The following article, ‘Sowing  Rural Insurgency” by Justin H. Vassallo is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

Regardless of whether one casts economic hardship, nativist bigotry, or coastal elitism as the primary cause of the Democratic Party’s disrepute in small factory towns and the farm belt, the resulting sense of alienation in rural America remains the single biggest obstacle to broadening the party’s regional power. And it has mostly stifled whatever impulse there might be to rally low-income Americans of all stripes against the crony capitalism now enveloping the American state.

Until Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) began holding rallies in Republican-held districts to address DOGE’s destructive impact on federal workers and programs, most progressives had not dared to dream of rural America as fertile ground for a backlash. But it’s central to the concept of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI), a group determined to breathe new life into rural organizing strategies.

More from Justin H. Vassallo

Conceived in early 2020 by Anthony Flaccavento, a small farmer, former Democratic congressional candidate, and community organizer in southern Virginia, and Erica Etelson, a political writer and former public-interest attorney based in California, RUBI is kindling a new way to approach—and ultimately advance—rural concerns within the progressive movement. Through training sessions, reports from local experts, policy development, and traditional volunteer work, RUBI hopes to depolarize rural politics and persuade other activist groups to engage in good faith with the needs, fears, and aspirations of rural communities.

RUBI’s most prominent effort to date is its campaign to convince the Democratic National Committee and the broader fundraising network on the left to devote substantially more resources to rural causes. Since Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, was elected in February to head the DNC, RUBI has lobbied him to allocate $400 million—10 percent of the Democratic ad buy for the 2024 general election—toward rural districts and candidates.

Although RUBI has yet to secure Martin’s commitment, co-signatories to the public letter include Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), author and sociologist Arlie Hochschild, veteran Texas populist Jim Hightower, two state party chairs and dozens of county committees, and scores of other individuals and organizations alarmed by Democratic decline in rural areas. (Disclosure: I am listed among the journalists who have signed it.)

Rural strategists hope to change the narrative and trajectory of American politics by transforming the everyday ways progressives think of and relate to left-behind Americans.

Regardless of the DNC’s final decision, the campaign testifies to the perseverance of rural progressive populism. It reflects, too, a growing recognition on the part of local groups committed to the welfare of rural workers that they are not isolated in their anger over how national Democrats have burned through billions of dollars in the last several election cycles without improving their position in a single “purple” state.

During Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats lost well over a thousand congressional, statewide, and local down-ballot offices. Tentative gains in critical presidential swing states since 2018 have been largely offset by Trump’s comeback; he won all seven in November. Other states where Democrats used to be competitive across the board, such as Florida and Ohio, are poised to go the way of Missouri, Indiana, and Arkansas.

A recent study from the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire suggests that a shift among rural voters to Kamala Harris of just 3 percent could have led her to victory over Donald Trump. If even just a few dozen rural Democrats from the South and Midwest won back offices controlled by the GOP, there could be a tectonic shift in how the party competes at the gubernatorial, congressional, and presidential levels.

As RUBI’s founders know well, it is a herculean task just to get the party elite to admit the main facts—that austerity, trade shocks, and monopoly power have distressed rural America—much less own their own culpability in these issues. But although it is tempting to place all the blame on party elites, the same, unfortunately, can often be said of the major progressive groups that have cropped up since the Bush years, Flaccavento argues. The overriding focus, he says, on “call[ing] out how horrible the Republicans are 24/7” has left little energy to discuss what matters to rural folks: “jobs, employment, the economy, livelihoods, manufacturing, trade policy, [and] antitrust.”

This, then, is how rural strategists hope to change the narrative and trajectory of American politics: not through conferences, white papers, and viral media, but by transforming the everyday ways progressives think of and relate to left-behind Americans.

RUBI’S EMERGENCE, ALONGSIDE SIMILAR ORGANIZATIONS like Contest Every Race, the Center for Working-Class Politics, More Perfect Union, and Dirt Road Democrats, comes at a precarious moment in national politics. Not only is the Democratic brand now routinely described as “toxic” outside of deep-blue cities and college towns, but the meaning and purpose of 21st-century progressivism seems uncertain, with many supporters believing it has deviated, at least partially, from its populist and New Deal origins. Some activists are beginning to entertain the nonpartisan path taken by independent Dan Osborn, who since losing to Republican incumbent Deb Fischer in last year’s U.S. Senate race in Nebraska, has started a Working Class Heroes Fund to back future insurgents.

But harrowing political defeats do create a window—at least temporarily—to take aim at ossified party structures and discredited strategies. For organizers like Flaccavento and Etelson, these candid assessments are essential to mapping a recovery. Though RUBI aims, in part, to overhaul the activist PR-speak that typically puts off rural and less-educated workers, Flaccavento, who is steeped in rural development issues, is frank about the big picture that most D.C. consultants and their paymasters evade.

“Even the most down-to-earth language ain’t going to cut it until we address why so many people are pissed,” he says.

A significant part of RUBI’s work involves exploring how Democrats and the modern left went wrong with rural Americans. That’s what “really differentiates us from almost every other rural group out there,” says Flaccavento, “which are more either trying to find better candidates or just trying to make the case that the Democratic Party is the right party.” Flaccavento is adamant that progressives have to comprehensively recognize that they have been in a losing battle to “persuade [blue-collar rural] people that we really are for them when they don’t buy it anymore.”

RUBI is concerned with reimagining what “bottom-up prosperity” looks like in this age of regional inequality.

RUBI’s work is about more than dissecting the weaknesses of contemporary progressivism, however. Its major policy document, “A Rural New Deal,” co-published with Progressive Democrats of America, champions and expands upon the best aspects of President Biden’s domestic legacy, particularly in the areas of antitrust enforcement and re-establishing regional supply chains.

But unlike many D.C.-based think tanks, RUBI and its allies are not trying to graft a left-leaning technocratic agenda onto rural workers based on an abstract assumption of what they most need. Instead, RUBI is concerned with reimagining what “bottom-up prosperity” looks like in this age of regional inequality, and retrieving the policy tools that give local communities “the capacity,” as Flaccavento puts it, “to solve many if not most of their problems.”

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 approval rating has declined to the point where his approval is “underwater”—that is, his net approval (approval minus disapproval) has turned negative in the both the RCP and Silver Bulletin running averages. And his net approval rating is even more negative (-8) on the all-important issue of the economy, Trump’s key issue in the 2024 election. Polls regularly show gloomy voter assessments of the economy’s current trajectory. In a recent Echelon Insights survey, voters by 17 points say the economy is getting worse rather than improving and by 18 points that their personal financial situation is getting worse rather than improving.

This raises the hope in Democratic hearts that voters are wising up to how terrible Trump is for the economy and the country and that a combination of #Resisteverything and a thermostatic reaction against the incumbent Trump administration will rekindle their political fortunes. This is a comforting take for Democratic partisans because it implies that a combination of stout-hearted opposition and waiting around for the sky to fall on Trump will suffice; no need to do anything drastic like actually changing toxic party positions and doing serious surgery on the party brand.

I think there are grounds for considerable skepticism here. The hole the Democrats are in is so deep that it is doubtful that the comforting take is the right one. Their problems are just too severe. I round up here a series of recent survey and analytical results plus new findings from the 2024 election that illustrate how deep the Democrats’ hole truly is.

1. Views of the Democratic Party. You’d think that as Trump runs into difficulties and sows chaos, voters would like Democrats more. They do not. Instead, Democrats’ favorability among voters is scraping the bottom. In a March CNN poll, favorability toward the Democratic Party clocked in at 29 percent, down ten points since right before the 2024 election and the lowest rating for the Democrats in the CNN poll since its inception in 1992. Trump’s job approval among working-class (non-college) respondents in the poll was 20 points higher than their favorability toward the Democratic Party. The working class does not appear to be warming to the Democrats.

In a March NBC poll, the Democratic Party’s favorability was even lower, 27 percent. The rating was the lowest in that poll since 1990. Among independents, the party’s favorability was an abysmal 11 percent vs. 56 percent unfavorable. These voters may not love Donald Trump but they really don’t like the Democrats.

In a February Blueprint Research poll, about two-thirds of voters thought the Democrats don’t have a workable strategy for responding to Trump and around the same number found this take on the Democrats persuasive: ”No one has any idea what the Democratic Party stands for anymore, other than opposing Donald Trump. Democrats have no message, no plan of their own, and no one knows what they would do if they got back into power. If Democrats ever want to win elections again, people need a clear message from them about what they stand for and what they’ll do.” Ouch.

On the plus side, voters in a February Navigator Research poll across the battleground Congressional districts thought Democrats in Congress “fight for what they believe.” However, they also thought Democrats don’t respect work, don’t share my values, don’t look out for working people, don’t value work, don’t care about people like me, don’t have the right priorities and, by a massive 47 points, don’t get things done. Double ouch.

