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.

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:

Democrats appear to have rediscovered the working class in the wake of the 2024 election. Their dismal showing among these voters—both white and nonwhite—doomed Kamala Harris’s candidacy and got them, and the country, another term of Donald Trump. So now Democrats want those voters back, and they’re racking their brains trying to figure out how to sell their party to the working class. All factions of the party—from AOC and Bernie Sanders to the Blue Dogs—are pitching their approach as the way Democrats can bring these voters back into the fold.

But perhaps, instead of trying to message their way into the hearts of America’s working class, they should first ask: what do these voters really want? That’s harder than it sounds because it entails suspending your ideology—and any conception of what these voters should want—so that you can find out what they do want.

The point about ideology is very important. Right now, Democrats are dominated by the most ideological voters in the country—white college-educated voters. It’s no secret that Democrats have been doing increasingly well with white college-educated voters, even as they’ve been slipping with nonwhite and working-class (noncollege) voters. Between the 2012 and 2024 elections, Democratic performance among white college graduates improved by 17 points, while declining by 37 points among nonwhite working-class voters.

Less well appreciated is how politically polarized white college graduates have become as these trends have unfolded. Patrick Ruffini’s analysis of data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study(CES), an academic survey with over 60,000 respondents, demonstrates this vividly. Across 50 policy items, white college Democrats are highly likely to give consistently liberal responses, while white college Republicans give consistently conservative responses.

Ruffini explains:

[G]iving the conservative or liberal answer more than 75 percent of the time places you in [ideological] camps. Otherwise, you’re in a non-ideological middle ground. The 75 percent cutoff is an important one. Above we find Assad-like margins for Donald Trump or Joe Biden in 2020 of more than 98 percent. If you’re above this threshold, you’re not persuadable in the slightest. In the middle, your vote is basically up-for-grabs, progressing from one candidate to other in sliding scale fashion according to your policy views.

This approach leaves relatively few white college voters—38 percent—in an ideological middle ground where their responses are significantly mixed across the 50 items. In contrast, black, Hispanic and Asian voters are much less polarized, including within education groups, and have far more voters of mixed orientation in their ranks. This middle ground includes 83 percent of black voters, 77 percent of Hispanic voters, 69 percent of Asian voters, and even 58 percent of white non-college voters, despite the fact that they skew conservative.

Taken together with the trend data, this means that as Democrats have increasingly relied on white college voters, they have been adding many more ideologically consistent liberals while shedding less ideological nonwhites with mixed policy preferences. Strikingly, among the most liberal voters—those who agree with liberal positions more than 90 percent of the time—there are 20 times more white college-educated voters than black voters.

These developments can only push the party toward being uncompromisingly and uniformly liberal in its policy orientation—and that is indeed what we’ve seen. Moreover, the cultural outlook of highly liberal white college graduates—given the heavy weight of this group in the Democratic Party infrastructure, as well as in sympathetic media, nonprofits, advocacy groups, foundations, and educational institutions—has inevitably come to define the culture associated with the party

For example, liberal white college graduates tend to view the police as a racist institution and oppose rigorous enforcement of the law for public order and safety. And their belief that America is a structurally racist, white supremacist society makes it no surprise that this same group believes that you should never refer to illegal immigrants as “illegal,” that border security is less important than welcoming immigrants, and that objective tests are fundamentally flawed if they show racial disparities in achievement.

Liberal white college graduates also tend to see patriotism as a dirty word and the history of the United States as a bleak landscape of racism and oppression. And they are highly likely to believe that sex is “assigned at birth” and can be changed by self-conception, rather than being an objective biological reality.

Views like these have come to define the Democratic Party in the eyes of many working-class voters, despite the fact that many Democrats do not endorse them. Liberal white college graduates punch far above their weight in determining the party’s image.

A few other findings that underscore the salience of Ruffini’s analysis about just how partisan, overrepresented, and monolithic these voters are:

1. According to Gallup, there has been an astonishing 37-point increase in professed liberalism among white Democrats between 1994 and today. White Democrats are now far more liberal than their black and Hispanic counterparts, who are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative.
2. White liberals are now more liberal on many racial issues than black and Hispanic voters.
3. White liberals now outnumber the nonwhite working class among Democratic voters.
4. Pew data found that of 21 policy priorities tested, protecting the environment and dealing with global climate change ranked 14th and 17th, respectively, on the public’s priority list. But among liberal Democrats, these issues ranked first and third. The pattern was essentially the same among white college-educated Democrats, who, as noted, are heavily dominated by liberals.
5. Gallup data indicate that two-thirds of white college Democrats are liberal, while 70 precent of black working-class and two-thirds of Hispanic working-class Democrats are moderate or conservative.

While the Democratic Party is a complex entity, it’s increasingly true that its positions and image are defined by the burgeoning ranks of white college-educated liberals who have made the party their political home. In the process, it has become much harder for many working-class voters, white and nonwhite, to feel comfortable in the party, given their more mixed policy views.

