The following article stub for  “Polling Shows ‘American Families Are Trapped in a Cycle of Debt‘” by Jessica Corbett is cross-posted from Common Dreams:

Yet another poll exposes the pain that working-class Americans are enduring thanks to US President Donald Trump’s policies, the economic justice advocates behind the new survey said Tuesday.

Polling released in recent months has highlighted how most Americans don’t believe that merely working hard is enough to get ahead, a majority blames Trump for the country’s economic woes, and large shares are concerned about the price of groceries, housing, and unexpected medical expenses.

The new survey—conducted by Data for Progress less than two weeks ago for Groundwork Collaborative and Protect Borrowers—shows that “American families are trapped in a cycle of debt,” the groups said.

Specifically, the Data for Progress found that 55% of likely voters have at least some credit card debt, and another 18% said that they “had this type of debt in the past, but not anymore.” Additionally, over half have or previously had car loan or medical debt, more than 40% have or had student debt, and over 35% are or used to be behind on utility payments.

More than two-thirds of respondents said that the federal government’s resumption of student loan collections had an impact on their family’s finances, and almost a quarter said they would need a one-time infusion of cash, “such as from inheritance, lottery, government assistance, etc.,” to be able to pay off all of their debt.

More here.

The following article, “Redistricting Isn’t the Democrats’ Problem” by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

The redistricting wars are in full swing. Somewhat implausibly, Democrats claim they will match Republicans’ redistricting moves, as in Texas, with moves of their own that will cancel them out. But Democrats just have fewer places than the GOP to pull off these maneuvers and, even where they are in control of state government, are more likely to face institutional obstacles like nonpartisan commissions specifically designed to prevent gerrymandering. Therefore, the net results of these moves and counter-moves is likely to favor the GOP.

How badly could all this hurt the Democrats in 2026? In all likelihood, not very. As Nate Cohn has pointed out, other factors that make the midterm environment favorable to the Democrats will likely swamp the effects of any pro-GOP redistricting. As he notes, even with a Texas redistricting, the 2026 midterm map will still be less pro-GOP than the 2018 map—and we know what happened then.

So does that mean Democrats shouldn’t worry at all about redistricting shenanigans? No, but it does mean they shouldn’t hit the panic button about it. Their problems lie far deeper than that and go way beyond the marginal House seat in the 2026 election. Indeed the garment-rending about the GOP’s redistricting efforts misses the harm done to Democrats by the continuing concentration of their partisans in ever-less competitive districts, under the press of both redistricting and population sorting.

In the 21^st century, the number of Democratic-held districts that are considered competitive has declined steadily to only about a quarter of seats. The Democrats’ median district now has a double-digit partisan lean of +13D, meaning it is 13 points more Democratic than the nation as a whole. This means that Democratic Congressional representatives are under less and less pressure to deviate from party orthodoxy and take account of sentiment outside of their highly partisan supporters.

The significance of this is reinforced by ideological trends among Democrats. The simple fact is that today’s Democrats are remarkably different from the Democrats of yesteryear: they are far more liberal. Few people know today or would believe that moderates and conservatives used to far outnumber liberals among Democratic identifiers. As recently as 2008, moderates and liberals were evenly balanced among Democrats and conservatives were still over a fifth of the total. But today, those saying they are liberal or very liberal are by far the largest group among Democrats (55 percent to 34 percent for moderates) and conservatives have become an endangered species.

Put all this together and the incentive structure for today’s Democratic politicians comes into focus. They are far more likely to be rewarded by their voters for no-holds-barred liberalism than to be punished for their lack of moderation or willingness to compromise. This has left the Democrats in poor shape to course correct against the loss of moderate-to-conservative working-class voters in the age of Trump. Even if individual Democratic politicians wish to do so, the pressures to stay within the bounds of Democratic orthodoxy are enormous. Sticking with the true faith generates adulation from activists, favorable media coverage, and gushers of donations. Breaking ranks risks unhinged attacks on social media and accusations of helping the Right and undermining “democracy.” Not too many Democratic politicians want to take that risk.

This dynamic has led to what I call “the paradox of Trumpian overreach”: that the more Trump overreaches, the more Democrats, ensconced in their partisan bubbles, are pressured into the most histrionic, radical, ineffective responses to Trump, thereby enabling Trump to overreach some more and crippling the effectiveness of his opposition. In other words, the very scale of his overreach, which should make it easier to defeat him, actually makes it harder.