There’s lots of polling data along these lines and they send a clear message: Democrats’ image is atrocious and therefore cannot present an attractive alternative to Trump and the GOP.

2. Identification with the Democratic Party. Nothing looms as large in driving political behavior than party identification: which party voters identify with or lean toward. Lately something astonishing has happened: Republicans have led in party identification for three straight years, which hasn’t happened in nearly a century. This trend shows no sign of abating in the aftermath of the election.

And the GOP is outregistering Democrats in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina. Indeed, over time, just four states—California, Colorado, Delaware and New York—have seen Democrats out registering Republicans compared to 22 states where Republicans have been gaining.

3. Leaving Democratic states. There’s no more meaningful vote than where you choose to live. And right now the trend is strongly against blue states and in favor of red states like Florida and Texas. This is implicitly a harsh judgement on Democratic governance.

My Liberal Patriot colleague Nate Moore has the facts:

Since Covid, the biggest blue states have dramatically lagged behind the biggest Republican states in population growth. Between 2020 and 2024, California, New York, and Illinois each lost more than 100,000 thousand residents. Florida and Texas, meanwhile, both gained around 2 million residents. The disparity is shocking.

It is tempting to chalk up the unprecedented decline to Covid. Now that the pandemic has faded, numbers will even out, some might argue. Nothing more than a blip. But the most recent figures confirm that the reasons behind the blue-state population decline run much deeper than Covid. Even though case counts are a thing of the past, populous red states continue to lap their blue counterparts. Between July 2023 and July 2024, Florida and Texas gained more than 1 million residents combined. Illinois, New York, and California barely broke 400,000 cumulatively.

That’s bad but consider the electoral implications:

Estimates from the American Redistricting Project predict that California is on track to lose three House seats—and three electoral votes—after 2030’s reapportionment. New York could drop 2 seats. Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Illinois all might lose a seat. Meanwhile, Texas and Florida are each projected to gain a whopping 4 seats. Idaho and Utah, too, will tack on an additional seat.

Notice a pattern? The states projected to gain representation—and an Electoral College boost—are overwhelmingly Trump states. The states projected to lose representation are Harris states.

Yup, where people choose to live matters. And increasingly they don’t want to live where Democrats are in charge.

4. No Democrats where you need ‘em. Wherever you find dense concentrations of highly educated voters you’ll find plenty of Democrats. As for the rest of the country—not so much. This is a big, big problem, not just in presidential elections but critically in Senate elections where every state, no matter its education level, gets the same two Senators.

Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck have the relevant facts:

Although Democrats won all the states with shares of BA degree holders at 40 percent or higher in 2024, there were only 12 of them, none swing states. By contrast, Democrats won only one of the 29 states with BA shares at 35 percent or lower while prevailing in seven of the 10 states with college attainment between 36 and 39 percent. [Note that the only swing state in the 36-39 percent group, North Carolina, was carried by Trump—RT] And because ticket-splitting between presidential and senatorial races has become more infrequent, the new class-based politics bodes ill for Democrats’ U.S. Senate prospects as well.

It turns out being widely disliked in huge parts of the country matters. A lot.

These four factors indicate a party that is truly in a deep hole. The party’s severe image, identification, governance, and geographic weaknesses cannot be remedied by mounting the (rhetorical) barricades against Trump and waiting for his administration to self-destruct. This may make the partisan faithful happy but it is woefully inadequate as a program to bring the party back to full health.

Unfortunately, that so many Democrats are wedded to #Resisteverything—starting with the defenestration of Chuck Schumer—rather than making the Democrats into a party more voters actually like shows the depth of denial in the party. They think they’re on the verge of a breakthrough if they just toughen up. They are not.

Perhaps some fresh data from the 2024 election can shock them back to their senses. I’ll write more about these data in coming weeks but here are some of the most startling findings from a tranche of data analysis just released by David Shor’s Blue Rose Research firm.

5. Democrats did worse in the 2024 election than you think. They completely failed to win over less engaged voters, who are becoming much more Republican. The higher the turnout, the more these voters show up and the worse it is for Democrats. Shor’s analysis indicates that if everyone had voted last year Trump would have won the popular vote by five points rather than a point and a half. Low turnout is now the Democrats’ BFF!

Hispanics are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative in ideology. It’s been well-documented that Hispanic conservatives have been shifting dramatically to the right in their voting patterns. But Shor’s new data establishes that Hispanic moderates are now joining the party. There was a 24-point decline in the Democratic advantage among this group from 2020 to 2024 and since 2016 there’s been a total 46-point margin shift away from the Democrats. Hispanic moderates (almost half of Hispanic voters) are now voting very similarly to white moderates.

More broadly, ideological polarization among all nonwhites is shifting moderate to conservative voters away form the Democrats. This is making nonwhite voters less reliable constituencies for Democrats.

Shor’s data also indicate that immigrant voters swung from a +27 Biden constituency in 2020 to a Trump +1 group in 2024. Wow.

Shor’s analysis also suggests that Trump outright won voters under 30. Double wow. He also finds that Gen Z voters under 25 regardless of race or gender are now more conservative than the corresponding Millennial voters. So much for the Democrats’ generational tsunami.

The issue landscape in 2024 was worse than most Democrats thought. The only really important issue Democrats had an advantage on was health care and that advantage was tiny by historical standards. The Democrats did have a large advantage on climate change—but voters don’t really care about the issue.

There’s plenty more in the Blue Rose analysis plus interesting discussion and data nuggets in two interviews Shor did with Vox and with the New York Times. But the totality of the data really does underscore how deep a hole Democrats are currently in. The way out is not with a feel-good Democratic playbook that leaves Democratic shibboleths intact. That hasn’t worked and it won’t work.

Instead Democrats should consider the approach recommended by John Judis (full disclosure: Judis was my co-author on Where Have All the Democrats Gone?) in his bracing new article on the Compact website.

To reverse their fortunes, the Democrats must alter their image in voters’ minds. Above all, they must be seen again as the party of the “normal American” and “the real America.” The last time they succeeded in doing a makeover like this was in the 1992 election when a group of politicians and political operatives, working through a group called the Democratic Leadership Council, turned around voters’ perception of the Democrats as weak on crime and defense and opposed to any reform of the welfare system. The DLC’s former president Bill Clinton won in 1992 on the DLC’s platform. I don’t suggest that the Democrats need to mimic the content of the DLC platform, particularly on economic and trade issues, but they do need to transform their image, or what political consultants call their “brand.”

Some commentators have insisted the Democrats’ defeat had nothing to do with “wokeness.” That is a fatal misreading. The Democratic makeover must start with the panoply of cultural and socio-economic stands that Republicans were able to use in 2024 to discredit Democratic candidates. These include the Democrats’ positions on immigration, sex and gender, affirmative action, criminal justice, and climate change. A candidate like Sherrod Brown in Ohio had said all the right things about economics and labor for decades, but he was defeated by a candidate who linked him to the Democrats’ stances on social issues.

I’m not suggesting Democrats should hypocritically adopt positions that are wrong-headed. In rejecting the participation of biological males in competitive women’s sports, as California Gov. Gavin Newsom did recently, Democrats would have biology and public opinion on their side. The same goes for policies that have encouraged street crime and illegal immigration. A more difficult issue is climate change. Democrats are right to reject Republican claims that it is a hoax or needs no serious attention—indeed, the Trump administration is actively discouraging the transition to renewable energy. But in order to win public support for any climate measures, Democrats will have to tone down their apocalyptic rhetoric and abandon unrealistic goals for achieving net-zero emissions. That would include, for instance, supporting natural gas as a transitional fuel and nuclear energy as a feasible alternative to fossil fuels.

Great advice. But I’m not holding my breath on when Democrats might choose to follow it. They’re too busy pretending the deep hole they’re in is just a shallow indentation and vanquishing Trump is right around the corner.

The following article, “An American Civic Renaissance: Inside the Fight to Revive the Democratic Party” by Conor Webb is cross-posted from Yale’s The Politic:

When polls closed at 9:00 PM on November 5th, 2024, there was hope in New York City’s suburbs. Former Congressman Mondaire Jones (D-NY17), a progressive reformer, had run to retake the seat he occupied from 2019 to 2021.

The race was a nail-biter. Over 25 million dollars were spent, making it one of the most expensive Congressional races in American history. But Jones came up short of incumbent Congressman Mike Lawler (R-NY) by just 23,946 votes out of nearly 380,000 cast.

“Vindication” is how Jones described election night.

“I was feeling a vindication in my belief that the district had changed from where it was in 2020. Now, of course, the district itself was not the same district in terms of the contours of the geography, but you can recreate how the district would have performed in 2020 quite easily. And what we saw in [the 2024] election is a double-digit shift towards the former president of the United States, now the current president of the United States, Donald Trump.”

