After writing my umpteenth explainer of this or that legislative, executive or judicial-branch development of 2025, it hit me there was an obvious pattern that I discussed at New York:

Systemic chaos and confusion have been the reigning leifmotif of the second Trump presidency. If your grasp of the way government is supposed to work is based on Schoolhouse Rock or social studies lessons on “how a bill becomes law,” the last five months or so must have been baffling to you. It’s not an accident, either: Donald Trump’s ways of doing business make the normal business practices of the public sector all but impossible.

Congress has done remarkably little this year other than slowly and erratically tinker on the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. When reconciliation bills were conceived of in the early ‘70s, they were meant to provide some budgetary discipline to Congress. Over time they have become the principle way for majority parties with governing trifectas to enact massive collections of legislation without fear of a Senate filibuster. Reconciliation bills, put simply, are a way to take power from the minority party. They are tailor-made for a president with authoritarian tendencies and largely undivided party support to ram through a vast agenda. And so, unsurprisingly, the 2025 reconciliation bill is bigger and badder than any of its predecessors. During his first term in 2017, Congress packaged Trump’s agenda into two reconciliation bills. This time he insisted on doing everything at once, creating a truly monstrous megabill.

Budget reconciliation bills have their own incredibly obscure and complex set of rules and procedures that confound everyone but a small tribe of budget wonks. There are multiple layers to the development of a megabill, from a budget resolution that sets targets, to “reconciliation instructions” that tell House and Senate committees what to produce in the way of revenues and spending, to all-night Senate “vote-a-ramas” where the minority party gets to offer dozens of symbolic amendments designed to make the majority look bad. Once the assembled bill reaches the Senate, that chamber’s nonpartisan parliamentarian rules on which provisions fail to meet the criteria for inclusion in such bills. Then the majority party will try to put Humpty Dumpty back together by tweaking the offending provisions, or altering other items to make the overall arithmetic work. All this is happening very quickly, and largely behind the scenes. And then the House has to accept changes made by the Senate or the whole wild process more or less starts over.

Figuring out where things stand at any given moment with a reconciliation bill is all but impossible, so people rely on big partisan narratives. To Republicans, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill is a carefully wrought device to extend and create tax cuts for people who deserve them; to boost national defense and border security spending; to reverse the “open borders” policies of the Biden administration; and to reduce government “waste, fraud and abuse.” To Democrats it’s an abominable reverse-Robin Hood measure to give tax cuts to the wealthy at the expense of vulnerable poor and middle-class Americans, whose Medicaid, Obamacare, and SNAP benefits will be slashed. Each party accuses the other of fiscal profligacy. Sometimes Republicans jockeying for leverage in their own caucuses temporarily agree with Democrats and yell and posture, but it’s understood that in the end they will toe the party line. No one will read the final bills that Trump will likely push through the House and Senate. So how can citizens comprehend the consequences until the dust clears and the new laws are fully implemented? They really can’t; it’s all based on partisanship, trust, selective information, and gut instincts. Civics in action it isn’t. And it’s all being done this way because Trump has insisted on making the Big Beautiful Bill a testament to his own power and historical significance.

The chaos in the judicial branch is arguably even worse. Since the Trump administration is determined to expand presidential powers to the breaking point, it is inviting and sometimes initiating litigation in the federal courts on a vast array of issues. In general challenges to Trump’s policies have succeeded more often than not in the lower courts. But many issues will only be resolved when they reach a deeply divided U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, on the final day of that Court’s current term, the conservative majority restricted the ability of lower-court judges to put a hold on the administration’s many power grabs through nationwide injunctions. So more than ever, all roads lead to incredibly high-stakes decisions by the Supreme Court, three of whose members owe their life-time appointments to Trump.

That same Supreme Court, moreover, is increasingly prone to issuing temporary orders with no explanation. This often helps the administration work its will, but leaves a lot of questions unresolved, as the Brennan Center recently explained:

“Today, the justices grant relief in contentious shadow docket cases twice as often as they did just a few years ago. The surge in issuing this relief has coincided with Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joining the Court.”

It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Supreme Court conservatives are trying to hide their tracks on controversial cases. Just this week the Court permitted the administration to resume deporting immigrants to random and often dangerous countries other than their own without a hearing — and the decision was made with no oral arguments and no majority opinion. Who knows what it means in the long run? Those without a law school education and a huge amount of time on their hands will be lost trying to follow it all.

On top of everything else, the Trump 2.0 executive branch has engaged in an incredible amount of secrecy and procedural chaos, all of it making it hard to know what will happen to the federal government and millions of federal employees. Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative may be winding down a bit with its chief’s recent departure from the administration. But the damage it wreaked throughout the public sector via arbitrary mass firings, lockdowns of agencies and programs, refusals to pay invoices, and sheer terror tactics by embedded teams of totally inexperienced data geeks, will live on for years. And anyone relying on, much less working on, federal programs and benefits will be seeing shadow ninjas jumping out of the walls to blow it all up for a long time.