This is not a healthy dynamic and presents a far greater obstacle to future Democratic fortunes than aggressive GOP redistricting efforts. Consider how little Democrats have changed since having their hat handed to them in the 2024 election. After a brief flirtation with the idea that the Democratic brand must be profoundly transformed in response and move dramatically to the center, Trump’s over-the-top actions and rhetoric have inflamed Democratic partisans against any change in Democratic commitments. Democratic politicians, dependent as they are on these partisans, have duly responded and the momentum is now clearly on the side of those in the party who reject compromise of any kind.

Take immigration. Trump successfully shut down the border but has also been very aggressive in using ICE for deportations within the country, some of them with questionable justification. Democrats have responded with fury and denunciations of the Trump administration for turning America into a police state. In the process, any attempt by Democrats to portray themselves as having a new, tougher (but fair!) policy on immigration has been completely submerged. Aside from being against Trump’s deportations, is the Democrats’ current immigration policy at all different from what they stood for before (and what helped them lose the 2024 election)? Most voters would have no idea.

Or how about trans issues. The Trump administration has taken decisive action to get biological males out of female sports and to shut down pediatric medicalization for gender dysphoria. The abrupt nature of these changes has triggered Democrats into intransigent opposition, despite how lopsided public support tends to be for these changes and how much rigid support for the trans activist agenda cost the Democrats in 2024. Democratic politicians, in thrall to their liberal partisan supporters who want no change whatsoever, have been powerless to change the party’s image in this area. Very few have even tried.

Then there’s racial preferences and DEI. Trump has taken a draconian approach to eliminating DEI programs and rooting out racial preferences of any kind. The very lack of nuance in Trump’s approach has provoked Democrats into frenzied denunciations of white supremacy and a blanket defense of everything that Trump is attacking. Any attempt to dissociate Democrats from racial preferences and rebrand the party as a vehicle for universal uplift has been lost. Woe betide the Democratic politician who hints that there was anything wrong with the previous Democratic approach to these issues.

The same dynamic has affected Democrats’ response to Trump administration cuts to government and to university funding. The very intemperate and throwing-out-the-baby-with-the bathwater nature of the administration cuts has infuriated Democrats to the point where they deny these institutions need any reform at all and characterize Republican actions as strictly arbitrary and unneeded. If Democrats have any ideas for reform of government bureaucracies and universities, voters are completely unaware of them.

Finally, consider the Democrats’ energy and climate policy commitments, which defined their approach to economic policy under the Biden administration. Trump has taken a meat axe to the Democrats’ “green” agenda, gutting the renewable energy and electric vehicle subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act and, through a flurry of executive orders and other actions, firmly committing the U.S. to using its massive endowment of fossil fuels to achieve energy dominance. This is fully in tune with public opinion but outrage in Democratic ranks has prevented Democratic politicians from recalibrating their approach and admitting some of this needed to happen. These politicians have strayed far from the all-of-the-above policies of the Obama years, which were more popular, but imprisoned as they are by their ever-more-fervent, ever-more-concentrated partisans, they can’t find their way back.

This is the fundamental problem then, not GOP redistricting skullduggery undermining Democratic House seats. Because structural trends, including but not limited to ongoing redistricting, have made Democratic politicians ever more insulated from the median voter, the more radical forces in the party now hold the whip hand. They are determined to prevent the Democrats from pursuing an effective reform course that could truly isolate Trump. And, by and large, they are succeeding.

The following article stub for “Can Democrats Offer a New Vision for Labor?” by Justin Vassallo is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

As in recent years, millions of working Americans marked this past Labor Day with a sense of trepidation. While the holiday’s ubiquitous steep sales suggested that distributors and retailers haven’t yet passed on the full impact of Trump’s tariffs (recently jeopardized by a federal appeals court), Americans are afraid new price hikes are around the corner. And the pervasive discontent of the last fifteen years has hardly ebbed. A new Wall Street Journal poll finds that since the pandemic the percentage of Americans who believe they have a “good chance” to lead better, more prosperous lives has plummeted to a quarter. At the turn of the century, over seventy-five percent expected to get ahead. Millions either feel poorer or believe their minor pay bumps and savings have been vacuumed up by larger bills for routine goods and services.

Worse, the ability to counter any of these trends through politics or the workplace feels negligible. Modest gains, mostly reflecting phased-in minimum wage hikesinitiated last decade in several cities and states, have been outpaced by extraordinary housing costs, sharp price increases for basic groceries and modest family excursions, and higher credit card interest rates and monthly minimum payments. Yet the ongoing debate between Abundance converts, anti-monopolists, “care economy” progressives, and the tariff-friendly parts of the labor-left is more of an academic exercise than something that would yield a blueprint for action.

