In his article, “Republicans didn’t have a chance Tuesday against the wave of voters’ anger” Paul Waldman shares his take on Tuesday’s election, and writes at MSNBC.com: “The most important takeaway from Tuesday night’s elections — the one that has real implications for 2026 and 2028 — is that Democrats won everywhere, in many cases improving their 2024 performance by striking margins.”

Waldman adds, “Democratic candidates didn’t just win the highest-profile races in Virginia, New Jersey and New York, but they also won judicial retention elections in Pennsylvania and a variety of down-ballot races. They even picked up seats in the Mississippi Legislature — which cost Republicans their supermajority — and ousted two Republican incumbents on the Georgia commission that regulates utilities.

“More moderate Democrats, more progressive Democrats, Democrats who were well-known and Democrats who weren’t, Democrats who ran explicitly against Donald Trump and those who barely mentioned him — they all did great…When we see a string of wins like the one Democrats put together Tuesday, we can’t attribute it to clever strategy, blistering attack ads or even attribute it to the skills of the candidates they nominated — but to widespread opposition to the party in charge of the country.”

Further, “When Trump is in office, the anger gets cranked up as far as it can go. The first year of his second term has been chaos, with his army of thugs terrorizing people in cities, erratic tariffs dragging down the economy, brutal cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and the evisceration of the federal government. Every Democrat benefited from the displeasure Trump produced, whether they campaigned on opposing him or not.”

Click on the link above for more of Waldman’s analysis. Also check out Wldman’s “The Real Reason Reporters Won’t Talk About Trump’s Mental Decline” at his blog site, The Cross Section.

Kyle Kondik shares his thoughts on Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger’s win at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “Loudoun County, Virginia, whose early reporting suggested Donald Trump was on the way to a significant national win in 2024, pointed the way to Abigail Spanberger’s (D) big gubernatorial win and Jay Jones’s (D) attorney general victory…A year ago, the near-complete vote from early-reporting Loudoun County, Virginia was the first major signal that Donald Trump was on the way to victory in the 2024 presidential election. Last night, Loudoun was the signal that the 2025 election, both in Virginia and elsewhere, was becoming a rout in favor of Democrats…Wealthy, highly-educated, and diverse, Loudoun had zoomed toward Democrats throughout the 2010s, punctuated by Ralph Northam (D) winning the county by 20 points in his 2017 gubernatorial victory and Joe Biden winning it by 25 in 2020…But by 2021, the Democratic margin in the county had contracted to 11 points, helping Glenn Youngkin (R) win the governorship. Three years later, Kamala Harris only won it by 16 points, another 9-point Democratic contraction from four years prior. The shift in Loudoun was emblematic of the overall results, in which Trump improved to varying degrees in all 50 states…But the pendulum has swung again. Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger (D) won Loudoun by an eye-opening 29 points. And Attorney General-elect Jay Jones (D) won it by 19 points—nearly matching Northam in the county and running ahead of Harris, and giving the clearest indication that he was on the way to winning. Despite the bombshell revelation of violent, outrageous text messages from Jones that rocked the race a month ago, Jones ended up winning easily, riding Spanberger’s coattails to a 6.5-point statewide win over state Attorney General Jason Miyares (R). Lt. Gov.-elect Ghazala Hashmi (D) won by 10.5 in what was the sleepiest of the three statewide races, and Spanberger won by 15. Polls were correct in the sense that there would be variation in the three races, but they all ended up just being different shades of blue. Democrats also made a massive gain in the state House of Delegates, pushing their majority to 64 seats, a massive 13-seat gain in which they flipped all 8 Harris-won Republican districts and an additional 5 that Trump had carried by small margins last year.”

Some insights from “A Big Night for Democrats,” in which Ruy Teixeira notes at The Liberal Patriot: “It was a good night for Democrats, which confirmed that their coalition, now tilted toward educated, engaged voters, is likely to overperform in non-presidential elections where their coalition’s turnout advantage has the most effect. Granted that the marquee 2025 elections in Virginia and New Jersey were in blue states and President Trump is not popular, Spanberger’s and Sherrill’s easy victories show that their coalition can be mobilized in off-year elections to deliver strong victories given competent, well-run campaigns…Beyond that, one should not read too much into the Democrats’ performance given the historically poor power of these elections to predict future ones. The 2026 and 2028 elections will be fought on a much, much wider playing field with different electorates and a political terrain that is difficult to predict. Still, Democrats can take heart that their coalition has passed an initial test that, had they not done well, would have further demoralized an already demoralized party. Of course, now they’ll have the reverse problem: clearing this low bar will make many Democrats too confident that their problems have been solved when such optimism is not merited…One such problem is the class gap in support. Democrats now do far better among college-educated voters than among the working-class (noncollege) voters. This election was no exception. Indeed, comparing the 2024 and 2025 elections in Virginia and New Jersey using the preliminary AP/NORC VoteCast results indicates you can account for almost all of Democrats’ overperformance in 2025 relative to 2024 (both Spanberger and Sherrill ran ahead of Harris) by (1) a larger class gap (college vs. working class) in both states primarily because both candidates did way better among college-educated voters than Harris did in 2024, and (2) a greater share of college voters in both states (especially VA) relative to 2024.” Teixeira adds, “Moderates will point to the triumphs of Spanberger and Sherrill as giving the party a mandate for moderation; progressives will point to democratic socialist Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral election, where he exceeded pre-election polling and broke 50 percent of the vote, as a clear signal the party needs to be more robustly progressive and exciting…I think the moderates have a better case and more persuasive evidence on their side. But the debate will continue. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. In truth, neither side has really cracked the case of how Democrats can rebuild their working-class support in a populist age, and these election results just do not provide a clear answer. Democrats would be well-advised to approach them with humility as they attempt to chart a course forward.”

