The following article, “Polls Keep Showing Americans Want Elon Musk and DOGE Out of Government” by Julianne McShane, is cross-posted from Mother Jones:

Yet more evidence shows Elon Musk and his cronies at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are unpopular with many Americans.

Nearly half of people who responded to a new CBS/YouGov poll out today said they want Musk to have less influence over government spending and operations, including nearly a third who think they should have none at all. The poll found that 18 percent of respondents said that Musk and his DOGE acolytes should have “not much” influence on government operations and spending, while 31 percent said they should have none at all. Predictably, the support differed along partisan lines: Nearly three-quarters of Republicans surveyed said Musk and DOGE should have “a lot” or “some” influence, whereas more than two-thirds of Democrats said they should have “not much” or “none.”

This comes as the latest bit of mounting evidence showing many Americans don’t want Musk running the government: Just this week, a poll from the Economist/YouGov also showed that 51 percent of Americans believe Musk has a lot of influence in the government, while only 13 percent want him to have that much influence; 46 percent, on the other hand, don’t want him to have anyinfluence. Another poll released this week from progressive advocacy groups Groundwork Collaborative and Public Citizen in partnership with Hart Research found 54 percent of voters have an unfavorable opinion of him, with a majority also saying he has too much influence and involvement in the government and that they have less favorable opinions after learning about the lack of oversight regulating potential conflicts of interest with his companies as well as the ability of DOGE to access unclassified information.

Last month, a Quinnipiac University poll found 53 percent of respondents disapprove of Musk’s prominent role in the Trump administration, and another January poll, from the Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center, found that a majority of Americans don’t want Trump relying on billionaires or family members for policy advice and have an unfavorable opinion of Musk.

All in all, this is not surprising, given that, as Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery wrote earlier this week, nobody voted for Musk, an unelected tech billionaire. The latest data offers a clear rebuke to the hurricane of chaos that Musk and his cronies at DOGE and across the federal government have unleashed since President Trump’s inauguration.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, that chaos has included trying to pay federal workers to quit their jobs; attempting to gain access to US Treasury data; threatening to shutter USAID, a federal agency tasked with supporting critical humanitarian and development work around the world; taking over the Education Department, which Musk claimed on X the other day “doesn’t exist”; and threatening reporters who report critically on DOGE. (And given that the department is reportedly staffed by Gen Z fanboys and former staffers of Musk—one of whom, Marko Elez, resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal unearthed openly racist posts on an account linked to him, before Musk promptly rehired him the next day—there has been plenty to cover.)

The CBS/YouGov poll released Sunday showed other Trump policies that are also unpopular: 52 percent of respondents said they oppose building large detention centers to house people awaiting decisions on whether or not they’ll be deported; only 13 percent said the US trying to take over Gaza, as Trump proposed this week, would be a good idea (47 percent called it a bad idea, and 40 percent said they’re unsure); 66 percent said Trump is not focused enough on lowering prices; and large majorities said they oppose new US tariffs on goods from Mexico, Europe, and Canada (economists have said those tariffs will likely raise prices for American consumers).

But in a news release from the White House Sunday, responses to those data points were invisible. “Americans Are Loving the New Golden Age,” the press release claimed, touting Trump’s 53 percent approval rating, the 70 percent of poll respondents who said Trump is doing what he promised on the campaign trail, and the majority approval for his mass deportation plan and his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict. (Never mind that those assertions would seem to be in conflict with some of the other findings mentioned above—such as the limited support for his floated plan to take over Gaza.)

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt shared the headline from CBS on X: “Trump has positive approval amid ‘energetic’ opening weeks; seen as doing what he promised,” it read. Leavitt’s enthusiastic promotion of it was curious given that, just a few days ago, her boss said in a post on Truth Social that CBS should “lose its license” over a 60 Minutes interview the network did with former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. (Trump filed a lawsuit against the network, alleging that the 60 Minutes interview was deceptively edited to make Harris look better; CBS denies those allegations and this week released the raw footage and transcript of the entire interview, which it also provided to the Federal Communications Commission upon request.)

The White House’s promotion of the latest CBS poll—and its refusal to seriously engage with public criticisms of Musk, along with other points of contention—offers a clear example of its hypocrisy regarding its attacks on journalism and truth: What Trump’s acolytes see as favorable to him get labeled as legitimate, whereas anything more critical gets branded “fake news”—or simply ignored.

When it comes to Musk, they’ve continued to defend him—and showed how unseriously they seem to be taking his position in the highest levels of government. At a press briefing this week, Leavitt said that Trump was clear on the campaign trail about the role Musk would play in his administration. Separately, when a CNN reporter asked Leavitt what kind of security clearance Musk has, if he passed a background check, or if the DOGE team members raiding the Treasury Department or USAID had security clearances, she said she didn’t know and would have to check. The White House does not appear to have clarified those points yet.

But if Democrats continue attacking Musk and the role of oligarchy in the Trump administration, as they did this week, the White House may have no choice but to confront the discontent around Musk and DOGE head-on.

Correction, Feb. 9: This story originally misstated the proportion of Democrats in the CBS poll who said Musk and DOGE should have not much or no influence in government.

One of the central concerns of The Democratic Strategist has been to explore ways that Democrats can regain the support of a healthy majority of working-class voters, including white working-class voters, a group which accounts for about half of the electorate. Toward that end, Andrew Levison has a new TDS Strategy Memo entitled “Democratic Political Strategy is Developed by College-Educated Political Analysts Sitting in Front of Computers on College Campuses or Think Tank Offices . That’s Why the Strategies Don’t Work.” Levison, author of influential works of political analysis, including “The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support,” argues that nearly all of the previous political analysis of white working-class voters “is profoundly and painfully superficial” because “It essentially visualizes working people as if they were isolated individuals sitting in their living rooms watching TV or reading a newspaper and thoughtfully evaluating the political messages and policy proposals that they see presented.” Further, Levison writes: “What is entirely ignored in this way of conceptualizing how workers make political choices is the massive effect of social and community life, of neighborhood and community institutions and a voter’s personal history and experience on their political perspective – on how daily interaction with friends, neighbors, co-workers and others in a workers’ neighborhood, workplace and community shape that person’s political attitudes.”

This is a very different perspective than the common wisdom embraced and regurgitated by many political analysts. As  Levison notes further, “At first glance these articles appear to offer a vast range of distinct suggestions but when examined more closely can be seen to fall into three basic categories:

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

Three months after the Democrats’ electoral drubbing, the party is still reeling—leaderless, rudderless, and historically unpopular. Only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, the lowest rating since CNN first asked the question in 1992. Republicans have led in party identification for three straight years, which hasn’t happened in nearly a century. And the GOP is outregistering Democrats in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina.

Think party pooh-bahs realize it is time for urgent change? Think again.

