The death of Jimmy Carter brings a much-needed reminder that American presidents, including Democrats, have on occasion provided object lessons in integrity, decency and compassion. In fact, it’s hard to identify another American President who cared more about human suffering and did more, post-presidency, to help alleviate it. Carter was not an impressive president in terms of concrete reforms that were enacted during his one term. And he was brutally shellacked by Reagan in 1980. And like President Biden, another decent man, who got more done in his one term than Carter, he was undone by inflation (as well as the Iran hostage crisis). I can still remember the SNL parody in which Dan Akroyd, playing President Carter, evoked laughter with the rant, “Inflation is our friend.” And that’s a point worth engraving on the portal of the DNC’s headquarters: “Inflation is a Democrat-killer.” Democrats need a more forceful strategy for fighting against it, so come what may, they at least appear to be fighting it with substantial reforms. Pretending it doesn’t exist did not work out well for Carter or Biden. His shortcomings notwithstanding, President Carter will be rightly revered for his fundamental decency, commitment to peace (Nobel Peace Prize winner) and humanitarian works, in the starkest possible contrast to the incoming president-elect.

At The National Catholic Reporter,  Michael Sean Winters probes the question, “Can Catholics save the Democrats?,” and writes:  “It is not a new question. I wrote a book about it in 2008: Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats. There was overlap in my diagnosis then with the assessments from Judis, Teixeira and Hunter this year. But Catholic social teaching contains a moral imperative that more secular diagnoses lack: The Gospel compels us to stand with the marginalized and to be at least suspicious of the wealthy and the powerful. In 2024, it became painfully obvious that the Democrats are now the party of the well-to-do and the privileged, and that is no place for a Christian….So, Catholics, do you want to stand with those who claim to speak for the marginalized, or do you actually want to identify with the marginalized?….What is more, Catholic social teaching provides a morally coherent set of ideas and beliefs that would help the Democrats embrace more liberal economic policies and avoid more extreme cultural ones.” Catholic and Black Baptist Churches are the two religious constituencies which express the most concern about poverty and economic injustice, so Winters has a point, although Catholics can also be found among the most hard-hearted right-wingers.

Winters continues, “Pope Francis famously said that neoliberal economics is “an economy that kills.”….The pope has also made clear that Christians cannot harbor any animus to anyone, that the church must welcome everyone. He is well-known for hosting transgender sex workers…..But he also has condemned gender ideology. Welcoming someone does not require subscribing to their ideology. The Democrats’ problem on the transgender issue was not really with people who are transgender. It is with the way academics and others demand that people discuss, or not discuss, issues surrounding transgender ideology….The Democrats would never embrace the pope’s fierce opposition to abortion, but they might recognize that someone of his moral seriousness should have all of his moral convictions respected, even if they can’t be shared. Nor, in America, could we embrace the fullness of Catholic social teaching’s understanding of how an economy should work. But we could move in that direction. Same for just war theory….The Catholic Church from before the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council might not be of much help in building a national mythos broad enough to enlist the support of most Americans. But 60 years of interreligious dialogue since the close of Vatican II has provided at least some Catholic thinkers with the ability to engage those with different theological and ideological starting points, and build common understandings….Here, then, are the essential ingredients for a Democratic Party that can win national elections:

• Articulate an economic populism that appeals to voters and craft policies that will improve the economic prospects of working-class Americans.
• Moderate its hardline, academic-driven approach to cultural issues.
• And help fashion a national narrative that is capacious enough to embrace the hopes of all Americans.”

In similar vein check out “How the left can get its mojo back: Listen to working-class people of faith” by Nathaniel Manderson, who writes at Salon: “Everyone is trying to figure out what happened in the wake of the November election and what needs to be done to getting this country back on track. My advice is simple. Listen to the working-class people who are struggling, especially the folks at the bottom of the economic ladder, and even more specifically working-class people of faith. For all his hypocrisy and all his flaws, Donald Trump knew how to listen. Most liberals don’t….The working-class people of faith I’m talking about are blue-collar folks of all races, colors and backgrounds who tend to believe in something bigger than themselves. They have been drifting further right ever since Trump came into the picture, while the left, as I see it, has lost touch with what the Democratic Party used to stand for in word and deed. Contemporary liberals seem baffled that they’re losing working-class people of faith to Trump….when I see working-class people of faith who believe they are being ignored or overlooked by the structures of power in our society, I completely understand their desire either to stay out off politics altogether — or try to blow it up, by voting for the guy who seems intent on disrupting the system….While I realize that “woke” has become a right-wing cliché, that has happened for a reason. Liberal need to “woke” themselves  and start to recognize that they have lost the support of working-class people of faith because they stopped listening and speaking to them, and only show them contempt rather than respect. There are a lot of us, and we are not deplorable. We are tired, broke, hard-working Americans, and we feel ourselves losing. Listening to us is the only way to reclaim the integrity of liberal values, and the pathway to reclaiming the American dream.”

Ronald Brownstein explains on camera how “Trump Is About to Betray his Rural Supporters” at Local 3 News. Brownstein also has a paywall article, “Many Trump voters still have doubts about him. Can he hold them?” at CNN Politics. And here’s a stub of another paywalled Brownstein article, “The Potential Backlash to Trump Unbound: A returning president who expects to govern without constraints leaves his opponents hoping to benefit from the blowback” at The Atlantic: “Donald trump will return to office facing far fewer constraints than when he entered the White House in 2017. The political, legal, institutional, and civic forces that restrained and often frustrated Trump during his first term have all palpably weakened. That will be a mixed blessing for him and for the Republican Party….There’s less chance that forces inside or outside his administration will thwart Trump’s marquee campaign proposals, such as mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, big tariffs on imports, and sweeping rollbacks of climate and other environmental regulations. But there will also be fewer obstacles to the kind of polarizing ideas that got stopped during Trump’s first term. On numerous occasions, his own aides intervened to prevent the president from, for example, deploying the military to shoot racial-justice protesters, firing missiles into Mexico against drug-cartel facilities without authorization from the Mexican government, or potentially quitting NATO. Republicans in Congress thwarted parts of his agenda, as when senators blocked his attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The courts ruled against some policies, such as separating the children of undocumented migrants from their parents at the southern border….This time, Trump’s fate will be much more in his own hands. If he can deliver greater economic stability for working families, while avoiding too many firefights on militant MAGA priorities, strategists in both parties agree that he will be in a strong position to consolidate the gains he’s made among traditionally Democratic constituencies, such as Black, Latino, and younger white men.”