Alicia Civita writes at The Latin Times that “Democrats celebrated a clean sweep in Tuesday’s elections across Virginia, New Jersey, New York City and Cincinnati, powered by a dramatic shift among Latino voters who have turned sharply against Donald Trump’s economic results and his immigration and deportation agenda…Early AP VoteCast exit polling cited by The Atlantic‘s Ronald Brownstein shows Hispanic support for Republican candidates collapsing to about one-third in states that Trump carried nearly two-fifths of just a year ago, a sign that the political pendulum among Latinos is swinging back toward the Democrats…In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, while in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill secured a second term as governor. Both victories came with notable margins among Hispanic voters…According to the AP VoteCast data shared by Brownstein, each Democrat held her GOP opponent to roughly one-third of the Hispanic vote, compared with the two-fifths or more Trump won in both states during the 2024 presidential race. Even more striking, about three-fifths of Hispanic voters in New Jersey and three-quarters in Virginia said Trump has gone too far with deportations, highlighting a deep disapproval of his enforcement policies…The numbers suggest that the administration’s recent mass-deportation initiatives and rhetoric about “removal quotas” are eroding what had been a rare area of growth for the GOP in 2024. Latino voters in both states cited fears of family separation, economic disruption, and anti-immigrant sentiment as motivating factors for their Democratic votes…In New Jersey, 64% and 81% of the Hispanic and Black vote (respectively) went for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate…According to the first numbers from exit polls, majority of Hispanics say that Trump “has gone too far on deportations.”

Harold Meyerson explains at The American Prospect that “Democrats connected with broad public discontent over Trump and the Republicans’ mishandling of the economy and ignoring the public’s resulting discontent. Compare, for instance, the difference between the salience in the public’s mind of Trump’s signature issues and the issues that actually mattered to them. When Virginia voters were asked what issue mattered most to them, 47 percent said the economy, 21 percent said health care, 12 percent said immigration, 10 percent said education, and 6 percent said crime. In New Jersey, 36 percent said taxes, 32 percent said the economy, 16 percent said health care, 7 percent said immigration, and 3 percent said crime. In New York City, 55 percent said the cost of living, 24 percent said crime, 9 percent said immigration, and 6 percent said health care. (And Mamdani voters ranked immigration much higher than the other voters; clearly, they were referring to ICE sweeps against law-abiding immigrants.).” Meyerson adds, “Newsom has managed to win, for now, the pole position in the party’s 2028 presidential contest in a way that has uniquely enabled him to avoid being boxed into the moderate or leftist camps.)..If every Democrat on the ballot yesterday was in touch with the public’s anxiety about the economy, a number of them—Newsom and Mamdani loudly, Spanberger and Sherrill quietly—were also in touch with the Democrats’ fury at the ICE sweeps and Trump’s attempted assumption of monarchial power. Those two themes powered the Democrats to victory yesterday; they should power them to victory next year as well.” More here.

After a long evening of election watching on November 4, I offered this happy take at New York:

Last November, Donald Trump recaptured the presidency and helped his party gain control of both chambers of Congress. He and his MAGA backers heralded it as the beginning of a realignment that would give the GOP a long-standing majority and give the president a popular mandate to do many unprecedented and unspeakable things. Democrats largely believed this spin and fell into mutual recriminations and despair.

Just a year later, everything’s looking different.

Democrats swept the 2025 elections in almost every competitive venue. They flipped the governorship of Virginia and held onto the governorship of New Jersey, in each instance crushing their Republican opponents. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani won easily on a wave of high turnout and voter excitement. At the same time, Democrats stopped efforts to purge their judges in Pennsylvania and rig voting rules in Maine. One of their most vulnerable candidates, Virginia attorney-general nominee Jay Jones, beset by a text-message scandal involving violent fantasies about Republicans, won anyway. Everywhere you look, the allegedly unbeatable Trump legacy is, well, taking a beating. The tide even flowed down to Georgia, where Democrats won two statewide special elections, flipping two seats on the utility-rate-setting Public Service Commission.

Exit polls show that those elements of the electorate where Trump made startling gains in 2024 are now running away from him and from the GOP. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger is winning 67 percent of under-30 voters, 64 percent of Latino voters, 61 percent of Asian American voters, and 90 percent of Black voters. Up in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill is winning under-30 voters by better than 2-1, Latinos by exactly 2-1, Black voters by better than 10-1, and Asian American voters by better than 4-1. She’s also winning 90 percent of Black men and 57 percent of Latino men. These are also demographic groups that have begun turning their back on Trump in job-approval polls. And Trump got another very direct spanking as Californians overwhelmingly approved Prop 50, a measure to gerrymander the state to give Democrats more seats, meant to retaliate against Trump’s earlier power grabs. There, too, the issue became entirely a referendum on the turbulent president.

