At Jacobin, Zoe Sherman’s “Solving the “Crisis of Men” Requires Tackling Inequality” makes a compelling case that policies addressing class inequality will do more to help men have better living standards than any gender-focused reforms. Here’s an excerpt of the article, with a link for those who want to read more of it:

Though you may have heard reports that men are in decline, rest assured that American men are not losing a battle of the sexes. But a majority of men are losing a class war, and losing a class war hurts. A majority of women are losing the class war too, but there are systematic gender differences in what it looks and feels like to lose. Some harms fall more heavily on women than on men, while other harms lean the other way.

Dramatically — and devastatingly — men too often lose their lives when they lose economic stability and the attendant social status. So far in the twenty-first century, fatality rates from suicide and opioid overdoses have been trending upward for the US population of all genders (aside from a very recent hopeful reversal of the opioid overdose death rate — a reversal that lamentably has not reached black Americans, whose fatality rates continue to climb). Men, however, make up roughly 80 percent of suicide deaths (though women make more suicide attempts) and 70 percent of opioid overdose deaths. We need no more convincing indicator of real pain.

Some on the Right look at the harms that men are experiencing in the United States and blame feminism or women in general. Meanwhile, some on the center and the Left want us to attend to the ways men are suffering and, to their credit, want to avoid a battle-of-the-sexes interpretation in which one side’s win must be the other side’s loss. But when analyses don’t pay enough attention to economic class, their explanations of men’s struggles also fall short.

By some measures, men in the United States today are doing worse than their fathers and grandfathers and, along a few dimensions, men are doing worse than women of the same age. The data on men over time show troubling trend lines such as falling prime-age labor-force participation rates, stagnant wages (despite growing national income), and, for some subsets of the male population, stagnant or falling life expectancy (despite gains for others). In their K–12 schooling, girls on average do better than boys do; in higher education, women participate at greater rates and with greater success than men; women have more friends; and women live longer.

It certainly matters that life is in some ways getting harder for men than it used to be, and it is certainly worth noting that there are some components of putting together a good life that men are struggling more than their female peers to achieve. But when diagnosing the ills and prescribing the remedies, we lay a trap for ourselves if we put too much emphasis on gender and leave class as a secondary consideration. In fact, we prime ourselves to fall into either of two different traps: the trap of a reactionary battle-of-the-sexes framing on the one hand, or the trap of a counterproductive “cry me a river” eye roll on the other.

Read 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: 

The Democratic Party is in sad shape, by its own self-report and in the view of most observers. At the same time, the party is seemingly more progressive and more dominated by progressives than it has been for a good long time. Are the two things related?

Yes, they are—but not in the way most people think. The problem isn’t that progressives have made the party too progressive; the problem is rather that today’s progressives aren’t really progressive in the true sense of the term and as a result have led the party into a number of political cul-de-sacs that have nothing to do with progress and dramatically undermine its appeal. Consider:

American progressives used to embrace a number of universal values and aspirations that defined their political project. They sought to make life better for ordinary people by emphasizing their universal interests across racial, ethnic and cultural divisions, ensuring universal fair treatment in daily life and throughout society, promoting universal standards of merit, achievement and truth and providing universal access to the bounty from scientific achievement and economic growth. The core concept was that all Americans could prosper when treated in this fashion and that existing social and governmental arrangements should be pushed in that direction.

Making progress along these lines was what being a progressive was all about. Today’s progressives are different. They have rejected the universal approach for particularistic defense of professional class cultural priorities and policy preferences. In that sense they have lost the right to call themselves “progressives.” Instead they now stand in the way of progress as progressives used to define it—and progress as most ordinary voters would recognize it.

Here are some of the ways that “progressives” have bid farewell to progress.

Colorblindness, anti-discrimination and equal opportunity. The quintessential moral commitment of midcentury progressives was to make American society truly colorblind. It was unfair and egregious that racial discrimination could truncate the life chances of black people and visit misery upon them. Therefore, progressives advocated and marched for ending discrimination and unequal opportunity. They won the argument. Not only was legislation passed to make such discrimination illegal but anti-discrimination and equal opportunity became as close to consensual beliefs as you can get in America.

Americans today believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a 2022 University of Southern California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” That view elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public.

Similarly, a 2023 Public Agenda Hidden Common Ground survey found 91 percent agreement with the statement: “All people deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, no matter their race or ethnicity.” This is what Americans deeply believe in: equal opportunity not, it should be noted, equal outcomes.

And it is what progressives used to believe in—indeed, mounted the barricades for. But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21^st century. Instead of treating the colorblind society as a noble ideal that progressives should strive for even if its perfect attainment is impossible, progressives lost faith in the ideal because racial disparities did not immediately disappear. Instead, they began to favor color-conscious remedies like affirmative action that went far beyond anti-discrimination and equal opportunity and to oppose colorblind policies if they did not produce desired outcomes by race. As eventually formulated by Ibram X. Kendi:

There is no such thing as a non-racist or race-neutral policy…The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination…The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

This inversion of traditional progressive principles is still with us today as progressives tenaciously defend affirmative action and DEI programs despite their lack of connection to consensual values of anti-discrimination and equal opportunity. Progressives view the very use of the term “colorblind” as right-coded, evidence of supporting racism rather than opposing it. If they no longer support progress toward a colorblind society, in what sense do they still qualify as “progressive”?

Merit and achievement. Progressives’ traditional theory of the case ran like this: discrimination should be opposed and dismantled and resources provided to the disadvantaged so that everyone can fairly compete and achieve. Rewards—job opportunities, promotions, commissions, appointments, publications, school slots, and much else—would then be allocated on the basis of which person or persons deserved these rewards on the basis of merit. Those who were meritorious would be rewarded; those who weren’t would not be. No more would people be rewarded because of whothey were instead of what they accomplished.

But 21^st century progressives have lost interest in the last part of their case, which undermines their whole theory. Merit and objective measures of achievement are now viewed with suspicion as the outcomes of a hopelessly corrupt system, so rewards should instead be allocated on the basis of various criteria allegedly related to “social justice.” Instead of dismantling discrimination and providing assistance so that more people have the opportunity to acquire merit, the real solution is to worry less about merit and more about equal outcomes—“equity” in parlance of our times.

