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.

At The Pennsylvania Capital-Star, Kalena Thomhave interviews Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO and current president of the Organizing Group, a political consulting firm that helps labor unions get out the vote and win campaigns. An Excerpt:

On the union vote, there was a lot of media discussion about how union members are migrating to Trump despite the Biden administration doing so much for unions. 

First off, union members voted for Harris in pretty strong numbers. Across the three blue wall states, [there was a] significant performance by union members.

In Pennsylvania, union members made up 18% of the electorate. So, almost one out of five votes cast came from union households, and they voted 52 to 47 for Harris, which is better than the Biden vote was in 2020, [when] Biden lost union households to Trump 49 to 50 in Pennsylvania. So, she actually did better.

In Wisconsin, Kamala Harris won union voters 53 to 46 — better than Clinton did in 2016 and not quite as good as Biden did in 2020, but still a nine-point margin among union voters in the state. In Michigan, Harris won [union voters] 55 to 44 — not quite as good as Biden did in 2020, but much better than Clinton in 2016.

Trump has eroded the union vote a little bit, but not in substantial numbers. The media rush to judgment before the election based on some polls suggesting that union members had abandoned the Democrats, it’s just wrong.

What are your thoughts on unions like the Teamsters not endorsing Harris?

The Teamsters, as was well reported, stayed neutral. So did the firefighters. But there were 50 unions that supported Kamala Harris.

The Teamsters released a poll that said that [nearly] 60% of their members were supporting Trump, and [indicated] that’s why they decided to stay neutral. I’ve seen a lot of union member polls over the more than 40 years I’ve been doing this work. Unions might start off with their members behind 10, 15, or 20 points.

But then you put your program into gear and communicate with your members — in this case, for example, point out that Trump supports right-to-work and that Trump ran one of the most vehemently anti-union administrations in the history of the country. And then contrast that with Harris’ record and the fact that Harris cast the deciding vote on the legislation that saved the pensions for hundreds of thousands of union members, including Teamsters.

It was inexcusable that the union didn’t take the opportunity to communicate to their members and explain to them what was at stake in this election. Because if they had done that, they would have moved those numbers. No union leader could look at these two candidates and with any degree of honesty suggest that one of them wouldn’t be better for working people.

You said that Democrats need to be doing the work in the trenches with workers. What does that look like? 

I think it is walking picket lines. I think it’s showing up at union halls. I think it’s gathering groups of working people together and sitting with them and listening to them — doing town hall meetings around your district or state and hearing what people have to say. It means standing united with working people and letting them see who’s really on their side.

Over the next couple of years, it’s going to be standing strong against what’s going to be a vicious assault on a range of worker’s rights. There are going to be attacks on [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration], overtime pay, the National Labor Relations Board, funding the Fair Labor Standards Act, and federal workers’ unions.

What has been your approach to mobilizing union and working-class voters? 

With our voter engagement program, In Union, we provide voters with a year of information — we don’t just start talking to them around the election. We give them tips on their families saving money, we provide them with information about unions on the front lines, we give them ways to hold politicians accountable and to fight back. And then we gradually get into communicating about the election itself. We never make endorsements, but we provide people with good, sound information and well-documented citations.

Read the rest of the interview right here.

In “The Democrat who won in Trump country,” Noel King interviews Rep. Marie Glusenkamp Perez, cross-posted here from Vox:

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

Democrats have lost two of the last three presidential elections to Donald J. Trump. Donald Trump! And they now face a governing trifecta of House, Senate, and presidential control by their (semi-fascist?) opponents.

Clearly, something has gone dreadfully wrong. A clue can be found in the shocking decline of nonwhite working-class (non-college) support for Democrats in this election. Harris carried nonwhite working-class voters by a mere 32 points, a 16-point decline from Biden’s 48-point margin in 2020. (Obama carried them by 67 points in 2012!) This latest decline swept across both black and Latino working-class voters.

What on earth is going on? Whatever happened to Democrats’ identity as the party of the working class? After all, it has been Democrats’ seemingly unchallenged hold over the nonwhite working class that has made that identity even semi-plausible, as white working-class voters have slipped farther and farther away from the party. But now that’s gone too.

