“Bernie Sanders is not running for president. But he is drawing larger crowds now than he did when he was campaigning for the White House,” Lauren Gambino writes at The Guardian. “The message has hardly changed. Nor has the messenger, with his shock of white hair and booming delivery. What’s different now, the senator says, is that his fears – a government captured by billionaires who exploit working people – have become an undeniable reality and people are angry…The Vermont senator recalled Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the three wealthiest people on the planet – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – were seated in front of his cabinet nominees in what many viewed as a shocking display of power and influence”…For weeks, voters have been showing up at town halls to vent their alarm and rage over the president’s aggressive power grabs and the Musk-led mass firings of federal workers. But they are also furious at the Democratic leadership, charging that their party spent an entire election season warning of the threat Trump posed to US democracy, and yet now appeared either unable or unwilling to stand up to him…“This isn’t just about Republicans, either. We need a Democratic party that fights harder for us, too,” Ocasio-Cortez said in Arizona, drawing some of the loudest, most sustained applause of the evening. She urged the crowd to help elect candidates “with the courage to brawl for the working class”…According to a memo by Sanders’ longtime adviser, Faiz Shakir, the senator has raised more than $7m from more than 200,000 donors since February, and is drawing crowds 25% to 100% larger than at the height of his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. On Friday, more than 30,000 people attended a rally in Denver – the largest audience Sanders has ever drawn, his team said…Ocasio-Cortez offered a more personal touch, weaving elements of her biography into her speech – something Sanders is typically loath to do. She spoke of her mother, who cleaned homes, and her father, whose death from a rare form of cancer plunged the family into economic uncertainty…“I don’t believe in healthcare, labor and human dignity because I’m an extremist,” she said, pushing back on the rightwing caricature of her. “I believe in these things because I was a waitress.”

In “How the American Left Became Conservative,” Michael Kazin writes at The Nation: “We have to think anew about how to win the trust of Americans who have good reasons to be cynical and angry about the current state of the nation. Just repeating the same rhetoric from the past, while simply defending agencies they know little about, won’t respond to that mood or respond effectively to the current crisis…One approach would be to highlight programs like pre-kindergarten for all kids and tax credits for childcare that Republicans killed in the cradle when Biden was president. Another would be to champion ideas that would have wide appeal—but have never been attempted: class-based affirmative action and subsidies for rent in urban areas. And how many people not named Musk or Bezos would oppose Elizabeth Warren’s “wealth tax” on the 75,000 richest Americans which the Massachusetts senator predicts would raise close to $4 trillion in a decade?…Any chosen policy ought to offer a fresh approach to narrowing the gap between classes and be available, like Social Security, to everyone regardless of need…One can wish that nationalism would fade away, sometime in the future. But as long as most Americans identify with and want to be proud of their country, a nationalism of caring is the best alternative to the nativist scare-mongering of the MAGA mogul. Anyone whose embrace of Trumpism derives primarily from a hatred of immigrants or transgender people will be beyond the reach of this strategy. But surveys and exit polls from last fall’s election show that anxiety about the economy was far more common than fears about cultural displacement.”

Mike Konczal ruminates on “The Abundance Doctrine: How modern liberalism became too obsessed with saying no—and can learn to say yes again” at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and writes: “Bending the cost curve, getting health care to more people, and saving hundreds of billions of dollars is the definition of abundance. The efficiency of social insurance sits uneasy in the authors’ framework. In this light, the call for the expansion of Medicare and public options to save larger costs—with similar or better outcomes—might be the most important abundance intervention…Moreover, criticisms of administrative inefficiency and capture were top of mind when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform. Consumer protection had previously been split among at least five financial regulators, leaving no single agency with the incentive, staffing, or expertise to do it well. The CFPB’s structure and funding were purposely designed to protect it from capture, and it has successfully returned more than $21 billion to consumers and produced rules addressing issues such as abuses in mortgage markets and student debt. Precisely because of these successes, ones that reformers can learn from, dismantling the CFPB has been a central goal of President Trump and Elon Musk…These examples complicate the narrative that Democrats just can’t get anything done. But that doesn’t mean we should duck from a more serious conversation about government action. It remains unclear what comes next for liberals and progressives, and there is a desperate urgency to figure out what ideological frameworks might fill the void. The Trump Administration’s plans for retrenchment, isolationism, tariffs, and deportations risk putting us on a path to severe stagnation, akin to the one the UK has suffered since Brexit. Liberals must offer an alternative, and one path is to put forth a vision built around future-oriented growth. While it isn’t clear either way whether abundance is a good electoral strategy, the priorities it flags have gone missing in recent decades. And if we can’t offer a more prosperous future while also delivering on the things we promise, why should voters trust us?”

“Toward a Foreign Policy for the Working Class” by Mohammed Soliman and Andrew Hanna at The National Interest, argues “Despite the brightest minds serving at the highest levels of government, Washington offers little tangible to the American working class struggling with rising costs and increasing threats to their security…Meanwhile, the American working class—which is rapidly diversifying—has reshaped the country’s politics. Working-class voters have played a decisive role in the past three major presidential elections, realigning both major parties away from the post-Cold War consensus on free trade and military intervention overseas… The political center of gravity in America has shifted toward the working class on both sides of the aisle. This is a good thing. There is an opportunity now to make the bipartisan populist shift actually serve the American working class. To revive the American Dream, national security elites should reorient their efforts away from defending broken global institutions and toward relentlessly advancing the interests of the American working class…Our leaders must confidently express their faith in America as a force for good in the world. This new American faith is not blind patriotism or nativist jingoism but a deep, unwavering trust in the American experiment. It is a belief in the enduring promise of America as a beacon of hope, a place where individual liberty remains sacred and inviolable. It is the conviction that this nation, flawed yet striving, can still light the way for the world.”

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:

Trump’s approval rating has declined to the point where his approval is “underwater”—that is, his net approval (approval minus disapproval) has turned negative in the both the RCP and Silver Bulletin running averages. And his net approval rating is even more negative (-8) on the all-important issue of the economy, Trump’s key issue in the 2024 election. Polls regularly show gloomy voter assessments of the economy’s current trajectory. In a recent Echelon Insights survey, voters by 17 points say the economy is getting worse rather than improving and by 18 points that their personal financial situation is getting worse rather than improving.

This raises the hope in Democratic hearts that voters are wising up to how terrible Trump is for the economy and the country and that a combination of #Resisteverything and a thermostatic reaction against the incumbent Trump administration will rekindle their political fortunes. This is a comforting take for Democratic partisans because it implies that a combination of stout-hearted opposition and waiting around for the sky to fall on Trump will suffice; no need to do anything drastic like actually changing toxic party positions and doing serious surgery on the party brand.

I think there are grounds for considerable skepticism here. The hole the Democrats are in is so deep that it is doubtful that the comforting take is the right one. Their problems are just too severe. I round up here a series of recent survey and analytical results plus new findings from the 2024 election that illustrate how deep the Democrats’ hole truly is.

1. Views of the Democratic Party. You’d think that as Trump runs into difficulties and sows chaos, voters would like Democrats more. They do not. Instead, Democrats’ favorability among voters is scraping the bottom. In a March CNN poll, favorability toward the Democratic Party clocked in at 29 percent, down ten points since right before the 2024 election and the lowest rating for the Democrats in the CNN poll since its inception in 1992. Trump’s job approval among working-class (non-college) respondents in the poll was 20 points higher than their favorability toward the Democratic Party. The working class does not appear to be warming to the Democrats.

In a March NBC poll, the Democratic Party’s favorability was even lower, 27 percent. The rating was the lowest in that poll since 1990. Among independents, the party’s favorability was an abysmal 11 percent vs. 56 percent unfavorable. These voters may not love Donald Trump but they really don’t like the Democrats.

In a February Blueprint Research poll, about two-thirds of voters thought the Democrats don’t have a workable strategy for responding to Trump and around the same number found this take on the Democrats persuasive: ”No one has any idea what the Democratic Party stands for anymore, other than opposing Donald Trump. Democrats have no message, no plan of their own, and no one knows what they would do if they got back into power. If Democrats ever want to win elections again, people need a clear message from them about what they stand for and what they’ll do.” Ouch.