Post-Musk, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has emerged as the real quarterback of executive branch aggressive chaos. The steely Christian nationalist and Project 2025 co-creator wants to shrink the federal government radically. He’s renowned for pursing all sorts of obscure power-grabbing measures that only a handful of people fully understand, including spending rescissions (cancellation of previously appropriated funds, which must be approved by Congress), spending deferrals (delays in releasing previously appropriated funds, which can be overriden by Congress), “pocket rescissions” (deferrals issued just before the end of the fiscal year so that Congress won’t have time to override them), and impoundments (blatant refusals to spend appropriated dollars). It’s all in play.

Top it all off with a powerful president who is famously erratic, and it’s hard to see the road ahead, or even the road underneath one’s feet right now. To understand any given issue you need to know where it stands in the latest version of the budget bill; whether it’s subject to federal court litigation; what the executive branch is doing to undermine the prerogatives of Congress and the courts; and what priorities Trump may choose at any given moment. It’s a lot, every minute of every day, and the relentless chaos fostered by the 47th president continues to defy every single precedent.

Lest Democrats get too optimistic about Trump’s recent troubles, Eleanor Mueller reports that “‘Workers don’t trust either party’: Sherrod Brown-backed focus groups reveal economic pessimism,” cross-posted here from Semafor:

An excerpt from “The real reason Republicans are rushing to pass the Trump megabill” by James Downie at msnbc.com: “And remember, the bill is massively unpopular, and it becomes even less popular the more voters learn about its provisions. Eight years ago, Republicans thought a tax cut bill would save them in the midterms; instead, that bill was so unpopular that they largely stopped talking about it before that campaign was even finished. Surely Republicans want to avoid reprising that disaster, so why not take a beat over the holiday, reassess and see whether there are other bills to give the president a legislative victory?…The answer is: There is no plan B. The megabill is not just the most important legislation of Trump’s first year; at this point, it is the only major legislation of Trump’s first year. If the bill is “big” and “beautiful,” that is by default. Republicans have to pass it because Trump wants them to pass something…What that something looks like does not matter to the president, who has been consistently incurious as to the bill’s contents. Earlier this month, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said Trump was surprised to learn the Senate bill would limit a tax on health care providers that states use to fund Medicaid — a provision that was a key source of savings. On Thursday, as my colleague Steve Benen noted, the president claimed: “Your Medicaid is left alone. It’s left the same.” In fact, the bill would kick millions off Medicaid. On Friday, he claimed — for the second time in two days — that the bill would eliminate taxes on Social Security. It would not…But whether this bill would cut taxes on Social Security — or throw millions off their health care or batter rural hospitals — is ultimately immaterial to the president. All that matters is he has a piece of paper to sign that cuts taxes for him and his wealthy friends and donors.”

In his most recent New York Times opinion essay, Thomas B. Edsall quotes Democratic activist Mike Lux on the class-based trends that are moving through both political parties: “…The foundational idea that Democrats are the party of working people (and its corollary that Republicans are the party of business and the wealthy) has grown much more tenuous than it once was. Democrats are lost without that core idea…Both parties have some elements of elitism. The Republicans have a hard case to make when Trump’s cabinet is full of billionaires and they let big business write their own rules, and when they are cutting taxes for billionaires and paying for it by cutting Medicaid and V.A. benefits and food for hungry children…But, yes, the Democratic Party has some elements of elitism. To survive, we need to re-emphasize our working-class identity and that we are fighting for regular folks. We need to not talk down to folks and not spend so much time hanging out with celebrities…Just like with white folks, working- class voters want candidates to focus on economic issues, and they want people who will fight for them and their communities, to be their proxy…Working-class voters’ perception, fed brilliantly by the Republican and right-wing media infrastructure, was that Democrats cared more about other issues and other people than they did about the essential economic needs of regular working families.”

In “Digging into a New 2024 Postmortem: Findings from Pew’s Validated Voter Study,” Kyle Kondik observes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball in his subsection entitled ‘How the Pew report fits in with other 2024 analyses’: “This morning, the Pew Research Center released its “validated voter” report on the 2024 presidential election. This report is the second of two we were looking forward to this year—the other came out last month from the Democratic firm Catalist…We wrote about the Catalist report in May and compared it to Election Night exit polls/analyses from Edison Research for a consortium of news networks as well as the VoteCastconducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for the Associated Press and Fox News. In today’s analysis, we are going to add Pew’s report to the mix, highlighting some of its key findings and comparing it to these other reports…First, some housekeeping: The full methodology of both the Pew and Catalist reports are available at their websites. The Pew report is conducted differently from the Catalist report. The Catalist report is “based on publicly available vote history data and precinct-level election results … as well as Census data, and Catalist’s proprietary modeling and polling, which are all used to estimate the composition and partisan leanings of the electorate from the precinct to the national level.” Meanwhile, the Pew report is based on a post-election survey of “U.S. adults on our nationally representative American Trends Panel (ATP). We verified their turnout using commercial voter files that aggregate publicly available official state turnout records.” Both reports came out months after the election because of both the large amount of work that goes into producing such reports and the fact that the voter files maintained at the state level take time to update after the election. The Edison and VoteCast analyses are large sample surveys that come out on Election Night and are adjusted to the results, but they don’t have the benefit of access to the voter files…With that, let’s take a look at the Pew report and put it in the context of these other analyses. This also functions as something of a sequel to our earlier analysis of the Catalist report and the exit polls, so there are some aspects of the election that we mentioned there but not here…— The Pew report adds further backing to the now well-established finding that the shifts from 2020 to 2024 were driven by voters of color, particularly Latinos and Asian Americans. Table 1 shows the voting by race in the Pew report, as well as the findings from the Catalist report and the Edison and VoteCast Election Night analyses.”