Trump dominated the working-class vote in 2024. And look what’s happened to the Democrats’ image over time:

As another indicator, look at this one:

Yup, the party of the working class no longer. So why might working-class voters, especially nonwhite working-class voters, be finding it ever more difficult to see the party as their tribune? A key reason is the overriding sense that Democrats’ priorities have changed over time and that the welfare of the working class is no longer front and center in their calculations. This chart illustrates the shift:

Democrats of course argue that while their cultural views may have shifted left over time and some of these views may be unpopular (actually, most are), they are nevertheless just as focused on the welfare of the working class as they’ve ever been. This ignores the basic reality of opportunity costs. The time, energy and resources spent on the Democrats’ cultural left agenda is time, energy, and resources taken away from promoting the economic welfare of the working class. Working-class voters are well aware of this tradeoff, even if progressive activists and “the Groups” are not. As a result, working-class voters tend to connect their economic criticisms of the Democrats to the party’s apparent preoccupation with cultural issues pushed by their liberal college-educated supporters—issues working class voters either don’t care about or are actively hostile to. This connection is clearly dragging the Democrats down with these voters.

The salience of this connection is demonstrated by post-election data from 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 focus was the most powerful reason.

And look at what swing voters who chose Trump thought were extremely or very accurate criticisms of the Democratic Party:

A recent article by Jennifer Medina in the New York Times illustrates how these views are expressed by nonwhite working-class voters:

“Democrats flipped,” said Daniel Trujillo, who owns a barbershop in East Las Vegas and watched many of his customers shift from supporting Barack Obama to favoring Mr. Trump. “They went from being for the working class to, if you’re not college-educated and have money, you’re not worthy.” He said he had watched with delight as his customers increasingly warmed toward Mr. Trump.

“The right turned blue-collar and went full border-control, strong-economy and law-and-order,” Mr. Trujillo added. “Who doesn’t want that?”

Who indeed? Later in the article, Medina notes:

Even as they held onto their faith in the American dream, many nonwhite working-class voters said they had come to see the Democratic Party as condescending, overly focused on issues irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. They bristled over social issues like the concerns of transgender children or the party’s focus on abortion rights. They felt scolded by liberals on Covid precautions—and crushed by the pandemic’s economic fallout.

Some sounded every bit as aggrieved as the white working-class voters who first fueled Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, voicing similar complaints about migrants being given easier access to housing and food than homeless veterans living on the streets.

These views and their antagonistic relationship to Democratic orthodoxy are further illustrated in an excellent article by Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “The End of Denial: How Trump’s rising popularity in New York (and everywhere else) exposed the Democratic Party’s break with reality,” that focused on the red shift this year in the Queens borough of New York City. He observes:

Through the resistance years and into the COVID era, liberal institutions from universities to media organizations to nonprofits cathartically swung left, which bred further denial about what voters cared about and were experiencing. A partial catalogue of progressive denialism, listed in no particular order: that alienating left-wing positions or rhetoric were confined to college campuses; that the externalities of pandemic shutdowns, such as grade-school learning loss, were overblown; that the rapid adoption of new gender orthodoxies, especially in settings involving children, was not a popular concern; that the “defund the police” movement would be embraced by communities of color; that inflation was overstated; that the pandemic crime wave was exaggerated; that concerns over urban disorder represented a moral panic; that Latinos would welcome loosened border restrictions.

Van Zuylen-Woods’ reporting indicates how absurd this denialism is when matched against the lives—the “lived experience”, as it were—of ordinary residents of Corona, Queens:

Carlos Bermejo owns an Italian Latin restaurant called La Pequeña Taste of Italy. Bermejo, who emigrated from Ecuador, says the street vendors undercut his sales and the streetwalkers deter customers and attract crime. “In the summer, in the window, maybe like ten ladies,” he said. Inflation was another concern: Facing rising costs of his own, he says he had to hike the price of his standard aluminum-container takeout from $10 to $12. When I asked whom he voted for, he looked at me like I was kidding: “Donald Trump. You gotta do that. Everybody knows that.”

Several blocks away, the manager of a grocery store complained of a spike in thefts—he didn’t want me to use his name to avoid risking further incidents—as well as of street vendors pouring their grease directly into the sewer, which he said attracted rats that wound up in his store basement. He says he voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump this time around. Carmen Enriquez, a substitute teacher from Ecuador who lives nearby in what is technically Elmhurst, says she’s a registered Democrat who voted Republican this year for the first time. She complained that migrants had received free shelter and benefits while existing residents struggled. She directed her ire at not only the Biden administration but also Ocasio-Cortez, who appeared at a local rally last year to support migrant vendors, and State Senator Jessica Ramos, who co-sponsored a bill several years ago to decriminalize sex work…

One of the most interesting people I spoke with was 57-year-old Mauricio Zamora, who lives just off vendor-packed Corona Plaza on 103rd Street. Zamora runs a Facebook page and an active WhatsApp group for an organization he founded called Neighbors of the American Triangle, named after a minuscule nearby park he started maintaining during the pandemic when it became a magnet for drinkers…

He says that thanks to the chaos on Roosevelt, he has been getting fined for random garbage in front of his home, which he owns. He feels some of his local representatives, meanwhile, have prioritized tolerance over law and order. Using our translator now, he claimed they showed up only for “LGBT mobilization or when the lady prostitutes do a rally.”