This phenomenon, colloquially called the “red shift,” occurred across the country, not only the affluent suburbs Jones aimed to represent. Though the 2024 presidential election was far from a landslide, it was a decisive victory for Trump and the Republican Party.  For the first time since 2004, a Republican candidate won the national popular vote, bruising the morale of Democratic organizers across the country.

Yale College Democrats President Christian Thomas ‘26 and his team knocked on doors for Jones in October. Thomas held out hope for Jones—and for Democrats across the country—until the end.

“I held on until the very last minute. I went home. My friends were hosting a watch party, and everyone there was in despair. And I was like, ‘Guys, it’s not over yet. We’ve only counted 20 percent of the votes in Phoenix. Once we get to 100% of the votes in Phoenix, then I can consider us perhaps not winning,’” Thomas recalled.

The next day, Thomas’ emotions took over.

“There’s a moment that is true for a lot of organizers that is just like, ‘damn. That was a lot of work that so many put in, that I also put into this.’ For an hour, I was like, ‘Was any of that worth it? Were any of those three-hour-long drives to Scranton [to knock on doors for Democratic candidates] worth it?’”

While Democrats like Thomas felt uncertainty when Trump was first elected in 2016, they weren’t hopeless. They mobilized to counter his administration. The Women’s March made national news just a day after his inauguration in 2017 by protesting his policies and rhetoric. It was the largest single-day protest in American history. Between 3.2 and 5.2 million people in the United States participated. Intrepid organizers formed grassroots organizations like Indivisible to combat Trumpism.

It is no longer 2016. The fierce resistance that followed Trump’s first election has faded. In its place, the quiet resignation has settled in. The Democratic coalition now wrestles with a painful political identity crisis.

Sam Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University and recent author of The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, argues Democrats need to examine the coalitional disconnect between the ideological priorities of the party and those of rank-and-file Democrats.

Since 2016, Rosenfeld said, Democrats have bled support down the income and education ladder. “In 2016, [the erosion] was about white voters outside the South who are non-college-educated, who Democrats used to do decently with. And then they lost ground.”

Today, however, Democrats lose ground on non-college-educated voters across age, racial, and ethnic categories. “That’s a huge problem. That’s a huge problem in terms of who’s in the electorate. And it’s a particular problem for Democrats existentially, in terms of a party that is committed to a vision of economic policy and political economy that is egalitarian and redistributive,” Rosenfeld noted.

This collapse is nothing short of catastrophic for Democrats electorally. In 2012, former President Barack Obama won voters making between $30,000 and $49,999 with 57 percent of the vote. In 2024, Trump won that income bracket 53 to 45. If Democrats are losing the very voters their policies are designed to help, it will become increasingly difficult for them to build winning coalitions.

But it’s not irreversible. Rosenfeld sees a chance to rebuild the Democratic Party and ignite a new generation of bold, unwavering advocates. Rosenfeld argued, “you have to think creatively about trying to rebuild a kind of civic and social and organizational life out there.”

“That could include and encompass ordinary working people in spaces that would habituate them to think it’s normal to vote for Democrats like there used to be,” said Rosenfeld. Several key stakeholders in the Democratic Party—academics, national political leaders like Mondaire Jones, analysts, and organizers—agree with Rosenfeld.

They have a vision for a Democratic Party that can rekindle its once-collective purpose and rise boldly against Trump-era disillusionment, a plan involving relational organizing, institutional reform, and truthfulness. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

***

Relational organizing might be the future of the Democratic Party.

On Saturday, November 2nd, just three days before Election Day, former Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign knocked on over 1.2 million doors in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The sheer organizing power of the Harris-Walz campaign gave the appearance of unstoppable momentum.

Yet Rosenfeld was skeptical. “I and others have had [suspicions] about parachuting in armies of idealistic, absolutely admirable volunteer canvassers from out of state to go around knocking on doors a million times.”

Rosenfeld called it a “costly way of trying to eke out votes.”

“It may not be effective at all. The scholarship has always said that leveraging people who are in those communities themselves, who are your neighbors or your friends or people you know, has just way more bang for your buck than professionals,” said Rosenfeld. This strategy is known as relational organizing, the practice of building political trust through entrenched personal relationships over long periods of time. Instead of dedicating large sums of campaign cash to temporary brigades of volunteers to battleground states, relational organizing aims to maintain those relationships over time.

Jack Dozier ‘27 is from rural Virginia and researches youth voter priorities with the Yale Youth Poll. Dozier spent three months as a regional organizer with the Virginia Coordinated Campaign—a joint effort spearheaded by the DNC, the Harris-Walz campaign, and the Virginia Democratic Party—and has seen firsthand the impact of relational organizing in his battleground home state. “Relational organizing is such an incredible program. It still has a way to go, but it’s reintroducing the idea of having conversations,” he said.

“When you’re an undecided young voter and you talk about the election with a trusted family member, with a close friend, with a family friend, that’ll have more of an impact on your decision-making than what some celebrity posts on Twitter,” Dozier noted.

Dozier named apps like Reach, a progressive organizing app piloted by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her insurgent Congressional primary challenge in 2018, which helps campaigns and activists engage voters and supporters in real time through relational and grassroots organizing.

Relational organizing strategies, including bolstered campaign infrastructure and offices open to staff and (importantly) the broader public, tend to become more effective with sustained, year-round implementation.  Dozier said that while year-round infrastructure is difficult, he found it more difficult to logistically set up new campaigns every other year. “As someone who helped open the office that I worked in, I spent more days in my first month of employment buying office supplies than actually talking with community members. Oh, my God, it was so hard to buy a stapler.”

Dozier added that when campaigns end, “the office lease goes up, the locks get changed, and all the furniture goes wherever it ends up.” Had the resources been present already, Dozier could have established more entrenched relationships with the community where he worked. Dozier covered nearly 1,500 square miles of territory, so the extra time spent building relationships with voters would have made an extraordinary impact. It’s for this reason that he calls relational organizing “the future of our modern politics.”

“As an organizer, I [have noticed] fewer people opening the doors and responding to text-bank texts. There’s a lot to be said about that. The methods that have won [young people] for years and years aren’t working as well anymore. There’s a route to find more trust, and that comes locally [in relational organizing].”

This recent decline in engagement is partly due to oversaturation—voters are inundated with campaign messages across platforms—and a generational shift in communication habits. Young people are also less likely to answer calls or respond to texts from unknown numbers than previous generations.

Relational organizing, applied to the conventional methods of voter outreach, offers a trusted, local alternative to cut through the noise. It is about elevating endorsements that carry weight within communities where trust and familiarity matter most. Dozier argued that small-scale endorsements, rather than the celebrity endorsements extolled by the Harris-Walz campaign, are intertwined with the project of relational organizing.

Dozier said, “celebrity endorsements are going to reach who they’re going to reach, but they might not have as much of a sway as we’ve thought they did. If your local paper, if your member of the Board of Supervisors, if your school board member is endorsing these national candidates, I think there’s a lot more trust.”

This stands in stark contrast to the Harris campaign’s strategy in 2024.

“One of the first celebrity endorsements of Harris was Charli XCX. A young person might say, ‘oh my gosh, that’s so exciting, Charli did this song [like the popular album “Brat” on which Harris branded her campaign].’ But there’s not complete trust of any given celebrity. It’s time to move even further into relational organizing, because that’s where you can make a real, tangible, and seeable difference,” Dozier remarked.

***

To repair the Democratic Party, the broader American political landscape may need reform.

Mondaire Jones shares Sam Rosenfeld’s observation about the disconnect between the ideology of the Democratic Party and the voters it purports to represent, but he takes the quandary one step further.

“It is untenable that a majority of working class people would not be voting for Democratic candidates as we seek to carry the mantle of the working class economic agenda,” said Jones. His solution: the party “needs to lean into an economic populism in order for us to regain the trust of the American people, particularly working class people we say we are running to represent,” requiring institutional changes that go beyond an increased emphasis on relational organizing.

This economic populism might take shape by the party changing the way it markets the pro-labor policies most Democrats already endorse. Democrats were criticized in the wake of Harris’ loss for overusing technocratic policy rhetoric. Shifting toward language that resonates with working class voters might align the policy—bolstering unions, raising the minimum wage, and cracking down on corporate monopolies that stifle competition and drive up the cost of living—with the politics to garner votes.

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:

The Democrats have become and remain today a “Brahmin Left” party. “Brahmin Left” is a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues to characterize Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites, including of course our own Democratic Party. The Brahmin Left character of the party has evolved over many decades but spiked in the 21^st century. The chart below illustrates this trend.

The chart does not show the most recent elections but election surveys agree that education polarization spiked further upward in both 2020 and 2024. Indeed, in the most reliable 2024 election survey the differential between unmodeled college and non-college Democratic support (compare the blue line in the chart) reached 27 points—literally off the Piketty chart and more than twice its level in the 2016 Piketty data.