Some MAGA folk will argue Trump can’t be blamed because he wasn’t on any ballot. But Republicans everywhere embraced him fiercely and counted on his assistance to win the day. And no major party has ever so completely turned itself into a cult of personality for its leader, or been so eager to give him total power. Trump’s domination of political discourse throughout 2025 — right up until this week, when he’s rejected any compromises with Democrats in a gridlocked Washington, D.C. — means the election is inescapably a setback that bids ill for his efforts to maintain total control of the federal government in the midterms next year. Democrats may finally turn to the future rather than the past, the struggles for the party’s soul forgotten for a while.

We’ll soon see if Mamdani can redeem the hope he has instilled in so many discouraged and marginalized voters, and if the women chosen to lead New Jersey and Virginia can cope with rising living costs and terrible treatment from Trump’s administration. The GOP gerrymandering offensive isn’t done, and the Trump-enabling chambers of the Supreme Court could provide new setbacks for those resisting Trump’s creeping authoritarianism. And yes, in 2026 Democrats must more clearly articulate their own agenda while providing running room for different candidates in different parts of the country.

But for now, Trump and his party look far less invincible than before and far more likely to harvest anger and disappointment for his second-term agenda than to build anything like a permanent majority. The opposition can now emerge from the shadow of an especially cursed year and fight back.

Not to gloat, but Democrats cleaned their clocks. We ran the table. We swept all of the big races. Cleaned, ran, swept. We gave them a major ass-whuppin’. (Insert your favorite sports victory gloat cliche right here). It may take a while before the top analysts weigh in with serious cross-tabs. Until then, however, we do have exit polls, be they flawed or otherwise unworthy of your attention due to oft-repeated caveats. Yet, it can’t hurt to take a peek at them, now can it?

A couple of days ago, Jennifer Agiesta wrote at CNN Politics, “This year, for the first time since 2016, CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox News, NBC and the Associated Press are working together to produce this critical research, in collaboration with SSRS, a nonpartisan research company that also conducts CNN’s polling. On behalf of the six media organizations, SSRS will conduct The Voter Poll in California, New Jersey, New York City and Virginia to cover the marquee contests on this November’s slate. You’ll see the results here as CNN’s Exit Poll.”

Agiesta noted, further, “Traditionally, exit polling has leaned heavily on in-person interviews of a randomly selected sample of voters at different Election Day polling locations. That remains a key part of the polling this time around. But to include people who vote early or vote by mail, those in-person interviews will be combined with survey results gathered before Election Day to ensure that exit polls reflect the views of the full electorate, regardless of when they vote or how they cast their ballot.” She has more details about the process at the  first-noted link.

Flash forward to this morning, which brings us the actual exit poll results in a handy tool you can tweak for specific results. As regards the Virginia Governorship, for example, the report indicates that: Governor-elect Spanberger got 48 percent of the men; 65 percent of women; 47 percent of White voters; 92 percent of Black voters; 67 percent of Latino voters; and 79 percent of Asian voters. And yes she did substantially better with women in this racial categories, the largest gap being a 23-point edge with Latina women.

Spanberger crushed it with the younguns (18-29) with 70 percent. She got 61 percent of the 30-44 age group; 55 percent of the 45-64 cohort; and 52 percent of the over 65s. She got 50 percent of those with no college degree and 63 percent of those who have a degree. In terms of party i.d., Spanberger won with 7 percent of Republican supporting her; 59 percent of Independents and 99 percent of Democrats. She got 65 percent of moderates, 15 percent of “somewhat conservative” voters and 5 percent of “very conservative” voters. Interestingly, she got 21 percent of “born again” or “evangelical Christians.” She got 50 percent of “military veteran household” voters and 64 percent of “federal worker/contractors this year.”

The data takes deeper dives into gender by race; income; trans rights; abortion; the Jay Jones factor; feeling about the way things are going; opinions of Trump (she got 6 percent of Trump approvers and 7 percent of those who voted for him in ’24). Tellingly she got 54 percent of those who took a “somewhat unfavorable view” of the Democratic Party. She got 81 percent of those who said “health care” is the “most important issue facing Virginia.”

Check out the exit poll tool for other candidates and issues right here.

The following stub for the article, “The Working Class Project: 2025 Report,” is cross-posted from the Executive Summary and the Summary of Research of the report:

Executive Summary

Working-class voters perceive Democrats to be woke, weak, and out-of-touch, too focused on social issues and not nearly focused enough on the economic issues that impact everyone, every day. But Democrats can win back these working-class voters, in 2026 and beyond.

Nearly one year since Trump was reelected, a solid majority of working-class voters remain frustrated, anxious, or struggling with their financial realities – and they aren’t optimistic any of that will change. They are worried about inflation, and about their paychecks keeping pace; about the price and attainability of both housing and health care; about the job market, Trump’s chaotic tariff policies, and their sense of stability. These Americans define themselves by their hard work and self-sufficiency, but feel like neither trait is rewarded in our economy. They’re angry – not necessarily at the wealthy, but at an unfair and rigged system where politicians give the rich and powerful all the breaks. And they’re disappointed Trump and Republicans aren’t helping them, viewing them as more focused on picking fights and looking out for themselves than on reducing how much everything costs.