An excerpt of “The Democrats Have a Crime Problem. Blame the Media. How news coverage fuels the widespread, misguided perception that crime is up and cities are unsafe” by John Pfaff at The New Republic: “In Democrats’ seemingly endless election postmortems—and in the postmortems on the postmortems—a persistent theme has been to blame the reddening of blue states like New York and New Jersey on crime in their big cities. On Pod Save America, the political commentator Ezra Klein emphasized the importance of taking crime seriously as a factor in voters’ decisions. To explain why he wasn’t surprised by blue states’ “sharp red shift,” he said: “Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them, they are furious. And this idea that, like … ‘Crime is actually down, this is all just Fox News’—like, shut the fuck up with that.” Klein argued that when it comes to crime and criminal justice policy, fact-checking is a political dead end for Democrats. Instead, Democrats need to “talk to some people who live near you” and grasp “the sense of disorder rising”—a disorder fueled by migrants, homeless encampments, turnstile jumping, and crime in general. In San Francisco, he noted, “the fury is overwhelming.” As evidence, he pointed to the losses of reform prosecutors and the defeat of San Francisco Mayor London Breed….At bottom, Klein’s claim was that it’s bad politics to respond to people’s fears about crime by saying that crime is actually down (even though it is) or by pointing out that their fears are the product of misleading press coverage (even though they are). In other words, facts don’t matter, the vibes do, and we need to govern in response to the vibes….Crime is not like inflation, a phenomenon everyone experiences because everyone buys stuff. Instead, crime is densely concentrated geographically and among certain people, in the areas that suffer the most from poverty, unemployment, and government disinvestment.” Read more here.

Laura Jadeed shares some insights regarding “How Democrats Can Win Back the White Working Class: Moving left on economic issues may be the key to winning over blue-collar voters of all races” at New Lines Magazine, including: “If rising enthusiasm for unionization is any indication, the white working class is already more progressive than most pundits think. Support for unions — which culture war proponents have tried to brand as “un-American” for their Marxist and socialist roots — has gone from 48% in 2008 to 70% this year. While Democrats are still more likely to support unionization than Republicans, the majority of low-income Republicans now believe that America’s decades-long trend of decreasing unionization is bad for workers. While the proportion of unionized American jobs has remained at around 10% since 2021, union election petitions filed increased by 53% — from 1,638 to 2,510 — between 2021 and 2022 alone, suggesting that it is anti-union regulations, not worker preferences, that keep the number of union jobs from rising higher. Recent surveys suggest that working-class voters support progressive economic policies when the proposals are stripped of liberal jargon; a July poll in swing states showed that 59% of voters without a college degree support free college education, 63% support single payer healthcare, and 76% support a cap on rent increases. This may help explain why a quarter of white voters for President Barack Obama without a high school diploma defected to Donald Trump in 2016. These candidates have little in common but both effectively used the language of economic populism.”

In “Teamsters president reveals how ‘arrogant’ VP Harris lost the party, and the vote,” Joe Dwinell writes at The Boston Herald: “Democrats have an ego problem, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien says….The head of the nation’s largest union said the party that once stood for the working class has “somehow lost their way” and it just cost them the election….He told the Herald Tuesday that the party of AOC — New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and VP Kamala Harris failed to grasp today’s political climate….“They feel it’s a birthright that they would get our support,” he said. “It’s troubling. They can’t dictate how voters should think….“It’s the fault of some Democrats who just forgot where they came from,” the Boston native added. “They need to be a little humble about it.”….The Herald reached out to O’Brien on Christmas Eve as his interview with Tucker Carlson was going viral. In that sitdown, O’Brien confirmed he was told by Harris pre-election that she wasn’t going to abide by the Teamsters’ full set of questions and answers….That roundtable, held after President Biden announced he wasn’t going to seek reelection, was cut short with the VP only answering a quarter of their 16 questions. Trump answered all of them, the New York Post added. ….“On the fourth question, one of her operatives or one of her staff slips a note in front of me — ‘This will be the last question.’ And it was 20 minutes earlier than the time it was going to end,” O’Brien told Carlson….“And her declaration of the way out was, ‘I’m going to win with you or without you,’’ O’Brien added….“Damn. I thought I was arrogant. That’s really arrogant,” Carlson responded.”

The following article, “Americans are unhappy with the state of health care and insurance” by Monica Potts, Cooper Burton, Holly Fong and Amina Brown, is cross-posted from abcnews/538:

When Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect in the Dec. 4 murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was arrested and taken into a Pennsylvania courthouse in an orange jumpsuit, he turned to the crowd of reporters and onlookers on the street and yelled that his arrest was “an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience.”

He was presumably referring to Americans’ experiences with the health care system, and the public reaction to Thompson’s murder has put a fine point on just how many Americans are very unhappy with it. When news about the predawn, execution-style shooting in Manhattan broke, the reaction online was largely driven not by sympathy for Thompson, but by Americans’ frustrations with the health care system and insurance industry — as a flood of social media users shared stories of denied health insurance claims and health care costs spinning out of control.

In fact, the shooting came at a time when health care seemed to be experiencing a bit of a surge in importance among Americans after the election. The share of registered voters who named it as the most important issue facing the country in YouGov/The Economist tracking polls had gradually declined from around 10 to around 7 percent throughout 2024, and even fewer, 4 percent, said it was the top issue specifically in determining their vote in the election. But after the election, that number has gone back up to between 8 and 11 percent.

A YouGov poll last week also found that more Americans, 49 percent, had an unfavorable view of the American health care system than the 42 percent who had a favorable one. Other polling suggests that Americans are as unhappy as they ever have been in recent years with the current state of health care. And while many Americans pointed fingers at the opposing party for the problems they see, more than 6 in 10 overall agreed that pharmaceutical and health insurance companies, as well as corporate executives like Thompson, were to blame for problems in the American health care system.