Viral video clips from the Democratic National Committee’s election for a new chair this past weekend seemed like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college. In one, outgoing DNC chair Jaime Harrison explains how the presence of a gender nonbinary candidate affected the committee’s gender-balance rules. (“The nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.”) In another, every candidate for chair blamed Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump on racism and misogyny.

The DNC settled on 24-year-old school-shooting survivor David Hogg as one of its new vice chairs. Here is Hogg’s take on why Democrats did badly among Gen Z voters:

We had to grow up worrying about dying in a school shooting today, or dying of climate change tomorrow, and then being crushed by student debt and the housing crisis in between. . . and I think on the issue of Gaza in particular, it was emblematic of the fact that people felt like we were not listening to them—that we didn’t care.

Hogg is almost as out of touch as the winning candidate for DNC chair, Minnesota’s Ken Martin. He confidently asserted: “We’ve got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”

In short, all the early signs point to a party that has learned nothing from defeat. If only the Democratic Party were wearing lapels, because then someone could grab them, shake hard, and yell: “What part of ‘the voters just rejected your fixation on identity politics’ do you not understand?”

Yet the simple recognition that they lost in November for a reason still seems inadmissible in the party’s deliberations about how to deal with Trump 2.0. Instead, they give every indication of doubling down on their least popular policy agenda items and the resist-everything-all-the-time strategy that yielded disastrous results for them last time.

Unless Democrats acknowledge that much of what Trump says and does is not only popular but also, here and there, good policy, they can never recover. They should seek compromise on issues where Trump holds the policy and political high ground, reserving hard opposition for the areas where voters are least likely to agree with him—such as blanket tariffs on U.S. trading partners, which are neither justified nor popular.

The party should heed the acerbic advice of the great Democratic congressman Barney Frank: “If you care deeply about an issue, and are engaged in group activity on its behalf that is fun and inspiring and heightens your sense of solidarity with others, you are almost certainly not doing your cause any good.”

In other words, if it feels good, don’t do it.

With that advice in mind, here are four rules of the road to help Democrats navigate the next four years.

1. Avoid the name-calling

Let’s start with something easy: Don’t drop the F-bomb. Democrats must resist the urge to characterize Trump or his policies as “fascist”—as Kamala Harris did in the home stretch of the presidential race. Why? For a start, it’s not true. Trump may have authoritarian tendencies. But—if the term is to retain any meaning—that is very different from being a fascist. A cursory acquaintance with twentieth-century history should make that clear. (If you have any further doubts, please consult Richard Evans’ three-volume history of the Third Reich.)

If Trump is a fascist then all that he does must be part of his heinous fascist plot, and all of it must be resisted all the time. California House Democrat Robert Garcia demonstrated this approach last week when he ruled out any compromise: “I think the idea that we’re talking about holding hands with Donald Trump and extremist Republicans and like, kumbaya, I think is a huge mistake. We know what he’s going to do. We should oppose that and be very vocal and tough and push back.” The F-bomb has another political disadvantage: It disparages everyone who voted for Trump by implication.

It is my sad duty to remind the gathering legions of anti-fascist fighters: it didn’t work last time and it won’t work this time. “Trump, Trump, Trump, fascist, fascist, fascist, Trump, Trump, Trump, racist, racist, racist” has repeatedly failed to stem the populist tide—most recently just a few months ago in the Harris campaign. This time is not different.

The path to durable victory is what it was before: convincing voters you are a moderate and reasonable alternative to Trump.

2. Moderate—starting with immigration

That moderation should start with a decisive issue in the last election: immigration. Voters want a secure border and an end to runaway illegal immigration. They believe Democrats don’t. In his first days in office, Trump tightened border security with a series of executive orders; his administration has started to implement deportations targeted at criminal immigrants; and he signed the Laken Riley Act, which is named after the Georgia nursing student murdered by illegal Venezuelan immigrant Jose Ibarra in 2024. (It provides for the detention and possible deportation of illegal immigrants charged with certain crimes, as Ibarra was. In a chemically pure example of what is wrong with the Democrats, Joe Biden apologized for referring to illegal immigrant Ibarra as illegalrather than the approved undocumented.)

So far, Democrats have done little to address voters’ suspicions that they don’t take border security seriously. The Laken Riley Act passed the House and the Senate with the support of only a handful of Democrats. They have offered close to no support for Trump’s executive orders tightening up border security and ongoing deportation actions. An honorable exception is Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, who not only voted for the law but attended the Act’s signing ceremony. He has said it is “common sense” that violent illegals “all need to go.”

The party could twin a serious, unapologetic commitment to border security with opposition to inhumane treatment of detainees, excessive deportation (e.g., of the Dreamers), and unpopular steps like eliminating birthright citizenship. But that would require meeting Trump halfway—something most Democrats still refuse to do.

3. Partner with Trump when he’s right—like on DEI

It’s a similar story with DEI and affirmative action. In a series of executive orders, Trump has set about dismantling DEI and affirmative action within the federal government and for federal contractors. Democrats appear willing to lie down on the railroad tracks on this one. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Trump’s actions with the disingenuous argument that DEI is merely an expression of the American values in the Constitution. That’s absurd. DEI is of comparatively recent vintage and the programs are now indelibly associated with racial preferences, oppression hierarchies, ideological indoctrination, and language policing. Those aren’t American values at all.

Tolerance, anti-discrimination and equal opportunity, on the other hand, are—precisely what Democrats used to advocate. Defending these principles against Trump and his inevitable tendency to encroach upon them as he pursues his agenda would be a worthwhile and popular stance for Democrats. But first they must recognize that Trump’s drive for a color-blind, merit-based society is extremely popular while affirmative action and DEI are not.

Instead, Democrats are repeating their misguided, ineffectual response to the 2023 Supreme Court decision that barred race-based affirmative action in college admissions. At the time, Jaime Harrison, then-chair of the DNC, “condemned” the Supreme Court for what he described as “a devastating blow for racial justice and equality.” Jeffries said the ruling showed the court was “more interested in jamming their right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”

Jeffries could not have been more wrong that opposition to affirmative action is an expression of fringey “right-wing ideology”. In fact, racial preferences are very, very unpopular with ordinary Americans and have been for a long time. In polling from Pew in 2022, an overwhelming 74 percent thought that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. A majority of all non-white racial groups agreed. Affirmative action also lost badly in a referendum in deep-blue California in 2020. Supporters of a measure to repeal the state’s ban on affirmative action outspent opponents by ten to one, but the measure still failed.

Most voters, especially working-class voters, believe, like Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” A 2022 University of California Dornsife survey found that more than 90 percent of Americans agree that America should strive for color-blind tolerance. But many Democrats dismiss the idea of color blindness as either hopelessly naive or itself a racist dog-whistle.

4. Embrace energy abundance

Democrats also need to show more pragmatism on energy. Trump has taken steps that he says will increase fossil fuel production and make energy more abundant. He plans to eliminate many of the subsidies and regulations that are designed to accelerate the transition to green energy and electric vehicles. And he has restricted environmental review processes to reduce the costs of big energy and infrastructure projects.