In short, Democrats have lost the plot in the view of more and more nonwhite, especially nonwhite working-class, voters. How can they find it again? The obvious answer would be to sever the party’s connection to unpopular and unworkable social policies and re-establish a focus on the material welfare of working-class voters.

The simplest way to do this, in turn, would be to forcefully denounce said policies and unambiguously break from the forces in the party that are pushing these policies—“the Groups” and their allies that insist being a Democrat is inseparable from being a progressive as they define it. But this is hard because it entails conflict and conflict with the Groups is something Democrats have been determined to avoid.

This is foolish, not least because the theory upon which this deference was based—that the Groups actually represented groups of voters—was incorrect. As Ezra Klein, generally a loyal liberal Democrat, has been compelled to admit:

[I]t’s very important to look at the power of this nonprofit complex in the Democratic Party. Because part of what that power has been based on…is a sense that the way to understand what …collections of voters want…is by listening to what the groups purporting to represent them want…

“[I]n the case of nonwhite voters, it proved really, really deceptive. So the groups that were, in a sense, representing Hispanic voters within the Democratic coalition — they were part of what was leading Democrats, many of them in 2020, to say they were going to decriminalize border crossing, unauthorized border crossing. But that wasn’t what Hispanic voters wanted.

It was many of the groups representing Black Americans that pushed the Democratic Party toward “Defund the Police” rhetoric…But that was never popular, and certainly is not now popular, among Black Americans.

And so there’s been this dynamic where you have these groups that are claiming to speak for very, very wide swaths of the electorate and persuading Democrats of things that those parts of the electorate simply don’t believe. In the room where the Democrats are sort of making these decisions, you have staffers from these groups, and they’re often maybe the only Black person in the room or maybe the only Hispanic person in the room, so they’re granted a degree of deference.

But it has proved to be a misleading form of politics. Because these aren’t mass-membership groups. And this is a place where I think the Democratic theory, political theory, has just actually and truly failed. The Democratic Party moved into a position of thinking it was doing more than it ever had before to win over the allegiance of this multicultural electorate.

And it has lost huge amounts of support among that very same multicultural electorate. Because the people it was listening to as its guide to how to win them over were nonrepresentative.

In short, it was a catastrophic error which should now be rectified. And that will inevitably entail conflict. Adam Jentleson put the issue squarely in a recent New York Times op-ed:

Democrats cannot [achieve electoral dominance] as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power…Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate…

[W]hen Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test…

The same year, a coalition of groups including the Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party demanded that all Democrats running for president embrace decriminalizing border crossings. When candidates were asked at a debate if they would do so, every candidate on the stage that night raised a hand (except Michael Bennet). Groups like Justice Democrats pushed Democrats to defund the police and abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Positions taken a few years ago are fair game in campaigns, and by feeding into Republican attacks these efforts helped Mr. Trump and left the people and causes they claim to fight for under threat.

In other words, if anyone was being thrown under the bus, it was the very voter groups the Groups purported to represent! It’s high time for Democrats to turn the tables and throw the Groups under the bus. It’s the road back to the working class if the Democrats care to take it. Otherwise, they’ll be stuck being America’s educated, affluent party relying on their redoubts in blue metropolitan areas for political support. That would be a sad fate indeed for America’s historic party of the working class.

The following article by Matthew Yglesias is cross-posted from slowboring.com:

Having written a nine-point Common Sense Democrat Manifesto, it now falls to me to explain in greater detail what I mean.

I chose to start the list with a point about economics, because I really think there is a profound and fundamental divide between the Slow Boring perspective, which is to complain about the Democratic Party’s positioning on cultural issues because I want to see Democrats win elections and help poor people, and the Free Press perspective, which is to complain about Democratic Party positioning on cultural issues because they want to see Republicans win elections and cut rich people’s taxes.