Currently, few elected Democrats are making an effort to clarify their top economic priorities following the sluggish response to “Bidenomics.” Struggling workers and cost-weary households don’t know who to turn to. Collective bargaining power remains stratified and has come under renewed assault by the Trump administration. Although the pandemic and its aftermath sparked an uptick in strike activity and organizing drives from Starbucks to Amazon to Uber, union households are typically older, concentrated in core legacy industries and the public sector, and comprise a dwindling fraction of the total workforce.

As the boomer retirement accelerates, the labor market is also undergoing a massive structural and demographic shift that Washington is plainly ill-prepared for. The share of Americans working as freelancers in some capacity has surged to over 64 million people, or nearly 40 percent of the working population, and is expected to grow as AI disrupts professional salaried work and spreads the demand for “labor flexibility” to fields in which expertise was once tied to greater employment security. Some of this growth reflects a genuine willingness on the part of workers to forge their own path and maximize the creativity and network power latent in the knowledge economy. Yet market fundamentalists would be mistaken to crow that this testifies to the march of individual liberty and the rejection of active government or collective agency. Unions enjoy their highest approval in decades, while consumers and small businesses are arguably attuned to the perils of monopoly power and anticompetitive practices at a level not seen since the Second World War.

Middle- and working-class Americans are clearly fed up with scraping by. Even so, many seem resigned to long-term labor market trends, believing American capitalism, more than ever, is a sink-or-swim system bereft of public goods and widespread upward mobility. Such pessimism about the dignity of work and the merits of trying to make an “honest living” is bound to affect how Americans approach core life decisions—and whether they take them up at all. That is a sociopolitical time bomb that, unaddressed, will make Trumpism’s extended pull seem like a minor affair.

Read more here.

The following article stub for “Democrats Keep Misreading the Working Class: Many in the party see workers as drifting rightward. But new data show they’re more progressive than ever on economic issues—if Democrats are willing to meet them there” by Bhaskar Sunkara, is cross-posted from The Nation:

“Zohran Mamdani won New York’s Democratic mayoral nomination with the most votes ever for a primary winner in the city. The democratic socialist did so with an agenda that spoke to the kitchen-table economic issues that, following the debacle of the 2024 election, Democrats generally acknowledge they have to get better at discussing. So what was the reaction of party leaders and the media echo chamber? A meltdown so severe that it has sparked widespread talk of a “civil war” within the party. On one side, the line goes, are younger, highly educated, pro-­Palestinian progressives who embrace economic populism; on the other, older Democratic stalwarts who are pro-Israel, economically moderate, in tune with the working class, and cautious about rocking the boat. But that’s not what the numbers say.

Advisers to House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries—who, like his counterpart in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, resisted endorsing Mamdani after the primary—referred to the city’s rising wave of democratic-­socialist-backed candidates as “Team Gentrification.” Yet exit polls reveal a different reality: Mamdani attracted support from a broad swath of New Yorkers by running a campaign relentlessly focused on working-­class cost-of-living concerns.

Unfortunately, top Democrats refuse to accept the notion that Mamdani’s economic populism is the key to his success. Or that the appeal of a boisterous tax-the-rich message might extend beyond urban progressive enclaves. Some go as far as Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, who says that Democrats need to stop demonizing rich people. But a recent report by the Center for Working-Class Politics(CWCP) upends Slotkin’s assertion. Analyzing data from three long-running national surveys, the report shows that working-class Americans have grown more progressive over the past two decades—not just on economic justice but also on immigration and civil rights. Today’s working class stands farther to the left than when it helped elect Barack Obama in 2008.

Why, then, do so many high-ranking Democrats imagine that workers are reactionary? Because the middle and upper classes are moving leftward at a faster pace, creating a perception gap. As higher-­income, college-educated voters embrace progressive positions on climate change, LGBTQ rights, and other issues, working-class voters—despite their own leftward shift—appear comparatively conservative. This distorted narrative misleads Democratic strategists and journalists alike.

Read more here.

The following article stub for “The Path to Defeating MAGA Runs Through the Working Class: Democrats must return to their roots as the party of the working class” by Dan Pfeiffer, is cross posted from The Message Box:

This upcoming weekend, elected Democrats will fan out across the nation to attend Labor Day picnics and parades, waxing nostalgic about the party’s long history of fighting for labor unions.