Much of this has both merit and popular support. Democrats, however, have been unremittingly hostile. They are letting the usual suspects at environmental and climate change NGOs dictate their response. Alas for them, voters care more about cheap, reliable energy than fighting climate change. They are willing to consider electric vehicles, but resent any regulatory attempt to force them to give up gas-powered vehicles. And Trump is right: Environmental regulations really have become a shocking drag on building practically anything in this country—be it energy-related projects, transportation infrastructure, or housing.

If Democrats can’t accept that much of this is both popular and necessary, they will be unable to mount a credible response where Trump’s energy plans go off the rails. For example, pausing wind but not other energy projects makes no sense from an “all-of-the-above,” energy abundance perspective. And just gutting the energy provisions of the IRA wholesale is neither wise nor necessary. Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath note:

Somewhere between half and three-quarters of projected Inflation Reduction Act spending over the next decade will be for wind, solar, and electric-vehicle subsidies. These are all mature, cost-competitive technologies that don’t need further subsidization. Cutting their subsidies could amount to somewhere between $300 billion and $650 billion in savings.

But Congress should maintain federal incentives for promising less-mature technologies, such as nuclear and geothermal energy and natural-gas plants with carbon capture. Doing so would rebuild the bipartisan consensus for energy innovation that prevailed in congressional politics for decades.

That would be a worthy goal for Democrats to promote. And in the end it might do more for emissions reduction than a quixotic attempt to defend renewables and EV subsidies to the death.

More generally, Democrats don’t need to—and shouldn’t—ignore climate change. But a winning message must be embedded in, and subordinate to, voters’ overriding priorities: energy abundance and prosperity. Polling clearly shows that this is the mainstream view—but among Democrats it is still, at best, a niche position.

What’s true of immigration, DEI, and energy is true in many other areas. The trick is knowing when to say “okay” to Trump, and when to say “no.” Democrats sometimes seem to understand this. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a recent interview, “Trump will screw up,” urging his colleagues to be patient. Even Jeffries seems to appreciate the point of this, at least in theory. “We’re not going to swing at every pitch,” he said last week. By Monday, though, he sounded a lot less restrained, unveiling his plans to push back against “far-right extremism that is being relentlessly unleashed on the American people.”

Amid all the denial that dominated the contest for DNC chair, there was a breath of realism from Adam Frisch, a Democratic former Congressional candidate in a rural Colorado district who over-performed the top of the ticket but still lost his 2024 race. “Twenty big cities, Aspen, and Martha’s Vineyard—that’s what’s left of the Democratic Party,” he told The Wall Street Journal recently.

If Democrats want to rebuild their shattered party, they have no choice but to exercise restraint and choose their fights with Trump wisely. The alternative is four years of garment-rending, continued isolation on a few islands in Blue America—and, in 2029, a fresh batch of candidates for DNC chair blaming the latest electoral disaster on racism and misogyny.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is now a contributing writer.

William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, two of the Democratic Party’s most astute strategists, make their case for ‘Renewing the Democratic Party,” cross-posted here from The Third Way:

A time comes for every political party when its policies and dominant assumptions no longer meet either the public’s expectations or the needs of the times. We believe that the Democratic Party has reached one of these moments and stands in urgent need of renewal.

This renewal involves more than communications, organization, and mobilization. It will require the party to ask itself hard questions about the reasons for its dwindling support among groups it has long taken for granted, to reflect on declining public confidence in government as a vehicle of progress, and to think anew about its policy agenda in an era of rapid change, at home and abroad. This process will be neither quick nor easy, which is why it must begin now.

The purpose of Democratic renewal is not only to win the next election. It is to build a party that can command a sustainable majority over a series of elections based on an agenda that successfully addresses the central issues of our time.

The Key Challenge to a Sustainable Democratic Majority: Losing the Working Class

As the 2024 election has made clear, the populist revolution that Trump has spearheaded within the Republican Party is reconfiguring the coalitions of both parties, to the Democrats’ disadvantage.

For the first time since the mid-20th century, the central fault line of American politics is neither race and ethnicity nor gender but rather class, determined by educational attainment. But in the intervening half century, the parties have switched places. Republicans once commanded a majority among college-educated voters while Democrats were the party of the working class. Now the majority of college educated voters support Democrats. Meanwhile, the troubled relationship between the Democratic Party and white working-class voters that began in the late 1960s now includes the non-white working-class as well, as populist Republicans are expanding their support among working-class Hispanics¹ and an increasing share of African American men. Making matters worse, several groups of Asian Americans shifted to the right as their concern mounted about crime in public spaces and attacks on test-based admissions to elite public high schools.²

The sorting of partisan preferences based on educational attainment is bad news for Democrats, demographically and geographically. Fewer than 38% of Americans 25 and older have earned BAs, a share that has plateaued in recent years after increasing five-fold between 1960 and 2020.³  And so, it appears, has the Democratic share of the college graduate vote (57% in 2020, 56% in 2024) even as the Republican share of the non-college vote surged from 51% to 56%. Meanwhile, non-college voters still make up 57% of the electorate, a figure that rises to 60% in the swing states.⁴

If Democrats cannot build a broader cross-class alliance, one that includes a larger share of non-college voters, their future is not bright. At the presidential level, they could end up confined to states with high densities of college-educated voters, leaving them far short of an Electoral College majority. Although Democrats won all the states with shares of BA degree holders at 40% 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% or lower while prevailing in seven of the 10 states with college attainment between 36 and 39%.⁵ 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.

The new class-based politics is reinforced by the fact that prosperity in twenty-first century America is concentrated in metropolitan areas where the workforce is educated, innovation is strong, and the information economy dominates. Our Brookings colleagues looked at all the counties in America and found that in 2024 the richer counties voted for Harris while the poorer counties voted for Trump.⁶ As the table below, taken from their recent report, illustrates, this trend has been going on for some time. Today, 60% of America’s wealth is concentrated in only 382 of the country’s more than 3000 counties. These wealthy counties are densely populated, which explains why Harris’ popular vote was competitive, but they are found in either deep blue states or as islands of high education and prosperity in deep red states.

National Trends

Donald Trump won a surprisingly broad-based victory in 2024. He received 3.1 million more votes than he did in 2020 and, contrary to the expectations of many, won the popular vote by 2.3 million. He bettered his share of the popular vote by 3.1 percentage points, coming within 0.1 point of winning an outright majority while sweeping all seven swing states, some by substantial margins. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’s share of the popular vote was 3 points lower than Joe Biden’s in 2020.

