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

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

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

“Vindication” is how Jones described election night.

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

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

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

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

The next day, Thomas’ emotions took over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Relational organizing might be the future of the Democratic Party.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Read more…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Leonhardt, New York Times magazine:

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

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

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

Justin Vassallo, Unherd:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff Maurer, I Might Be Wrong Substack:

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Here is some] advice for the Democrats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll go way out on a limb here, and say that 2025 does not appear to be a good year for making political predictions. But, if anybody can do it credibly, it would be Kyle Kondik, who writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

1. The electorate will be smaller.

Midterm electorates are not as big as presidential electorates, and there is no modern precedent for a midterm electorate having a higher turnout rate among eligible voters than the turnout rate in the most-recently held presidential election.

According to data from turnout expert Michael McDonald of the University of Florida, the average turnout rate for eligible voters in the 43 presidential elections held since 1856 is about 64%, while the average turnout in the 42 midterms held since that year is 49%. So the turnout is on average about 15 percentage points higher in the presidential than in the midterms, and the midterm turnout was never higher than the immediately previous presidential election. We went back to 1856 because that is the start of our modern two-party system, with the Republicans first fielding a presidential candidate that year to join the Democrats, a party that had existed in various forms prior to that year.

Of course, those who would have been an “eligible voter” was much different back then than it is now, with the franchise later expanding to previously disenfranchised groups like women, Black voters, and, in advance of the 1972 election, 18-20 year olds. Figure 1 shows the presidential and midterm turnout rates for this more modern time period.

Average turnout for presidential elections from 1972-2024 was 58%, and average midterm turnout in that timeframe was 41%, or a 17-point gap that’s very similar to, but slightly larger than, the presidential to midterm gap in the longer time period since 1856.

Note that turnout in both the last two presidentials and last two midterms have been high by recent standards—but even comparing the 2016 presidential election to the historically-high turnout 2018 midterm still showed a 10 percentage point smaller turnout in the midterm.

The bottom line is that the electorate in 2026 will be substantially smaller than 2024, it’s just a question of how much smaller…

2. The electorate should be whiter, older, and more educated.

Because midterm electorates are smaller than presidential electorates, it stands to reason that demographic groups that have historically had better turnout rates would make up a greater share of midterm electorates than presidential electorates. We see this with white voters in general, voters with a four-year college degree, and voters aged 65 and over.

Table 1 shows the makeup of the eight electorates by certain age, racial, and education groups from 2008-2022 (four midterms and four presidentials) from the Democratic data firm Catalist. Catalist’s reports on the makeup of the electorate are widely-cited and include analysis of state voter files that are not available to exit polls released on Election Night (2024 is not included here because that Catalist report is not yet out—neither is a similar analysis that we look forward to seeing later this year, Pew’s validated voter study).

While non-college voters have always made up a clear majority of the electorate, the midterm electorates have been a few points more college-educated than the presidential electorates. Pre-Trump, college and non-college voters (this includes people of all races), voted fairly similarly in both the 2012 presidential election and 2014 midterm election (the non-college group was slightly more Republican in each election). But starting in 2016, the education gap expanded greatly, so that by 2020, Joe Biden won college graduates 59%-41% in the two-party vote but lost non-college graduates 52%-48%, a 22-point gap in margin. The gap was similar in the 2022 congressional vote. Again, Catalist has not released its report for 2024 yet, but the Edison Research national exit poll for several media entities found a gap of a little more than 25 points between college graduates and non-graduates in 2024.

The 65 and over cohort has been growing over time, but their share of the midterm electorate was always at least 4 percentage points bigger than the previous presidential election during the 2008-2020 timeline. Likewise, the 18-29 group has always made up at least 3 percentage points less of the midterm electorate than the previous presidential—it likely is no coincidence that the drop off was smallest from 2016 to 2018, the only midterm in this timeframe conducted under a Republican president that also represented the best Democratic performance among these four midterms. Even though Donald Trump made some gains among the 18-29 group in 2024 compared to his previous performance with them, this is still a Democratic-leaning cohort, just like voters 65 and over remain Republican-leaning to some extent.

