“For the first time since Donald Trump returned to the White House, his net approval rating among white working-class voters has turned negative, according to a CNN/SSRS poll conducted between 26 and 30 March 2026. The survey recorded 49 per cent of white working-class voters approving of Trump’s performance, against 50 per cent who disapproved — a net rating of minus one. It is the first time that the figure has dipped below zero in his second term.
The pace of the reversal is equally notable. As recently as mid-February, CNN/SSRS polling had Trump at 54 per cent approval and 46 per cent disapproval among this group — a net positive of eight points — a cushion that evaporated in under six weeks.
A Year-Long Slide in the Numbers
The March result did not emerge in isolation. In late February 2025, two CNN polls showed Trump at 63-37 and 61-38 among white working-class voters. By July 2025, the split had narrowed to 54-45. By January 2026, it stood at 52-47 — still positive, but shrinking — before crossing into negative territory by late March.
Fox News polling pointed in the same direction. Among white non-college men specifically, a Fox News survey in March 2025 showed Trump at 58 per cent approval against 41 per cent disapproval. By March 2026, that had shifted to 48 per cent approval and 52 per cent disapproval — a swing of 21 net points over twelve months. The trajectory is consistent across different polling organisations, which makes it harder to dismiss as a single-outlet anomaly.
CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten has been among the most direct in his assessment. Drawing on CNN exit poll data, his own polling aggregate, and Pew Research Center figures, Enten described what he called a ’23-point switch’ — from Trump winning working-class voters by 14 points over Kamala Harris in 2024, to a current net approval of negative nine. ‘He is absolutely collapsing with the group of voters that helped put him into the White House,’ Enten said.
Economy Central to the Discontent
The White House has pointed to economic progress, but polling tells a different story. Trump’s approval rating for handling the economy has fallen to a new career low of 31 per cent, with roughly two-thirds of Americans saying his policies have worsened economic conditions — up 10 points since January. Just 27 per cent approve of how he has handled inflation, down from 44 per cent one year ago.
Petrol prices, now averaging above $4 per gallon (approximately £3.02)nationally following the US strike on Iran, are compounding the pressure. More than six in ten Americans say they are still cutting back on groceries and discretionary spending, and 45 per cent say they have reduced how much they drive, up five points over the past year. Overall, 63 per cent say higher costs at the pump have caused at least some financial hardship in their household.
A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll conducted between 20 and 25 March 2026 placed Trump’s overall approval at 33 per cent, the lowest of his second term, with 17 per cent of people who voted for him in 2024 now expressing reservations about that choice.”
Jennifer Rubin puts Trump’s “Words and Phrases” and his disastrous Iran mess in context at The Contrarian. An excerpt:
No wonder Donald Trump is melting down.
The Iran war, more than any other Trump screw-up, perfectly illustrated the central truth at the heart of his presidential bluster: “The emperor has no clothes.” With the announcement of the half-baked ceasefire, the entire world could see that Trump, who fancies himself a great dealmaker (whom critics call a conman) and a winner, turns out to be an easy mark and a loser.
Trump came oh so close to grasping the extent of his humiliation in his Truth Social post: “The Iranians don’t seem to realize they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways.” (One is tempted to respond: ‘Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?’)
“Short term extortion” is a preposterous phrase to camouflage “indefinite and overwhelming leverage.” Trump’s ostensible purpose for the war (other than fantasy regime change) was to reduce Iran’s ability to project power in the regime. Now Iran can project power internationally with a chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz — while also maintaining its stockpile of enriched uranium and retaining “thousands of ballistic missiles in its arsenal that it could use by retrieving launchers from underground storage areas.”
Transporting us from tragedy to farce, Trump announced that the Iranians would not get away with blockading the Strait of Hormuz — HE would do it! As ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee Mark Warner (D-VA) said dryly on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “How blockading the strait gets it open suddenly — I don’t get that logic.” Neither does anyone else, Senator.
Trump still does not understand — or will not admit — that if Iran refused to release the Strait of Hormuz when it was getting pummeled by U.S. and Israeli air power, it is unfathomable that it will give up control during a negotiation in which Trump is desperate to avoid resumption of fighting. (Watching inflation soar and consumer confidence tank no doubt makes him more frantic than ever to “end” the war for good.) And indeed, the marathon negotiating session over the weekend came to … nothing.