Compared to Biden’s performance in 2020, Harris lost ground in almost every demographic group, with especially severe losses among young adults⁷ and non-white voters, particularly Hispanics and Black men. Moreover, Harris’s non-stop efforts to mobilize women on the abortion issue fell well short of its goal, even though large majorities continued to vote for the pro-choice position on referenda. Indeed, Harris’s margin among suburban women, a major campaign target, was 4 points lower than Biden’s had been four years earlier.⁸

To be sure, Trump’s victory fell well short of the landslide he often claims. Kamala Harris won 48.4% of the popular vote, falling short of Trump’s share by just 1.5 points. Some Democratic leaders are trying to put a sunny spin on this result.⁹

But the fact remains that Trump has improved his vote total and vote share in both presidential elections since his surprise Electoral College victory in 2016, disproving pundits who spoke confidently about the “low ceiling” of his popular support. And he is winning the public argument about the issues on which he has run consistently for decades—trade, globalization, and immigration.

A single statistic sums up the Democratic Party’s decline. Between 1976 and 2020, Democrats consistently led Republicans as a share of the presidential electorate. Republicans won elections only when they garnered significant support from Democrats, as Ronald Reagan did in 1980 and 1984 and George H. W. Bush did in 1988. The 2024 election interrupted this longstanding trend: Republicans constituted 35% of the electorate compared to just 31% for Democrats. Donald Trump got only 4% of votes cast by Democrats, but this poor performance didn’t come close to costing him the election.¹⁰

This break with the past reflected more than the sharp 2024 decline in Democratic turnout. During the past three years, Republicans have led Democrats in party identification for the first time since 1991.¹¹ If they can mobilize their base and do reasonably well among independents, they now can win elections without reaching across party lines. Whether or not Donald Trump was aware of this trend, he sensed that turning out the party faithful would be enough to win. To this end, he pursued a relentless strategy of intensifying rather than broadening his support, and it worked.

The Swing States Versus the Rest of the Country

Drilling down below the national aggregates, we find that the 2024 election was actually two separate and very different contests—one in the seven swing states, the other in the rest of the country. In the latter, where advertisements and voter mobilization were scarce, support for Harris collapsed from the high-water mark Biden had established, especially in blue states. In the swing states, by contrast, the Harris campaign came very close to equaling Biden’s performance in the aggregate. This wasn’t enough, however, because Trump improved significantly from his 2020 showing.

In many of the blue states, Trump’s vote total expanded modestly if at all while Harris’s collapsed relative to Biden’s performance four years earlier. In Illinois and New Jersey, Harris received about 400,000 fewer votes than Biden. In New York, Harris fell short of Biden by 600,000. And in California, the shortfall reached an astonishing 1.8 million votes, a drop of 16.5% from 2020.

By contrast, Harris performed well in most of the swing states. She got more votes than Biden in three swing states (Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin), fewer than Biden in three swing states (Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania), and virtually tied him in Nevada. Her vote total in the swing states trailed Biden’s by just 47,000—three tenths of one percent. But fatally for her presidential prospects, Trump improved on his 2020 showing in the swing states by nearly one million votes—6.2%.¹² While Harris lost them all, it would be more accurate to say that Donald Trump won them, with a message strong enough to overcome the Harris campaign’s edge in funds and organization.

The implication of the swing state outcomes is clear: as Democrats ponder the way forward, their challenge is not only to repair their weaknesses but also to develop an agenda and message appealing enough to counter the strength that Republicans showed in 2024.

As President Trump began his second term, he enjoyed substantial support from the American people, and so did his party.  In contrast, the Democratic Party hit new lows in public approval. At the end of January 2025, only 31 percent of the people had a favorable opinion of the party, compared to 57 percent unfavorable.  Among Independents, the favorable/unfavorable split was 22/59; among men, 22/67.  After an intensive Democratic outreach throughout the Biden administration, the party scored only 39 percent approval among women, barely better than the Republicans’ 37 percent.  The party cannot hope to recover until unless it finds a way to improve its brand.¹³

Why Harris Lost

Optimists may argue that Kamala Harris’s defeat stemmed from a series of unfortunate events without broader significance for the future of the Democratic Party. If Joe Biden had not, in 2024, engaged in a presidential debate in which he appeared to have aged substantially, if he had honored what many Democrats thought was a tacit promise to serve only one term, if he had announced his intention not to run after the 2022 election, if there had been a presidential primary that gave the winner not only public exposure but also time to plan for the general election, if Harris had found more effective ways of distancing herself from President Biden and explaining why she had abandoned her past positions—the 2024 contest could well have turned out differently.

These arguments have merit—up to a point. For example, a wide-open primary in 2023 and 2024 may have attracted candidates free to tackle the key issues of inflation and immigration more aggressively and without the constraints that a sitting vice president faces.

But these might-have-beens do not absolve Democrats from the disagreeable but necessary task of facing their underlying weaknesses and their opponents’ strength. In 2024 an attractive if flawed candidate lost to a former president with legal woes and personality defects who had been impeached twice and defeated for reelection, allowing a former incumbent to return to the White House for the first time since 1892.

If President Trump fails to fulfill the promises that drove his campaign, Democrats could defeat his successor in 2028. But this would merely perpetuate the destructive status quo of narrow, ever-shifting majorities that undermine successful governance. Democrats must work to build a sustainable majority. This means more than playing better the cards they now hold. They need a reshuffled deck and a new deal.

A year after the Biden presidency began, the authors of this memo published “The New Politics of Evasion: How Ignoring Swing Voters Could Reopen the Door for Donald Trump and Threaten American Democracy.”¹⁴ In that article, we warned Hispanic voters could continue to move away from the Democratic Party. We noted Democrats’ weakness among working-class voters, especially in the swing states. We suggested that contrary to the belief of many Democratic leaders and activists, Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 did not herald a new progressive era in either economics or culture. “For reasons of education, income, and geography,” we argued, too many Democrats were “far removed from the daily experiences and cultural outlooks of non-college voters.” And we showed that Democrats’ weakness among working-class Americans threatened to overwhelm their gains among voters with college degrees.

The 2024 election results confirmed our fears and revealed structural weaknesses in the Democratic Party as serious as those that were revealed in George H. W. Bush’s victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988. They require an equally comprehensive response.

In this context, we turn to a more detailed analysis of the factors that undermined Kamala Harris’s chances.

Inflation and Immigration

There is wide agreement that inflation and immigration hurt Harris’s chances, but the administration’s defenders argue that both higher prices and mass migration were global phenomena over which President Biden and Vice President Harris had little control. We disagree. Several well-known economists who served in prior Democratic administrations—for example, Larry Summers and Jason Furman—argued that Biden’s stimulus bills were excessive and therefore inflationary, a point recently conceded by the president’s chief economic advisor.¹⁵ To be sure, these bills were passed in the shadow of a national trauma—the COVID-19 epidemic—and the impulse to spend money was powerful. The Biden administration acted quickly to ease the COVID-induced interruption of supply chains, the one concrete action they could take to ease inflation. But as President Jimmy Carter found many decades ago, the president’s toolbox for dealing with rapid inflation once it has begun is pretty bare.