This is a problem. As Ruffini remarks:

[White college graduates are] less than 30 percent of the American electorate. If everything seems polarized these days, it’s probably because of the circles you run in. Not everyone is like this. And the people that aren’t—the multiracial working class—are wildly underrepresented in political media.

Add to that the fact that white college-educated liberals make up less than 10 percent of all voters—and perhaps only twice that share among Democratic voters. This illuminates a core truth that Democrats and Democratic politicians need to absorb: being highly ideological and consistent in your positions may appeal to the party’s educated, professional-class base, but it’s a terrible way to reach the far more numerous working class, where views on many issues diverge dramatically from that ideological consensus. That has to change—which means Democrats must be willing to relax their ideological orthodoxy and embrace a heterodox mix of positions that brings them closer to the median working-class voter. Otherwise, these voters will continue to regard the party with suspicion—and not as their own

Indeed, to even get in the door with many working-class Americans and make their pitch, Democrats must convince these voters that they are not looked down upon, that their concerns are taken seriously, and that their views on culturally freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. With today’s Democratic Party that is difficult. Resistance is stiff, particularly among white college-educated liberals, to any compromise that might involve jettisoning ideological orthodoxy and moving closer to working class voters on such issues.

In my own research, I’ve found this same disjuncture between even nonwhite working-class voters⎯three-quarters of whom are moderate or conservative⎯and white college-educated liberals. My analysis, based on a 6,000-respondent survey conducted by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life (SCAL) and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), highlights several specific topics where the views of college-educated white liberals are diametrically opposed to those of this key Democratic constituency:

Structural racism. Is racism “built into our society, including into its policies and institutions”, as held by current Democratic Party orthodoxy? Or does it “come from individuals who hold racist views, not from our society and institutions?” In the SCAL/NORC survey, moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters—70 percent of whom identify as moderate rather than conservative—chose the latter view, that racism comes from individuals, not society, by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent. In stark contrast, white college-educated liberals chose the structural racism position by a lopsided margin of 82 percent to 18 percent. That tells you a lot about who influences the Democratic Party today and who does not.

Public safety. Voters were offered a choice between “we need to reallocate funding from police departments to social services” and “we need to fully fund the budget for police departments.” Nonwhite moderate-to-conservative working-class voters supported full police department funding by 63 percent to 36 percent. But white college-educated liberals favored moving police department funding to social services by a whopping 76 percent to 22 percent. The luxury belief to “defund the police” might sound moral in an ivory tower, but it hardly passes muster with everyday Americans.

Transgender athletes in team sports. Should “transgender athletes… be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity,” or should they “only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender?” By a staggering 70 percent to 26 percent margin, moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters chose the second option—that sports team participation should be determined by birth gender—directly contradicting current Democratic Party doctrine. But white college-educated liberals are almost exactly the reverse, endorsing the Democratic Party’s gender identity stance by a 40-point margin. Again, it is easy to see to whom today’s Democratic Party is really listening.

Renewable energy. As Democrats have rushed headlong into an energy transition to replace fossil fuels with renewables, this too threatens to leave most nonwhite working-class voters behind. In the SCAL/NORC survey, when given a choice between the country using ‘a mix of energy sources including oil, coal, and natural gas along with renewable energy sources’ and the current Democratic approach—phasing ‘out the use of oil, coal, and natural gas completely, relying instead on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power only’—moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters endorsed the continued use of fossil fuels by an overwhelming 75 percent to 25 percent margin. In contrast, white college-educated liberals favored eliminating fossil fuels entirely, by a margin of 66 percent to 34 percent.

Despite the radical nature of many of these positions and the fact that Democrats’ working-class supporters do not typically share them, the clear direction of the party has been to embrace these positions ever more enthusiastically. It should not be a surprise that even working-class “people of color” have been reconsidering their loyalties.

Since white working-class voters tend to be even farther away from today’s ideological Democrats in these and other areas, the scale of the working-class challenge for Democrats is immense. The only viable solution for the Democrats is a stiff dose of heterodoxy to bring them into closer alignment with the median working-class voter. Some examples of positive principles that Democrats could—and should—endorse:

On culture, there must be a recognition that, while our country is not perfect, it is good (and reasonable) to be patriotic and proud of the role America has played in world history. Equality of opportunity should be held up as a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not. Yes, racial achievement gaps are a problem, and we should seek to close them, but not every example therein can be attributed to racism. Standards of high achievement—particularly at a moment of intense geopolitical competition—should be maintained for people of all races. And critically, language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith.

On economics—an issue that helped sink the Democrats with working-class voters in 2024—white college-educated liberals should recognize that making climate change the party’s rallying cry is self-destructive, and solutions won’t come overnight. As we move toward a clean energy economy with an ‘all of the above’ strategy, energy must become and remain cheap, reliable, and abundant. That means fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will continue to be an important part of the mix.

And the degrowth fixation that the climate focus sometimes inspires is the worst idea on the Left since Communism. Ordinary voters want abundance: more stuff, more opportunity, cheaper prices, and nicer, more comfortable lives. The only way to provide this is with more growth, not less.

