In the current issue of Washington Monthly, Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris spotlights “Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself,” and writes, “For many years, outside observers, including the editors of this magazine, have warned that the Democratic Party cannot win if it continues to hemorrhage the support of working-class Americans. The results of the November election should put an end to any debate about this….

The tragedy is that as president, Joe Biden did a lot to try to bring back these voters. He openly supported unions and was the first sitting president to walk a picket line. He pushed through major legislation to fund infrastructure and manufacturing projects that would produce, he said again and again, good-paying jobs that you don’t need a college degree to get—and by design these projects were disproportionately located in red areas. He signed other bills that put cash in the pockets of average Americans, including a short-lived but successful child tax credit. He began a revolution in competition policy that took on corporate power and greed in favor of small businesses and employees. When he dropped out of the race, Kamala Harris picked a running mate with working-class rural roots and proposed to help ordinary Americans buy a first home, start a new business, and secure protection from corporate price gouging…. Yet despite all of this, Donald Trump not only won the election but also gained ground with working-class Americans of every race and gender and in every part of the country.”

Here’s a teaser from one of the ‘ten new ideas,’ “Medicare Prices for All: Want a real raise? Slash health care costs by tying employer plans to Medicare rates” by Phillip Longman:

….Everyone complains about the high price of drugs and hospital stays. But few people are aware of how hidden health care costs that don’t show up in the Consumer Price Index are profoundly eroding their purchasing power.

To understand how this giant rip-off works and how to fix it, you need some background. Most working- and middle-class Americans receive their health care coverage through employer-sponsored insurance plans. Most of us covered by such plans know full well that we are perpetually being asked to pay higher deductibles and co-pays. Most of us also know when our premiums go up. Individual workers covered by such plans typically pay around 20 percent of the cost of the premium in the form of a paycheck deduction. Workers who insure a spouse and two children under an employer plan typically see about 32 percent of the cost of the premium deducted from their paycheck.

….The employee-benefits expert Syl Schieber has calculated how much rising health care costs have lowered what he calls the “kitchen table” income of workers with employer-sponsored health care plans—that is, the income they have available each month to pay for housing, groceries, gas, and other day-to-day expenditures. He finds that due to the wage suppression caused by the rising cost of their health care plans, lower-income workers with family coverage had $2,500 less kitchen table income in 2019 (adjusted for inflation) than they brought home two decades earlier. In effect, health care inflation gobbled up all of the meager raises they received as they gained seniority, and more.

….Since 2010, health care costs for the average family of four with an employer-sponsored plan have risen by more than $13,000, or over 71 percent. Currently, the cost for individuals covered by such plans is rising by 6.7 percent a year, roughly double the official rate of inflation. No wonder so many Americans, even those “privileged” enough to have employer-sponsored health insurance, feel like the economy is not working for them.

….What can be done? Abolishing our employer-based health care finance system and replacing it with something like a government-financed, “Medicare for All” program might be a good idea. But it hardly needs saying that it is a political nonstarter at the moment.

….So here’s the solution. Just mandate, going forward, that all employer-sponsored plans pay providers the same, or close to the same, prices Medicare does. And further mandate that employers share the enormous resulting savings with their workers.”

Read more here.

The following article, “Key elections to watch in 2025” by 538’s Geoffrey Skelley is cross-posted from abcnews.go.com:

The 2024 election may be over, but the electoral hamster wheel will keep on spinning in 2025. In the past, elections that occur the year after a presidential race have often presented opportunities for the party that lost the White House to make gains or hold onto power in places it already controls, and 2025 is no different.

Statewide races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey sit at the top of the 2025 marquee, and Democrats and Republicans, respectively, will hope that recent trends in those states point to success this fall. Meanwhile, Wisconsin will host a race that will determine whether liberals or conservatives control the state’s highly contested Supreme Court. Millions of other voters will also decide on the next mayors of their cities, including the country’s largest city, New York. Lastly, we can already anticipate at least three special elections in the House. Here then is an early look at what’s to come now that the calendar has turned to January.

State elections

Virginia

Virginia’s gubernatorial elections are unique because the Old Dominion is the only state that prevents incumbent governors from seeking immediate reelection. As a result, these races are always open-seat contests that test each party’s strength just a year after the presidential contest — which has usually benefited the party not in the White House. Dating back to 1977, that party has won all but one of 12 gubernatorial contests in the state, with Democrats’ narrow win in 2013 serving as the lone exception. And in each of those contests, the national opposition party has gained ground relative to its statewide performance in the presidential election a year earlier.

Media coverage of the outcome of the 2024 presidential election does not point to a good year for women in politics. Despite widespread anger about the Dobbs decision, Kamala Harris was defeated, while Trump won a healthy majority of male voters. But Harris did win the votes of women by a margin of 10 percentage points, vs. 13 for Hillary Clinton and 15 percent of Biden. However, Harris lost white women voters by a margin of 5 percent.

Looking at the 2024 elections in general, it was a pretty good year for women in politics. As Simone Pathe, Renee Rigdon and Arit John write in “Fewer women will serve on Capitol Hill, but they’re setting new records in the states” at CNN Politics,

While Vice President Kamala Harris fell short of the Oval Office, women in executive office are setting a record – with 13 female governors set to serve in 2025 after the election of Republican Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire. (President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, however, could change that.)

Further down the ticket, 2,467 women across the country will serve in state legislatures – more than ever before, according to CAWP. That’s still just about a third of legislators – more than the roughly quarter of Congress that is female – but similarly far short of the 53% of the 2024 electorate that was female.