On the plus side, voters in a February Navigator Research poll across the battleground Congressional districts thought Democrats in Congress “fight for what they believe.” However, they also thought Democrats don’t respect work, don’t share my values, don’t look out for working people, don’t value work, don’t care about people like me, don’t have the right priorities and, by a massive 47 points, don’t get things done. Double ouch.

There’s lots of polling data along these lines and they send a clear message: Democrats’ image is atrocious and therefore cannot present an attractive alternative to Trump and the GOP.

2. Identification with the Democratic Party. Nothing looms as large in driving political behavior than party identification: which party voters identify with or lean toward. Lately something astonishing has happened: Republicans have led in party identification for three straight years, which hasn’t happened in nearly a century. This trend shows no sign of abating in the aftermath of the election.

And the GOP is outregistering Democrats in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina. Indeed, over time, just four states—California, Colorado, Delaware and New York—have seen Democrats out registering Republicans compared to 22 states where Republicans have been gaining.

3. Leaving Democratic states. There’s no more meaningful vote than where you choose to live. And right now the trend is strongly against blue states and in favor of red states like Florida and Texas. This is implicitly a harsh judgement on Democratic governance.

My Liberal Patriot colleague Nate Moore has the facts:

Since Covid, the biggest blue states have dramatically lagged behind the biggest Republican states in population growth. Between 2020 and 2024, California, New York, and Illinois each lost more than 100,000 thousand residents. Florida and Texas, meanwhile, both gained around 2 million residents. The disparity is shocking.

It is tempting to chalk up the unprecedented decline to Covid. Now that the pandemic has faded, numbers will even out, some might argue. Nothing more than a blip. But the most recent figures confirm that the reasons behind the blue-state population decline run much deeper than Covid. Even though case counts are a thing of the past, populous red states continue to lap their blue counterparts. Between July 2023 and July 2024, Florida and Texas gained more than 1 million residents combined. Illinois, New York, and California barely broke 400,000 cumulatively.

That’s bad but consider the electoral implications:

Estimates from the American Redistricting Project predict that California is on track to lose three House seats—and three electoral votes—after 2030’s reapportionment. New York could drop 2 seats. Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Illinois all might lose a seat. Meanwhile, Texas and Florida are each projected to gain a whopping 4 seats. Idaho and Utah, too, will tack on an additional seat.

Notice a pattern? The states projected to gain representation—and an Electoral College boost—are overwhelmingly Trump states. The states projected to lose representation are Harris states.

Yup, where people choose to live matters. And increasingly they don’t want to live where Democrats are in charge.

4. No Democrats where you need ‘em. Wherever you find dense concentrations of highly educated voters you’ll find plenty of Democrats. As for the rest of the country—not so much. This is a big, big problem, not just in presidential elections but critically in Senate elections where every state, no matter its education level, gets the same two Senators.

Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck have the relevant facts:

Although Democrats won all the states with shares of BA degree holders at 40 percent or higher in 2024, there were only 12 of them, none swing states. By contrast, Democrats won only one of the 29 states with BA shares at 35 percent or lower while prevailing in seven of the 10 states with college attainment between 36 and 39 percent. [Note that the only swing state in the 36-39 percent group, North Carolina, was carried by Trump—RT] And because ticket-splitting between presidential and senatorial races has become more infrequent, the new class-based politics bodes ill for Democrats’ U.S. Senate prospects as well.

It turns out being widely disliked in huge parts of the country matters. A lot.

These four factors indicate a party that is truly in a deep hole. The party’s severe image, identification, governance, and geographic weaknesses cannot be remedied by mounting the (rhetorical) barricades against Trump and waiting for his administration to self-destruct. This may make the partisan faithful happy but it is woefully inadequate as a program to bring the party back to full health.

Unfortunately, that so many Democrats are wedded to #Resisteverything—starting with the defenestration of Chuck Schumer—rather than making the Democrats into a party more voters actually like shows the depth of denial in the party. They think they’re on the verge of a breakthrough if they just toughen up. They are not.

Perhaps some fresh data from the 2024 election can shock them back to their senses. I’ll write more about these data in coming weeks but here are some of the most startling findings from a tranche of data analysis just released by David Shor’s Blue Rose Research firm.

5. Democrats did worse in the 2024 election than you think. They completely failed to win over less engaged voters, who are becoming much more Republican. The higher the turnout, the more these voters show up and the worse it is for Democrats. Shor’s analysis indicates that if everyone had voted last year Trump would have won the popular vote by five points rather than a point and a half. Low turnout is now the Democrats’ BFF!

Hispanics are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative in ideology. It’s been well-documented that Hispanic conservatives have been shifting dramatically to the right in their voting patterns. But Shor’s new data establishes that Hispanic moderates are now joining the party. There was a 24-point decline in the Democratic advantage among this group from 2020 to 2024 and since 2016 there’s been a total 46-point margin shift away from the Democrats. Hispanic moderates (almost half of Hispanic voters) are now voting very similarly to white moderates.

More broadly, ideological polarization among all nonwhites is shifting moderate to conservative voters away form the Democrats. This is making nonwhite voters less reliable constituencies for Democrats.

Shor’s data also indicate that immigrant voters swung from a +27 Biden constituency in 2020 to a Trump +1 group in 2024. Wow.

Shor’s analysis also suggests that Trump outright won voters under 30. Double wow. He also finds that Gen Z voters under 25 regardless of race or gender are now more conservative than the corresponding Millennial voters. So much for the Democrats’ generational tsunami.

The issue landscape in 2024 was worse than most Democrats thought. The only really important issue Democrats had an advantage on was health care and that advantage was tiny by historical standards. The Democrats did have a large advantage on climate change—but voters don’t really care about the issue.

There’s plenty more in the Blue Rose analysis plus interesting discussion and data nuggets in two interviews Shor did with Vox and with the New York Times. But the totality of the data really does underscore how deep a hole Democrats are currently in. The way out is not with a feel-good Democratic playbook that leaves Democratic shibboleths intact. That hasn’t worked and it won’t work.

Instead Democrats should consider the approach recommended by John Judis (full disclosure: Judis was my co-author on Where Have All the Democrats Gone?) in his bracing new article on the Compact website.

To reverse their fortunes, the Democrats must alter their image in voters’ minds. Above all, they must be seen again as the party of the “normal American” and “the real America.” The last time they succeeded in doing a makeover like this was in the 1992 election when a group of politicians and political operatives, working through a group called the Democratic Leadership Council, turned around voters’ perception of the Democrats as weak on crime and defense and opposed to any reform of the welfare system. The DLC’s former president Bill Clinton won in 1992 on the DLC’s platform. I don’t suggest that the Democrats need to mimic the content of the DLC platform, particularly on economic and trade issues, but they do need to transform their image, or what political consultants call their “brand.”

Some commentators have insisted the Democrats’ defeat had nothing to do with “wokeness.” That is a fatal misreading. The Democratic makeover must start with the panoply of cultural and socio-economic stands that Republicans were able to use in 2024 to discredit Democratic candidates. These include the Democrats’ positions on immigration, sex and gender, affirmative action, criminal justice, and climate change. A candidate like Sherrod Brown in Ohio had said all the right things about economics and labor for decades, but he was defeated by a candidate who linked him to the Democrats’ stances on social issues.

I’m not suggesting Democrats should hypocritically adopt positions that are wrong-headed. In rejecting the participation of biological males in competitive women’s sports, as California Gov. Gavin Newsom did recently, Democrats would have biology and public opinion on their side. The same goes for policies that have encouraged street crime and illegal immigration. A more difficult issue is climate change. Democrats are right to reject Republican claims that it is a hoax or needs no serious attention—indeed, the Trump administration is actively discouraging the transition to renewable energy. But in order to win public support for any climate measures, Democrats will have to tone down their apocalyptic rhetoric and abandon unrealistic goals for achieving net-zero emissions. That would include, for instance, supporting natural gas as a transitional fuel and nuclear energy as a feasible alternative to fossil fuels.