Why should Iran give up its most valuable bargaining chip? Iran surely grasps that Trump does not have the stomach for a mammoth military exercise to free the strait. If the Iranians had any doubt, Trump reassured them that he did not care if a deal was reached, since the United States had “already won.” (Translation: He will walk away with the strait in Iran’s hands.)
How did Iran wind up with all the cards (in Trump lingo, “short term extortion”)? Simple: Trump was “played,” as the New York Times illustrated in its account of how Trump plunged recklessly into a disastrous war. Unlike his predecessors, Trump got snowed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As former secretary of state John Kerry explained to Jen Psaki:
Kerry: I was part of any number of conversations with Netanyahu.
Psaki: Pitching the U.S. strike Iran?
Kerry: Yes, he wanted us to strike. He came to President Obama. He made a presentation to ask to strike. President Obama refused. President Biden refused. President Bush refused.
The only thing Trump refused was to appreciate or listen to aides who warned that Netanyahu was peddling the “farcical” (CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s description) notion that bombing Iran could expedite regime change. Whether you prefer Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s evaluation (“Bullshit”) or Chairman of the Joints Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine’s formulation (“They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed”), Trump’s addled brain could not process that the Iranian regime’s survival — coupled with its predictable seizure of the Strait of Hormuz and success in refurbishing missiles to hit Israel and the Gulf States — would leave Iran moredangerous. Narcissism coupled with utter ignorance of history, military strategy, and the Iranian mindset set up Trump (eager to repeat his success in knocking out Nicolás Maduro and in avoiding a robust Iranian response during the 12-day war) as an eager mark for Netanyahu’s farcical sales pitch.
A new CBS News poll published Sunday found that Trump has suffered an unprecedented collapse in support among what has historically been his single-strongest voter base, leaving critics stunned.
Conducted between April 8 and 10, the CBS News/YouGov survey was conducted with a “nationally representative sample” of 2,387 adults, and found that among white, non-college-educated voters, Trump’s support fell from 36 points in February of 2025 to minus 4, a staggering 40-point drop.
“Trump complete collapse amongst his original base: working class voters,” wrote Robert Barnes, a trial and constitutional lawyer, in a social media post on X Sunday to his nearly 370,000 followers.
“This is the making of a party [realignment],” wrote Neera Tanden, a Democratic strategist and former Biden administration official, also in a social media post on X to her more than 330,000 followers.
More broadly, Americans overall disapproved of Trump’s job performance by a margin of 61%, with 39% approving. Additionally, 63% described the condition of the economy as “bad,” and 64% disapproved of Trump’s handling of the U.S. war against Iran, with 62% believing that Trump did not “have a clear plan” for the conflict.
And if that wasn’t bad enough news for Republicans, The Tampa Free Press reports, via msn.com, that “Trump’s approval plunges in GOP states,” and notes, “Quarterly tracking shows Trump now holds net-positive approval in only 17 states, down from 22 at the end of 2025. Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Ohio—all states he carried in 2024—flipped to net-negative ratings. Analysts link the drop to economic anxiety tied to military actions in Iran and resulting energy market volatility, with his national approval at 45% and disapproval at 52%.”
“…A poll of 2024 Trump voters found 20% will not support the GOP in the midterms, and nearly 60% of Biden-to-Trump switchers are reconsidering Republican votes. The erosion is compounded by policy reversals on foreign wars and domestic spending cuts, alienating working-class supporters.”
You won’t have to google very long to find numerous similar reports from other recent polls. Could it be that former Republicans Geoff Duncan running for Georgia governor as a Democrat and George Conway running as a Democrat for a House of Reps seat (NY-12) are harbingers of an emerging trend?
Working-class voters already back Medicare for All. Framed like Social Security — as a benefit earned from work, not a handout — it can reach two-thirds support.
Medicare for All (M4A) is back. Juliana Stratton, who just won the Illinois Democratic Senate primary, pledged in her victory speech to “fight for Medicare for all.” Graham Platner, the populist veteran and oyster farmer running to unseat Susan Collins in Maine, has made universal health care a centerpiece of his platform. Abdul El-Sayed, running for Michigan’s open Senate seat, is one of the policy’s most prominent champions — he literally wrote the book on it. In California, single-payer has become a near-universal fixture of Democratic gubernatorial platforms, with Katie Porter, Tony Thurmond, Betty Yee, and Xavier Becerra all declaring support. And Rep. Pramila Jayapal has been presenting polling directly to House Democratic colleagues arguing the electoral merits of Medicare for All, even in battleground districts the party must win to flip the House.