Further, “94 Democratic women were elected to the House, while 31 Republican women were elected, fewer than the 34 who served on Election Day 2024. Overall, Democratic women far outnumber Republican women in Congress.”

Pathe, Rigdon and John add that “More than half of [state] legislators in Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado will be women, as a result of the 2024 general election. And 12 states are in the range of 40%-50%, nearing equal representation….Women are expected to be about 50% of Democratic state legislators, according to CAWP’s preliminary data, but only about 20% of Republican legislators….Three states will have majority-women legislatures in 2025: Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. All of them have Democratic majorities and, as Dittmar noted, they have state-based programs to recruit and help female candidates.”

Looking toward the next elections, it’s hard to sort out the strategic implications of the way women voted in 2024, other than the conclusion that growing percentages of women in state legislatures should eventually produce increased acceptance of women statewide candidates, which is probably good for Democrats. At the presidential level, Harris came within 1.6 percent of winning the popular vote, close, but still a consolation prize, as long as the Electoral College continues to distort U.S. politics.

The following article, “Democrats must make working Americans a better offer” by Will Marshall, founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute, is cross-posted from The Hill:

Americans voted for radical change in November, and judging by the chaos he’s already generated before taking office, Donald Trump might give them more than they bargained for. Can Democrats offer a saner alternative?

So far, the signs aren’t encouraging. Instead of taking a hard look at how they managed to lose to the most ethically tainted and unpopular presidential candidate in memory, many in the party seek refuge in self-exonerating excuses.

President Biden was too old. Kamala Harris didn’t have time to wage a real campaign. Republicans and Elon Musk dominated social media and flooded the campaign debate with lies and bigoted attacks on immigrants and transexual people. The high cost of living warped voters’ perception of the nation’s economic health.

And anyway the race was still close, even if Harris failed to win a single battleground state, Trump cut his losing margins in blue cities and states, and Latino and Black voters without college degrees continued to defect to the Republicans.

This is the politics of evasion — the recurrent tendency of badly whipped parties to blame everything but their own failure to make a convincing case to voters that their ideas and governing commitments would serve them best.

Many progressives, for example, are loath to admit that Biden’s economic policies had anything to do with the loss. In their view, he was right to spend trillions to revive a pandemic-stricken economy, reduce inequality and combat climate change, sideline trade in favor of industrial policy, launch an unsuccessful attempt to break up America’s most dynamic tech companies and side reflexively with unions in labor disputes.

It was just bad luck that inflation came out of nowhere to mug working families, preventing them from appreciating all that Biden and the Democrats had done for them. Instead, a 20 percent rise in prices put them in a mood to punish incumbents.

Well, that’s one possibility. A more plausible one is that the president and his advisors fell victim to the establishment fallacy of “deliverism” — the notion that passing a slew of multi-trillion-dollar spending bills in Washington would impress working families and show that the “system” was working for them at last.

For one thing, those voters are deeply mistrustful that the “deep state” has their interests at heart. According to a YouGov poll commissioned by my organization, they also believe that heavy public spending helped to spark the upsurge in prices — a view shared by Larry Summers and other prominent economists who note that the chief economic dilemma Biden faced on taking office wasn’t weak demand, but insufficient supply.

Some liberals argue that they were done in by cultural politics rather than the economy. Indeed, a post-election analysis by More in Common found that Americans overwhelmingly believe that Democrats care more about advancing progressive social causes than the kitchen table interests that preoccupy working families.

In fact, that wasn’t the case in 2024 — Democratic voters like Republicans cited inflation and the economy as their top concerns. But the public’s skewed perception reflects the outsized influence of progressive activists, who have associated Democrats with positions on immigration, crime and race and gender that are toxic to working-class voters.

The breadth of Trump’s victory suggests the right answer to the question of why Harris lost is “all of the above.” Democrats were seen as defending a status quo inimical to working families’ interests and values, and as wielding power in Washington mainly for the benefit of educated and wealthy elites.

That helps to explain why Democrats suffered from wide deficits of public trust on almost all the issues that working class voters cared most about.

PPI’s post-election analysis, based on polls and focus groups with working class voters, shows that they trusted Republicans more than Democrats to improve the economy (55-34); make housing more affordable (45-37); protect Americans from crime (54-31); handle immigration (57-29); keep Americans safe from foreign threats (55-30); handle Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; and fight for working people (48-39).

By a whopping 62-43, non-college voters saw Republicans as the more patriotic party. And by nearly 2-to-1 they identified Trump and the Republicans as strong and Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats as weak.

In short, Democrats have dug themselves in a very deep hole and must change direction dramatically to regain their competitiveness.

Blurring the line between hyperbole and fantasy, Trump claims he won an “unprecedented and powerful mandate to govern.” While solid, his victory was no landslide. Moreover, Trump remains underwater in terms of personal approval, which is extraordinary for someone who’s just won a presidential election.

Nonetheless, Democrats should focus now on their own vulnerabilities, not Trump’s amply documented flaws. Their coalition is inexorably shrinking, demographically and geographically, as non-college voters head for the exits.

Trump’s antics and misrule will no doubt create tactical openings for Democrats to take the offensive. But their strategic challenge now is to draw up a new governing blueprint that centers on America’s non-college majority.

Democrats must show they get how those voters feel and what matters to them, and offer concrete remedies to the problems working families in middle America define as urgent, rather than the post-material preoccupations of progressive elites.

They also must stop reflexively defending the programmatic status quo at a time when working families feel forgotten and disrespected by Washington policymakers and want to see fundamental changes in politics and government.