For as long as I’ve worked in politics, Labor Day has been a critical holiday for Democrats. It’s not just the kickoff of campaign season in election years — it has been an opportunity to draw a sharp contrast with Republicans. We were the party of the working class and union members; Republicans were the party of the rich and powerful corporations.

But this Labor Day, Democrats need to look in the mirror. Whatever story we want to tell ourselves, we are no longer the party of the working class. We are losing working-class voters — the core of our coalition since the New Deal — to a corrupt billionaire with a gold toilet, infamous for scamming workers and cutting taxes for the rich.

Fighting Trump and defeating MAGA extremism begins with Democrats thinking hard about how to rebuild the multi-racial working-class coalition.

A Dramatic and Disturbing Shift

For most of the last 75 years, Democrats were the party of the working class. That’s how we were known, and that’s who our policies were designed for. The path to the White House ran through cities and the industrial Rust Belt, and union members were central to our coalition.

So much has changed in a very short period of time.

In 2012, Barack Obama won voters making under $50,000 a year by 22 points. In 2024, Kamala Harris lost those voters by two points. In 2012, Mitt Romney won voters making over $100,000 by 10 points. Last year, Harris won them by 4.

Read more here.

If you are looking for a sound analysis of The Dignity Act, a recent bipartisan effort to address the immigration crisis in the U.S., check out “The Dignity Act: Two Futures for American Immigration” by Anne Webster at The Immigrant’s Journal. An excerpt:

“The Dignity Act is not a Trump administration proposal; it is a comprehensive, bipartisan piece of legislation introduced in the House of Representatives by Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) and Congresswoman Veronica Escobar (D-TX). It represents a complex attempt at a grand legislative bargain, trading enhanced border security and enforcement for pathways to legal status for the long-term undocumented population…The Dignity Act, officially titled the “Dignity for Immigrants while Guarding our Nation to Ignite and Deliver the American Dream Act,” is one of the most comprehensive immigration reform bills introduced in Congress in years. It is structured as a classic legislative “grand bargain,” attempting to build a broad coalition by combining stringent enforcement measures favored by conservatives with legalization provisions sought by Democrats and immigrant advocates. A core feature designed to broaden its appeal is its unique funding mechanism; unlike past efforts, the bill is designed to be fully funded through restitution payments and application fees paid by immigrants themselves, requiring no new taxpayer dollars and even projecting a net surplus for the U.S. Treasury. The legislation rests on two central pillars: a massive investment in border security and enforcement, and the creation of new pathways for undocumented immigrants to gain legal status.”

Further, from the article’s “Conclusion and Strategic Recommendations”: “This analysis reveals that the Dignity Act and the Project 2025 agenda are not merely different policy options; they represent two fundamentally irreconcilable futures for the United States. The choice confronting the nation in 2025 is between a pragmatic, if imperfect, legislative compromise aimed at managed immigration, economic growth, and social integration, and a radical, executive-led agenda of unprecedented restriction, social disruption, and severe economic contraction.

The Dignity Act, for all its political challenges and controversial compromises, is a serious attempt to govern. It acknowledges the complex reality of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. and seeks to integrate them into a legal, taxable, and regulated system. Its framework is built on a pro-growth economic logic that recognizes the vital role of immigrant labor in an aging society. While the creation of a permanent non-citizen class raises valid concerns about long-term social equity, the bill’s primary impact would be to provide stability to millions of families and a significant boost to the American economy.

Project 2025, in contrast, is a blueprint for demolition. It is an ideological crusade that prioritizes the radical reduction of the foreign-born population above all other considerations, including economic prosperity, social stability, and the rule of law. Its implementation would inflict a catastrophic blow to the U.S. economy, trigger a deep recession, and tear apart the social fabric of communities across the country. It represents a departure not only from decades of U.S. immigration policy but also from the foundational principles of American governance, favoring executive fiat over legislative consensus and due process.

