Some insights from “Cornyn, Paxton in ugly runoff: 5 takeaways from Texas, North Carolina primaries” by Caroline Vakill and Julia Mueller at The Hill:

Texas Republicans are bracing for an ugly Senate runoff, while Democrats wait to see the outcome of its contest for the upper chamber, with primary season in full swing.

Voters in Texas, North Carolina and Arkansas headed to the polls Tuesday to kick start the 2026 midterm cycle. Texas held competitive primaries for Senate, state attorney general and a number of House districts, which included several awkward Democratic matchups.

The Tar Heel State, meanwhile, weighed in on the primaries to succeed retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) in addition to a heated House race between an establishment Democrat and younger progressive challenger…Republican runoffs were also projected in Texas’s 9^th, 23rd and 35^th Congressional Districts.

Vakil and Mueller note further:

In Texas, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) are projected to head into a May 26 runoff. Cornyn, Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas) vied for the GOP nod, but no candidate was able to win more than half the vote outright to avoid a runoff on Tuesday…Republicans are already bracing for an ugly multi-month brawl, with tens of millions of dollars already spent in the GOP primary thus far…  “I refuse to allow a flawed, self-centered and shameless candidate like Ken Paxton risk everything we’ve worked so hard to build over these many years,” Cornyn told supporters at his watch party, according to CBS Austin.

Meanwhile, the Senate Democratic primary between Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and state Rep. James Talarico had not been called as of 1:15 a.m. EST Wednesday. Talarico had more than 50 percent with about over 75 percent of the votes reported, according to Decision Desk HQ.

Vakil and Mueller add:

Litigation in Dallas County over extended voting on Tuesday roiled the Democratic contest, raising questions about whether a final tally would emerge on Election Day…The Texas Supreme Court’s decision to temporarily pause a lower court’s ruling allowing an extension of voting hours in Dallas County has not only stirred the Senate Democratic primary, but is also impacting a prominet House contest for the party…Dallas County has separate polling locations for both political parties, and confusion over this practice sparked calls from Democrats for the country to extend voting hours for Texans seeking to cast their vote at the correct polling location…A Texas judge allowed voting to be extended two more hours in the county before The Lone Star State’s highest court temporarily halted that decision, asking that any votes cast after 8 p.m. ET be separated from the final tally.

But it wasn’t all abut Texas, as Vakil and Mueller add:

The picture was less murky in North Carolina, where former Gov. Roy Cooper (D) and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley were projected to win their respective primaries for Senate early Tuesday. The Tar Heel State is seen as a key pickup opportunity for Democrats given Tillis’s retirement.

Further,

Democratic turnout surged in Texas and North Carolina, adding to signs of the party’s midterm momentum…In Texas, early turnout in the Democratic primary outpaced Republicans and exceeded totals from recent cycles, energized by the marquee Senate race…  Roughly 1.4 million voters cast ballots in the Democratic primary during early voting, which ended Friday, according to unofficial data from the Texas secretary of state’s office. Across the aisle, roughly 1.2 million voted early in the GOP election…In 2018, when Democrats came within just a couple points of flipping another Senate seat, roughly 1.1 million turned out across early and Election Day voting in the party’s primary, compared to 1.5 million in that year’s Republican contest.

More here.

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

Can Democrats be effective populists? They’d certainly like to believe so. They’d particularly like to believe that if they turn up the volume high enough on economic populism, they can neutralize Trumpian populism and direct anger at the true elites who preside over a broken system. For example, Texas Democratic Senatorial candidate, James Talarico, generally seen as the Democrats’ best shot for flipping that state’s Republican-held Senate seat, has this pitch:

Similar pitches are being made by many Democratic candidates and office-holders, including Graham Platner of Maine and the party’s shining new star, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. What they have in common is a complete lack of interest in addressing what Talarico refers to as “the culture wars.” The real issues are economic; the culture stuff isn’t important (“a smokescreen”) and not negotiable anyway.

Can the Democrats get away with this? Can an economics-only populism really succeed in a populist era where anger at elites is so widespread and so many voters see the system as completely broken?

The answer is no. This narrowly-defined populism is doomed to fail.

An aggressive economic populist pitch by itself is not a get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged. It’s just a comforting myth for Democrats who don’t want to make hard choices.

