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:

Cast your mind back to the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. It was then that Joe Biden emerged as the “Great Moderate Hope.” Recall that by the time the first Democratic presidential primary debates were held in late June 2019, leading candidates were seeking to outflank one another to the left. The thinking was that a Democratic electorate radicalized by the Trump presidency would respond favorably to maximally progressive positions.

Many of these candidates endorsed a wide range of radical policy options: “Medicare for All” reforms that would eliminate private health insurance; a Green New Deal with an aggressive timeline for reducing reliance on fossil fuels; banningfracking; decriminalizing unauthorized migration over the Mexican border; providing health insurance to illegal immigrants; allowing prisoners to vote; abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and promising reparations to the descendants of slaves.

Joe Biden, by and large, did not participate in this race to the left. Instead, he took advantage of both his primary opponents’ radical ideas and the chaos of Trump’s governance by striking a moderate note, promising to pursue progressive but sensible policies, restore the “soul of America,” provide the help Americans needed to get through the crisis, and, of course and above all, beat Donald Trump. This was a congenial message to the Democratic primary electorate, starting with black voters in South Carolina on February 29 and running through every demographic on Super Tuesday and beyond. It turned out that, despite the strenuous appeals of many candidates to the party’s rising left, most Democratic primary voters had more pragmatic and moderate views than the media-anointed advocates for a more radical party. Other candidates’ failure to understand this emptied the field for Biden, who cruised to the nomination after Super Tuesday.

Then a funny thing happened which was a “tell” on whether Biden intended to govern—as opposed to run—as a moderate. Usually, candidates attempt to move toward the center in preparation for a general-election campaign. But Biden did the reverse. He formed six “unity task forces” jointly coordinated by Biden and Bernie Sanders campaign figures, covering climate change, criminal-justice reform, the economy, education, health care, and immigration. The co-chairs included such lions of the left as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal, then-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and the task forces themselves were well stocked with Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren) supporters. The task forces produced a blizzard of positions and language considerably to the left of the “moderate, normie” politics upon which Biden had built his successful campaign. And these positions and language found their way into the Democratic Party platform, were incorporated into Biden’s campaign promises and, importantly, determined how the Biden administration made staffing and policy decisions. Despite Biden and his team’s initial insistence that the strenuous leftism found on Twitter wasn’t real life, by the end of the campaign they seemed to be quite happy to act as though it was.

Sure enough, once the Biden administration was up and running, moderation was conspicuous by its absence. First, there were the executive orders that, among other things, dramatically loosened the rules for dealing with illegal immigrants (pleasing progressive immigration advocacy groups), cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline and paused oil and gas leasing on Federal lands (pleasing progressive climate groups) and instituted a sweeping, government-wide effort to promote “equity” (pleasing the congeries of progressive identity-focused groups). He also signaled his support for transgender activists by appointing a transwoman, Rachel “gender-affirming care is settled science” Levine, as Assistant Secretary for Health and de factoadministration spokesperson on transgender issues. And Biden repeatedly referred to transgender equality as “the civil rights issue of our time.”

None of this suggested a moderate approach targeted to the bulk of voters who had put him in office but rather one focused on pleasing the progressive wing of his party. The ordinary voters that supported Biden had bought the image of moderate “Scranton Joe” who would restore normality to the country after the stormy Trump years and the double whammy of a pandemic and subsequent economic crash. They were not really looking for a “transformational” president.

Biden, however, did aspire to be one, not least in the economic realm where he pursued an amazingly aggressive agenda despite his narrow victory and thin congressional majorities. The first indicator of this was the American Rescue Plan (ARP). While there was a reasonable argument for a stimulus package of some size, Democrats, with Biden’s support, opted for a super-sized $1.9 trillion package that included $1,400 per person direct payments to households, an increased, fully-refundable child tax credit, $350 billion to state and local governments and much, much more. This was on top of well over $2 trillion in stimulus spending already passed at the end of the Trump administration. Larry Summers warned that a stimulus of the size pushed by Democrats had a high probability of spiking inflation.

And spike inflation it did. While some inflation was likely unavoidable due to supply-chain issues as the economy revved up, there seems little doubt that over-stimulating the economy made the inflation surge substantially worse than it would otherwise have been. As it happened, the inflation rate did indeed go up dramatically in the aftermath of the ARP eventually hitting 9 percent, a 40-year high, in mid-2022.

Read more…

In “Trump’s Tax Plan: A Guide for Advocates,” Navigator Research shares the following “key takeaways” from a poll they conducted last month:

• Democrats are more trusted to make sure the rich and big corporations pay their fair share in taxes, while Trump and Republicans are more trusted to handle the level of taxes paid by the middle class.

