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.

The following article, “NEW POLL: Working Class Voters on the GOP’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’: Working class voters oppose the GOP bill, think it overwhelmingly hurts them while helping the rich, and find messages about health care impacts and tax unfairness most convincing,” is cross-posted from The Working-Class Project (click on link to see full article with graphs):

We’re back this week with another update from the largest research effort to understand why working class voters are trending away from Democrats.

This week, we want to share some new polling data on how working class voters are viewing the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

It’s one of our surveys from a pool of 1,000 registered self-identified working class voters that we’ve been polling for months. This snapshot was taken in mid-June across 21 of the “swingiest” states (see map below). The group of voters surveyed supported President Trump by 7 points in the 2024 election.

TOPLINES

• A majority of working class voters in our battleground oppose the GOP bill after hearing arguments both for and against it.
• A generic 2026 ballot test goes from tied to +8 Democrat after hearing messaging against the GOP bill – including +2 Democrat in reliably redstates.
• Messaging against the GOP bill increases support for Democrats in the 2026 ballot test among independents by a net 12 points from +4 Dem (36-32%) to +16 Dem (42-26%).

WORKING CLASS VOTERS SEE MEDICAID AS IMPORTANT TO THEIR FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES

Even without hearing messaging on the GOP bill and its impact on Medicaid, working class voters overwhelmingly see Medicaid as important to their families and communities – including in red states and among Republican working class voters.

This reinforces discussions in our focus groups, where voters consistently identify Medicaid by its local name (BadgerCare in Wisconsin, AHCCCS in Arizona, Healthy Louisiana, etc.) and defend it as a critical resource for working class people – very different from the way they talk about other programs that they view as “handouts” or welfare that reward people who refuse to work hard and play by the rules.

WORKING CLASS VOTERS SAY THEY WILL BE HURT MOST BY THE GOP BILL

As Republicans in Congress rush to pass their budget bill, working class voters believe it will hurt them and the poor, while benefiting the wealthy.

• 72% of working class independents, and 4 in 10 Republicans, name the working class as the group most hurt by the GOP bill.

WHAT MESSAGES AGAINST THE GOP BILL ARE MOST EFFECTIVE?

WHAT GROUPS OF WORKING CLASS VOTERS MOVE THE MOST?

Messaging about the GOP bill moves all working class voter demographics against the Republicans and toward the Democrats in a generic ballot test, with the largest shifts among Latino and Black voters and independents.

Among those who shifted, we see the same group of messages emerging, but the single most effective message focuses on how the GOP bill gives tax cuts to the wealthy while unfairly burdening working class people.

DEMOCRATS HAVE A HUGE OPPORTUNITY TO SOLIDIFY UNSHAPED OPINION AGAINST THE BILL

But after they hear messaging for and against the bill, those who came in with little information about it oppose it by nearly 30 points – showing Democrats have the chance to set the perception of this bill among the very working class voters who helped power President Trump’s 2024 victory.

SO WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

Across our focus groups over the past few months, when we’ve brought up the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” many participants initially didn’t know much about it or react strongly to it. But once they’ve been provided information about what the bill does, they have developed strong, negative reactions. Nearly all of them could tell a story about how some aspect of what this bill does to certain programs would hurt them or someone close to them. It’s been clear as we’ve listened to these voters that the GOP is taking a huge risk by pushing through this bill that dramatically cuts Medicaid and hurts people’s health care in order to give big tax cuts to rich people and billionaires.

The findings of this survey specifically should jar Republicans, in that this was a Trump-heavy voter sample. (Remember: this group supported Trump by 7 points in 2024.) These working class voters were the decisive group that swung the election his way. By ramming through this bill, Republicans are putting their own electoral coalition in jeopardy, as GOP Senator Thom Tillis noted in his passionate warning on the Senate floor this week.

The race is on to define the perception of this bill. Many remain unsure about the bill, what it does, and how it will impact them. But when they hear more about the bill, they oppose it – and think it hurts them.