In addition to the never-ending search for fresh faces to lead the way forward in all of America’s cultural, social and political institutions, April Rubin reports at Axios that “A growing number of Gen Z and millennial Americans are seeking elected office — campaigning on the issues that matter most to them and their peers…Why it matters: The 119th Congress is the third oldest in U.S. history, and both of America’s most recent presidents set records as the oldest ever inaugurated. As leadership skews older, young candidates from both parties are running to get their voices heard in local, state and federal government…Case in point: Thousands of young progressives have expressed interest in running for office since Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral primary win last week…Between Tuesday’s primary and Friday afternoon, about 2,700 people signed up with Run for Something, an organization that supports young Democrats running for down-ballot office…Zoom in: If elected in November, 33-year-old Mamdani would be the youngest among the mayors currently serving in the 50 largest American cities, according to an Axios analysis…He’d also be New York City’s second-youngest mayor, after Hugh J. Grant in the late 19th century…The intrigue: Candidate age is becoming an increasingly important issue for American voters…67% of U.S. adults in a February YouGov poll said they believed maximum age limits should be imposed on elected officials.”

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:

Progressive Democrats have been dreaming for years of a way they could be both economically populist and culturally radical—and succeed. The original name for this was “inclusive populism.” The idea was that Democrats may indeed be bleeding working-class voters but the solution does not lie in any way with moving to the center on culturally-inflected issues like crime, immigration, race, gender, and schooling. That would not be “inclusive.”

Instead, as recounted in a 2022 New York Times article on their initial gathering, the inclusive populists argued for turning it up to 11 on economic populism since “[Democrats] don’t fight hard enough for working-class people, and…aren’t tough enough on big, greedy corporations.” As the article noted:

The unmistakable tone of the event was a rebuke of the Democrats who have failed to squeeze more progressive policy wins out of their congressional majority over the last 18 months—and essentially, in the left’s telling, let their most conservative member, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, dictate the terms of their governing agenda.

The 2024 election results delivered a big blow to the inclusive populist theory of the case. Perhaps economic populism and cultural radicalism did not go together like soup and sandwich. But inclusive populism devotees did not give up; they hoped that the tide would turn in their favor. Now they believe it has with the capture of the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City (and, therefore, likely general election winner) by Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who enthusiastically backs every culturally radical cause under the sun and ran on an economically populist program long on bashing evil landlords and price-gougers but short on policy plausibility and any conceivable way to pay for it.

Mamdani was an exceptionally good candidate running against an exceptionally bad opponent in a Democratic primary in a exceptionally left-leaning city (Harris carried New York City by 38 points in the 2024 election). That would appear to limit its generalizability to other areas of the country, particularly in general elections. But don’t tell that to culturally radical economic populists—they are ecstatic. From an NBC News article by Ben Kamisar:

Maya Rupert, a Democratic strategist who managed the 2021 mayoral campaign of Democrat Maya Wiley, told NBC News that Mamdani’s “decisive victory” is a signal to the left that its candidates can run unapologetically authentic campaigns that take tough issues head-on with progressive solutions.

“These issues aren’t unpopular; we just need a way to communicate them across geography, across a multiracial coalition, across partisan divides. He was able to do that, and more than that, show other people across the country how it can be done,” she said.

“We’ve heard this so much since the election: Democrats have gone too far afield, the vilification of talking about social justice, talking about racial justice, that you can’t do that stuff and also win. You can, and if it’s where your politics are, you can’t do it any other way, I really believe that. So I hope there are more people that are going to take this moment and decide to run like this because it really does seem to be our path forward,” she said.

This is lamentably, if predictably, dumb. It certainly makes sense that in our current populist era, Democrats need to be responsive to that populist mood. But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populism by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged, especially by its cultural radicalism. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats like Rupert, Mamdani and the party’s legions of inclusive populists who don’t want to make hard choices.

In particular, it’s preposterous that economic populism, by itself, can solve Democrats’ cultural radicalism problem. In a post-election YouGov survey of working-class (non-college) voters for the Progressive Policy Institute, 68 percent of these voters said Democrats have moved too far left, compared to just 47 percent who thought Republicans have moved too far right. It’s a fair surmise that working-class sentiment about the Democrats’ leftism is heavily driven by the party’s embrace of cultural leftist positions across a wide range of issues (immigration, crime, race, gender, etc.) given how unpopular these positions are among those voters.