• Only one in five have heard “a lot” about Trump’s tax plan, with Americans divided along party lines on initial support.

• The framing of Trump’s tax plan is critical: framing the plan as giving “tax cuts to the rich and big corporations while shifting the burden to the middle class” drives opposition up to more than three in five Americans, while Republican messaging drives support up to a similar level.

Drilling down,

“Americans trust Democrats more on “making sure the rich and big corporations pay their fair share in taxes” (net +11 trust Democrats more), while Republicans hold an advantage on “the level of taxes paid by the middle class” (net +5 Trump and Republicans)….Among independents, Trump and the Republican Party have an advantage over the Democratic Party on both items.

Views of Trump’s tax plan are polarized along partisan lines, as seven in ten Democrats oppose the plan (net -59 support) and two in three Republicans support it (net +58 support).

Framing Trump’s tax plan as giving “tax cuts to the rich and big corporations while shifting the burden to the middle class” drives opposition up to more than three in five Americans (62% oppose), while Republican messaging drives support up to a similar level (64% support).

After reading Democratic messaging about Trump’s tax plan, nearly three in five (57%) say it “would hurt people like me.” By comparison, after reading Republican messaging about the plan, only a plurality (45%) say it “would help people like me.”

Among those who read Democratic messaging about Trump’s tax plan, the top concern was that it “wouldn’t help middle- and working-class people struggling to deal with rising costs” (35% top two concern).

It appears Democrats have much to gain by pressing their case against Trump’s tax policies.

The following article by Robert Reich, professor of public policy at U. Cal, Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor, is cross-posted from Alternet.org:

Trump will try to take credit for the Biden economy. Don’t let him. And don’t let Republican enablers of Trump or the media give him credit, either.

In 2017, Trump inherited a strong economy from President Obama and never stopped congratulating himself for it. He claimed that “we created the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

Rubbish. Trump tanked the economy with his trade wars and his botched pandemic response.

Now, Trump is inheriting an even stronger economy.

On Friday, the Department of Labor reported that the nation added 256,000 jobs in December, significantly more than economists expected.

The total number of jobs created under Biden’s four years is 16.6 million. That makes him the only president in history to have presided over an economy that created jobs every single month.

He has also presided over the lowest average unemployment rate of any president in a half-century, ending at 4.1 percent.

The nation gained more jobs in Biden’s four years than it did under Trump’s first term of office, or under either of Barack Obama’s or George W. Bush’s terms of office.

Working-age women are now employed at record levels.

The gap in employment between Black Americans and their white counterparts is at the lowest level ever.

Biden has also presided over an economy that has grown faster and created more jobs than any other advanced economy around the world. Under Biden, the American economy grew faster than did the pre-pandemic Trump economy.

Yes, the United States and every other country had to deal with inflation, but Biden brought inflation down to below 3 percent — lower than in most other countries.

Americans have every reason to be outraged at decades of policies that prioritized corporations over people. But the Biden administration cracked down on corporate price-gouging, monopolization, and trickle-down nonsense.

All this means that Trump begins his second presidency with the best economy a president has inherited in living memory.

Will he claim credit for it? You betcha.

In addition, some of the most important Biden initiatives will start to pay off only during the Trump presidency (assuming Trump doesn’t reverse them).

Biden took on Big Pharma by capping out-of-pocket drug costs for millions of seniors on Medicare. That lowered the price of 64 drugs. These changes will take place throughout 2025. More drugs are scheduled to get cheaper in the following years.

Will Trump claim credit? Of course he will.

Biden’s infrastructure law will give us better roads, bridges, public transit, and broadband access. But most Americans won’t see those improvements for a year or two, well into Trump’s term of office.

Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act will provide more American-made semiconductors, but we won’t see them for a few years, so during Trump’s presidency.

Biden’s clean energy initiatives will also pay off with greater fuel efficiency and less pollution. But here again, not for several years.

Will Trump claim credit for these successes as well? Do birds fly?

His whole life, Trump has taken credit for things he simply inherited, starting with his own personal fortune.

Just as he avoids accountability for the bad stuff he’s done, such as his attempted coup against the United States, he congratulates himself for the good stuff others have done.

If Trump doesn’t wreck the economy with his bonkers tariff plans or cruel mass deportations, you can be sure he’ll take a bow for what Biden built.

Don’t let him. Don’t let Republican politicians claim credit. Don’t let the media allow Trump or other Republicans to claim credit. Speak out. Remind America that these good things happened because of Joe Biden.