Finally, the electorate is usually a little bit whiter in the midterm compared to the presidential. Again, Trump made gains with nonwhite voters in 2024, but as a bloc, nonwhite voters are still markedly more Democratic leaning than white voters.

In this era of politics, the midterm having a higher share of college graduates than the presidential would seem to help Democrats, and the midterm having a smaller share of younger and nonwhite voters would seem to help Republicans. But an electorate’s demographic makeup does not necessarily tell us what the results will be: The 2018 midterm’s electorate was whiter and older than either the 2016 or 2020 electorates, but that was also the Democrats’ best election of the trio. Likewise, the college-educated share in 2022 was very similar to 2018 and perhaps even slightly larger, but that didn’t stop Republicans from winning the House majority that year.

3. The non-presidential party’s share of the House popular vote should go up.

Last week, in a piece on how House incumbents from the non-presidential party rarely lose in midterms, we noted that the presidential out-party almost always nets seats in the midterm. Democrats are hoping this trend continues, as they need to net just 3 seats to win the House next year.

In addition to typically netting seats, the non-presidential party also almost always sees its share of the total congressional vote go up in the midterm compared to what happened in the presidential.

Figure 2 and Table 2 show this dynamic, again going back to 1972. This shows the two-party House vote, and it corrects for unopposed seats in a given year by estimating the two-party vote in those seats. The data from 1972-2020 is from a past Crystal Ball contributor, the late Theodore S. Arrington of UNC-Charlotte, and the 2022 and 2024 data is from Split Ticket (they each use different methods to account for unopposed districts, but Arrington’s calculations and Split Ticket’s calculations for 2008-2020 are similar).

Read the rest of Kondik’s article for his charts, graphs and visuals and to see how he gets to his concluding sentence: “Overall, it would be a surprise if Democrats didn’t at least do better in the national House vote in 2026 than they did in 2024.”

In his NYT opinion column, “Even If Democrats Can Move to the Center, It May Not Help,”  Thomas B. Edsall writes: “There is, in fact, evidence that when Democrats moderate, they actually lose ground…Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford who has also examined the effects of candidate ideology, wrote by email that his research in “The Electoral Consequences of Ideological Persuasion” shows that

even substantial ideological shifts toward the center yield remarkably modest electoral benefits. Specifically, if a Democratic candidate were to shift their position from the median of the Democratic Party to a position as centrist as Joe Manchin, they would gain only about 0.6 percentage points in vote share through persuasion effects alone.

That persuasion benefit, Bonica continued, “must be weighed against the potential negative effects on turnout.”…When both factors are taken into account, “Democrats have achieved their greatest electoral successes precisely in cycles (2008 and 2018) when they did not moderate relative to Republicans,” while “in cycles where Democrats ran more moderate candidates (like 2010 and 2014), their electoral performance was notably weaker.”…Bonica’s bottom line:

The empirical evidence is increasingly converging around a clear conclusion: There appears to be very little electoral advantage from running to the center in contemporary congressional elections.”

Edsall writes further, “On Feb. 2, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, both senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, posted their paper “Renewing the Democratic Party.” In it, they wrote that the party must undergo an ideological “revolution” to win back even marginal support from the working class, which, they wrote, believes

that the Democratic Party is dominated by elites whose privileges do not serve the common good and whose cultural views are far outside the mainstream and lack common sense.

They believe that educated professionals look down on them and that the professional class favors policies that give immigrants and minorities unfair advantages at their expense.

They believe that educational institutions preach a set of liberal values that are out of the mainstream and that parents, not schools, should be teaching values. They reject the assertion that slavery and discrimination have made it difficult for Black Americans to work their way out of the lower class and believe that Black Americans can and should rise “without special favors,” as other groups experiencing prejudice have done.

Also, “In an email responding to my queries, Galston provided anecdotal evidence that the Democratic Party is changing in a favorable direction:

The Democrats’ shattering defeat last November has convinced many actual and aspiring leaders that to be competitive in future elections, their party must change. This opened the door to new ways of thinking and challenges to the status quo.

Some of Galston’s examples:

• “The party’s designated responder to Trump’s speech, Senator Elissa Slotkin, delivered a calm and moderate message, which was well received by Democrats.