It has not escaped the notice of many Democratic-sympathizing analysts that this ever-increasing education polarization—Brahminization—of the Democrats presents existential dangers to the party. Not only might the continued desertion of working-class (non-college) voters fatally undermine the Democrats’ electoral formula over time, the party’s fundamental purpose is being rapidly obliterated. What does it even mean to be the “progressive” party if the most educated and affluent voters are your most enthusiastic supporters? What does it mean to be “progressive” if working-class voters think your party mostly represents the values and priorities of those educated and affluent voters not their values and priorities?

In theory one way of responding to this dynamic is to just to “own” the Brahminization by (1) seeking to make up working-class losses with ever-increasing shares of educated voters (challenging since the college-educated are a much smaller group); and (2) redefining progressivism so that it centers around the cultural commitments of educated professionals and whatever economic program such voters feel comfortable supporting.

Democrats still appear reluctant to embrace such a path, at least publicly. This makes sense since the electoral arithmetic of an all-in Brahmin Left strategy is very difficult, especially on a state-by-state basis, and Democrats still like to think of themselves as the party of the downtrodden rather than the political vehicle for America’s educated class. Therefore, many Democrats have started to argue, with varying degrees of intensity, that Democrats must reconnect with the working class and win back many of those voters.

That’s logical and a worthy goal but not so easy to do. How do you de-Brahminize a Brahmin Left party that’s been evolving in the Brahmin direction for decades? Some Democrats seem to think it’s just a matter of playing the economic populist card as in: “Hey working class, over here, we love you and will fight for your interests against the billionaire class and their despicable Republican handmaidens!” Thenthe working class will realize the Democrats are their party and all will be well.

This is not remotely plausible. You cannot undo the damage of decades of Brahminization by simply asserting you are something so many working-class voters think you are not: the tribune of the working class. The challenge goes much deeper than that and involves a decisive break with the many Brahmin Left priorities that alienate the working class. Some analysts do get this; herewith a sampling.

David Leonhardt, New York Times magazine:

Immigration is a natural issue for the Brahmin left. The old left worried that a labor pool swollen by immigration would undermine unions and lower wages. The new progressives focused instead on the large benefits for the new arrivals. Immigration was a way to help the world’s poor, many of whom were not white….

Supporters of mass migration often claim that it is inevitable, stemming from some combination of demography, globalization and climate change. Yet like most arguments for historical inevitability, this one is more wishful than accurate. Countries can exert substantial control over their borders. Japan has long done so. Denmark has recently done so. Biden tightened policy in his last year in office, and border traffic plummeted. Trump has pushed it even lower. If anything, modern technology, such as employment-verification systems, can make enforcement easier than in the past. When immigration advocates say that controlling borders is impossible, they are adopting an anti-government nihilism inconsistent with larger goals of progressivism.

Trump’s cruel approach to immigration will create an opportunity for Democrats, much as it did during his first term. If they can fashion a moderate approach, and not only in the final months of an election campaign, they will improve their chances of winning back many of the voters they have lost. But doing so will require real change, not merely different marketing. Much of the Brahmin’s left post-election analysis remains tied to the magical idea that working-class voters are simply wrong about mass migration and can be won over with clever narratives rather than substantive policy changes.

Justin Vassallo, Unherd:

[P]rogressives have backed themselves into a corner, disconnected, even in deep-blue cities, from the very people they profess to serve. Thanks to their uncritical defense of all things branded “woke,” Democrats are now viewed by working-class voters of all races as litigious, censorious, and elitist. Indeed, the Democratic Party is seen as the very opposite of the one whose unifying thread, from Bryan’s heyday through the Seventies, was its respect for the dignity—and judgement—of the common man and woman.

It will take much more that clever rhetoric to change perceptions. Democratic allies sermonise about democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law at the same time that they repeat the self-defeating, self-righteous notion that all voters who have rejected the party’s Soviet-esque succession of leaders are rubes and bigots. Such attitudes are, in a way, akin to Trumpian defiance, but with none of the obvious political benefits.

Josh Barro, Very Serious Substack, referring to a talk by Pete Buttigieg:

Pete [while critical of many absurd DEI initiatives] pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the [identity politics-promoting] people who have led Democrats down this road toward being off-putting and unpopular.

These people don’t have good intentions—they have a worldview that is wrong and bad, and they need to be stopped. And while DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Pete rightly complains about…is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments, which have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many non-white voters perceive these positions, correctly, as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them on how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are due to those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences among the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent…

[T]he problem here is not really the ten-dollar words…the problem can’t be fixedby dropping [words like] “BIPOC” from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of its citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason that you should be admitted to the U.S. and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch—you get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk—you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Jeff Maurer, I Might Be Wrong Substack:

The Democratic Party is increasingly the party of educated, upper middle-class people. This is a problem, partly because only 38 percent of American adults hold a four year degree, and partly because educated, upper middle-class people are the most annoying twats to ever curse humanity with their presence (and I know this because I’m one of them)…The MAGA movement is a reactionary movement against self-righteous progressive jerk offs, and believe me when I say: When I look at that photo of Democrats holding those stupid paper-plate-and-popsicle-stick paddles, I completely get where MAGA heads are coming from…

Protest culture basically only exists in progressive circles. There’s a type of person who romanticizes protest, and that person is almost always left-wing. Progressives think that when they protest, they’re signaling their opposition to something—and I wouldn’t say that’s not happening—but I think what’s mostly happening is that they’re signaling membership in a cultural group. The more virtue signal-y the protest, the more the cultural weirdness drowns out the message….

When progressives virtue signal, they aren’t just pinning a scarlet “W” for “weird” on their chests; they’re also showing that they don’t share most people’s priorities. And that’s true because feckless, performative protests are a thing that progressives do for each other. Nobody else cares; in fact, most people would like to see the protester fall into a vat of battery acid. And the protest doesn’t do anything…except that it might elicit hands-clapping emojis and “YAS QUEEN”s on Bluesky. When Democrats stage performative protests, they’re making a values statement, and that statement is: “I value plaudits from my progressive peers, not whatever you care about.

And finally, Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal (Yes, I know Noonan is a Republican but she’s a very smart Republican):

Sometimes a party takes a concussive blow, such as the 2024 presidential loss, and you can see: They’ll shape up and come back, they’re pros, they lost an election but not their dignity. But now and then you see: No, these guys don’t know what happened, they are going to lose over and over before they get the message.

What I saw Tuesday night [at Trump’s Congressional address] is that the Democratic Party in 2025, as evinced by its leaders on Capitol Hill, is too proud and stupid to change…

[Here is some] advice for the Democrats.

I will start with something they won’t believe. In politics, there is bringing the love and bringing the hate. When the 13-year-old boy who had brain cancer and has always wanted to be a cop is appointed as an honorary Secret Service agent, laminated ID and all, and the child, surprised by the gesture, hugs the normally taciturn head of the Secret Service, the only thing to do, because you are human, is cheer that child. And when the president honors a young man whose late father, a veteran and policeman, had inspired his wish to serve, and dreams of attending West Point, and the president says that he has some sway in the admissions office and young man you are going to West Point—I not only got choked up when it happened I’m choked up as I write. The boy with cancer high-fives the young man, and the only response to such sweetness is tears in your eyes.

That moment is “the love.” It was showing love for regular Americans. To cheer them is to cheer us. It shows admiration for and affiliation with normal people who try, get through, endure and hold on to good hopes.

The Democrats brought the hate. They sat stone-faced, joyless and loveless. They don’t show love for Americans anymore. They look down on them, feel distance from them, instruct them, remind them to feel bad that they’re surrounded by injustice because, well, they’re unjust….

Mr. Trump says: No, man, I love you.

Which is better? Which is kinder, more generous? Which inspires? Which wins?

Democrats have to understand where they are. They have completely lost their reputation as the party of the workingman. With their bad governance of the major cities and their airy, abstract obsessions with identity politics and gender ideology, they have driven away the working class, for whom life isn’t airy or abstract. Democrats must stop listening to the left of the left of their party. It tugs them too far away from the vast majority of Americans. They have been radical on the border, on crime, on boys in the girls’ locker room. They should take those issues off the table by admitting they got them wrong.

I agree with pretty much every word in these interventions. And I think they make clear just how profound the Democrats’ current challenge is. It really is about comprehensively de-Brahminizing a profoundly Brahmin Left party, not just sanding off a few rough spots in Democratic positions/rhetoric or populist posturing or (that old standby) better messaging. Nor is about just waiting around for Trump to screw up—which is already happening and will continue to happen. Of course Democrats should take advantage of these opportunities but such openings will never suffice for convincing working-class voters that the Democrats have truly become a different kind of party—their party—and not the Brahmin Left party they have been watching evolve for decades.