This provides Democrats with an opening. To earn back the votes of working-class Americans, our Party needs to make clear it values people who work hard. Instead of denigrating or contrasting ourselves with Republicans, Democrats need to advocate for our own policy agenda, one that first-and-foremost rewards hard-working, fair-playing people – an agenda that helps them get ahead, not just get by; an agenda that ensures health care is affordable, homeownership is obtainable, and retirement is possible. And because the status quo feels broken, Democrats shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge we need big, bold, aggressive changes, across the board.

There’s no one perfect model for Democrats to follow as we try to earn back working-class votes and work our way out of the political wilderness. But Democrats who are authentically relatable, clear, and respectful in how they communicate connect most with the working class.

Finally, when and where we reach these voters also matters. They still increasingly get their information from, and form their opinions on, non-traditional platforms – particularly YouTube and TikTok – and Democrats need to build up their presence on these channels.

Summary of Research

The Working Class Project conducted:

• 39 focus group discussions with nearly 400 collective working-class voters across 21 states, from February to August.
• A two-phase media consumption study among working-class voters across 21 states in the spring. This included an online survey of 7,555 voters, of whom 2,179 self-identified as working class, and media-usage diary research, in which survey respondents were asked to complete a detailed diary of their media usage over 24 hours. A total of 474 working-class voters participated in this diary research.
• Weekly longitudinal qualitative research over 13 weeks from March to June, among a fixed group of 28 self-identified working-class swing voters across battleground states who voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Participants responded to and discussed new questions each week, focused on Trump’s actions in office, party brands, and current events.
• Monthly longitudinal quantitative research in April, May, and June. Each wave included 1,000 interviews via an online panel among self-identified working-class voters, who were asked a series of tracking questions to measure movement, and new questions to capture reactions to unfolding national events.
• A benchmark messaging survey of more than 3,000 working-class voters across 21 states. This survey consolidated the most resonant message frames borne from focus group discussions and longitudinal qualitative boards to assess how they moved voters on a generic ballot and congressional vote. Messages covered issue areas focused on the economy and rising costs, tariffs, health care, corruption, immigration and LGBTQ+ issues, specifically focused on trans issues that continued to arise in each focus group.
• Ad testing in September and October that assessed messages that performed well in the benchmark survey, integrated into various ad treatments, and tested in Virginia as well as the remaining 20 states in which we conducted research.

More here.

Some takeaways from “Working-class voters think Dems are ‘woke’ and ‘weak,’ new research finds: The extensive research project shows the challenges and openings for the party in winning back working-class voters” by Elena Schneider ate Politico: “Working-class voters see Democrats as “woke, weak and out-of-touch” and six in 10 have a negative view of the party, concluded a frank internal assessment of the hole the party finds itself in…The nine-month, 21-state research project is the latest in a wave of post-mortems and data dives aimed at solving the Democratic Party’s electoral challenges after their sweeping losses in 2024. It was funded by Democracy Matters, a nonprofit aligned with flagship Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, and backed by months of polling, dozens of focus groups and message testing…American Bridge’s project focused exclusively on working-class voters, shedding light on a once-core constituency for Democrats that’s drifted away from the party over the last decade…The Democratic brand “is suffering,” as working-class voters see the party as “too focused on social issues and not nearly focused enough on the economic issues that impact every one, every day,” the report said…Other center-left groups’ post-mortems drew similar conclusions about the depths of the problem Democrats face in repairing their brand, as well as urging their party to side-step social issues and prioritize economic concerns. But even as the report calls for a proactive policy agenda, it’s not clear what that detailed policy agenda might be…The report argues Democrats still have a path to regain the support of blue-collar voters they have been losing to Republicans, from resetting their perceived priorities to leaning into issues that voters trust them on, including health care and housing. They point to Trump’s failure to bring down costssince resuming office this year as proof that “this group is very much up for grabs,” said Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster who worked on the project…The report acknowledged that “Republicans start off on stronger ground on these issues, but Democrats can reclaim them when they vividly illustrate how their plans differ from Republicans’, particularly on health care.” Read on here.

From “Healthcare for All: The Democratic Promise That Could Heal a Broken Nation” by thomhartmann at Daily Kos: “Every election cycle, candidates talk about “freedom,” “security,” and “opportunity,” yet ignore the most basic measure of all three: whether ordinary Americans can afford to stay alive.In the richest nation in the history of planet Earth, millions of Americans are dying from treatable illnesses, rationing insulin, and running GoFundMe campaigns for chemotherapy. This isn’t just a policy failure, it’s a moral collapse…And it’s the one issue that could unite the country, reshape the Democratic Party, and finally prove that compassion is not weakness, but strength…Dilbert creator Scott Adams is begging Donald Trump for help forcing Kaiser to provide him with a possibly life-saving infusion for his cancer. That’s how f*cked-up healthcare is in today’s America…They’ve voted over 100 times to date on bills that would end, gut, or severely disfigure the ACA and finally got a good chunk of it done with their so-called “Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill” that handed Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, et alover  four trillion dollars in tax cuts, while making up for it by eviscerating ACA subsidies and Medicaid eligibility…But now that November 1st is in the past and we’re atop the actual enrollment period, 24.2 million people on the ACA plans are discovering their insurance rates, co-pays, and deductibles are exploding…And they’re pissed. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene is pissed!…we spend more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP…Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%…Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll, whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10%…Medicare For All, like Canada has, would save American families thousands every year immediately and do away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen because somebody in the family got sick.”