To deliver that, we need to make it much easier to build things, from housing to transmission lines to nuclear reactors. That cannot happen without serious regulatory and permitting reform. That should be paired with a robust industrial policy that goes far beyond climate policy. We are in direct competition with nations like China, a competition we cannot win without building on cutting-edge scientific research in all fields. That would lend itself to a more bipartisan approach than Democrats’ recent fixation on climate.

These are all positions that working class voters would likely heartily embrace, even if they caused heartburn among many of the Democrats’ professional-class supporters. Working-class voters simply want the country to be prosperous, provide them with opportunities for upward mobility, treat everybody fairly, and not tell them to believe dumb stuff. They’ll do the rest; they could care less about ideology. This leaves plenty of room to criticize Trump and the GOP for their excesses and policy errors, while signaling to working-class voters that Democrats are no longer in thrall to their most ideological supporters. In this Democratic party, voters with mixed views that combine conservative and liberal inclinations would be welcome. And the more of these voters who felt welcome, the more Democrats would come to understand what the working class really does want. Right now, they don’t.

Editor’s note: A version of this essay originally appeared in Commonplace, American Compass’ webzine.

Lydia Saad of has a revealing post, “Americans’ Economic, Financial Expectations Sink in April” at Gallup.com, the text of which cross-posted here:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Several measures of Americans’ economic mood, including their perceptions of the U.S. economy and their own finances, have weakened in April compared with their prior readings — in some cases, substantially.

Most notably, since January, Americans’ six-month outlooks for economic growth and the stock market have turned from positive to negative, while their forecasts for inflation, interest rates and the job market have dimmed.

In line with those changes, Gallup’s yearly reading on Americans’ assessment of their personal finances shows a record-high 53% now believing their situation is getting worse. This marks the first time in the trend dating back to 2001 that a majority have expressed financial pessimism.

Despite these changes, Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index has held steady, with April’s -22 score not meaningfully different from March’s -20 and January’s -19, though it is down from a -14 reading in December.

These findings come from Gallup’s annual Economy and Personal Finance survey, conducted April 1-14. Most of the poll was conducted after President Donald Trump announced what he termed “Liberation Day” tariffs on numerous countries on April 2. The market subsequently experienced significant volatility, resulting in 4% to 5% declines in the major stock indices over the two-week survey period.

Exuberance Over Stock Market, Economic Growth Fizzles

The latest poll updates Americans’ six-month forecasts for several aspects of the economy, last measured in January. Optimism is down on all five, but particularly for the stock market and economic growth.

Americans have gone from being mostly positive about the direction of the stock market and economic growth in the days after Trump took office to being pessimistic, on balance, today.

• Just 29% now expect the stock market to go up over the next six months, while 58% think it will decline. This is a near reversal from late January, when 61% foresaw the market gaining and 18% declining.
• Similarly, 38% are currently optimistic about U.S. economic growth, predicting it will increase over the next six months, while 48% think it is likely to decline. This differs from the strongly positive tilt in January, when 53% believed economic growth would rise and 29% thought it would decline. Americans were already predicting inflationwould increase — as they typically do — in January, but that has risen 11 percentage points to 63%. The public has gone from having mixed expectations for interest ratesand unemployment in January to tending to believe these will go up, now at 42% and 47%, respectively.

In further evidence that perceptions of the job market have soured, a majority of 58% now believe it’s a bad time to find a quality job, whereas 38% consider it a good time. This is a change from January, when the public was split between calling it a good time (48%) and a bad time (45%).

This is the most pessimistic outlook for jobs that Gallup has recorded in four years, since January 2021, when the nation was still experiencing high unemployment related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Record High Say Financial Situation Is Getting Worse

Americans’ assessment of their current financial situation is the same today as a year ago, but their perception of the direction in which their finances are going has worsened.

Ten percent of U.S. adults rate their current financial situation as excellent, 34% call it good, 37% only fair and 18% poor. While those figures are all within a point of last year’s ratings, they are subpar historically. The average percentage of Americans calling their personal finances excellent or good since 2001 is 50%, with positive perceptions peaking at 57% in 2021.

Meanwhile, consumers’ outlook for their finances is the most negative on balance since Gallup began tracking this measure in 2001. A record-high 53% now say their financial situation is getting worse, exceeding the 38% saying their finances are improving by 15 points.

There have been only a few periods in Gallup’s trend that consumers’ pessimism about their finances has significantly exceeded optimism. One was in the economically challenged period during and after the 2007-2009 recession; another was at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and the other was from 2022 to 2023 amid high inflation.

At all other times, Americans have been more likely to think their finances are improving than deteriorating.

The six-point increase over the past year in those saying their finances are worsening has occurred about equally across household income groups as well as among stock owners and those who do not own stock.

Following the expected partisan pattern that occurs when the party of the sitting president changes, Republicans’ pessimism about their finances has mostly vanished now that Trump is back in office, falling 40 points from when Joe Biden was president a year ago. At the same time, Democrats’ pessimism has surged, up 55 points. Independents are slightly more pessimistic today than last April, contributing to the negative overall shift.