Democrats have the opportunity to re-align perceptions of the two parties and who they’re fighting for, and to define the early stakes of the 2026 election cycle, by leaning into the effects of this signature Republican bill and taking their messages as far-and-wide as possible.

Lest Democrats get too optimistic about Trump’s recent troubles, Eleanor Mueller reports that “‘Workers don’t trust either party’: Sherrod Brown-backed focus groups reveal economic pessimism,” cross-posted here from Semafor:

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:

Progressive Democrats have been dreaming for years of a way they could be both economically populist and culturally radical—and succeed. The original name for this was “inclusive populism.” The idea was that Democrats may indeed be bleeding working-class voters but the solution does not lie in any way with moving to the center on culturally-inflected issues like crime, immigration, race, gender, and schooling. That would not be “inclusive.”

Instead, as recounted in a 2022 New York Times article on their initial gathering, the inclusive populists argued for turning it up to 11 on economic populism since “[Democrats] don’t fight hard enough for working-class people, and…aren’t tough enough on big, greedy corporations.” As the article noted:

The unmistakable tone of the event was a rebuke of the Democrats who have failed to squeeze more progressive policy wins out of their congressional majority over the last 18 months—and essentially, in the left’s telling, let their most conservative member, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, dictate the terms of their governing agenda.

The 2024 election results delivered a big blow to the inclusive populist theory of the case. Perhaps economic populism and cultural radicalism did not go together like soup and sandwich. But inclusive populism devotees did not give up; they hoped that the tide would turn in their favor. Now they believe it has with the capture of the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City (and, therefore, likely general election winner) by Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who enthusiastically backs every culturally radical cause under the sun and ran on an economically populist program long on bashing evil landlords and price-gougers but short on policy plausibility and any conceivable way to pay for it.

Mamdani was an exceptionally good candidate running against an exceptionally bad opponent in a Democratic primary in a exceptionally left-leaning city (Harris carried New York City by 38 points in the 2024 election). That would appear to limit its generalizability to other areas of the country, particularly in general elections. But don’t tell that to culturally radical economic populists—they are ecstatic. From an NBC News article by Ben Kamisar:

Maya Rupert, a Democratic strategist who managed the 2021 mayoral campaign of Democrat Maya Wiley, told NBC News that Mamdani’s “decisive victory” is a signal to the left that its candidates can run unapologetically authentic campaigns that take tough issues head-on with progressive solutions.

“These issues aren’t unpopular; we just need a way to communicate them across geography, across a multiracial coalition, across partisan divides. He was able to do that, and more than that, show other people across the country how it can be done,” she said.

“We’ve heard this so much since the election: Democrats have gone too far afield, the vilification of talking about social justice, talking about racial justice, that you can’t do that stuff and also win. You can, and if it’s where your politics are, you can’t do it any other way, I really believe that. So I hope there are more people that are going to take this moment and decide to run like this because it really does seem to be our path forward,” she said.

This is lamentably, if predictably, dumb. It certainly makes sense that in our current populist era, Democrats need to be responsive to that populist mood. But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populism by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged, especially by its cultural radicalism. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats like Rupert, Mamdani and the party’s legions of inclusive populists who don’t want to make hard choices.

In particular, it’s preposterous that economic populism, by itself, can solve Democrats’ cultural radicalism problem. In a post-election YouGov survey of working-class (non-college) voters for the Progressive Policy Institute, 68 percent of these voters said Democrats have moved too far left, compared to just 47 percent who thought Republicans have moved too far right. It’s a fair surmise that working-class sentiment about the Democrats’ leftism is heavily driven by the party’s embrace of cultural leftist positions across a wide range of issues (immigration, crime, race, gender, etc.) given how unpopular these positions are among those voters.

And in a widely-noted finding from a post-election survey by the Blueprint strategy group, the third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”. And among swing voters, this concern about cultural focus was the most powerful reason.