If you’ve been following the fuss about Maine’s Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, read “You’re Being Lied to About Graham Platner” by Branco Marcetic at Jacobin. Marcetic takes the time and trouble to comb all of Platner’s Reddit posts to see what he is really about, and ends up painting a nuanced portrait of a solid, upright guy, with an admirable sense of decency. Marcetic sheds light on Platner’s political views expressed over the years and concludes, “Platner’s Reddit archive contains thousands of comments over more than a decade, and it is possible to single out many of them to accuse him of any number of unflattering things. This is, in fact, exactly what seems to be happening in the media coverage of his posts, in which Platner is simultaneously portrayed as both a bigoted, far-right reactionary, and a dangerous left-wing radical…But read in their totality, Platner’s posts paint a different picture of the candidate: someone who, far from a secret fascist, was openly and passionately opposed to fascism; who held a variety of typical progressive views even as he expressed himself in ways many liberals would regard as crass and offensive; who sympathizes with rural Americans despite being vehemently opposed to many of the candidates they vote for; and who was disillusioned with and radicalized against the system by US wars…Platner, in other words, comes off as a flawed, complicated, and sometimes contradictory human being whose political views don’t always fit neatly into a box. In that, he resembles millions of Americans — including some of the exact voter demographics that American liberals say they want to win back, yet seemingly can’t help but vilify.” Read more here.

“A number of progressive groups close to the Democratic Party and the labor movement are trying to recruit working-class candidates,” Robert Kuttner writes in “Working-Class Heroes: Today on TAP: Would democracy work better if more working-class people ran for public office?” Kuttner explains:  “The Working Families Party recruits working-class candidates up and down the ballot,” says Joe Dinkin, the party’s national deputy director. “We run trainings for hundreds of working-class people to run for every year.”…It’s far from easy. Running for office is time-consuming and expensive. Working-class people tend to be working. Few can just take time off to run for office. The most important pipeline that launches working-class people into politics, the labor movement, is far weaker than it once was…“The experience of having to work hard for a living is familiar to most Americans but not to most elected officials,” Dinkin adds. “There are more millionaires in Congress than working-class people.” Too true. And the more the party is dominated by millionaires, the less hospitable it is to either working-class candidates or working-class causes…That said, getting the right candidate matters as least as much as the candidate’s class background. Occasionally, an authentic working-class candidate who is also a superb politician breaks through…Some of the greatest working-class champions, beginning with FDR, were well-to-do class traitors. And some people rose up from the working class, such as Vice President JD Vance, who was saved from destitution by New Dealer grandparents and grew up to be a plutocrat whose famous book blamed poverty on low character rather than disparities of power…when Ted Kennedy, one of the great champions of legislation to help working people, first ran for the Senate in 1962, he was 30 years old and was inheriting a seat from his brother Jack that had been kept warm for him by a family retainer until he was old enough to run. Campaigning at a factory gate, Teddy encountered a burly worker coming off the graveyard shift…Worker: “You’re a rich kid. You’ve probably never worked a day in your life.”…Kennedy: “Ye-es, I guess you could say that.”…Worker: “You ain’t missed a thing.”

The following article, “Forecast for Democratic Party Renewal: Cloudy with a chance of rain” 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:

There seems to be general agreement that Democrats need to radically transform their party image. The second election of Donald Trump and the subsequent failure of the party to gain favor in voters’ eyes even as many of Trump’s actions are notably unpopular suggests that Democrats have a “yuck” factor that just isn’t going away.

Can the Democrats accomplish such a renewal of their party’s brand? On the plus side there are a number of Democratic-aligned organizations focusing on the party change imperative and promulgating useful analyses and suggestions. These include the new Searchlight Institute, the new Majority Democrats group of Democratic officeholders, the Welcome Party (whose terrific new data-driven report, “Deciding to Win,” is cited below) and the more venerable Progressive Policy Institute and Third Way. Their ideas are not without support in significant sectors of the Democratic party, including House moderates, some Senators, and some who appear to be intent on contending for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.

This is promising, but of course the pushback has been fierce from those in the party who believe the party’s image merely needs a few strategic tweaks to become enticing to voters. This includes a huge contingent of Democrats who are not really interested in anything that distracts from the party line that Trump-is-a-fascist-and-everything-he-does-is-wrong. And there are those who, astoundingly, believe the solution lies in the Democrats becoming even more progressive! It’s just a fact that energy in the Democratic Party seems to be coming preponderantly from these quarters, not from the reformers.

Moreover, it’s not even clear that the reformers are offering stern enough medicine to cure what ails the party or, even if they were, that sympathetic politicians would actually be willing to push for truly decisive breaks with party orthodoxy. This can be illustrated by referring to recent work that demonstrates just how steep a hill Democrats have to climb and how, therefore, half-measures will likely be inadequate.