But whether M4A is a winning issue or an electoral liability for progressives depends — particularly for those running in red and purple districts — on how the issue is framed to voters.
Polling data makes the framing problem clear. Depending on how you ask, Americans’ support for universal health coverage lands at anywhere between nearly 70 percent to just over 30 percent. When the question leads with outcomes, coverage, access, and affordability, large majorities say yes. Indeed, when you poll Americans on whether the federal government should make sure everyone has health care coverage, 66 percent say yes.
But how you talk about the mechanism government should use to guarantee universal coverage has an enormous impact on how favorably the idea is received.
Simply asking Americans if they favor or oppose Medicare for All tends to land between 55 and 60 percent support. Tell people that the plan would require voters or employers to pay more in taxes, and support drops into the 40s. Further highlight that a M4A model could entail a single national health care system that would not allow people to buy private insurance, and support declines to the 30s.
That swing is not a verdict on the policy idea itself. It is a warning about framing: When M4A sounds like a government handout or restraint on individuals’ freedom to choose, working-class voters tune out. When it sounds like something they’ve paid for, something they’ve earned and deserve, they don’t.
Working-class voters are not opposed to bold health policy. What our research at the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) finds consistently, however, is that they are skeptical of programs that feel like government handouts rather than something they’ve earned.
Consider that Social Security regularly sits at 80 percent support or higher, despite the fact that it is a massive government redistribution program to help the elderly and those who can’t work. Workers don’t experience it that way. To them, it’s a program they’ve paid into, a benefit they’ve earned — it’s a return on decades of contributions. The moment a health care policy sounds like something the government is giving to people, rather than something people have already paid for and deserve, you’ve lost the working-class voters you need most.
Europe’s social democratic parties are collapsing — and their leaders don’t seem to know how to reverse the trend.
For much of the 20th century, center-left parties rooted in trade unions and industrial labor were among Europe’s dominant political forces.
But today, many of them are politically unrecognizable — or in dire straits.
The latest example is Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, which last week suffered a dramatic slump in national elections. Although the party scored the most votes overall, its results were the worst since 1903.
Working-class electors frustrated by the party’s inaction on cost-of-living issues gravitated to the far-right Danish People’s Party, while left-wing voters frustrated with Frederiksen’s willingness to partner with the center right and take a hard line on migration defected to the Green Left.
Giacomo Filibeck, secretary-general of the Party of European Socialists — the pan-European entity comprising all of Europe’s national social democratic parties — told POLITICO the poor results were attributable to “anger” over the governing center-left party’s handling of the affordability crisis. The issue had become more pressing “due to the war in Iran, which raised energy prices and more,” he said.
Vagn Juhl-Larsen, a local-level Social Democrat party chairman in Denmark, put it more bluntly. “Voters have no respect for a party that does not pursue its own politics,” he said, slamming the Social Democrats’ leadership for giving up on “red” political values.
The situation in Denmark is hardly unique.
After 35 years of uninterrupted rule, Germany’s Social Democratic Party lost its hold on the industrial state of Rhineland-Palatinate in last week’s regional elections, where debate over the stagnant economy dominated the campaign. That defeat followed a March 8 thumping in Baden-Württemberg, where the SPD got just 5.5 percent of the votes cast.
In France, meanwhile, the center left claimed key cities such as Paris and Marseille in this month’s municipal elections, but remains missing in action at the national level. Over the past decade the once-dominant Socialist Party has declined so steeply that it was forced to sell its historic headquarters to pay off debts, and today controls just 65 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly.
“The center left does not seem to know where it fits in Europe right now,” said political analyst Rodrigo Vaz, a former deputy attaché at Portugal’s permanent representation to the EU. “And that identity crisis has led it to defend policy programs that are indistinguishable from those of the center right — a strategy that is neither clear, nor appealing for voters.”
The centrist dilemma
Europe’s center left was built on industrial workers, union members and working-class communities — a base that once powered leaders like Willy Brandt and François Mitterrand.
But that world no longer exists. Since the mid-1980s, deindustrialization has shrunk the traditional blue-collar workforce, while union membership has declined across the continent. Europe’s social democratic parties have yet to find a coherent response to the changes in their traditional voting bloc.
“The center left has yet to come up with a new social contract, one that addresses the concerns of modern-day society,” Vaz said. “There’s no clear narrative on where social democrats stand on automation, artificial intelligence or the future of work.”