Based on this comprehensive analysis, the following strategic recommendations are offered to policymakers:

1. Prioritize Economic Reality Over Political Rhetoric: Policymakers must recognize the indisputable economic data showing that legal immigration is a powerful driver of GDP growth and essential for long-term fiscal solvency. The severe economic costs of a mass deportation strategy—lost jobs, higher inflation, and a shrinking economy—must be at the forefront of any policy debate.
2. Acknowledge the Imperative of a Legal Workforce: In an era of persistent labor shortages, the primary policy goal should be to create pathways for workers to enter and remain in the legal labor force. The Dignity Act’s model of pairing mandatory work verification with a legalization program offers a pragmatic template for achieving this, providing stability for both employers and employees.
3. Defend the Legislative Process: The attempt to circumvent Congress and the courts to implement radical policy changes, as outlined in Project 2025, poses a threat that transcends immigration. Policymakers across the political spectrum should defend the role of the legislative branch in setting national policy and resist the concentration of unchecked power in the executive.
4. Seek Incremental Progress if Comprehensive Reform Fails: If a grand bargain like the Dignity Act proves politically impossible, policymakers should pursue targeted, incremental reforms that can command bipartisan support. This could include standalone legislation to provide permanent protection for Dreamers, measures to clear the legal visa backlogs, or reforms to temporary agricultural worker programs—all of which have broad support and significant economic benefits.”

As the article concludes, “The path chosen on immigration in 2025 will be a defining moment for the nation. It will determine whether the United States embraces a future of managed growth and integration or one of self-inflicted decline and social strife. The evidence strongly suggests that the former path, however difficult, is the only one consistent with the nation’s long-term prosperity and its core values.”

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 American Enterprise Institute:

One doesn’t need to be a Marxist revolutionary like Che Guevara, who advocated two, three, many Vietnams, to think Democrats are in need of a bit of revolution in their ranks. In my view, they need to think about a “Sister Souljah moment”—indeed, two, three, many Sister Souljah moments!

Recall that the original Sister Souljah moment occurred in June 1992, when Bill Clinton, speaking at a gathering for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, commented on a statement rapper/activist Sister Souljah had made in an interview with The Washington Post. In the interview, she replied to a question about whether black-on-white violence in the 1992 LA riots was a “wise, reasoned action” as follows:

Yeah, it was wise. I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?…White people, this government and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?

Clinton’s comment on this to the Rainbow Coalition was:

You had a rap singer here last night {on a panel} named Sister Souljah… Her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight. Just listen to this, what she said: She told The Washington Post about a month ago, and I quote, ‘If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?…So if you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?

If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke [founder of a Louisiana-based KKK organization] was giving that speech.

At the time, Democrats were suffering from a highly negative image of being soft on crime and public disorder and practicing a racial double standard (sound familiar?). Given what Clinton said and where he said it (to the Rainbow Coalition), his message was crystal clear: Democrats should not tolerate violence and inflammatory rhetoric, including any that comes from members of their own coalition. There should be no double standards.

Clinton was relentlessly attacked by Jackson and other figures on the party’s left for his apostasy. But normie voters got the message. Here was a different kind of Democrat who was willing to throw obvious Democratic lunacy over the side. Clinton reaped the reward and helped to change the party’s image for the better on key cultural issues…at least for a while.

That was a long time ago and today Democrats’ image is significantly worse and over a wider range of cultural issues than it was back then. The animus toward the party among working-class voters has reached epic proportions and Democrats appear clueless on how to overcome that. The reigning theories seem to be talking more about economics (“kitchen table issues” or, more daringly, “abundance”), insisting they’re “fighters” and cussing a lot. Damon Linker gets to the heart of how absolutely hopeless this approach is.

[W]hat liberals need to do to defeat right-wing populism…[is] to moderate on culture. That means on policies and moral stances wrapped up with the old culture war (like trans and other gender-related issues) as well as in other areas of policy that have a strong cultural valance—like crime, immigration, and DEI. This isn’t just necessary because Democratic positions on these issues are unpopular at the moment. It’s also crucial because culture is more fundamental than politics: It sends a signal to voters about where a politician or party stands on base-level moral questions. When voters become convinced that a specific politician or party has bad (or just sufficiently different) moral judgment, they lose trust in that politician or party. And then other, more superficial policy commitments don’t matter…

The area surrounding the Texas-Arkansas border has been solidly Republican for a while, but the Biden people wanted to demonstrate that federal dollars are available to all, regardless of political leanings, and they hoped they might be able to tilt the area’s partisan alignment a bit back toward the Dems if those dollars were used to jump-start a solar-panel-construction industry in the region, creating jobs and boosting the local economy in other ways…The money arrived, but in the 2024 election, the region voted even more overwhelmingly for Donald Trump than it had in the previous two election cycles…The effort failed because the voters in Texarkana, like voters in rural and exurban communities around the country, have learned to distrust the Democrats on fundamental issues of morality and culture, making them disinclined to trust them on anything else…

The way to [reach these skeptical voters] is for the party to make an effort to distance itself from the leftward cultural stances associated with its most animated progressive activists, but also often affirmed by many millions of well-educated upper-middle-class white and often female professionals. Since people fitting this description frequently hold top jobs in the Democratic Party itself, this is a hard ask…

This, I’m convinced, is the top challenge facing liberalism and the Democratic Party today.