In the same poll, overwhelming majorities (67 to 77 percent) of swing voters who chose Trump thought the following characterizations of Democrats were extremely or very accurate: not tough enough on the border crisis; support immigrants more than American citizens; want to take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants; want to promote transgender ideology; don’t care about securing the border; have extreme ideas about immigration; aren’t doing enough to address crime; and are too focused on identity politics.

It’s really is magical thinking to believe that simply changing the subject to economics will evaporate these cultural liabilities. Culture matters—a lot—and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters, especially outside of deep blue areas like New York City, assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.

Instead, for working-class voters in most areas of the country to seriously consider their economic pitch, Democrats need to convince them that they are not looked down on, that their concerns are taken seriously, and that their views on culturally-freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. That’s the threshold test for many of the working-class voters Democrats need to reach and Democrats have flunked it over and over.

That’s why changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work outside of special cases like New York City—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook they detest. Convincing voters of the latter is much harder and more uncomfortable for Democrats. But it has to be done, whether inclusive populists like it or not.

It should also be noted that economic populism in whatever form has little to do with making Democratic governance of states and, especially, cities any better. Democratic governance is not, to say the least, synonymous with public order, low crime, and effective and efficient administration of public services. Quite the contrary. Progressive domination of deep blue cities instead has become synonymous with poor governance across the board. Josh Barro:

I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them…Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system…even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it…The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets…[S]chools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything—and it’s really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels. And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population—we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy.

To anyone who thinks a Mamdani administration is going to solve the problems enumerated by Barro: I’ve got a bridge to sell you (and it’s conveniently located in New York City!)

Finally, as should be screamingly obvious to anyone who has lived this country for the last ten years, economic populism is inadequate as populism. We are certainly in a populist era and, as noted, it makes sense to respond to that mood. But it does not necessarily follow that Democrats can effectively speak to that mood simply by bashing the rich (“the billionaire class”), insisting they pay their fair share, and advocating for programs aimed at middle- and working-class voters, rather than corporate priorities. Many voters, including swing voters, are certainly sympathetic to such a pitch. But what this approach leaves out is that the populist sentiments of voters go much deeper than that.

To put it bluntly, voters, particularly working-class voters, harbor deep resentment toward elites who they feel are telling them how to live their lives, even what to think and say, and incidentally are living a great deal more comfortably than they are. This is not the rich as conventionally defined by economic populism but rather the professionals-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power. By and large, these are Democrats in Democratic-dominated institutions. Looked at in this context, truly populist Democrats might want to say, with Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is a bitter pill for most Democrats to swallow. In today’s America, they are the Establishment even if in their imaginations they are sticking it to the Man and fighting nobly for social justice. Think of Michael Lange’s professionals-dominated “Commie Corridor” in Western Queens and North Brooklyn, stretching from Astoria to Sunset Park, where Mamdani ran up his biggest margins. The failure to understand that they themselves are central targets of populist anger leads inclusive populists to overestimate the efficacy of economic populism and interpret populism on the right as driven solely by racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. That’s more comfortable than realizing millions of populist voters hate you. But they do.

Coming to terms with this reality—while unpleasant—would help Democrats win outside of New York City and similar areas. And I say to inclusive populists: let me know when you elect, say, a Democratic Senator from Ohio with these politics. Then I’ll take you more seriously.

The following op-ed by James Carville and Stanley B. Greenberg, co-founders of Democratic pollster Democracy Corps and co-authors of “It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!,” is cross posted from The Washington Post:

The following article stub of “The Secret to Reindustrializing America Is Not Tax Cuts and Tariffs. It’s Regulated Competition” by Phillip Longman is cross-posted from The Washington Monthly:

Guess who is coming for your holidays. If your first answer is Trump and his Republican minions, congratulations, you are paying attention. They just don’t think you are working hard enough. CNN reports that Trump said last Thursday, “”Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Juneteenth, a newly designated federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged during a Thursday briefing with reporters that it was a federal holiday and thanked reporters for showing up, but declined to answer whether Trump was doing anything to mark it.” For those who like insult to  intelligence added to their injuries, Trump added, “The workers don’t want it either!” Trump said of federal holidays in his post. “Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Never mind that workers in other industrialized economies have more paid holidays.  Trump and the Republicans want you to have less time to be with your families and to work more for less money. It will be good for you. It’s a MAGA thing.