Economic Confidence Ticks Down

Gallup’s monthly Economic Confidence Index (ECI) is essentially steady in April at -22, reflecting little change in U.S. adults’ ratings of current economic conditions as well as their outlook for the economy.

Longer term, the index has declined by eight points since December. The index score, which has been negative since the start of high inflation in mid-2021, had climbed to -14 in December amid the presidential transition, its highest reading since 2021. But even after worsening since then, this indicator of U.S. economic conditions remains better than was recorded for most of the past four years.

Gallup’s ECI summarizes Americans’ evaluations of current economic conditions (as excellent, good, only fair or poor) and their outlook for the economy (whether they believe it is getting better or getting worse).

The index has a theoretical range of +100 (if all Americans were to rate current conditions as excellent or good and say the economy is getting better) to -100 (if all Americans were to rate the economy as poor and say it is getting worse). In Gallup’s trend of these measures since 1992, the highest ECI score is +56, in January 2000, and the lowest is -72, in October 2008.

Three in Four Americans Believe the Economy Is Faltering

Other questions in the April poll ask Americans where the economy stands on the standard business cycle and where it will be in a year.

A quarter of Americans believe the economy is currently growing, 33% perceive it’s slowing down, and 42% say it is in a recession (27%) or economic depression (15%).

Attitudes are more positive about where the economy will be a year from now, with 45% predicting it will be growing by that time and fewer thinking it will be slowing down (7%). However, the percentage expecting the economy to be in a recession or depression (47% combined) is slightly larger than the 42% saying that about the current economy.

Gallup has asked this question periodically since 2008, including most recently in 2019. Across the limited trend, the most positive evaluation was recorded in January 2019, midway through Trump’s first term, when 41% said the economy was growing and only 17% thought it was in a recession or depression. The least positive was in September 2008, during the global financial crisis, when 3% said it was growing and 69% believed it was in a recession or depression.

Americans’ outlook for the economy has varied less, historically, with more forecasting growth than a recession or depression. This year’s reading is the first time that more than a third think the economy will be in a recession or depression in a year’s time — and the first time that the combined figure for those two negative predictions (now 47%) matches the percentage expecting the economy to be growing.

Republicans Have High Hopes for the Economy; Democrats Predict Contraction

Republicans, including independents who lean Republican, are divided on the health of today’s economy. Forty-nine percent say it is growing, whereas 48% think it is either slowing down (25%), in a recession (15%) or in a depression (8%). By contrast, the vast majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents already believe the economy is slowing down (40%), in a recession (39%) or in a depression (17%), with very few saying it’s growing (3%).

Looking to the future, however, most of Republicans’ hesitancy about economic conditions fades, as 82% say the economy will be growing a year from now. Democrats, on the other hand, foresee an even more difficult economic future, with fewer thinking it will be slowing down and nearly eight in 10 predicting a recession (41%) or depression (35%).

Bottom Line

Public attitudes about several specific aspects of the U.S. economy have changed markedly in the short time Trump has been in office, as Americans’ expectations for the stock market, economic growth and employment have turned negative and consumers are feeling unusually pessimistic about their personal finances.

This has occurred against the backdrop of Trump’s shifting tariff policies and an emerging trade war with China that has roiled the stock market. The administration has argued that higher prices and declining stock values are essentially short-term medicine necessary for remaking the American economy as a financially secure manufacturing giant, promising a strong economy will follow. Most Republicans seem to have faith in that plan, while Democrats are beyond skeptical, with most foreseeing economic pain or collapse.

Saad provides eight charts illustrating these trends.

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:

This just in: Americans love nukes! New Gallup data show attitudes toward nuclear energy doing a U-turn from negative views in the mid-teens to strongly positive views today. In less then 10 years, positive views have spiked by 17 points while negative views have plummeted by 19 points. That’s taken net support (favor minus oppose) from -10 to +27.

This is surprising but it’s worth asking why this is surprising. Nuclear power, after all, is a clean, carbon-free energy source in an era when the center-left is obsessed with eliminating carbon emissions. Moreover, nuclear can provide the necessary firm, baseload power to the grid that intermittent renewables (wind and solar) cannot. So where is—or has been—the love?

The answer goes back to the origins of the modern environmental movement and the apocalyptic strain that always lurked there, ready to be activated by an issue like nuclear power and, later, climate change. Here you need to make the acquaintance of a man named William Vogt.

Vogt was an ornithologist and ecologist whose experiences in the developing world had convinced him that economic growth and overpopulation would inevitably lead to civilizational collapse unless both growth and population were radically curtailed. He published his book-length polemic Road to Survival in 1948.

Vogt’s book had an enormous impact. It was a main selection of the Book of the Month Club, condensed by Reader’s Digest for its 13 million subscribers, translated into nine languages and immediately adopted as a textbook by dozens of colleges and universities. It became the best-selling book of all-time on environmental themes until the 1960’s and the publication of Silent Spring.