Great advice. But I’m not holding my breath on when Democrats might choose to follow it. They’re too busy pretending the deep hole they’re in is just a shallow indentation and vanquishing Trump is right around the corner.

Bernie Sanders said something this week that really upset this yellow-dog Democrat, so I wrote about it at New York:

At a time when plenty of people have advice for unhappy progressive Democrats, one of their heroes, Bernie Sanders, had a succinct message: Don’t love the party, leave it. In an interview with the New York Times, he previewed a barnstorming tour he has undertaken with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but made it clear he wouldn’t be asking audiences to rally ’round the Democratic Party. “One of the aspects of this tour is to try to rally people to get engaged in the political process and run as independents outside of the Democratic Party,” Sanders said.

In one respect, that isn’t surprising. Though he has long aligned with the Democratic Party in Congress and has regularly backed its candidates, Sanders has always self-identified as an independent, even when he filed to run for president as a Democrat in 2020. Now, as before, he seems to regard the Democratic Party as inherently corrupted by its wealthy donor base, per the Times:

“During the interview on Wednesday, Mr. Sanders repeatedly criticized the influence of wealthy donors and Washington consultants on the party. He said that while Democrats had been a force for good on social issues like civil rights, women’s rights and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, they had failed on the economic concerns he has dedicated his political career to addressing.”

Still, when Democrats are now already perceived as losing adherents, and as many progressives believe their time to take over the party has arrived, Sanders’s counsel is both oddly timed and pernicious. Yes, those on the left who choose independent status may still work with Democrats on both legislative and electoral projects, much as Sanders does. And they may run in and win Democratic primaries on occasion without putting on the party yoke. But inevitably, refusing to stay formally within the Democratic tent will cede influence to centrists and alienate loyalist voters as well. And in 18 states, voters who don’t register as Democrats may be barred from voting in Democratic primaries, which proved a problem for Sanders during his two presidential runs.

More fundamentally, Democrats need both solidarity and stable membership at this moment with the MAGA wolf at the door and crucial off-year and midterm elections coming up. Staying in the Democratic ranks doesn’t mean giving up progressive principles or failing to challenge timid or ineffective leadership. To borrow an ancient cigarette-ad slogan, it’s a time when it’s better to “fight than switch.”

That said, there may be certain deep-red parts of the country where the Democratic brand is so toxic that an independent candidacy could make some sense for progressives. The example of 2024 independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn of Nebraska, who ran a shockingly competitive (if ultimately unsuccessful) race against Republican incumbent Deb Fischer, turned a lot of heads. But while Osborn might have been a “populist” by most standards, he wasn’t exactly what you’d call a progressive, and in fact, centrist and progressive Nebraska Democrats went along with Osborn as a very long shot. They didn’t abandon their party; they just got out of the way.

Someday the popularity of electoral systems without party primaries or with ranked-choice voting may spread to the point where candidates and voters alike will gradually shed or at least weaken party labels. Then self-identifying as an independent could be both principled and politically pragmatic.

But until then, it’s important to understand why American politics have regularly defaulted to a two-party system dating all the way back to those days when the Founders tried strenuously to avoid parties altogether. In a first-past-the-post system where winners take all, there’s just too much at stake to allow those with whom you are in agreement on the basics to splinter. That’s particularly true when the other party is rigidly united in subservience to an authoritarian leader. Sanders is one of a kind in his ability to keep his feet both within and outside the Democratic Party. His example isn’t replicable without making a bad situation for progressives a whole lot worse.

The humanitarian aid cuts illegally imposed by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been devastating across the globe. The Prospect’s Ryan Cooper has described how DOGE’s withdrawal of funding for nutritional support, tuberculosis treatment, malaria prevention, and PEPFAR—the HIV prevention program that was perhaps the only good thing George W. Bush did—amounts to a “disease holocaust” likely to kill millions of the world’s most vulnerable people.

If it hasn’t already, DOGE’s onslaught against the federal workforce—composed of millions of workers in every state—will soon be responsible for the premature deaths of people throughout the United States, too. The problem with this, as in politics more broadly, is that someone must tell the public who’s responsible; they won’t always figure it out on their own.

Last weekend’s deadly spate of extreme weather is among the latest examples of how Trump and Musk are putting millions of Americans in harm’s way. Dozens of people across the Midwest and South were killed by a combination of tornadoes, dust storms, and wildfires between Friday and Sunday. This carnage unfolded just days after Trump and Musk pushed out more than a thousand National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employees at the start of peak tornado season, including meteorologists who provide forecasts in National Weather Service (NWS) offices around the country.

On March 12, two days before the chaotic weather began, the Associated Press reported that following a fresh round of cuts, NOAA will have eliminated roughly 1 in 4 jobs since Trump’s inauguration. In the words of former NOAA administrator Rick Spinrad, “There is no way to make these kinds of cuts without removing or strongly compromising mission capabilities.” “People are going to start seeing this very quickly,” warned former NOAA chief scientist Craig McLean.

Early indications are that a last-minute appeal from Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) helped keep open an NWS office in Norman, Oklahoma, which is why that facility issued lifesaving warnings about the storms. Had Cole’s request been ignored, the death toll would almost certainly have been higher. What about other NWS centers? Were they spared?

According to Inside Climate News, the NWS issued “more than 250 tornado warnings in less than 72 hours,” suggesting that many local offices remained operational. Nevertheless, “NOAA’s own website suggests that some functions of the agency have already been affected by the administration’s actions,” ICN reported Monday. On Tuesday, the NWS website acknowledged“nation-wide internet and communications issues,” stating that “you may not be able to access products on our webpages, or these products will be old.”

What’s indisputable is that Trump and Musk’s ongoing assault on scientific knowledge and already understaffed federal agencies will exacerbate death and destruction in the future. Dismantling NOAA, the agency tasked with monitoring and warning the public about storms, andshrinking the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is responsible for coordinating disaster responses, will needlessly worsen mortality and hardship. There will be more tornadoes, and official wildfire and hurricane seasons are quickly approaching. Virtually every form of extreme weather is growing in frequency, severity, and duration due to planet-heating pollution, which is set to increase further thanks to the Trump administration’s embraceof even more fossil fuel production.

These agencies, like others, are being unlawfully defunded in a bid to justify privatization. Before Musk and other rentiers seize public assets, they’re deliberately breaking them to “prove” the right-wing myth of public-sector ineptitude. That’s the kind of thing a fighting Democratic Party could politicize.

By politicize, I mean communicating to the public how DOGE’s frenzied “cost-cutting” is not only anti-democratic, but jeopardizes public health and safety. In other words, Democrats need to explain how DOGE is generating an escalation in entirely preventable suffering.

There are in fact dozens of compelling examples of DOGE-induced hazards and harms with lethal consequences. Trump and Musk’s attack on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is hinderinggovernment scientists from finding a cure for your mother’s illness. Trump and Musk are terminating food inspectors and disbanding food safety advisory committees in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), meaning more contaminants in our food supply courtesy of Big Ag. Trump and Musk’s job cuts are destabilizing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), making it riskier to fly unless you’re in one of Trump or Musk’s private jets.

Some may complain that we can’t yet definitively prove that Trump and Musk’s actions are begetting specific outcomes. But we have seen the consequences of destroying government for decades. There are plenty of ways to point out everything the dangerous duo did in the days preceding a given calamity, and warn of similar injuries that the right’s indiscriminate “chain saw” approach to government is likely to produce moving forward. It’s about drawing attention to the myriad threats posed by DOGE. We can connect DOGE’s decimation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the suppression of influenza vaccine research at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to the next flu season, just as we can connect these recent deadly storms to the upcoming hurricane and wildfire seasons.

We should not assume that voters will automatically and independently understand cause and effect. It’s the job of an energetic opposition party to connect the dots between, say, DOGE’s neutering of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a lack of enforcement of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and a subsequent rise in cases of asthma and lead poisoning. Democrats need to draw a straight line between Trump and Musk’s epidemiologically reckless policies and an eventual bird flu pandemic.

