The following article, “The Left’s 21st Century Project Has Failed” 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 20^th century encompassed the era of social democracy followed by an attempt to resurrect the left through the Third Way after that era’s ignominious end. In the 21^st century, the left embarked on a new project they hoped would remedy 20^th century weaknesses and inaugurate a new era of political and governance success. We are now a quarter of the way through the 21^st century, which has witnessed both a genuine “crisis of capitalism” (the Great Recession of 2007-09) and the systemic breakdown of the COVID era (2020-22). Enough time has gone by to render a judgement: despite ample opportunity to advance their cause, the left’s 21^st century project has failed and failed badly.

Consider:

• It has failed to stop the rise of right populism.
• It has failed to create durable electoral majorities.
• It has failed to achieve broad social hegemony.
• It has failed to retain its working-class base.
• It has failed to promote social order.
• It has failed to practice effective governance.
• It has failed to jump-start rapid economic growth.
• It has failed to generate optimism about the future.

Of course, the project hasn’t been a complete failure. Left parties, including the Democratic Party, have succeeded in building strong bases among the educated and professional classes and, if they have lacked broad social hegemony, they have generally controlled the commanding heights of cultural production. As a result they have mostly set the terms of “respectable” discourse in elite circles.

But that’s pretty weak beer compared to all those massive failures and the heady aspirations of those who presume to be on “the right side of history.” Most on the left would prefer to believe that the left’s 21^st century project is basically sound and just needs a few tweaks. This is whistling past the graveyard. After a quarter century, it is time to face the facts: the project is simply not fit for purpose and needs to be jettisoned.

When we look at what has been distinctive about the left’s 21^stcentury project, it is not hard to see why it has not had its desired result. Here are the key strands of the project:

Mass immigration. In the 20^th century, the left was generally suspicious of uncontrolled immigration. But all over Europe in the 21^st century, immigration surges abetted by the left have contributed to results like these:

At the end of Milan’s M1 metro line you’ll find Sesto San Giovanni, a sizable blue-collar city. It was once called “Italy’s Stalingrad,” not only for its Brutalist concrete block apartment buildings and hulking steelworks, but also because Sesto San Giovanni was consistently one of the most left-wing towns in Italy…

That’s all over. In 2017 Sesto elected a right-wing mayor for the first time in 71 years. And in 2022, Sesto voted for Giorgia Meloni’s right-populist alliance by double-digit margins. Over the same period, Milan, rich as ever, has drifted to the left.

Immigration was the issue at the heart of these elections.

Such trends have been repeated in working-class areas in the rest of Italy and all over Europe. And of course we have many such equivalents in our own country as working-class areas have moved to the right, with the immigration issue playing a starring role. But, as in Europe, the American left has repeatedly refused to see anything wrong with a de facto policy of mass immigration, which is considered an unalloyed good contributing to a more diverse society. Therefore, to oppose mass immigration is to oppose diversity, which can only mean that you are racist and xenophobic. It’s that simple.

This attitude is a huge mistake because in fact there are rational reasons for voters to oppose mass immigration that cannot be reduced to racism or xenophobia. As Josh Barro notes:

Democrats…need to get back in touch with the reasons that both uncontrolled migration and excessive volumes of migration really are problems—not just political problems, but substantive ones. That is, they need to get back in touch with the feeling that illegal and irregular migration reflect a failure of our civic institutions, a misuse of the social safety net, and a breakdown of the rule of law, and that all of that is actually bad…

Illegal immigration, and other forms of irregular migration that happen with the authorization of the executive branch, really do hurt Americans by putting strain on public resources, imposing costs on taxpayers, and undermining social cohesion. And this has been particularly noticeable because of the huge surge in three categories of migration over the last few years: old-fashioned illegal immigration; migrants abusing our asylum system to gain years of legal access to the U.S., even without claims that are likely to be judged valid in the end; and the Biden administration’s large-scale use of the Temporary Protected Status designation to admit about a million mostly low-skill, mostly non-English-speaking migrants into our communities, especially from Haiti and Venezuela.

Here and in Europe, promoting and defending mass immigration has been a core part of the 21^st century left’s project. And it has been a massive failure.

Climate change politics. At the end of the 20^th century, climate change was an issue on the left but generally a peripheral one. A time-traveler from the year 2000 would be shocked to discover how the status of the issue evolved in the intervening decades. Far from peripheral, it became a core part of the left’s 21^st century project in country after country including the United States.

This was despite a thunderous lack of interest from these countries’ working classes. But for these parties’ burgeoning Brahmin left constituencies, it became a non-negotiable commitment—after all, they were saving the world! As the 21^st century unfolded, more and more of left parties’ policy plans centered around combating climate change and promoting a rapid clean energy transition. The claim was that the clean energy transition was not only a virtuous thing to do but would actually drive the economy forward. Hence, the Democrats’ Green New Deal, a version of which was implemented by the Biden administration, and similar schemes in other countries.

The working class has not been impressed. In the United States, these voters view climate change as a third-tier issue, vastly prioritize the cost and reliability of energy over its effect on the climate, and, if action on climate change it to be taken, are primarily concerned with the effect of such actions on consumer costs and economic growth. Making fast progress toward net-zero barely registers. The left’s assurance that the clean energy transition will deliver prosperity has fallen on deaf ears. The working class just doesn’t believe it will. And it hasn’t.

Nor do they believe the end of the world is nigh if the green transition doesn’t proceed really fast. And Bill Gates thinks they’re right!

Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future…Although climate change will hurt poor people more than anyone else, for the vast majority of them it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.