But I also put it first because I think some sectors of the left harbor weird fantasies about the possibilities of politics grounded in “populist” economics. One set holds to a sort of red-brown fantasy, in which they fuse with social conservatives and bring back the left wing of the Dixiecrats. Another set, the one that was more influential with Biden-era Democrats, holds that if you’re somehow just populist enough on economics, you can short-circuit people’s brains and they’ll stop noticing that you disagree with them on cultural issues.

Neither of these works, because the pure left-populist approach to economics is itself not a satisfactory answer to the economic question. Thus, the first point of the manifesto:

Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.

Democrats want and need to be a party that stands up for the little guy, for the person who, in Bill Clinton’s memorable phrase, works hard and plays by the rules. And that absolutely involves progressive economic policies. Conservatives are just way too eager to write off poor kids, sick people, and the elderly and disabled in pursuit of low taxes. They are also way too indulgent of businesses that pollute or perpetrate fraud. And they tend to stand with incumbents, the heirs to inherited wealth, and rent-seekers. But contrary to the attitudes of the hard left, a growing and dynamic private sector is really important. Americans are much richer than Europeans, and that matters. Middle-class people tend to leave San Diego for San Antonio in pursuit of bigger, cheaper houses, and that matters. It also matters that poor people can get Medicaid in San Diego but not in San Antonio.

You need an economic agenda that does both: a rapidly growing economy with a safety net that ensures people aren’t left behind.

The growth mindset

I think these tweets by Lee Hepner from the American Economic Liberties Project about why he hates YIMBYs are telling. He and Nathan Proctor, who works on right- to-repair issues at US PIRG, are not articulating a typical objection to new housing in a neighborhood, like “I’m worried about traffic” or “what if it creates problems for my kids’ school.” They are articulating a fundamental, principled disagreement with the idea that economic growth is important. They say American society has enough “energy, wealth, stuff, etc” and that all we need is a purely redistributive politics.

I think it’s important to note that Proctor and Hepner are not working on climate policy. Most readers here are familiar with the “degrowth” talking points in some climate activist spaces, and Democrats rightly reject that approach. But these guys work on competition policy, and here they are degrowthing. Not because YIMBYism conflicts with the right to repair or antitrust enforcement, but because the core principle of YIMBYism is that growth — more and better housing — is important, and they see this as antithetical to their views.

This is a tragedy, because antitrust law and competition policy are genuinely important.

It’s a real problem that right-wing politics has become too indulgent of businesspeople’s desire to engage in anticompetitive practices that raise prices and restrain output. We need aggressive enforcement of rules against cartels and anticompetitive mergers and abuse of dominant positions in low-competition markets to secure an advantage in more competitive spaces. This stuff is important precisely because it’s important to economic growth. And the same is true of plenty of other progressive ideas:

• Investment in basic science
• Good schools and good infrastructure
• Internalizing pollution externalities
• Transparent markets and rules against fraud
• Macroeconomic stabilization policy

These things are important for growth and prosperity. There is a warm and cuddly side to progressive economic policy that’s about caring for the vulnerable. But there is also a tough-minded side that’s about true public goods and securing the commons. And what you do not want to do is just be prog-maxing randomly. To say that vigorous antitrust enforcement is important is not to say that maximal levels of antitrust enforcement are optimal. And the same is true of environmental rules and spending on public goods and everything else. There’s a temptation to just throw growth under the bus to avoid making choices or exerting discipline. And there are people who sincerely (and wrongly) believe that growth doesn’t matter and that we can just redistribute our way to heaven.

The need to govern

The Biden Administration was not in the grips of hard anti-growth ideology.

But it has, in important ways, been adrift in the interest group fog since the passage of the American Rescue Plan. People can, and will, forever debate the wisdom of a demand-side stimulus that large. But it happened, and it happened very early in the Biden Administration. And while demand-driven growth is great, once you max out demand, you need to aim for supply-driven growth. And they just didn’t do that. The White House considered coming out for Jones Act repeal, but the president personally didn’t want to do anything that was anti-union. They took a look at the bipartisan permitting reform bill, and they weren’t exactly against it, but they also weren’t exactly for it, because they didn’t want to cross the environmental groups. They came out in favor of YIMBY principles, but they couldn’t come up with very much to do about it, because the federal government doesn’t run zoning.

And even while talking about housing costs, they raised tariffs on imported Canadian lumber. They reinterpreted the Waters of the United States rule in a way that homebuilders say is bad for supply. They put expensive rules in place to accelerate electric car adoption, even while alienating the owner of the world’s most important electric car company to please labor unions, while also alienating blue collar union members over cultural issues.