It’s the job of an energetic opposition to explain the chain of events between Trump and Musk slashing the workforce at the Bureau of Reclamation, which supplies water and hydropower in 17 Western states, and any catastrophic events stemming from that. When there’s a heatwave (like the one that killed hundreds of people in the Pacific Northwest in June 2021) and people perish because air conditioners stop working amid electricity disruptions: DOGE did that. If a community is flooded or crops wither due to a lack of timely water provision to farmers: DOGE did that.

In the absence of effective communication, the public won’t interpret DOGE’s raiding of the civil service as the source of their mounting troubles. That’s especially true when it comes to less visibleaspects of the government that were poorly understood by the public beforehand, from NOAA’s indispensable weather forecasting to NIH’s seeding of medical breakthroughs, including the mRNA technology that is (or was?) poised to revolutionize cancer treatment.

Finally, it’s crucial to note that because poverty and inequality are major killers, it follows that DOGE’s bulldozing of the social safety net will compound economic immiseration and, by extension, avoidable deaths.

The ruling class has been trying to destroy this country’s underdeveloped welfare state since before FDR’s ink was dry. Now, a far-right unelected billionaire is on the verge of possibly ruining(and privatizing) the biggest social insurance accomplishments of the New Deal and Great Society eras: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The retrenchment of those programs, along with reductions in the provision of nutrition, housing, and other forms of vital assistance, will lead to more hunger, more homelessness, more abandonment and, yes, more deaths.

Ultimately, Trump and Musk’s shredding of the state’s administrative, regulatory, and redistributive arms ought to be so thoroughly scrutinized and criticized that people remember the names of the “DOGE victims” who died needlessly at the hands of our dystopian duo.

Sitting and waiting for Trump and Musk’s malevolent actions to provoke a backlash is a dead end. If Democrats have any hope of reversing their precipitous decline in popularity, they need to passionately get across to voters how Trump and Musk’s war on the public good is endangering their material well-being.

“In just a few weeks, special elections will take place in Florida for two previously Republican-held House seats,” an email blast from actable says. “Let us explain why these campaigns are so important:…Republicans’ House majority is razor thin. Any Democrat we elect right now is another Democrat fighting against Trump and his allies’ extreme, harmful agenda…Like DNC Chair Ken Martin has said, part of his vision is to compete everywhere — and especially as Democrats continue to overperform in special elections throughout the country — we need to do our part to compete in Florida this April…Now, to tell you a little bit more about these races:…Gay Valimont for FL-1: Gay Valimont is running to fill a house seat that was vacated by Matt Gaetz. While navigating the terminal illnesses of both her husband and son at the same time, Gay saw firsthand how broken our health care system is for too many people. In Congress, Gay will fight to expand access to affordable health care and to bring down prescription drug prices…Josh Weil for FL-6: Josh Weil is a proud single father and public school educator who wants to help the people of Florida, protect schools, and make a brighter future for all of us. He wants to protect our environment, fix health care, lower prescription drug prices, keep up with inflation for seniors living on a fixed income, and make our economy work for working people — not just the rich.” Donate here.

“Could Low-Wage White Workers Spark Trump’s Undoing?,” Rob Okun asks at Ms. magazine, and writes: “If an unelected technocrat can delete the financial commitments of a government established for the people and by the people—and we don’t say anything—we betray our moral commitments to liberty,” [Bishop William] Barber underscored…Indeed, the Republican tax plan would attack those who are most economically vulnerable. The plan calls for cutting around $880 billion from Medicaid over 10 years, callously ignoring the 72 million people enrolled in the program and the seven million in the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Barber points to a new study, “The High Moral Stakes: Our Budget, Our Future,” to illustrate these consequences, detailing that, “about 39 [percent] of the enrollees in Medicaid are white, 18 [percent] are Black, 29 [percent] are Latino, 4.7 [percent] are Asian…”…Based on these statistics, 40 percent of everyone on Medicaid is white. So while Trump won with a significant portion of white, working-class voters, his policy in office may sway them to join a burgeoning resistance movement once they’ve absorbed the reality of his eviscerating cuts to Medicaid…Ultimately, having these white, working-class voters in the fight against Trump would be critical to further building up the movement. The next step, according to Barber, is to call this community and others to action. “We abdicate our own moral capacity if we walk away from this moment. And we’re not going to walk away from this moment,” Barber said. “The only way a king becomes a king is if you bow. And we cannot bow. Bowing is not in our DNA. We have to stand in this moment.”

Commentators blithely bandy about the term “middle class,” and what it means context of national politics. But there are significant differences between regions and states. Nicole Spector explains “How Much Money Is Needed To Be Considered Middle Class in Every State?” at gobankingrates.com. Of course these figures reflect  the cost of living in each state to some extent. “How much money do you need to be considered middle class?,” Spector asks. “It might take more money than you think to reach this income tier. The Pew Research Center defines the middle class, or middle-income households, as those with incomes that are two-thirds to double the U.S. median household income…However, because the cost of living and average income vary so widely from state to state, the income needed to be “middle class” in one state could be much more or less than what it takes to be middle class in another.” Here’s the middle-class income for every state (Here’s our sample from the “A” states to provide a sense of the range):

Factor in mobility, and you have a helluva mess that makes you wonder about the value of “national” income data.

An excerpt from “2026 reset: How Democrats are plotting to regain power: Expect to hear a lot about Medicaid, Elon Musk, and the working class over the next two years” by Cami Mondeaux at Deseret News: “House Democrats are gathering in Leesburg, Virginia, this week for their annual policy retreat where party members discuss messaging and strategy for the upcoming year…Democrats are scrambling to regroup and pinpoint their messaging tactics before the 2026 cycle begins in earnest….Much of that message will focus on the Trump administration’s efforts to slash government spending, particularly multibillionaire Elon Musk’s role in purging the federal workforce. Democrats have already started their attacks by accusing Republicans of seeking to dismantle Medicaid and other welfare programs — and party leaders are hoping to make those concerns a top issue…“Our job over the next 21 months is to make sure that voters are hearing this message loud and clear, and we’re going to keep repeating it over,” Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., chairwoman of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, said on Wednesday…House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., reiterated those plans, telling reporters the party would focus their message on supporting the working class while accusing Republicans of working for the wealthy, with Musk as a prime example…Meanwhile, a few Democrats I spoke with said they want to hear more from party leaders about outreach tactics, noting that’s become a major discussion point in the aftermath of the 2024 election.“…I think a big reason we lost (in 2024) was around communications, and they’ve already really been talking a lot about that (and) what we did wrong,” Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., told me ahead of the retreat. “Republicans really outflanked us on the podcasts and those networks. They had all these top podcasters I’d never even heard of until the day after the election.”

There’s been a lot of buzz about the fresh analysis of the 2024 elections by Democratic data hound David Shor, so I tried to summarize his findings and their implications at New York:

Arguments over how Trump won and Democrats lost in 2024 remain in the background of today’s political discourse: Trump fans are focused on exaggerating the size and significance of the GOP victory, and Democrats are mostly settling scores with one another. But there’s also some serious analysis of hard data underway. And this week, an election diagnosis from Blue Rose Research’s David Shor, who was interviewed by Vox’s Eric Levitz and the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, is drawing particular attention.

Shor’s findings largely confirm the conventional wisdom about how Trump won in 2024, including three main points: (1) Trump made significant gains as compared to his 2020 performance among Black, Latino, Asian American, immigrant and under-30 voters; (2) Trump did better among marginally engaged voters than did Kamala Harris, reversing an ancient assumption that Democrats would benefit from relatively high turnout; and (3) inflation was the overriding issue among persuadable voters, even as Democrats overemphasized the threat to democracy posed by Trump’s return to power.