And in a widely-noted finding from a post-election survey by the Blueprint strategy group, the third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”. And among swing voters, this concern about cultural focus was the most powerful reason.

In the same poll, overwhelming majorities (67 to 77 percent) of swing voters who chose Trump thought the following characterizations of Democrats were extremely or very accurate: not tough enough on the border crisis; support immigrants more than American citizens; want to take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants; want to promote transgender ideology; don’t care about securing the border; have extreme ideas about immigration; aren’t doing enough to address crime; and are too focused on identity politics.

It’s really is magical thinking to believe that simply changing the subject to economics will evaporate these cultural liabilities. Culture matters—a lot—and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters, especially outside of deep blue areas like New York City, assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.

Instead, for working-class voters in most areas of the country to seriously consider their economic pitch, Democrats need to convince them that they are not looked down on, that their concerns are taken seriously, and that their views on culturally-freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. That’s the threshold test for many of the working-class voters Democrats need to reach and Democrats have flunked it over and over.

That’s why changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work outside of special cases like New York City—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook they detest. Convincing voters of the latter is much harder and more uncomfortable for Democrats. But it has to be done, whether inclusive populists like it or not.

It should also be noted that economic populism in whatever form has little to do with making Democratic governance of states and, especially, cities any better. Democratic governance is not, to say the least, synonymous with public order, low crime, and effective and efficient administration of public services. Quite the contrary. Progressive domination of deep blue cities instead has become synonymous with poor governance across the board. Josh Barro:

I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them…Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system…even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it…The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets…[S]chools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything—and it’s really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels. And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population—we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy.

To anyone who thinks a Mamdani administration is going to solve the problems enumerated by Barro: I’ve got a bridge to sell you (and it’s conveniently located in New York City!)

Finally, as should be screamingly obvious to anyone who has lived this country for the last ten years, economic populism is inadequate as populism. We are certainly in a populist era and, as noted, it makes sense to respond to that mood. But it does not necessarily follow that Democrats can effectively speak to that mood simply by bashing the rich (“the billionaire class”), insisting they pay their fair share, and advocating for programs aimed at middle- and working-class voters, rather than corporate priorities. Many voters, including swing voters, are certainly sympathetic to such a pitch. But what this approach leaves out is that the populist sentiments of voters go much deeper than that.

To put it bluntly, voters, particularly working-class voters, harbor deep resentment toward elites who they feel are telling them how to live their lives, even what to think and say, and incidentally are living a great deal more comfortably than they are. This is not the rich as conventionally defined by economic populism but rather the professionals-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power. By and large, these are Democrats in Democratic-dominated institutions. Looked at in this context, truly populist Democrats might want to say, with Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is a bitter pill for most Democrats to swallow. In today’s America, they are the Establishment even if in their imaginations they are sticking it to the Man and fighting nobly for social justice. Think of Michael Lange’s professionals-dominated “Commie Corridor” in Western Queens and North Brooklyn, stretching from Astoria to Sunset Park, where Mamdani ran up his biggest margins. The failure to understand that they themselves are central targets of populist anger leads inclusive populists to overestimate the efficacy of economic populism and interpret populism on the right as driven solely by racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. That’s more comfortable than realizing millions of populist voters hate you. But they do.

Coming to terms with this reality—while unpleasant—would help Democrats win outside of New York City and similar areas. And I say to inclusive populists: let me know when you elect, say, a Democratic Senator from Ohio with these politics. Then I’ll take you more seriously.

The following op-ed by James Carville and Stanley B. Greenberg, co-founders of Democratic pollster Democracy Corps and co-authors of “It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!,” is cross posted from The Washington Post:

As an inveterate defender of the value of public opinion research, I sprang into action at New York when critics mocked pollsters for getting the NYC Democratic mayoral primary wrong:

One of the reasons Zohran Mamdani’s smashing victory yesterday created such a sensation is that public polls (overall) did a poor job of predicting the size and shape of both his and Andrew Cuomo’s coalitions in the Democratic mayoral primary. An average of these polls prepared by Race to the WH showed Cuomo with 36.4 percent of first-choice ballots and Mamdani with 28.6 percent. While nearly all of these polls showed Cuomo being pushed into a ranked-choice battle with Mamdani, and a few (notably the final survey from Emerson College) showed the democratic socialist prevailing in the final calculation, only one public survey, from Public Policy Polling, predicted a first-choice Mamdani plurality. No one provided evidence of a Mamdani plurality so large that his nomination was certain without waiting for the final ranked-choice numbers.