From the Executive Summary of the annual study,  “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2025” at the AFL-CIO webpage: “…too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death as chemical plant explosions, major fires, construction collapses, infectious disease outbreaks, workplace assaults, toxic chemical exposures and other preventable tragedies continue to permeate the workplace. Workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year—including 5,283 from traumatic injuries and an estimated 135,000 from occupational diseases in 2023. That is 385 workers each day—and many worker protections are under threat. Job injury and illness numbers continue to be severe undercounts of the real problem.” Further, “Big corporations, many conservatives and billionaires have launched an aggressive assault on workers’ lives and their livelihoods by repealing job safety and health regulations, promoting deregulatory initiatives, blocking funding and pulling back resources for job safety agencies, firing federal staff doing critical work to protect worker health and safety, and requiring additional burdens in order to issue protections at all. They aim to dissolve the protection structures and shift the responsibility for providing safe jobs from employers to individual workers, and to undermine the core duties and capacity of workplace safety agencies, and more recently disregard and discard the government’s responsibility to protect workers altogether…President Trump’s first 100 days of his second administration have not only attacked Biden administration progress, but confirmed his anti-worker, pro-business philosophy. 1 Since taking office at the end of January 2025, he has issued dozens of executive orders to roll back or review existing regulations, including an order that requires that for any new regulatory protection issued, an agency must remove 10 safeguards from the books.”

In “Democrats Must Become the Party of the Working Class—Or Else: It’s true that the party isn’t dead… yet. But if it does not seriously reflect on its disastrous 2024 performance—and all that led up to it—the future is beyond bleak,” James Zogby writes at Common Dreams: “The lesson that Democrats need to learn is that “the left” is not primarily defined by where you stand on social issues. Instead, unlike Republicans, Democrats must define themselves as the party that understands the government’s positive role in creating an economy and programs that create jobs and opportunities for working and middle class families—Black, Asian, Latino, and White ethnics. When they don’t embrace these concerns, they cede this ground to Republicans, who despite their horribly regressive policies now claim to represent the working class while charging that Democrats only represent elites…This doesn’t mean that Democrats should ever abandon their commitment to the range of social and cultural issues party leaders have long embraced as critical for our diverse democratic society…they are the party that believes that government has a role to play in lifting up those who need a helping hand, and providing for the working classes and middle classes of all ethnic and racial communities.”

At Talking Points Memo, editor Josh Marshall strikes a cautionary note for evaluating Administration reports on military actions and their consequences. Sure, responsible reporters should quote the President’s view. But they should also look at analysis by independent experts on national defense…”A few points on the effect rather than the wisdom or possible fall-out of these attacks…The President has repeatedly said the Fordow nuclear facility was “obliterated”. Clearly that is a party slogan rather than any kind of factual analysis. We’re now getting the first after-action reports out of the Pentagon and Israel which speak of the Fordow facility appearing to have sustained “severe damage” but not being destroyed. One thing that struck me last night was the US assessment that helped prompt this attack which, reportedly, was that the entirety of the Israeli assault had pushed Iran’s program back roughly six months. That’s pretty paltry in terms of any great change in the strategic outlook. I note that because we should wait a significant period of time before we conclude – if the evidence ever merits it – that the US has somehow put the Iranians back to square one in their ability to build nuclear warheads…The President has repeatedly said the Fordow nuclear facility was “obliterated”. Clearly that is a party slogan rather than any kind of factual analysis. We’re now getting the first after-action reports out of the Pentagon and Israel which speak of the Fordow facility appearing to have sustained “severe damage” but not being destroyed. One thing that struck me last night was the US assessment that helped prompt this attack which, reportedly, was that the entirety of the Israeli assault had pushed Iran’s program back roughly six months. That’s pretty paltry in terms of any great change in the strategic outlook. I note that because we should wait a significant period of time before we conclude – if the evidence ever merits it – that the US has somehow put the Iranians back to square one in their ability to build nuclear warheads.” 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 Democrats have Trump right where they want him! Anti-racism didn’t work….anti-fascism didn’t work….so now it’s time for anti-feudalism. No kings! The Democrats are certainly right that anti-feudalism is popular. The June 14 “No Kings” demonstrations were very successful in turning out protestors with nationwide estimates in the 4-6 million range, compared to 3-5 million for the April 5 “Hands Off” protests.