OK then! Sorry about all that “uninhabitable earth” stuff. As the entire world transitions away from the green transition, it’s now clear that making climate change politics core to the left’s 21^st century project has been a huge mistake.

Cultural radicalism. The 20^th century left generally tried to remain on the high ground of anti-discrimination, basic civil rights, and colorblind meritocracy. The left’s 21^st century project went in a much more radical direction.

The high ground was left behind in favor of an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those engaging in them. Those identities are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, an action is judged not by whether it is justified—or an argument by whether it is true—but rather by whether the people advancing it are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized group or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

This doesn’t make much logical sense, and it has led left parties, including the Democrats, to take many positions at odds with the concerns of ordinary voters. Voters overwhelmingly believe illegal immigration by anyone is wrong and should be deterred, not indulged, as Democrats have frequently done. They believe crimes should be punished no matter who commits them, public safety is sacrosanct, and police and policing are vital necessities, not tools of oppression. They believe, with Martin Luther King, that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and therefore oppose discrimination on the basis of race no matter who benefits from that discrimination.

Perhaps most pernicious: the ideal of equal opportunity has been compromised by commitment to a new ideal of “equity” that strives for equal outcomes. Lack of proportional representation by racial groups in desirable positions or achievements is taken as evidence of racism, structural or otherwise. Therefore, the outcomes should be equalized regardless of merit.

But voters’ common sense is that opportunities should be made equal if they are not, and then let people achieve as they will. There is no guarantee, nor should there be, that everyone will wind up in the same place. Indeed, voters deeply believe in the idea of merit and they in their ability to acquire merit and attendant rewards if given the opportunity to do so. To believe otherwise is insulting to them and contravenes their view about the central role of merit in fair decisions. As George Orwell put it: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

But perhaps nothing would surprise our time traveler from 2000 as much as the incorporation of transgender “rights” into the left’s 21^stcentury project. Going far beyond basic civil rights in housing and employment, left parties in Europe and very much here in the United States have uncritically embraced the ideological agenda of trans activists who believe gender identity trumps biological sex, and that therefore, for example, transwomen—trans-identified males—are literally women and must be able to access all women’s spaces and opportunities. The same goes for children whose gender dysphoria should generally be medically treated with puberty blockers, hormones, and, if desired, surgery to align their bodies with their “true” sex (their gender identity).

This remarkably radical approach has until very recently been met with very little resistance on the left, including in the Democratic Party. But as evidence mounts that the medicalization of children is not a benign and life-saving approach, but rather a life-changingtreatment with many negative effects, and voters stubbornly refuse to endorse the idea that biological sex is just a technicality, the left’s identification with gender ideology has become a massive political liability.

Leaving the high ground of anti-discrimination, basic civil rights, and colorblind meritocracy for these radical alternatives has been a defining part of the left’s 21^st century project. And it has been a huge mistake.

Economic growth. The 20^th century left at its best understood the centrality of economic growth. That’s because growth, particularly productivity growth, is what drives rising living standards over time. The left sought to harness the benefits of growth for the working class, not to interfere with the economic engine of progress. They believed in the future and the possibilities for dramatic improvement in human welfare.

The left’s 21^st century project has, at its core, been dedicated to other goals. They now prize goals like fighting climate change, reducing inequality, pursuing procedural justice, and advocating for immigrants and identity groups above promoting growth. This is remarkably short-sighted. Faster growth gives the left far more degrees of freedom to attain its goals. Hard economic times and slow economic growth typically generate pessimism about the future and fear of change, not broad support for more democracy and social reform. In contrast, when times are good—when the economy is expanding and living standards are steadily rising for most of the population—people see better opportunities for themselves and are more inclined toward social generosity, tolerance, and collective advance.

Reflecting this lack of interest in economic growth, the left’s 21^stcentury project has not been techno-optimist, tending to focus instead on mitigating the negative effects of technological change. This is very odd. Almost everything people like about the modern world, including relatively high living standards, is traceable to technological advances and the knowledge embedded in those advances. From smart phones, flat-screen TVs, and the internet, to air and auto travel, to central heating and air conditioning, to the medical devices and drugs that cure disease and extend life, to electric lights and the mundane flush toilet, technology has dramatically transformed people’s lives for the better. It is difficult to argue that the average person today is not far, far better off than his or her counterpart in the past. As the Northwestern University economic historian and newly-minted Nobel Prize winner Joel Mokyr puts it, “The good old days were old but not good.”

Given this, the left’s 21^st century project should have embraced techno-optimism rather than techno-pessimism. Rapid technological advance is key to fast productivity growth and rising living standards. But the left has been lukewarm at best about the possibilities of new and better technologies, leaving techno-optimism to the libertarian-minded denizens of Silicon Valley. As British science journalist Leigh Phillips has observed:

Once upon a time, the Left…promised more innovation, faster progress, greater abundance. One of the reasons…that the historically fringe ideology of libertarianism is today so surprisingly popular in Silicon Valley and with tech-savvy young people more broadly…is that libertarianism is the only extant ideology that so substantially promises a significantly materially better future.

Sound familiar? The left has ignored growth and its drivers to its great detriment. In its place, it has squandered enormous political capital on a 21^st project that has largely failed. Twenty-five years is long enough; it is high time to try something new.

Not that long ago it looked like Republicans might hold onto their trifecta next year by rigging U.S. House maps. Not so much any more, as I explained at New York:

At some point earlier this year, Donald Trump took a look at his shaky political standing and decided two things. First, he really wanted to hold on to the trifecta control of the federal government that made all his 2025 power grabs possible. And second, he recognized that keeping control of the U.S. House during the 2026 midterms would probably require a big thumb on the scales, which he could most easily achieve by quite literally changing the landscape. He went public in July with a national effort to get red states to remap their congressional districts immediately so that the GOP would go into the midterms with a cushion larger than the likely Democratic gains. And it all began with a blunt demand that Texas give the GOP four or five new seats in a special session that was originally supposed to focus on flood recovery.