The polling miss will be a source of great joy among those who think polling plays too great a role in contemporary politics — or that would like to get rid of polling altogether. The idea that we should rely on hunches, spin, prejudice, and tiny-sample reporting to get a handle on public opinion rather than trying to measure it objectively strikes me as, to use a technical term, willfully stupid. But partly to rebut polling nihilists, and to promote a better understanding of what polls can and cannot be expected to do, it’s worth a look at why they were wrong in New York. Here, a few reasons:

Polls are snapshots of fast-moving races

This explanation may seem too obvious to require explanation, but highly dynamic multicandidate contests often take shape late in a cycle, when ads and get-out-the-vote efforts have reached their maximum impact in both persuading and mobilizing voters. Polls often can’t capture such trends, which is why we often mystify them with terms like momentum. Only a few pollsters (e.g., Marist, Data for Progress, and Emerson) did multiple surveys, making apples-to-apples comparisons possible. There was clearly a Mamdani trend underway, but its size and durability was hard to nail down.

Primary polling is always shaky

It’s a truism in the political-analysis biz that polling for general elections is typically more accurate than polling for party primaries. The reasons are simple enough: Much of the electoral behavior we see each November is entirely predictable thanks to partisan patterns that recur time and time again and change slowly, if at all. Candidate choice in primaries is far less mechanical and thus is more fluid and harder to capture. So fairly sizable polling errors in primaries are actually normal, not a sign that they are for some reason becoming useless or misleading. You should just add a few grains of salt to any primary poll.

Turnout in a race like New York’s is extremely hard to predict

All polls are based on models that make certain assumptions about the shape of the electorate, which in turn depends on turnout patterns. There’s nothing much more difficult to predict than who will show up for a municipal primary in late June of a non-presidential, non-midterm election year. For all the local and national hype, heavy campaign spending, and genuine excitement associated with the New York mayoral primary, turnout was only about 30 percent. The value of precedents was limited; for one thing, the advent of early-voting opportunities (a relative novelty in New York, where there was no early voting prior to 2019) has added a new variable to turnout and likely helped boost the participation of the younger voters who backed Mamdani so decisively. More fortuitously, the extremely high temperatures that afflicted the city on Tuesday likely depressed turnout among the older voters central to Cuomo’s prospects for victory.

Ranked-choice voting complicates everything

This was only the second mayoral primary conducted under the controversial ranked-choice voting system, which allows voters to express second-through-fifth-place candidate preferences, with a postelection calculation eliminating lower preferences until someone wins a majority. While there has been a lot of talk about how RCV might affect who won or lost, it’s equally important to comprehend that the system has a complex and hard-to-measure impact on campaign strategies (especially the cross endorsements that Mamdani used effectively) and how voters process their own decisions, particularly when everyone is still a novice at utilizing RCV. A lot of late-deciding voters were just figuring out how RCV worked, which very likely affected how they responded to polls.

Maybe 2025 is a bad year for pollsters

It’s almost always a bad idea to generalize from any one contest, or any one election cycle, that “the polls” (another generalization) are good or bad. For one thing, they are always useful in providing analytical data, even if they’re “wrong” about predicting winners or winning margins. Some data is better than no data at all. Beyond that core dogma, which cannot be repeated too often, the reality is that polls are more accurate in some election years than others and vary by the type of race involved. Most famously, the 2016 presidential-general-election polls were pretty accurate at the national level but erred decisively in the battleground states that unexpectedly vaulted Donald Trump to the White House. Similarly, 2024 general-election polls were reasonably accurate, but a slight underestimation of Trump’s vote in the battleground states, which tilted all of them into his column, made them seem off. 2020, by contrast, was a “bad” presidential election for polls, in part because the pandemic introduced a lot of uncertainty into turnout patterns and candidate preference alike.

Polling in non-presidential election years is harder to assess because they are less frequent and consistent, and the only “national” numbers predict the overall House popular vote, which is not that tightly related to the number of seats won or lost. But 2022, to cite the most recent example, was a “good” midterm election for polls. There’s no telling what the scattered election landscape of 2025 will ultimately show (there’s no public polling at all in many off-year races), and pollsters are constantly refining their methodologies as well. So the smart thing to do is to wait a beat, or two, or three before making any sweeping judgments about what the New York City results mean for the relevance of polls.

In his opinion essay, “Democrats Are Getting Richer, and It’s Not Helping” at The New York Times, Thomas B. Edsall writes, “I asked Mike Lux, one of the founders of Democracy Partners, a consulting firm serving progressive clients, if the rising affluence and education levels of white Democrats weaken the party’s claim to be the representative of the working class….Lux replied by email: “Of course it does. The foundational idea that Democrats are the party of working people (and its corollary that Republicans are the party of business and the wealthy) has grown much more tenuous than it once was. Democrats are lost without that core idea.” …Lux argued that conversations with working-class voters show they “want a candidate and a political party that will fight hard for you. Right now, they don’t think that is the Democrats.”…Both parties have some elements of elitism. The Republicans have a hard case to make when Trump’s cabinet is full of billionaires and they let big business write their own rules, and when they are cutting taxes for billionaires and paying for it by cutting Medicaid and V.A. benefits and food for hungry children…But, yes, the Democratic Party has some elements of elitism. To survive, we need to re-emphasize our working-class identity and that we are fighting for regular folks. We need to not talk down to folks and not spend so much time hanging out with celebrities.”