1. The Democrats’ image isn’t as bad as you think—it’s worse! The treasure trove of data in the new “Deciding to Win” report clarifies just how bad things are. Here’s a chart on what voters think Democrats do prioritize versus what voters think they should prioritize. At the top are issues Democrats vastly underprioritize (securing the border, lowering everyday costs, lowering the rate of crime, creating jobs and economic growth); at the bottom are issue Democrats vastly overprioritize (protecting the rights of undocumented immigrants, protecting the rights of LGBT+ Americans, raising taxes to increase spending on social programs, promoting DEI). Ouch.

Further illustrating this problem, take a look at this chart of unpopular Democratic policies. Some have not had really serious support within the party but quite a few have—indeed, some have become closely associated with what it means today to be a Democrat.

Read more here.

I’ve been getting steadily more exasperated at Democratic opinion-leaders telling Democratic pols not to talk about Trump’s threats to democracy, and wrote about it at New York:

There’s a disconnect in the Democratic Party strategy for combating Donald Trump this year and in the 2026 midterms. Democratic elites and many activists (not to mention millions of No Kings protesters!) are convinced the 47th president is engaged in an authoritarian power grab that could entrench his kind of politics for a long time to come. But again and again, party strategists keep telling Democrats not to talk much about it.

The spanking new “Deciding to Win” report from the Democratic Establishment group Welcome PAC makes this prescription repeatedly:

“Convince voters that we share their priorities by focusing more on issues voters do not think our party prioritizes highly enough (the economy, the cost of living, health care, border security, public safety), and focusing less on issues voters think we place too much emphasis on (climate change, democracy, abortion, identity and cultural issues).”

In a recent interview my colleague Benjamin Hart conducted with centrist Democratic super-strategist Lis Smith, she suggested the same thing with respect to what went wrong last year:

“[T]he biggest mistake we made in 2024 was not leading every single conversation by talking about the economy. When people feel like they are one accident, one incident, one layoff away from financial collapse, they do not want to hear us starting conversations by saying, ‘The most existential issue you should care about is democracy.’”

And despite the alarm often expressed by progressive activists about Trump’s authoritarian aspirations, progressive “populist” strategists almost invariably prefer appeals to voters’ material interests as opposed to such abstract matters as the U.S. Constitution or institutional barriers to a would-be tyrant like Trump. The standard leftist critique of Kamala Harris’s campaign held that all this pointy-headed talk about “democracy” was a donor-driven distraction from the class-warfare messaging that might have beaten Trump but also distressed rich Democratic elites.

To be clear, whatever you think of the credibility of Harris’s claims that Trump posed a “threat to democracy,” nine months into his second term we know for a fact that he does indeed represent a threat to democracy, and a near and present threat at that. Yet Democratic politicians are being told by their party’s wise heads to put a sock in it and instead focus public attention on Trump’s performance on kitchen-table issues. Apparently, Trump’s aggressive work toward creation of the most imperial presidency ever isn’t something discussed at kitchen tables, so it’s not worth a lot of attention.

You can see this disconnect in action right now during the government-shutdown crisis. In truth, Democrats chose to trigger the shutdown at the end of September because they were at a point of near-panic over Trump’s rapid construction of an imperial presidency. With both congressional Republicans and (so far) the U.S. Supreme Court offering zero resistance to Trump’s assertions of unlimited authority over national affairs, Democrats seized on their only leverage point: the need for Democratic votes to keep the government open. But to hear Democrats talk about it, all they really want is an an extension of Obamacare premium subsidies — a very worthy goal, but one they could have pursued without a government shutdown. And worse yet, if they succeed and (as his own pollster is advising him to do) Donald Trump imposes an Obamacare subsidy extension on his party, what Democrats will have accomplished is taking the issue right off the table for the 2026 midterms. In addition, the shutdown itself is making life miserable at many kitchen tables, including those of the members of public-employee unions that are now breaking solidarity with congressional Democrats.

Even as some Democrats pretend they aren’t that worried about threats to democracy, Trump is working overtime to thwart democracy in the midterms via a vast smorgasbord of measures to prevent and if necessary overturn adverse election results. Normally, given Trump’s persistent unpopularity, Democrats could be confident of breaking the GOP’s fragile governing trifecta next year. But instead the president has initiated an entirely unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering blitz that will become unstoppable if the Supreme Court responds to his demand to gut what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. He’s also effectively plotting another attempted insurrection with better tactics and a more united party behind him. If against all prior odds the GOP holds onto Congress in 2026 by such methods, America will have become what experts call a “competitive authoritarian” country, operating a hybrid system with elections but no real democracy. The consequences for those relying on a vibrant and viable opposition to represent their interests on kitchen-table issues against a powerful and corrupt oligarchy will be enormous.

You’d think this situation would be worth mentioning and perhaps emphasizing, unless Democrats truly believe swing voters are too stupid, selfish, or short-sighted to care. Are Americans committed to democracy only so long as it manifestly delivers more short-term economic benefits than an authoritarian alternative? If so, we have bigger problems than higher Obamacare health-insurance premiums, as we’ll discover when a future GOP regime wipes Obamacare, the Great Society, and the New Deal right off the books.