Arguments can be made in defense of the anti-merit approach. You can’t swing a dead cat on most university campuses without hitting some progressive academic who will give you 10,000 words on why this is actually a great idea. In my view, these arguments are universally specious but what shouldn’t be debatable is that ordinary people—ordinary voters—don’t buy the idea. They believe in the idea of merit and they believe in their ability to acquire merit and attendant rewards if given the opportunity to do so. To believe otherwise is insulting to them and contravenes their common sense about the central role of merit in fair decisions. As George Orwell put it, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

If progressives no longer believe in helping individuals progress, how is that progressive? The original progressive idea was to remove barriers so that people could accomplish what they are capable of, not to disregard the importance of accomplishment. A progressive society—a fair society—is one where people can count on the former not one where they have to worry about the latter. Today’s anti-merit “progressives” are no longer progressive because, in essence, they no longer believe in fairness.

Free speech, cultural pluralism and the open society. Progressives used to be steadfast defenders of free speech. Free speech was viewed as integral to advancing the progressive agenda against those who opposed that agenda and sought to suppress organizing efforts for social change. But the tables have turned and now in institutions where progressives dominate, such as the universities, the arts, NGO-world and the Democratic Party, the commitment to free speech has become very shaky indeed. Conflation of speech with “violence” and “harm” and making people feel “unsafe” has put a damper on the free expression of ideas.

Today’s progressives may be happy with this situation but voters are not. They have a different model of discourse in mind, such as that suggested by this poll question tested from April to June in 2023 among over 18,000 registered voters by RMG Research:

Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith. (76 percent agree/14 percent disagree)

Progressives used to err on the side of free speech, not its suppression. They thought that the universal open exchange of ideas would benefit their cause and was a fundamental progressive commitment. But as with a colorblind society, a funny thing happened on the way to the 21^st century. Instead of judging ideas by their truth content, it became increasingly common for progressives to judge ideas by who was putting them forward. If the idea came from people in an oppressed/powerless/marginalized group, the idea should be supported; if not, it should be opposed.

From there it was a short step for progressives to consider ideas they disagreed with hateful or “misinformation/disinformation,” inflected with racism or sexism or xenophobia or transphobia or whatever and therefore not part of legitimate discourse. And therefore it was “progressive” to suppress the expression of those ideas wherever possible.

This inversion of a traditional progressive commitment is shocking—especially since it undercuts cultural pluralism, which progressives hitherto supported. They believed their ideas would freely prevail over the long haul because they were better, even if cultural traditionalists in the working class temporarily resisted. They could, and would be, eventually convinced. Today’s progressives skip that step and now consider only their own culture acceptable.

So can today’s progressives be considered “progressive” when they don’t really support free speech, cultural pluralism and the open society? They cannot and voters, especially working class voters, are unlikely to consider them so.

Working-class prosperity. Speaking of the working class, surely no goal was more important to progressives back in the day than promoting prosperity for the working class and disadvantaged. Progressives believed in the future and the possibilities for dramatic improvement in human welfare, to be fully realized among the working class. That was progressives’ central goal.

No longer. Progressives now prize goals like fighting climate change, procedural justice, and protecting identity groups above prosperity. Take climate change. Progressives’ theory of the case on the economy leans heavily on the idea that a rapid move to a clean energy economy to fight climate change will—eventually—result in strong growth, a burgeoning supply of good jobs and a rising standard of living for all.

This theory reflects what is now an overriding priority among today’s progressives: action on climate change. But the working class is not especially interested in this issue and has predictably material priorities: more stuff, more growth, moreopportunity, cheaper prices, more comfortable lives. They do not believe that progressives’ green economy prescription will provide that.

The question of growth is worth dwelling on. This is another funny thing that happened on the way to the 21^st century. It used to well-understood that growth, particularly productivity growth, is what drives rising living standards over time. Midcentury progressives sought to harness the benefits of growth for the working class, not to interfere with the economic engine of progress. But over time progressives developed a general suspicion that the fruits of growth are poisoned. Growth encourages the accumulation of unneeded material possessions and a consumerist lifestyle rather than a truly good life, their thinking went. And, worse, it is literally poisoning the Earth, driving the climate crisis that is hurtling the human race toward doom.

Some progressives have gone so far as to argue that our capitalist economy based on growth must be replaced with a “degrowth” economy focused on simple, healthy communities; efficient resource use; and the elimination of wasteful consumerism. If that means no or negative economic growth, so be it. Most progressives don’t quite go this far but the jaundiced view of growth—and the technological change that enables it—remains.

Indeed, today’s progressives are basically techno-pessimists. Progressives are now distinctly unenthusiastic about the potential of technology, tending to see it as a dark force to be contained rather than a force for good to be celebrated. This is very odd indeed. Almost everything people like about the modern world, including relatively high living standards, is traceable to technological advances and the knowledge embedded in those advances. From smart phones, flat-screen TVs, and the internet, to air and auto travel, to central heating and air conditioning, to the medical devices and drugs that cure disease and extend life, to electric lights and the mundane flush toilet, technology has dramatically transformed people’s lives for the better. It is difficult to argue that the average person today is not far, far better off than her counterpart in the past. As the Northwestern University economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, “the good old days were old but not good.”

Economists debate endlessly about the exact mechanisms connecting technology to growth, and about the social and institutional conditions that must be met for technology to maximize its effect on growth, but at the end of the day the growth we have seen—and the living standards the mass public enjoys—would simply not have been possible without the massive breakthroughs and continuous improvements we have seen in the technological realm.

Given all this, progressives should logically embrace techno-optimism rather than techno-pessimism. If the goal is working class prosperity, rapid technological advance is surely something to promote enthusiastically. But progressives are now lukewarm at best about the possibilities of new and better technologies, leaving techno-optimism to the libertarian-minded denizens of Silicon Valley. As British science journalist Leigh Phillips has observed:

Once upon a time, the Left…promised more innovation, faster progress, greater abundance. One of the reasons…that the historically fringe ideology of libertarianism is today so surprisingly popular in Silicon Valley and with tech-savvy young people more broadly…is that libertarianism is the only extant ideology that so substantially promises a significantly materially better future.

There are two main reasons for progressives’ current techno-phobia. One is that progressives simply underestimate the importance of economic growth, believing incorrectly that its social objectives are achievable with slow or even no growth. That leads naturally to an underestimation of the importance of technological change, since one of its chief attributes is promoting growth.