“Although this is the second mayoral cycle where the city has used a ranked-choice format—final tabulations are set to be run next week—Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist who has vowed to lower the cost of living in the city, will be the Democratic nominee,” J. Miles Coleman writes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “As of this writing, Mamdani leads the field with 43.5% of the vote, while Cuomo is at just over 36%. The third-place finisher, City Comptroller Brad Lander, took about 11% of the vote. During the closing weeks of the race, Lander and Mamdani ran as, essentially, a ticket: Lander told his supporters to rank Mamdani as their second choice, and vice-versa. So we can reasonably expect Mamdani to receive much of Lander’s voters once ranked-choice tabulations kick in. Cuomo has already conceded the primary…While Mamdani was clearly gaining steam throughout the primary campaign, the outcome is still a surprise. Though Cuomo, to say the least, did not leave office in 2021 under ideal circumstances, his name recognition, track record in Democratic politics, and financial advantage gave his candidacy something of an “inevitability” factor. In some years, that may have played to his advantage. But the Democratic electorate, which seems frustrated with national leadership that it perceives as too risk-averse, did not seem willing to simply stick with the devil they knew…But Mamdani didn’t only win with college educated progressives. In Lower Manhattan, Mamdani took most precincts that cover Chinatown. Going back near the “Commie Corridor,” Mamdani got some of his largest margins in the city in the Latino-majority precincts of Bushwick, an area that makes up the heart of New York’s 7th District. During the campaign, one of his visible supporters was Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D, NY-7)—according to calculations by Split Ticket’s Armin Thomas, NY-7 was Mamdani’s best congressional district in the city, giving him 65% yesterday…”

“On a bigger picture note,” Coleman adds, “though Mamdani was behind in several polls heading into Election Day, there were signs he was closing in on Cuomo. The difference—or, lack thereof—between voting methods also offers some support for the idea that late deciders broke to Mamdani. During the early voting period, which took place last week, it was clear that many of the aforementioned pro-Mamdani areas were punching above their weight. So, if Mamdani was racking up a lead with early voters, surely Cuomo would do better with voters who waited until Election Day, or so the conventional wisdom went…So, what’s next in the race? As many of our readers probably know, under New York’s fusion voting system, non-major parties have their own “lines” in the general election, although they can also endorse major-party nominees. In the case of this race, the Working Families Party (WFP), which typically aligns itself with Democratic nominees, endorsed Mamdani last month. Had Mamdani lost the Democratic primary, he could have still appeared in the general election as the WFP candidate…As a bit of a historical aside, Mario Cuomo was similarly denied the Democratic nomination for mayor in 1977 and ran in the general election as the Liberal Party’s candidate, although he still lost to then-Rep. Ed Koch (D). While the younger Cuomo could theoretically continue to campaign under the Fight and Deliver banner, the apparently decisive margin that he lost the Democratic primary by may give him some pause (while Cuomo conceded the Democratic nomination last night, he did not rule out staying in the race)…Aside from Mamdani, and possibly Cuomo, the general election will, to a degree, be a rematch of 2021. Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, who was elected four years ago, exited the Democratic primary to run as an independent—although, in part because of a litany of scandals, his approval ratings are generally low. Curtis Sliwa, founder of the anti-crime Guardian Angels group, was the GOP’s 2021 nominee and was unopposed for the nomination this year. There may still be some twists and turns in the general election if the anti-Mamdani forces are able to coalesce, although their options for doing so are not great right now…For now, Mamdani’s apparent victory could represent a watershed election in New York’s political history. At a national level, while Democrats nominated center-left candidates earlier this month for the key gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia, Mamdani’s win this week gives Democrats a much different and much more left-wing candidate than they are fielding in those other significant 2025 races.”

At Daily Kos, slipperyone writes: “Last weekend, the Atlanta Journal ran a report on the possible effects of Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” on rural healthcare in Georgia, and the results weren’t pretty. According to a study by the American Hospital Association, Medicaid cuts in the bill could result in a reduction in funding of $50.4 billion nationally and $540 million in Georgia over the next 10 years. Another study from the University of North Carolina listed hundreds of hospitals nationwide, including four in Georgia, at risk of closing down services or shutting down completely. One of the Georgia hospitals mentioned in the report was in Fannin County, which voted 83% for Trump last year. Another was in Irwin County, which voted 77% for Trump in 2024. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 310,000 Georgians would lose all insurance if the bill passes…The bulk of those losing insurance are lower-income individuals, who are disproportionately located in rural counties with small total populations. Georgia has 159 counties, many with total populations under 20,000. Without paying patients, the hospitals in these counties can easily become distressed. Further, doctors won’t practice in areas where they can’t make a living, leading to severe physician shortages as well.”

At New York, I wrote a post about Andrew Cuomo and the sort of faux-centrism I believe he represents–the week before the former governor went down to a shocking defeat in the New York Democratic mayoral primary. Maybe I was on to something….