The Working Class Project, which has extensively surveyed non-college workers’ attitudes, is skeptical that the left’s pitchfork populism will make it more receptive to Democrats. “They do believe that our political system is broken — and that it has been influenced by the rich and powerful to make things easier on those at the top while failing to deliver for those at the bottom.”
they really want us to crack down on corruption and those who abuse the system to benefit themselves.”
As a white man from Texas put it in one of the project’s focus groups, “Politicians use billionaires as scapegoats for their own failures of not fixing the tax code, not fixing issues with this country.”
Nonetheless, progressives insist that Democrats can only reach non-college voters by amping up the volume on class warfare.
THERE ARE SIGNS that the deate about health care in America is about to get out of the rut it’s been in for about fifteen years—and that Democrats are preparing for the moment when it does.
Ever since 2010, the most high-profile fights in Washington have been about the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid. Mainly that’s because Donald Trump and the Republicans keep attacking those programs—as they did last year when they enacted the largest-ever cuts to Medicaid, then refused to extend lapsing “Obamacare” subsidies that had helped millions to get coverage, and reduced premiums for many millions more.
Democrats are determined to reverse those two steps, somehow, and you can expect them to make that a rallying cry in their campaigns for November’s midterm elections. But at least some Democrats don’t want to stop there. On March 19, a dozen of the party’s senators released an open letter announcing their intention to develop policies that would address a broader topic: The underlying increase in health care costs that is affecting everybody, not just people who are uninsured, on Medicaid, or buying coverage at HealthCare.gov.
The roughly 170 million Americans who get coverage through their employers are now paying (directly and indirectly) an estimated $27,000 a year on average for a family policy. “The American people need relief from rising premiums and deductibles that are forcing families into financial ruin,” the Senate Democrats wrote in their letter. “They also want an insurance system that doesn’t require them to jump through hoops and hack through red tape every time they need care.”
That may sound like a bunch of frothy boilerplate, given that the letter contained no specifics. But it’s not just these Democratic lawmakers who say it’s time to have a broader conversation, one that goes beyond undoing what Trump and the Republicans have just done. You hear the same thing from prominent analysts and advocates like Anthony Wright, president of the pro-coverage, pro-consumer organization FamiliesUSA.
“I do think people recognize that, as we wage the fight to defend coverage and consumer protection and specific communities under attack, that we don’t fall into a trap of defending the status quo that people thought rightly was broken,” Wright told me in an interview. “We need to show that we have a plan, not just to repeal bad stuff, or even to rebuild—but to reimagine what the health system should look like.”
That kind of reimagining can’t happen right away. Trump and the Republicans seem incapable of putting forward serious reform proposals, unless they involve hacking away at insurance coverage for people who need it. And the first chance Democrats might have to govern with a trifecta is nearly three years away. But it’s with an eye to that possibility that Democrats and their allies are starting to plan now—to make sure they are “prepared to take action on these issues the next time Democrats have an opportunity,” as the Senate Democrats put it in their letter.
And there’s an unmistakable parallel here, to a politically similar time when Democrats and their allies started laying the groundwork for future legislation. “This moment feels a bit like twenty years ago,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, told me in an interview, “when groups of policy experts, advocates, and politicians started to talk about health care ideas that ultimately coalesced into the passage of the Affordable Care Act.”
But the challenge is different this time, and in some ways more difficult. Reducing health care costs inevitably involves reducing the flow of money into somebody’s pockets, which just as inevitably angers powerful constituencies and industry groups. Democrats aren’t even close to having a consensus on what to do. And 2029 is a lot closer than it might seem.
Why don’t more Democrats explicitly moderate their stands on transgender rights, immigration and other issues? Those who maintain far-out positions are well to the left of the electorate and its emblematic median voter. The trans issue clearly weakened Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, leaving her open to devastating pro-Trump ads.
In the case of one of the most disputed rights claimed by some parts of the transgender activist community — transgender women’s participation on women’s sports teams — Democrats have clear liberal grounds to challenge that claim, by asserting that they are protecting a woman’s right from unfair competition.
But this phenomenon — drifting far from the median voter — is hardly limited to the left. There are many factors behind the reluctance of both Democrats and Republicans to shift to the center.