The U.S. remains unique among its peer nations in relying on a for-profit health insurance system and, as Mangione’s own writings alluded to, many Americans have expressed rage at a system that can deny coverage for people’s medical treatments while making shareholders and CEOs very rich. Despite decades of presidents trying to ensure universal access to health insurance, about 8 percent of Americans remained uninsured as of last year, and a higher percentage, about a quarter of American adults, said they or a family member had struggled to afford health care over the past year, whether they were insured or not.

By and large, Americans are unhappy with the costs of care and often find their insurance difficult to use. The share who rated the quality of health care in this country as “excellent” or “good” was just 44 percent in Gallup’s annual health and health care survey, conducted Nov. 6-20, its lowest point since 2001, when Gallup began asking the question. Even fewer, 28 percent, said the same about health care coverage — i.e., what insurance programs do — the lowest it has been since 2008, two years before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the signature Obama-era legislation that overhauled health insurance by expanding Medicaid, requiring health insurance companies to cover certain levels of care, subsidizing premiums for low- and middle-income families and banning practices like refusing to cover preexisting conditions.

A growing share of Americans in Gallup’s surveys seem to want the government to take action to improve health care access: 62 percent said it was the federal government’s responsibility to ensure all Americans have health care, the highest it’s been since 2007. Republicans are the least likely to agree with this sentiment — 32 percent said so, compared to 90 percent of Democrats and 65 percent of independents — but those numbers have increased by around 20 percentage points among all three groups over the past decade or so.

Perhaps surprisingly, YouGov polling found that around two in three Americans are at least somewhat satisfied with their health insurance plans — but that topline figure doesn’t capture a lot of nuance. For example, 89 percent of those with Medicaid were satisfied with their health coverage, compared to 75 percent who are covered by an employer-sponsored plan. Unsurprisingly, those who had had an insurance claim denied were also more likely to be dissatisfied with their coverage.

And despite many being mostly satisfied with the plans they have, a high number of Americans still experience problems using them. KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization, found in a survey last year that 58 percent said that they had at least some trouble using their insurance in the previous year — including issues like denied claims or difficulty accessing in-network providers — and nearly half of whom said their biggest problem was not resolved to their satisfaction. Overall, 18 percent of Americans with health insurance had experienced a denied claim, and those were more common among people with private or employer-sponsored insurance. Around a quarter of those who’d had a claim denied suffered serious consequences, like a decline in health or not receiving recommended medical care.

Plus, around half of insured adults had at least some difficulty understanding components of their health insurance. Unsurprisingly, around 9 in 10 Americans said they support more government rules to require companies to make insurance easier to use, such as by maintaining up-to-date provider directories.

It’s in this context that President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican Party will go into office with sweeping but vague plans to overhaul health care — including to potentially overturn the Affordable Care Act. But while replacing the law has long been something of a GOP rallying cry, it’s not clear how the public feels about it. Gallup found that Americans are fairly split on whether they’d prefer a system that relies on private insurance (49 percent) or a government-run health care system (46 percent). The ACA itself remains highly polarizing but popular among the public more than a decade after its passage.

Fifty-four percent of Americans in Gallup’s most recent survey approved of the legislation, near the record high of 55 percent reached in 2017 and 2020. Specific policies under the ACA have broader support. For example, a YouGov poll from Dec. 5 found that a plurality, 46 percent, wanted government-subsized health insurance, like that provided by the ACA, to be expanded, while 19 percent said it should remain as is and only 13 percent said it should be reduced. That included 53 percent of Republicans in favor of keeping or expanding government-subsidized insurance and only 25 percent in favor of reducing it.

— Monica Potts

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

In the wake of the Democrats’ drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you’d assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions.

Questions like: Is America a “white supremacist” society? Is it racist to question levels of immigration? Are citing one’s personal pronouns necessary? Is anyone who questions the differences between trans women from biological women a bigot who should be expunged from polite society? For each of these questions, the answer for the overwhelming majority of Americans is an obvious no. But in elite Democratic circles, it’s a different story. For a party pondering its unpopularity, you might think that this gap would be a good place to start.

Well, if the six weeks since the election is anything to go by, you’d be wrong. Instead, much of the party is maneuvering to change as little as possible on the cultural front. Why? Because many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues to be real issues. Instead, they see them as fictions, distractions, or expressions of bigotry that are to be opposed, not indulged.

Consider Greg Casar, the new chair of the powerful Congressional Progressive Caucus. In a recent interview with NBC News, Casar urged the Democrats to “re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up.” He said that “when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did—with Republican help.” Casar said that “the Republican Party obsession” with culture war issues is “driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”

Massachusetts Democratic representative Jim McGovern echoed Casar’s thoughts recently with this rhetoric about Republicans: “They want to blame trans people? Guess what? Trans people aren’t the ones raising people’s grocery prices. Big corporations are.” Republicans, he added, “want to blame immigrants. . . . Immigrants aren’t the ones denying health insurance claims. . . . it’s the billion-dollar insurance companies that do that.”

Get it? These aren’t real issues. They’re just distractions ginned up by Republicans for nefarious political purposes. The logical conclusion of this argument is that Democrats don’t need to actually change their position on any “culture war” issue. Instead, they just need to change the subject and talk about mustache-twirling corporate villains.

Many senior figures on the party’s left have skipped discussions of cultural issues altogether, instead publishing progressive policy wish lists. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont thinks Democrats should talk more about billionaires. Rep. Ro Khanna is betting on a “New Economic Deal” that would emphasize high-paying jobs for the middle class. Senator Chris Murphy thinks the key to a Democratic revival is advocating for the breakup of corporate power. Other Democrats suggest a relentless focuson “kitchen-table” issues. (Ah, what would Democrats do without that fabled kitchen table?) The general idea is that talking more about economic issues, typically in a populist vein, will win back the working class and obviate the need to change anything else.

Or perhaps the real problem, some Democrats argue, is that the party hasn’t communicated its wonderful positions adeptly and thoroughly enough. With the right spin, maybe their positions on everything, from the economy to transgender issues and immigration would be popular. This seems to be the view of the two leading candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Ken Martin, head of Minnesota’s Democratic Party (technically its Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), has a10-point plan that calls for a “massive narrative and branding project.” Ben Wikler, head of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, believes Democrats must “become the narrator” of their own brand.