Instead of simply expanding government, it’s time for Democrats to remake themselves as a forward-looking party of change and radically pragmatic reform across the full range of what government does and fails to do well.

For Democrats, the only way to win back working Americans is to make them a better offer.

The following article, “Americans are unhappy with the state of health care and insurance” by Monica Potts, Cooper Burton, Holly Fong and Amina Brown, is cross-posted from abcnews/538:

When Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect in the Dec. 4 murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was arrested and taken into a Pennsylvania courthouse in an orange jumpsuit, he turned to the crowd of reporters and onlookers on the street and yelled that his arrest was “an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience.”

He was presumably referring to Americans’ experiences with the health care system, and the public reaction to Thompson’s murder has put a fine point on just how many Americans are very unhappy with it. When news about the predawn, execution-style shooting in Manhattan broke, the reaction online was largely driven not by sympathy for Thompson, but by Americans’ frustrations with the health care system and insurance industry — as a flood of social media users shared stories of denied health insurance claims and health care costs spinning out of control.

In fact, the shooting came at a time when health care seemed to be experiencing a bit of a surge in importance among Americans after the election. The share of registered voters who named it as the most important issue facing the country in YouGov/The Economist tracking polls had gradually declined from around 10 to around 7 percent throughout 2024, and even fewer, 4 percent, said it was the top issue specifically in determining their vote in the election. But after the election, that number has gone back up to between 8 and 11 percent.

A YouGov poll last week also found that more Americans, 49 percent, had an unfavorable view of the American health care system than the 42 percent who had a favorable one. Other polling suggests that Americans are as unhappy as they ever have been in recent years with the current state of health care. And while many Americans pointed fingers at the opposing party for the problems they see, more than 6 in 10 overall agreed that pharmaceutical and health insurance companies, as well as corporate executives like Thompson, were to blame for problems in the American health care system.

The U.S. remains unique among its peer nations in relying on a for-profit health insurance system and, as Mangione’s own writings alluded to, many Americans have expressed rage at a system that can deny coverage for people’s medical treatments while making shareholders and CEOs very rich. Despite decades of presidents trying to ensure universal access to health insurance, about 8 percent of Americans remained uninsured as of last year, and a higher percentage, about a quarter of American adults, said they or a family member had struggled to afford health care over the past year, whether they were insured or not.

By and large, Americans are unhappy with the costs of care and often find their insurance difficult to use. The share who rated the quality of health care in this country as “excellent” or “good” was just 44 percent in Gallup’s annual health and health care survey, conducted Nov. 6-20, its lowest point since 2001, when Gallup began asking the question. Even fewer, 28 percent, said the same about health care coverage — i.e., what insurance programs do — the lowest it has been since 2008, two years before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the signature Obama-era legislation that overhauled health insurance by expanding Medicaid, requiring health insurance companies to cover certain levels of care, subsidizing premiums for low- and middle-income families and banning practices like refusing to cover preexisting conditions.

A growing share of Americans in Gallup’s surveys seem to want the government to take action to improve health care access: 62 percent said it was the federal government’s responsibility to ensure all Americans have health care, the highest it’s been since 2007. Republicans are the least likely to agree with this sentiment — 32 percent said so, compared to 90 percent of Democrats and 65 percent of independents — but those numbers have increased by around 20 percentage points among all three groups over the past decade or so.

Perhaps surprisingly, YouGov polling found that around two in three Americans are at least somewhat satisfied with their health insurance plans — but that topline figure doesn’t capture a lot of nuance. For example, 89 percent of those with Medicaid were satisfied with their health coverage, compared to 75 percent who are covered by an employer-sponsored plan. Unsurprisingly, those who had had an insurance claim denied were also more likely to be dissatisfied with their coverage.

And despite many being mostly satisfied with the plans they have, a high number of Americans still experience problems using them. KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization, found in a survey last year that 58 percent said that they had at least some trouble using their insurance in the previous year — including issues like denied claims or difficulty accessing in-network providers — and nearly half of whom said their biggest problem was not resolved to their satisfaction. Overall, 18 percent of Americans with health insurance had experienced a denied claim, and those were more common among people with private or employer-sponsored insurance. Around a quarter of those who’d had a claim denied suffered serious consequences, like a decline in health or not receiving recommended medical care.

Plus, around half of insured adults had at least some difficulty understanding components of their health insurance. Unsurprisingly, around 9 in 10 Americans said they support more government rules to require companies to make insurance easier to use, such as by maintaining up-to-date provider directories.

It’s in this context that President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican Party will go into office with sweeping but vague plans to overhaul health care — including to potentially overturn the Affordable Care Act. But while replacing the law has long been something of a GOP rallying cry, it’s not clear how the public feels about it. Gallup found that Americans are fairly split on whether they’d prefer a system that relies on private insurance (49 percent) or a government-run health care system (46 percent). The ACA itself remains highly polarizing but popular among the public more than a decade after its passage.

Fifty-four percent of Americans in Gallup’s most recent survey approved of the legislation, near the record high of 55 percent reached in 2017 and 2020. Specific policies under the ACA have broader support. For example, a YouGov poll from Dec. 5 found that a plurality, 46 percent, wanted government-subsized health insurance, like that provided by the ACA, to be expanded, while 19 percent said it should remain as is and only 13 percent said it should be reduced. That included 53 percent of Republicans in favor of keeping or expanding government-subsidized insurance and only 25 percent in favor of reducing it.

— Monica Potts

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

In the wake of the Democrats’ drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you’d assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions.