Vogt argued that humans were worse than parasites, who lacked enough intelligence to be truly destructive. But humans had used their brains to rip up nature and compromised their own survival to become richer. Only drastic measures could prevent worldwide environmental disaster (sound familiar?).

Vogt argued that beliefs in progress were weighing humanity down and were actually “idiotic in an overpeopled, atomic age, with much of the world a shambles.” He concluded that the road to survival could only lie in maximizing use of renewable resources and accepting lower living standards or reduced population.

In his language and outlook, one can see all the strands of apocalyptic environmentalism that were brought to bear, first on nuclear power, then on climate change. This especially applies to his description of the United States and its economic system. He said:

Our forefathers [were] one of the most destructive groups of human beings that have ever raped the earth. They moved into one of the richest treasure houses ever opened to man, and in a few decades turned millions of acres of it into a shambles.

He continued:

’Free enterprise has made the country what it is!’ To this an ecologist might sardonically assent, ‘Exactly.’ For free enterprise must bear a large share of the responsibility for devastated forests, vanishing wildlife, crippled ranges, a gullied continent, and roaring flood crests. Free enterprise—divorced from biophysical understanding and social responsibility.

Vogt’s outlook was enormously influential. Historian Allan Chase observed:

Every argument, every concept, every recommendation made in Road to Survival would become integral to the conventional wisdom of the post-Hiroshima generation of educated Americans…[They] would for decades to come be repeated, and restated, and incorporated again and again into streams of books, articles, television commentaries, speeches, propaganda tracts, posters, and even lapel buttons.

More benignly, Vogt’s book marked the evolution of traditional conservationism into environmentalism. Stripped of the apocalyptic verbiage, he was arguing that conservation of nature was not enough. The interdependence of man and nature meant that human activities could not be isolated and instead were having negative effects on the entire planet—wilderness, settled areas, oceans, everywhere. The balance of nature was being destroyed, dragging down the natural world and humanity with it. Restoring that balance, not merely conserving parts of the ecosystem, was the new meaning of being an environmentalist.

Also key to Vogt’s analysis was the concept of “carrying capacity”—how much the environment/planet could sustainably bear of a species’ imprint before disaster ensued. This was not precisely defined but it is easy to see the relationship of this idea to how climate change is conventionally thought of today.

The modern environmentalist movement kicked off in the early 1960’s with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (as with Vogt’s book, a Book of the Month Club selection). Carson was directly inspired by Vogt and in fact was a friend of his. Her book was primarily focused on the impact of synthetic chemicals, especially DDT and other pesticides, on the natural environment. Her prognosis was dire; not only were these chemicals destroying the balance of nature by disrupting ecosystems but they were also destroying the ecosystem of the human body. These chemicals have “immense power not merely to poison but to enter into the most vital processes of the body and change them in sinister and often deadly ways.” Moreover, these chemicals would “bioaccumlate” and have enhanced effects over time. Perhaps eventually even the birds would not sing (producing a “silent spring”).

The serialization of the book in The New Yorker took the middlebrow educated audience by storm. The chemical industry fought back, which only raised the profile of the book. The public furor led to a report on pesticides by President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee which, in 1963 issued a report largely sympathetic to Carson’s analysis. The general issue of pollution of the natural environment by commercial processes and chemicals received a huge boost from the intense and prolonged public discussion and from this the modern environmental movement was born. Protecting the environment and natural systems now had a truly mass base.

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:

Trump’s “golden age” is presenting Democrats with a golden opportunity. The reason isn’t excesses around DOGE, deportation, DEI, universities, research funding, and the like—though all of these have been problems for the Trump administration. But they pale in comparison to current developments around Trump’s tariff regime and its economic effects. Put simply, while Trump’s populist working-class coalition was certainly animated by issues around cultural leftism, illegal immigration, and government waste, they also believed putting him in office would fix what they viewed as a broken economic system.

That does not appear to be happening. The chaotic rollout of Trump’s tariff regime has simply made voters more nervous about the economy rather than convincing them the economic system is being fixed. Trump’s average net approval rating (approval minus disapproval) on the economy is now -10 points and on inflation it is -13 points. Economic approval ratings were Trump’s great strength in his first term! No more.

A CBS News poll taken right before “Liberation Day” (whose aggressive tariffs have only increased economic angst and uncertainty) found that views on whether Trump’s policies are making you financially better or worse off have flipped since January; the percentage believing Trump policies are making them better off has declined by about 20 points and now those who believe Trump’s policies are making them worse off far outnumbers the “better off” group. As for the tariffs specifically an overwhelming 72 percent believe they will make the prices they pay go up rather than down (a mere 5 percent).

And here’s the kicker: by more than 2:1 (64 percent to 31 percent) people believe the administration is not focusing enough on lowering the price of goods and services but the result is reversed for tariffs—they strongly feel the administration is focusing too much on this area. That marks a clear break between Trump and working-class priorities and a big—a golden—opportunity for Democrats.