Working-class voters are acutely aware that the professional-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power is overwhelmingly Democratic. For the working class, the professional upper middle class may not be the super-rich but they are elites just the same. These voters harbor deep resentment toward the cultural gatekeepers 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 a bitter pill for most Democratic elites 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 targets of populist anger is a central reason their populist pitch fails—and will fail—to get traction among the working class. Call it the “old wine in new bottles” problem—these voters hear the economic populist words but they sense that behind them is the same old Democratic Party with the same old elites and the same old cultural priorities.

It therefore follows that Democrats’ attempts to pose as populists will fail to convince without a strong dose of cultural populism. Unless Democrats are willing to align with populist sentiment on cultural issues and therefore confront their own elites and associated NGOs and institutions, working-class voters will not take them seriously as populists, viewing them merely as an alternative set of elites.

And an alternative set of elites who do a very poor job governing where they have the most power. Here again Democrats’ purely economic populism falls short. Deep blue states and cities are notoriously reluctant to confront the NGO-activist-industrial complex and the congeries of interest groups, including public sector unions, who drive up costs and make it near-impossible to govern efficiently and preserve social order. For ordinary voters, this amounts to siding with the Democrats’ own elites against the people.

No wonder that even with the thermostatic reaction against Trump and his administration’s excesses and failures, Democrats as a party are still not deriving commensurate benefits. As my Liberal Patriot colleague Michael Baharaeen notes:

As Baharaeen also notes, the one group that has moved most meaningfully to the left over the period is white college graduates (by 12 points). This group of course heavily populates the very elites that “populist” Democrats are so reluctant to confront.

Democrats will eventually have to take on cultural populism as part of their brand or just give up on ever being a working-class party again. Simple economic populism is hopelessly inadequate. The voters they need to reach overwhelmingly believe illegal immigration is wrong and should be deterred and penalized not indulged. They believe crimes should be punished, public safety is sacrosanct, and police and policing are vital necessities. They believe, with Martin Luther King, that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and therefore oppose discrimination on the basis of race no matter who benefits from that discrimination. They believe biological sex is real, spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved, and medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available simply on the basis of declared “gender identity,” especially for children.

So where are the Democrats’ cultural populists who are willing to robustly defend these sentiments? Essentially non-existent. That bodes poorly for the party’s long term prospects and likely ensures a long life for right populism to the country’s detriment.

• Boston Review is holding a forum on”How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism,” which features contributions by Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbaugh, along with:
• Cori Bush
• Amanda Litman
• Matthew Yglesias
• G. Elliott Morris
• Julia Serano
• Eric Rauchway
• Suzanne Mettler & Trevor E. Brown
• Thomas Ferguson
• Timothy Shenk
• Jared Abbott & Milan Loewer
• Jenifer Fernandez Ancona
• Lily Geismer
• Danielle Wiggins
• William A. Galston
• Henry Burke

Here’s a teaser from William A. Galston’s response: “I am sympathetic to Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach’s argument that the term “moderation” conceals more than it reveals and threatens to mislead party reformers who seek to strengthen the Democratic Party as a bulwark against autocracy. I fear, however, that much of their argument is open to the same criticism.The authors lead off by intimating that Kamala Harris might have won with a less moderate campaign. Maybe so, but they offer no evidence. In reality, she lost for several reasons: because she was the successor to an unpopular president from whom she did nothing to separate herself; because the issue of reproductive rights, on which she bet heavily, receded in importance compared to the 2022 midterm elections; because the Biden administration was seen (rightly, in my view) as having botched the two issues—inflation and immigration—whose salience rose the most relative to 2020; because her campaign did not even try to counter Trump’s “Kamala is for they/them” attack ad that served as effective synecdoche for a host of unpopular progressive stances on cultural issues; because Trump was seen as a stronger leader more likely to bring needed change and better equipped to handle a crisis; and finally, because messaging about democracy being “at risk” did not work the way her campaign expected. Some 73 percent of voters regarded democracy as “threatened,” but Trump beat Harris by 50 to 48 in this group. He did even better among the 4 in 10 voters who saw democracy as “very threatened,” carrying them by 52 to 47.