Questions like: Is America a “white supremacist” society? Is it racist to question levels of immigration? Are citing one’s personal pronouns necessary? Is anyone who questions the differences between trans women from biological women a bigot who should be expunged from polite society? For each of these questions, the answer for the overwhelming majority of Americans is an obvious no. But in elite Democratic circles, it’s a different story. For a party pondering its unpopularity, you might think that this gap would be a good place to start.

Well, if the six weeks since the election is anything to go by, you’d be wrong. Instead, much of the party is maneuvering to change as little as possible on the cultural front. Why? Because many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues to be real issues. Instead, they see them as fictions, distractions, or expressions of bigotry that are to be opposed, not indulged.

Consider Greg Casar, the new chair of the powerful Congressional Progressive Caucus. In a recent interview with NBC News, Casar urged the Democrats to “re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up.” He said that “when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did—with Republican help.” Casar said that “the Republican Party obsession” with culture war issues is “driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”

Massachusetts Democratic representative Jim McGovern echoed Casar’s thoughts recently with this rhetoric about Republicans: “They want to blame trans people? Guess what? Trans people aren’t the ones raising people’s grocery prices. Big corporations are.” Republicans, he added, “want to blame immigrants. . . . Immigrants aren’t the ones denying health insurance claims. . . . it’s the billion-dollar insurance companies that do that.”

Get it? These aren’t real issues. They’re just distractions ginned up by Republicans for nefarious political purposes. The logical conclusion of this argument is that Democrats don’t need to actually change their position on any “culture war” issue. Instead, they just need to change the subject and talk about mustache-twirling corporate villains.

Many senior figures on the party’s left have skipped discussions of cultural issues altogether, instead publishing progressive policy wish lists. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont thinks Democrats should talk more about billionaires. Rep. Ro Khanna is betting on a “New Economic Deal” that would emphasize high-paying jobs for the middle class. Senator Chris Murphy thinks the key to a Democratic revival is advocating for the breakup of corporate power. Other Democrats suggest a relentless focuson “kitchen-table” issues. (Ah, what would Democrats do without that fabled kitchen table?) The general idea is that talking more about economic issues, typically in a populist vein, will win back the working class and obviate the need to change anything else.

Or perhaps the real problem, some Democrats argue, is that the party hasn’t communicated its wonderful positions adeptly and thoroughly enough. With the right spin, maybe their positions on everything, from the economy to transgender issues and immigration would be popular. This seems to be the view of the two leading candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Ken Martin, head of Minnesota’s Democratic Party (technically its Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), has a10-point plan that calls for a “massive narrative and branding project.” Ben Wikler, head of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, believes Democrats must “become the narrator” of their own brand.

This all seems reasonable enough but, cutting through the verbiage, nowhere do these candidates for the DNC chair concede the party’s cultural vulnerabilities. When reading their pitches for the powerful post, it’s as if those problems don’t exist.

The outgoing DNC chair takes things even further. Since the election, Jaime Harrison has strenuously resisted the idea Democrats should abandon “identity politics,” saying they represent how “people of color” see Democrats fighting for them. Invoking his status as a black man, he remarked: “That is my identity. . . . it is not politics. It is my life. And the people that I need in the party, that I need to stand up for me, have to recognize that. You cannot run away from that.” In other words, Democrats should double down on so-called culture war issues like race and gender that are so off-putting to voters. This is a strange recommendation since, as Democrats have become ever more associated with identity politics, they have been doing ever more poorly among non-white voters, especially non-white working-class voters. Their advantage among the latter group has declined by more than half since 2012.

Read more…

An excerpt from “What Happened to the Democratic Party? The squalid state of our present political institutions points to a failure of not just individuals but the system as a whole” by Chris Lehman at The Nation:

Two new books make this crisis of institutional atrophy and ideological entropy their central theme. In Left Adrift, the historian Timothy Shenk chronicles the Democratic Party’s path to a working-class dealignment—perhaps the single greatest demographic shift that sparked the rise of Trumpism as a bogus brand of right-wing “populism.” Meanwhile, in The Hollow Parties, the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld examine the broader drift of both major parties from their traditional mandates of building mass coalitions, promulgating policy agendas to serve their grassroots bases, and recruiting and cultivating leaders with material connections to those bases.

Both books ask how our political parties, which once represented somewhat coherent and wide-ranging coalitions and political ideas, morphed into zombie-like institutions that fundraise and battle over shrinking segments of the electorate while stage-managing random culture-war contretemps in each new election cycle. Both books also wonder if the return to an era of majoritarian party politics has become an unrealizable dream in the blighted 21st century. In past eras of modern liberalism’s history, the central protagonists would have been party leaders, such as Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson, or pivotal movement figures, such as Sidney Hillman or Martin Luther King Jr. But in our own age of retreating governing ambitions and malleable party messaging, it makes a grim kind of sense to foreground the thinking of hired-gun political strategists like Greenberg and Schoen, who have played an outsize role in the steady miniaturization of our public life.

For Shenk, these two men—bitter rivals for clout and clients in the retooling Democratic Party of the Clinton era—understood better than many traditional New Dealers in the party’s leadership caste that a massive, if slow-moving, political realignment was under way: the party’s abandonment of its traditional working-class base and its embrace of a professional, highly educated elite. This turn to a new breed of voters—“Atari Democrats,” as the journalist Chris Matthews called them—marked an ideological transformation in the party as well as a social one: Democrats began to preach a gospel of cultural tolerance and demographic diversity, even as they broke from basic issues of economic fairness. The party’s activist base, now broadly maligned as a backward-looking congeries of “special interests,” were replaced by a cadre of Ivy Leaguers weaned on the fables of a new information economy and avowing a politics of free trade, cheap labor, and a financialized model of national prosperity.