• “The party’s likely candidates for this year’s high-profile governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia are moderates with impeccable records of service to the country.

• “Most Democrats have abandoned the extreme 2020 ideas — defunding the police, eliminating ICE, etc. — that their eventual presidential nominee, Joe Biden, opposed during his successful primary campaign.

• “Gavin Newsom — up to now, no one’s idea of a moderate — just decided to break with party orthodoxy on the hottest of hot-button issues — transgender rights.

• “Most Democrats have come to understand that Biden’s approach to immigration was a political as well as policy failure and are open to a discussion of alternatives. In a recent Pew poll, 40 percent of Black Democrats and 43 percent of Asian Democrats supported increased efforts to deport people living illegally in the U.S.”

In addition, Edsall notes, “From a different vantage point, Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at N.Y.U., wrote by email that he

would challenge the assumption that Democrats should be moving to the center. There is little evidence that running on progressive policies has hurt Democrats or, conversely, that abandoning those positions has been electorally profitable.

Continuing to protect the civil rights of all Americans while expanding economic opportunity is not just smart politics — it is the party’s duty to its core constituencies. But more important, in the current political moment, calls for Democratic centrism are a distraction.

American democracy is being systematically dismantled before our eyes by an administration that has no regard for the U.S. Constitution. Thus, we are no longer in an era of political competition between liberalism and conservatism, but between democratic values and authoritarianism. It is time for Democrats to steadfastly defend those values, which are so deeply cherished by most Americans.”

Moving to his conclusion, Edsall writes, “Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, replied to my inquiries by email, saying that he, too, would push back against the “twin premises that the Democrats need to moderate across the board as the Democratic Leadership Council did and that the prime reason they can’t is professional liberal voters.”…Democrats, Hacker acknowledged, “have certainly been out of step on some highly salient noneconomic issues — the border crisis chief among them — and they have correctly started moderating here already.”

Hacker emphasized the point, however, that

Democrats should also be embracing a more forthrightly left-populist stance on economics in response to the oligarchic takeover of American democracy. In short, the diagnosis for Democrats shouldn’t be moderation as such but a deeper embrace and prioritization of economic populism.

The biggest challenge, in Hacker’s view…is the longer-term party building that’s needed to address the party’s biggest problems, such as conservative dominance of social media platforms, poor governance in blue states and cities (which hurts the brand and causes voters to locate in more affordable precincts of red America), the party’s organizational weaknesses (which have a lot to do with the decline of its traditional mass base of organized labor) and the fact that Democrats are the party of government in an anti-system era.

The threat Trump poses, Hacker continued,

may create leverage for tackling these big problems without the internal pushback that has doomed such efforts in the past. Democrats have a chance to become the party of change, seeking to redemocratize the corrupt lawless system that Trump and Musk are creating.

For this to happen, there must be broader social mobilization, not just a Democratic elite response, and the party must revitalize its own aging leadership and adopt a strong, optimistic and economically forward-looking orientation. Very dark possibilities loom for Democrats — and democracy — otherwise.”

Having closely watched congressional developments over the last few weeks, I’ve concluded that one much-discussed Democratic tactic for dealing with Trump 2.0 is probably mistaken, as I explained at New York:

No one is going to rank Mike Johnson among the great arm-twisting Speakers of the House, like Henry Clay, Tom Reed, Sam Rayburn, or even Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, he still resembles Winston Churchill’s description of Clement Atlee as “a modest man with much to be modest about.”

But nonetheless, in the space of two weeks, Johnson has managed to get two huge and highly controversial measures through the closely divided House: a budget resolution that sets the stage for enactment of Donald Trump’s entire legislative agenda in one bill, then an appropriations bill keeping the federal government operating until the end of September while preserving the highly contested power of Trump and his agents to cut and spend wherever they like.

Despite all the talk of divisions between the hard-core fiscal extremists of the House Freedom Caucus and swing-district “moderate” Republicans, Johnson lost just one member — the anti-spending fanatic and lone wolf Thomas Massie of Kentucky — from the ranks of House Republicans on both votes. As a result, he needed not even a whiff of compromise with House Democrats (only one of them, the very Trump-friendly Jared Golden of Maine, voted for one of the measures, the appropriations bill).