Could Harris have overcome the multiple handicaps with which she began? The most obvious road not taken was a bold step to distinguish herself from the president she served. Those with long memories will recall that after Vice President Hubert Humphrey broke with President Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, he nearly erased the fifteen-point edge that Richard Nixon enjoyed in late September of 1968 and almost caught him at the finish line. Would a similar break—on immigration, say—have helped Harris? We will never know…”

• More here.

In “Trump’s Tariffs Weren’t Really About Trade Policy,” Harold Meyerson writes at The American Prospect:

Now that the Supreme Court has relegated Donald Trump’s tariffs to the history books, their obituaries need to make clear how utterly out of sync with any previous tariffs they actually were. Nothing in their raisons d’être or implementation bore any resemblance to any previous American tariffs.

(On Saturday, Trump levied 15 percent tariffs on goods from all nations under a different law, but that law stipulates that the tariffs are only good for 150 days unless Congress votes to extend them—a vote that would be tantamount to electoral suicide for many Republicans up for re-election in November.)

To begin, the tariffs of the 19th century, for which Trump has been volubly nostalgic, were enacted to protect America’s fledgling new industries, centered in Northern states, from competition from the more developed industries of Britain and Europe. By contrast, as early as the 1820s, leaders of the almost entirely agricultural American South, John C. Calhoun most particularly, railed against tariffs that had been enacted to give breathing space and growing room to these nascent industries (the “tariff of abominations,” Calhoun termed it). The Southern slave plantation owners whom Calhoun represented loathed having to pay more for the European-made luxury goods they enjoyed; the Southern industrialists—well, there were no Southern industrialists. But the owners of the New England clothing and iron mills, and later in the century the owners of the massive steel mills, welcomed tariffs that enabled them to grow their domestic markets free (or at least freer) from British competitors.

Trump’s innovation in tariff-ology is that the domestic industries he’s most insistent on protecting aren’t fledgling or new; they’re dying or dead. Far from being threatened by foreign competition, they’re industries that rival nations either are scaling back or have abandoned altogether. So Trump attempts to resurrect coal, while blocking the further development of wind and solar power. He promotes fossil-fueled cars and cripples the domestic sale and construction of EVs, enabling our chief economic competitor, China, to take a giant step toward cornering the burgeoning global market in EVs, and then cars in general. When it comes to our most cutting-edge industry, AI computer chips, Trump has allowed their manufacturer, Nvidia, to sell them to China so long as his government gets a take—25 percent of the proceeds—from every sale.

So Trump’s policy protects industries which our competitors are rapidly transferring away from, even as we abandon the essential industries of the future that our competitors are working furiously to develop. This isn’t to say that selective tariffs aren’t still sound policy in major American industries that remain central to the nation’s prosperity, autos and steel in particular. But both those industries (and the auto- and steelworkers they employ) would be in a lot better long-term shape if Trump allowed them to position themselves for future markets by going electric. Instead, his myopic view of transactional policy leads him to consider it a win when he wrangles a quarter share of Nvidia’s proceeds from bolstering Chinese power. In for a penny, out for a pound: That’s the economic logic behind Trump’s trade policies.

More here.

From “Apprenticeships can help save the Democratic Party” by John Kenneth White, professor emeritus at the Catholic University of America and author of  “Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism” at The Hill via aol..com:

Democrats are well-positioned to win control of one or both houses of Congress in this year’s midterm elections. The Republicans are in such a weakened position that a Fox News poll finds them with just a 10-point lead among white working-class voters — the party’s smallest such advantage since 2006.

Ever since President Trump entered politics a decade ago, he has won strong majorities from white working-class voters. In “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, one person expressed his support for Trump this way: “To me, there are only two groups of people, the globalists and the nationalists, and unfortunately the Democrats have wound up appearing to be the friends of the globalists.”

In 2024, Trump beat Kamala Harris among this group by a whopping 34 points. Working class voters were once a mainstay of the Democratic party. In 1940, 57 percent of skilled and 68 percent of semiskilled and unskilled laborers voted to keep Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House for a third term.

But the Republican Party’s weakened position with working-class voters should hardly give comfort to the Democrats. Rather than plan to bank votes based on their disillusionment with Trump, Democrats need to deliver results that improve their lot.