For one thing, donors, especially the growing legions of small donors, prefer more extreme candidates. Adding additional pressure, what have come to be known as “the groups” — advocacy organizations on the left and the right — demand fealty to policies that are sometimes politically costly; they threaten to support primary challengers to run against those who defy their authority. On a psychological level, Democrats and liberals are morally committed to protecting marginalized groups from harm and defending racial and sexual minorities.
Before exploring these pressures, let’s go to the dominant political fact of life working against moderation, which is that there are decisive majorities in both the House and the Senate that have no interest in abandoning more extreme stands. Many Democrats and Republicans won their seats with the promise to fight the partisan opposition until hell freezes over.
Edsall has much more to say about Democrats bumbling into extremist stereotypes, and he quotes TDS frequent contributor Ruy Teixeira extensively, and adds:
The one issue that has rapidly gained salience in the Democratic debate over moderation is transgender rights.
There is overwhelming evidence from polling that strong majorities of the electorate oppose discrimination against trans men and women in employment and education, reinforced by a firm conviction that trans people should be treated as equal members of society.
At the same time, majorities of voters oppose allowing trans women to join women’s sports teams, to allow trans men and women to use bathrooms based on their gender identity and to allow the assignment of criminally convicted trans women to women’s prisons.
Victor Kumar, a professor of philosophy at Boston University, argued in a July 2025 essay published on his Substack Open Questions that the backlash against the trans movement was
exacerbated by tactical errors. It was a mistake to insist that any concern about youth medical transition is transphobic. To habitually take the bait on marginal issues like trans-inclusive sport, particularly at elite levels. To deny that cis women can reasonably desire sex-segregated spaces in locker rooms, shelters and prisons. To adopt a maximalist politics of pronouns that shames people for honest mistakes.
Going into the midterm elections and the presidential contest two years from now, there is what can best be called a widespread churning in Democratic and liberal circles over transgender issues.
The Searchlight Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank founded last year, published “The Path Forward for Transgender Rights” on Thursday, a call for retrenchment on trans issues by Mara Keisling, the now retired founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality and a senior fellow at Searchlight. Keisling wrote:
There is broad support for protecting trans people from discrimination in housing, access to credit, employment and for ensuring that adults have access to the health care they need.
That said, Americans hold conservative attitudes where certain policies related to gender identity and transgender rights are concerned. Voters are especially focused on kids — from the bathrooms they use to the sports teams they may join, and access to hormone treatments and other forms of health care.
What, then, should the transgender movement do? Keisling:
We need to reset our approach to advocacy, public education and policy development regarding the rights and acceptance of transgender Americans. This means shifting our primary focus to education while continuing to try to enshrine core civil rights protections into statute.
On issues such as sports participation and kids’ access to health care, we should accept that we have more work to do to win hearts and minds, and focus on pursuing the smartest possible approach to bring more Americans over to our side.
The intense desire among Democratic voters to win puts some wind behind Keisling’s views, especially in the 61 competitive (or at least somewhat competitive) House districts, 28 of which are currently held by Democrats. Those races will determine which party controls the House in 2027. But given the power of the forces against moderation in the 374 safe districts, her agenda will be easier to admire than enact.
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:
Last July, I wrote a piece asking, in the wake of Democrats’ catastrophic defeat in the 2024 election and the obvious need for serious party-wide change, “Is Our Democrats Learning?” At the time, I saw little evidence that Democratic learning was, in fact, taking place.
Posing this question again in early spring 2026, it is my sad duty to inform you that our Democrats continue not to learn. If anything, they are increasingly adamant that such learning is not even necessary. Their mantra now might be, paraphrasing that old joke about the British: “No learning please, we’re Democrats.”
The proximate reasons for this complacency are not hard to discern. Trump and many of his administration’s actions are very unpopular and voters’ views on the economy, their most important issue, are dire. Consistent with these sentiments, Democrats did well in the 2025 elections, continue to clean up in special elections, and appear poised to have a very good election this coming November.
These favorable political winds have made it a great deal easier for Democrats to ignore the need for change. Surely the American people have now woken up, are rejecting Trump and Trumpism once and for all and will never be seduced by right populism again.
But we’ve heard all that before haven’t we? In 2018. In 2022. And now in 2026 with gusto. How quickly they forget.
There was a brief shining moment right after the 2024 election when it did seem like the scale of the debacle would force a real reckoning within the party. But that trend quickly dissipated as #Resistance fever gripped the party, the usual suspects mounted stiff resistance to any revision of party positions and momentum shifted to the energized progressive left within the party.