But can they make the most of it? It seems doubtful at this point. Of course, they will pillory the Trump administration mercilessly for their economic mistakes and the pain and uncertainty voters are experiencing. That’s Politics 101: make the incumbent administration pay when the economy goes south.

The problem, however, is that Democrats are still struggling to find their way in the current populist era where they are the Establishment in the eyes of the working class and their brand therefore extremely unpopular—“toxic” as even many Democrats have put it. By definition, beating up on the Trump administration doesn’t do much to change that brand; you’re simply trying to make the other party more unpopular than you.

What would be better—much better—would be for Democrats to use this opportunity to craft a new image for themselves that connects to the populist zeitgeist. Otherwise their denunciations of Trump and the GOP, however hard-hitting and creative, will strike working-class voters as an implicit defense of the Establishment and the current system.

That’s not what these voters want, even those among them who are disconcerted with Trump’s actions and worry about their economic effects. As David Shor has documented, we live in a country where 78 percent of voters think change is more important than preserving America’s institutions and where delivering a “shock to the system” is preferred to a “return to basic stability.” Democrats need to make their sale in that populist environment not in deep blue, highly-educated America where anti-Trump sentiment easily outruns the populist impulse. Those voters are not the Democrats’ problem.

With that in mind, let’s look at what the Democrats have on offer to take advantage of Trump’s vulnerabilities. I’d put the approaches in three basic buckets:

1. Resist! This is the default option for most Democrats. EverythingTrump does must be resisted all the time. The latest economic problems are just one more manifestation of his unspeakable evil. The important thing is to Fight! Those like Chuck Schumer, who pursue practical compromises, should be pushed aside in favor of leaders who wave the blue flag of resistance high. Cory Booker’s 25-hour filibuster against the administration is precisely the right spirit. The nationwide “Hands Off!” demonstrations on April 5 show that the masses are rallying to the cause, etc.

Implicitly, “hands off” also means hands off all Democrats priorities, programs and interest groups—in other words a return to the status quo ante, which we already know populist working-class voters don’t want. This approach seems well-designed to rally the Democratic faithful going into the midterms but not to change the image of the Democratic Party.

2. Fight the Oligarchy! This is a close cousin of the Resist! approach, which essentially juices it with a heavy dose of naïve economic populism. Basically, not only is Trump doing all these terrible things but he is doing them to enrich the oligarchy and maintain their power. They twirl their moustaches and laugh (bwa-ha-ha) as Trump does their bidding! This approach is particularly popular on the left of the party and is currently on nationwide tour with the redoubtable AOC and the ageless Bernie Sanders. Perhaps coming soon to a theater near you.

I get why this seems like a good idea. As noted, it certainly makes sense that in our current populist era, Democrats need to be responsive to that populist mood. But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populist pitch by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats who don’t want to make hard choices.

To begin with, Democrats have plenty of oligarchs on their side that they seem much less interested in fighting (remember JB Pritzker, who proudly proclaimed himself a billionaire at the Democratic convention, and the countless other fabulously wealthy individuals in the Democratic orbit). Voters are not unaware of this fact.

They are also painfully aware that the professional-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power is overwhelmingly Democratic. To working-class voters, the professional upper middle class may not be the super-rich but they are elites just the same—junior oligarchs if you will.

This is a bitter pill for most Democratic elites to swallow. In today’s America, they are the Establishment even if in their imaginations they are sticking it to the Man and fighting nobly for social justice. The failure to understand that they themselves are targets of populist anger is a central reason their populist pitch fails—and will fail—to get traction among the working class. Call it the “old wine in new bottles” problem—these voters hear the economic populist words but they sense that behind them is the same old Democratic Party with the same old elites and the same old cultural priorities. So far, the Fight the Oligarchy! crowd has done nothing that would disabuse working class voters of this notion.

3. Abundance Now! This approach is gaining adherents in Democratic circles though it lags far, far behind the first two approaches. But it has the advantage of directly posing an actually different path for Democrats thereby mitigating the old wine in new bottles problem. The central idea of the approach is to radically reduce the barriers, bottlenecks, and regulations that prevent Democratic governance from meeting progressive goals in areas like housing, infrastructure, and public services. Their approach aims to make these things “abundant” and therefore tamp down the widespread anger at Democratic governing failures.

This is promising and, as Derek Thompson has pointed out, a sort of “centrist populism,” where the elites standing in the way of getting things done are targeted, is consistent with an abundance approach. That would speak to the populist moment in a way that is certainly fresher than just bashing the rich, which is well past its sell-by date.

However, the very elites that such a centrist populism might target are by and large Democratic, presenting an awkward problem for abundance Democrats. Are they willing to take on “the Groups” and entrenched interest groups that are likely to fight a drive for deregulation and efficiency tooth and nail? So far, I’m not seeing it. A failure on this front will undercut the whole abundance project and vitiate any populist appeal to working-class voters.