Now there are a host of factors that made this impressive achievement possible. The budget-resolution vote was, as Johnson kept pointing out to recalcitrant House Republicans, a blueprint for massive domestic-spending cuts, not the cuts themselves. Its language was general and vague enough to give Republicans plausible deniability. And even more deviously, the appropriations measure was made brief and unspecific in order to give Elon Musk and Russ Vought the maximum leeway to whack spending and personnel to levels far below what the bill provided (J.D. Vance told House Republicans right before the vote that the administration reserved the right to ignore the spending the bill mandated entirely, which pleased the government-hating HFC folk immensely). And most important, on both bills Johnson was able to rely on personal lobbying from key members of the administration, most notably the president himself, who had made it clear any congressional Republican who rebelled might soon be looking down the barrel of a Musk-financed MAGA primary opponent. Without question, much of the credit Johnson is due for pulling off these votes should go to his White House boss, whose wish is his command.

But the lesson Democrats should take from these events is that they cannot just lie in the weeds and expect the congressional GOP to self-destruct owing to its many divisions and rivalries. In a controversial New York Times op-ed last month, Democratic strategist James Carville argued Democrats should “play dead” in order to keep a spotlight on Republican responsibility for the chaos in Washington, D.C., which might soon extend to Congress:

“Let the Republicans push for their tax cuts, their Medicaid cuts, their food stamp cuts. Give them all the rope they need. Then let dysfunction paralyze their House caucus and rupture their tiny majority. Let them reveal themselves as incapable of governing and, at the right moment, start making a coordinated, consistent argument about the need to protect Medicare, Medicaid, worker benefits and middle-class pocketbooks. Let the Republicans crumble, let the American people see it, and wait until they need us to offer our support.”

Now to be clear, Congressional GOP dysfunction could yet break out; House and Senate Republicans have struggled constantly to stay on the same page on budget strategy, the depth of domestic-spending cuts, and the extent of tax cuts. But as the two big votes in the House show, their three superpowers are (1) Trump’s death grip on them all, (2) the willingness of Musk and Vought and Trump himself to take the heat for unpopular policies, and (3) a capacity for lying shamelessly about what they are doing and what it will cost. Yes, ultimately, congressional Republicans will face voters in November 2026. But any fear of these elections is mitigated by the realization that thanks to the landscape of midterm races, probably nothing they can do will save control of the House or forfeit control of the Senate. So Republicans have a lot of incentives to follow Trump in a high-speed smash-and-grab operation that devastates the public sector, awards their billionaire friends with tax cuts, and wherever possible salts the earth to make a revival of good government as difficult as possible. Democrats have few ways to stop this nihilistic locomotive. But they may be fooling themselves if they assume it’s going off the rails without their active involvement.

The following article, “Dems’ own polling shows massive brand problem ahead of 2026” by Elena Schneider, is cross-posted from Politico:

The Democratic Party’s brand is in rough shape in the congressional battlegrounds.

Nearly two months into the second Donald Trump administration, a majority of voters in battleground House districts still believe Democrats in Congress are “more focused on helping other people than people like me,” according to an internal poll conducted by the Democratic group Navigator Research. Among independents, just 27 percent believe Democrats are focused on helping them, compared with 55 percent who said they’re focused on others.

Michael Scherer sets the stage in his article, “The Democrats’ Working-Class Problem Gets Its Close-Up” at The Atlantic: “The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by…Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, “Is there such a thing as a middle class anymore? What is that?” They spoke about the difficulty of buying a house, the burden of having kids with student loans, and the ways in which the “phony” and “corrupt” Democratic Party had embraced far-left social crusades while overseeing a jump in inflation.?…“It was for the people and everything, and now it is just lies,” one man said when asked how the Democratic Party has changed.”