Currently, the desire for change seems to be hovering around zero, as more and more Democrats have convinced themselves that their problems have essentially been solved. Here at The Liberal Patriot, we know all about that. Funding for our modest enterprise, always precarious, has now completely dried up. Our view that the party has neither solved its problems nor is even very close to doing so has tanked our appeal among partisan Democratic donors, even reform-oriented ones, who now tend to regard us with suspicion. A little heterodoxy is fine but there’s a limit! Hence: no money.
So we are forced to close our doors. The Liberal Patriot, alas, will be no more. “[P]assed on…no more…ceased to be! [E]xpired and gone to meet [its] maker!…Bereft of life…rests in peace!…kicked the bucket…shuffled off [its] mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!” You get the idea: we are now an ex-site.
To wrap things up, let’s review some of those Democratic problems that have not been solved. This is but a selection from a broader rogues’ gallery of problems that continue to bedevil the party.
The culture problem. This is a big one. The yawning gap between the cultural views of the Democratic Party, dominated by liberal professionals, and those of the median working class voter is screamingly obvious. One approach to this problem would be to actually change some of the Democratic Party positions that are so alienating to those voters.
Nah! That would be way too simple plus would create fights within our coalition plus…we’re on the right side of history aren’t we so why the hell would we change our correct, righteous positions? Democrats have instead chosen a different path, aptly summed up by Lauren Egan:
It didn’t take long after the 2024 election—in which their party lost the White House and the Senate—for Democratic leaders to identify the problem: The party had drifted too far to the left on social and cultural issues.
It also didn’t take them long to come up with a solution: simply to shut up about it…
[I]n my conversations over the past few weeks, strategists and campaign staffers I’ve talked to across the country have argued that in order to win back working-class voters, Democrats just need to jiu-jitsu uncomfortable cultural questions about race or gender into criticism of the billionaire class…
The shut-up-and-pivot approach is not without merit. As its proponents see it, people vote largely on economics…But the dismissiveness of cultural issues as not ‘real issues’ that actually matter to voters—and therefore not worthy of formulating an opinion on—has left some party operatives on edge. They worry that by not engaging, Democrats will continue to be perceived as condescending and untrustworthy. They fundamentally don’t believe that the party can win back working-class voters and prevent a lasting GOP majority by pretending these issues simply don’t exist.
Those unnamed party operatives are correct. The shut-up-and-pivot approach won’t solve the underlying problem, even if in the short-term it may be adequate for leveraging thermostatic reaction against the Trump administration. It is trading short-term gain for long-term pain.
The working-class and rural voter problem. This brings us to the Democrats’ working-class and rural voter problem, also screamingly obvious from long-term trends and the results of the 2024 election. Of course, Democrats take comfort from the copious evidence that many of these voters are now having second thoughts about their support for Trump and the GOP. This can be seen both in low Trump approval and future Republican voting intentions relative to those voters’ 2024 levels of Trump support.
But there is little evidence that declining enthusiasm for Trump has been matched by increased enthusiasm for the Democrats among these voters. Indeed, a careful recent study by Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams for the invaluable Center for Working-Class Politics finds that “waverers”—those Trump supporters who now say they are not planning to vote Republican in 2028—are overwhelmingly not supporting the Democrats but rather supporting neither party or generally disengaging from politics.
In short, Democrats have not yet made the sale among these voters even if they do bank some improvements in working-class support in 2026 as seems likely. They are still viewed with suspicion among these voters and not regarded as “their” party. Current Democratic efforts to reverse that perception are limited by the party’s preference for candidates who simulate a populist working-class affect while still having the “correct” positions on cultural issues—in other words, a liberal professional’s idea of what a rural or working-class person should be like.
The candidacy of Graham Platner for the Democratic Senatorial nomination in Maine is a good illustration of this dynamic. As James Billot notes:
Platner likes to present himself as a gruff, no-nonsense prole who, like Cincinnatus abandoning his plow, felt compelled to enter the race by the sheer weight of national misery. After bouncing between several schools in Maine, he enlisted in the Marines in 2004 and served in Iraq and Afghanistan. A brief spell at George Washington University, a stint tending bar, and another War on Terror tour (this time with the private military company formerly known as Blackwater) followed before he returned home to become an oyster farmer. It was only after Democratic consultants “discovered” him—in a video for a local group opposing a Norwegian company’s plan to build a large salmon farm off his hometown of Sullivan—that he entered the political arena.