This all seems reasonable enough but, cutting through the verbiage, nowhere do these candidates for the DNC chair concede the party’s cultural vulnerabilities. When reading their pitches for the powerful post, it’s as if those problems don’t exist.

The outgoing DNC chair takes things even further. Since the election, Jaime Harrison has strenuously resisted the idea Democrats should abandon “identity politics,” saying they represent how “people of color” see Democrats fighting for them. Invoking his status as a black man, he remarked: “That is my identity. . . . it is not politics. It is my life. And the people that I need in the party, that I need to stand up for me, have to recognize that. You cannot run away from that.” In other words, Democrats should double down on so-called culture war issues like race and gender that are so off-putting to voters. This is a strange recommendation since, as Democrats have become ever more associated with identity politics, they have been doing ever more poorly among non-white voters, especially non-white working-class voters. Their advantage among the latter group has declined by more than half since 2012.

Read more…

Boston College historian and sub stacker Heather Cox Richardson comments on the Musk-Trump budget resolution meltdown: “Passing continuing resolutions to fund the government is usually unremarkable, but this fight showed some lines that will stretch into the future….First of all, it showed the unprecedented influence of billionaire private individual Elon Musk over the Republicans who in 2025 will control the United States government. Musk has a strong financial interest in the outcome of discussions, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he had included Musk as well as President-elect Trump in the negotiation of the original bipartisan funding bill….Then Musk blew up the agreement by issuing what was an apparent threat to fund primary challengers to any Republican who voted for it. He apparently scuttled the measure on his own hook, since Trump took about thirteen hours to respond to his torpedoing it….Musk expressed willingness to leave the government unfunded for a month, apparently unconcerned that a shutdown would send hundreds of thousands of government workers deemed nonessential into temporary leave without pay. This would include about 800,000 civilian employees of the Pentagon, about 17,000 people from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and those who staff the nation’s national parks, national monuments, and other federal sites….Federal workers considered essential would have to continue to work without pay. These essential workers include air traffic controllers and federal law enforcement officers. Military personnel would also have to continue to work without pay.”

At Common Dreams, Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, the nation’s largest grassroots-funded progressive organization, argues that “The core of that reform message” Democrats deploy should being with: “Banning Dark Money in Primaries: Working-class voters have no reason to trust a party whose primaries are shaped by billionaire-funded super PACs. Eliminating dark money ensures that our candidates win based on voter support, not corporate influence. We’ve seen too many examples where races are flooded with big money to crush popular (progressive) candidates….Investing in State Parties and Grassroots Organizing: The first step to rebuilding working-class coalitions is investing in organizing infrastructure—direct voter outreach based on authentic solutions and supporting grassroots leadership in every state. A 50-state strategy means strengthening state parties and empowering organizers, not handing millions to out-of-touch consultants….Committing to a Progressive Platform: To win back working families, Democrats must champion and deliver on the issues that impact their lives—Medicare expansion, living wages, affordable housing, union rights, and climate justice, to name a few. These policies are not only popular; they are essential to solving the economic pain fueling Trump’s appeal….Increasing Transparency and Accountability: For too long, DNC resources have been squandered on expensive media buys and elite political insiders. A reformed DNC must be accountable to its base and transparent about how it spends its resources—resources that belong to grassroots Democrats.”

Dustin Guastella, research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623, writes at The Guardian  that “it will not be enough for the left to protest the billionaire economy. An honest assessment of progressive liabilities is in order. Those on the left must confront the cultural elite that has pushed the party away from workers on all sorts of non-economic issues. While Trump and his billionaires won’t be able to adequately represent the economic interests of the working class, liberals must recognize that their party doesn’t represent their values. The Democrats captured by highly credentialed clerics has led them to embrace the cultural values of an aristocratic elite. From crime, to climate, to gender politics, and the border, mainstream liberal opinion is much further from the views of workers than many liberals are willing to admit. And this too is a class story….s the Democratic party transformed itself from the party of the New Deal to the party of Nafta it embraced a new constituency: progressive professionals. Since Bill Clinton, liberals presided over the offshoring of high-wage blue-collar jobs in manufacturing. They watched as abandoned factories, and the towns that once relied on them, slowly oxidized. As the Rust belt stretched across the heartland, Democrats helped to subsidize the growth of a new elite primarily concentrated on the coasts. They pushed for policies that pulled the economy away from blue-collar industries and toward more “dynamic” sectors primarily in information technologies.”

Guastella continues, “They fashioned a “new economy” through public policy, and attracted a new constituency as a result. They hoped that as high-wage jobs disappeared, they would be replaced by new high-tech careers; as the party lost blue-collar voters, they invested in white-collar professionals. They got what they wished for….the folkways, mannerisms, and tastes of salaried high-income professionals have come to define the party, and now serve as a powerful repellent for working-class voters. Indeed, not only has the embrace of the knowledge class led to the economic neglect of the working class but the aggressive advocacy of professional class cultural values has played a major role in pushing working-class voters away….Simply put, progressive elites have remade the party to reflect the cultural and aesthetic preferences of blue-blooded liberals, and then made these preferences the priority. Ironically, some highly educated Democrats now embody the definition of “conservative” in their defense of these “woke” priorities: they defend the status of the affluent and the educated, the stand for the preservation of a profoundly powerful elite. If Democrats have any hope of winning back working-class voters they will need to confront this liberal aristocracy as much as they protest the corporate money grab of Republican plutocrats….There is promising evidence that workers may be more progressive on economic issues than in the recent past, and in relation to their professional-class peers. As a forthcoming analysis from the Certified Workers’ Compensation Professional program shows, workers do embrace progressive economic positions. Meaning, those on the left have an opportunity to develop an appealing populist economic program. Such a program would confront the very structure of the job market, ending mass layoffs, automation, and offshoring. It would advocate for rebuilding the industrial heartland, providing high-wage jobs for workers at all levels of education, not just for professionals in “smart” coastal hubs. And it would seek to strengthen union rights, revitalize social programs, lower costs and improve education.”