Second, and worse, progressives now tend to regard technological change with dread rather than hope. They see technology as a force facilitating inequality rather than growth, destroying jobs rather than leading to skilled-job creation, turning consumers into corporate pawns rather than information-savvy citizens, and destroying the planet in the process. We are far, far away from the midcentury progressive attitude, which welcomed technological change as the handmaiden of abundance and increased leisure, or, for that matter, from the liberal optimism that permeated the culture of the 1950s and ‘60s with tantalizing visions of flying cars and obedient robots.

Instead, today’s progressives seem to envision a socially liberal ecotopia of dense housing powered by renewable energy. This very much includes the progressive “abundance” advocates who are having a moment in the discourse. This is abundance as today’s progressives envision it, not as working-class people desire, who would prefer a big house in the suburbs with plenty of money and lots of nice stuff and perhaps a “big-ass truck” or two in the driveway. Here as elsewhere progressives are dedicated to progress as they define it, not as normal people would and as they themselves used to.

The fact of the matter is that today’s progressives have abandoned their former goals of universal uplift based on universal values and aspirations. That’s why today’s progressives are no longer progressive except in their own eyes.

The following article, “Democrats Should Get Tough and Quit Negotiating Spending Bills:  The Republican majority can no longer be trusted to maintain bipartisan spending-level agreements. So, Democrats should let Republicans figure out how to keep the government open” by Bill Scher, is cross-posted from The Washington Monthly:

In late summer of a typical year, both parties in Congress are drafting bipartisan appropriations legislation that won’t get filibustered in the Senate and will keep the federal government open when the next fiscal year starts on October 1.
This year is not typical.

Congressional Republicans, at President Donald Trump’s behest, have unapologetically broken faith in the appropriations process by undermining a bipartisan agreement struck just four months ago. That deal kept the government open through the current fiscal year. Since Democrats can no longer trust Republicans to keep their word, they should abandon negotiations over Fiscal Year 2026 spending and let the Republican majority figure out how to keep the government open.

Let’s review what just happened.

During Fiscal Year 2025, Congress passed three bills to fund the federal government, the last signed by Trump in March. These bills set specific spending amounts for government programs.

Last week, Republicans exploited a quirk in the law that allows the Senate to vote on a presidential request for “recissions”—cuts to previously agreed-upon spending amounts—without the possibility of a filibuster. Without any Democratic votes in favor, Republicans clawed back $8 billion in foreign aid and $1 billion in support for public broadcasting. An agreement on funding levels, approved of by a bipartisan Senate supermajority, was rolled back by a narrow partisan simple majority.

If you are charitable, you might say: Nine billion dollars is a rounding error on nearly $7 trillion of federal spending. The lion’s share of the agreement held. And this only happened once. There’s no need to overreact, end negotiations, and stumble into a government shutdown.

However, Trump’s budget director Russ Vought said afterwards that the recissions package was not intended to be a one-off, but the beginning of a new appropriations process. “Who ran and won on an agenda of a bipartisan appropriations process? Literally, no one,” Vought told reporters at the July 17 Christian Science Monitor Breakfast, “No Democrat, no Republican. There is no voter in the country [who] went to the polls and said, ‘I’m voting for a bipartisan appropriations process.’ The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan.” He also said another recissions package is “likely to come soon.”

So there will be a next time, and the next recissions may be even bigger. Any bipartisan agreement is worthless. Trump and the Republican majority will determine the final budget. Why should Democrats provide a wisp of bipartisan cover?

Beyond passing recissions through legal, if dishonorable, methods, the White House has also spent the last six months sandbagging Congress’s power of the purse by decimating federal agencies with mass layoffs of government workers.

The Democratic response to Vought should be: You want a partisan appropriations process? You got it.

The ranking member of the House Budget Committee, Brendan Boyle, in an article for The Bulwark, encouraged “my fellow Democrats to be wary this September before lending their votes for deals that President Trump is inevitably going to disregard through illegal impoundments, or that Republicans are just going to rip up anyway. Doing so will chip away at public trust, undermine our ability to govern effectively, and weaken the checks and balances meant to protect democracy.”

I would take it a step farther.

Democrats should immediately announce that all talks about Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations are over. Democrats, even in the congressional minority, are willing to share the responsibility of governing for the common good. But they cannot exercise joint responsibility if Republicans not only won’t keep bipartisan agreements but are openly dismissive of them.

Where would that leave the appropriations process?

Under the current rules, in limbo. Trump just signed what he calls the One Big Beautiful Bill, which cleared Congress through the budget reconciliation process, which forbids a Senate filibuster. But as the current rules stand, the type of spending determined through the annual appropriations process is not eligible for budget reconciliation. To pass the Senate, 60 votes will be needed, which means securing at least seven Democratic votes.

Does that guarantee a government shutdown for which Democrats will get blamed?

No. Republicans would have two options.

One, Republicans could change the rules. After all, these are not folks who are especially enamored with norms and precedents. For example, in the budget reconciliation process, Republicans wriggled out of rules meant to limit deficit spending by asserting that expiring tax cuts—initially made temporary to survive budget reconciliation rules—could be extended as “current policy” without adding to the deficit. Republicans then prevented Democrats from having the Senate parliamentarian review the maneuver.

Skirting the parliamentarian was a hair short of overruling the parliamentarian by majority vote. Senate rule changes are supposed to require a two-thirds vote. Still, everyone knows that rule changes can be, and have been, steamrolled by overruling the parliamentarian by simple majority. (This is the so-called “nuclear option” maneuver.) But nothing is stopping Republicans from crossing that line too, except the recognizing Democrats could do the same the next time they have a Senate majority. If you want a partisan appropriations process, that’s how to get it.

Two, Republicans could capitulate. The Fiscal Year 2026 appropriation bills could include provisions that protect spending from the threat of recission. Separate legislation could be enacted that broadly subjects future rescission requests to filibusters.

The former, of course, is more likely than the latter. But both are ways the Republican majority is empowered to avoid a government shutdown. They are the party in control. They have already indicated they do not believe the minority party should share governing responsibilities. So it’s entirely on Republicans to keep the government open; they own the consequences of failing to do so. It’s not the Democrats’ job to keep the government open and have no say in how the federal government functions.