Texas complied, and other red states followed suit, even as Democrats — most notably in California — retaliated the best they could with their own gerrymanders. But now, the original map-rigging in Texas has just been canceled (subject to U.S. Supreme Court review) thanks to the ham-handed incompetence of the Trump administration, as Democracy Docket explains:

“A federal court Tuesday delivered a devastating blow to Texas Republicans’ attempt at a mid-decade gerrymander. And the court found that a July letter sent by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — intended to justify the GOP’s aggressive redraw — effectively handed voting rights advocates a smoking gun proving it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. …

“Unless the U.S. Supreme Court reverses it — Texas has already said it will appeal — the state must use its 2021 congressional map for the 2026 elections, killing what had been the GOP’s biggest planned redistricting gain of the decade.”

The blow to Trump’s plans came from two federal district-court judges (one of whom is a Trump appointee) who were part of a three-judge panel. Their order made it clear that DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, under the direction of Trump appointee and longtime Republican operative Harmeet Dhillon, stupidly insisted on making its instructions to Texas Republicans revolve around the racial makeup of the desired new districts, which is a big constitutional no-no:

“’It’s challenging to unpack the DOJ Letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,’ the judges wrote. ‘Indeed, even attorneys employed by the Texas Attorney General — who professes to be a political ally of the Trump Administration — describe the DOJ Letter as ‘legally unsound,” “baseless,” “erroneous,” “ham-fisted,” and “a mess.”‘

“The judges noted that while Texas insisted the 2025 map was drawn for partisan reasons, the DOJ letter made no such claim and framed its demands entirely around race.

“That omission was pivotal.”

The grand irony is that this same DOJ Civil Rights Division subsequently sued California to invalidate that state’s voter-approved gerrymander on grounds that the legislators who drew the map had taken race into account in designing the new districts.

Trump’s whole map-rigging exercise seems to be unraveling all over the country. On the very same day as the Texas ruling, Indiana’s Republican-controlled state Senate killed a special session that Trump, J.D. Vance, U.S. senator Jim Banks, and Governor Mike Braun had all demanded in order to wipe out two Democratic U.S. House districts. Kansas Republicans have similarly balked at Trump’s orders to kill a Democratic district. Voters in Missouri seem poised to cancel that state’s recent gerrymander designed to eliminate a Democratic seat in a ballot initiative. Fearing litigation, Ohio Republicans cut a deal with Democrats to make two Democratic-controlled House districts a bit redder instead of flipping them altogether. And on November 4, voters in Virginia solidified Democratic control of that state’s legislature and elected a new Democratic governor, which greatly facilitated plans to remap that state’s congressional districts to flip as many as three GOP seats.

Republicans could still gain seats in Florida, and a U.S. Supreme Court review of the Voting Rights Act could create all sorts of chaos. But Trump’s gerrymandering crusade will soon hit the wall of 2026 candidate filing deadlines. As Punchbowl News observes, his party could actually lose ground overall: “It’s not impossible to imagine that [Democrats] end up netting more seats than the GOP in these mid-decade redraws, a stunning change of circumstances that didn’t seem possible only a few months ago.”

Trump opened a Pandora’s box in Texas, and he and his party — not to mention his bumbling and heavily politicized legal beagles — are now dealing with the consequences.

From “Americans’ Social Media Use 2025” at Pew Research:

Even as debates continue about the role of social media in our country, including on censorship and its impact on youth, Americans use a range of online platforms, and many do so daily.

Which online platforms do Americans most commonly use?

YouTube and Facebook remain the most widely used online platforms. The vast majority of U.S. adults (84%) say they ever use YouTube. Most Americans (71%) also report using Facebook. These findings are according to a Pew Research Center survey of 5,022 U.S. adults conducted Feb. 5-June 18, 2025.

Half of adults say they use Instagram, making it the only other platform in our survey used by at least 50% of Americans.

Smaller shares use the other sites and apps we asked about, such as TikTok(37%) and WhatsApp (32%). Somewhat fewer say the same of Reddit, Snapchatand X (formerly Twitter).

This year we also asked about three platforms that are used by about one-in-ten or fewer U.S. adults: Threads, Bluesky, and Truth Social.

Center studies also find that YouTube is the most widely used online platform among U.S. teens, like it is among U.S. adults.

The post also includes this chart:

More here. Toplines here and here.

Ryan Mancini reports that “Rural America more optimistic about future of US” at The Hill, and notes, “While polling in recent years has shown Americans to be worried about the nation’s future, rural America has a more optimistic outlook, according to a new American Communities Project (ACP)/Ipsos poll...The poll showed that 59 percent of people living in “Rural Middle America,” which pollsters classified as largely white, rural communities with middle-income residents and 24 million people, have a positive outlook on the country’s future. This grew from what respondents said in 2024, at 43 percent…Other groups saw a growth in optimism since last year, with 67 percent of people living in “Aging Farmlands” and “Evangelical Hubs” each up from 48 percent and 51 percent, respectively…The primary issue that “Rural Middle America” respondents said they face is inflation and increasing costs. But this number saw a slight drop from last year, with 74 percent worried in 2025, down from 79 percent last year…Rural Middle America” saw immigration as another major issue facing the country, at 31 percent. Narrowed down further, 14 percent of respondents in this group saw immigration as an issue within their community…“Rural Middle America” showed slightly less concern about the growth of political violence than last year. In 2025, 23 percent saw it as a major issue, down from 27 percent last year. Corruption inched up a percentage point for “Rural Middle America,” from 18 percent in 2024 to 19 percent…The ACP/Ipsos survey was conducted Aug. 8 to Sept. 4 and included 5,489 respondents. The margin of error is 1.8 percentage points.”