The following post, “MAGA Republicans Dodge Questions About Their Own Party’s Plans To Gut Social Safety Net” by Emine Yucel is cross posted from Talking Points Memo:

Some House Republicans in recent weeks have not exactly been shy about their interest in reviving the party’s longtime passion for gutting the social safety net in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection and the coming Republican trifecta.

Reports have surfaced indicating that some congressional Republicans are in talks with Trump advisers about making cuts to programs like Medicaid and food stamps to offset the cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Others are openly suggesting that Medicare and Social Security may be on the chopping block as part of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s performative venture into government spending cuts through the new Department of Government Efficiency.

But MAGA Republicans on Capitol Hill who recently spoke to TPM were unwilling to be pinned down on the issue.

When asked if he was supportive of the cuts to federal safety net programs being discussed by members of the Republican conference and DOGE enthusiasts, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) told TPM that they would look at cuts at other programs first.

“The low hanging fruit is the DoD, which has failed an audit for the seventh year in a row,” Norman said last week. “Low hanging fruit is the DEI things in it.”

Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) expressed a similar sentiment.

“I think there’s so much fraud and abuse in health care, so we can have trillions of offsets for reconciliation just in healthcare,” Spartz told TPM.

The “fraud in health care” line has become a go-to for Republicans in recent weeks. When Trump announced that failed Republican Senate candidate and TV doctor Mehmet Oz would serve as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid in his incoming administration, he said Oz would “cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency.” Since then, Republicans on the Hill have been using the rhetorically creative line to discuss potential spending cuts to tackle in the new Congress, emboldened by the supposed Musk/Ramaswamy mandate to cut down government spending by $2 trillion.

“You look at improper payments — that’s a big issue — where the government sends money to people fraudulently in Medicare, in Medicaid, where they send money fraudulently in unemployment insurance,” House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY) told CNN in an interview. “All of these improper payments are also on the table.”

“Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, you got to look at all that,” Norman told TPM when asked about the DOGE agenda. “Farm bill, you got to look at it.”

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If anyone needs further corroboration that Trump emphatically does not have a ‘mandate,’ this headline from The Hill should help: “Less than half of Americans say opinion of Trump is favorable: Poll” The article, by Tara Suter, says in part: “Less than half of Americans said their opinion of President-elect Trump is favorable, according to a recent poll….In a Reuters/Ipsos poll, about 41 percent stated their opinion of the president-elect is favorable. About 55 percent stated their opinion of the president-elect is unfavorable.” It’s only one poll, yada yada, and he hasn’t even taken office yet. In a saner political arena, however, the poll would buck up Democrats and maybe even discourage more groveling on the part of Republican elected officials. However, Suter also notes that “President Biden did not fare well when it came to public opinion in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, garnering an approval of 38 percent,” so let’s not all get on the high horse just yet. Suter notes, further, that “The Reuters/Ipsos poll took place Dec. 12-15, featuring 1,031 people and a 3 percentage point margin of error.” OK, not a huge sample, and it’s only one poll. Given all available polling evidence, Trump would be smart to pull off the political equivalent of a football reverse, and appoint Democrats to his inner circle, just to show that he is more bridge-builder than wall-maker. And he probably ought to give some serious thought to dumping his so yesterday dead weight staff and advisors, those charmers who are hell-bent on revenge and retribution, which are not  public priorities.

All of the GOP’s problems notwithstanding, “After the 2024 election, Democrats are at a steep disadvantage in the Senate: Polarization and incumbent losses make it harder for them to win the chamberr,” according to 538 writer G. Elliot Morris, who shares this grim outlook: “Much of the coverage of the outcome of the 2024 election has focused on how President-elect Donald Trump will wield executive power to pursue his political goals over the next four years. Trump, however, will not be alone in Washington: Voters elected Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate as well. The two chambers could help Trump levy taxes on imports, close the U.S. border and begin the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. And with 53 seats in the Senate, in particular, Republicans will be able to approve a long list of Trump’s judicial nominees, approve (or withdraw from) any treaties and, of course, sign off on his Cabinet nominees….The coming, sudden U-turn in the policy output of the U.S. government is a reminder that elections have serious consequences in the short term. But the impact of the 2024 election could be felt for years in another important way: It may have relegated Democrats to long-term minority status in the Senate. According to a new 538 analysis, barring significant changes in the party’s coalition, it will be tough for them to win a majority in coming elections — and implausible, verging on impossible, to win the 60-seat majority needed to overcome a filibuster (assuming that parliamentary maneuver isn’t abolished).” Of course, all bets are off if Trump flunks most of his major tests in his term ahead, which is not beyond the realm of possibility, given his self-defeating opposition to the notion of broadening his support, instead of shrinking it.

“The trickiest problem for Democrats and progressives in the coming months will not be finding a new electoral strategy,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his Washington Post column, “Progressives should defend Biden’s legacy to protect their future: Trump’s victory should not be used to erase Biden’s policy achievements.” Dionne, adds, “There’s plenty of time for that, and the 2024 outcome was close enough to allow multiple paths to the White House. A far more pressing imperative is to prevent Donald Trump’s victory from discrediting Biden’s genuinely impressive accomplishments and the course he set for the country, which was broadly correct….Legacies are not just about bragging rights or a politician’s self-esteem. How a president is judged can affect the direction of policy for decades. Public anger over Herbert Hoover’s mismanagement of the Great Depression opened the way for the dominance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism for a half-century — even when Republicans held power. Frustration over inflation under Jimmy Carter led to Ronald Reagan’s 1980 counterrevolution in favor of lower and less progressive taxes, regulatory restraint, and a celebration of the social role played by wealthy entrepreneurs…the truth about the Biden economy should not be lost in the mire of political defeat and messaging failure. It’s a reality that will make it much easier to defend his domestic policy legacy than it was to stand up for Hoover’s or Carter’s: The economy Biden leaves behind really is in good shape. Unemployment and, now, inflation are both low. The initial effects of Biden’s investment programs have been positive, and their impact will grow over time.”