It’s Shor’s explanation of why these trends occurred that’s most interesting. Among every Trump-trending slice of the electorate, unique pressures related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the dramatic inflation that followed undermined support for the incumbent Democratic Party. But there were some other things going on. For example, the non-white-voters trends reflected, Shor told Levitz, a delayed ideological polarization that had hit white voters decades ago:

“If we look at 2016 to 2024 trends by race and ideology, you see this clear story where white voters really did not shift at all. Kamala Harris did exactly as well as Hillary Clinton did among white conservatives, white liberals, white moderates.

“But if you look among Hispanic and Asian voters, you see these enormous double-digit declines. To highlight one example: In 2016, Democrats got 81 percent of Hispanic moderates. Fast-forward to 2024; Democrats got only 57 percent of Hispanic moderates, which is really very similar to the 51 percent that Harris got among white moderates.

“You know, white people only really started to polarize heavily on ideology in the 1990s. Now, nonwhite voters are starting to polarize on ideology the same way that white voters did.”

To put it another way, non-white voters were disproportionately loyal to the Democratic Party for many years, and that loyalty inevitably began to wear off. The intense ideological polarization of the 2024 election sped that process along, even though one might expect that Trump’s barely concealed racism and overt nativism would slow it down. Why didn’t they? Mostly, Shor suggests, because Trump-trending voters weren’t viewing or reading media coverage of the 45th president’s horrific views and conduct:

“People who are the least politically engaged swung enormously against Democrats. They’re a group that Biden either narrowly won or narrowly lost four years ago. But this time, they voted for Trump by double digits.

“And I think this is just analytically important. People have a lot of complaints about how the mainstream media covered things. But I think it’s important to note that the people who watch the news the most actually became more Democratic. And the problem was basically this large group of people who really don’t follow the news at all becoming more conservative.”

The massive impact of diverse media consumption is most evident in Shor’s analysis of the single-most-stunning finding about the 2024 results: the huge gender gap among young voters, with Trump doing exceptionally well among young men, as he explained to Klein:

“18-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics …

“If you look at zoomers, there are some really interesting ways that they’re very different in the data. They’re much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them. If you look at their psychographic data, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them.

“If I were going to speculate, I’d say phones and social media have a lot to do with this.”

Klein suggests some very specific points of divergence between young men and young women that Shor agrees with entirely:

“It seems plausible to me that social media and online culture are splitting the media that young men and women get. If you’re a 23-year-old man interested in the Ultimate Fighting Championship and online, you’re being driven into a very intensely male online world.

“Whereas, if you’re a 23-year-old female and your interests align with what the YouTube algorithm codes, you are not entering that world. You’re actually entering the opposite world. You’re seeing Brené Brown and all these other things.”

Finally, Shor provides some definitive evidence that Democratic messaging about Trump’s anti-democratic characteristics fell on rocky ground. By an astonishing 78 percent to 18 percent margin, voters said “delivering change that improves Americans’ lives” was more important than “preserving America’s institutions.” This finding suggests that in 2024, and right now, Democrats should exploit Trump’s broken promises about the economy and other practical concerns instead of focusing on how Trump has broken those promises. This isn’t a binary choice as much as a perspective on how to talk about outrages like Elon Musk’s assault on the federal government, which negatively affects the benefits and services Americans rely on and is intended to benefit Musk’s fellow plutocrats via skewed tax cuts and paralysis of corporate oversight, as Shor told Levitz:

“Trump and Elon have really spent the first part of their term diving into the biggest weaknesses of the Republican Party — namely, they’re trying to pass tax cuts for billionaires, they’re cutting essential services and causing chaos for regular people left and right, while trying to slash social safety net programs. It’s Paul Ryan–ism on steroids.”

 

The following article, “An American Civic Renaissance: Inside the Fight to Revive the Democratic Party” by Conor Webb is cross-posted from Yale’s The Politic:

When polls closed at 9:00 PM on November 5th, 2024, there was hope in New York City’s suburbs. Former Congressman Mondaire Jones (D-NY17), a progressive reformer, had run to retake the seat he occupied from 2019 to 2021.

The race was a nail-biter. Over 25 million dollars were spent, making it one of the most expensive Congressional races in American history. But Jones came up short of incumbent Congressman Mike Lawler (R-NY) by just 23,946 votes out of nearly 380,000 cast.

“Vindication” is how Jones described election night.

“I was feeling a vindication in my belief that the district had changed from where it was in 2020. Now, of course, the district itself was not the same district in terms of the contours of the geography, but you can recreate how the district would have performed in 2020 quite easily. And what we saw in [the 2024] election is a double-digit shift towards the former president of the United States, now the current president of the United States, Donald Trump.”

This phenomenon, colloquially called the “red shift,” occurred across the country, not only the affluent suburbs Jones aimed to represent. Though the 2024 presidential election was far from a landslide, it was a decisive victory for Trump and the Republican Party.  For the first time since 2004, a Republican candidate won the national popular vote, bruising the morale of Democratic organizers across the country.

Yale College Democrats President Christian Thomas ‘26 and his team knocked on doors for Jones in October. Thomas held out hope for Jones—and for Democrats across the country—until the end.

“I held on until the very last minute. I went home. My friends were hosting a watch party, and everyone there was in despair. And I was like, ‘Guys, it’s not over yet. We’ve only counted 20 percent of the votes in Phoenix. Once we get to 100% of the votes in Phoenix, then I can consider us perhaps not winning,’” Thomas recalled.

The next day, Thomas’ emotions took over.

“There’s a moment that is true for a lot of organizers that is just like, ‘damn. That was a lot of work that so many put in, that I also put into this.’ For an hour, I was like, ‘Was any of that worth it? Were any of those three-hour-long drives to Scranton [to knock on doors for Democratic candidates] worth it?’”

While Democrats like Thomas felt uncertainty when Trump was first elected in 2016, they weren’t hopeless. They mobilized to counter his administration. The Women’s March made national news just a day after his inauguration in 2017 by protesting his policies and rhetoric. It was the largest single-day protest in American history. Between 3.2 and 5.2 million people in the United States participated. Intrepid organizers formed grassroots organizations like Indivisible to combat Trumpism.

It is no longer 2016. The fierce resistance that followed Trump’s first election has faded. In its place, the quiet resignation has settled in. The Democratic coalition now wrestles with a painful political identity crisis.

Sam Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University and recent author of The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, argues Democrats need to examine the coalitional disconnect between the ideological priorities of the party and those of rank-and-file Democrats.

Since 2016, Rosenfeld said, Democrats have bled support down the income and education ladder. “In 2016, [the erosion] was about white voters outside the South who are non-college-educated, who Democrats used to do decently with. And then they lost ground.”

Today, however, Democrats lose ground on non-college-educated voters across age, racial, and ethnic categories. “That’s a huge problem. That’s a huge problem in terms of who’s in the electorate. And it’s a particular problem for Democrats existentially, in terms of a party that is committed to a vision of economic policy and political economy that is egalitarian and redistributive,” Rosenfeld noted.

This collapse is nothing short of catastrophic for Democrats electorally. In 2012, former President Barack Obama won voters making between $30,000 and $49,999 with 57 percent of the vote. In 2024, Trump won that income bracket 53 to 45. If Democrats are losing the very voters their policies are designed to help, it will become increasingly difficult for them to build winning coalitions.

But it’s not irreversible. Rosenfeld sees a chance to rebuild the Democratic Party and ignite a new generation of bold, unwavering advocates. Rosenfeld argued, “you have to think creatively about trying to rebuild a kind of civic and social and organizational life out there.”

“That could include and encompass ordinary working people in spaces that would habituate them to think it’s normal to vote for Democrats like there used to be,” said Rosenfeld. Several key stakeholders in the Democratic Party—academics, national political leaders like Mondaire Jones, analysts, and organizers—agree with Rosenfeld.

They have a vision for a Democratic Party that can rekindle its once-collective purpose and rise boldly against Trump-era disillusionment, a plan involving relational organizing, institutional reform, and truthfulness. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

***

Relational organizing might be the future of the Democratic Party.

On Saturday, November 2nd, just three days before Election Day, former Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign knocked on over 1.2 million doors in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The sheer organizing power of the Harris-Walz campaign gave the appearance of unstoppable momentum.