Why wait to make that clear? Democrats shouldn’t want to have a government shutdown. Publicly ending negotiations now gives Republicans the maximum time to determine their next steps. Trump is already pressuring the Senate Majority Leader to cancel the August recess to get more of his nominees confirmed, including highly controversial ones such as Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to a federal appeals court despite being accused by a whistleblower of encouraging defiance of judicial orders. If Republicans are going to cut short their break, they might as well work on keeping the government open.

Sometimes the minority party is caught between what’s politically smart and what’s necessary for the public interest. This is not one of those times. Walk away.

The following article, “According to our research, 11% of Trump voters can be won back. Here’s how: Democrats need to win back the working class in 2028. Our research shows what does and doesn’t work,” by Dustin Guastella, director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics, is cross-posted from The Guardian:

The following article stub for “Bobby Kennedy, Liberal Patriot – What RFK’s Approach Could Teach Political Leaders Today,” is cross posted from aei.org:

Key Points

• Today, America is deeply divided, and neither major political party is able to command a durable majority of voters.
• At another moment of national division—1968—US Senator Robert F. Kennedy ran for the Democratic presidential nomination and forged a remarkable political coalition of working-class black and Hispanic voters alongside working-class white voters, some of whom had supported segregationist George Wallace in a previous election.
• RFK attracted voters from antagonistic camps with a unifying appeal to a “liberal patriotism” that drew on the best traditions of American liberalism and conservatism. In this centennial year of Kennedy’s birth, his approach offers potent lessons for leaders seeking to unify a fractured country.

Foreword

As my father told it, one of his earliest meetings with Robert Kennedy was soon after John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961, when the newly confirmed attorney general asked to meet at a breakfast counter after Mass on Sunday.

Dad was a Republican holdover from Wisconsin in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. He had begun the first significant voting rights cases in the South, and the meeting concerned one of those imminent trials. Dad had recently replaced a lawyer on the case with a more junior counsel. The attorney general asked Dad if he knew that the dismissed lawyer was the cousin of a very prominent Democratic member of Congress. Dad said he didn’t know and didn’t see how it mattered.

Kennedy replied, “How old are you?”

The attorney general may have joked about Dad’s political judgment, but he let Dad go to trial with the attorneys he wanted.

That was not their first meeting. They had met in the attorney general’s office when Dad was asked to brief on the status of voting rights cases that the division was bringing across the South.

“Too slow,” said the attorney general. Bring more, and faster. That also was the right direction.

They quickly came to like each other. And that should have been no surprise. Dad was 40; Kennedy, 35; Dad had been a basketball player at Princeton; Kennedy went to Harvard and played football. Dad’s oft-stated goals were to fight communism, make a million dollars, and help elect a president. Kennedy, a former staffer to red-baiter Joe McCarthy, had just helped elect a president, and, through his father’s investment prowess, was a millionaire. Oh, and they were both Catholic.

They both also would soon earn a reputation for being “Christers”—so sure of their moral judgments that they could come across as uncompromising, even ruthless. Oh, and one more thing: They were funny and liked to tell funny stories, often about themselves and their families, especially their children.

They were bound to become friends

Read more here:

The following article, “If Democrats Want to Appeal to Rural America, They Need to Talk Like a Neighbor” by Erika Etelson, its cross-posted from The Nation:

Democratic Party officials, activists, and donors have finally decided to start paying attention to the voters they’ve lost. It’s about time. With a 27 percent approval rating, Democrats are about as popular as a vegan hot dog at a rodeo cookout.

The disaffected include Latinos, blacks, Native Americans, Asian Americans, the non-college-educated, young and old, urban and rural, all of whom are either long lost to Democrats or more recently have been trending away. On Pod Save America, Dan Pfeiffer prognosticated that if the current staggering loss of Latino voters continues, “there is no path to Democrats winning elections.” Texas Representative Greg Casar, chair of the Progressive Caucus, called the loss of working-class voters an “existential issue.” They’re right, and that’s why paying attention to rural Americans, 70 percent of whom don’t have college degrees, is not optional.

A mere 3 percent shift in the rural vote would be game-changing for Democrats. But if they want to win the reality show that American politics has become, they need to make to at least five changes in how they communicate:

1. Listen to the voters, not the consultants

Democrats have a bad habit of ignoring what voters tell them—listening instead to party insiders, billionaire donors, and professional consultants. Voters told them Joe Biden was too old. They said they saw Democrats as “obsessed with LGBT transgender issues” and “lacking a real economic plan.” They complained that middle-class taxes were too high, that corporations were screwing them, and that they had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. They said they were more worried about the end of the month than the end of democracy. But the powers that be insisted that one more reminder that “Trump is very very very bad” would finally do the trick.

Democrats can call it fascism or authoritarianism all they want, and they won’t get an argument from half the country. But voters have made it clear that they want Democrats to Make America Affordable Again, not go after the “mad king” for the umpteenth time. Saving a democracy that has delivered diminishing returns for the past 50 years—and is widely seen as rigged by both parties on behalf of the 1 percent—is not as compelling as the Democratic political class presumes it to be.

Democrats need to start taking advice from people who spend most of their time hanging out with ordinary Americans. Polls and focus groups are useful but no substitute for people who live and breathe un-rarefied air every day of the week.

The need for messaging professionals could be minimized if the party recruited depolarizing, down-to-earth candidates who speak to everyday concerns and can communicate just fine without having to poll-test every word out of their mouths. People like Nebraska independent Dan “paycheck populist” Osborne, former Alaska congresswoman Mary “to hell with politics” Peltola, and Senator Raphael Warnock, whose humble-servant authenticity is seldom seen in the vipers’ den.

These candidates performed, respectively, eight, seven and three percentage points better than Harris in 2024, and working-class voters, including Republicans are drawn to them. They appreciate that these politicians and others, like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Gretchen (“fix the damn roads”) Whitmer, are genuinely “for” something and do not reflexively attack all things Trump.

2. Talk more about working people and less about MAGA

The way most folks see it, they’ve worked hard and played by the rules—but are still falling further and further behind. Calling Trump a fascist is just a jousting game for elites and a distraction from what really matters.

What really matters? The right to repair farm equipment, the subsidization of corporations instead of small farms and businesses, the soaring cost of health insurance and housing.

Most Americans are exhausted by partisan mudslinging and Chicken Little proclamations that the end is nigh. This “exhausted majority” constitutes 67 percent of the population. They resent politicians who seem more interested in scoring political points than making life better for people like them.