In “Trump’s lies on tax cuts are another gut punch to America’s working-class,” Svante Myrick, President of People for the American Way, writes: “Trump’s numbers don’t add up. If he were getting a math grade for his speech to the joint session of Congress, he’d fail miserably… Trump is worse than a student who hasn’t done his homework. He’s a president who routinely lies to mislead the public, justify his wrongdoing and distract us from the real harm he’s doing to Americans and the lasting damage he’s doing to America… Trump made a lot of promises about a new “golden age” for America. But in reality, he and congressional Republicans are getting ready to sell out Americans and our future so he can deliver massive tax cuts to billionaires like Elon Musk… The budget bill House Republicans just approved is big, but it’s far from beautiful. Their top priority is providing $4.5 trillion in tax cuts whose benefits go overwhelmingly to the richest Americans. That will pile on even more national debt, leave us with less money to support families and communities who need it and force big cuts in Medicaid…Budget experts report that the Trump-Republican plan would give the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers an average tax cut of more than $300,000 — and that the richest 200,000 multimillionaires would get more money than 187 million families…  While the rich would get richer, lower-income households would be even worse off when you factor in cuts to Medicaid and food stamps that would be necessary to make his tax-cut boondoggle work….A majority of Americans who voted in the 2024 election voted for someone other than Trump. A third of eligible voters didn’t participate. Most Americans do not support a tax scheme that funnels most of the benefits to those who are already at the top of the economic pyramid. And the overwhelming majority of Americans want to preserve Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

“In the wake of the 2024 election, pundits and politicos have had much to say about the battle for the American “working class,” with their commentary—whether from the left, the right, or the middle—invariably accompanied by the same image: guys wearing hard hats, toiling away at a construction site or on an assembly line…”Two-thirds of those without a four-year college degree—the criterion that many demographers use to define the “working class”—are employed in services (including health care, retail, and hospitality), compared with one-third in manufacturing, construction, and related industries,” Rick Watzman and Erin Contractor write in “America’s working class barely scrapes by. An outdated image of them doesn’t help” at Fortune…We know this because one of us has been researching and writing about this topic for many years. The other helped to shape labor policy in the Obama and Biden administrations… Their needs are distinct, and they remain largely unmet…We know this because one of us has been researching and writing about this topic for many years. The other helped to shape labor policy in the Obama and Biden administrations—and, perhaps more to the point, has a mom who has worked as an hourly employee at Walmart since the late 1990s. (She currently makes $17.78 an hour as a floor associate.)…”

Tyler Stone writes in “Why Is Trump Relatable? Listen To Him Talk, This Is How Working-Class People Talk” at Real Clear Politics: “On SiriusXM ‘The Megyn Kelly Show,’ Host Megyn Kelly is joined by comedian Andrew Schulz, whose latest Netflix special is “Life,” to discuss the Democrats’ failed messaging and inability to connect with the working class, why Trump’s boldness resonates with Americans of all political persuasions, Trump’s ability to talk like normal people, and more.” Stoner quotes Schulz: “I find a lot of times with the Democrats, there is this pretentiousness. There’s this, like, Ivy League educated, second or third generation kind of trust fund nepo babies that are telling people how they should live and how they should vote. And it’s like, first of all, if you’ve never had a real job, you don’t get to talk… You don’t get to tell people how they should vote… We just despise that. So what I think they have to do is get back in touch with the working class is very much make this a class issue, and you’ve got to call out those people who are giving you money, which these young billionaires and these corporations that are donating, and they won’t do it, and that’s why they’ll probably lose. But the first person in that party that calls it out, you’re going to see the Bernie effect happen again…another thing Democrats don’t understand. They don’t understand like — why this like billionaire who was given money from his dad is so relatable. Well, why don’t you listen to him talk? I’ve had conversations with like rich people. Okay, they don’t talk like that. Yeah, they are incredibly buttoned up a lot of them and concerned publicly about their image and they’re very deliberate about what they say…” The problem didn’t originate with Trump. Something of the same dynamic was in play with Bush v. Gore in 2000. Democrats flipped that script in Obama vs. Romney in 2012. Like Bush II, Trump is every inch a preppie. But he has developed an ear for worker-speak, and it has served him well. It wasn’t all that long ago that nobody thought a New York City guy would do so well in the south. Even bogus class identification trumps regional kinship in winning voters.