Cue the rapturous “turning the corner” pronouncements from the usual suspects. The honest workers and peasants of America, led by their vanguard party, the (professionals-dominated) Democrats, are rising up to throw off the shackles of oppression! The #Resistance has been reawakened and a wave is gathering to sweep the hated Trump and his MAGA movement into the ashbin of history!

Well…maybe. But why should we believe this isn’t just the latest iteration of a failed strategy? For ten years, since Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, Democrats have tried over and over to turn a political strategy centered around Trump and his terribleness into a successful exorcism of Trump/right populism. It hasn’t worked.

But this time it will, we are assured. This time is different. This time, he’s gone too far. This time, voters will be roused from their stupor and massively reject the Bad Orange Man. If only it were that simple. Here are some reasons why it’s not.

Start with Trump’s and the GOP’s popularity. They’re not popular but then again neither are the Democrats. Trump’s approval has gone down since the beginning of his second term, now sitting at 46.5 percent in the RCP running average (a point lower in Nate Silver’s average). But Trump is still running ahead of his approval rating at this point in his first term. And at this point in his second term, he’s actually running slightly ahead of Obama and Bush at this point in their second terms.

In terms of favorability, Republican Party favorability still significantly outruns Democratic favorability (42 percent vs. 35 percent). The Democrats are a dreadful 24 points underwater (favorable minus unfavorable) while Republicans are net negative by a more modest 11 points. And Trump’s favorability is higher than that of his party and of course way higher than the Democrats’.

That’s a problem. To truly vanquish Trump and his movement, it won’t be enough to rely on their unpopularity; Democrats must work on making themselves much more popular and attractive than they are.

That won’t be easy given the scale of the challenge Democrats face in the current era. David Brooks put it well in a recent column:

For nearly a century, the Democrats have ridden on the grand narratives of previous eras. First, the welfare state narrative…Second, the liberation narrative…Those are noble narratives. They are not sufficient in the age of global populism.

The Democrats’ first core challenge is that we live in an age that is hostile to institutions and Democrats dominate the institutions—the universities, the media, Hollywood, the foundations, the teachers unions, the Civil Service, etc. The second is that we live in an age in which a caste divide has opened up between the educated elite and everybody else, and Democrats are the party of the highly educated.

Democrats recently had an argument about whether they should use the word “oligarchy” to attack Republicans. They are so locked in their old narratives that they are apparently unaware that to many, they are the oligarchy…(emphasis added)

Every society has a recognition order, a diffuse system for doling out attention and respect. When millions of people feel that they and their values are invisible to that order, they rightly feel furious and alienated. Of course they’ll go with the guy—Trump—who says: I see you. I respect you. If Democrats, and the educated class generally, can’t change their values and cultural posture, I doubt any set of economic policies will do them any good. It is just a fact that parties on the left can’t get a hearing until they get the big moral questions right: faith, family, flag, respect for people in all social classes.

It’s also just a fact that Democrats have done little or nothing to address this problem. To do so would be painful. That would annoy much of the educated class Brooks alludes to, not to mention “the Groups” who exert so much influence over the party. Much easier to just focus on Trump. No kings!

Let’s look at a concrete example: immigration. There’s no doubt Trump’s approach to deportation (as opposed to his program to deport illegal immigrants) has been unpopular. Many of the specific actions his administration has taken on deportations have landed poorlywith voters and given them a sense that many of the deportations are unfair and arbitrary. As a result, while immigration remains Trump’s best issue, he is now underwater in polling averages on the issue.