Exactly. This is the top challenge facing the Democrats today. Yet they are shockingly M.I.A. in dealing with it. Democrats overwhelmingly would rather do anything than do what is needed: two, three many Sister Souljah moments. Consider how Democrats have handled culturally-inflected issues since their 2024 election defeat.

Trans? A few peeps, quickly slapped down by the Groups and party activists.

Immigration? Everything Trump’s doing is wrong. We’ll only cooperate with federal law enforcement when we feel like it.

Crime? Not a problem. Everything’s going great—especially in D.C.! Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries: “The crime scene in D.C. most damaging to everyday Americans is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.” Trump’s turning D.C. into a police state!

Race? DEI is wonderful and we’ll defend it to our dying breath. Same thing with racial preferences. Those who oppose these policies are racists and white supremacists.

The list could go on. Using the traditional 0-10 Sister Souljah scale, where zero is doing nothing at all, 5 is barely adequate, and 10 is what Bill Clinton did, I’d give today’s Democrats a 1 for the occasional grudging admission in interviews and the like that maybe the Democrats have overdone their noble commitments a little bit (though of course their heinous opponents are 100 percent wrong). And the 1 might be generous.

They’ve got a long way to go but they could learn a lot from what Clinton did and how he did it. First, his criticism was unsparing and it was directed at an actual person as opposed to a vague allusion to something unnamed someone’s might have gotten wrong despite the best of intentions. Second, and very important, he made his intervention confrontational by entering the lion’s den—making his statements in a public appearance sponsored by a group that was part of his coalition and associated with the attitudes he criticized. Given all that, there was no way this was not going to be injected directly into the media bloodstream, provoke a tempest of controversy, and send a very clear signal to the voters he wanted to reach. Genius.

Democrats could go there if they wished. Democratic politicians are always giving speeches to various groups that are part of their coalition and present perfect venues to unload on some exemplar of cultural lunacy. There are a lot of groups and a lot of lunacy to choose from. Indeed, there’s so much lunacy that, like I say, they need two, three, many Sister Souljah moments!

All that’s lacking is the guts to do it and right now that seems distinctly lacking in Democratic ranks. If that continues, it’s likely that right populism will be with us for a very long time. Gulp.

The following article, “The Cost to Taxpayers from Trump’s Tariffs Is Bigger Than the Savings from His Income Tax Cuts:  Repealing Trump’s tariffs gives Democrats a rare opportunity to offer a big working-class tax cut” by Bill Scher, is cross-posted from Washington Monthly:

A New York Times article recently speculated that the money flowing into federal government coffers from President Donald Trump’s tariffs amounts to “such a substantial stream of revenue” that it “could end up being hard to quit.” But Democrats should find it easy to argue that they would gladly end what is a regressive tax increase that vastly outweighs the amount of Trump’s tax cuts.

CNN tabulated that under Trump’s tariff regime, “since April, when the president began imposing a 10% tariff across nearly all goods, among several other steeper levies that followed, The government collected a total of $100 billion in tariff revenue, three times the amount collected during the same four months last year.” But that understates the increase, because each month has produced more tariff revenue than the previous month, peaking at $29.6 billion in July. And that’s before the latest wave of global tariffs kicked in yesterday.

Projecting the annual cost of Trump’s tariffs remains impossible because the president constantly changes the rules. He could announce a new deal with or punishment for a particular country at any moment.

We also don’t know which tariffs will survive the court. Already, the Trump administration has lost rulings by the United States Court of International Trade and by a district judge in the District of Columbia, though the decisions have been stayed pending appeals. Not only could the Supreme Court eventually rule that Trump lacked the legal authority to impose some tariffs, it could force his administration to pay back wrongfully harmed businesses.

But Trump, presumably, would never accept defeat. He could try re-imposing tariffs by creatively interpreting existing laws and continuing the cat-and-mouse game with the judiciary until his term ends. Or he could pressure the Senate (if it is still Republican-controlled) to junk the filibuster and pass legislation giving him explicit tariff-raising powers.