Greenberg, who came of political age during Eugene McCarthy’s incendiary anti-war presidential campaign in 1968, accepted this political shift as it gained traction in the Reagan era. But he did so from a defensive posture, seeking to persuade candidates and clients to echo vintage Democratic populist appeals in a last-ditch bid to arrest the dealignment of working-class voters from the party. Meanwhile, Schoen, a scion of Manhattan privilege, cheerfully welcomed the shift as the new consensus delimiting future Democratic agendas, policy goals, and political campaigns.

Using data gleaned from polls, Greenberg laid out his case for a more social-democratic path to winning back the working-class and suburban “Reagan Democrats” who had helped deliver Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980. In a series of focus-group studies in the suburban Detroit communities of Macomb County, he found many of these voters still receptive to universalist appeals to economic fairness and social-democratic equality—but wary of the racialized remedies and social-engineering planks of the Great Society. Writing in The American Prospect in the early 1990s, Greenberg divined the lineaments of a new “mass party, encompassing the needs of the have-nots and working Americans,” even as Democratic leaders pursued the interests of a new base of professionals and suburbanites. What was needed, Greenberg argued, was a party that “can speak expansively of broad, cross-class issues, such as full employment, tax relief, and health care.” But for that message to come through loud and clear to its target voters, Democrats had to purge “the demons of the 1960s.” As Shenk sums up Greenberg’s prescription for a renewed majoritarian platform in the pinched realities of the Reagan era:

Disillusioned white voters would not listen to what Democrats had to say about economics until the party showed respect for their values. A shift to the center on polarizing social issues was the price of admission for resurrecting the New Deal coalition. [Greenberg] had seen time and again in his work that class wasn’t just a matter of economics. It was an identity, and a fragile one at that. Getting voters to hear its call required turning down the volume in the culture wars.

Greenberg’s analysis was steeped in the anxious postmortems that the party launched after Reagan’s powerful new coalition made strong inroads among Democrats in the 1980s. But the presuppositions behind his counsel reflected a constrained and fast-obsolescing view of working-class politics and interests—and even of who was and who was not in the working class. While plenty of white workers fit into the Macomb model, the country’s working class was also composed of many groups who benefited from the Great Society’s programs. Likewise, the work of the working class was shifting as the service economy grew; the financialization of key sectors caused wage and wealth inequality to spike; and rural Americans were laid low by the farm crisis—a calamity compounded by the deregulation of the savings-and-loan industry. These other constituencies—far more complex and diverse than the ones found in a place like Macomb County—loomed large in the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s insurgent presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. They also served as a reminder that Greenberg’s version of a retrenched New Deal politics risked overlooking the actual makeup of working-class America.

….Meanwhile, class dealignment continued at a prodigious pace during Clinton’s two terms in the White House. Greenberg charted this baleful process closely, but he was largely left exhorting Democratic campaign gurus from the sidelines as Schoen and Penn’s argument won the day and Clintonite neoliberalism became the party’s savvy insider consensus. As the 2016 Trump campaign drew greater and greater support from disenchanted white working-class voters, Greenberg told John Podesta, the head of Hillary Clinton’s campaign that year, “You sound clueless in blue-collar America,” and later announced in The American Prospect that “the Obama years were the critical juncture when Democratic leaders stopped seeing the working class.” As Shenk observes, “Bill Clinton had managed to hold off the shift in the 1990s, but a gap had opened after his presidency that turned into a chasm in 2016.”

Even as the Democrats continued to lose more and more of the working class, Shenk tracks how the Greenberg-Schoen battle went abroad. The consultants’ own practices became global as they took on electoral clients in Israel (Labor and Kadima leader Shimon Peres and his embattled successor, Ehud Barak), Britain (New Labour’s lead apostle Tony Blair), and South Africa—where Greenberg worked with African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, before defecting in the face of mounting ANC corruption and ruling-class complacency to represent the first Black candidate fielded by the country’s traditional white rival party, Democratic Alliance.

Read more here.

The following article, “The Democrats’ Hispanic Voter Crash: It’s not as bad as you think—it’s worse” by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

It’s been widely noted that the Democrats fared very poorly with Hispanic voters in the November election. But I believe that the scale of the Democrats’ crash among Hispanic voters has not yet been fully processed nor the extent to which this crash undermines Democrats’ plans for the future.

Let’s start by looking at some data on the scale of the Democratic Hispanic voter crash. Here are a dozen illustrative findings:

1. According to AP VoteCast data (the best data currently available), the national Democratic margin among Hispanics crashed by 16 points, from a 28-point advantage to just 12 points. This comes on top of another 16-point margin crash between 2016 to 2020, according to the gold standard Catalist data. Compare that to the overall national shift to the right across the entire time period, 2016-2024, which goes from Hillary Clinton’s 2-point advantage in 2016 to Trump’s point and a half margin in this election. That’s a total overall shift of just 3 and ½ points toward Trump, a shift that is simply dwarfed by the massive shift among Hispanics.

2. The Democratic margin among Hispanic working-class (non-college) voters declined by 18 points between 2020 and 2024. That is after a 19-point decline between 2016 and 2020, as measured by Catalist.