Assuming office in 2023, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) signed an executive order eliminating the requirement for state employees to earn a four-year college degree. He noted that more than 62 percent of Americans over 25 do not hold bachelor’s degrees. The New York Times praised Shapiro’s action, calling it “good policy and good leadership.”

Shapiro was following the lead of Republican governors in Utah and Maryland, who had previously abolished the college requirement for employment in their state’s agencies. Issuing his executive order, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) said, “Instead of focusing on demonstrated competence, the focus too often has been on a piece of paper.”

More here.

From “The Urgency of Marrying Affordability to Anti-Corporate Populism: For all the good news, Democrats are at a dangerous moment politically” by Mike Lux at The Nation:

The inspiring victory won in the streets of Minneapolis gives Democrats an opening for a realignment of American politics, but only if we build a bridge to working-class voters conflicted on immigration, based on the populist economic issue driving their anger right now: the abuse of corporate power. We must show people that the same government that is terrorizing people in cities like Minneapolis is also allowing big business to abuse its power to make life tougher for all working families.

The combination of wages’ not rising fast enough plus the inflation of recent years has hit working families very hard. These voters have not liked the excesses of ICE, so we have an opening with them on immigration, but it will never be their main issue. Economic struggles will always be the first order of business for most working-class voters.

Right now, the political dynamic favors the Democrats. Republicans are no longer winning the immigration debate, and the economy is hurting them because they are the party in power.

The problem is that Trump is moving fast to develop and promote his own populist-sounding affordability agenda, including proposals to cap credit-card interest rates at 10 percent; prohibit large corporate investors from buying up single-family homes; and slash the cost of prescription drugs.

More here.

From “A Georgia Democrat finds the perfect way to talk to voters” by Paul Fanlund at The Cap times:

“At 39, he is the Senate’s youngest member. Ossoff gave what national pundits have already dubbed the “Epstein class” speech before an Atlanta audience on Feb. 7.

“We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans,” Ossoff told that crowd. “But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It is the wealthiest cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class ruling our country. They are the elites they pretend to hate.

“(Trump) was supposed to drain the swamp,” he added. “Instead, this is the most corrupt administration of all time and everybody knows it.”

It was a simple yet brilliant negative branding, tying the scandal of the disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to the economy that enriches Trump and Republican economic elites.

Democratic strategist Matt McDermott, with nearly 100,000 followers on X, wrote of the speech: “Jon Ossoff renames the MAGA elites running the country: the Epstein class,” according to Newsweek.

Newsweek reported that an account on X named “Call to Activism,” which aims to expose MAGA corruption, defend democracy and that has 1.1 million followers, said: “Jon Ossoff is on fire at his rally.”

Progressive political YouTuber Jack Cocchiarella wrote: “Every Democrat needs to watch this video and sound more like Jon Ossoff.”

I listened to all of it on YouTube and emerged enormously impressed with how Ossoff’s message might appeal to elusive white, working-class voters as well as the different ideological and identity groups within the Democratic base.

Ossoff also ripped Trump for his recent post that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

“You’re seeing what I’m seeing, right?” Ossoff asked his audience. “The president posting about the Obamas like a Klansman at 1 a.m.”

Yes, I thought, that is the perfect analogy.

He also told the audience: “You see our government transformed into a tool of one man’s personal vengeance, power and enrichment.”

Ossoff pounded Republican actions on health insurance costs: “While prices are going up and jobs are getting harder to find, they decided to let health insurance premiums double for more than 20 million Americans.”

In a “Project Battleground” essay on Substack, political strategist Chase Lindsey wrote this about the speech: “I didn’t watch Jon Ossoff in Atlanta for inspiration. I watched him the way an organizer watches anything: for what actually moves people.”

He continued, “Democrats love persuasion theater. We love the fantasy that if we just explain ourselves better (cleaner charts, nicer tone, sharper policy) we’ll win. But that’s not the country we’re organizing in. People aren’t confused. They’re bruised. They’re watching prices climb, jobs wobble, hospitals cut back, and politics get used like a personal weapon. They’re waiting to see if anyone will talk about it without flinching. Ossoff did.”

Finland notes that U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan said: “First and foremost, Democrats need to get much more ruthless about winning,” which, she added, is not necessarily compatible with the “weird consensus-based leadership” Democratic leaders lean toward.