Voters clearly feel Trump has overreached on the issue and is not doing deportation right. But what about the Democrats? Do Democrats want to deport anyone? Do they have an immigration policy that goes beyond just opposing everything Trump does? Voters can be forgiven for not thinking so. That’s why Democrats have an incredibly abysmal rating on the issue. Trump may be slightly underwater on immigration (4 points in the Nate Silver average) but Democrats are an astonishing 58 points net negative (19 percent positive vs. 77 percent negative) on the issue in a recent poll of battleground districts from Impact Research.

The same could be said for a number of other issues—from DEI and transgender issues to energy policy and government bureaucracy—where Democrats are much more animated by opposing everything Trump and the Republicans stand for than by articulating what theystand for in a way that meets voters, especially working-class voters, where they are. In a profound way, too many voters just aren’t buying what they’re selling. Democrats need to sell voters something new; just yelling at (or in preferred Democratic jargon, “fighting”) Trump all the time and changing little else won’t cut it.

The scale of the challenge is well-illustrated by new data from Nate Silver. Silver took the Catalist data and did something I did a lot in the aftermath of the 2020 election. He calls it using the “net contribution to popular vote margin” or NCPVM to measure election-to-election change; in my earlier analyses I called it the CDM for “contribution to Democratic margin”. But it’s exactly the same concept and math.

The idea is very simple. To calculate the NCPVM/CDM for a given demographic in a given election, multiply the election’s proportion of voters in that demographic group (which reflects both that group’s underlying size and its election-specific turnout rate) by the group’s Democratic margin in that election. These results can then be compared across elections to see how demographic groups change in their contribution to the overall Democratic margin and therefore drive election-to-election margin change.

Silver has helpfully done this for a number of key demographic groups. His aim was to show “how the electoral math flipped against Democrats” and turned a winning coalition into a losing one. I think his results are quite illuminating and do indeed illustrate the startling change in electoral math and the scale of the Democrats’ challenge. (Frankly, I stopped using CDM because I worried it was a bit too arcane for most readers but I am hopeful that Silver’s analysis will help popularize this very useful metric.)

Here are some of Silver’s tables:

And finally:

The final column in Silver’s tables shows the net swing by demographic group 2012-2024. But of course you can use Silver’s data to compare any two elections (e.g., 2020-2024) to enrich the story. But generally the following is true, as Silver says:

[O]verall, Democrats look like a party that took for too much for granted: that Black voters would continue to vote for them at near-unanimous rates, that Hispanics and Asian American voters were solidly in their coalition rather than often being swing voters, that Gen Z voters (particularly Gen Z men) would be as liberal as the Millennials that came of age under Obama, and that the rising share of college-educated voters would offset any other problems. Democrats simply don’t have a coalition that adds up to 50 percent—plus whatever additional margin they need in the Electoral College—any longer. To the extent they see elections as a demographic numbers game, they need to go back to the drawing board.

Back to the drawing board indeed. “No Kings” is not enough; it’s just another Democratic mirage fooling them into thinking a new slogan and more anti-Trump demonstrations will get them to the promised land. It won’t so that land will continue to shimmer tantalizingly in the distance. But wake up Democrats, it’s just a mirage.

The following article by Democratic political consultant Douglas Schoen, is cross-posted from The Hill:

Immigration may be one of President Trump’s strongest issues, but recent polling data suggests that the administration’s tactics are facing growing opposition, potentially turning one of Trump’s strengths into a vulnerability.

Put another way, as protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement efforts rage in Los Angeles and other cities, Americans increasingly disapprove of Trump’s response, even if they also do not support the civil unrest.

Indeed, a plurality (47 percent) of Americans disapprove of Trump’s decision to deploy the Marines, versus 34 percent who approve, according to YouGov polling.

As it relates to the president’s decision to federalize the California National Guard and deploy them against the protestors, a similar 45 percent of Americans disapprove, while 38 percent approve, the same poll shows.