There’s something very familiar to me in the air right now as some Democrats unhappy with the alleged leftist direction of their party aggressively brand themselves as “centrist.” I spent quite a few years, you see, associated directly or indirectly with 20th and early 21st-century Democratic centrism, eventually serving as policy director for the famous Clinton-adjacent Democratic Leadership Council. That organization finally closed its doors in 2011, mostly because its principal goal of making it possible for a Democrat to be elected president had been redundantly accomplished.

The DLC and the politicians associated with it regularly oscillated between two distinct impulses: (1) advancing a positive policy agenda rather than simply defending past progressive accomplishments, and (2) disassociating the Democratic Party from some of the more toxic policy and political habits of the left. Bill Clinton embodied both impulses in his 1992 campaign and subsequent presidency: promoting polices from national service to reinventing government to welfare reform that also helped position him as a “different kind of Democrat,” or as we liked to say, a “New Democrat.”

All along there were people in and around the DLC who weren’t all that interested in policy ideas, but were really into “pushing off the left” as some of us called it, or “hippie-punching” as some critics described it. Some of the hippie-punchers unsurprisingly wound up becoming Republicans or Republican-enabling deal-cutters, including longtime DLC chairman and 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman. In any event, the extremism of the 21st-century Republican Party, intensified by the ascendancy of Donald Trump, convinced my kind of DLC Democrats to declare an intraparty truce and work with progressives against the common foe.

Since Trump’s successful comeback in 2024, however, there’s a new era of Democratic intraparty tension clearly underway. And while efforts to bring back some sort of DLC-style institutional presence haven’t born fruit so far, we are definitely seeing the second coming of a breed of centrist Democratic politician who is as interested in “pushing off the left,” almost to the exclusion of any other purpose, as anyone in Clinton’s orbit. Indeed, two of today’s prime examples, Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emanuel, made their bones as Clinton administration figures (the former as HUD secretary and the latter as a key White House staffer). As Ben Mathis-Lilley argues compellingly at Slate, both men embody what he calls centrist “identity politics,” based on positioning and intraparty conflict more than anything positive or tangible:

“[T]here is the tendency of well-to-do Democrats who work in law, finance, management, and the media to become captivated by a certain kind of pugnacious, business-friendly centrist—examples include Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz, and Rahm Emanuel. The Bloombergs and Emanuels win this audience—which includes numerous high-level donors and pundits—by taking shots at the left and extolling their own contrasting commitment to pragmatism and realism. Crucially, their hold on their elite base persists even if, in practice, they turn out to be inept candidates or incompetent managers with few practicable ideas. …

“And no one coasts on reputation for pugnacious realism, in U.S. politics, like Mario Cuomo’s son. Yes, he was forced into resigning in 2021 because a large number of women (including several who worked for him) said he had harassed or groped them; one of those gross interactions even happened on camera. … But let’s not forget that at that time, he was also being exposed for having lied repeatedly about COVID deaths in New York nursing homes and other aspects of his pandemic response. … Extensive reporting by New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister depicted a Cuomo administration that had almost no interest at all in what the actual consequences of its own policies would be, operating entirely as a vehicle for Cuomo’s spotlight craving and feuds with other political figures.”

Cuomo’s “not a lefty” political identity has reached its apotheosis in his current campaign for mayor of New York, in which he has managed to get himself into a virtual two-way race against a young Muslim democratic socialist who has been outspokenly hostile toward Israel’s war in Gaza. “I’m not Zohran Mamdani” appears to be Cuomo’s main message, aside from the personal “toughness” that is supposed to make him an effective battler against the Trump administration.

This last characteristic of latter-day belligerent centrists is key. There are certainly plenty of Democratic politicians who are decidedly not “of the left” — say, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, or for that matter, Joe Biden. But all of these centrist Democrats have more than a passing interest in policies as opposed to positioning, and also are committed to intraparty civility.

Cuomo and Emanuel, on the other hand, enjoy long-standing reputations for being — to use a technical term — assholes. Cuomo in particular has inspired loathing among a wide swath of associates and observers, regardless of party or ideology. In a Democratic Party longing desperately for someone to fight back against the terrifying second Trump administration, mere pugnacity can be advertised as a real asset.

Unfortunately, in the long run, brains matter as much as spine in politics. To effectively challenge the Trump administration, centrist Democrats need a fresh policy agenda and a reputation of competence, not just a willingness to fight. And within the Democratic Party, new ideas and a sense of camaraderie will do more for centrists than calling progressives names. Perhaps the most encouraging sign on the center-left is the emergence of the so-called “abundance agenda,” which combines some specific policy goals for Democrats with an acute but not unsympathetic analysis of how the left has managed to frustrate the ability of government to get things done. It’s interesting that one of the authors who has helped stimulate this debate, Marc Dunkelman (author of Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back), was once communications director for the DLC.

In the ongoing emergency of the Trump era, there’s nothing wrong with a robust intra–Democratic Party debate, even if that means an occasional sharp elbow. But those promoting a sort of centrist identity politics of conflict without substance would be well-advised to work harder to identify with the common values and goals that unite Democrats across the spectrum, and to make successful governance rather than ideological positioning the gold standard.