Fanlund adds, “Something to think about next time you read about the Democratic squabbles between young and old, identity groups versus the general population, the center left and the far left.

Before you can do anything, help anyone, you have to, you know, actually win elections. Sounding more like Ossoff might help.”

Read the whole article here. You can support Ossoff’s re-election campaign here.

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

Gavin Newsom has had quite a year. While other Democratic politicians have struggled to adapt their pitches to the chaos of the second Trump term, Newsom has responded with a blizzard of activity that has dramatically raised his national profile. He has also benefited from copious, if not fawning, media coverage including a splashy recent profile in Vogue magazine. At first mired in single digits with a scrum of other potential candidates, all trailing Kamala Harris by wide margins, he is now close to her or narrowly ahead in three commonly-cited poll averages (RCP, 270toWin, Race to the WH) of primary voter support for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

His rising strength is reflected in the betting markets. On Predictit, he is far and away the betting favorite for the Democratic nomination, way ahead of AOC (second) and Harris (third). And in the market on the 2028 general election, he is way ahead of other Democrats and very close to the leading Republican candidate, JD Vance.

What accounts for this remarkable pro-Newson surge? How did this liberal California Democrat win over so many in the wake of Democrats’ comprehensive defeat running…a liberal California Democrat?

The answer lies in Newsom’s ability to be everything to, well not everybody, but to every Democrat. Think of Gavin Newsom not as an ordinary politician but as a message delivery system—and a very effective one. Of course, all politicians to varying degrees are about that. But Newsom stands out as letting absolutely nothing stand in the way—principles, beliefs, prior positions—of delivering the message he deems most politically effective at any given time to any given audience.

That has enabled him to appeal to diverse Democratic audiences. Think of Resistance liberals, whose white-hot anger at Trump is sure to galvanize a large share of Democratic primary voters. Right after Trump was elected, he declared a special session of the California legislature. His office said:

The special session responds to the public statements and proposals put forward by President-elect Trump and his advisors, and actions taken during his first term in office—an agenda that could erode essential freedoms and individual rights, including women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights…A special session allows for expedited action that will best protect California and its values from attacks.

A steady stream of denunciations of Trump administration actions from Newsom and the governor’s office has followed, especially during last June’s protests against ICE actions in Los Angeles which resulted in the deployment of the National Guard to quell riots. Newsom did not hold back his rhetoric or legal actions against this development. He said:

Democracy is under assault right before our eyes—the moment we’ve feared has arrived.

He’s taking a wrecking ball to our Founding Fathers’ historic project.

And so on. Indeed, Newsom has not missed a chance to aggressively oppose everything the Trump administration has done, whether it directly involved California or not. He has traveled to Brazil to oppose Trump climate policies at COP30 and, most recently, showed up at the World Economic Forum in Davos to denounce the administration. And, in reply to Republican attempts to gerrymander congressional seats in Texas and elsewhere, he has happily torn up nonpartisan districting in California to heavily gerrymander the state for the Democrats.

In essence, he has appointed himself “Chairman of the anti-Trump Resistance” and has the receipts to back it up. In Resistance liberal land, they love this just as Newsom intends.

But for those who are concerned that the party must moderate some, not just resist Trump, Newsom also has something to offer. He started a podcast, This is Gavin Newsom, where his guests have include the late Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and other conservative luminaries. This has provided him with the opportunity to venture some cautious signals that he is more moderate than the average Democrat. In his podcast with Kirk he agreed that trans-identified biological boys in girls’ sports seemed “unfair” to him. And in his very recent podcast with Shapiro, he allowed as how calling ICE activities “state-sponsored terrorism” was not justified and that it was probably not a good idea to call for abolishing ICE. Related, in a conversation with Ezra Klein, he admitted that “we [the Democrats] failed on the border, we have to own that.” He has also, in his actions as California governor, responded to moderates’ concerns about homeless encampments by supporting moves to dismantle them and to concerns about crime with tougher rhetoric and additional tools to prosecute felonies and drug dealers.

More here.

