Washington Post’s Deputy Opinion Editor James Hohmann interviewed Ruy Teixeira last month in “a wide-ranging discussion about the Democrats, the DSA, working-class voters, the culture wars, the 2026 midterms, the 2028 election, and plenty more.” Welcomstack.org is providing a transcript of their discussion, a stub of which appears below:

James Hohmann: Ruy Teixeira, great to have you here. You wrote one of the most influential political science books of the 21st century, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Here we are, a quarter century later. I guess just to start our conversation, have socialists taken over the Democratic Party? Are socialists hijacking the Democratic Party?

Ruy Teixeira: I wouldn’t say they’re hijacking it or really taking it over. I actually just wrote a piece on this…which was titled, “DSA: Vanguard of the Radial Professionals.” I think that’s what they are. Professional-class people have been taking over the Democratic Party for a long time—they’ve been hegemonizing it.

They’ve also become more radical as they become more influential, and I think the DSA is a logical terminus of that. I think these radical professionals have been further radicalized by the Trump administration, by their view of the Democratic establishment as feckless and failing to stand up to Trump, failing to do what they were supposed to do.

That puts the DSA in a good position to absorb all these people, which they are. Obviously, they are having some success. They may have as many as ten House members, by my count, in the next Congress. And as people endlessly say, they’ve got the energy. Whether they actually have the votes in the big, big country sense of America is another question, a very different question. But clearly, they’ve got energy within the Democratic ranks.

So my view is that is true, and it’s going to continue for a while. They’ve caught the imagination of a lot of these young, radical professionals who loom large in a lot of blue areas of the country. I think the main thing that will do is not so much that they’ll take over—run the DNC, be the arbiters of what rolls forward in the Democratic Party—but they are going to make it even harder for the Democrats to correct some of their brand problems that we saw emerging in a big way in the 2024 election.

How does a party lose two out of three times to Donald Trump? Well, start with the idea that they’re out of step with big sections of the American voting population, particularly working-class voters, who just don’t share the cultural priorities and some other things that the Democratic Party stands for. How easy is it going to be now to backtrack on those or to move to the center? Because the DSA people—famously, they’re for whatever they mean by “socialism”—they also deeply believe in every single culturally radical stance that the Democratic Party has become associated with in the last 10 or 15 years.

Defund the police, trans rights, open borders, abolish ICE.

Right. Race, immigration, climate, you name it. Famously, their ridiculous program calls for not only eliminating the Electoral College but eliminating the Senate.

And the presidency.

And the presidency. And the Supreme Court [will be] subservient to Congress. I think this is maybe a little bit unconstitutional, James, but it doesn’t seem to stop them. So they are pretty radical.

Now, I think some of them try to pass themselves off, like Mamdani does, as, “I just want to fix the potholes. I’m a sewer socialist.” Famously, I think it was Milat Kiros in Colorado who was asked about some of this—you know, “Socialism just means you’re for garbage collection, and we just care about healthcare.” So this is an attempt to sane-wash their fundamentally very radical positions, both in economics and on cultural issues.

Let’s hypothesize that the Democratic Party needs to move to the center to do better over the medium to long term with working-class voters and [vanquish] a right-populist Republican Party. Obviously, [the DSA] now stands in the way. Instead, politicians are being crowded to the left to not be totally outflanked by the DSA and to respond to the so-called energy in the party.

We already see it happening with some relatively moderate Democratic politicians who refuse to denounce the DSA. They just say, “Well, you know, kids will be kids. They’re just for healthcare in a different way. We’re a big tent.” But these people are nuts, many of them. And they stand for a number of things that are anathema to the median voter in America.

So if you aspire to be the working majority in American politics, you don’t want the DSA identified with your party. You want it disidentified as much as possible. As Karl Rove correctly argued today in the Wall Street Journal, you need a Sister Souljah moment where you disassociate the Democrats from the kinds of things the DSA stands for. Just say it loud and say it proud. But it’s the reverse. People are walking on eggshells when they’re asked about the DSA today.