3. Talk like a neighbor

Lukewarm Trump supporters often say, “Give him a chance, let’s wait and see.” That may sound nuts to diehard Democrats, but it’s common sense to less partisan types. Honor that attitude by saying something like this: “Trump came in with a lot of big ideas for fixing a broken system and a lot of us here took a ‘wait and see’ approach. Now that he’s half a year in, what I’m seeing is that a lot of those same folks who gave him a fair shot are doing worse off. The billionaires, they’re doing better than ever but, for people living paycheck to paycheck, hard work doesn’t pay off the way it should. Trump had his chance, but I’m ready to move on.”

This is what it means to meet voters where they’re at (uncertain) instead of where we wish they were at (tuned in to The Nation Podcast).

4. Make it clear that the big tent has room for white guys

Politics isn’t just about which candidate you like; it’s about which candidate likes you. Nearly nine years after Hillary Clinton blew up her campaign by deploring half of all Trump supporters, I’m still seeing endless flogging of whiteness, maleness, and rural rage. The trafficking in categorical condemnation has become so irksome that I can’t get through my inbox without groaning so despairingly my husband rushes in to make sure I’m okay. Like this Democratic political consultant with the laziest and most antagonizing hot take imaginable:

Read more here.

The following article, “Here’s how Trump’s tariffs could be impacting prices for US consumers,” is cross-posted from CNN Business:

Consumer prices rose 0.3% last month, pushing the annual inflation rate higher to 2.7%, the highest since February, according to the latest Consumer Price Index data released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Tuesday’s data came right in line with economists’ forecasts for the headline CPI to rise from the 0.1% monthly and 2.4% annual increases reported in May.

“Tariffs are starting to bite,” Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, told CNN in an interview. “It wasn’t as bad as expected, but you can see it in the data.”

Excluding gas and food, which tend to be quite volatile, core CPI came in below expectations by rising 0.2% from May and 2.9% for the 12 months ended in June. However, that’s an acceleration from 0.1% and 2.8%, respectively, the month before.

Stocks were mixed Tuesday morning. The Dow was down 250 points, or 0.5%. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 was mostly flat and the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 0.65%.

“While it’s a relief to see Tuesday’s CPI in line with expectations, it still showed that inflation was hotter in June than it was in May,” Skyler Weinand, chief investment officer at Regan Capital, said in an email.

A fits-and-starts trade policy makes its mark

In recent months, President Donald Trump has enacted a sweeping trade policy of tacking steep tariffs on most goods that come into America.

The sheer breadth of the tariffs as well as the fits-and-starts approach to their implementation has roiled markets and caused heightened uncertainty among businesses and consumers as to how much prices would move higher.

However, inflation has remained relatively tame in recent months due to a variety of factors, including ongoing disinflation trends in housing and other key services, falling gas and travel prices (in part due to weakened demand from uncertainty), and businesses loading up on pre-tariff inventories.

Economists cautioned that the tariff-related price hikes wouldn’t come quickly nor in one fell swoop and would likely start to hit consumers more as the year went on.

“It’s really been an inventory story,” Long said. “Businesses have done an excellent job of managing inventory, particularly the large retailers heading into April” when the bulk of the tariff hikes were put into place.

The larger retailers were carrying about three months’ worth of extra inventory, Long said.

“And so, you do the math in your head and you’re thinking, ‘OK, this summer, right?’” she said. “They’re eventually going to run out of inventory or run down their inventory and have to bring in more items with the tariff costs.”

How tariff-exposed goods prices are rising

On a relatively scattered basis, some items with high exposure to tariffs (the United States imports about 80% of toys from China, for example) have become more expensive, both private sector and federal reports such as CPI have shown.

In May, for example, the CPI report showed very few widespread impacts from higher tariffs; however, prices were on the rise for a smattering of goods — such as toys, appliances, sporting goods and tools — typically imported or heavily reliant upon imported materials and components.

Monthly economic data can be quite volatile, and economists frequently caution that it’s important to take a longer view. However, some of the pricing trends seen in May also showed up in June and, in some cases, in a bigger way.

Commodities excluding food and gas: This index strips out the oft-volatile food and energy categories and is being closely scrutinized in the wake of higher tariffs. Prices rose 0.2% in June after being flat in May.

Apparel: Trump’s tariffs were expected to raise the cost of most clothing, but the hardest hit items were expected to be some of the most basic (cheap T-shirts, socks, sneakers and undies). Overall apparel prices nudged up just 0.4% in June after declining in May and April.

Appliances: Prices here leapt 1.9% in June after rising 0.7% in April and 0.6% in May. It was the highest monthly jump in appliance prices since August 2020, when homebound Americans upped their purchases of home goods during the Covid pandemic. Last month, the Trump administration extended the 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum to “derivative products,” including consumer appliances such as dryers, washing machines, refrigerators, ovens and garbage disposals.

Computers, peripherals and smart home assistants: Prices heated up in this category for the third-consecutive month, rising 1.4%, the highest monthly increase since January 2024. While Trump gave a reprieve for tech giants, exempting some smartphones, computers and electronics from tariffs, those products and parts are still exposed to the higher base tariff on Chinese imports. (Notably, Trump also has promised to levy higher tariffs on semiconductors, the chips that power scores of everyday items.)

Sporting goods: The pace of price hikes accelerated here, with the index rising 1.4% in June, up from 0.3% in May. The June increase is the largest in 18 months.

Tools, hardware and supplies: During much of 2023 and 2024, prices fell for this category. In June, prices rose 0.7%, marking the fifth-straight month of increases.

Toys: For the second month in a row, prices rose by 1.4%, a back-to-back jump only seen during periods of abnormally high inflation (2022, 1980). And more price hikes could be coming down the pike, Hasbro CEO told CNN’s Audie Cornish this week.

Video equipment: Prices surged a record 4.5% in June after rising 1% in May in this category that typically has seen more deflation than inflation since 1998, when the BLS started tracking it.

Windows and floor coverings and other linens: After rising 0.3% from May to April, prices in this category surged 4.2% higher in June, a record-high increase (BLS started tracking this category in early 1999). The US textile industry has shrunk considerably in recent decades, resulting in a high reliance on imported linens.

‘This feels like inning No. 1’

The June CPI was expected to be a “turning point” where steep tariffs would make an even bigger mark within the inflation data.

However, the extent to which tariffs could drive inflation higher and how long that may last, remains an open question.