Despite all these political and judicial uncertainties, the fresh tariff revenue data does allow us to make a reasonable, back-of-the-napkin projection of how much extra cost taxpayers are coughing up thanks to Trump’s tariffs, and to compare that to how much they are saving from Trump’s income tax cuts.

We already have projections for how much the Trump tax cuts enacted through budget reconciliation this summer will cost the federal government (and, in turn, save taxpayers and corporations). For example, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated that the various tax cut provisions for individuals and businesses amounted to $5.3 trillion over 10 years. About $3.6 trillion of that comes from merely extending existing provisions from Trump’s 2017 tax reform package that were due to expire. That means less money for federal government coffers than the current law anticipated. But for individuals and businesses, extensions of existing tax provisions don’t change their bottom lines. As far as they are concerned, the new tax cuts total about $1.7 trillion.

But how much more are individuals and businesses paying in tariffs? According to the data tabulated by CNN, tariff revenue in 2024 totaled $98.4 billion. If the July 2025 tariff number of $29.6 billion reflects what we will be paying going forward, the annual cost will be $355.2 billion. That’s $256.8 billion more than last year. Over a 10-year window, that’s $2.6 trillion in added tariff costs, nearly a trillion more than the new tax cuts.

That calculation doesn’t account for other aspects of the budget reconciliation bill that push more costs on individuals, such as Medicaid and food assistance cuts. Nor does it factor in the regressive nature of both the tariff increases and new tax provisions. According to a Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis of the budget reconciliation bill, by 2033, households in the bottom 40 percent of income will, on net, lose after-tax income, while other households make gains, and the wealthiest make the most significant gains.

The poorest families will also bear the brunt of the tariffs. They will likely feel squeezed harder soon, as businesses have been trying to absorb the higher costs but are warning that they will soon pass more costs on to consumers.

This system will not be hard to quit.

The Times article suggested lawmakers “may be hesitant to roll back the tariffs if that would mean a further addition to the federal debt load, which is already raising alarms on Wall Street. And replacing the tariff revenue with another type of tax increase would require Congress to act, while the tariffs would be a legacy decision made by a previous president.”

But Democrats are eager to campaign on repealing Trump’s extreme tariffs; a repeal can be truthfully portrayed as a tax cut for working families, offset with new revenue from taxes on the wealthy. A Democratic presidential candidate can promise to lift Trump’s tariffs by executive order. Democratic congressional candidates can promise to raise taxes on the rich on a party-line vote through budget reconciliation.

The GOP has long been known as the party of tax cuts. Trump ended that era. Democrats are poised to reap the political benefits.

The Democrats are probably on course to have a pretty good 2026 election. They are the out-party, Trump isn’t particularly popular, Democratic partisans are highly motivated, and there is a lot of general voter discontent, particularly about the economy. That means Democrats will likely take back the House, where they only need a net gain of three seats, perhaps pick up a seat or two in the Senate and make some gains in governorships and state legislatures. Sure, Republicans will try their best to stop this by redistricting and other shenanigans but they will likely fail because the terrain is too favorable to their opponents.

That’s the good news for Democrats. The bad news is that this very success will likely cripple them going forward as they stare into the abyss of the 2028 election and the ongoing realignment of US politics. As they grasp onto the fool’s gold of midterm success, their opportunities to fix their party’s weaknesses will slip away—indeed, are already slipping away. This dynamic is succinctly explained by pollster Patrick Ruffini. He notes that Democrats went through a brief period of introspection after their 2024 presidential loss forced them to confront their weaknesses and the need for change. This was predictable. And also predictably brief.

But a few months later, this newfound openness to doing things differently has faded in the face of all-out opposition to Trump 2.0. In the U.S., midterm elections are a unique mechanism that squash[es] heterodoxy and lock[s] parties into sticking with their existing positions. The parties are thrown immediately back into campaign mode a few months after the election. That means the out-party quickly needs to maximize fundraising and enthusiasm from their base, which is usually at its angriest in the first few months of the opposing Administration’s term.

By favoring the out-party, midterm elections preempt the gnarly questions raised by the party’s last election defeat. And this false optimism carries through to the next presidential cycle.

If Democrats have a good election next November, you can count on their problems with Hispanic voters or young men to be memory-holed. Fans of the party’s existing strategy will argue that the current path works just fine. Just recall what happened after 2022: following a decent midterm, Democrats told themselves that Joe Biden was actually a viable candidate for re-election, that he was the only one who had beat Trump before and that he could do it again…

Or consider 2018, a smashing success for Democrats. The takeaway there was that all the party would need to do was take that Resistance mojo and double down on it for 2020. The party was on the upswing, and Democrats told themselves this meant a broad mandate for social change, not just a narrow repudiation of Trump. And so you got a race to the left to appease the groups, with hands raised on debate stages for decriminalizing border crossings and positions taken in favor of taxpayer funding for gender transition surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison.