3. Hispanic men were a particular trouble spot for the Democrats this election. VoteCast data have the Democratic advantage dropping by 20 points in this election, down to a slender 1-point margin. But Hispanic women also shifted 14 points right in this election. And if you look back to the last election, the decline in Democratic margin between 2016 and 2020 among Hispanic women was actually twice as large (20 points) as it was among Hispanic men (10 points). So across the two elections, the decline in Democratic support among Hispanic men and women may have been quite similar.

4. The Hispanic shift to the right was concentrated among the younger generations of Hispanics who of course are the future of the Hispanic vote. Among Hispanics under 45, the Democratic margin dropped by a shocking 26 points. Trump actually carried working class Hispanic men in this age group by 7 points.

5. Turning to geographic patterns, here’s a New York Times chart illustrating the shift to the right in Hispanic-majority counties. Compared to Native American- and black-majority counties, the shift to the right in 2024 was larger in Hispanic-majority counties (13 points) and has been continuous since 2016 so these counties wind up way to right of where they were in that election.

6. Similar findings come from Jed Kolko, who analyzed counties using a typology developed by the American Communities Project, which groups counties using a variety of demographic, economic and other factors. The counties grouped into the “Hispanic Centers” category had the largest shift of any county group, shifting to the right by 14 points.

7. Drilling down to specific geographic areas, there is no dearth of vivid examples of big Hispanic shifts. As Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis Research, a Democratic-oriented firm specializing in Hispanic voter research, observed somewhat ruefully:

The New York Times, for example, mapped precinct level shifts in 11 cities—Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix and San Francisco. A continuing theme of their analysis was the strikingly large shifts toward Trump in Latino neighborhoods across this diverse basket of cities.

8. A vivid illustration of this dynamic comes from Philadelphia via a terrific Philadelphia Inquirer analysis of precinct results. Note the sharp rise in Hispanic support for Trump compared to other racial groups.

9. Staying in Pennsylvania—the tipping point state in this election—AP VoteCast indicates a 16-point pro-Trump margin shift across the state among Pennsylvania’s Hispanics. In a fascinating analysis by Charles McElwee, “Main Street of the Realignment” that follows the 2024 vote along historic route 309 in Pennsylvania, he finds some amazing trends in Latino-heavy areas:

Route 309 begins around the northeast’s Wyoming Valley, continues through Luzerne County then past the Blue Mountain ridge and onward to the Lehigh Valley, where it passes Pennsylvania Dutch communities and enters suburban Philadelphia’s Bucks County before terminating at the state’s biggest city… This highway long ran through reliable Democratic territory. This trend dates back to a day in October 1960, when John F. Kennedy’s campaign caravan traveled on Route 309 as it targeted working-class Catholic voters in small industrial cities and towns.

The Latino shift in Republicans’ favor was dramatically evident in Luzerne County’s Hazleton, a small city where Route 309 runs through the downtown and past the old Altamont Hotel, the site of a [John F.] Kennedy stump speech before 12,000 on that October 1960 day…Trump won every ward in Hazleton, where Trump’s overall vote share—62 percent—matched Latinos’ share of the city population. Even in 2016, when Luzerne’s voting margins fueled Trump’s narrow statewide victory, Hazleton still favored Hillary Clinton, though Joe Biden handily lost the city in 2020. This Election Day, the enthusiasm for Trump was hard to miss in Hazleton, where I spent the evening watching returns with friends. In the city’s Nanny Goat Hill section, an historically Italian neighborhood once reliably Democratic, residents displayed Trump regalia outside their homes. In that neighborhood alone, Trump carried nearly 65 percent of the vote….

Last week, Republicans overperformed in Lehigh County while flipping Northampton County. According to a Morning Call analysis, some of Trump’s biggest gains came in Allentown—Pennsylvania’s Latino-majority, third-largest city—where some wards saw a 25-point swing in the incoming president’s favor compared with 2020.

10. How about New York and New Jersey? In New Jersey, AP VoteCast reports a statewide Hispanic swing toward Trump of 26 points. And check out these massive swings in heavily Hispanic cities and towns in the state.

In New York, VoteCast estimates a 23-point statewide shift toward Trump among Hispanics. Notably big shifts took place in New York City, particularly in Queens. Matthew Thomas has analyzed the precinct data and here’s what he finds. In precincts that are 50-75 percent Hispanic the margin shift toward Trump is a whopping 36 points and in precincts that are more than 75 percent Hispanic the rightward shift since 2020 is an astonishing 48 points.

11. Massachusetts? Sure. VoteCast shows a 32-point (!) statewide shift toward Trump among Massachusetts Hispanics. As it happens, this is exactly the size of the shift that took place this election in the historic industrial town of Lawrence. Steve Kornacki explains the significance of the result:

This was a disastrous result for Democrats in Massachusetts’ most heavily Hispanic city. When Trump ran in 2016, he was crushed in Lawrence, an old mill city on the Merrimack River, by 66 points. Four years ago, he brought it down to 49 points. His 57%-40% defeat this time around is the first time a GOP presidential candidate has cracked 40% here since 1988, back when the city was still majority white. Dominicans are the largest Hispanic subgroup in Lawrence, demonstrating the breadth of Trump’s gains.

12. Florida and Texas, of course. In Florida, VoteCast shows a 21-point margin shift toward Trump, including a 31-point rightward shift among Puerto Ricans. The latter explains how Trump was able to flip heavily Puerto Rican Osceola county into his column.