Moreover, the goals of an abundance approach tend to be linked to a concept of abundance that does not line up well with the preferences of actually-existing working-class voters who, quite simply, want to be richer and have more stuff. Abundance Democrats, on the other hand, seem to have in mind a socially liberal ecotopia that is highly appealing to educated, upper middle class liberals but much less so to the working class. As Josh Barro notes Democratic abundance advocates tend to support “policies that would make energy, and the aspirational suburban lifestyle, more expensive.” And that lifestyle, he points out, is what “abundance” means for most ordinary Americans. Arizona Democratic senator Ruben Gallego underscores the issue: “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck.”

Call it the “big-ass truck problem.” Any abundance approach in a populist era needs to reckon with this problem. Otherwise, like the other Democratic approaches, it will fall short among the populist working class.

Democrats who truly want to find their way in our current populist era need some new approaches. But first they should accept that they’re still lost. That is the beginning of wisdom and renewal.

Chris Matthews reports “Trump tariffs to hit working class the hardest, costing an average family $3,800 a year” at Marketwatch, and writes that “President Donald Trump has plunged the United States into a new phase of his trade war, and this time the economic casualties will be clear, immediate and, for many Americans, painful.” Further,

The new levies, combined with other tariffs already implemented this year, will raise costs for the average American family by $3,800, according to a new report by the Yale Budget Lab.

In the wake of Trump’s never-ending vacillations on tariffs, here are some excerpts from “Shawn Fain Is Right. America Needs to Rethink Trade” by Dustin Guastella at The Nation:

“United Auto Workers (UAW) president Shawn Fain has many liberals scratching their heads. The longtime critic of Donald Trump who wore a “TRUMP IS A SCAB” T-shirt at the Democratic National Convention last year has come out in support of the president’s favorite economic policy: tariffs. Despite the fact that other leading progressives have expressed extreme alarm at Trump’s plans, Fain has insisted that tariffs are “a tool in the toolbox…to bring jobs back here, and, you know, invest in the American workers.

He’s right, and he’s not alone in thinking this. A group of self-proclaimed “economic patriots” on the left are making a similar case in Congress. Representative Chris Deluzio, a Democrat from Western Pennsylvania who won election in the state’s most competitive district, recently took to The New York Times to plead with his party not to embrace “anti-tariff absolutism” as a response to Trump’s policies. And Representative Jared Golden, a Democrat from a rural Trump-leaning district in Maine, recently made a similar case, arguing, “Tariffs are a first step in rewriting a rigged trade system.”

…Of course, Trump’s tariffs are erratic, and their intended purpose is unclear. They will likely do more harm than good. But that doesn’t mean protectionism is inherently a bad idea. In fact, if the left cannot offer a compelling exit from neoliberal globalization, it will be unable to effectively combat the GOP’s national populism with a social populism of its own. Rethinking trade must be a central part of a pro-worker agenda.

For many union members, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) marks the beginning of US decline. The agreement made it so that money, goods, and labor could flow more freely across the continent. Since it was enthusiastically signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993, manufacturing jobs have drained out of the United States to lower-wage corners of the globe. And NAFTA wasn’t even the worst of it; a succession of trade deals followed, including the admission of China into the World Trade Organization. This led to a collapse of manufacturing jobs in the United States.

In the 30 years since, around 90,000 US manufacturing plants have been shuttered. The impact on the labor movement has been disastrous. In 1990, around 20 percent of workers in the US belonged to a union; by 2024 that rate had plummeted to around 9 percent, a record low. The decline of manufacturing and union density combined with looser border restrictions that invited hyper-exploited foreign-born workers into the United States have crushed wages, which have been stagnant for non-college-educated workers.

By swapping high-wage often union jobs in manufacturing, for low-wage nonunion jobs in services, free trade has effectively robbed the working class of its social, political, and economic power.

Few industrial unions have been as affected as the UAW. Since the 1990s, the autoworkers have witnessed over 60 major plant closures among the Big Three automakers. Membership in the union peaked at around 1.5 million in 1979. Today, the UAW has around 390,000 members—a 74 percent decrease. Worse, even when the union manages to make inroads in new plants, companies always have an exit option. They can pack up and relocate to places where labor is cheaper.

…By 2016, the populist backlash had arrived. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders slammed the establishment for disastrous trade deals. And both won a larger share of working-class voters than their establishment counterparts. And the United States wasn’t alone. A recent meta-analysis by political scientists, led by Gábor Scheiring at Georgetown University, found that the surge in populism all over the world is driven by a reaction against the insecurity induced by globalization. While debate remains over whether workers were driven away from the left because of economic issues or cultural ones, with globalization the two phenomena are linked—the same market forces that drove manufacturing to extinction also helped to drive the increasing pace of cultural churn.

…Fain is right when he argues that auto manufacturers can afford to eat the tariffs without passing on price hikes. Consider that, despite labor-saving automation, manufacturers were charging record prices for a new car before tariffs—in some cases 10 points above the general inflation rate. Where is that money going? Into auto-industry profits that have grown over 50 percent since 2019—despite depressed sales. Fain is right that the industry has “excess capacity” and that tariffs “could bring work back in very short order” by reopening recently closed or underutilized plants. And he’s right that tariffs, combined with an effective industrial policy, could boost workers’ wages, not just in the auto industry but across the board. But more than all of this, Fain is right that we need to restore democratic sovereignty over our economy.