What tends to be omitted from this narrative is that his upbringing wasn’t quite so hardscrabble. Platner’s grandfather was a renowned architect, known for his work in modernist interior design; his father, Bronson, is an Ivy-educated lawyer and Democratic donor; his mother, Leslie Harlow, is a local activist and entrepreneur runs a restaurant in Bar Harbor, which happens to be the main client for Platner’s oysters. Thanks to the family largess, he enrolled at the elite Hotchkiss School before moving to another private school six months later—a fact he tries to play down.
OK, from an affluent professional family, attended Hotchkiss, sells his oysters to his mom’s upscale restaurant—now that’s a proletarian. Albeit an exemplary proletarian who wants to abolish ICE, supports biological boys in girls sports and generally sees debate about Democrats’ unpopular cultural positions as a “billionaire-funded distraction.” That’s the kind of working-class dude that gives liberal Democrats the warm fuzzies; actually-existing rural and working voters less so as polling data from the primary race indicates.
No wonder that, as Billot summarizes:
For all the campaign’s talk of winning over Trump voters and bringing back the popular classes, his coalition is composed mostly of #Resistance liberals, college students, and crunchy retirees. That may be enough to win the primary, and perhaps even the general. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for a durable re-realignment, or evidence that Democrats have rediscovered a winning formula for 2028.
Even in a rural town that had supported Trump, Billot could not find any Republicans at a rally for Platner.
Everyone I spoke to was a lifelong Democrat, their first rally likely predating Jimmy Carter. They were less worried about finding common cause with the other side than about Trump putting them in concentration camps. Others even asked Platner, hopefully, if the army might consider mutinying.
We’ll likely see more of these faux working-class candidates who strike a populist tone but are otherwise culturally compatible with the priorities of professional class Democrats, whose formidable infrastructure and fundraising clout can make or break them. That will ensure that Democrats remain mostly uncompetitive in the red rural and working-class states Democrats need to carry to have a prayer of taking and keeping the Senate and, increasingly, to prevail in the Electoral College where voting strength is flowing away from high education blue states.
The trans “rights” problem. Every once in a while, some Democratic politician ventures a mild dissent from the trans activist agenda. Without exception, they are met with a brick wall of intense intra-party opposition which typically results in a hasty retreat by said politician. It is truly a litmus test issue.
Donald Trump reversed course and will accept an offer from Democrats to reopen parts of the Department of Homeland Security, excluding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and end the nation’s growing airport delays, a White House official said on Tuesday.
Homeland Security, which includes both ICE and the Transportation Safety Administration, has been in shutdown mode since February as Democrats have refused to vote to authorize ICE funding unless a set of reforms to immigration enforcement operations and tactics were made nationwide. Among those reforms is a requirement that ICE obtain judicial warrants before conducting searches and an end to roving enforcement operations.
That has left the nation’s airports in turmoil as TSA agents have gone unpaid and are calling out sick and quitting in droves, resulting in hours-long security lines at the nation’s busiest airports. Trump, meanwhile, has deployed ICE agents to the airports as a supplement, even though those agents are not trained in security screening. As a result, congressional discomfort over the increasingly dire situation in the nation’s airports is weakening resistance on both sides of the aisle, as senators seek an off-ramp to the deadlock.
Democrats on Monday offered the White House and Senate Republicans a deal that would reopen every part of DHS, excluding ICE, and allow Republicans to attempt to reauthorize funding for ICE through a budget reconciliation package that would only require 50 votes to clear the Senate. A White House official told NewsNation on Tuesday that the president had decided to accept the offer.
The flip-flop from Trump — the kind of reversal on a hard-line stance that has come to be known as TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) among his critics — came a day after he insisted that Republicans not “make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats” and urged them to work through the Easter break if necessary to force through his voter ID initiative.
Democrats reportedly offered at least ten different compromises to end the mess at the nation’s airports. All of the people who have waited four hours in Airport lines and longer, while watching ICE agents check their phones and hang around the food courts, are not going to get their time back. The episode provided an instructive illustration of how much Trump values the time of Americans who had to travel this week. The only question is will they remember the lesson in November.