Given the lack of effective policy options, the administration was too slow to acknowledge the pain being felt by Americans beset by high grocery store and gasoline prices. Because so many Democratic voters now come from the upper middle class, the Administration overlooked the fact that inflation hits working-class voters, who live from paycheck to paycheck and spend most of their income on necessities, especially hard. In this context, the administration’s ill-conceived effort to sell “Bidenomics” was a fiasco that succeeded only in making the president and the party appear out of touch.

While there is some uncertainty whether Biden could have done more on inflation once it emerged, there is none on the question of immigration.

Between 2020 and 2023, migration and arrivals at the border surged.¹⁶ Several factors were no doubt responsible, but among the most important was that Democrats had been staunch critics of Trump’s border policies, especially his policy of family separation. In a world of instant communications, even in the poorest countries, the change in American leadership and policy after the 2020 election was not lost on people trying to escape poverty and violence, and they came to the United States in record numbers. As immigrants overwhelmed the border, opposition by progressive advocacy groups to tougher border enforcement or asylum reforms helped deter the president from acting until the political costs of inaction became prohibitive.

Unlike inflation, where President Biden’s policy tools were weak, he had plenty of authority to act at the border. The effective immigration restraints Biden implemented in 2024 could have been put in place years earlier.¹⁷ In fact, as the border was being overrun, Democrats in Congress, seeing the chaos and the effect on their constituents, agreed with Republicans on one of the toughest immigration bills ever. Once Trump torpedoed the bill, Biden’s insistence that he couldn’t act because he didn’t have the legal authority to do so only added to the public perception that he was weak, and his shift toward a tougher stance in 2024 undermined the claim that he lacked legal authority.

Democrats need to understand just how badly the Biden administration’s mishandling of immigration hurt Kamala Harris’s chances in 2024, not only among white voters, but across the board. Political scientist Michael Tesler has shown that between 2020 and 2024, the percentage of Hispanic and Black voters who agreed that “immigrants drain national resources” increased dramatically and that this shift moved voters of color to Trump.¹⁸ A Progressive Policy Institute survey found that by a narrow margin, working-class Hispanics actually preferred Trump to Harris on immigration.¹⁹ A Financial Times survey found that while 80% of white progressives believe that “immigration to the US should be made easier,” only 30% of Hispanics agree.²⁰ Even in deep-blue California, 63% of Hispanics now consider unauthorized immigrants to be a “burden,” contributing to the large shift of Golden State Hispanics toward Trump.²¹

Nowhere has the impact of shifting Hispanic opinion been more dramatic than in Florida, a former swing state. In 2012, Barack Obama carried Florida by 1 point. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost it by 1 point. In 2020, Joe Biden lost by 3 points. In 2024, Kamala Harris lost the Sunshine State by a stunning 13 points, 56-43, mainly because Hispanics deserted her for Donald Trump. In 2020, Joe Biden carried Florida’s Hispanics by 7 points, 53-46. This year, Harris lost them by 14 points, 56-42.

Without regaining an edge among Hispanics, who now constitute almost one-quarter of Florida’s voters, Democrats have no chance of recapturing Florida in the foreseeable future. But to do so, they must discard obsolete ideas about the interests and preferences of this increasingly influential bloc, the majority of whom are now native-born citizens. Years ago, we predicted that Hispanics would turn out to be the Italians of the 21st century, and now it is happening.

Read more…

This has been quite the chaotic week or so, and one of the byproducts of the nihilistic conduct being displayed by Donald Trump and his allies has been a decided end of Democratic cooperation, and I welcomed that development at New York:

Following the time-honored ritual of giving a new president a “honeymoon,” a good number of prominent Democrats made friendly noises about their nemesis after Donald Trump’s November election victory. Some, like Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, seemed inclined to cross the partisan barricades whenever possible, praising Trump’s dubious Cabinet nominations, calling on Joe Biden to pardon Trump to get rid of his hush-money conviction, and even joining Truth Social. Others, notably Bernie Sanders, talked of selective cooperation on issues where MAGA Republicans at least feigned anti-corporate “populism.” Still others, including some Democratic governors, hoped to cut deals on issues like immigration to mitigate the damage of Trump’s agenda. And one congressional Democrat, the normally very progressive Ro Khanna, promoted cooperation with Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, at least with respect to Defense spending.

This made some sense at the time. After all, Democrats, having lost control of both Congress and the White House, didn’t have much power of their own, and there was always the chance that having achieved his improbable comeback, Trump would calm down and try to become a normal chief executive in his final term in the job.

Now it is extremely clear that is not the case. The past chaotic week or so has convinced most Democrats that Trump has zero interest in compromise, bipartisanship, or even adherence to the law and to the Constitution. Musk and his Geek Kiddie Corps are ravaging agency after agency without the slightest legal authorization; OMB is preparing its own unilateral assault on federal benefits that don’t fit the Project 2025 vision of a radically smaller social safety net; and congressional Republicans are kneeling in abject surrender to whatever the White House wants. Democrats are resigning themselves to the mission of becoming an opposition party, full stop, making as much noise and arousing as much public outrage as they can. They shouldn’t be credited all that much for courage, since the new regime has given them little choice but to dig in and fight like hell.

OMB’s January 27 memo freezing a vast swath of federal programs and benefits, inept and confusing as it was, kicked off the current reign of terror. It reflected (and was likely dictated by) the belief of Trump OMB director nominee Russell Vought that the president can usurp congressional spending powers whenever he deems it necessary or prudent. Yet Congressional Republicans went along without a whimper. House Appropriations Committee chairman Tom Cole, who would have gone nuts had a Democratic president threatened his role so audaciously, said he had “no problem” with the freeze. The federal courts stepped in because OMB’s order was incoherently expressed, but there’s no question the administration will come back with something similar. As a sign of belated alarm over OMB’s direction, Senate Budget Committee Democrats boycotted Vought’s confirmation vote in reaction to this challenge to the constitutional separation of powers. After Republicans gaveled him on through without a whisper of dissent, Senate Democrats held an all-night “talk-a-thon” to recapitulate past and present concerns about Vought, a self-described Christian Nationalist and one of the principal authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a radically diminished federal government. He will be confirmed by the full Senate anyway.

Musk’s guerrilla warfare on the federal workforce and the programs they administer made the OMB power grab unfolding at about the same time look like a walk in the park. Even as his landing teams of 20-something coders took control of multiple agency IT systems and fired anyone who got in their way, Musk himself was on X making wild charges about the programs he was short-circuiting and all but cackling like a cartoon villain over his unlimited power. When Ro Khanna upbraided him for his lawlessness, he responded as you might expect, tweeting at Khanna: “Don’t be a dick.”