We now know this created all sorts of downstream problems with traditional Democratic constituencies, problems invisible in the post-2018 euphoria but very apparent following the 2020 and 2024 elections…

Midterm success is all well and good, but a mere cyclical reaction to the party in power doesn’t solve the deep-seated problems exposed in the presidential year when the broadest set of voters participates…

Running a base mobilization strategy can work in midterms but in presidential years, usually gets canceled out quickly by an influx of low-information and more persuadable voters motivated by an entirely different issue set…

While many Democrats sincerely want to change how their party is perceived by low-propensity voters, all the incentives going into and following the midterms are lined up against them. The better Democrats do in the midterms, the more that arguing for a change in direction makes you the skunk at the garden party.

This all seems exactly right to me. In fact, I don’t see how any attentive Democrat could look at how the party discourse has evolved since November 2024 and not see this dynamic unfolding in real time. The fool’s gold of midterm success is once again poised to distract Democrats from what really needs to be done to secure their long-term success against a formidable populist opponent.

Before this happens and, as Ruffini puts it, they “memory-hole” their profound problems with key voter groups, it’s worth underscoring how much work Democrats have to do to re-establish support levels that might stand up in a presidential election context, when low-propensity voters flood into the electorate.

1. The Democratic Party recently hit a record low in favorability (34 percent) in Gallup polling going back to 1992. As recently as when Biden entered office in 2021, favorability toward Democrats was 48 percent, exactly balancing the 48 percent who viewed the party unfavorably.
2. This decline in Democratic favorability has been skewed toward nonwhites. Since 2021, there has been an astonishing 53 point swing away from the Democrats in net favorability among nonwhites. In 2021, Democrats’ nonwhite favorability was a very strong 39 points above water—66 percent favorable to 27 percent unfavorable. Today, the Democratic Party is 14 points underwater among nonwhites—just 37 percent favorable to 51 percent unfavorable.
3. Party identification—even more consequential for voting behavior—has also shifted dramatically since those halcyon days when Joe Biden first occupied the White House. At that time, Democrats had a 10-point advantage in party identification over the GOP according to Pew. Now Republicans have a one point advantage.
4. Here again the decline in Democratic party identification has not been uniform but skewed toward nonwhites. The Democratic party-ID advantage has declined by 17 points since 2021 among Asians (from 35 to 18 points), by 16 points among Hispanics (from 35 to 19 points), and by 16 points among blacks (from 68 to 52 points).
5. Declining Democratic party identification has also been skewed toward the young. Those under 30 favored Democrats by 32 points in 2021; now the Democratic advantage in just 6 points. Looked at in terms of decadal cohorts (Pew does not use generational divisions), those born in the 1980’s favored Democrats by 20 points in 2021, an advantage that has now essentially vanished. And those born in the 1990s gave Democrats a 22 point advantage in 2021, now down to just 3 points.
6. Most astonishing, back in 2023—two short years ago—Democrats had a very healthy party identification advantage of 26 points among men under 30 (62 percent Democratic to 36 percent Republican). Now this group has radically shifted against the Democrats and gives Republicans an 18-point advantage (52 percent GOP to 34 percent Democratic). That’s a 44-point shift in net party ID over two years.

If calling attention to these facts makes me “the skunk at the garden party” so be it. Maybe the Democrats need a few more skunks and a few less cheerleaders and others dazzled by that midterm fool’s gold.

The following article stub for “Allies, in jab at Trump, threaten not to buy F-35s” by Joe Gould, Jacopo Baragazzi and Chris Lunday,  is cross-posted from Politico.

Allies fed up with Donald Trump’s latest round of punishing tariffs and spending demands are hitting the president where it hurts — his favorite fighter jet.

Spain, in the wake of a row with Washington over NATO’s new 5 percent defense spending goal, ditched its multibillion-dollar purchase of the stealthy F-35 fighter jet. Switzerland, reeling from steep U.S. tariffs, is facing increasing pressure across the political spectrum to drop plans for its own F-35 war planes. And India, frustrated at higher U.S. prices on its goods, has reportedly decided to pause efforts to buy American combat vehicles.