I remember getting a briefing in advance of the 2024 State of the Union. The administration team was, naturally, touting their various efforts to address struggles with the cost of living, and many of their ideas seemed plausible, but they all struck me as ideas that could have been on a progressive laundry list cooked up in 2017. So I asked what they had that I could say a Democratic administration wouldn’t typically propose, except for their recognition that Americans were struggling with inflation.

They had nothing.

The one that has stuck in my craw for years is student loan cancellation. This policy was explicitly pitched by its architects as an economic stimulus measure.

When Biden first won the election and I thought he’d be struggling to secure adequate stimulus from Congress, I thought this was a good idea, because it could be done without a Senate majority. But then ARP passed — you don’t need stimulus anymore!

I get why the president didn’t want to say, “I promised student debt forgiveness and I understand that people will be angry at me if I break that promise, but the truth is the country is now wrestling with inflation, and I have to do the right thing.” But to pour extra fiscal stimulus on the fire when the country is struggling with inflation, just because you promised to do it back in 2019 when the situation was completely different, is wildly irresponsible. On the regulatory front, as I’ve written before, it’s not just that Biden didn’t want to tackle sacred cows like the Jones Act — he made Jones Act rules stricter. Politicians love to talk up Buy American in speeches, but Biden is a true believer who wrote the strictest-ever rules in subtle legal ways.

I’ve been accused of being a soulless monster who doesn’t believe in anything. But on core economic management, it was the Biden Administration that acted hyper-politically rather than genuinely prioritizing the biggest problem facing the country.

Caring for the needy

Taking this out of election retrospective territory, the other question here is what’s worth the risk. I’ll concede that a fully refundable Child Tax Credit is not great politics. But I do think that, if passed, it would prove quite durable, like the Affordable Care Act. If I were a House member being asked to risk my career over something, then I think a huge and probably durable cut in child poverty would be a reasonable thing to ask me to take a risk for. I’d be proud to stop Medicaid cuts. These are solid progressive issues that make sense as priorities.

But I also think it’s important to get means and ends straight.

I support certain policies that aren’t free market, because they’re necessary to ensure the interests of poor people. But it doesn’t make sense to turn all of these policies into a principled critique of free market economics. A lot of left intellectuals clearly find YIMBYs annoying because the idea of a capitalist solution to a major problem annoys them. But working people don’t need a principled debate about the role of the free market in society, they need higher material living standards. Regulations that limit the supply of health care providers are one way that the wealthy and powerful use their privilege to entrench their interests. The same is true of NIMBY rules. And the dockworkers opposing port automation earn significantly more than the average American. These are all leaky buckets of upward redistribution.

You can’t take the politics out of politics, and we’re never going to have a purely technocratic regime. But if you’re a Democrat and you’re trying to think things through on the merits, “How does this impact poor kids and struggling workers?” is a pretty good lodestar.

I think that leads us to see that the social safety net is incredibly important, but so are other things. Population movements to the red states are telling us something important about the cost of overregulation, especially but not exclusively, in the housing sector. Regulatory protections can be very important, but rigorous cost-benefit analysis is also important. Economic growth and consumer goods matter a lot. Stopping cartels from jacking up prices helps poor kids a lot. Trying to create a comprehensive price control regime so lawyers can get over on businessmen does not. Investing in effective educational institutions is great. Providing open-ended subsidies to college and universities and telling yourself it’s “neoliberalism” to demand any kind of measurable result is not.

And to deliver a common sense agenda of broad economic uplift, you also need to be in touch with common sense moral values. Which we’ll get to as we work our way through the manifesto’s remaining eight points.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and John B. Judis, a former editor of The New Republic and author of major works about contemporary politics, is cross-posted from The New York Times.

In his victory speech last week, Donald Trump declared that a “historic realignment” in American politics had occurred. His claim has been echoed by Republican intellectuals. In a podcast the day after, Michael Needham, the chairman of American Compass, said, “We are seeing the realignment come to mind.”

As writers who once made an argument for a potential emerging Democratic majority, we are especially curious when a new one comes up — and because of our own experience, we treat claims by Mr. Trump and others of a durable Republican realignment with some skepticism.

There are two meanings for a realignment claim. The first is that the parties’ coalitions have changed. This is undeniable, but the changes really began during the period from the 1970s through 1994. During that time, portions of the white working class began their journey from the Democratic to the Republican Party. They were originally called Reagan Democrats.

Alternately, many college-educated voters began leaving the G.O.P. for the Democrats. Geographically, the South, once solidly Democratic, came to lean Republican, while Northern states, once dominated by liberal or moderate Republicans, became more Democratic.