The following article stub of “The Secret to Reindustrializing America Is Not Tax Cuts and Tariffs. It’s Regulated Competition” by Phillip Longman is cross-posted from The Washington Monthly:

Guess who is coming for your holidays. If your first answer is Trump and his Republican minions, congratulations, you are paying attention. They just don’t think you are working hard enough. CNN reports that Trump said last Thursday, “”Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Juneteenth, a newly designated federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged during a Thursday briefing with reporters that it was a federal holiday and thanked reporters for showing up, but declined to answer whether Trump was doing anything to mark it.” For those who like insult to  intelligence added to their injuries, Trump added, “The workers don’t want it either!” Trump said of federal holidays in his post. “Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Never mind that workers in other industrialized economies have more paid holidays.  Trump and the Republicans want you to have less time to be with your families and to work more for less money. It will be good for you. It’s a MAGA thing.

From the Executive Summary of the annual study,  “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2025” at the AFL-CIO webpage: “…too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death as chemical plant explosions, major fires, construction collapses, infectious disease outbreaks, workplace assaults, toxic chemical exposures and other preventable tragedies continue to permeate the workplace. Workplace hazards kill approximately 140,000 workers each year—including 5,283 from traumatic injuries and an estimated 135,000 from occupational diseases in 2023. That is 385 workers each day—and many worker protections are under threat. Job injury and illness numbers continue to be severe undercounts of the real problem.” Further, “Big corporations, many conservatives and billionaires have launched an aggressive assault on workers’ lives and their livelihoods by repealing job safety and health regulations, promoting deregulatory initiatives, blocking funding and pulling back resources for job safety agencies, firing federal staff doing critical work to protect worker health and safety, and requiring additional burdens in order to issue protections at all. They aim to dissolve the protection structures and shift the responsibility for providing safe jobs from employers to individual workers, and to undermine the core duties and capacity of workplace safety agencies, and more recently disregard and discard the government’s responsibility to protect workers altogether…President Trump’s first 100 days of his second administration have not only attacked Biden administration progress, but confirmed his anti-worker, pro-business philosophy. 1 Since taking office at the end of January 2025, he has issued dozens of executive orders to roll back or review existing regulations, including an order that requires that for any new regulatory protection issued, an agency must remove 10 safeguards from the books.”

In “Democrats Must Become the Party of the Working Class—Or Else: It’s true that the party isn’t dead… yet. But if it does not seriously reflect on its disastrous 2024 performance—and all that led up to it—the future is beyond bleak,” James Zogby writes at Common Dreams: “The lesson that Democrats need to learn is that “the left” is not primarily defined by where you stand on social issues. Instead, unlike Republicans, Democrats must define themselves as the party that understands the government’s positive role in creating an economy and programs that create jobs and opportunities for working and middle class families—Black, Asian, Latino, and White ethnics. When they don’t embrace these concerns, they cede this ground to Republicans, who despite their horribly regressive policies now claim to represent the working class while charging that Democrats only represent elites…This doesn’t mean that Democrats should ever abandon their commitment to the range of social and cultural issues party leaders have long embraced as critical for our diverse democratic society…they are the party that believes that government has a role to play in lifting up those who need a helping hand, and providing for the working classes and middle classes of all ethnic and racial communities.”

At Talking Points Memo, editor Josh Marshall strikes a cautionary note for evaluating Administration reports on military actions and their consequences. Sure, responsible reporters should quote the President’s view. But they should also look at analysis by independent experts on national defense…”A few points on the effect rather than the wisdom or possible fall-out of these attacks…The President has repeatedly said the Fordow nuclear facility was “obliterated”. Clearly that is a party slogan rather than any kind of factual analysis. We’re now getting the first after-action reports out of the Pentagon and Israel which speak of the Fordow facility appearing to have sustained “severe damage” but not being destroyed. One thing that struck me last night was the US assessment that helped prompt this attack which, reportedly, was that the entirety of the Israeli assault had pushed Iran’s program back roughly six months. That’s pretty paltry in terms of any great change in the strategic outlook. I note that because we should wait a significant period of time before we conclude – if the evidence ever merits it – that the US has somehow put the Iranians back to square one in their ability to build nuclear warheads…The President has repeatedly said the Fordow nuclear facility was “obliterated”. Clearly that is a party slogan rather than any kind of factual analysis. We’re now getting the first after-action reports out of the Pentagon and Israel which speak of the Fordow facility appearing to have sustained “severe damage” but not being destroyed. One thing that struck me last night was the US assessment that helped prompt this attack which, reportedly, was that the entirety of the Israeli assault had pushed Iran’s program back roughly six months. That’s pretty paltry in terms of any great change in the strategic outlook. I note that because we should wait a significant period of time before we conclude – if the evidence ever merits it – that the US has somehow put the Iranians back to square one in their ability to build nuclear warheads.” Read more here.