In “These are the blue-collar voters the GOP needs to worry about,’ Ronald Brownstein writes at Bloomberg, via the Anchorage Daily News:

“In the 2024 election, Donald Trump mapped an escape route for Republicans from the greatest long—term challenge facing the party. Less than a year later, that path looks much more precarious.

The core demographic challenge facing the GOP is that the party’s most reliable bloc of voters — white people without a four—year college degree — is shrinking. Trump’s solution in 2024 was to markedly improve his performance among non—white voters without a four-year college degree. But polling through his second term consistently shows those voters cooling on his performance and priorities. If that trend continues, the math for Republican candidates — especially in presidential races — will grow much more complicated.

For decades, white voters without a college degree were the nucleus of the dominant New Deal coalition forged for Democrats by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the cultural and racial storms of the 1960s shattered that coalition; during the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, millions of blue-collar white voters moved right, largely around racially tinged issues such as school busing, crime and welfare, but also because of social issues, taxes and national security. Democrats have struggled with those voters ever since, but Trump widened the GOP advantage to a commanding level not seen since the “Reagan Democrats” era in the 1980s. The major data sources on how Americans vote — including exit polls, the AP/VoteCast survey and the Pew Research Center’s Validated Voters study — agree that Trump carried nearly two-thirds of white voters without a college degree in each of his three campaigns.

But although working-class white people remain the largest single bloc of voters, their presence in the electorate has steadily declined as the US has grown both more racially diverse and better educated. In 1980, white people without a four-year degree comprised 68% of voters, according to an analysis of Census data provided exclusively to me by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Metro think tank. By 2008, Frey calculates, their share had fallen below half, to 48%, for the first time. Though Trump inspired very high turnout among these blue-collar white people, that hasn’t overcome their continued decline in the overall population: Their share of the total vote fell from 42% in 2016 to slightly over 37% in 2024, the Census reported. Blue-collar white voters remain a bigger share of the electorate in the pivotal Rustbelt swing states, but even there they have already fallen below a majority in Pennsylvania and are likely to do so in Michigan in 2028.

College-educated voters, of all races, have mostly filled this gap. In 2004, Frey found, white adults with at least a four-year degree cast just under 28% of all ballots nationwide, and college-educated non-white adults about 5%. In 2024, those numbers rose to 33% for white adults and about 12% for non-white adults. The share of Non-white adults without a college degree has grown, too, but only from 16% in 2004 to about 18% last year. (The Census data puts the total share of college-educated voters slightly higher than the other leading data sources on voting behavior, but they all show the same trends.)

Pervasive disappointment in Joe Biden’s record allowed Trump in 2024 to improve with virtually every group, including college graduates of all races. But in the long run, a party recast in his image is likely to struggle with well-educated voters, who mostly hold liberal positions on social issues and express the greatest concern about Trump’s assaults on constitutional safeguards. September surveys by the New York Times/Siena College and the Washington Post/Ipsos each found that about 7 in 10 college-educated people of color, and between 55% and 60% of well-educated white people, disapproved of his performance as president.

That leaves blue-collar non-white voters as the crucial source of potential long-term growth for a Trump-stamped GOP. And, in fact, both the exit polls and the AP/VoteCast survey calculated that he won about one-third of them last year, while Pew (in a new analysis provided to me) put his total even higher, at nearly two-fifths. In each case, that was a big improvement from the roughly one-fourth support among those voters that all three surveys recorded for Trump in 2020.

Those gains prompted exuberant predictions among some Republican strategists that Trump had constructed a stable, cross-racial, working-class majority coalition. Even if the party lost votes from the continued shrinking of the white working class, the thinking went, Trump had proved the GOP could add enough votes from the non-white working class to offset those losses.

But Trump’s grasp on those voters is already slipping. Like polls earlier in his term, the New York Times/Siena College and Washington Post/Ipsos surveys found that only about one-fourth of non-college non-white voters approved of his job performance. In the Times/Siena survey, four times as many of those blue-collar racial minorities said his economic policies had hurt rather than helped the economy, and two-thirds said he has gone too far both with his immigration enforcement policies and in deploying the National Guard to major cities. In the Washington Post poll, three-fourths of them said his tariffs were raising prices. These results all diverged sharply from Trump’s continued strong support among working-class white voters.”

More here.

Sen. Bernie Sanders suggests some reforms needed to help workers navigate the problems generated by the explosive growth of A.I.: “First, we must move to a 32-hour work week with no loss in pay. Think about it. Today, American workers are 4oo percent more productive than they were in the1940s when the 40-hour work week was first established. Artificial intelligence and robotics will greatly increase that productivity. Workers must benefit from that increased output through a shorter work week. A 32-hour work week with no loss of pay would be a major step forward in improving the quality of life for millions of Americans. Second, we must require large corporations to allow workers to elect at least 45% of the members of their boards of directors, similar to what already takes place in Germany. Workers need a seat at the table to best determine how AI is used in their companies. If Tesla workers were on their corporate board, I doubt very much that they would be rewarding Elon Musk with a trillion dollar pay package. Third, we must greatly increase profit sharing at our nation’s largest corporations. In my view, workers should receive at least 20% of the stock in companies they work for. Corporate profits should not just be going to enrich wealthy stockholders and the billionaires who own them. Fourth, we need to substantially expand the concept of employee ownership in America. When workers own their own businesses and are more involved in the decision-making processes, they will make choices that benefit everyone in the company, not just the people on top. Fifth, instead of providing billions of dollars in tax breaks to companies that are throwing workers out on the street and replacing them with new technologies, we should enact a robot tax on large corporations and use that revenue to improve the lives of workers who have been harmed in this transition. Bottom line, AI and robotics will bring a profound transformation to our country. Nobody denies that. In my view, we must fight to make sure that these changes benefit all of us and not just a handful of billionaires. Let the debate begin and we need your participation.”