Much stronger medicine is needed for that. Just as Trump shook up the Republican Party and decisively changed its image and political base, Democrats need a political entrepreneur who will shake up the Democratic Party and decisively change its Brahmin Left trajectory. That entrepreneur will have to be unafraid of the professional class blowback (accusations that you are racist, sexist, transphobic, a bigot, MAGA-lite, etc.) that will inevitably arise and aggressively push back against that class and its priorities.

In short, Democrats need a class traitor—a politician who’s not afraid to ask Democrats who the social justice they prize so highly is really for. Is it really for the poor and working class who have the short end of the stick in our society or is it to make Democrats feel righteous and onside with Team Progressive? Are Democrats’ social justice commitments and priorities what the poor and working class actually want? Does the language Democrats speak on these issues even make sense to them?

Such a politician might actually be able to remake the party and face down the Brahmin Left dead-enders. But is such a politician or politicians out there in the Democratic ranks? I’ve got my doubts. Not only have breaks with party orthodoxy been extremely modest so far, they have been regularly and mercilessly attacked within the party. Even those like Josh Shapiro who seem to have the right instinctsabout a lot of issues are reluctant to publicly break with the orthodoxy and criticize the party’s mistakes.

So am I confident the Democratic Party can de-Brahminize? I am not. But I am confident that the party will fall short of both its electoral and policy goals if it can’t.

We’ll go way out on a limb here, and say that 2025 does not appear to be a good year for making political predictions. But, if anybody can do it credibly, it would be Kyle Kondik, who writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

1. The electorate will be smaller.

Midterm electorates are not as big as presidential electorates, and there is no modern precedent for a midterm electorate having a higher turnout rate among eligible voters than the turnout rate in the most-recently held presidential election.

According to data from turnout expert Michael McDonald of the University of Florida, the average turnout rate for eligible voters in the 43 presidential elections held since 1856 is about 64%, while the average turnout in the 42 midterms held since that year is 49%. So the turnout is on average about 15 percentage points higher in the presidential than in the midterms, and the midterm turnout was never higher than the immediately previous presidential election. We went back to 1856 because that is the start of our modern two-party system, with the Republicans first fielding a presidential candidate that year to join the Democrats, a party that had existed in various forms prior to that year.

Of course, those who would have been an “eligible voter” was much different back then than it is now, with the franchise later expanding to previously disenfranchised groups like women, Black voters, and, in advance of the 1972 election, 18-20 year olds. Figure 1 shows the presidential and midterm turnout rates for this more modern time period.

Average turnout for presidential elections from 1972-2024 was 58%, and average midterm turnout in that timeframe was 41%, or a 17-point gap that’s very similar to, but slightly larger than, the presidential to midterm gap in the longer time period since 1856.

Note that turnout in both the last two presidentials and last two midterms have been high by recent standards—but even comparing the 2016 presidential election to the historically-high turnout 2018 midterm still showed a 10 percentage point smaller turnout in the midterm.

The bottom line is that the electorate in 2026 will be substantially smaller than 2024, it’s just a question of how much smaller…

2. The electorate should be whiter, older, and more educated.

Because midterm electorates are smaller than presidential electorates, it stands to reason that demographic groups that have historically had better turnout rates would make up a greater share of midterm electorates than presidential electorates. We see this with white voters in general, voters with a four-year college degree, and voters aged 65 and over.

Table 1 shows the makeup of the eight electorates by certain age, racial, and education groups from 2008-2022 (four midterms and four presidentials) from the Democratic data firm Catalist. Catalist’s reports on the makeup of the electorate are widely-cited and include analysis of state voter files that are not available to exit polls released on Election Night (2024 is not included here because that Catalist report is not yet out—neither is a similar analysis that we look forward to seeing later this year, Pew’s validated voter study).

While non-college voters have always made up a clear majority of the electorate, the midterm electorates have been a few points more college-educated than the presidential electorates. Pre-Trump, college and non-college voters (this includes people of all races), voted fairly similarly in both the 2012 presidential election and 2014 midterm election (the non-college group was slightly more Republican in each election). But starting in 2016, the education gap expanded greatly, so that by 2020, Joe Biden won college graduates 59%-41% in the two-party vote but lost non-college graduates 52%-48%, a 22-point gap in margin. The gap was similar in the 2022 congressional vote. Again, Catalist has not released its report for 2024 yet, but the Edison Research national exit poll for several media entities found a gap of a little more than 25 points between college graduates and non-graduates in 2024.

The 65 and over cohort has been growing over time, but their share of the midterm electorate was always at least 4 percentage points bigger than the previous presidential election during the 2008-2020 timeline. Likewise, the 18-29 group has always made up at least 3 percentage points less of the midterm electorate than the previous presidential—it likely is no coincidence that the drop off was smallest from 2016 to 2018, the only midterm in this timeframe conducted under a Republican president that also represented the best Democratic performance among these four midterms. Even though Donald Trump made some gains among the 18-29 group in 2024 compared to his previous performance with them, this is still a Democratic-leaning cohort, just like voters 65 and over remain Republican-leaning to some extent.

Finally, the electorate is usually a little bit whiter in the midterm compared to the presidential. Again, Trump made gains with nonwhite voters in 2024, but as a bloc, nonwhite voters are still markedly more Democratic leaning than white voters.

In this era of politics, the midterm having a higher share of college graduates than the presidential would seem to help Democrats, and the midterm having a smaller share of younger and nonwhite voters would seem to help Republicans. But an electorate’s demographic makeup does not necessarily tell us what the results will be: The 2018 midterm’s electorate was whiter and older than either the 2016 or 2020 electorates, but that was also the Democrats’ best election of the trio. Likewise, the college-educated share in 2022 was very similar to 2018 and perhaps even slightly larger, but that didn’t stop Republicans from winning the House majority that year.

3. The non-presidential party’s share of the House popular vote should go up.

Last week, in a piece on how House incumbents from the non-presidential party rarely lose in midterms, we noted that the presidential out-party almost always nets seats in the midterm. Democrats are hoping this trend continues, as they need to net just 3 seats to win the House next year.

In addition to typically netting seats, the non-presidential party also almost always sees its share of the total congressional vote go up in the midterm compared to what happened in the presidential.

Figure 2 and Table 2 show this dynamic, again going back to 1972. This shows the two-party House vote, and it corrects for unopposed seats in a given year by estimating the two-party vote in those seats. The data from 1972-2020 is from a past Crystal Ball contributor, the late Theodore S. Arrington of UNC-Charlotte, and the 2022 and 2024 data is from Split Ticket (they each use different methods to account for unopposed districts, but Arrington’s calculations and Split Ticket’s calculations for 2008-2020 are similar).

Read the rest of Kondik’s article for his charts, graphs and visuals and to see how he gets to his concluding sentence: “Overall, it would be a surprise if Democrats didn’t at least do better in the national House vote in 2026 than they did in 2024.”

The following article, “Dems’ own polling shows massive brand problem ahead of 2026” by Elena Schneider, is cross-posted from Politico:

The Democratic Party’s brand is in rough shape in the congressional battlegrounds.

Nearly two months into the second Donald Trump administration, a majority of voters in battleground House districts still believe Democrats in Congress are “more focused on helping other people than people like me,” according to an internal poll conducted by the Democratic group Navigator Research. Among independents, just 27 percent believe Democrats are focused on helping them, compared with 55 percent who said they’re focused on others.

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

It’s hard to believe Trump’s only been in office for a month and a half. He’s certainly delivering on many of his aggressive campaign promises and his general pledge to shake things up in Washington. His address to Congress on Tuesday night did not stint on retailing how far and fast he has gone in changing business as usual.

On one level, his fast start could be viewed as a smart response to the overwhelming sense among voters that the political and economic system in the country needs major changes or to be completely torn down. But is all this frenetic activity succeeding in expanding his coalition beyond those who supported him in the last election?

After all, it doesn’t follow that, even if most voters want big changes, voters will necessarily be happy with all of the big changes the Trump administration is pursuing and, importantly, with how those changes are being implemented. Voters don’t want change just for the sake of change; they want change that actually improves the system and brings it closer to their vision of how government should work. And they certainly don’t want change that might negatively impact them personally.

That helps explain why Trump’s popularity has declined from its post-inauguration high. At that point, his net approval (approval minus disapproval) was around +8, hinting at the possibility of an expanded Trump coalition. But now it is only around +1 in the RCP running average and his overall approval rating hovers close to his share of the vote in the 2024 elections.

That said, it is true that Trump’s popularity so far is running above his first term ratings; in that term his approval rating never cracked 50 percent and went into net negative territory very quickly. But that is a very low bar indeed since his early first term ratings were historically bad. Trump’s current popularity trend indicates his early bid to broaden his coalition beyond his 2024 supporters has not succeeded.

Internals from the most recent AtlasIntel poll—now Nate Silver’s highest rated pollster thanks to their stellar performance in the 2024 election—illustrate how similar Trump’s current coalition looks to his 2024 support. His net approval is +21 among working-class (non-college) respondents, but -27 among the college-educated. Among those with under $50,000 in household income his net approval is +16; among those with $50,000-$100,000 income, his net approval is +9—but among those whose household incomes are over $100,000 his approval is net negative: -18.