In “House Rating Changes: Six Moves Toward Democrats, Although Topline Remains Close,” Kyle Kondik report at Sabto’s Crytal Ball: “Despite the haze over the House battlefield thanks to a flood of mid-decade redistricting, Democrats remain favored to flip the House majority next year…The one thing that could really change the House calculus would be a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Section Two of the Voting Rights Act. A maximally positive ruling for Republicans issued early enough in the cycle could allow them to add multiple safe seats in the South ahead of next year’s elections…With six states having redistricted so far, the median House seat by presidential performance has actually shifted slightly toward Democrats, a finding that is both subject to change and also somewhat surprising given Republican ambitions at the start of 2025’s redistricting battle…we do think a couple of first-term Northern Virginia Democrats are trending away from being true Republican targets next year, regardless of redistricting. While Rep. Eugene Vindman (D, VA-7) has a credible announced Republican opponent in state Sen. Tara Durant (R), among others, last year was probably the time for Republicans to win this district, when it was both open and competitive at the presidential and House levels. Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger (D), Vindman’s predecessor, carried her old district by a margin identical to her 15-point statewide win. The same is the case for Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D, VA-10), who won a surprisingly close 4.5-point victory in 2024. The aforementioned Jones, who was the weakest statewide Democrat this year, carried VA-10 by 11 points. Aside from the promising signals in this month’s returns, both Vindman and Subramanyam will now have incumbency, as well as what will likely be a better environment for Democrats than when they last ran. So we are upgrading each in our ratings: Vindman moves from Leans to Likely Democratic, and Subramanyam moves from Likely to Safe Democratic…Additionally, we’re moving a couple more Democrats off our Likely Democratic list and into Safe Democratic: Reps. Hillary Scholten (D, MI-3) in the Grand Rapids area and Kim Schrier (D, WA-8) in a district that covers some of Seattle’s suburbs and exurbs as well as redder, more rural turf. Kamala Harris won WA-8 by 6 points and MI-3 by 8 points in 2024, with the incumbents doing a little better than that. There’s not much reason to think either are in any danger in 2026.” More here.

Perry Bacon interviews Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica, who explains why “Anti-Corruption Politics Are the Way for Democrats to Crush Trumpism” at The New Republic. Further, notes, Bacon, “The Democrats need to become a party centered on fighting government corruption, oligarchy, and other issues that don’t cut along traditional ideological lines, says Adam Bonica, a political science professor at Stanford University and author of the On Data and Democracy newsletter. In the latest edition of Right Now, Bonica argues that many voters don’t think in the left-right terms that political junkies do. These Americans think basically politicians are corrupt and ineffective, leading them to keep ejecting whichever party briefly has control in Washington. Instead of Democrats mindlessly following polls and trying to demonstrate “moderation,” Bonica says they could appeal to the big bloc of people either not voting or swinging between the parties, by taking stands such as limiting how much billionaires and corporations can spend in politics and banning members of Congress from trading stocks.” Watch the video at The New Republic here.

“Donald Trump has never polled well,” Bill Scher writes in “Trump’s Poll Numbers Just Entered the Danger Zone.  In November, for the first time in his second term, the president’s average job approval dropped below 45 percent. That spells trouble for the 2026 midterms” at Washington Monthly. “. While in office, in the Real Clear Politics job approval averages, he has never cracked 50 percent, save for a brief period at the beginning of his second term. His average favorability rating—which, unlike job approval, is measured while out of office—never has at all…But in a polarized era, in elections including third-party candidates determined by the Electoral College and not the popular vote, keeping these numbers above 45 percent has been for Trump—shall we say—good enough for government work. About three weeks before his 2024 presidential victory, Trump managed to push his favorability rating above 45 percent for the first time since the spring of 2022. And Trump kept both his job approval and favorability numbers above 45 percent throughout this year…Until now…Trump’s favorables dipped below 45 percent in August and have tracked around 44 percent since then. More striking is the decline in Trump’s job approval rating since the run-up to the shutdown. Since September 21, the president’s approval rating has declined by four points, from 46.3 to 42.3 percent…Of course, with a year before the midterm elections, Trump has time to regain three points or more and give the GOP a puncher’s chance to hold the House next year. And to get there, he’s hardly above gimmicky ideas—recently, he mused about $2,000 government checks sent to most Americans… Yet what should unnerve Republicans is that Trump’s second-term agenda is already firmly in place—including tariffs, deportations, civil servant layoffs, and the One Big Beautiful Bill—and the public is unimpressed. Only 36 percent of Americans say the country is on the “right track,” down seven points since June.” More here.