“We do have to bear in mind that goods are still only 25% of the core CPI, and so it takes a pretty meaningful increase in those goods prices to really lead to a spike in core inflation,” Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo, told CNN earlier this week.

The price increases seen on the goods side have been kept in check by disinflation (slower price increases) or deflation (outright price declines) in other components of the CPI — dynamics both long in swing prior to tariffs and others attributed to tariff-related fallout.

“I think you’re still seeing, in many ways, the long tail of the pandemic in the services numbers — things like auto insurance continuing to subside on trend as vehicle price inflation has cooled off” as well as housing-related price hikes, House said. “And in some ways, the recent inflation numbers have captured some of the downside effects on demand, for example, the drop in oil prices and the drop in travel services.”

Economists such a Navy Federal Credit Union’s Long cautioned that the tariff-related impacts remain early days.

“This feels like inning No. 1, the early stages of what will likely be more and more items showing that price increase,” she said.

She noted how prices on coffee and oranges — categories already hit hard by climate-related impacts and also expected to feel added price pressure from tariffs — spiked in June. Trump’s latest tariff threats on Canada and Mexico could reignite fears of higher food prices, she added.

“You don’t buy a new washing machine every week, but you do buy fruits and vegetables,” she said.

Trump on Tuesday cheered that consumer prices were low and White House officials downplayed the effect of tariffs on overall inflation. Trump urged for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates “now!”

“I think one thing that Wall Street, a lot of economists, (the) market in general, got wrong early on was that tariffs were going to cause a substantial price level rise, which just hasn’t happened,” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview on Bloomberg prior to the CPI’s release Tuesday morning.

However, while the June CPI data “screams” that Fed officials will likely take a “wait and see” approach on further rate cuts when they meet later this month, there is some growing pressure for easing later this year, said Long, the Navy Federal Credit Union economist Long said.

“There is strain on the middle-class consumer right now and middle-class families: The housing market is frozen … the job market is frozen outside of a handful of sectors like healthcare,” she said. “And it would be really helpful to the overall economy to see the Federal Reserve take a little bit of pressure off in September. I know it’s a hard call looking at this data, but just from the middle-class perspective, some relief in September would be really helpful.”

The CPI report is the first of two major pieces of inflation data due out this week. On Wednesday morning, the BLS will release the Producer Price Index, which is expected to show a continued pickup in wholesale-level inflation.

CNN’s John Towfighi and Elisabeth Buchwald contributed to this report.

The following article stub 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:

Once upon a time, Democrats said this:

We can move towards a sustainable energy-independent future if we harness all of America’s great natural resources. That means an all-of-the-above approach to developing America’s many energy resources, including wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, hydropower, nuclear, oil, clean coal, and natural gas. President Obama has encouraged innovation to reach his goal of generating 80 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources by 2035…We can further cut our reliance on oil with increased energy efficiency in buildings, industry, and homes, and through the promotion of advanced vehicles, fuel economy standards, and the greater use of natural gas in transportation.

That was in the Democratic Party platform for 2012. But Democrats changed their tune as the decade progressed. Obama’s continued commitment to an all-of-the-above energy policy started to be relentlessly attacked as insufficiently progressive. In 2014, 18 environmental organizations, including Earthjustice, the Environmental Defense Fund, the League of Conservation Voters, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club sent Obama a sternly worded protest letter. They characterized his policy as “a compromise that future generations can’t afford. It…locks in the extraction of fossil fuels that will inevitably lead to a catastrophic climate future.” By the late teens, Democrats were in a completely different space than 2012.

In February 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) formally introduced a congressional resolution advocating a Green New Deal. This Green New Deal proposal was everything the increasingly radical climate movement could have wished for and more. The proposal affirmed that the United States must become net zero on carbon emissions by 2030 through a dramatic and far-reaching transformation of every aspect of the economy. And far from entailing sacrifice, this economic transformation would provide full employment in high-wage jobs, accompanied by universal high-quality health care and housing. It would end all oppression of indigenous people, “communities of color,” migrant communities, and other “frontline and vulnerable communities.”

The proposal generated enormous publicity and was injected into the mainstream of Democratic Party discourse. Six Senators who would become contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination endorsed it: Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Kamala Harris (D-CA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). Sanders would go on to release a $16.3 trillion Green New Deal plan of his own during his campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Of course, none of these hopefuls garnered the Democratic nomination; Joe Biden did. However, while Biden declined to specifically endorse and use the Green New Deal language, he did put forward his own ambitious climate plan that was essentially a softer version of the Green New Deal proposals. And once in office he very much pursued his plan, resulting in his administration’s last major legislative accomplishment, the big climate bill disingenuously labeled the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

But the Democratic tune is changing once again. As Trump cancels or cuts back much of the IRA with remarkably little public protest, Democrats are starting to realize their Green New Deal-type plans are out of step with both the physical realities of America’s thirst for energy in the age of AI and what American voters actually want from their energy system. Their grand plans just don’t have much support, outside of professional class liberals and climate NGOs. A recent Politico article reported on the vibe shift:

“There’s no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,” said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama’s White House. “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.”

It’s a strategy Freeman admitted she was “struggling” to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to more renewable power—an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration—finding “a new approach” for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support.

The reality Freeman and other Democrats are waking up to is powerfully illustrated in a new AEI report, “The Science vs. the Narrative vs. the Voters: Clarifying the Public Debate Around Energy and Climate,” by myself and my AEI colleague, Roger Pielke, Jr. To support our effort to clarify that debate, we fielded the AEI 2024 Energy/Climate Survey about a month before the 2024 election. The survey asked more than 3,000 registered voters about their views on trends in extreme weather, IPCC climate projections, climate tipping points, favored energy sources, priorities and preferences on energy policy, willingness to bear costs to fight climate change, personal energy consumption behavior, and much more.

Here are some findings that show why Democrats are warming back up to all-of-the-above—and why the Green New Deal is basically dead.

First, what are voters’ overall views on the appropriate energy strategy for the United States? Answer: it’s all-of-the-above and it isn’t even close!

Read more here.

The following article by United Auto Workers President Sean Fain is cross-posted from The Detroit News:

The budget reconciliation bill that the Republicans just passed isn’t just bad policy — it’s a full-blown attack on America’s working class. Behind the hollow promises and temporary fixes lies a brutal agenda: stripping working-class people of security, dignity and power while lining the pockets of billionaires.