Of course, Trump’s 2024 coalition was a winning one so simply maintaining it is not an obvious disaster. However, Trump’s 2024 victory, while solid, was hardly a landslide—his popular vote margin was only about a point and a half and most of his swing state victory margins were close to that narrow national margin. If he doesn’t expand his 2024 coalition he and his party will be only modest voter defections away from an electoral drubbing. That could happen as soon as the 2026 midterm elections, where the incumbent party is generally at a disadvantage to begin with.

Digging into recent polling data reveals the contradictions in Trump’s approach that undermine his ability to expand his coalition. On the one hand, some of his actions are quite popular from cracking down on illegal immigration to getting biological boys and men out of girls’ and women’s sports and restricting medicalization of minors for “gender dysphoria.” He is also on secure ground in opposing affirmative action, advocating a colorblind meritocratic society and pursuing an “all-of-the-above” energy policy that includes fossil fuel production.

Even in these areas, the devil is in the details and Trump is in some danger of going too far too fast. But the dangers for him are much larger in another area where, at first blush, public opinion would appear to be on his side: cutting wasteful government spending and promoting efficiency. In a recent New York Times poll, 60 percent of the public agreed that government “is almost always wasteful and inefficient” rather than “does a better job than people give it credit for” (37 percent). Views were even more lop-sided among working-class (non-college) respondents; by 2:1 (64-32 percent) they believe that government is wasteful and inefficient.

Similarly, in a recent Harvard/Harris poll, 77 percent of voters thought a full examination of all government expenditures was needed, rather than letting all contracts and expenditures proceed unimpeded; 70 percent believed government expenditures were full of “waste, fraud and inefficiency,” rather than fair and reasonable; and 69 percent supported the goal of cutting $1 trillion from government expenditures. Such findings suggest that an aggressive attack on government waste and inefficiency has the potential to be very popular and expand Trump’s coalition.

But the key word here is “potential”. Activating that potential depends on two things the Trump administration is paying little attention to: 1) it has to be clear to voters that actual government waste and inefficiency is being attacked rather than just cutting government willy-nilly; and 2) it has to be clear to voters that cuts to government are not affecting and will not affect them negatively.

On both counts, the Trump drive to trim government, spearheaded by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is falling short. While DOGE audits have indeed found many examples of highly questionable government expenditures and related inefficiencies, DOGE has not exactly been wielding a scalpel to excise these inefficiencies. Instead, wholesale layoffs and expenditure stoppages have been implemented which, even if temporary, are difficult for voters to connect to the ostensible goal of eliminating government waste. Particularly egregious here has been the DOGE habit of firing any government employees who have a “provisional” status, presumably because this is a quick way of reducing headcount in agencies and generating savings.

But such moves have little obvious connection to promoting government efficiency. As Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass, has put it, this is pressing the “easy button” for no other reason than it is easy. The result is likely to be neither productive nor popular.

This will be particularly the case where eliminating workers leads to staffing shortages in ways the public notices (e.g., at National Parks). And nothing makes voters more nervous than the possibility that entitlements—Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—will be interfered with by DOGE’s actions or Trump’s future plans. This is a sure loser.

Given all this, it’s not surprising that voters’ enthusiasm for DOGE, Musk and the actually-existing project of overhauling government (as opposed to the theory) is rapidly ebbing. This is neatly illustrated by Navigator Research polling showing that the “Department of Government Efficiency” without Musk’s name linked to it is actually viewed favorably but once you attach Musk’s name to it—thereby evoking the real-world DOGE—favorability plummets to 37 percent.

Consistent with this, Musk’s favorability rating has been rapidly declining and in a recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll, his approval rating on the job he is doing within the federal government was a mere 34 percent. And in a recent CNN/SSRS poll, respondents by almost 2:1 thought Trump giving Musk a prominent role in his administration was a bad thing rather than a good thing. Views among working-class respondents were only slightly less negative.

Unsurprisingly, views are mixed on reductions in the federal workforce so far, both in terms of overall approval and specific effects. In a new CBS News poll, majorities thought that the reductions will eventually “remove workers doing unnecessary jobs” but also thought they will “remove essential workers” and “reduce or cut services for people like you.” This suggests thoroughly cross-pressured voters rather than enthusiastic supporters.

Also suggesting cross-pressured voters, respondents in the CNN poll by 55 to 45 percent thought Trump so far hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems rather than has had the right priorities. Clearly, the high profile efforts of DOGE aren’t helping the Trump administration get on the right side of that question which is probably a prerequisite for building his coalition.

Then there’s the economy, particularly the cost of living, which was central to Trump’s victory in 2024. Voters want to see improvements on this front, regardless of what else Trump does. It’s early days but so far voters are not impressed.

In the Washington Post poll, 76 percent of respondents rate current gas or energy prices negatively (not so good or poor), 73 percent rate the incomes of average Americans negatively and 92 percent (!) rate food prices negatively. In the CNN poll, only 27 percent think Trump has been about right on trying to reduce the price of everyday goods, compared to 62 percent who believe he hasn’t gone far enough. And in the CBS poll, 82 percent and 80 percent, respectively, wanted Trump to put a high priority on the economy and inflation but only 36 percent and 29 percent, respectively, believed Trump was prioritizing these issues a lot.

There’s a message there for the Trump administration should they care to hear it. His mandate was to shake up the system by pursuing popular priorities Democrats were ignoring, especially on illegal immigration, and deliver prosperity for ordinary workers and families. His mandate was not to do whatever excites his base the most or accords with his personal priorities.

In short, Trump may be over-interpreting his mandate, just as Biden did when he took office in 2021, which will prevent him from seizing the center from a disorganized and remarkably unpopular Democratic Party. Instead of a second Trump administration realigning American politics and building a more powerful working-class, populist GOP, the Democrats could limp back into power and our current partisan stalemate would continue.

Call it “Politics Without Winners.” In our paper of the same name my AEI colleague Yuval Levin and myself observed:

Surveying the parties’ decisions in one election cycle after another, it is hard to avoid concluding that they are stuck at 50–50 because they choose to be. Both have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters—who would never vote for the other party—over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way. They have done this even as the nature of their most devoted voters has changed. They have not operated as institutions geared to construct broad coalitions and win broad general-election victories. Instead, they have focused on fan service—satisfying their most partisan and loyal constituencies.

It’s early days for the second Trump administration but that still sounds about right.

This article , “California’s Gavin Newsom opposes trans athletes in women’s sports, splitting with progressives” by Bill Barrow, is cross-posted below from apnews.com. For Gov. Newsom, a former Mayor of San Francisco, who is frequently short-listed as a potential presidential candidate, this policy position represents a significant departure from public expectations and may herald a trend among Democratic politicians. The article:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, used the inaugural episode of his new podcast to break from progressives by speaking out against allowing transgender women and girls to compete in female sports.

Newsom made his declaration in an extended conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old who built the influential Turning Point USA organization that helped President Donald Trump increase his support last fall among the youngest generation of voters. Kirk, like Trump, has been a vocal opponent of allowing transgender women and girls to participate.

“I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness — it’s deeply unfair,” Newsom told Kirk on “This is Gavin Newsom.”

“I am not wrestling with the fairness issue,” continued Newsom, who played varsity baseball as a college student. “I totally agree with you. … I revere sports. So, the issue of fairness is completely legit.”

The governor’s comments are the latest in Democrats’ efforts to reconcile a 2024 election that returned Trump to the White House and gave Republicans control of both chambers of Congress. Among the disagreements since November is how much cultural issues – as opposed to economic policy and other matters – explain the party’s losses.

Overall, polling suggests that allowing transgender female athletes to play on women’s teams isn’t broadly popular. Even most Democrats — around 7 in 10 — oppose allowing transgender female athletes to participate in women’s sports, according to a January New York Times/Ipsos poll. A 2023 Gallup poll also found that Democrats were divided on whether transgender people should be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity.Newsom, who has long positioned himself as a social progressive, drew sharp rebukes from LGBTQ+ advocates.

“Sometimes Gavin Newsom goes for the Profile in Courage, sometimes not,” said California Assemblyman Chris Ward and state Sen. Carolina Menjivar, who lead the state’s LGBTQ+ legislative caucus. “We woke up profoundly sickened and frustrated by these remarks.”

Tony Hoang, executive director of Equality California, said he was “disappointed and angered” by Newsom’s statements and that they “added to the heartbreak and fear” the transgender community feels under the Trump administration.

“Right now, transgender youth, their families, their doctors, and their teachers are facing unprecedented attacks from extremist politicians who want to eviscerate their civil rights and erase them from public life,” Hoang said. “They need leaders who will unequivocally fight for them.”