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:

For the last decade, Democrats and the left have ever more eagerly embraced a climate catastrophist narrative on energy policy. That narrative may be summarized as follows:

Climate change is not a danger that is gradually occurring, but an imminent crisis that is already upon us in extreme weather events. It threatens the existence of the planet if immediate, drastic action is not taken. That action must include the immediate replacement of fossil fuels, including natural gas, by renewables, wind and solar, which are cheap and can be introduced right now if sufficient resources are devoted to doing so, and which, unlike nuclear power, are safe. Not only that, the immediate replacement of fossil fuels by renewables will make energy cheaper and provide high wage jobs.

People resist rapidly eliminating fossil fuels only because of propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Any of the problems with renewables that are being cited, such as their intermittency and reliability, are being solved. This means that as we use more renewables and cut out fossil fuels, political support for the transition to clean energy should go up because of the benefits to consumers and workers.

That’s been the mantra that’s dominated Democrats’ policy commitments on energy and their rhetoric and philosophy on climate issues. Indeed, it is not uncommon for Democrats to apply the term “climate denialist” to those who, while they accept the reality of global warming, refuse to endorse the climate catastrophist mantra and its maximalist policy agenda.

So what have the Democrats gained from their fervent advocacy for climate catastrophism? Not much. Sure, they did manage to pass the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act which pumped hundreds of billions of dollars—if not over a trillion—into the renewable energy and electric vehicle industries.

But the needle is moving very slowly indeed on a renewables-based clean energy transition. During the Biden administration, the share of renewables in the country’s primary energy consumption has increased only very modestly from 10.5 percent to 11.7 percent. And the share of energy consumption from fossil fuels remains over 80 percent just as it does in the world as a whole.

It is just very hard to bring that share down quickly while keeping an advanced industrial economy chugging along. That’s why, despite the Biden administration’s professed commitments, energy realities have forced them to preside over record levels of oil production (both on federal lands and overall), record natural gas production, and record LNG exports.

Nor have Democrats been rewarded with a political bonanza for their embrace of climate catastrophism. Quite the contrary. They just lost the presidential election to an opponent who says “drill, baby, drill” and whose priority is cheap, abundant energy—not clean energy. And Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Energy is Chris Wright, CEO of a fracking company, who has been forthright in his advocacy of energy realism, or as he puts it, “energy sobriety.”

It’s interesting to look at Wright’s actual views on climate and energy because they represent what Democrats’ climate catastrophism is now up against. While Wright has been accused of being a climate denialist, this is not, as noted above, because he refuses to accept the reality of global warming but rather because he does not accept the Democrats’ current climate catastrophist narrative and policy approach. Here is what he actually says:

The expansion of the global energy supply by adding fossil fuels has greatly improved the human condition; it also brought the risk of climate change caused by increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases…. Climate change is a real and global challenge that we should and can address.

And his basic stance on meeting this challenge is:

Two things are required for positive progress on climate change: a sober understanding of the issue and the tradeoffs required, and massive improvements in energy technologies that can deliver low-carbon energy that is also low cost, reliable and secure.

That seems….pretty reasonable. Here’s his own 10 point summary of his perspective:

1. Energy is essential to life and the world needs more of it!

2. The modern world today is powered by and made of hydrocarbons.

3. Hydrocarbons are essential to improving the wealth, health, and life opportunities for the less energized seven billion people who aspire to be among the world’s lucky one billion.

4. Hydrocarbons supply more than 80 percent of global energy and thousands of critical materials and products.

5. The American Shale Revolution transformed energy markets, energy security, and geopolitics.

6. Global demand for oil, natural gas, and coal are all at record levels and rising – no energy transition has begun.

7. Modern alternatives, like solar and wind, provide only a part of electricity demand and do not replace the most critical uses of hydrocarbons. Energy-dense, reliable nuclear could be more impactful.

8. Making energy more expensive or unreliable compromises people, national security, and the environment.

9. Climate change is a global challenge but is far from the world’s greatest threat to human life.

10. Zero Energy Poverty by 2050 is a superior goal compared to Net Zero 2050.

Again, all pretty reasonable and empirically defensible though one could quibble here and there with how he formulates some of his points. But I would not quibble with his last point; it underscores the moral problems with the standard climate catastrophist/net zero approach. Lifting up the billions in the world who suffer from energy poverty and the stunted lives and living standards such poverty produces is or should be a moral imperative—a moral imperative about which net zero definitionally has nothing to say.

But Wright’s approach is more than a strong empirical and moral competitor to Democrats’ approach—it also overlaps in important ways with emerging voter sentiment about these issues. This is particularly true among working-class (non-college) voters where Democrats have rapidly been bleeding support. Consider these data from a YouGov survey conducted for an AEI project comparing scientific understandings of energy and climate with dominant public narratives on these issues and comparing both to the views of actual voters.

The survey found that, by 74 percent to 26 percent, working-class voters prefer an energy approach that uses a mix of energy sources including oil, coal, and natural gas along with renewables to an approach that seeks to phase out the use of oil, coal, and natural gas completely.