Ryan Cooper explains how “Democrats Lost the Propaganda War: The party used up about $5 billion on political ads in 2024. There’s a better way” at The American Prospect, and writes that “the Trump campaign was so badly overmatched money-wise that they found a clever technique to maximize their ad spending. There is no price regulation for political ads on streaming services, so super PACs pay the same as campaigns. Streamers, particularly the free ones like Tubi, are also disproportionately used by the working-class, less-white swing demographics, and unlike broadcast or cable, ads can also be microtargeted using the surveillance data the platforms collect. The Trump campaign went hard on this approach, and claims it was dramatically more efficient than Harris’s tsunami of spending. It’s hard to argue with the results….Once again, Trump’s governing approach will benefit his political project. Hollywood can’t wait to consolidate the space, reducing the number of streaming channels and magnifying the data each of the remaining ones has access to. Without congressional legislation—a good bet—the streaming loophole will make super PACs even more powerful, and conservative billionaires are eager to capitalize….Putting this all together: The typical Democratic approach of funneling billions through sporadic ad campaigns on traditional television channels is plainly not working. There are cheaper and more reliable ways to get the party’s messaging in front of persuadable voters, consistently. This would probably require at least partly cracking up the cartel of well-connected party consultants who cream off a large chunk of the spending, as Minnesota Democratic Party chair Ken Martin argues in a case for why he should be chair of the Democratic National Committee….In any case, business makes for an instructive comparison. Does Ford try to convince drivers that it makes trucks for rugged manly men in the American heartland for only a few months every four years? Of course not. They are doing that every minute of every day, on every conceivable communications medium. It’s a big reason why the Ford F-series has been the best-selling line of personal vehicles in this country for the last 47 years straight….The Democrats, by contrast, have not had the same consistency. It’s time to rethink things.”

After looking at various Democratic utterances about dealing with Trump 2.0, I wrote up a brief typology for New York:

The reaction among Democrats to Donald Trump’s return to power has been significantly more subdued than what we saw in 2016 after the mogul’s first shocking electoral win. The old-school “resistance” is dead, and it’s not clear what will replace it. But Democratic elected officials are developing new strategies for dealing with the new realities in Washington. Here are five distinct approaches that have emerged, even before Trump’s second administration has begun.

If you can’t beat ’em, (partially) join ’em

Some Democrats are so thoroughly impressed by the current power of the MAGA movement they are choosing to surrender to it in significant respects. The prime example is Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, the onetime fiery populist politician who is now becoming conspicuous in his desire to admit his party’s weaknesses and snuggle up to the new regime. The freshman and one-time ally of Bernie Sanders has been drifting away from the left wing of his party for a good while, particularly via his vocally unconditional backing for Israel during its war in Gaza. But now he’s making news regularly for taking steps in Trump’s direction.

Quite a few Democrats publicly expressed dismay over Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter, but Fetterman distinguished himself by calling for a corresponding pardon for Trump over his hush-money conviction in New York. Similarly, many Democrats have discussed ways to reach out to the voters they have lost to Trump. Fetterman’s approach was to join Trump’s Truth Social platform, which is a fever swamp for the president-elect’s most passionate supporters. Various Democrats are cautiously circling Elon Musk, Trump’s new best friend and potential slayer of the civil-service system and the New Deal–Great Society legacy of federal programs. But Fetterman seems to want to become Musk’s buddy, too, exchanging compliments with him in a sort of weird courtship. Fetterman has also gone out of his way to exhibit openness to support for Trump’s controversial Cabinet nominees even as nearly every other Senate Democrat takes the tack of forcing Republicans to take a stand on people like Pete Hegseth before weighing in themselves.

It’s probably germane to Fetterman’s conduct that he will be up for reelection in 2028, a presidential-election year in a state Trump carried on November 5. Or maybe he’s just burnishing his credentials as the maverick who blew up the Senate dress code.

Join ’em (very selectively) to beat ’em

Other Democrats are being much more selectively friendly to Trump, searching for “common ground” on issues where they believe he will be cross-pressured by his wealthy backers and more conventional Republicans. Like Fetterman, these Democrats — including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — tend to come from the progressive wing of the party and have longed chafed at the centrist economic policies advanced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and, to some extent, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They’ve talked about strategically encouraging Trump’s “populist” impulses on such issues as credit-card interest and big-tech regulation, partly as a matter of forcing the new president and his congressional allies to put up or shut up.

So the idea is to push off a discredited Democratic Establishment, at least on economic issues, and either accomplish things for working-class voters in alliance with Trump or prove the hollowness of his “populism.”

Colorado governor Jared Solis has offered a similar strategy of selective cooperation by praising the potential agenda of Trump HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as helpfully “shaking up” the medical and scientific Establishment.

Aim at the dead center

At the other end of the spectrum, some centrist Democrats are pushing off what they perceive as a discredited progressive ascendancy in the party, especially on culture-war issues and immigration. The most outspoken of them showed up at last week’s annual meeting of the avowedly nonpartisan No Labels organization, which was otherwise dominated by Republicans seeking to demonstrate a bit of independence from the next administration. These include vocal critics of the 2024 Democratic message like House members Jared Golden, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Ritchie Torres, and Seth Moulton, along with wannabe 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Josh Gottheimer (his Virginia counterpart, Abigail Spanberger, wasn’t at the No Labels confab but is similarly positioned ideologically).

From a strategic point of view, these militant centrists appear to envision a 2028 presidential campaign that will take back the voters Biden won in 2020 and Harris lost this year.

Cut a few deals to mitigate the damage

We’re beginning to see the emergence of a faction of Democrats that is willing to cut policy or legislative deals with Team Trump in order to protect some vulnerable constituencies from MAGA wrath. This is particularly visible on the immigration front; some congressional Democrats are talking about cutting a deal to support some of Trump’s agenda in exchange for continued protection from deportation of DREAMers. Politico reports:

“The prize that many Democrats would like to secure is protecting Dreamers — Americans who came with their families to the U.S. at a young age and have since been protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created by President Barack Obama in 2012.

“Trump himself expressed an openness to ‘do something about the Dreamers’ in a recent ‘Meet the Press’ interview. But he would almost certainly want significant policy concessions in return, including border security measures and changes to asylum law that Democrats have historically resisted.”