Yet Rosenfeld was skeptical. “I and others have had [suspicions] about parachuting in armies of idealistic, absolutely admirable volunteer canvassers from out of state to go around knocking on doors a million times.”

Rosenfeld called it a “costly way of trying to eke out votes.”

“It may not be effective at all. The scholarship has always said that leveraging people who are in those communities themselves, who are your neighbors or your friends or people you know, has just way more bang for your buck than professionals,” said Rosenfeld. This strategy is known as relational organizing, the practice of building political trust through entrenched personal relationships over long periods of time. Instead of dedicating large sums of campaign cash to temporary brigades of volunteers to battleground states, relational organizing aims to maintain those relationships over time.

Jack Dozier ‘27 is from rural Virginia and researches youth voter priorities with the Yale Youth Poll. Dozier spent three months as a regional organizer with the Virginia Coordinated Campaign—a joint effort spearheaded by the DNC, the Harris-Walz campaign, and the Virginia Democratic Party—and has seen firsthand the impact of relational organizing in his battleground home state. “Relational organizing is such an incredible program. It still has a way to go, but it’s reintroducing the idea of having conversations,” he said.

“When you’re an undecided young voter and you talk about the election with a trusted family member, with a close friend, with a family friend, that’ll have more of an impact on your decision-making than what some celebrity posts on Twitter,” Dozier noted.

Dozier named apps like Reach, a progressive organizing app piloted by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her insurgent Congressional primary challenge in 2018, which helps campaigns and activists engage voters and supporters in real time through relational and grassroots organizing.

Relational organizing strategies, including bolstered campaign infrastructure and offices open to staff and (importantly) the broader public, tend to become more effective with sustained, year-round implementation.  Dozier said that while year-round infrastructure is difficult, he found it more difficult to logistically set up new campaigns every other year. “As someone who helped open the office that I worked in, I spent more days in my first month of employment buying office supplies than actually talking with community members. Oh, my God, it was so hard to buy a stapler.”

Dozier added that when campaigns end, “the office lease goes up, the locks get changed, and all the furniture goes wherever it ends up.” Had the resources been present already, Dozier could have established more entrenched relationships with the community where he worked. Dozier covered nearly 1,500 square miles of territory, so the extra time spent building relationships with voters would have made an extraordinary impact. It’s for this reason that he calls relational organizing “the future of our modern politics.”

“As an organizer, I [have noticed] fewer people opening the doors and responding to text-bank texts. There’s a lot to be said about that. The methods that have won [young people] for years and years aren’t working as well anymore. There’s a route to find more trust, and that comes locally [in relational organizing].”

This recent decline in engagement is partly due to oversaturation—voters are inundated with campaign messages across platforms—and a generational shift in communication habits. Young people are also less likely to answer calls or respond to texts from unknown numbers than previous generations.

Relational organizing, applied to the conventional methods of voter outreach, offers a trusted, local alternative to cut through the noise. It is about elevating endorsements that carry weight within communities where trust and familiarity matter most. Dozier argued that small-scale endorsements, rather than the celebrity endorsements extolled by the Harris-Walz campaign, are intertwined with the project of relational organizing.

Dozier said, “celebrity endorsements are going to reach who they’re going to reach, but they might not have as much of a sway as we’ve thought they did. If your local paper, if your member of the Board of Supervisors, if your school board member is endorsing these national candidates, I think there’s a lot more trust.”

This stands in stark contrast to the Harris campaign’s strategy in 2024.

“One of the first celebrity endorsements of Harris was Charli XCX. A young person might say, ‘oh my gosh, that’s so exciting, Charli did this song [like the popular album “Brat” on which Harris branded her campaign].’ But there’s not complete trust of any given celebrity. It’s time to move even further into relational organizing, because that’s where you can make a real, tangible, and seeable difference,” Dozier remarked.

***

To repair the Democratic Party, the broader American political landscape may need reform.

Mondaire Jones shares Sam Rosenfeld’s observation about the disconnect between the ideology of the Democratic Party and the voters it purports to represent, but he takes the quandary one step further.

“It is untenable that a majority of working class people would not be voting for Democratic candidates as we seek to carry the mantle of the working class economic agenda,” said Jones. His solution: the party “needs to lean into an economic populism in order for us to regain the trust of the American people, particularly working class people we say we are running to represent,” requiring institutional changes that go beyond an increased emphasis on relational organizing.

This economic populism might take shape by the party changing the way it markets the pro-labor policies most Democrats already endorse. Democrats were criticized in the wake of Harris’ loss for overusing technocratic policy rhetoric. Shifting toward language that resonates with working class voters might align the policy—bolstering unions, raising the minimum wage, and cracking down on corporate monopolies that stifle competition and drive up the cost of living—with the politics to garner votes.

Read more…

Savannah Kuchar brings the bad news in “Democratic Party’s favorability hits record lows in two polls after 2024 losses” at USA Today: “The Democratic Party’s latest approval ratings hit record lows in a pair of polls on Sunday, coming after a bruising 2024 election for the party in which it lost control of the White House and Senate… An NBC News poll found 27% of registered voters say they view the party favorably − the lowest favorability rating for Democrats in NBC polls going back to 1990. Only 7% of survey respondents said they said they have a “very positive” view of the party…Another poll released by CNN similarly found 29% of voters view Democrats in a positive light, a low in CNN’s polling since 1992. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 63% said they have a favorable view of the party…In the CNN poll, 57% of Democrats and Democratic-aligned independents said they believe party leaders should focus on stopping the GOP agenda, compared to 42% who said they want to see Democrats work with their Republican colleagues…NBC found that, among self-identified Democratic voters, 65% said they want their party to “stick to their positions even if this means not getting things done in Washington.” Thirty-two percent said they want Democrats to “make compromises with President Trump to gain consensus on legislation.”…The NBC poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters in the U.S. from March 7-11. The margin of error is +/- 3.1 percentage points. The CNN poll surveyed 1,206 adults in the U.S. from March 6-9. It has a margn of error of +/- 3.3 percentage points.”

“For weeks, Donald Trump and Republicans have insisted that social security, Medicaid or Medicare would not “be touched,” Lauren Gambino writes in “Democrats train fire on Musk as unelected billionaire dips in popularity” at The Guardian. “Now Musk was suggesting the programs would be a primary target. Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, Democrats pounced…“The average social security recipient in this country receives $65 a day. They have to survive on $65 a day. But you want to take a chainsaw to social security, when Elon Musk and his tens of billions of dollars of government contracts essentially makes at least $8m a day from the taxpayers,” Hakeem Jeffries, the US House minority leader, said in a floor speech the following day. “If you want to uncover waste, fraud or abuse, start there.”…As the second Trump era comes into focus, Democrats have found a new villain: an “unelected billionaire” whose bravado – and sinking popularity – they believe may offer their party a path out of the political wilderness…“There’s nowhere in America where it is popular to cut disease research, to gut Medicaid and to turn off social security,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “So it’s hard to see a place where what Musk is doing for Trump doesn’t become an albatross for Republicans.”…Despite mounting criticism of Musk, the president has embraced his beleaguered ally, who spent close to $300m helping elect him to the White House…Public polling underlines Democrats’ interest in Musk. A new CNN surveyfound that just 35% of Americans held a positive view of the billionaire Trump adviser, a full 10 percentage points lower than the president. The poll also found that he is notably better known and more unpopular than the vice-president, JD Vance…More than six in 10 Americans said Musk had neither the right experience nor the judgment to carry out a unilateral overhaul of the federal government, though views broke sharply along partisan lines. Roughly the same share said they were worried the reductions would go “too far”, resulting in the loss of critical government programs.”