In terms of the energy they consume, cost and reliability are way, way more important to working-class voters than possible effects on the climate. Given four choices, 41 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them and 35 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Just 17 percent thought the effect on climate of their energy consumption was most important and 6 percent selected the effect on U.S. energy security.

In terms of proposals to mitigate the effects of climate change, getting to “net zero” as quickly as possible is relatively unimportant to working-class voters. Asked to consider proposals to reduce the effects of global climate change, these voters were least likely to say “getting the U.S. to net zero carbon emissions as quickly as possible” was very important to them personally (26 percent), fewer than said “limiting the burden of regulations on business” was very important (33 percent). Working-class voters were most likely by far to say keeping consumer costs low (66 percent) and increasing jobs and economic growth (60 percent) were very important aspects of climate mitigation proposals.

Consistent with many other surveys, the YouGov survey found that climate change as an issue has very low salience to working-class voters. Voters were asked to evaluate a list of 18 issue areas and rate their priority for the president and Congress to address in the coming year. As a “top priority,” dealing with global climate change ranked 16^th out of these 18 areas among working-class voters, well behind strengthening the national economy, fighting inflation, defending the country from terrorist attacks, and keeping Social Security financially sound—and also behind reducing health care costs, dealing with immigration, improving the educational system, keeping energy costs low, reducing the budget deficit, reducing crime, improving how the political system works, improving the job situation, strengthening the military, dealing with the problems of poor people, and dealing with drug addiction. The climate issue only ranked above global trade and issues around race.

Finally, by 30 points (59 to 29 percent) working-class voters flat-out favor more domestic production of fossil fuels like oil and gas. But only 15 percent of these voters are aware that the Biden administration increased oil production on federal lands. However, when informed that the U.S. has, in fact, increased domestic production of oil and gas in the last several years, they are delighted. Almost three-quarters (73 percent) of working-class voters said “this is a positive development, which brings good jobs for U.S. workers, ensures our energy supply and helps the U.S. support our allies who need similar resources” compared to 27 percent who thought “this is a negative development, which brings more pollution, climate change, and continued reliance on fossil fuels.”

How about that. Perhaps instead of hiding this achievement away Democrats should have featured it. Their failure to do so obviously has a lot to do with the climate catastrophist narrative they have felt obliged to embrace and defend. That narrative is clearly getting in the way of Democrats’ ability to reach working-class voters and is leaving an open lane for Chris Wright’s version of energy realism.

Can Democrats wean themselves away from climate catastrophism and their obsession with net zero? It could be difficult. Their net zero commitment stems from the extremely high priority placed on this goal by the educated elites and activists who now dominate the party. These elites and activists—unlike working-class voters—believe that nothing is more important than stopping global warming since it is not just a problem, but an “existential crisis” that must be confronted as rapidly as possible to prevent a global apocalypse. President Biden said in September, 2023:

The only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next 20—10 years. That’d be real trouble. There’s no way back from that.

He also said in November of that year:

I’ve seen firsthand what the reports made clear: the devastating toll of climate change and its existential threat to all of us. And it is the ultimate threat to humanity: climate change.

More frightening than nuclear war, eh, from which there ispresumably a way back? Up and down the Democratic Party, rhetoric has been more similar than not to Biden’s absurdly histrionic take. That’s an awful lot of rhetoric to walk back.

It also seems unlikely that the climate movement, with its intransigent radical wing, is going to do much to help Democrats do a reset on on these issues. Instead it seems like they’re inventing new ways to make their movement irrelevant to normie voters. A recent innovation is “intersectional environmentalism” which emphasizes how “injustices happening to marginalized communities and the earth are interconnected”. Somehow that’s going to result in a movement “rooted in joy and radical imagination and community building.”

Intersectionalism and a radical politics of joy? This does not sound like a movement prepared to grapple with reality. The reality is that climate change policy, to be politically successful, must be embedded in and subordinate to, the goal of energy abundance and prosperity. In other words, as energy abundance is pursued, efforts to mitigate climate change should be undertaken within those constraints, rather than pursuing climate change as the paramount goal and trying for energy abundance within those limits. There’s a big difference and only the former approach offers a viable way forward for Democrats.

Such an approach will require Democrats and the left to develop a more realistic understanding of what is feasible in terms of climate action. There is no point in setting goals and timelines that cannot be met. Discarding these will make it much easier to pursue an energy abundance path that also includes reasonable progress on reducing emissions over what will undoubtedly be a very lengthy time period. Democrats would be well-advised to develop this path—their own version of energy realism—rather than pursuing the dead-end of climate catastrophism. The latter is and has been a loser. Energy realism will beat it every time.

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.

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