In Texas, VoteCast records a 27-point rightward shift among the state’s Hispanics between 2020 and 2024. This comes of course on top of sharp rightward Hispanic shifts in the state between 2016 and 2020. Indeed, according to a Washington Post analysis, 13 of the 15 hardest right-swing counties in the country between 2016 and 2024 were majority-Hispanic counties in Texas. And the king of rightward-swinging is Texas’ Starr county, which is close to 100 percent Hispanic. In 2016, Clinton carried the county by 60 points; this election Trump carried it by 16 points. That’s an almost unbelievable swing of 76 points across the two elections!

These are big, big shifts. And Democrats seem at a loss on how to deal with this, outside of hoping for the ever-popular “thermostatic reaction” against Trump where Hispanic voters finally “come home” to the Democrats. That’s not much of a strategy. Paraphrasing Dylan, we might say: “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is….do you, Mr. Democrat.”

They’d better figure it out since these trends undermine what has been Democrats’ default plan for their political future. Consider that most Democrats like to believe that, since a relatively conservative white population is in sharp decline while a presumably liberal nonwhite population keeps growing, the course of social and demographic change should deliver an ever-growing Democratic coalition. It is simply a matter of getting this burgeoning nonwhite population to the polls.

But consider further that, as the Census documents, the biggest single driver of the increased nonwhite population is the growth of the Hispanic population. They are by far the largest group within the Census-designated nonwhite population (19 percent vs. 12 percent for blacks). While their representation among voters considerably lags their representation in the overall population, it is fair to say that voting trends among this group will decisively shape voting trends among nonwhites in the future since their share of voters will continue to increase while black voter share is expected to remain roughly constant.

It therefore follows that, if Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not cancelled out entirely, and this very influential Democratic theory of the case falls apart.

They’d better start planning for a very different future. And soon. To quote Dylan again: “Let us not talk falsely, the hour is getting late”.

The following article is cross-posted from stevenrattner.com:

President-elect Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with the goal of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. (While none of the protagonists have been specific, they appear to be suggesting that the $2 trillion would be annual reductions, not cumulative savings over a number of years.) This will likely prove impossible to effectuate.

The challenge is that much of the federal government’s expenditures are off limits for cutting for one reason or another. For example, Trump has declared Social Security and Medicare off limits (although he has been conspicuously silent about Medicaid, which represents about 10% of outlays. As for defense, while some savings could probably be achieved, most experts believe the overall defense budget needs to become larger, not smaller. And of course, interest on the national debt is sacrosanct — the federal government can’t default. All of that leaves just 25% of the budget — $1.5 trillion of annual expenditures – available for cutting.

Undaunted, Musk and Ramaswamy have identified a list of government programs totaling $516 billion of annual expenditures that they believe could be eliminated without congressional approval due to a questionable legal quirk. Topping this list would be health care for veterans, which costs $119 billion a year, and the National Institutes of Health, which receives funding of $47 billion a year.

But consider the consequences. As of 2021, the most recent year for which there is complete data, the federal government provided health care to 6.2 million veterans, up from 5.4 million in 2010. That number is almost surely larger now because the bipartisan PACT act passed in 2022 expands and extends health care for veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxic substances. The PACT Act is a good example of what DOGE will be up against: It passed both houses of Congress with broad bipartisan support.

Then there’s the NIH, which conducts and funds early stage research that the private sector has historically not been willing to support. All told, the NIH is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world and has made particularly substantial contributions to reducing death rates for cancer. While the decline in lung cancer relates principally to smoking cessation, the NIH deserves significant credit for the fall in deaths from many other forms of cancer such as colon, breast and prostate.

The DOGE leaders also talk about trimming the federal workforce; Ramaswamy has talked about cuts of 50% to 75%. Doubtless, there are cuts that can be made. But the number of civilian federal employees today is only slightly higher than when Ronald Reagan took office while the population of the U.S. has risen by 47%. Note also that the size of the civilian workforce has grown under every Republican president since Reagan while it fell precipitously during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

Nor is the pay of federal workers out of line. Back in 2011, the average civilian federal worker made about 6% more than a similarly qualified private sector employee. But political pressure has kept raises for federal workers below those awarded to private sector workers so as of 2022, the average federal worker made 8% less than his civilian counterpart.

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

I never cease to be amazed at the touching faith of many Democrats in the wonder-working powers of economic populism. In the wake of Democrats’ stunning defeat by the hated Trump and his allegedly fascist party, this brand of magical thinking has risen again within the Democratic ranks. Sure, the argument goes, the party has lots of problems but there is nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by turning up the volume—way up—on an economic populist pitch. That will finally convince the lamentably unfaithful working class that their real interests lie with their old pals the Democrats.

It certainly makes sense that in our current populist era, Democrats need to be responsive to that populist mood. But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populism by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats who don’t want to make hard choices. Here are four reasons why Democrats should discard this magical thinking as quickly as possible and devote their energies to strategies that might actually work.

1. Economic populism cannot solve the cultural leftism problem. In a post-election YouGov survey of working-class (non-college) voters for the Progressive Policy Institute, 68 percent of these voters said Democrats have moved too far left, compared to just 47 percent who thought Republicans have moved too far right. It’s a fair surmise that working-class sentiment about the Democrats’ leftism is heavily driven by the party’s embrace of cultural leftist positions across a wide range of issues (immigration, crime, race, gender, etc.) given how unpopular these positions are among those voters.

And in a widely-noted finding from a post-election survey by the Blueprint strategy group, the third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”. And among swing voters, this concern about cultural focus was the most powerful reason.