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

It’s hard to believe Trump’s only been in office for a month and a half. He’s certainly delivering on many of his aggressive campaign promises and his general pledge to shake things up in Washington. His address to Congress on Tuesday night did not stint on retailing how far and fast he has gone in changing business as usual.

On one level, his fast start could be viewed as a smart response to the overwhelming sense among voters that the political and economic system in the country needs major changes or to be completely torn down. But is all this frenetic activity succeeding in expanding his coalition beyond those who supported him in the last election?

After all, it doesn’t follow that, even if most voters want big changes, voters will necessarily be happy with all of the big changes the Trump administration is pursuing and, importantly, with how those changes are being implemented. Voters don’t want change just for the sake of change; they want change that actually improves the system and brings it closer to their vision of how government should work. And they certainly don’t want change that might negatively impact them personally.

That helps explain why Trump’s popularity has declined from its post-inauguration high. At that point, his net approval (approval minus disapproval) was around +8, hinting at the possibility of an expanded Trump coalition. But now it is only around +1 in the RCP running average and his overall approval rating hovers close to his share of the vote in the 2024 elections.

That said, it is true that Trump’s popularity so far is running above his first term ratings; in that term his approval rating never cracked 50 percent and went into net negative territory very quickly. But that is a very low bar indeed since his early first term ratings were historically bad. Trump’s current popularity trend indicates his early bid to broaden his coalition beyond his 2024 supporters has not succeeded.

Internals from the most recent AtlasIntel poll—now Nate Silver’s highest rated pollster thanks to their stellar performance in the 2024 election—illustrate how similar Trump’s current coalition looks to his 2024 support. His net approval is +21 among working-class (non-college) respondents, but -27 among the college-educated. Among those with under $50,000 in household income his net approval is +16; among those with $50,000-$100,000 income, his net approval is +9—but among those whose household incomes are over $100,000 his approval is net negative: -18.

Of course, Trump’s 2024 coalition was a winning one so simply maintaining it is not an obvious disaster. However, Trump’s 2024 victory, while solid, was hardly a landslide—his popular vote margin was only about a point and a half and most of his swing state victory margins were close to that narrow national margin. If he doesn’t expand his 2024 coalition he and his party will be only modest voter defections away from an electoral drubbing. That could happen as soon as the 2026 midterm elections, where the incumbent party is generally at a disadvantage to begin with.

Digging into recent polling data reveals the contradictions in Trump’s approach that undermine his ability to expand his coalition. On the one hand, some of his actions are quite popular from cracking down on illegal immigration to getting biological boys and men out of girls’ and women’s sports and restricting medicalization of minors for “gender dysphoria.” He is also on secure ground in opposing affirmative action, advocating a colorblind meritocratic society and pursuing an “all-of-the-above” energy policy that includes fossil fuel production.

Even in these areas, the devil is in the details and Trump is in some danger of going too far too fast. But the dangers for him are much larger in another area where, at first blush, public opinion would appear to be on his side: cutting wasteful government spending and promoting efficiency. In a recent New York Times poll, 60 percent of the public agreed that government “is almost always wasteful and inefficient” rather than “does a better job than people give it credit for” (37 percent). Views were even more lop-sided among working-class (non-college) respondents; by 2:1 (64-32 percent) they believe that government is wasteful and inefficient.

Similarly, in a recent Harvard/Harris poll, 77 percent of voters thought a full examination of all government expenditures was needed, rather than letting all contracts and expenditures proceed unimpeded; 70 percent believed government expenditures were full of “waste, fraud and inefficiency,” rather than fair and reasonable; and 69 percent supported the goal of cutting $1 trillion from government expenditures. Such findings suggest that an aggressive attack on government waste and inefficiency has the potential to be very popular and expand Trump’s coalition.

But the key word here is “potential”. Activating that potential depends on two things the Trump administration is paying little attention to: 1) it has to be clear to voters that actual government waste and inefficiency is being attacked rather than just cutting government willy-nilly; and 2) it has to be clear to voters that cuts to government are not affecting and will not affect them negatively.