Don’t look now, but it’s already time for the DNC and the states to figure out the 2028 Democratic presidential primary calendar, so I wrote an overview at New York:
The first 2028 presidential primaries are just two years away. And for the first time since 2016, both parties are expected to have serious competition for their nominations. While Vice-President J.D. Vance is likely to enter the cycle as a formidable front-runner for the GOP nod, recent history suggests there will be lots of other candidates. After all, Donald Trump drew 12 challengers in 2024. On the Democratic side, there is no one like Vance (or Hillary Clinton going into 2016 or Joe Biden going into 2020) who is likely to become the solid front-runner from the get-go, though Californians Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris lead all of the way too early polls.
But 2028 horse-race speculation really starts with the track itself, as the calendar for state contests still isn’t set. What some observers call the presidential-nominating “system” isn’t something the national parties control. In the case of primaries utilizing state-financed election machinery, state laws govern the timing and procedures. Caucuses (still abundant on the Republican side and rarer among Democrats) are usually run by state parties. National parties can vitally influence the calendar via carrots (bonus delegates at the national convention) or sticks (loss of delegates) and try to create “windows” for different kinds of states to hold their nominating contests to space things out and make the initial contests competitive and representative. But it’s sometimes hit or miss.
Until quite recently, the two parties tended to move in sync on such calendar and map decisions. But Democrats have exhibited a lot more interest in ensuring that the “early states” — the ones that kick off the nominating process and often determine the outcome — are representative of the party and the country as a whole and give candidates something like a level playing field. Prior to 2008, both parties agreed to do away with the traditional duopoly, in which the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary came first, by allowing early contests representing other regions (Nevada and South Carolina). And both parties tolerated the consolidation of other states seeking influence into a somewhat later “Super Tuesday” cluster of contests. But in 2024 Democrats tossed Iowa out of the early-state window altogether and placed South Carolina first (widely interpreted as Joe Biden’s thank-you to the Palmetto State for its crucial role in saving his campaign in 2020 after poor performances in other early states), with Nevada and New Hampshire voting the same day soon thereafter. Republicans stuck with the same old calendar with Trump more or less nailing down the nomination after Iowa and New Hampshire.
For 2028, Republicans will likely stand pat while Democrats reshuffle the deck (the 2024 calendar was explicitly a one-time-only proposition). The Democratic National Committee has set a January 16 deadline for states to apply for early-state status. And as the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher explains, there is uncertainty about the identity of the early states and particularly their order:
“The debate has only just begun. But early whisper campaigns about the weaknesses of the various options already offer a revealing window into some of the party’s racial, regional and rural-urban divides, according to interviews with more than a dozen state party chairs, D.N.C. members and others involved in the selection process.
“Nevada is too far to travel. New Hampshire is too entitled and too white. South Carolina is too Republican. Iowa is also too white — and its time has passed.
“Why not a top battleground? Michigan entered the early window in 2024, but critics see it as too likely to bring attention to the party’s fractures over Israel. North Carolina or Georgia would need Republicans to change their election laws.”
Nevada and New Hampshire have been most aggressive about demanding a spot at the beginning of the calendar, and both will likely remain in the early-state window, representing their regions. The DNC could push South Carolina aside in favor of regional rivals Georgia or North Carolina. Michigan is close to a lock for an early midwestern primary, but its size, cost, and sizable Muslim population (which will press candidates on their attitude towards Israel’s recent conduct) would probably make it a dubious choice to go first. Recently excluded Iowa (already suspect because it’s very white and trending Republican, then bounced decisively after its caucus reporting system melted down in 2020) could stage a “beauty contest” that will attract candidates and media even if it doesn’t award delegates.
Even as the early-state drama unwinds, the rest of the Democratic nomination calendar is morphing as well. As many as 14 states are currently scheduled to hold contests on Super Tuesday, March 7. And a 15th state, New York, may soon join the parade. Before it’s all nailed down (likely just after the 2026 midterms), decisions on the calendar will begin to influence candidate strategies and vice versa. Some western candidates (e.g., Gavin Newsom or Ruben Gallego) could be heavily invested in Nevada, while Black proto-candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Wes Moore might pursue a southern primary. Progressive favorites like AOC or Ro Khanna may have their own favorite launching pads, while self-identified centrists like Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttigieg might have others. Having a home state in the early going is at best a mixed blessing: Losing your home-state primary is a candidate-killer, and winning it doesn’t prove a lot. And it’s also worth remembering that self-financed candidates like J.B. Pritzker may need less of a runway to stage a nationally viable campaign.
So sketching out the tracks for all those 2028 horses, particularly among Democrats, is a bit of a game of three-dimensional chess. We won’t know how well they’ll run here or there until it’s all over.