In the same poll, overwhelming majorities (67 to 77 percent) of swing voters who chose Trump thought the following characterizations of Democrats were extremely or very accurate: not tough enough on the border crisis; support immigrants more than American citizens; want to take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants; want to promote transgender ideology; don’t care about securing the border; have extreme ideas about immigration; aren’t doing enough to address crime; and are too focused on identity politics.

It’s magical thinking that simply changing the subject to economics will evaporate the Democrats’ many cultural liabilities. Culture matters—a lot—and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.

Instead, for many working-class voters to seriously consider their economic pitch, Democrats need to convince them that they are not looked down on, that their concerns are taken seriously and that their views on culturally freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. That’s the threshold test for many of the working-class voters Democrats need to reach and Democrats have flunked it over and over.

That’s why changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook they detest. Convincing voters of the latter is much harder and more uncomfortable for Democrats. But it has to be done.

2. Economic populism will not produce a big turnout dividend. Many Democrats have looked at the 2024 election results, noticed that Harris, relative to Biden, lost more votes than Trump gained across the two elections and concluded the Democrats’ loss was really about poor turnout. Comforting solution: more economic populism please! That will, it is alleged, galvanize the higher turnout among Democratic-leaning voters needed in future elections.

But was turnout really the problem? As Nate Cohn points out, even under generous assumptions, lower relative Democratic turnout likely explains no more than a third of lower Democratic support. And critically, nonvoting attrition among 2020 Biden voters is inextricable from vote-switching to Trump. Both reflected dissatisfaction with Harris, the Democrats, and the record of Biden administration.

[L]ow turnout among traditionally Democratic-leaning groups—especially nonwhite voters—was a reflection of lower support for Ms. Harris: Millions of Democrats soured on their party and stayed home, reluctantly came back to Ms. Harris or even made the leap to Mr. Trump. And if those who stayed home had voted, it wouldn’t have been an enormous help to Ms. Harris, based on Times/Siena polling linked to validated records of who did or didn’t vote.

Clearly, the turnout problem, such as it was, was an indicator of broad dissatisfaction with Harris and her party. As noted above, that broad dissatisfaction cannot and will not be solved by sprinkling the magic elixir of economic populism onto the currently existing Democratic Party and its tarnished brand. There will be no turnout dividend separate from fixing that brand.

3. Economic populism will do nothing to fix Democrats’ governance problems. Pretty much by definition, economic populism in whatever form has little to do with making Democratic governance of states and, especially, cities any better. Democratic governance is not, to say the least, synonymous with public order, low crime, and effective and efficient administration of public services. Quite the contrary. Progressive domination of deep blue cities instead has become synonymous with poor governance across the board. Josh Barro:

I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them…Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system…even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it…The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets…[S]chools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything—and it’s really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels. And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population—we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy.

Ouch. No wonder Democratic-governed large metros, including and especially New York City, swung so heavily to the right in the last election. Fixing this has nothing at all to do with economic populism and everything to do with getting better at governing. That will not be easy with the array of Democratic-oriented interest groups who benefit from the current system (I’m looking at you non-profit industrial complex!) and of course the innumerable regulations that undermine efficient public services and prevent the building of needed housing and infrastructure.

Speaking of regulations, economic populism has nothing to say about the radical reform we need in the country’s regulatory and permitting structure so that, well, stuff could actually get done. As Ezra Klein points out:

The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later—four years—the first 28 stations opened.

Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.

Appalling. There are innumerable other examples. How about the $42 billion allocated in the 2021 infrastructure act to provide broadband access to underserved, primarily, rural areas? Three years later, almost nothing’s been done. Or how about the $7.5 billion allocated by the IRA to build half a million EV charging stations? So far, a grand total of seven! This should be completely unacceptable.

As should the failure of the bipartisan Energy Permitting Reform Bill of 2024. The bill would have facilitated the building of renewable energy infrastructure, particularly long-distance transmission lines, as well as new fossil fuel infrastructure. But the environmental groups blocked it so we’re still stuck with the same old glacially slow and inefficient permitting regime for energy infrastructure, ensuring that the goals of the IRA, of questionable feasibility to begin with, will certainly not be met. In the immortal words of Bob Dole: “Where’s the outrage?”

This is a problem that most assuredly will not be fixed by a generous dose of economic populism. Not even close.

4. Economic populism is inadequate as populism. We are certainly in a populist era and it makes sense to respond to that mood. But it does not necessarily follow that Democrats can effectively speak to that mood simply by bashing the rich (“the billionaire class”), insisting they pay their fair share, and advocating for programs aimed at middle- and working-class voters, rather than corporate priorities. Many voters, including swing voters, are certainly sympathetic to such a pitch. But what this approach leaves out is that the populist sentiments of voters go much deeper than that.

To put it bluntly, voters, particularly working-class voters, harbor deep resentment toward elites who they feel are telling them how to live their lives, even what to think and say, and incidentally are living a great deal more comfortably than they are. This is not the rich as conventionally defined by economic populism but rather the professional-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power. By and large, these are Democrats in Democratic-dominated institutions. Looked at in this context, truly populist Democrats might want to say, with Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is a bitter pill for most Democrats to swallow. In today’s America, they are the Establishment even if in their imaginations they are sticking it to the Man and fighting nobly for social justice. The failure to understand that they themselves are central targets of populist anger leads Democratic elites and activists to overestimate the efficacy of economic populism and interpret populism on the right as driven solely by racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. That’s more comfortable than realizing millions of populist voters hate you. But they do.

Coming to terms with this reality—while unpleasant—will help Democrats overcome their current tendency toward magical thinking. Assuming they want to. Magical thinking may not lead to effective politics but it can be mighty comforting.