California law, enacted before Newsom became governor, requires schools in the state to allow transgender athletes to play on school sports teams consistent with their gender identity. Republican state lawmakers introduced bills in the Legislature this year to ban that practice, but they would be difficult to pass in the Democrat-dominated statehouse. The governor’s office declined to comment on the proposals, saying Newsom doesn’t typically weigh in on pending legislation.

Beyond questions about athletics, there is less public support for broader restrictions on transgender rights and issues like medical care for transgender people, particularly among Democrats.

According to AP VoteCast, 55% of voters in the 2024 election said support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far, while about 2 in 10 said it’s been about right and a similar share said it hasn’t gone far enough. Voters were also slightly more likely to oppose than favor laws that ban gender-affirming medical treatment, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, for minors who identify as transgender.

But Republicans have nonetheless sought to capitalize on the cultural touchstone that sports represent in America.

Trump regularly hammered Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Newsom’s fellow Californian, for supporting LGBTQ+ rights. Trump promised at his rallies to get “transgender insanity the hell out of our schools” and “keep men out of women’s sports.” His campaign also spent tens of millions of dollars on television and digital ads with the searing summation: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

“Boy, did I see how you guys were able to weaponize it,” Newsom told Kirk, before yielding to Kirk’s protest and saying instead that the ads were an effective “highlight” during the campaign.

Since taking office, T rump has threatened to withhold federal money from schools that allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s’ or girls’ events. He declared victory on the issue recently when the NCAA, which governs collegiate athletics in the U.S., changed its policy to restrict women’s sporting events to those athletes who were assigned the female gender at birth. Previously, the NCAA had a sport-by-sport policy determined by the respective sports’ national or international governing bodies.

Ward and Menjivar, the California lawmakers, said playing on a team consistent with one’s gender hasn’t been a problem “until Donald Trump began obsessing about it.”

Kirk, not Newsom, brought up the overall issue during their hour-plus conversation, which focused in part on how Democrats can rebuild a broader coalition of voters. Kirk pressed Newsom on whether he would speak out in opposition to transgender women athletes in competition.

The governor attempted to mitigate his comments, saying the discussion is about more than competitive advantage.

“There’s also a humility and a grace that these poor people are more likely to commit suicide, have anxiety and depression, and the way that people talk down to vulnerable communities is an issue that I have a hard time with, as well,” Newsom said. “So, both things I can hold in my hand. How can we address this issue with the kind of decency that I think is inherent in you but not always expressed on the issue and at the same time deal with the unfairness.”

Still, Newsom’s approach marks a different political tack than he took on same-sex marriage more than two decades ago. As San Francisco mayor in 2004, Newsom drew national attention for the first time by directing the city clerk to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

The move prompted legal action that led to a 2008 ruling from the California Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage in the nation’s largest state. That decision came seven years before the U.S. Supreme Court established same-sex marriage as a national right.

This coalition of rural, progressive and Democratic organizations from across the United States is urging Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, to substantially shift more of the Party’s time, attention and funding into rural and working-class communities. Regretfully, our earlier post of this petition campaign omitted the link for those who want to sign it. They should click here. Also, here is the link for making contributions and signing up for the coalition mailing list. 

To: Ken Martin, Chair, Democratic National Committee, and fellow DNC officers

As you know, Democrats spent over $4 billion on advertisements in the 2024 campaign cycle, outspending Republicans on the presidential race as well as both Senate and House races. Meanwhile, rural and factory town Democratic committees and candidates were starved for funds, as they have been for many years. Allocating a small percentage of those funds annually to long-term organizing and outreach in these communities would, we are confident, do far more
to broaden our base of voters and win elections.

The signatories to this letter fight for rural and working-class people. Most of us hail from or reside in small towns and rural communities. Whether through local organizing and party building, developing concrete tools for policy and communications, or careful analysis of what
works and what does not, our collective experience can help Democrats change course and
rebuild our base.

We extend this invitation to you to work together in prioritizing and fixing the Democratic Party’s profound deficits with rural and working-class voters. We have an opportunity, right now, to change course and begin to win back millions of people now alienated from our party, including demoralized rank-and-file voters, donors and activists. Anything less than a major course correction will, we fear, lead to the loss of even more voters, including the women,
minorities, youth, and working-class men who once comprised the party’s base.

In the attached addendum to this letter, we highlight what we believe to be the most important causes of our losing trend and propose seven promising steps most likely to reverse our decline in rural America. The DNC has profound influence and moral authority within the Democratic coalition. If the leadership of the DNC would passionately and forcefully call upon the complex network of large and small contributors and Democratic fundraising organizations to explicitly direct just 10% of their resources to rural and working-class districts and candidates, it could produce deeply significant and enduring long-term gains for the Democratic Party as a whole. If Democrats had done this in 2024, we’d now have $400 million in organizing infrastructure to help mobilize and rebuild our base before the midterms.

We offer our partnership to you, committing our experience, tools and resources and on-the-ground networks to this essential mission and work. Thank you.

Signatories below:

Elected Officials and Candidates

Rep. Ro Khanna – Congressman, California’s 17th District

Sam Rasoul – Delegate, Virginia House

Ken Tole – Former State Senator in Montana

Antoinette Sedillo Lopez – New Mexico State Senator, District 16

Javier Martinez – Speaker of the NM House of Representatives

Andrea Romero – NM House of Representatives

Patricia Roybal Caballero- New Mexico House of Representatives

Dayan Hochman-Vigil- New Mexico House of Representatives

Charles Maughan – Mayor, City of Corvallis, OR

Mauree Curry – Councilwoman in Easton, MD

Christopher Wier – OK HD 4 Candidate, 2024

Tegan Malone – OK HD 95 Candidate, 2024

Ellen T Wright- Candidate for GA state senate SD29

State Parties, State and Congressional District Caucuses

Indiana Democratic Party – Mike Schmuhl Chair

Washington State Democratic Party – Shasti Conrad, Chair

Maine Democratic Party – Imke Schessler-Jandreau, Vice Chair, BJ McCollister

Tennessee Democratic Party – Carol V. Abney, Treasurer and Executive Committeewoman

Virginia Democratic Party 9th Congressional District – Rebecca Daly, Chair

Minnesota Democratic Party 7th Congressional District- Jennifer Cronin, Chair

Iowa 4th Congressional District- C.J. Petersen, Chair

Missouri Democratic Party Rural Caucus – Jacqueline Farr

Maryland Democratic Party Rural Caucus – Judy Wixted

Georgia Democratic Party Rural Council – Leonard Fatica

California Democratic Party Rural Caucus – Katie Jaycox

Virginia Democratic Party Central Committee – Joan Kark

Oregon Democratic Party Education Caucus- Liz Marlia-Stein, Communication Secretary

New Mexico Democratic Party Labor Caucus – Sara Attleson, Chair

Arizona Democratic Party State committee – Aaron J Essif

Washington State Progressive Caucus – Sharon Abreu

California Democratic Party – Rocky Fernandez, Regional Director

New Mexico Democratic Party Veterans and Military Families Caucus – Claudia Risner, Chair

Minnesota Democratic Party 9th Senate District – Jane Stock, ChairTulsa Young Democrats – David Wilson, Chair

Maine DNC Committeeperson – BJ McCollister

Democrats Abroad – Sue Alksnis

Eastern Shore, Maryland Democrats- Judy Wixted, Chair

Democratic County Committees

Cecil County, MD, John Dixon

Allegany County, MD, Cresta Kowalski

Druid Hills Community, DeKalb County, GA, Michael St. Louis

Marshall/Wicomico County, MD, Demetria Marshall-Leonard

Garrett County, MD, Judy A. Carbone

Port Townsend Precinct, Jefferson County, WA, John Collins

Tuolumne County, CA, Elaine Hagen

Washington County, NY, Jay V. Bellanca

Eau Claire County, WI, Gloria Hochstein

Cherokee County, NC, Diane Snyder

Coos County, OR, Garrett Kin

Conesus Town, Livingston County, NY, Maureen McCarron

Russell County Democratic Committee, VA – Dustin Keith

Scott County, VA, Patricia Kilgore, Chair

Pottawatomie County, OK – Kerri Keck, Ben Parker, and Sandy Ingram

Montgomery County, VA, Gretchen Distler and Deborah Olsen

Hart County, GA, Margaret O’Neal

White County, GA, Leigh Stephens

Oglethorpe County, GA, Jane Kidd

Lac qui Parle County, MN

City of Radford, VA, Vicki Tolbert

Columbia County, GA, Ron Battista

Benton County, MO, Jacqueline Farr

Talbot County, MD, Naomi Hyman, Rudy Reyes and Kaye Dutrow

Caroline County, MD, Jessica Taylor

Dorchester County, MD, Sydney Bradner-Jacobs

Kent County, MD, Muriel Cole

Morgan County, TN, Joel Derek Hawn

Bernalillo County, NM, Marisol Enriquez

Yamhill County, OR, Bill Bordeaux

Cambria County, PA, John Soyka

Denton County, TX, Anjana ParasharCumberland County, ME, Heidi J Vierthaler

Benton County, OR, Holly Shutta

Staten Island, NY, Elaine A. Friedland

Santa Clara, CA, Margaret Okuzumi

Linn County, OR, Susan Heath

Boone County, IA

Union County, OR, Randy L Knop

Riverside County, CA, Judy Rice

Mansfield Town, Bristol County, MA, Tyler Putnam

Palm Beach County, FL, Jill Sheridan

Trinity, Pasco County, FL, Ronald E Simpson

Wine Country Young Democrats (Sonoma County), CA

Adelante Progressive Caucus, NM, Colton Dean

Tioga County, PA

Grayson County, VA, Terry Dunlevy

Kent County, MD, Paula Reeder

Democratic Women’s Club of Greenbrier, WV, Carol F Evans

Phelps County, MO, Robert Cesario

Tuscarawas County, OH, Mike DiDonato

National Organizations

Progressive Democrats of America- Alan Minsky (Executive Director), Donna Smith (Chair of