For the UAW and the millions of workers we represent, four core issues define what it means to live and work with dignity: a livable wage, affordable health care, retirement security and time to enjoy life beyond the job. On every one of those fronts, this bill delivers nothing but setbacks.

Let’s start with health care. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the GOP’s reconciliation bill will cut Medicaid spending by roughly a trillion dollars over the next decade, while stripping healthcare coverage away from 17 million Americans. These aren’t numbers on a spreadsheet. These are real people losing access to life-saving care. The impact of these cuts will go beyond those who are most in need. In response to these Medicaid cuts, hospitals and healthcare providers are likely to cut services and pass costs along to those with employer-sponsored health insurance plans, such as union members.

What about wages? While Republicans talked a big game about no tax on tips, the actual details in the bill tell a different story. Tipped occupations only account for 2.5% of all employment in the U.S., so the number of Americans who will actually benefit will be small, and many of those tipped workers (37% in 2022) make so little income, they pay no federal income tax. Those workers will see no benefit because the tax breaks in this bill don’t apply to payroll taxes. In addition, the no tax on tips and no tax on overtime language — which both benefit workers — are only temporary and expire in 2028.

On the other hand, many of the tax benefits in this bill for the wealthy are indefinite and have no expiration date. This is the same bait-and-switch the Trump administration used to sell its 2017 billionaire tax giveaway to the American people: small, temporary tax breaks for working people, with massive, long-term benefits for the wealthy and corporate America.

And when it comes to retirement? Forget it. The bill undermines the safety net that seniors rely on. The CBO estimates that more than 1.3 million low-income Medicare beneficiaries will lose assistance that helps seniors cover high out-of-pocket medical costs. Medicaid cuts in the bill may also make it harder for seniors and people with disabilities to access long-term care coverage and home and community-based services that enables them to age with dignity.

And on top of everything written directly into the bill, it could also trigger more than $500 billion in cuts to Medicare because it blows up the deficit. That means seniors could see their healthcare slashed after working their whole lives. Medicare, as it stands today, is already failing to meet the healthcare needs of seniors. At a time when 60% of Americans have no retirement savings, we need to be improving Medicare, not making cuts.

And what about time to live a full life outside of work? This bill sends a clear message: work harder, for less, and with fewer protections. H.R. 1 will burden the vast majority of the working class in this country with additional costs, which means workers will need to find a way to spend even more time on the job simply to make ends meet.

This bill isn’t governance. This is a class war waged from Capitol Hill. It shifts the balance of power even further toward the billionaire class and hollows out the rights and dignity of labor. By passing this legislation, the government is telling working-class families they’re on their own while billionaires get even more tax breaks.

The UAW has always supported bold ideas that make life better for working people, regardless of which party proposes them. But this bill is not that. It’s a total betrayal.

Our 2023 Stand Up Strike proved that working class people are fed up with a system where billionaires hoard the vast majority of the wealth that the working class creates. The title of this bill is missing an extra “B” word: billionaire.

Working people aren’t going to stand for this big, beautiful bill for billionaires.

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:

George W. Bush famously posed this question back in 2000: “Is our children learning?” In 2025, we can follow up Bush’s earnest inquiry with one of our own: “Is our Democrats learning?” It’s been half a year since their catastrophic loss to their arch-nemesis Trump, so it’s a good time to assess whether Democrats are indeed moving up the learning curve.

I’d say progress has been quite spotty. The party’s favorability rating is still dreadful, they have only a modest lead in the generic congressional vote for 2026 and their prospects for taking back the Senate are slim. To most voters, the 2025 Democrats seem awfully similar to the 2024 Democrats they didn’t like much at all.

That’s a shame. A party that was truly in the process of reinventing itself and shedding its core liabilities would likely get a close look from voters. Trump isn’t very popularand many of his actions have alarmed broad sections of the electorate. Confidence in the economy, despite some recent improvement, is still quite low. And the so-called Big Beautiful Bill (BBB), an omnibus reconciliation package on the verge of party-line passage in Congress, has many juicy targets for Democrats, reflecting the attempt to jam the priorities, popular and unpopular, of all sections of the GOP into one bill. The BBB is already remarkably unpopular and may not improve with greater public awareness. In particular, the cuts in Medicaid spending—projected at around a trillion dollars over 10 years—are to a very popular program Trump swore he’d never cut. This is unlikely to go down well with many of the GOP’s new working-class voters.

Here are some reasons why the Democratic drive to reinvent the party seems to have stalled out—and may have a hard time restarting despite their political opening.

The “’tis but a scratch” problem. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Black Knight insists, against all evidence, that his wounds are not that serious—“’tis but a scratch.” Democrats, in the aftermath of losing two of three elections to the widely-disliked Trump and seeing their coalition re-configured by massive losses among both white and nonwhite working-class voters, are still in denial about how serious theirwounds are. They are not but a scratch and cannot be fixed by anything less than a full-scale overhaul of the party’s approach and image. Tinkering around the edges, while easier, will not work.

The breaking point fallacy. Democrats have a hard time thinking outside their own views of Trump and the GOP. They are deeply convinced that Trump is perhaps the worst person to ever walk the earth and find it difficult to relate to voters whose views are more mixed. They are convinced that a breaking point from Trump’s actions will inevitably be reached where voters will wake up and realize Democrats were right all along, with happy political results to follow. This fallacy undergirded Democrats’ thinking in the 2024 campaign with rather unhappy results when that breaking point was not reached. Democrats’ reliably florid responses to Trump’s outrage-of-the-day in 2025 indicates that they are still hoping that breaking point can be reached and that they are puzzled, indeed outraged, that voters have not yet mounted the barricades. Conveniently, the expectation of a breaking point let’s Democrats off the hook from changing very much in their own party.

The “whatever it is, I’m against it” problem. In the classic Marx Brothers movie, Horsefeathers, Groucho uncompromisingly asserts: “whatever it is, I’m against it.” That pretty much sums up Democrats’ approach to Trump administration proposals and actions. With very minor exceptions, Democrats have refused to support any of it, even where these actions are popular and/or are targeted at clear areas of Democratic vulnerability that needed shoring up. Little to no effort has been made to stake out a middle ground that recognizes some of Trump’s actions address areas where Democrats have screwed up, while setting out a better (kinder, gentler?) approach that would more effective and less illiberal. Easier though to adopt Groucho’s approach and avoid the uncomfortable need to acknowledge mistakes and convince voters you won’t make them again.