In “Democrats Have a Man Problem” John Hendrickson writes at The Atlantic:  “Chances are low that Joe Rogan will save your soul—or your party. Since Donald Trump’s election victory, countless Democrats have lamented their party’s losses among men, and young men, in particular. One refrain has been a yearning for a “Rogan of the left” who might woo back all the dudes who have migrated to MAGA. If the wishfulness is misplaced, the underlying problem is real: Trump carried men by roughly 12 points in November, including 57 percent of men under 30. …I recently spoke with Democrats across different levels of leadership to see how they were trying to address this electorally lethal gender gap. Two theories for how to win back men, I found, are bubbling up. One is to improve the party’s cultural appeal to men, embracing rather than scolding masculinity. The other is to focus on more traditional messaging about the economy, on the assumption that if Democrats build an agenda for blue-collar America, the guys will follow….These approaches are not necessarily in conflict, but they each present a challenge for the modern Democratic Party. And as pundits and consultants peddle their rival solutions, they highlight another risk: Even if Democrats can settle on a message, will voters believe they really mean it?…Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts is one of many Democrats who believe that the party has to make a serious, sustained outreach effort to connect with men. What Democrats should not say or do seems more obvious than what they should proactively offer. “No one wants to hear men talk about masculinity,” Auchincloss, a former Marine, told me. “We’re not going to orient society’s decision making to the cognitive worldview of a 16-year-old male.” Read more here.

At Axios, Alex Thompson explains why “Why some Democrats are warm to Trump’s tariffs“:”Democrats across the Rust Belt and in several congressional swing districts, along with leaders of historically Democratic unions, have voiced support for many of Trump’s tariffs — even if they believe he’s haphazardly implementing them.

• Rep. Jared Golden of Maine introduced legislation to put a 10% tariff on all goods coming into the U.S. He told Axios: “The world is changing, and some Democrats haven’t quite caught up to that fact.”
• Golden, whose largely rural district voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, added: “I think Trump did identify the problem. In many ways, Democrats are doubling down [on free trade] in reaction to him.”

“Some have said that we have really healthy trade with Canada, and I don’t agree,” Golden added. “I’m not arguing we should embrace tariffs as part of a campaign strategy. I’m arguing we should do it based on the merits of the policy and what is good for working-class Americans.”

• The United Auto Workers union, which endorsed then-President Biden last year, said this month: “We are glad to see an American president take aggressive action on ending the free trade disaster that has dropped like a bomb on the working class.”

…Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) has criticized Trump’s “chaotic” implementation of tariffs, but argued that “the answer isn’t to condemn tariffs across the board.”

• “Democrats need to break free from the wrong-for-decades zombie horde of neoliberal economists who think tariffs are always bad,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed.”

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 become and remain today a “Brahmin Left” party. “Brahmin Left” is a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues to characterize Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites, including of course our own Democratic Party. The Brahmin Left character of the party has evolved over many decades but spiked in the 21^st century. The chart below illustrates this trend.

The chart does not show the most recent elections but election surveys agree that education polarization spiked further upward in both 2020 and 2024. Indeed, in the most reliable 2024 election survey the differential between unmodeled college and non-college Democratic support (compare the blue line in the chart) reached 27 points—literally off the Piketty chart and more than twice its level in the 2016 Piketty data.

It has not escaped the notice of many Democratic-sympathizing analysts that this ever-increasing education polarization—Brahminization—of the Democrats presents existential dangers to the party. Not only might the continued desertion of working-class (non-college) voters fatally undermine the Democrats’ electoral formula over time, the party’s fundamental purpose is being rapidly obliterated. What does it even mean to be the “progressive” party if the most educated and affluent voters are your most enthusiastic supporters? What does it mean to be “progressive” if working-class voters think your party mostly represents the values and priorities of those educated and affluent voters not their values and priorities?

In theory one way of responding to this dynamic is to just to “own” the Brahminization by (1) seeking to make up working-class losses with ever-increasing shares of educated voters (challenging since the college-educated are a much smaller group); and (2) redefining progressivism so that it centers around the cultural commitments of educated professionals and whatever economic program such voters feel comfortable supporting.

Democrats still appear reluctant to embrace such a path, at least publicly. This makes sense since the electoral arithmetic of an all-in Brahmin Left strategy is very difficult, especially on a state-by-state basis, and Democrats still like to think of themselves as the party of the downtrodden rather than the political vehicle for America’s educated class. Therefore, many Democrats have started to argue, with varying degrees of intensity, that Democrats must reconnect with the working class and win back many of those voters.

That’s logical and a worthy goal but not so easy to do. How do you de-Brahminize a Brahmin Left party that’s been evolving in the Brahmin direction for decades? Some Democrats seem to think it’s just a matter of playing the economic populist card as in: “Hey working class, over here, we love you and will fight for your interests against the billionaire class and their despicable Republican handmaidens!” Thenthe working class will realize the Democrats are their party and all will be well.

This is not remotely plausible. You cannot undo the damage of decades of Brahminization by simply asserting you are something so many working-class voters think you are not: the tribune of the working class. The challenge goes much deeper than that and involves a decisive break with the many Brahmin Left priorities that alienate the working class. Some analysts do get this; herewith a sampling.

David Leonhardt, New York Times magazine:

Immigration is a natural issue for the Brahmin left. The old left worried that a labor pool swollen by immigration would undermine unions and lower wages. The new progressives focused instead on the large benefits for the new arrivals. Immigration was a way to help the world’s poor, many of whom were not white….

Supporters of mass migration often claim that it is inevitable, stemming from some combination of demography, globalization and climate change. Yet like most arguments for historical inevitability, this one is more wishful than accurate. Countries can exert substantial control over their borders. Japan has long done so. Denmark has recently done so. Biden tightened policy in his last year in office, and border traffic plummeted. Trump has pushed it even lower. If anything, modern technology, such as employment-verification systems, can make enforcement easier than in the past. When immigration advocates say that controlling borders is impossible, they are adopting an anti-government nihilism inconsistent with larger goals of progressivism.

Trump’s cruel approach to immigration will create an opportunity for Democrats, much as it did during his first term. If they can fashion a moderate approach, and not only in the final months of an election campaign, they will improve their chances of winning back many of the voters they have lost. But doing so will require real change, not merely different marketing. Much of the Brahmin’s left post-election analysis remains tied to the magical idea that working-class voters are simply wrong about mass migration and can be won over with clever narratives rather than substantive policy changes.

Justin Vassallo, Unherd:

[P]rogressives have backed themselves into a corner, disconnected, even in deep-blue cities, from the very people they profess to serve. Thanks to their uncritical defense of all things branded “woke,” Democrats are now viewed by working-class voters of all races as litigious, censorious, and elitist. Indeed, the Democratic Party is seen as the very opposite of the one whose unifying thread, from Bryan’s heyday through the Seventies, was its respect for the dignity—and judgement—of the common man and woman.

It will take much more that clever rhetoric to change perceptions. Democratic allies sermonise about democracy, pluralism, and the rule of law at the same time that they repeat the self-defeating, self-righteous notion that all voters who have rejected the party’s Soviet-esque succession of leaders are rubes and bigots. Such attitudes are, in a way, akin to Trumpian defiance, but with none of the obvious political benefits.

Josh Barro, Very Serious Substack, referring to a talk by Pete Buttigieg:

Pete [while critical of many absurd DEI initiatives] pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the [identity politics-promoting] people who have led Democrats down this road toward being off-putting and unpopular.

These people don’t have good intentions—they have a worldview that is wrong and bad, and they need to be stopped. And while DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Pete rightly complains about…is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments, which have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many non-white voters perceive these positions, correctly, as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them on how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are due to those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences among the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent…

[T]he problem here is not really the ten-dollar words…the problem can’t be fixedby dropping [words like] “BIPOC” from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of its citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason that you should be admitted to the U.S. and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch—you get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk—you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Jeff Maurer, I Might Be Wrong Substack:

The Democratic Party is increasingly the party of educated, upper middle-class people. This is a problem, partly because only 38 percent of American adults hold a four year degree, and partly because educated, upper middle-class people are the most annoying twats to ever curse humanity with their presence (and I know this because I’m one of them)…The MAGA movement is a reactionary movement against self-righteous progressive jerk offs, and believe me when I say: When I look at that photo of Democrats holding those stupid paper-plate-and-popsicle-stick paddles, I completely get where MAGA heads are coming from…

Protest culture basically only exists in progressive circles. There’s a type of person who romanticizes protest, and that person is almost always left-wing. Progressives think that when they protest, they’re signaling their opposition to something—and I wouldn’t say that’s not happening—but I think what’s mostly happening is that they’re signaling membership in a cultural group. The more virtue signal-y the protest, the more the cultural weirdness drowns out the message….