Khanna’s centrist Democratic colleague from Florida, Jared Moskovitz, had actually signed up for service on the DOGE oversight panel Mike Johnson created, despite its clear purpose as an ongoing pep rally for Musk. Now he’s out, as Punchbowl News reports:

“I need to see one of my Republican colleagues in the caucus explain the point of the caucus, because it seems that Elon doesn’t need them, because it seems what Elon is doing is destroying the separation of powers. And I don’t think the DOGE caucus at this moment really has a purpose … Whether I stay in the caucus, I think is questionable. I don’t need to stay in a caucus that’s irrelevant.”

Meanwhile, as all this madness was unfolding from the executive branch and its outlaw agents, congressional Republicans have been laboring through the process of putting together budget legislation to implement whatever portion of Trump’s agenda that wasn’t rammed through by fiat. Democrats are not being consulted at all in these preparations to produce a massive bill (or bills) that is expected to pass on a party-line vote and that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because of the immense leverage of the House Freedom Caucus over this legislation, the plans keep shifting in the direction of deeper and deeper domestic spending cuts at levels never discussed before. Per Punchbowl News:

“Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican committee chairs initially proposed between $500 billion to $700 billion in spending cuts as part of a massive reconciliation package. Yet conservative GOP hardliners rejected that, saying they wanted more. They’re seeking as much as $2 trillion to $5 trillion in cuts.”

Democrats can’t really do anything other than expose the extent and the effect of such cuts in the forelorn hope that a few House Republicans in particularly vulnerable districts develop their own counter-leverage over the process. But whatever emerges from the GOP discussion will have to be approved by OMB, where Russell Vought will soon be formally in charge. There’s just no path ahead for Democrats other than total war.

They do have their own leverage over two pieces of legislation Trump needs: an appropriations bill to keep government running after the December stopgap spending bill (which Musk nearly torpedoed in an early demonstration of his power) runs out, and a measure increasing the public debt limit. These bills can be filibustered, so Senate Democrats can kill them. There are increasing signs that congressional Democrats may refuse to go along with either one unless Trump puts a leash on Vought and Musk and perhaps even consults the Democratic Party on the budget. If there’s a government shutdown, it couldn’t be too much worse than a government being gutted by DOGE and OMB.

Republicans hope that Trump’s relatively strong popularity (for him, anyway) will keep Democrats from defying him. But they may not be accounting for the 47th president’s erratic character. On any given day, he may do something completely bonkers and deeply unpopular, like, say, suggesting the United States take over Gaza, expel its population, and build a resort development.

In “Democrats Launch Plan To Win Back Working Class,” Kahleda Rahman writes at Newsweek: “The leading super PAC supporting House Democrats in next year’s midterms has launched a $50 million fund aimed at winning back working-class voters….The House Majority PAC’s investment, which it has dubbed the “Win Them Back Fund,” is “focused on ensuring that we win back working-class voters across the congressional battlefield,” according to a Monday memo. It comes two years after it began the 2024 election cycle with funds for House seats in New York and California….The memo said that one of the “major roadblocks we have faced as a party has been declining support among a multiracial group of working-class voters.”….But it noted that some House Democrats including Representatives Adam Gray, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Don Davis “continue to overperform with this crucial bloc of voters,” demonstrating that House Democrats “can win back this coalition of voters with the support of strategic investments in recruitment, research, and programming.”….The memo said, “the House Republican agenda—including tariffs and taxes that would raise costs on families and force steep cuts to programs like Medicare, Social Security, and veterans’ benefits, would hurt working-class voters and only benefit the ultrarich—and awareness of that reality is key to our success with these voters….The super PAC’s memo included a list of 14 Republicans the fund will initially target, saying they represent districts where working-class voters would be “especially hurt” by the Republican policies….Mike Smith, the president of the House Majority PAC, said in a statement to Newsweek: “We’re laying a marker down with our Win Them Back Fund—this is a priority. Crafting and developing a credible working-class message through an economic frame is the single best thing we can do as a party.”

Les Leopold explains “Why Working People Need a Political Movement of Their Own” at Common Dreams, and writes: “It would be suicidal, some argue, for the working class to abandon the Democrats. Better that they exert pressure so that the Democrats become genuine economic populists. For that to happen, realistically, it must be proven that Democrats can win elections on a populist platform in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin….But Sherrod Brown, a very strong economic populist, lost his Senate seat in Ohio in 2024. Did populism drag him down? Brown, who lost by 3.6 percent, certainly ran better than Harris, who lost Ohio by 11.2 percent. Brown believes, however, that he was done in by NAFTA, the free trade bill pushed for and signed by Bill Clinton in 1993….The power of NAFTA, not the working-class racism, is also what delivered the South to the Republicans, according to Nelson Lichtenstein in his new book on the Clinton years, A Fabulous Failure. Even after Nixon used his racist Southern Strategy to lure the South away from the Democrats, Lichtenstein notes that congressional representation in the southern states was still evenly split between the two parties. After NAFTA demolished the southern textile industry, however, most of the South abandoned the Democrats….The Democrats also have failed to redevelop decimated areas by directly creating jobs, as the New Deal did during the Depression. Job stability is not something either political party cares about, because corporate interests come first, but the issue hurts the Democrats more because of its historical claim as the party of working people….Working people, union and non-union alike, can still be mobilized through civic engagement to express their hopes and desires. Workers could join something new, like a new Workers Populist Alliance, to develop and put forth a working-class agenda….The billionaire class has two political parties. Working people need one of our own.”

Democrats should energetically publicize that military veterans are included in the Trump-Musk  seizure of data pertaining to all U.S. government payments. As Rebecca Kheel writes at military.com: “Over the weekend, Musk and his team gained access to the system that the Treasury Department uses to make all U.S. government payments. The system includes taxpayer data, such as Social Security numbers, for nearly every American, which naturally includes scores of veterans. On top of that, information about VA disability and retirement benefits, Medicare and Medicaid payments and any other government benefits veterans might receive would be swept up in the system….”Anyone who’s receiving payments from the federal government, first and foremost, is likely to be concerned that payments that they are obliged to receive might not show up, either intentionally because they’re getting blocked for some reason that’s not explained, or even unintentionally, because they’re giving admin access to a critical piece of our federal infrastructure to random coders off the street, which violates like every principle of cybersecurity and administration of these systems that exists,” said Alan Butler, executive director and president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit privacy advocacy group….”With this takeover, Musk can now access veterans’ personal data — from where they live, to their bank account info, and the amount of their earned VA benefits,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said in a statement. “Veterans risked their lives to defend this country, and they deserve more than to have unaccountable billionaires playing with the benefits they earned and rely on.” Read on here.