Those views, combined with the fact that it’s incredibly hard to argue, as the administration has, that the protests pose a credible threat to the United States, make it more likely that support for Trump’s approach will further decline.

After a U.S. District Court ruled that Trump’s use of the National Guard was illegal, an appeals court reversed that decision, letting the order remain in place for now.

To be sure, Americans also take a dim view of the protests themselves, something Axios described as a continuation of a historical trend.

By a 9-point margin (45 percent to 36 percent), Americans disapprove of the protests in Los Angeles, and there is a virtual tie on whether people believe the protests are “mostly peaceful” (38 percent) or “mostly violent” (36 percent).

Predictably, Democrats (58 percent) are more supportive of the protests than Republicans (15 percent), although a plurality of independents (41 percent) disapprove.

In some ways, the administration should have foreseen Americans’ hesitancy when it comes to using the military to enforce immigration policies, even those that had widespread support.

Immediately after Trump’s inauguration, 66 percent of Americans supported deporting illegal migrants, but only 38 percent supported involving the military, according to Ipsos.

To that end, despite mixed feelings over the protests, the administration’s recent hardline rhetoric and policies are beginning to weigh on perceptions of Trump’s handling of immigration more broadly.

In early March, Trump had a plus-13 net approval on immigration (53 percent to 40 percent) according to Economist/YouGov polling.

That same poll, conducted as the situation in Los Angeles deteriorated and Trump federalized the National Guard, shows Trump’s net approval on immigration shrinking to plus-4 (49 percent to 45 percent).

Moreover, the more recent poll reveals that a plurality (47 percent) of Americans, including a 44 percent plurality of independents, believe that Trump’s approach to immigration is “too harsh.”

Other polls are even more negative for the White House.

A recent Quinnipiac poll, also conducted as the protests in Los Angeles began in earnest, shows Trump’s approval on immigration actually underwater, with just 43 percent of registered voters approving, versus a majority (54 percent) disapproving.

To be clear, this is not to say that Americans are suddenly against tougher immigration policies. As the data shows, Americans remain broadly supportive of many of Trump’s policies.

For example, there is near-universal support (87 percent) for deporting migrants who commit violent crimes, and a plurality (47 percent) of Americans support deportations for migrants who commit non-violent crimes, per the aforementioned Economist/YouGov poll.

Rather, this is to make the point that when the administration takes an extreme approach or acts hastily, it does so without broader support among American voters.

The same poll reveals widespread opposition to deporting migrants married to U.S. citizens (66 percent) and those brought here as children (61 percent).

A majority (54 percent) of Americans also opposes deporting migrants with young children born in the U.S., even if the parents are in the country illegally.

Similarly, 57 percent believe the administration is making mistakes in who it is deporting, while 74 percent say the government should make sure no mistakes are made in who is deported, even if it drags out the process.

Taken together, the polling data should serve as a warning to both the administration and the Democrats.

For the White House and Trump, heavy-handed deportation policies risk undermining support for what is his strongest issue. They should recalibrate their approach and tailor it narrowly, so that not every single immigrant is in their crosshairs.

Few Americans, outside of the far left, would have an issue if the administration stuck to its policy of deporting migrants who commit crimes, and it would be a losing issue for Democrats to stand in the way.

At the same time, Americans do broadly support many of Trump’s policies, and he was elected in large part because of his promise to remove violent migrants.

Last Summer, a Democratic consulting firm published a survey which noted that, if former President Biden were reelected, the top two concerns Americans had were that the border would be wide open (51 percent), and crime would be out of control, threatening police and businesses (50 percent).

Instead of blindly opposing all of Trump’s immigration policies, Democrats should consider this their “Sister Souljah” moment. They can affirm their support for deporting violent criminals, advance their own pathway to citizenship for some migrants, and double down on support for law and order.

Ultimately, given the salience of this issue, it is likely that whichever side internalizes the polling data and adjusts its approach first stands to benefit politically. It just remains to be seen whether Trump or Democrats are willing to do so.