When progressives virtue signal, they aren’t just pinning a scarlet “W” for “weird” on their chests; they’re also showing that they don’t share most people’s priorities. And that’s true because feckless, performative protests are a thing that progressives do for each other. Nobody else cares; in fact, most people would like to see the protester fall into a vat of battery acid. And the protest doesn’t do anything…except that it might elicit hands-clapping emojis and “YAS QUEEN”s on Bluesky. When Democrats stage performative protests, they’re making a values statement, and that statement is: “I value plaudits from my progressive peers, not whatever you care about.

And finally, Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal (Yes, I know Noonan is a Republican but she’s a very smart Republican):

Sometimes a party takes a concussive blow, such as the 2024 presidential loss, and you can see: They’ll shape up and come back, they’re pros, they lost an election but not their dignity. But now and then you see: No, these guys don’t know what happened, they are going to lose over and over before they get the message.

What I saw Tuesday night [at Trump’s Congressional address] is that the Democratic Party in 2025, as evinced by its leaders on Capitol Hill, is too proud and stupid to change…

[Here is some] advice for the Democrats.

I will start with something they won’t believe. In politics, there is bringing the love and bringing the hate. When the 13-year-old boy who had brain cancer and has always wanted to be a cop is appointed as an honorary Secret Service agent, laminated ID and all, and the child, surprised by the gesture, hugs the normally taciturn head of the Secret Service, the only thing to do, because you are human, is cheer that child. And when the president honors a young man whose late father, a veteran and policeman, had inspired his wish to serve, and dreams of attending West Point, and the president says that he has some sway in the admissions office and young man you are going to West Point—I not only got choked up when it happened I’m choked up as I write. The boy with cancer high-fives the young man, and the only response to such sweetness is tears in your eyes.

That moment is “the love.” It was showing love for regular Americans. To cheer them is to cheer us. It shows admiration for and affiliation with normal people who try, get through, endure and hold on to good hopes.

The Democrats brought the hate. They sat stone-faced, joyless and loveless. They don’t show love for Americans anymore. They look down on them, feel distance from them, instruct them, remind them to feel bad that they’re surrounded by injustice because, well, they’re unjust….

Mr. Trump says: No, man, I love you.

Which is better? Which is kinder, more generous? Which inspires? Which wins?

Democrats have to understand where they are. They have completely lost their reputation as the party of the workingman. With their bad governance of the major cities and their airy, abstract obsessions with identity politics and gender ideology, they have driven away the working class, for whom life isn’t airy or abstract. Democrats must stop listening to the left of the left of their party. It tugs them too far away from the vast majority of Americans. They have been radical on the border, on crime, on boys in the girls’ locker room. They should take those issues off the table by admitting they got them wrong.

I agree with pretty much every word in these interventions. And I think they make clear just how profound the Democrats’ current challenge is. It really is about comprehensively de-Brahminizing a profoundly Brahmin Left party, not just sanding off a few rough spots in Democratic positions/rhetoric or populist posturing or (that old standby) better messaging. Nor is about just waiting around for Trump to screw up—which is already happening and will continue to happen. Of course Democrats should take advantage of these opportunities but such openings will never suffice for convincing working-class voters that the Democrats have truly become a different kind of party—their party—and not the Brahmin Left party they have been watching evolve for decades.

Much stronger medicine is needed for that. Just as Trump shook up the Republican Party and decisively changed its image and political base, Democrats need a political entrepreneur who will shake up the Democratic Party and decisively change its Brahmin Left trajectory. That entrepreneur will have to be unafraid of the professional class blowback (accusations that you are racist, sexist, transphobic, a bigot, MAGA-lite, etc.) that will inevitably arise and aggressively push back against that class and its priorities.

In short, Democrats need a class traitor—a politician who’s not afraid to ask Democrats who the social justice they prize so highly is really for. Is it really for the poor and working class who have the short end of the stick in our society or is it to make Democrats feel righteous and onside with Team Progressive? Are Democrats’ social justice commitments and priorities what the poor and working class actually want? Does the language Democrats speak on these issues even make sense to them?

Such a politician might actually be able to remake the party and face down the Brahmin Left dead-enders. But is such a politician or politicians out there in the Democratic ranks? I’ve got my doubts. Not only have breaks with party orthodoxy been extremely modest so far, they have been regularly and mercilessly attacked within the party. Even those like Josh Shapiro who seem to have the right instinctsabout a lot of issues are reluctant to publicly break with the orthodoxy and criticize the party’s mistakes.

So am I confident the Democratic Party can de-Brahminize? I am not. But I am confident that the party will fall short of both its electoral and policy goals if it can’t.

Having spent much of the week watching the runup to a crucial Senate vote on appropriations, I had to express at New York some serious misgivings about Chuck Schumer’s strategy and what it did to his party’s messaging:

For the record, I’m usually disinclined to promote the hoary “Democrats in Disarray” narrative whereby the Democratic Party is to blame for whatever nightmarish actions Republicans generally, or Donald Trump specifically, choose to pursue. That’s particularly true right now when Democrats have so little actual power and Republicans have so little interest in following laws and the Constitution, much less precedents for fair play and bipartisanship. So it really makes no sense to accuse the powerless minority party of “allowing” the assault on the federal government and the separation of powers being undertaken by the president, his OMB director Russ Vought, and his tech-bro sidekick Elon Musk. If congressional Republicans had even a shred of integrity or courage, Senate Democrats would not have been placed in the position this week of deciding whether it’s better to let the government shut down than to let it be gutted by Trump, Vought, and Musk.

Having said all that, Senate Democrats did have a strategic choice to make this week, and based on Chuck Schumer’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining his decision to get out of the way and let the House-passed spending bill come to the floor, he made it some time ago. Nothing in his series of rationalizations was new. If, indeed, “a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda,” while enabling the administration to exert even more unbridled power over federal programs and personnel, that was true a week ago or a month ago as well. So Schumer’s big mistake was leading Senate Democrats right up to the brink of a collision with the administration and the GOP, and then surrendering after drawing enormous attention to his party’s fecklessness.

This doesn’t just look bad and feel bad for Democrats demanding that their leaders do something to stop the Trump locomotive: It also gives the supreme bully in the White House incentive to keep bullying them, as Josh Marshall points out in his postmortem on the debacle:

“[P]eople who get hit and abused and take it tend to get hit and abused again and again. That’s all the more true with Donald Trump, a man who can only see the world through the prism of the dominating and the dominated. It is a great folly to imagine that such an abject acquiescence won’t drive him to up the ante.”

The reality is that this spending measure was the only leverage point congressional Democrats had this year (unless Republicans are stupid enough not to wrap the debt-limit increase the government must soon have in a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered). Everyone has known that since the new administration and the new Congress took office in January. If a government shutdown was intolerable, then Democrats should have taken it off the table long before the House voted on a CR. Punchbowl News got it right:

“Let’s be blunt here: Democrats picked a fight they couldn’t win and caved without getting anything in return. …

“Here’s the lesson from this episode: When you have no cards, fold them early.”

Instead, Democrats have taken a defeat and turned it into a debacle. House and Senate Democrats are divided from each other, and a majority of Senate Democrats are all but shaking their fists at their own leader, who did in fact lead them down a blind alley. While perhaps the federal courts will rein in the reign of terror presently underway in Washington (or perhaps they won’t), congressional Democrats must now become resigned to laying the groundwork for a midterm election that seems a long time away and hoping something is left of the edifice of a beneficent federal government built by their predecessors from the New Deal to the Great Society to Obamacare. There’s a good chance a decisive majority of the general public will eventually recoil from the misrule of the Trump administration and its supine allies in Congress and across the country. But at this point, elected Democrats are going to have to prove they should be trusted to lead the opposition.