On both counts, the Trump drive to trim government, spearheaded by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is falling short. While DOGE audits have indeed found many examples of highly questionable government expenditures and related inefficiencies, DOGE has not exactly been wielding a scalpel to excise these inefficiencies. Instead, wholesale layoffs and expenditure stoppages have been implemented which, even if temporary, are difficult for voters to connect to the ostensible goal of eliminating government waste. Particularly egregious here has been the DOGE habit of firing any government employees who have a “provisional” status, presumably because this is a quick way of reducing headcount in agencies and generating savings.

But such moves have little obvious connection to promoting government efficiency. As Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass, has put it, this is pressing the “easy button” for no other reason than it is easy. The result is likely to be neither productive nor popular.

This will be particularly the case where eliminating workers leads to staffing shortages in ways the public notices (e.g., at National Parks). And nothing makes voters more nervous than the possibility that entitlements—Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—will be interfered with by DOGE’s actions or Trump’s future plans. This is a sure loser.

Given all this, it’s not surprising that voters’ enthusiasm for DOGE, Musk and the actually-existing project of overhauling government (as opposed to the theory) is rapidly ebbing. This is neatly illustrated by Navigator Research polling showing that the “Department of Government Efficiency” without Musk’s name linked to it is actually viewed favorably but once you attach Musk’s name to it—thereby evoking the real-world DOGE—favorability plummets to 37 percent.

Consistent with this, Musk’s favorability rating has been rapidly declining and in a recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll, his approval rating on the job he is doing within the federal government was a mere 34 percent. And in a recent CNN/SSRS poll, respondents by almost 2:1 thought Trump giving Musk a prominent role in his administration was a bad thing rather than a good thing. Views among working-class respondents were only slightly less negative.

Unsurprisingly, views are mixed on reductions in the federal workforce so far, both in terms of overall approval and specific effects. In a new CBS News poll, majorities thought that the reductions will eventually “remove workers doing unnecessary jobs” but also thought they will “remove essential workers” and “reduce or cut services for people like you.” This suggests thoroughly cross-pressured voters rather than enthusiastic supporters.

Also suggesting cross-pressured voters, respondents in the CNN poll by 55 to 45 percent thought Trump so far hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems rather than has had the right priorities. Clearly, the high profile efforts of DOGE aren’t helping the Trump administration get on the right side of that question which is probably a prerequisite for building his coalition.

Then there’s the economy, particularly the cost of living, which was central to Trump’s victory in 2024. Voters want to see improvements on this front, regardless of what else Trump does. It’s early days but so far voters are not impressed.

In the Washington Post poll, 76 percent of respondents rate current gas or energy prices negatively (not so good or poor), 73 percent rate the incomes of average Americans negatively and 92 percent (!) rate food prices negatively. In the CNN poll, only 27 percent think Trump has been about right on trying to reduce the price of everyday goods, compared to 62 percent who believe he hasn’t gone far enough. And in the CBS poll, 82 percent and 80 percent, respectively, wanted Trump to put a high priority on the economy and inflation but only 36 percent and 29 percent, respectively, believed Trump was prioritizing these issues a lot.

There’s a message there for the Trump administration should they care to hear it. His mandate was to shake up the system by pursuing popular priorities Democrats were ignoring, especially on illegal immigration, and deliver prosperity for ordinary workers and families. His mandate was not to do whatever excites his base the most or accords with his personal priorities.

In short, Trump may be over-interpreting his mandate, just as Biden did when he took office in 2021, which will prevent him from seizing the center from a disorganized and remarkably unpopular Democratic Party. Instead of a second Trump administration realigning American politics and building a more powerful working-class, populist GOP, the Democrats could limp back into power and our current partisan stalemate would continue.

Call it “Politics Without Winners.” In our paper of the same name my AEI colleague Yuval Levin and myself observed:

Surveying the parties’ decisions in one election cycle after another, it is hard to avoid concluding that they are stuck at 50–50 because they choose to be. Both have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters—who would never vote for the other party—over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way. They have done this even as the nature of their most devoted voters has changed. They have not operated as institutions geared to construct broad coalitions and win broad general-election victories. Instead, they have focused on fan service—satisfying their most partisan and loyal constituencies.

It’s early days for the second Trump administration but that still sounds about right.