance proposed a $5,000 child tax credit to ease financial burdens on families.

Donald Trump proposed ending taxes on overtime, Social Security benefits, and income below $150,000.

The Republican National Convention welcomed Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who—despite criticism from Democrats—used the platform to deliver a clear, anti-corporate, pro-union message.

Yet, despite these gestures, the new Trump administration seems determined to continue its assault on workers:

Revoking the $15-an-hour minimum wage for federal contractors.

Weakening standards that require only responsible contractors to receive government projects.

Illegally firing NLRB members to cripple the agency’s ability to protect workers, while Elon Musk challenges its constitutionality.

Breaking contracts with every federal union.

Raising prices through indiscriminate tariffs.

Appointing renowned union-buster Elon Musk to oversee reckless firings and union-busting of government unions.

President Biden was a true pro-union, pro-US manufacturing president. But now, voters see a Republican Party—not the Democrats—saying they are going to stand up for American jobs, embracing tariffs not just to protect existing jobs but to expand manufacturing.

So what exactly are Democrats fighting for?

Lower out-of-pocket healthcare costs or adding home care, dental, and vision coverage to Medicare?

Ending stock trading by Congress or billionaires’ dominating spending in elections?

Extending to all Americans the 30–40 percent Medicare prescription drug discounts on all prescriptions that veterans receive through VA-negotiated prices?

Raising the minimum wage or expanding overtime pay eligibility?

Raising taxes on billionaires and ending taxes on every working American below a certain income?

Free community college?

Stopping corporate price gouging or using tariffs to protect American manufacturing jobs?

The problem is: We do not know! The Democratic Party has failed to define a clear economic agenda for working Americans.

…A Call to Action

We hope our brothers and sisters in the labor movement will step up and lead—starting with a resurgence of organizing. That means deploying billions of dollars of the $18 billion in revenue and the $35 billion in assets currently sitting idle in banks and investments to target the large technology, healthcare, grocery, trucking, and manufacturing corporations undermining union wages.

Organizing is not just about the workplace—but also produces political change.

Union members vote more pro-worker than their non-union counterparts.

In Union, a labor-led project in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, proved that year-round economic education can significantly shift votes among former union members and working-class families.

Targeting anti-union, multibillion-dollar corporations forces politicians to pick a side.

Unions Must Demand More—From Both Parties

It is time—long overdue—for labor unions to challenge both Democrats and Republicans.

Unions should lead with a plan to:

1. Hold politicians accountable to an “economic contract for working families” and demand that any candidate seeking union support commit to it.

2. Deploy a minimum of $3 billion a year of the more than $18 billion of annual union dues and $35 billion in labor assets to major organizing efforts targeting corporate giants that suppress wages, cut benefits, and gouge consumers. This should include hiring 20,000 organizers (about $2 billion).

3. Immediately launch campaigns in key 2026 electoral districts to educate members and their communities on a pro-worker economic agenda.

4. Spark both an internal membership and national conversation on federally guaranteeing existing workers’ pensions and Social Security and stopping all union busting, including reversing the busting of federal union recognition and prohibiting the privatization of the Postal Service. Then leaders should ask union members to vote for a National Day of Retirement and Worker Security, supporting coordinated actions at union and non-union worksites across the country.

The future of work and working families is not a matter of chance—it is a matter of choice.

It is time for unions and Democrats to decide.

Read the entire article here.