From “Americans think everyone is corrupt: Voters have weird views about this, and progressive advocacy groups do a lot that’s counterproductive” at slowboring.com:

Donald Trump is running easily the most corrupt administration in decades. Whether selling off pardons for cash, delivering sweetheart deals on rare earth metals to donors, or earning hundreds of millions in deals with the United Arab Emirates while authorizing them to buy America’s most powerful computer chips, he is at every opportunity leveraging political power for personal financial gain.

This hasn’t translated to political success, though. After starting his second term much more popular than he was in 2017, he’s converged on his own poor approval ratingsfrom his first term.

And yet, it’s not as if there’s been massive political mobilization against his corruption.

The money machine works in part because Trump has, through persuasion or intimidation, induced the vast majority of Republicans to refrain from criticizing or challenging him on any of this in any kind of meaningful way.

So will the party pay a price for Trump’s corruption? They’re set to lose the House, which almost always happens to the president’s party during a midterm, but remain the odds-on favorites1 to hold the Senate, in which case Trump will be able to keep MAGAfying the judiciary and getting away with his corrupt schemes.

So how does he get away with it? Some people think it’s because the voters don’t care about corruption, but I think that’s probably wrong.

Searchlight Institute polling on this shows that voters just have an incredibly low estimate of the baseline level of integrity of politicians. Seventy-one percent say the “typical politician” is corrupt. Typical Republican? Sixty-eight percent. Typical Democrat? Sixty-one percent. Seventy-two percent say that “long-term elected officials” are probably corrupt.

I think it’s hard to make political hay out of Trump’s corruption because, while it looks extraordinary to me (and probably to you if you’re reading this), many voters see it as pretty normal.”

More here.

From “Whole Hog Politics: Republicans’ alarming nosedive with white working class voters” by Chris Stirewalt at The Hill:

In 1980, nearly three-quarters of voters nationally were white Americans without college degrees. In 2024, it was about 40 percent. Greater cultural diversity explains some of that, but the key element that changed our politics so much wasn’t about ethnic identity but rather education.

In 1980, a college degree was far less essential as a stepping stone to success and entry to the managerial class. Only about 17 percent of all adults older than 25 back then had a bachelor’s degree or more. Now, a four-year degree is the ante price even for many kinds of administrative jobs. Accordingly, about 40 percent of adults now have college diplomas, a share that will continue its climb as those baby boom Americans who were new in the less credentialist job market of 50 years ago pass away — and out of the demographic tables — in large numbers over the coming 15 years or so.

What changed our politics, though, wasn’t so much that more people were going to college, but rather that those who did and those who did not started voting very differently … the white ones, anyway.

According to the University of Virginia Center for Politics analysis, Black voters from 1980 to 2020 were not only consistent in their preference for Democrats, but also there was no significant difference between Black voters with or without college degrees.

Over the same period, white voters without college degrees went from narrowly favoring Democrats (2.2 points in the 1980s) to overwhelmingly favoring Republicans in the 2010s (23.7 points). College-educated white voters went on exactly the opposite trip, going from solidly Republican (12.2 points) to kind of Democratic (2.5 points). What the heck happened there?

…In each of President Trump’s three presidential contests, a majority of his overall support came from white voters without college degrees. That would be an alarming degree of dependency on one shrinking demographic group, unless … you could score increasingly high shares of those voters.

The last time Republicans won the national popular vote before 2024 was in 2004. That year, white working-class voters split about evenly, with a slight edge for then-President George W. Bush. He got a little more than half of a group that was back then a little more than half of the electorate itself.

Twenty years later, the white working class made up about 40 percent of the electorate, but Trump won 66 percent of them. Like a diver on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, Republicans are going from increasing heights into a smaller and smaller pool. Which is fine, as long as you hit the target.

Which is why, if you are a Republican, you might want to let your eyes drift through the crosstabs of the most recent survey from Marist College’s excellent polling unit. Trump’s approval rating among whites without college degrees — the same voters that went for Trump by a 2-to-1 ratio in 2024 — is 46 percent. Trump is at 43 percent with these voters on his handling of the economy, including an abysmal 38 percent among the women of that group. These voters don’t even like the tariffs that are supposed to be a boon to them: 35 percent approve of Trump on the import taxes.

On how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is conducting its operations? The white working class clocks in at 40 percent approval. On foreign policy generally, it’s 43 percent. On Greenland, it’s 13 percent.

More here.