From “Record anxiety over medical costs gives Democrats their opening by Alex Samuels at Daily Kos:

So, “How Many Republicans Will Defy Trump and Vote to Release the Epstein Files?” is a question Julianne McShane addresses at Mother Jones. As McShane explains, “On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will finally vote on the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act. If passed, the bill would force the Department of Justice to release all unclassified records related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors, including flight logs, names of people and entities with ties to Epstein, sealed settlements, and internal DOJ communications related to the case…The Tuesday vote—which was first reported by Politico on Friday, citing three anonymous sources—has been a long time coming. The bill was first introduced in the House by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in July; in early September, he and co-sponsor Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) put forth a discharge petition to force the legislation out of the Rules Committee for a floor vote. Last week, when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) finally swore in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.), they secured the last signature needed to make the legislation eligible for a vote…Now, the question is whether enough House Republicans will turn on President Donald Trump—who has been doing everything he can to tank the vote—to move the bill forward. Only four Republicans—Massie, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.)—signed onto the discharge petition, and CNN reported that the White House held a meeting with Boebert in the Situation Room to pressure her to take her name off of it. (She declined.) Trump has called the effort to release the files “a Democrat hoax” but, confusingly, also ordered the DOJ on Friday to investigate Epstein’s ties to prominent Democrats…But at least some on the right appear undeterred. On ABC’s This Week on Sunday morning, Massie said he expects “a deluge of Republicans” to vote for the bill, adding, “There could be 100 or more.” (On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Khanna offered a more conservative estimate, of at least 40 Republicans he expects to vote in support of the bill.)” More here.

At Semafor, David Weigel writes that “Poll: As Trump loses ground with Latinos, Democrats still lag,” and explains: “New polling from the Latino polling group Equis finds that President Donald Trump has lost most of his 2024 gains with Latino voters, but Democrats haven’t won those voters back…The “pulse check” study of 2,000 registered voters, taken before the Nov. 4 elections, found 68% of Latino voters disapproving of how Republicans handled the “cost of living.”…That was higher than the share who disapproved of sending military units into cities (62%), but the support for Trump on both questions has plunged since last year. Yet only 45% of Latino voters viewed Democrats favorably…“What we’ve seen is this feeling of not knowing who is leading the party, and not visibly seeing leaders fighting against the Trump administration,” said Maria Isabel Di Franco Quiñonez, director of research at Equis. “I think that there will be so many opportunities in the coming months to fight on affordability.” Weigel shares the following chart:

If you think the transgender issue of the 2024 election was a one-time concern, for Democrats, you should read “What’s Next in the Transgender Wars” by Joseph Figliolia, who writes at The Dispatch: “For years, there has been a growing chorus arguing that, in an era where Americans are increasingly devoid of faith and transcendent meaning, our sublimated religious impulses have found a new home in our political sphere, turning every policy debate into a zero-sum game with existential stakes. Add to this our social media echo chambers and the algorithms that highlight outlier positions on the left and right, and it’s no wonder that we assume the worst about our political rivals… Nevertheless, few issue areas in our political discourse are as tense as the discourse surrounding transgender issues, particularly the medical transition of minors. Indeed, the discourse is likely to be reignited, with NPR recently reporting that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services plans to issue two proposed rules later this month which would prohibit Medicaid and CHIP reimbursements for pediatric medical interventions for dysphoric minors, and Medicaid and Medicare funding for any hospital that renders these practices…Ironically, both the “affirming” and what I’ll call the “restrictionist” camps are united by compassion for what they perceive as highly vulnerable and exploited groups, yet they diverge radically in how they define those groups and their needs. In the spirit of lowering the political temperature, I think it is useful to map out some of the basic assumptions underlying the affirming and restrictionist perspectives. Although years of research—and my own value judgments—have led me to conclude that the available evidence supports the restrictionist position, I view this exercise as a good-faith attempt to help readers, and each camp, better understand the nature of the debate…after the success of Trump’s “they/them” ad in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, some within the Democratic Party have suggested moderating on transgender issues… The recent success of Democrats like Zohran Mamdani in New York City—who promised to set aside $65 million for “affirming care”—has convinced some that the left should instead double down on transgender rights. Of course, New York is not representative of America. But the fact remains that the debate over pediatric medical transition is not going anywhere. The U.S. is functionally divided into “affirming” sanctuary states and states that prohibit physicians from treating dysphoric minors with medical interventions.” More here.

Check out “How To Win the Midterms: Yasmin Radjy on her New Campaign Initiative Ground Truth” by Jennifer Rubin ands Yasmin Radjy at The Contrarian. As Rubin and Radjy writes, “Yasmin Radjy, Executive Director of Swing Left, unveils their new initiative Ground Truth, a deep-canvassing strategy aimed at not only speaking to voters face-to-face, but implementing their feedback directly into a candidate’s policy proposals. As Radjy and Jen discuss voter frustration and distrust of a “broken system,” it becomes clear how vital a grassroots campaign for voters is needed to take back the House in 2026…Yasmin Radjy: Jen, you, as… I think this is the second time that you are one step ahead of us. You’re, like, you’re previewing what we will be sharing soon, so the answer is yes, we are going to definitely be sharing more seats very, very soon, but I think there’s a couple factors that we’re weighing, so I cannot wait to share the updated list with you. They won’t be super surprising. Right now, we are… we’ve got 14, defensive districts and 8 offensive districts. And we really… I think the balance that we have here is we’ve gotta focus on the most competitive districts, so we’re talking about Democrats who won their races by 3 percentage points or less. Republicans who, won their races that we need to defeat, by either 4 percentage points or less, or The Republican won by more, but Kamala Harris won the district, so people split their tickets, so districts like Mike Lawler’s, where people assume he’s a moderate, even though he’s not. So we’re starting there, and then there is a dynamic that I’m sure you’re familiar with, because so many of your listeners and viewers are the same folks who volunteer and give to Swing Left. That a lot of folks are feeling a level of, sort of, paralysis about giving to house races, volunteering for house races, because they’re like. there’s so many redistricting fights, it’s a whack-a-mole game, and so I can’t keep track, so I’m not gonna do anything. And so, what we will be sharing soon, and I can’t wait to share with you, is, first of all, what, how our California map has just changed with Prop 50, which is very exciting. Thank you to your home state, to my home state. But then also, to your point. we’ve got to get a little more aggressive, right? But we also, I think there is a risk when we are both riding high from these incredible wins in 2025, we are riding high on, you know, we won back so many voters that we lost in 2024, maybe everything is different, and I think our job is to stay really sort of steady, pragmatic. We consider ourselves the smart political friend of so many people who don’t know where to put their time, where their dollars, to make sure that we are winning the House. And there is a reality of the math is still the math. These are districts that are still… there’s only so many, and unfortunately it’s a shrinking number rather than a growing number, with a redistricting asterisk, of competitive races, and so we’ve got to stay the course.” More here.