It’s not going to happen and it’s just a distraction from the Administration’s barrage of unpopular recent initiatives. But Kevin Liptak, Alayna Treene and Jeff Zeleny explain “How Trump arrived at his stunning idea to ‘take over’ the Gaza Strip” at CNN Politics: “President Donald Trump’s idea — announced Tuesday evening at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — was formulated over time, people familiar with the matter said, and appeared to originate with the president himself. It was only the latest reminder that policy ideas often start with Trump, rather than slowly build through national experts before ultimately reaching the Oval Office for discussion….“The president has said he’s been socialing this idea for quite some time. He’s been thinking about this,” his press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday….The proposal for Gaza has not come up in private meetings Trump has held with GOP members of the Armed Services Committees, aides said, even though the ceasefire and broader challenges across the Middle East were key points of discussion as late as last week….Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was traveling in Guatemala, heard the idea for the first time as he watched Trump’s news conference with Netanyahu on television. The Middle East has been dramatically reduced from his portfolio, with Witkoff, the president’s longtime friend, serving as the US envoy to the region….A day after Trump made his comments, [national security advisor Mike] Waltz suggested it had been in the works for some time….“We’ve been looking at this over the last weeks and months, and frankly he’s been thinking about it since October 7,” Waltz said Wednesday on CBS….In public and private conversations over the last year, Trump has repeatedly highlighted the value of Gaza’s seaside location, suggesting it was prime real estate for development….Sending US troops to the region would be in stark contrast to Trump’s long-held critique of nation building and foreign entanglements. He was among the sharpest critics of Republican orthodoxy of national building during the George W. Bush administration.”

Here’s the stub of “Trump is giving Elon Musk an unprecedented amount of power: The Department of Government Efficiency could wind up hurting Trump politically” a 538/abcnews chat, featuring Nathanial Rakich, Julia Azari and Cooper Burton:

Welcome to 538’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior editor and elections analyst): One of President Donald Trump’s core campaign promises was to cut government spending and dismantle the federal bureaucracy — and two weeks into his presidency, he’s attempted to consolidate an extraordinary amount of power in order to do just that. Last Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave the Department of Government Efficiency — a unit of Trump advisers led by billionaire Elon Musk — access to the federal payment system, giving DOGE a huge amount of oversight and power over how government money is spent. Over the weekend, two top officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development were also placed on leave for refusing to give DOGE access to classified information at the agency, which Musk now says he and Trump are shutting down. And on Monday, the Small Business Administration also gave DOGE access to all its systems.

All this has greatly alarmed independent watchdogs and Trump critics, who argue that DOGE is operating without oversight and point out that Musk, the world’s richest man and an owner of several businesses that work with the government, could use the data he now has access to for personal gain. But do Americans share that alarm, or are they just interested in getting results? In today’s installment of the 538 politics chat, we’ll talk about whether this weekend’s events — as big of a story as they have been inside the Beltway — will matter to the general electorate.

So, team: I know this story is still developing, but do we have any sense yet about how much Americans care about Musk’s heavy-handed attempts to cut the government?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political scientist at Marquette University and 538 contributor): The story really seemed to bubble over on Monday when Musk announced that he and Trump were trying to shut down USAID. This might be less true among the broader public, which may or may not have much of an opinion about USAID, and more among members of Congress (who gathered outside the agency to protest its dismantling) and the press.

nrakich: Well, it may be breaking through with the broader public too. Google Trends data is imperfect, but it does show that, over the weekend, Google searches related to USAID exceeded those related to the upcoming Academy Awards. And on Monday morning, Americans were Googling USAID more than they were Googling the search topic “pizza” at dinnertime on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights!

cooper (Cooper Burton, researcher and copy editor): It’s too early to have polling data about Musk’s attempted dismantling of USAID, but we have seen surveys ask more generally about DOGE and its mission, and that data has been mixed. For example, in late January, Data for Progress found that likely voters supported the creation of DOGE, 46 percent to 36 percent. And an AP-NORC poll found that wide majorities of Americans think that issues like corruption, inefficiency and red tape are major problems in the federal government.

But they don’t really like any of DOGE’s proposals to fix those issues. Out of four proposals that the AP-NORC poll asked about, only one was above water: requiring federal workers to return to the office five days a week. Other ideas, like eliminating a large number of federal jobs or eliminating federal agencies, were quite unpopular, though large shares said they didn’t have an opinion either way.

I think these latest actions with USAID and the SBA will probably provoke a similar response from the public: People like the abstract idea of eliminating waste and bureaucracy in the government, but usually dislike it when specific cuts have to be made.

Read more here.

In “What Is Donald Trump’s Mandate? Voters want big changes from Biden’s failed policies, but many are not in Trump’s plan,” Stanley B. Greenberg, one of America’s most respected pollsters and poll analysts, writes at The American Prospect: “Democratic leaders sound understandably cautious when talking about whether President Donald Trump has a mandate, or what steps Democrats should take now. They are respecting the voters who put Trump back in office, and they recognize the elites have gotten a lot of hot-button issues wrong….We will have no clue about the Trump mandate or what Democrats should do, of course, unless we are frank about what happened with Joe Biden and what changes voters want. Major parts of the mandate will help Trump, but failure to deliver change will hurt. And other parts of Trump’s agenda insult voters in ways that will push down his already unimpressive approval ratings….Knowing what happened starts with knowing voters were more fearful of “Biden continuing as President” than “Trump winning a second term.” A 53 percent majority in a Democracy Corps survey felt that. And that majority grew to 54 percent after seeing all the Trump attacks….President Joe Biden gave an upbeat account of his progress, but he was deeply and singularly unpopular. About 60 percent disapproved of his presidency in our November election poll. And other polls have shown his approval and favorability decline further as he left office in January.”

Greenberg explains further, “Kamala Harris ran much worse with working-class voters than Biden did in 2020, but his approval in our November poll was below her vote. His support was eroding further. And how do you get a strong vote in the base when 37 percent of Blacks, 56 percent of Hispanics, and 59 percent of white millennials disapproved of Biden on Election Day?….According to Gallup, 3 in 5 Americans thought the country “lost ground” under Biden on debt, immigration, crime, the economy, “the gap between the wealthy and less well-off,” and “United States’ position in the world.”….What is so difficult for all of us to process is that Trump has a mandate to fix where Biden failed on the border, the economy, crime in cities, and certain aspects of the woke agenda. Those actions will help Trump….But voters’ disappointment with Biden also included not helping the middle class enough or addressing inequality. Trump has no mandate to exploit all energy sources and reverse Biden’s climate policies. He has no mandate to put the oligarchs in the White House. And contrary to Trump’s actions, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is very popular with the public.”