On a broader front, the New York Times has found significant support among Democratic governors to selectively cooperate with the new administration’s “mass deportation” plans in exchange for concessions:

“In interviews, 11 Democratic governors, governors-elect and candidates for the office often expressed defiance toward Mr. Trump’s expected immigration crackdown — but were also strikingly willing to highlight areas of potential cooperation.

“Several balanced messages of compassion for struggling migrants with a tough-on-crime tone. They said that they were willing to work with the Trump administration to deport people who had been convicted of serious crimes and that they wanted stricter border control, even as they vowed to defend migrant families and those fleeing violence in their home countries, as well as businesses that rely on immigrant labor.”

Hang tough and aim for a Democratic comeback

While the Democrats planning strategic cooperation with Trump are getting a lot of attention, it’s clear the bulk of elected officials and activists are more quietly waiting for the initial fallout from the new regime to develop while planning ahead for a Democratic comeback. This is particularly true among the House Democratic leadership, which hopes to exploit the extremely narrow Republican majority in the chamber (which will be exacerbated by vacancies for several months until Trump appointees can be replaced in special elections) on must-pass House votes going forward, while looking ahead with a plan to aggressively contest marginal Republican-held seats in the 2026 midterms. Historical precedents indicate very high odds that Democrats can flip the House in 2026, bringing a relatively quick end to any Republican legislative steamrolling on Trump’s behalf and signaling good vibes for 2028.

An excerpt from “What Happened to the Democratic Party? The squalid state of our present political institutions points to a failure of not just individuals but the system as a whole” by Chris Lehman at The Nation:

Two new books make this crisis of institutional atrophy and ideological entropy their central theme. In Left Adrift, the historian Timothy Shenk chronicles the Democratic Party’s path to a working-class dealignment—perhaps the single greatest demographic shift that sparked the rise of Trumpism as a bogus brand of right-wing “populism.” Meanwhile, in The Hollow Parties, the political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld examine the broader drift of both major parties from their traditional mandates of building mass coalitions, promulgating policy agendas to serve their grassroots bases, and recruiting and cultivating leaders with material connections to those bases.

Both books ask how our political parties, which once represented somewhat coherent and wide-ranging coalitions and political ideas, morphed into zombie-like institutions that fundraise and battle over shrinking segments of the electorate while stage-managing random culture-war contretemps in each new election cycle. Both books also wonder if the return to an era of majoritarian party politics has become an unrealizable dream in the blighted 21st century. In past eras of modern liberalism’s history, the central protagonists would have been party leaders, such as Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson, or pivotal movement figures, such as Sidney Hillman or Martin Luther King Jr. But in our own age of retreating governing ambitions and malleable party messaging, it makes a grim kind of sense to foreground the thinking of hired-gun political strategists like Greenberg and Schoen, who have played an outsize role in the steady miniaturization of our public life.

For Shenk, these two men—bitter rivals for clout and clients in the retooling Democratic Party of the Clinton era—understood better than many traditional New Dealers in the party’s leadership caste that a massive, if slow-moving, political realignment was under way: the party’s abandonment of its traditional working-class base and its embrace of a professional, highly educated elite. This turn to a new breed of voters—“Atari Democrats,” as the journalist Chris Matthews called them—marked an ideological transformation in the party as well as a social one: Democrats began to preach a gospel of cultural tolerance and demographic diversity, even as they broke from basic issues of economic fairness. The party’s activist base, now broadly maligned as a backward-looking congeries of “special interests,” were replaced by a cadre of Ivy Leaguers weaned on the fables of a new information economy and avowing a politics of free trade, cheap labor, and a financialized model of national prosperity.

Greenberg, who came of political age during Eugene McCarthy’s incendiary anti-war presidential campaign in 1968, accepted this political shift as it gained traction in the Reagan era. But he did so from a defensive posture, seeking to persuade candidates and clients to echo vintage Democratic populist appeals in a last-ditch bid to arrest the dealignment of working-class voters from the party. Meanwhile, Schoen, a scion of Manhattan privilege, cheerfully welcomed the shift as the new consensus delimiting future Democratic agendas, policy goals, and political campaigns.

Using data gleaned from polls, Greenberg laid out his case for a more social-democratic path to winning back the working-class and suburban “Reagan Democrats” who had helped deliver Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980. In a series of focus-group studies in the suburban Detroit communities of Macomb County, he found many of these voters still receptive to universalist appeals to economic fairness and social-democratic equality—but wary of the racialized remedies and social-engineering planks of the Great Society. Writing in The American Prospect in the early 1990s, Greenberg divined the lineaments of a new “mass party, encompassing the needs of the have-nots and working Americans,” even as Democratic leaders pursued the interests of a new base of professionals and suburbanites. What was needed, Greenberg argued, was a party that “can speak expansively of broad, cross-class issues, such as full employment, tax relief, and health care.” But for that message to come through loud and clear to its target voters, Democrats had to purge “the demons of the 1960s.” As Shenk sums up Greenberg’s prescription for a renewed majoritarian platform in the pinched realities of the Reagan era:

Disillusioned white voters would not listen to what Democrats had to say about economics until the party showed respect for their values. A shift to the center on polarizing social issues was the price of admission for resurrecting the New Deal coalition. [Greenberg] had seen time and again in his work that class wasn’t just a matter of economics. It was an identity, and a fragile one at that. Getting voters to hear its call required turning down the volume in the culture wars.

Greenberg’s analysis was steeped in the anxious postmortems that the party launched after Reagan’s powerful new coalition made strong inroads among Democrats in the 1980s. But the presuppositions behind his counsel reflected a constrained and fast-obsolescing view of working-class politics and interests—and even of who was and who was not in the working class. While plenty of white workers fit into the Macomb model, the country’s working class was also composed of many groups who benefited from the Great Society’s programs. Likewise, the work of the working class was shifting as the service economy grew; the financialization of key sectors caused wage and wealth inequality to spike; and rural Americans were laid low by the farm crisis—a calamity compounded by the deregulation of the savings-and-loan industry. These other constituencies—far more complex and diverse than the ones found in a place like Macomb County—loomed large in the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s insurgent presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. They also served as a reminder that Greenberg’s version of a retrenched New Deal politics risked overlooking the actual makeup of working-class America.