In “Previewing the New Jersey and Virginia Governor Races: Part Two,” Michael Baharaeen writes at The Liberal Patriot: “Next week, voters in New Jersey and Virginia will go to the polls to select new governors in the first major election since Donald Trump was re-elected. In my previous rundown of these races, I detailed how historical trends suggest Democrats are favored to win both. But I also noted that over the last four years, these two blue-leaning states have drifted rightward and delivered some surprise wins for Republicans—and that Democrats can’t take either one for granted…This week, we’re diving into the current state of play, including what the polls show, which issues are dominating, and how much all this can tell us about what to expect next week…Heading into the final stretch of the campaign, Democrats appear to be in a stronger position in Virginia than in New Jersey. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, the Democrat in the race, former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, lead her GOP challenger, Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, by about seven points…Up the Atlantic coast, the landscape looks a little different. Though New Jersey has for years been a much bluer state than Virginia in federal elections, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate there, Mikie Sherrill, is having a tougher go at it than Spanberger. Sherrill has held a lead over Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, since late summer, but it has narrowed considerably over the past couple of months. RealClearPolitics’ polling average showed Sherrill’s advantage dropping from nine points in August to just 3.7 points as of this week…When married together with historical election trends, this evidence adds to the idea that Spanberger and Sherrill are the favorites ahead of next week. However, Sherrill is arguably in a tougher fight, and there is a clear opening for Ciattarelli to upset historical trends and become New Jersey’s first Republican governor since Chris Christie…Next week, I’ll conclude this series with a look at the arguments for why each party’s candidate could win in each state—and detail a list of things I’ll be watching for heading into election night.” More here.

From “Is Economic Populism the Key to Winning Over Rust Belt Voters?” by Jared Abbott, head of the Center for Working-Class Politics, at In These Times: “For all their divisions, Americans share one conviction: the economy comes first…In September 2024, 81% of registered voters told Pew the economy would be very important to their presidential vote—the top issue on their list, ahead of all others. Gallup likewise found the economy was the most important of 22 issues, with 52% calling it ​“extremely important” and another 38% ​“very important,” making it a significant factor for roughly nine in ten voters. And this February, Pew reported that economic concerns dominate Americans’ top national problems, including the affordability of health care (67%) and inflation (63%)…But beyond general concern about ​“the economy,” affordability and inflation, it’s much less clear what specific economic policies might help to nudge more infrequent voters to the polls and turn swing voters into Democrats…Centrist Democrats claim that the best policies to connect with working-class voters are commonsense, practical, non-ideological policies aimed at strengthening economic growth and expanding economic opportunities for working people. For example, a post-election study conducted by PPI of battleground voters found that 82% of Americans agreed that it should be easier to start a business, 83% favored having more alternatives for college and 81% wanted to reduce government budgets. By contrast, only 47% of respondents in the PPI survey supported taxpayer-funded health insurance and just 42% had a favorable view of ​“increasing social spending and redistribution.”…Progressives counter by arguing that the notion Americans are averse to bold progressive economic policies is a myth — and there’s substantial evidence to support that claim. Recent polls have shown, for example, that 63% of Americans favor higher taxes on large corporations, 76% support Congress passing a national paid family and medical leave program, and 65% of working-class respondents want to see worker representatives on corporate boards of directors, while 69% of working-class respondents hope the federal minimum wage will rise to $15 per hour, and 79% of working-class voters support increased funding to Social Security and Medicare. But just because voters express hypothetical support for a given policy doesn’t mean they would be moved to support candidates who endorse it.” More here.

Some notes from Martha McHardy’s article, “Donald Trump’s Support Among Middle Class Crumbling: Poll” at Newsweek: “Middle-income voters surveyed by YouGov/The Economist remain broadly negative about the economy under Trump. Their approval of his handling of the economy has slipped from 41 percent in August to 37 percent in October, while disapproval rose from 50 to 59 percent. Views on inflation were even more negative, with just 33 percent approving and 63 percent disapproving in October, compared to 33 percent approval and 57 percent disapproval in August…However, some of the polling data shows the outlook of middle class voters has begun to stabilize after months of decline…While only 22 percent of respondents in October said the economy was “getting better,” that figure has remained steady since September after a sharp drop earlier in the summer. The share saying the economy was “getting worse” has held at 52 percent for two consecutive months…Similarly, the share of middle-income voters reporting that their personal finances have improved fell slightly, from 17 percent in August to 15 percent in October, while those saying their situation was “about the same” has stabilized near 45 percent…The dim economic mood follows signs of renewed strain in key areas: Inflation rose to 3 percent in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)—its highest level since January—while the unemployment rate reached 4.3 percent, the highest in four years.”