The rising generations chimera. Many Democrats have seized upon the fact that leading Democratic politicians tend to be quite old, if not ancient (hello, Joe Biden!) and decided what is needed is younger Democrats. The changing of the guard—that’ll do the trick! On net, it seems like a no-brainer to move younger cohorts up in the party who can better communicate with young voters where Democrats have been losing ground. But what if these young communicators aren’t communicating anything to voters that would actually help Democrats dig out of the hole they’re in? Then the changing of the guard will only help at the margins.

Take Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic Millennial who pulled off an upset victory in the New York City Democratic primary and will likely be New York’s next mayor. His energy and media savvy are admirable but his radical cultural politics—only lightly sanded off recently—and his wildly impractical economic plans don’t seem likely to change the image of the Democratic Party in a good way. But he nevertheless will be a pole of attraction in the party, just as AOC and “the Squad” were in the aftermath of the 2018 election—and we saw how well that worked out. Democrats’ thirst for generational excitement, whatever its content, will make it even harder than it already was for Democrats to re-orient the party around an effective majoritarian politics. As Matt Yglesias has pointed out:

The generational change they’re envisioning is AOC and Greg Casar, not Ritchie Torres, Jake Auchincloss, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. They want to do think pieces about Zohran Mamdani, not Abigail Spanberger. And here I think it’s important to be clear: Generational change is both needed and also largely inevitable, but it doesn’t make ideology or policy irrelevant, and it’s just not factually true that younger people are automatically more progressive…[T]hey will also need to remember that it’s dangerous to assume that youth appeal and communications savvy will lead to progressive nirvana, because there’s a younger and more conservative generation [Gen Z] coming up behind us.

Relying on generational change and excitement, absent of content, is a mug’s game. But it does have the advantage of avoiding all the pesky rethinking stuff.

The “round up the usual suspects” problem. In the movie Casablanca, Captain Reynaud (Claude Rains) concludes the film by saying “round up the usual suspects.” The Democrats have an establishment and establishments don’t like change. Thus, there is a built-in tendency to blame messaging, narrative, lack of coalitional input, etc.—the “usual suspects”—rather than deeper problems of culture, economic policy, and class antagonism. Most recently this tendency was on display in the formation of a Project 2029 group drawn from various sectors of the Democratic establishment to craft a new, improved approach for the Democrats. As the Politico article on the group notes:

Some would-be allies are skeptical that such an ideologically diverse and divergent set of policy minds could craft anything close to a coherent agenda, let alone a politically winning one.

“Developing policies by checking every coalitional box is how we got in this mess in the first place,” said Adam Jentleson, who has spent recent months preparing to open a new think tank called Searchlight. “There is no way to propose the kind of policies the Democratic Party needs to adopt without pissing off some part of the interest-group Borg. And if you’re too afraid to do that, you don’t have what it takes to steer the party in the right direction.”

I think Mr. Jentleson is on to something.

The abundance for whom? problem. The “abundance” idea is having a moment in the discourse. The idea is to clear away procedural, zoning, and regulatory obstacles that make it ridiculously hard to build stuff and govern efficiently, particularly in “blue” areas. A recent Washington Post article asked: “Can the abundance movement save the Democrats?” The article notes the predictable resistance from the Democratic Party left who accuse abundance of being thinly veiled neoliberalism and too easy on the power of big capital.

But the big problem with abundance isn’t that—I’m all for the deregulatory stuff—it’s the abundance for whom? problem. As the movement has developed and been motivated so far, it’s been oriented toward the governance problems of progressive areas and the need to fight climate change through building out clean energy. In other words, it’s abundance for progressives, not necessarily for ordinary working-class people. That’s a big problem, as many have noticed.

Progressives may be pining after a socially liberal ecotopia of dense housing powered by renewable energy but most working-class voters would prefer a big house in the suburbs with plenty of money and lots of nice stuff and perhaps a “big-ass truck” or two in the driveway. And they could care less about renewable energy. This electorally toxic contradiction is yet another fundamental problem Democrats are assiduously avoiding.

The red state Senators problem. Re-taking the presidency is the problem Democrats think most about. That’ll be hard enough. But the Senate is now looking much tougher, due to the Democrats’ fading strength in so-called red states—all of whom get two Senators, regardless of population size—where their brand is so damaged that electing a Democratic Senator against underlying partisanship is getting close to impossible.

In 2026, Democrats not only have to defend seats they hold in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, they’ll have to knock off Republicans in Maine and North Carolina and then take two out of three in the certifiably red states of Iowa (Trump +13), Ohio (Trump +11), and Texas (Trump +14). The only way to effectively and reliably compete in states like these is for the national party’s brand to be different enough from its current iteration so that good candidates like Sherrod Brown are not dragged down by their association with the national party. Without that, Democratic control of the Senate will be very difficult to attain.

The necessity to compete in red states for Senate seats is another problem Democrats are loathe to confront because of the scale of needed change it implies. Much easier to think about other things. For example, Democrats have an excellent chance to take back the House in 2026 even if their program is simply: “Trump is bad. We are not Trump.” But that won’t work for the Senate.

These obstacles help clarify why, despite the depth of the Democrats’ recent defeat and their fragmenting coalition, their response to adversity has seemed so perversely underpowered. What could shake them out of their torpor? Galen Druke had a useful suggestion in a recent New York Times op-ed: take a page out of the Donald’s book!

The presidential hopefuls are likely to divide into two camps: moderates and progressives. But these paths misunderstand Democrats’ predicament and will fail to win over a meaningful majority in the long term. If the next Democratic nominee wants to build a majority coalition—one that doesn’t rely on Republicans running poor-quality candidates to eke out presidential wins and that doesn’t write off the Senate as a lost cause—the candidate should attack the Democratic Party itself and offer positions that outflank it from both the right and the left.

It may seem like an audacious gambit, but a successful candidate has provided them a blueprint: Donald Trump…

Running against your own party from both the left and the right, and more broadly against both parties, allows you to frustrate voters’ perceptions of you…To be truly successful, the next Democratic nominee will transform how Americans view the Democratic Party as a whole, leading the way to winning voters not currently viewed as “gettable” in states that have been written off.

That may seem a bit radical. But in light of the Democrats’ current problems, I think it’s just practical.