The following article, “The Great Affordability-Washing of the Democrats” 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 a new mantra: “affordability.” It played a starring role in Democratic gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia and in the surprising mayoral victory of democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City. By all accounts, this was an effective message even controlling for other factors like the light blue to deep blue nature of these states and municipalities, the overrepresentation of Democratic-friendly educated, engaged voters in these elections, and the general unpopularity of President Trump.

Affordability is an area of deep vulnerability for Trump and his party since they promised to fix Biden and the Democrats’ mismanagement of the economy and are not viewed as having done so. According to Silver Bulletin’s polling aggregates, Trump’s handling of the economy is 18 points underwater (approval minus disapproval) and an astonishing 28 points underwater on handling inflation (34 percent approval vs. 62 percent disapproval). Other data show that general views of the economy have not improved since Trump took office, that most believe Trump’s policies are actually making the economy worse and that more see the economy getting worse rather than better in the coming year.

In such a situation, it would be political malpractice not to focus on this vulnerability, neatly encapsulated in the term “affordability.” Everything just costs too damn much! Democrats have taken to this approach delightedly, whether moderate or fire-breathing progressive. It provides a convenient way of changing the subject when other issues, particularly cultural ones, come up where their views are decidedly less popular. Pay no attention to those other issues: we Democrats are affordability people!

Will this work? Well, it did in 2025. Indeed, it worked so well that one Democratic commentator declared it a new “theory of everything” for the Democrats and there has been general euphoria that—finally!—a way has been found to neutralize the toxic image the party has developed over time. In short, Democrats hope to affordability-wash their party brand and be reborn as a party that cares for little beyond making ordinary citizens’ lives easier and better. But can the Democrats really wash away their political sins so easily?

There are reasons to be skeptical that affordability, despite its utility as a campaign trope, has such magical powers. Start with the ongoing struggle between moderates and progressives within the party. Their differences were temporarily suppressed during the 2025 campaigns, where everyone latched onto the affordability message, but in the aftermath these differences are coming to the fore. Mamdani’s victory in New York City has put wind in the sails of the good ship Progressive; now is not the time they say to bow “at the altar of caution.” Such candidates are running hard to the left in many Democratic primaries and Democrats could well find themselves with their own version of Republicans’ Tea Party problem from the early 2010’s where insurgents undermined GOP electoral fortunes.

Case in point: progressive darling Graham Platner is running strong against Janet Mills for the Maine Senate Democratic nomination. In past social media posts, Platner referred to himself as a communist, disparaged the police, and criticized Maine’s rural white people for being “stupid” and “racist.” And then there’s his “Totenkopf” tattoo historically associated with the Nazis. Not ideal; recent polling indicates that with this baggage Republican Susan Collins would easily vanquish him in a general election.

After balanced information about Platner, he trails Collins significantly. After a positive paragraph reflective of Platner’s bio and current campaign messaging, and a negative paragraph summarizing the recent news about him and reflecting likely Republican messaging in a general election, Collins gets above 50 percent and Platner trails her by 9 (42 percent Platner / 51 percent Collins)—the same margin by which Democrats lost the 2020 Maine Senate race.

Without flipping Collins’ seat, Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate are extremely small. In general, Democrats are in desperate need of moderate candidates who can overcome, rather than reinforce, the negative weight of the party’s image—an image which cannot be magically affordability-washed away in purple-to-red states. This imperative is underscored by this chart from Lakshya Jain on how Democrats would do in Senate contests outside of Maine and North Carolina even if 2026 is a 2018-type blue wave (D+7.3) election.

The starkness of this challenge is underscored by the difficulties of being truly moderate in today’s Democratic Party. As liberal Ezra Klein admitted, apropos of the 2025 results:

If Democrats want power in the Senate in any significant numbers ever again, they’re going to need to be competitive in places where they used to be able to win elections. Places like Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Alaska. But they’ve not really been competitive there for some time.

So I don’t know how much I think this was a positive test of that…Abigail Spanberger is a moderate in Virginia and Zohran Mamdani is a democratic socialist in New York City…But also by any historical measure of politics, they’re actually just not that far apart. Abigail Spanberger is a moderate within the current Democratic Party, but she is not a moderate from the perspective of 1998.

The thing about all three of these figures is that none of them challenge Democrats in any significant way, except maybe Mamdani, from the left…I don’t think the question of what you would need to do to win an election in Ohio, Florida and Iowa is answered yet.

Indeed not. The fact of the matter is that Democrats can’t just sprinkle affordability pixie dust over their candidates—they actually need to move their left-trending partyto the right in important ways. As noted in the big New York Times feature on “Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win”:

The success of candidates like [Democrat Marcy Kaptur, who successfully defended her House seat in a district that Trump won easily] demonstrates that America still has a political center. Polls show that most voters prefer capitalism to socialism and worry that the government is too big—and also think that corporations and the wealthy have too much power. Most voters oppose both the cruel immigration enforcement of the Trump administration and the lax Biden policies that led to a record immigration surge. Most favor robust policing to combat crime and recoil at police brutality. Most favor widespread abortion access and some restrictions late in pregnancy. Most oppose race-based affirmative action and support class-based affirmative action. Most support job protections for trans people and believe that trans girls should not play girls’ sports. Most want strong public schools and the flexibility to choose which school their children attend…

[Trump’s] extremism offers an opportunity to the Democratic Party. Mr. Trump is governing in ways that put the Republican Party out of step with public opinion on taxes, health insurance, abortion, immigration, executive power and more. If Democrats were willing to be less ideological—less beholden to views that many liberal activists, intellectuals and donors genuinely hold but that most Americans do not—they would have the opportunity to build the country’s next governing majority.