I think that’s quite remarkable, and frankly I don’t expect it to change for a while.

More here.

From “Keeping It Classy: A Revised Model for Forecasting Seat Swing in Midterm Senate Elections” by Alan I. Abramowitz at centerforpolitics.org:

A class-conscious Senate forecasting model

The U.S. Senate was not intended to be a democratic body. Prior to the adoption of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913, Senators were chosen by state legislatures rather than voters. Even after the advent of direct popular election, differences in state populations ensured that states with small populations were vastly overrepresented in the upper chamber—an advantage that has increased substantially over time. Today, a senator from California, the most populous state, represents more than 65 times as many people as a senator from Wyoming, the least populous state. And, of course, residents of the District of Columbia, with a larger population than Wyoming or Vermont, have no representation in the Senate.

Enormous differences in state populations have important political consequences for modern Senate elections because of two recent trends affecting these contests. First, over time, the average state presidential vote margin has become increasingly Republican relative to the national popular vote margin because the least populous states are now more Republican than the most populous states in presidential elections. At the same time, the relationship between presidential and Senate election outcomes has become much stronger over time. As a result of these two trends, Senate elections have had an increasing Republican bias in recent years.

Note: Eras are defined as Eisenhower 1952-1958, Kennedy/Johnson 1960-1966, Nixon/Ford 1968-1974, Carter 1976-1978, Reagan-Bush1 1980-1990, Clinton 1992-1998, Bush2 2000-2006, Obama 2008-14, Trump/Biden 2016-24.

Source: Data compiled by Gary Jacobson and author

Figure 1 displays the trend in the average Democratic state vote margin compared with the national vote margin in presidential elections since the 1950s. During the Eisenhower presidential era, which covers the 1952 through 1958 elections, there was no difference between the average state Democratic margin and the national Democratic margin. During that era, there was no Republican bias in Senate elections. In every presidential era since then, however, there has been a Republican advantage due to greater Republican strength in less populous states. Moreover, that advantage has increased over time so that in the Obama and Trump-Biden eras, which include the 2008-2024 elections, the average state Democratic vote margin has been more than 6 points more Republican than the national Democratic vote margin.

The growing Republican advantage seen in Figure 1 has become much more important in recent years due to a second major trend in American politics—the increasing nationalization of congressional elections. The outcomes of both Senate and House elections are now much more closely connected to the outcomes of presidential elections. The trend for Senate elections is very clear in Figure 2. This figure displays the trend in the percentage of Senate outcomes that were consistent with the outcome of the presidential election in the state in the same year, or in the case of midterm elections, the outcome in the previous presidential election.

More here.

Anne Kim explains “What You Need to Know About Election Threats This Fall. Be prepared. Don’t panic. Vote early in person” at Washington Monthly:

“Here’s how crazy things have gotten in America.

The most significant threat to our elections this fall isn’t Russian interference or terrorism. It’s our own federal government.

As a candidate, Donald Trump made his lies about a stolen election the focus of his campaign. As president, Trump has made election denialism a cornerstone of his presidency. And in recent weeks, he’s accelerated his efforts to subvert November’s elections.

On Monday, Trump instructed the Department of Homeland Security to “surge” investigations into voter fraud in crucial swing states, including Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and California, according to CNN. He’s also pursued aggressive efforts to restrict mail-in voting, which could potentially disenfranchise millionswhile sowing further chaos. Trump has moreover threatened to arrest election officers suspected of wrongdoing and to send ICE agents to the polls. He hasn’t let the unlawfulness of these actions stop him (nor has the Supreme Court stepped into pump the brakes).

Yet there’s no need to panic, argues Beau Tremitiere of the nonprofit Protect Democracy. “We have never seen the scope and scale of mobilization that civil society is currently engaged in to take this threat on,” he says. “Folks are not going to be caught off guard because they see what’s coming.”