…Too many liberals are now rejoicing at Wall Street’s rejection of the tariffs as if “the markets” are a substitute for democratic input. But plunging stocks only prove what we already knew: that high finance is loath to get off the free-trade gravy train…

but the left can’t fall into the trap of letting Wall Street set the terms of the debate. To match Trump’s national populism, we need a social populism of our own. We should not retreat to advocating for free trade as a response to stock market panic but advance to a conversation about industrial planning. We need a program that seeks to repatriate American finance, claw back the trillions in taxes lost to offshore banking, and reinvest in US jobs.

The tariff is one of the tools we need to rebuild the economy in favor of the working class.”

Click here to read more of Guastella’s article in the Nation.

The following article, “House Democrats unveil 35 Republican targets for 2026 midterms” by Mary Ellen McIntire, is cross-posted from Roll Call:

House Democrats on Tuesday rolled out an initial list of 35 Republican-held seats they are targeting next year as the party looks to win control of the chamber.

The list from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee includes traditional swing seats but also districts that Donald Trump carried by up to 18 points in November, underscoring Democrats’ confidence in their chances of flipping the House more than eighteen months out from the midterm elections.

“House Republicans are running scared, and they should be. They’re tanking the economy, gutting Medicaid, abandoning our veterans, and making everything more expensive. In short, they’ve lost the trust of their constituents, and it’s going to cost them the majority,” DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene of Washington said in a statement.

While Democrats lost the White and House and Senate in last year’s elections, they had a net gain of one seat in the House, cutting into Republicans’ narrow majority. The party hopes that sets the scene to flip at least three more seats next year.

“The DCCC is already busy recruiting compelling, authentic candidates in these key districts who will serve their communities, not Elon Musk and Donald Trump,” she added.

Democrats are once again seeking to oust longtime targets such as GOP Reps. David Valadao of California, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Don Bacon of Nebraska. They’re also targeting four freshmen who flipped key seats last year: Michigan’s Tom Barrett, Colorado’s Gabe Evans and Pennsylvania’s Rob Bresnahan Jr. and Ryan Mackenzie.

But the party is also looking to expand its reach into districts that weren’t considered competitive last year. Those include Iowa’s 2nd District, where Republican Ashley Hinson won reelection by 16 points last year and voters backed Trump by 10 points, according to calculations by elections analyst Drew Savicki. Also on the list are Ohio’s 15th District represented by Republican Mike Carey, which Trump won by 9 points; and Kentucky’s 6th District, which Trump won by 15 points and whose GOP congressman, Andy Barr, is considering a Senate run this cycle.

That bullishness follows a pair of special elections for deep-red House seats in Florida last week, in which Democrats’ cut their losing margins by roughly half from November. Party officials have also sharply criticized Trump’s new tariff policies over the past week, which looks poised to be a significant messaging line in the midterm campaign.

Last month, the DCCC named 26 Democratic incumbents to its Frontline program for vulnerable members. That list heavily overlaps with the targeted members rolled out by the National Republican Congressional Committee last month.

Here’s the full list of Republican members included in the DCCC’s “Districts in Play” for 2026:

• Nick Begich of Alaska’s at-large district
• David Schweikert of Arizona’s 1st District
• Eli Crane of Arizona’s 2nd
• Juan Ciscomani of Arizona’s 6th
• David Valadao of California’s 22nd
• Young Kim of California’s 40th
• Ken Calvert of California’s 41st
• Gabe Evans of Colorado’s 8th
• Cory Mills of Florida’s 7th
• Anna Paulina Luna of Florida’s 13th
• María Elvira Salazar of Florida’s 27th
• Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa’s 1st
• Ashley Hinson of Iowa’s 2nd
• Zach Nunn of Iowa’s 3rd
• Andy Barr of Kentucky’s 6th
• Bill Huizenga of Michigan’s 4th
• Tom Barrett of Michigan’s 7th
• Open; Michigan’s 10th District
• Ann Wagner of Missouri’s 2nd
• Don Bacon of Nebraska’s 2nd
• Thomas H. Kean Jr. of New Jersey’s 7th
• Mike Lawler of New York’s 17th
• Max Miller of Ohio’s 7th
• Michael R. Turner of Ohio’s 10th
• Mike Carey of Ohio’s 15th
• Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania’s 1st
• Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania’s 7th
• Rob Bresnahan Jr. of Pennsylvania’s 8th
• Scott Perry of Pennsylvania’s 10th
• Andy Ogles of Tennessee’s 5th
• Monica De La Cruz of Texas’ 15th
• Rob Wittman of Virginia’s 1st
• Jen Kiggans of Virginia’s 2nd
• Bryan Steil of Wisconsin’s 1st
• Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin’s 3rd