And without that, they won’t. In many ways, Democrats just don’t realize what time it is. The eras of racial preferences and adjacent DEI policies, of “no human being is illegal,” of gender ideology and treating biological sex as a mere technicality, of tolerance for social disorder in the name of kindness, of climate hawks and net-zero maximalism, of spending that doesn’t produce commensurate results, of shoddy but “progressive” governance—they are all coming to their ends. The Democrats must find their way in this strange new world for which their most ideological supporters—those “liberal activists, intellectuals and donors”—are unprepared. They cannot just affordability-wash their political sins away. Their problems are embedded too deeply and the skepticism of ordinary voters too entrenched for such a superficial fix to work.

Without knowing what horrors may lie in the Epstein Files, you can pretty clearly see it’s dividing Trump from elements of his MAGA base, as I explained at New York:

November 12 was a very busy day in the White House as Donald Trump’s congressional allies worked overtime to end the longest government shutdown in history. But it does not appear the president was spending any time burning up the phone lines to Congress to ensure the reopening of the government. Instead, he was worried about something unrelated: trying to talk House Republicans into removing their signatures from a discharge petition forcing a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a mostly Democratic-backed bill to make the Justice Department disgorge all its material on the late sex predator and his associations.

Trump spoke with one signatory, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who also met with Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel on the subject in the White House. She did not change her mind. Trump also tried to reach another, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who sent the president a message explaining why she, too, would turn down his blandishments, as the New York Times reported: “Ms. Mace, who is running for governor, wrote Mr. Trump a long explanation of her own history of sexual abuse and rape, and why it was impossible for her to change positions, according to a person familiar with her actions.”

And so from the White House’s point of view, the worst-case scenario happened despite Trump’s personal lobbying. When recently elected Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva was finally sworn in after a long and very suspicious delay, she quickly became the 218th signature on the discharge petition, and House Speaker Mike Johnson duly announced the chamber would vote on the Epstein Files bill next week.

This is really odd for multiple reasons.

First of all, one of the most important political stories of 2025 has been the abject subservience of congressional Republicans to Donald Trump. They’ve rubber-stamped nearly all of his appointees, even some they probably privately considered unqualified; devoted much of the year to developing and enacting a budget reconciliation bill that they officially labeled the “One Big Beautiful Act” to reflect Trump’s distinctive branding; stood by quietly as he and his underlings (at first DOGE honcho Elon Musk and then OMB director Russ Vought) obliterated congressional prerogatives in naked executive-branch power grabs; and regularly sang hymns of praise to the all-powerful leader. But the Epstein-files issue appears to be different. Politico reports that House Republicans expect “mass defections” on the bill forcing disclosure now that a vote cannot be avoided. That’s amazing in view of Trump’s oft-repeated claim that any Republicans interested in the Epstein-files “hoax” are “stupid,” or as he has most recently called them, “soft and weak.”

Second of all, Boebert and Mace are Trump loyalists of the highest order. Boebert always has been a MAGA stalwart. And after some earlier rifts with Trump, Mace has become a huge cheerleader for him, backing him over Nikki Haley in 2024 and receiving his endorsement for her own tough primary contest last year. Mace desperately needs and wants his endorsement in a multicandidate gubernatorial primary next year. That she spurned his request to back off the Epstein Files discharge petition speaks volumes about how important it is to her to maintain solidarity with Epstein’s victims right now. That seems to be the primary motive for Boebert as well, as the Times noted a couple of months ago:

“Ms. Boebert, who grew up moving around the country and living with different men her mother was dating, has been less vocal [than Mace] about her own experiences. But she has also alluded to abuse and trauma. In her memoir, Ms. Boebert wrote that one of the men she lived with for a time in Colorado when she was young was verbally and physically abusive to her mother.

“During her divorce last year, Ms. Boebert was also granted a temporary restraining order against her ex-husband, Jayson Boebert, after she said he was threatening to harm her and enter the family’s home without permission.”

Third of all, it’s important to remember that Epstein in particular, and the idea of a cabal of elite sex traffickers in general, are highly resonant topics for elements of the MAGA base. Boebert and a third Republican signatory of the Epstein-files discharge petition, Marjorie Taylor Greene, first came to Congress closely identified with the supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, in which Epstein and his global-elite friends are key figures. Indeed, as my colleague Charlotte Klein observed this summer, discussion of the Epstein files has for years served as a routine conservative dog whistle to QAnon folk:

“‘All of this gives more mainstream right-wing figures an opportunity to take advantage of some of that QAnon energy: They can use Epstein’s story as a way to nod to the QAnon theories of widespread Democratic child-sex trafficking and to bolster their own audiences,’ said Matthew Gertz of Media Matters. ‘You can run segments on it on Fox News in a way that you just can’t about QAnon, and so that makes it a much broader right-wing story.’”

Trump himself has often fed this particular beast, as Karen Tumulty reminds us in arguing that this is a “wedge issue” dividing the president from his otherwise adoring followers:

“Trump was stoking conspiracy theories about Epstein at least as far back as the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2015. Asked for his opinion of Bill Clinton, Trump replied, ‘Nice guy.’ Then he added: ‘Got a lot of problems coming up in my opinion with the famous island. With Jeffrey Epstein.’”