I interviewed Beau for the latest episode of the Monthly podcast, which you can watch in this preview in Substack. He offered a wealth of advice about what citizens can do this fall to safeguard the right to vote. Here are his top three tips:

• Vote early in person. Given the potential for disruption at polling places, and the uncertainties around mail-in ballots, the safest way to ensure that your vote is counted this fall is to vote early and in person. If you must vote absentee, use a dropbox, not a mailbox, so the U.S. Postal Service never touches your ballot. Be sure to check your voter registration early as well so you can fix any problems (and ensure that you haven’t been mistakenly purged).

• Encourage your friends and neighbors to vote. Help people get to the polls. Remember that the administration’s chief strategy is to suppress the vote through fear and intimidation. Stand with those who may feel hesitant to vote in person. Offer rides and reassurance.

• Record and report. “One of the most valuable things we’ve seen happen throughout civil society is people taking advantage of technology and using peaceful and safe filming as a means of accountability,” Beau says. Bear witness on camera to what you see, but resist the urge to use provocative language in the hopes of going viral. Share what you see with nonprofit voter protection organizations and election lawyers so they can use your recordings as evidence in future litigation…”

More here.

“For only the second time in a quarter century, a majority of Republicans — 52% — approve of labor unions, according to a new Gallup poll.

Listen to any presidential campaign speech over the last half-century. Everything the candidate is proposing will benefit “the middle class” or “the working class” or will pump up “small business.” And won’t voters please consider that children are our future?

There’s no universally agreed-upon definition of lower, working, middle, upper-middle or upper class. And that suits politicians just fine: They want as many voters as possible to think the policies they’re promoting will benefit them.

In 2026 America, that means promising the world to the “working class,” if a new poll from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center is any guide.

A warning from within, “Whistleblower claims USPS plan for Trump’s mail voting order could ‘derail’ midterms” by Hansi Lo Wang at NPR:

The U.S. Postal Service could “derail” the midterm election if it continues rushing out “untested” technology as part of President Trump’s push to restrict mail-in voting, a newly released whistleblower report warns.

With voting by mail for the midterms set to officially start this week, key parts of the USPS plan for carrying out Trump’s directives, including requirements for states to comply, remain blocked for now by a court order in the legal fight over the president’s executive order.

Still, the mailing agency has been preparing for months to launch an online portal that would allow state election officials to submit absentee voters’ names and ballot envelope barcodes required by the now-blocked rule.

Testing of that new system, however, has been insufficient, according to claims by a whistleblower, outlined in a disclosure that Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut submitted Monday to USPS.

“USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation — raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” said the disclosure, prepared by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit organization representing the anonymous federal government official with direct knowledge of the Postal Service’s development of the new system.

If courts allow USPS’ plan for Trump’s order to proceed for the midterms, problems with the online portal could lead to eligible absentee voters not receiving their mail-in ballots in time or at all.

One potential logistical hurdle, the whistleblower claimed, stems from an unusual “zero-percent failure policy” USPS has set for the process of verifying that the mail-in ballots states want to send out meet the requirements of its new rule…

More here.

The following stub for “Americans Are Patriotic. Why Aren’t Our Politicians?” by Karlyn Bowman and Ruy Teixeira is cross-posted from The American Enterprise Institute:

Simple appreciation for America, and a desire to build on its strengths, has become nearly impossible to find among today’s politicians and pundits. The loudest voices in politics today say there’s hope for America, but only if you empower them to save it from itself. On the right, Tucker Carlson announced a manifesto last week to free America from the clutches of the elite “Epstein class.” On the left, the leading Democrat in Wisconsin’s race for governor, state representative Francesca Hong, has declined to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at legislative hearings, and in 2020 urged the cancellation of Thanksgiving, which she said honors colonialism.

Since pundits and politicians alike tend to mirror the public, can we deduce that Americans have simply lost interest in patriotism? We don’t think so. On the contrary, we believe that there is an unmet demand in this country for a revival of patriotism that politicians of both parties appear incapable of meeting.

More here.