….Meanwhile, class dealignment continued at a prodigious pace during Clinton’s two terms in the White House. Greenberg charted this baleful process closely, but he was largely left exhorting Democratic campaign gurus from the sidelines as Schoen and Penn’s argument won the day and Clintonite neoliberalism became the party’s savvy insider consensus. As the 2016 Trump campaign drew greater and greater support from disenchanted white working-class voters, Greenberg told John Podesta, the head of Hillary Clinton’s campaign that year, “You sound clueless in blue-collar America,” and later announced in The American Prospect that “the Obama years were the critical juncture when Democratic leaders stopped seeing the working class.” As Shenk observes, “Bill Clinton had managed to hold off the shift in the 1990s, but a gap had opened after his presidency that turned into a chasm in 2016.”

Even as the Democrats continued to lose more and more of the working class, Shenk tracks how the Greenberg-Schoen battle went abroad. The consultants’ own practices became global as they took on electoral clients in Israel (Labor and Kadima leader Shimon Peres and his embattled successor, Ehud Barak), Britain (New Labour’s lead apostle Tony Blair), and South Africa—where Greenberg worked with African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, before defecting in the face of mounting ANC corruption and ruling-class complacency to represent the first Black candidate fielded by the country’s traditional white rival party, Democratic Alliance.

Read more here.

In “Is This How Democrats Win Back the Working Class?Embracing populism could help the party build a lasting political coalition—if the Republicans don’t do it first,” Tyler Austin Harper writes at The Atlantic: “The politics of the average American are not well represented by either party right now. On economic issues, large majorities of the electorate support progressive positions: They say that making sure everyone has health-care coverage is the government’s responsibility (62 percent), support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour (62 percent), strongly or somewhat support free public college (63 percent), and are in favor of federal investment in paid family and medical leave  (73 percent). They also support more government regulation of a variety of industries including banking (53 percent), social media (60 percent), pharmaceuticals (68 percent), and artificial intelligence (72 percent). Yet large majorities of this same American public also take conservative positions on social issues: They think the Supreme Court was right to overturn affirmative action (68 percent), agree that trans athletes should compete only on teams that match their gender assigned at birth (69 percent), believe that third-trimester abortions should be illegal in most circumstances (70 percent), and are at least somewhat concerned about the number of undocumented immigrants entering the country (79 percent).” There is not a lot of “buyer’s remorse” on the part of Trump supporters quite yet, but he hasn’t even been inaugurated. Democrats should now focus on getting their own ship in shape, and not waste a lot of time gloating about Trump’s troubles.

Dustin Guastella and Bhaskar Sunkara argue that “The US needs more working-class political candidates” at The Guardian, and write that “there is evidence that people want to vote for workers across the country. A study by the Center for Working-Class Politics found that among working-class voters, hypothetical candidates with elite or upper-class backgrounds performed significantly worse than candidates from humbler backgrounds….Yet, in reality, there were few working-class candidates to vote for. Only 2.3% of Democratic candidates worked exclusively in blue-collar jobs before entering politics. Even if we broaden out the category to professionals like teachers and nurses, the number is still under 6%. Why? Mainly because it’s extremely expensive to run for office. Most workers simply do not have the fundraising networks or the ability to take time away from their jobs to run for office….The lack of working-class representation in government is also one major factor in explaining the dysfunction in our politics and the persistence of economic policies that seem to only benefit the rich. Working-class voters have been cut adrift. Their views and voices are invisible in Washington, and they see no real champions for their interests. One reason these voters are likely to prefer working-class candidates is that these candidates are much more likely to advance an economic agenda that benefits them.” The authors add that Dan Osborne, an independent U.S, U.S. Senate candidate who lost in Nebraska “outperformed Kamala Harris by 14 percentage points, is “starting a new political action committee, Working Class Heroes Fund, to support working-class candidates, something our national politics direly needs.”

Zachary B. Wolf explains “Why hasn’t the US been trying to fix its health insurance problems?” at CNN Politics: “A Gallup poll released this week but conducted before the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, found that most Americans, 62%, think it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure that all Americans have health care coverage. A minority, 36%, said it’s not the government’s responsibility….Gallup has been asking this question for years, and this new data reflects a gradual reversal from 11 years ago, during the troubled rollout of private health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Back then, a minority, 42%, said it was the federal government’s responsibility to make sure people have health coverage, and a majority, 56%, said it was not….There’s a partisan story behind those numbers, since nearly all Democrats, 90%, now say the government is responsible, compared with a little more than two-thirds in 2013. Just about a third of Republicans hold the same view today, although that is up from just 12% who said the government had a responsibility in 2013….The upward shift in Americans who say the government has a responsibility to make sure its citizens have coverage has tracked with a downward shift in satisfaction with the health care system overall in Gallup’s polling….Any number of studies say similar things, that the US pays a lot more per person and as a percentage of its gross domestic product, or GDP, to cover a much smaller portion of its population and achieve a much lower life expectancy – although life expectancy in the USis also affected by gun deaths, suicides and drug overdoses.”

Steve Liesman reports “Majority of Americans are ready to support Trump and large parts of his agenda, says CNBC survey,” but notes that “the public is flashing yellow and red warning lights on some parts of the Trump agenda.”: Despite public support for Trump’s plan to deport large numbers of undocumented immigrants and cutting taxes, “Where the potential agenda gets more contentious is most obviously in President-elect Trump’s plans to pardon those convicted of crimes from the Jan. 6 protest. Just 43% support the move, with 50% opposing it, including 87% of Democrats, 46% of independents and 18% of Republicans. It’s the issue with the single largest Republican opposition. Support for tariffs is also more lukewarm with 27% backing them outright and 24% saying it can be done later in the term. It’s opposed by 42% of respondents….Americans overall are more upbeat about the economic outlook for the second Trump presidency than they were the first. More than half, or 51%, say they expect their personal financial situation to improve, 10 points higher than when he was elected in 2016; the same percentage, 51%, also say they expect the U.S. economy to improve, up 5 points from 2016….There were also gains in the percentage believing they’d be worse off, suggesting Trump is even more polarizing now than he was in his first term.”