Interestingly enough, the president now seems to be going back to the idea that the Epstein Files isn’t a problem for him at all, as can be seen from a Truth Social post on November 14:

“The Democrats are doing everything in their withering power to push the Epstein Hoax again, despite the DOJ releasing 50,000 pages of documents, in order to deflect from all of their bad policies and losses, especially the SHUTDOWN EMBARRASSMENT, where their party is in total disarray, and has no idea what to do. Some Weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish. Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem! Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers about Epstein, they know all about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!”

This doesn’t just beg, but scream the question: If this is a Democrat Problem, why not release the files like your base wants you to do?

This is an issue for him that he cannot wave or wish away.

 

From “Johnson shifts strategy on Epstein files vote – as GOP leaders brace for mass defections” by Annie Grayer, Manu Raju and Kristen Holmes at CNN Politics:

House Speaker Mike Johnson decided to quickly schedule a House vote on an effort to force the release of all of the Jeffrey Epstein case files once the calculation was made that it couldn’t be stopped.

The decision marked a shift in strategy for Johnson and the White House, who had long sought to delay the process, ​three sources told CNN.

House GOP leaders are bracing for a significant number of Republicans to break from President Donald Trump and support the bipartisan bill led by GOP Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna calling for the Justice Department to release the Epstein files — as supporters push for a veto-proof majority.

Republican sources say there’s a broad cross-section of the conference willing to support the plan — and it will be hard to limit defections.

“No point in waiting,” one House GOP leadership source familiar with the strategy shift told CNN.

A House GOP lawmaker said of the speaker’s decision: “If you got to do it, might as well do it quickly.”

Massie told CNN on Wednesday that his hope is that a veto-proof majority will pressure the Senate to act over Trump’s opposition. It would require two-thirds of the House — or 290 votes if all members are present — for a veto-proof majority.

“If we get less than two-thirds vote when it comes up for a vote, I think it’s an uphill battle,” Massie said. “But if we are somehow able to get two thirds vote here in the House, [that] puts a lot of pressure on the Senate, and also, if the Senate does pass it, that’s a very serious step for the president.”

A Senior White House official told CNN that Trump was made aware ahead of time that Johnson was going to expedite the vote, and that the two had spoken about it.

“It was made clear to President Trump, and he understands that this is an inevitable reality,” the official said.

More here.

The CW has it that the government shutdown, at least the way it ended, was a setback for Democrats. I suggested otherwise at New York.

There’s a lot of ill-suppressed glee among Republicans right now, along with recriminations among Democrats, about the end of the longest government shutdown ever. Eight Democratic senators were able to undercut a few hundred of their colleagues by ending a filibuster against a bill to reopen government, exhibiting both weakness and disunity. (Though there’s no telling how many holdouts privately agreed with the “cave.”) Worse, Democrats failed to secure an extension of Obamacare premium subsidies they repeatedly demanded.

So were Republicans the “winners” and Democrats the “losers” in the shutdown saga? Maybe now, but maybe not later. As the New York Times’ Annie Karni observes, the short-term stakes of the shutdown fight may soon be overshadowed by more enduring public perceptions of what the two parties displayed:

“[Some Democrats] assert that in hammering away at the extension of health care subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of next month, they managed to thrust Mr. Trump and Republicans onto the defensive, elevating a political issue that has long been a major weakness for them.

“And in holding out for weeks while Republicans refused to extend the health tax credits and Mr. Trump went to court to deny low-income Americans SNAP food benefits, Democrats also honed their main message going into 2026: that Republicans who control all of government have done nothing to address voters’ concerns that the cost of living is too high”.

Trump’s clumsy and insensitive handling of the SNAP benefit cutoff was an unforced error and a gift to Democrats. But just as importantly, by “losing” the Obamacare subsidy–extension fight, Democrats may have dodged a bullet. A deal on that issue would have cushioned or even eliminated an Obamacare premium price hike that will now be a real problem for Trump and the GOP. Republicans appear to have no health-care plan other than the same tired panaceas involving individual savings plans that allow health insurers to discriminate against poorer and sicker Americans — precisely the problem that led to passage of the Affordable Care Act and has made Obamacare popular.

The big takeaway from Democrats’ election sweep this month is that “affordability” is a message that accommodates candidates ranging from democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani to centrist Abigail Spanberger and that plays on tangible public unhappiness with Trump’s broken promises to reduce the cost of living. That Republicans emerged from the government shutdown having abundantly displayed their lack of interest in soaring health-care costs and persistently high grocery costs positions Democrats exactly where they hope to be next November.

In addition, the election wins showed that rank-and-file Democratic voters and the activists who helped turn them out were not particularly bothered by the year’s many ideological and generational collisions over anti-Trump strategy and tactics. The Democratic “struggle for the soul of the party” that Republicans and Beltway pundits love more than life itself may manifest itself more visibly during 2026 primaries. But when general-election season arrives, there’s every reason to believe Democrats will stop fighting each other and focus on flipping the House — and in a big-wave election, maybe even the Senate — and destroying the governing trifecta that has enabled so many Trump outrages this year. It’s one thing to debate endlessly how to “fight” and “stop” Trump. It’s another thing to be given a clear opportunity to do just that at the ballot box.

The expiration of the shutdown deal on January 30 could in theory produce another government shutdown and another set of expectations to be met or missed. But “winning” the current shutdown won’t in itself improve Trump’s lagging job-approval ratings, or the incoherence of his economic policies, or the fears his authoritarian conduct instills. That’s the GOP’s problem and Democrats’ opportunity.