National Advisory Board), Mike Fox (Deputy Executive Director)

American Family Voices- Mike Lux, Founder, Director

Rural Urban Bridge Initiative- Anthony Flaccavento, Executive Director

Community Works- Meredith Dean, Director

No Dem Left Behind- Hassan Martini, Executive Director and James Bartosh, Digital Director

Movement Labs/Contest Every Race- Yoni Landau, CEO

State Democratic Party Progressive Network- Sandra J. Klassen, Steering Committee

Dirt Road Democrats

RootsAction- Sam Rosenthal, Political director

Young Men Research Project and Democratic Messaging Project (DMP)- Lisa Liddle

State and Local Organizations

State and regional chapters of Progressive Democrats of America in

● Arizona

● Maryland

● Iowa

● Oregon● Nebraska

● New Mexico

● Florida

Blue Missouri

Rise Up WV

Network NOVA

Giles Political Action

Our Revolution Northern Virginia

New Rural Virginia

Tuolumne County Indivisible

Blue Horizon Texas

Center for Common Ground

Ohio Poor People’s Campaign

NJ Universal Healthcare Coalition

Indivisible VT

Open Democracy NH

California Nurses Association

Healthy Aging Coalition

Indivisible Northwest Indiana

El Dorado Progressives

Fighting 50 PAC

Speak Out Against Hate

Major Democratic Donors

Roger Milliken

Bernard Cossell

Donna Sylvester

Margaret Gupta

Edward Rice

Sally Ketcham

Shashi Gupta

Rural/Working Class Organizers, Advocates, and Analysts

Jim Hightower- Former Texas Agriculture Commissioner and lifelong activist

Andrew Levison- Editor, the Democratic Strategist

Arlie Hochschild- Writer, author of Stolen Pride

Beth Ruck- New York state rural and urban advocateJustin H. Vassallo- Writer/researcher, political economy and American political development

Jared Abbott- Director, Center for Working Class Politics

Bill Hogseth- Rural organizer, Wisconsin

Sage Lawrence- Rural organizer and former Campaign Manager for US Rep. Val Hoyle

Jared Jodts- Former Organizing Director, Wisco Project

John Russell- Founder, editor at The Holler

Georgia de la Garza- Illinois/Jackson-Union Editorial board of People’s Tribune/

Beth Macy – Writer and author of Factory Man

Local Democratic/Progressive Activists
As of this date, over additional 500 people from all walks of life have signed this letter or a petition with the same essential requests.

At The Nation, read “Resistance Is Not Enough. The Left Must Address the Grievances of the Working Class” by Anthony Flaccavento, author of Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up: Harnessing Real-World Experience for Transformative Change and cofounder of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative.: “The deluge of antidemocratic, generally inhumane actions taken by the Trump/Musk presidency are fulfilling our worst fears. So what should we do in response?…For most left-leaning activists, the answer is resistance. Resistance to Trump’s cabinet nominees; resistance to his mass deportations; resistance to Elon Musk’s ongoing evisceration of critical federal agencies. Team Trump’s destructive plans and actions cry out for resistance—in the streets, the courts, and anywhere else we might have impact. One example of the resistance platform is Indivisible’s “Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink.” The essence of their strategy is encapsulated in one short sentence: “For the next two years, ‘no’ is a complete sentence.” This is “a time for defense,” they advise, rather than “proposing our own policies.”…the left’s almost singular focus on defense—without offering an equally compelling vision that addresses the grievances of rural communities and working-class people—is a grave mistake. If we don’t make our commitment to an economy and politics that serves everyday people loud and clear, we will undermine efforts to fight Trump and further solidify the estrangement of the working class. Our outrage and resistance must encompass the ongoing betrayal of farmers, unions, and workers and US manufacturers and small businesses…As New York Times reporters summarized their conversations with Black and Latino voters who went for Trump in 2024, “Democrats’ dire warnings about threats to democracy felt far less compelling compared with the urgency of their own struggles to pay the rent.” Pushed by some of the most prominent consultants and pundits on the left, that was an unforced error that may have cost Kamala Harris the election. We cannot afford to make that mistake again…the Trump/Musk onslaught of anti-worker, anti-farmer, pro-corporate actions are an opportunity to offer a plan of our own to unrig the system most Americans hate…We can begin by lifting up some of the Democrats who won in Trump-leaning districts, emphasizing their pro-worker or pro-farmer positions and pledges to confront corporate power. From Chris Deluzio in western Pennsylvania to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in rural Washington, to Pat Ryan in New York’s Hudson Valley, the Democratic tent includes people who know that fighting for the little guy against Wall Street’s housing grab or for farmers’ rights over John Deere’s profits is both the right policy and a winning politics…As Representative Khanna put it in a recent New York Times op-ed, “The alternative to Mr. Trump cannot be a defense of institutions as they are. We need to stand for national renewal driven not by nostalgia for some golden past or simplistic anti-system slogans, but by offering transformative solutions to deliver future prosperity for all Americans, rekindling our bonds as citizens and healing our divides in the process.”

Galen Druke of 538/ABC News conducted a discussion with Washington Post data scientist Lenny Bronner and New York Times polling editor Ruth Igielnik on the topic, “Democrats Aren’t Popular. What Should They Do about it?” It went like this:

Former Rep. Tim Ryan has an article worth reading at MSNBC.com, “The right way for Democrats to communicate about Trump,” subtitled “If Democrats want to reach working class voters, they must acknowledge, empathize and recapture the narrative from Donald Trump.” As Ryan observes, “When I reflect on November’s election, two glaring omissions are missing from the Democratic Party’s messaging: acknowledgment and empathy. The lesson Democrats should take away from Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump is the importance of meeting people where they are emotionally. If Democrats don’t do that, their message isn’t going to stick…Democrats should have acknowledged the tough spot a lot of Americans were in. They should have shown voters they’re empathetic. But we also can’t just look in the past and talk about what the Democratic Party should have done. Democrats in Congress have a real opportunity to right that ship and show voters what the party really stands for… There’s an analog element to this, members should be holding town hall meetings as often as they can. They need to get on the local news. It’s time to start building the case for the American people. But that doesn’t mean Democrats should run around with hair on fire over every issue…Don’t take the bait on everything coming out of this White House. Sometimes the smartest strategy is just to play possum. As Democratic strategist James Carville recently suggested in a guest essay for the New York Times, maybe the most daring political maneuver Democrats could implement right now is to “roll over and play dead.”

How would you rate Democrats response to Trump’s speech Tuesday night? It was a tough call, and they ended up playing it safe, maybe a bit too safe. Democratic Rep. Al Green (TX-9 ) was removed from the SOTU for standing up and protesting Medicaid cuts early on during Trump’s speech. There were a few other Democratic walk-outs, but most Democratic members just sat there and grumbled, sometimes loud enough to be heard. It was the “We must maintain decorum and civility” strategy, with some Democratic members waving little signs with protest messages that looked more like those personal fans people used to use when it got hot in D.C., back before air conditioning. That may have been the right strategy. People forget all about the last SOTU within a few days after it is delivered. Why risk anything, when no one cares that much, so shortly after the event? Then there is the strategic priciple, “When your adversary is making himself look bad, get out of the way.” When your political opponent is delivering a speech that history books will characterize as drenched with bile, pique and resentment, why turn a two-day story into a week of coverage that could backfire? But, what if all the Democrats walked out on cue, right after a personal insult directed their way?  We’ll never know if that would have been a better strategy. But it seems like a question worth considering before the next SOTU. There is something to be said for a dignified walk-out, when confronted with personal insults. Nothing wrong with modeling civility, while those across the aisle howl like demented cheerleaders, and their leader finishes his sour speech to a half-empty hall. That’s not such a bad look for Democrats either.