Greenberg goes on to share the results of poll questions he posed. Here is one example: “Trump’s top mandate is to secure the open border and deport undocumented immigrants in our cities. We examined many possible reasons to vote for Trump, but nothing came close to support for his commitment to “secure the border and deport illegal immigrants.” The same is true in the reasons to vote against Harris. Nothing is close to the “open border and illegal immigrants in all our cities.” These are each 10 to 20 points above the next reason cited….Over 70 percent of white working-class men, women, and union households give it as the top reason to vote for Trump—about 20 points above the next reason….Democratic leaders need to understand that this mandate is also the very top reason Hispanics voted for Trump and against Harris. They are not looking for “comprehensive immigration reform” or policies that “solve the problem.” Fully 64 percent chose that Trump would “secure the border and deport illegal immigrants,” and 54 percent rejected Harris because of the “open border and illegal immigrants in our cities….Blacks and Hispanics were angry that non-citizens were competing for housing, schools, and health services in their cities. And they were already much more likely to say that “crime and homelessness in the cities” should be a top priority….Democrats may be paying a price already. They get their most Fs from voters on “prioritizing citizens over non-citizens.” Additional issue attitudes explored in the poll and Greenberg’s analysis include: inflation; taxes; crime; abortions; tariffs; and transgender identity, and others. Read Greenberg’s entire American Prospect article right here.

From “Trump Caves On Tariffs After Getting Virtually Nothing From Canada” by Jason Easley at Politicususa: “As markets started getting shaky and outrage was growing over his tariffs, Donald Trump needed a way out. Mexico gave Trump an escape hatch by staging a little performance on the border, and Canada got the tariffs postponed by continuing to implement their already passed border plan….Trump got some Mexican troops to go to the border and parade around, and Canada is going to keep doing what it was already doing, plus a new intelligence directive and a fentanyl czar, whatever that is….Trump settled for getting nothing because he is so poorly informed that he thinks he is getting something in the deal.” Clearly, the president needs some better economic advisors. At Daily Kos, The Critical Mind saw it this way in “Promises? What promises? Trump folds as Canadian/Mexican tariffs are postponed – likely permanently”: “Trump will spin this as a victory. ‘I got what I wanted and more — much more. It was the best deal ever.’ The reality is otherwise. Both Mexico and Canada made vague promises. But there will be no real change — or money spent. Trump had seen the polls — and realized people knew his tariffs would slam their pocketbooks….Even he had to admit that his ill-considered nationalism was financially catastrophic. It would spur inflation. And the promised income to the treasury from tariffs would prove far less than the federal subsidies he would have to send to American farmers and manufacturers to keep them onside. So he caved.” However, nobody should be surprised if Trump argues that his tariffs initiative was mostly a successful negotiating tactic designed to tighten up the border and reduce fentanyl smuggling. His tariff on China is a bigger gamble, with larger potential for disaster.

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

The Democrats’ electoral problems have received a lot of attention—as they should! Whatever the commitments of a political party, they’ve got to be elected to pursue them. But that can distract attention from what they do when they are elected. Typically that underlies electoral problems that come to the fore and explains why it’s rarely enough for a party to tout their allegedly wonderful values or continually disparage their nefarious political opponents to fix their problems.

In other words, governance is key. You’ve got to run the government well and get things done voters care about if you want those voters to stick with you. And that’s where Democrats have been running into problems—big problems.

Think about it. If you wanted safe streets and public order would your first impulse be to turn to…a Democrat? Or if you wanted a secure, actually-enforced border? How about efficient, effective delivery of public services? Or rapid completion of public projects and infrastructure? Or nonideological public administration?

I don’t think on any of these fronts the reaction of a typical voter would be: “Democrats! Of course, I need Democrats to do all these things because they’re so good at them!” On the contrary, it seems like over time Democrats—both nationally and in many localities where they dominate—have become worse and worse at delivering in these areas. That’s a huge problem because why should voters take Democratic plans to improve their lives seriously if Democrats persist in running government so poorly? Democratic governance is their advertising and the advertising makes the Democratic “product” look pretty bad. So voters don’t want to buy it.

Let’s look at some specific areas. Take safe streets and public order. The Democratic-leaning commentator Noah Smith admits:

In the late 2010s, blue cities brought [a] problem on themselves: urban disorder. Crime rates began rising in 2015, fueled by national unrest. But blue cities didn’t respond by cracking down on crime as they did in the 90s and 00s. Progressives in the late 2010s reviled and rejected “stop-and-frisk”, “broken windows policing”, and other tools that blue cities had used to keep order in previous decades. Instead, they elected a bunch of progressive prosecutors, enacted more permissive policies toward public drug use, passed laws that made it hard to use violence against shoplifters, and sometimes even reduced penalties for minor crimes.

The result was entirely predictable. Blue cities became increasingly afflicted by pervasive, low-level urban disorder—drug needles in children’s parks, epidemics of car break-ins, and so on. Female friends of mine in San Francisco started to report being followed for blocks, harassed on the train, or even slapped in the head by street people on their way to work. The housing crunch made the disorder much worse, of course, by exacerbating homelessness.

Then the pandemic and the riots hit, and the trend got turbocharged. Without “eyes on the street” to deter crime, and with police cowed or disgruntled by the protests of summer 2020, progressive cities became increasingly lawless, chaotic zones. Violent crime soared in 2020-21, with waves of attacks on vulnerable populations like Asian elders….

Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder—restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on—represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.

Opinions vary about how much things have improved in blue cities since their nadir. But the fundamental problem is: this never should have happened in the first place. And the culprit is well-articulated by Smith in the last paragraph of the quote above. Blue city Democrats have adopted a philosophy that is antithetical to good governance—it is not surprising it does not produce good governance; it is not intended to. Public order is treated as optional, subordinate to ideological goals Democrats wish to pursue. Until that philosophy changes in a big way and Democrats unapologetically and aggressively enforce public order, voters will continue to view Democratic governance negatively in this area. And they’ll be right to do so.

Voters also see de facto open borders and uncontrolled immigration on Democrats’ watch as symptoms of public disorder and poor governance. In their view, illegal (Democrats cannot even bring themselves to use the word) immigrants are in fact breaking the law by making unauthorized entry to the United States and creating a chaotic situation at our nation’s border. And they were shocked that almost all candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination endorsed decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

And then, even more astonishingly to the typical voter, these law-breakers were rewarded for their behavior on the Democrats’ watch. Consider what happened when Biden came into office in 2021. He immediately issued executive orders dramatically loosening the rules for handling illegal immigrants. His party’s left wing and various immigration advocacy groups rapturously applauded this. As TheNew York Times’ David Leonhardt summarized:

Biden tried to pause deportations. He changed the definition of asylum to include fear of gang violence. He used immigration parole—which the law says should be used “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons”—to admit hundreds of thousands of people. The parole programs alone amounted to “the largest expansion of legal immigration in modern U.S. history,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News wrote.

Would-be migrants, as well as the Mexican cartels that run transit networks, heard a clear message: Entering the United States had become easier. The number of people attempting to do so spiked almost immediately.

And continued to spike throughout the first three and a half years of the Biden administration until they finally took some steps to stanch the tide. But by that time the country had experienced truly mind-boggling levels of immigration. Indeed, the Biden immigration surge, driven heavily by illegals, was the largest in US history, surpassing even the immigration surges of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Read more…