From “We surveyed 6,000 Americans. Here is the winning message for Democrats” by Dustin Guastella and Erica Etelson at The Guardian:

In “You Can Take This as Gospel: A new breed of political hopefuls is challenging the religious right’s theology of hate with a Christian message of love,” Robert Kuttner writes at The American Prospect:

When I first moved to the Boston area in 1979, my congressman was Robert F. Drinan, better known as Father Drinan. He was, of all things, a left-wing Catholic priest.

Father Drinan, a Jesuit, ran for Congress in 1970 on an anti-war platform, defeating the incumbent, Philip Philbin, a pro-Vietnam hawk who served on the House Armed Services Committee. Despite being a priest, Drinan was also a champion of abortion rights.

Exasperated church officials repeatedly tried to drive Drinan out of politics. Finally, Pope John Paul II issued an order in 1980 that no priests could hold elective office. Rather than exit the priesthood, Drinan left Congress. He was succeeded by Barney Frank.

More from Robert Kuttner

Few clergymen have served in Congress since then, but this year, one divinity student and one ordained minister have a shot at being elected to the U.S. Senate as Democrats. They would join the Rev. Raphael Warnock, senator from Georgia, who succeeded Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.

As Christians, both James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas are superb at reaching back, past the hatred preached by the religious right, to invoke the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Maybe this is some kind of harbinger.

Talarico, who is running ahead of his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, has a particular gift for shaming the hatred preached by the religious right. “Scripture says you can’t love God and hate other people,” Talarico said in a sermon. “You can’t love God and abuse the immigrant. You can’t love God and bully the outcast. You can’t love God and oppress the poor.”

He has also explicitly criticized so-called Christian nationalists for “the worship of social, economic, and political power in the name of Christ and a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.” Christian nationalists, he deftly observed, have a “greater commitment to the love of power than to the power of love.”

Talarico’s genuine commitment to a Christianity rooted in love has left the religious right and the Paxton campaign sputtering mad. For lack of a better rejoinder, the right has gone after Talarico’s “low testosterone.” In his victory speech after winning the Republican primary, Paxton said of his opponent, “Some people know him as Tofu Talarico. Some people call him Six-Gender Jimmy. I’ve even heard some people call him James Talafreako. And others refer to him simply as Low-T Talarico.”

Even in Texas, you have to believe that the actual message of the Gospels will prove more powerful than Paxton’s pathetic name-calling.

More here.

From “Working-Class Voters Are Winnable for the Left. Here’s How.” by Ned Rust at Jacobin:

In a new report from the Equality Action Center, Joan C. Williams and Jared Abbott lay out a sensible, pragmatic approach to what has always seemed a Sisyphean task: explaining to progressives how they can turn more people on to their politics than they turn off. In so doing, Williams and Abbott offer a means to block one of the misanthropic right’s signature moves: playing populist and turning the working class against a college-educated left that wants to address our system’s fundamental injustices.

The report is essentially a “For Dummies” coalition guide for progressive smarties (especially social justice advocates, political candidates, and funders) that shows how to recognize and redirect the antisocial, prejudicial habits of their class and channel them toward the common goal of taking populism back from the Right.

Much of the guide’s wisdom comes down to the broad working class’s perception that college-educated voters are too focused on problems that don’t affect workers’ lives. Citizens scrabbling just to get by are turned off when they see elites focusing on issues that may be real and significant but that they perceive are at a distance from the pressures they face to put food on the table, collect a paycheck, and pay the rent.

Wage-earners certainly are not mostly anti-LGBT, anti-international, anti-immigration, anti-art, anti–gun control, anti-abortion, anti-democracy, or anti-environment. But they do prioritize issues directly connected to their economic and social precarity. This is not hard to understand, and progressive and the Left — if they hope to win the trust of working-class voters — need to remember it.

This is exemplified by the biggest priority gap in the survey: the 40-point delta (90 percent versus 50 percent) between liberal college-educated voters and no-four-year-degree working-class voters on “defending democracy.” The issue was the second-highest priority for the college set, but just the nineteenth (of the twenty-five priorities Williams and Abbott tested) for the working class. Food, jobs, health, wages, and safety outpoll any four-syllable word used by a group that’s uphill from you.

More here.