Some insights shared by Arlie Russell Hochschild in her article, “My Journey Deep in the Heart of Trump Country,” reporting from Kentucky’s Pike County at The New York Times:

“In the 2024 election, 81 percent of Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District — the whitest and third poorest in the nation — voted with Mr. Ford for Donald Trump. Once full of New Deal Democrats, the region had suffered losses that its people felt modern Democrats didn’t care about or address. During World War I and II, the “black gold” dug out of their mountains fed industrial America. Then the coal mines closed, and the drug crisis crept in.

…What do things feel like, I wondered, to the people in Kentucky’s Fifth District? Are we approaching a tipping point when they might start to question Mr. Trump — either because of his threats to democracy, or because his economic policies will make their lives tougher? After all, experts predict Mr. Trump’s tariffs will raise prices, and his budget cuts will hit some of his strongest supporters the hardest. Meals on Wheels: cuts. Heating cost assistance: cuts. Black lung screening: cuts. One nearby office handling Social Security has closed. Even the Department of Veterans Affairs may have to pull back on the services it offers.

…These are services people need. More than 40 percent of people in the Fifth District rely on Medicaid for their medical care, including addiction treatment. Now, Mr. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is poised to cut benefits, which could lead to layoffs in the largest employer in eastern Kentucky, the Pikeville Medical Center. Meanwhile, many children in the district qualify for food stamps, and the administration’s chain saw is coming for those, too.

…James Browning, the drug counselor, had a different take on the Appalachian pain threshold: “A lot of people around here are living on the edge. If we start to see Trump policies lead to price hikes and benefit cuts — especially Medicaid and Social Security and food stamps — some people will begin to say, ‘Wait a minute. I didn’t vote for this.’”

…But now after months of Mr. Trump’s fevered talk of migrants “poisoning the blood” of America, the casual association of all migrants with “evil” gang members dispatched by Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, Mr. Ford’s views seemed to have hardened. Noncitizens, he told me, have no right to due process. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was guilty, Mr. Ford told me, of being a member of the vicious MS-13 gang — this, he concluded from the Homeland Security website — and he thought Mr. Abrego Garcia was rightly deported.

…Democrats are deeply unpopular. According to a March poll, only 27 percent of registered voters have a positive view of the Democratic Party, the lowest level since NBC News began asking the question in 1990, and my conversations with voters in the Fifth District distilled just how difficult it will be for the party to break through when Mr. Trump has so powerfully captured the bitterness and pain that has taken root in the hills of Appalachia. The last Democratic state senator from eastern Kentucky just registered as a Republican.

…Rob Musick explained: “Around here, Democrats come off as against this and against that — and not for anything. They need a big positive alternative vision. And they need to understand that in rural areas like this, the deeper problem is that we’re socially hollowed out. That happy buzz of community life? That’s not here. There are fewer meetings of the Masons, the Rotary Club, the Red Hatters. Our church benches are empty. In the mountains, there’s no safe place against drugs. One elderly woman told me, ‘I don’t open my door anymore.’ I’ve heard teens say, ‘There’s nothing to do.’ A lot of kids are alone in their rooms online with Dungeons and Dragons. I think MAGA plays to a social desert.”

…“I think Democrats need to get behind this kind of effort and initiate a campaign of grand civic re-engagement,” Mr. Musick said. Federal funds could support the best local initiatives, he added, and help start ecology, drama and music clubs — “good local things that lack funding.”

…For now, Mr. Trump’s support isn’t fading. So Democrats face a double task. America needs a firm hand on the wheel of democracy — defending the free press, universities, the judiciary. At the same time, Democrats need to begin taking steps to regain the basic trust of voters who once supported them.

That starts with confronting, up close and personal, the circumstances that have led red America into the angry fires of a stolen pride narrative: visit, listen, campaign everywhere, propose policies that could elevate local politicians whose stories resonate nationally and begin to restore the civic fabric of life in towns like Coal Run Village and Pikeville.

…In the meantime, James Browning, the addiction counselor, offered this important warning. “If people in Pike County or elsewhere get socked with higher prices, there might come a tipping point. But what happens then would hinge on how Democrats handle it, what better ideas they have to offer, their tone of voice. If the left starts scolding, ‘You Trump supporters brought this on yourselves,’ or ‘We told you so,’ people around here will get more pissed at the snarky left than they are at the hurtful right — and Trump will march on.”

This terrifying week in California had a high point after all, and I wrote about it at New York:

In the second Trump administration, Democrats have had trouble finding a focal point for their opposition to the 47th president’s riotous agenda. It’s significant that the most galvanizing moments for congressional Democrats have been the scattered and uncoordinated signage they displayed during Trump’s address to Congress in March and a 26-hour filibuster by Senator Cory Booker in April. Neither provided much in the way of clear and sustainable leadership. Grassroots protest activities have ramped up significantly since January as Team Trump began violating constitutional norms and threatening key public services almost hourly; the “Hands Off” protests in April were impressive. But the net effect is reflected in the contrast between next weekend’s massive show of military force in Washington to celebrate Trump’s birthday and the diffuse “No Kings” events around the country aiming to counteract it. The opposition needs a singular voice among the many voices of protest.

Trump’s assault on Los Angeles and California may have provided such a focal point in the unlikely figure of Gavin Newsom. Longtime observers of the two-term governor, former San Francisco mayor, and veteran chaser of spotlights know him to be a man who sees a future president of the United States in his bathroom mirror each morning. But despite his obvious brains and policy chops, he’s never quite overcome his reputation as someone whose ambition isn’t matched by the political skills needed to achieve them, a problem displayed most graphically when he provoked a 2021 recall election by violating his own pandemic rules to attend a party for a lobbyist at one of the most exclusive restaurants in the world.

Most recently, California’s budget problems have forced Newsom to reverse his state’s long march toward expansion of health care and other progressive initiatives. A month ago, he looked a lot like a former political star beginning to fade from sight.

All that was changed by the Trump administration’s decision to go nuclear on California with respect to a broad range of policy disputes. Even as the president threatened to eliminate all federal assistance to the state to punish it for its alleged “wokeness” and incompetence, ICE launched widespread raids in and near the heavily Latino city of Los Angeles, and then Trump poured gasoline on small protest fires by federalizing National Guard units and deploying U.S. Marines. For all the world, it looked like the federal government was declaring war on the Golden State and its governor, whom it threatened to arrest and jail.

Now Newsom is rising to the occasion, delivering the best opposition speech of Trump’s second term. In a Tuesday evening address, Newsom said that the president sending the military to Los Angeles is just the first step in a broader move toward authoritarianism.

“California may be first, but it clearly won’t end here,” Newsom said. “Other states are next. Democracy is next … the moment we’ve feared has arrived,” he added.

Newsom’s speech, carefully scripted and telepromptered (a practice he normally disdains) and broadcast nationally through multiple social-media outlets, was notable for its simple and calmly expressed indictment of the administration’s conduct in Los Angeles and its defense of the besieged city and state. He made a point of denouncing violence by protesters and accepting the need for immigration enforcement that properly targets dangerous criminals, while accusing the president of deliberately creating an unnecessary crisis in order to inflate his own power. Newsom said:

“We’re seeing unmarked cars, unmarked cars in school parking lots. Kids afraid of attending their own graduation. Trump is pulling a military dragnet all across Los Angeles, well beyond his stated intent to just go after violent and serious criminals. His agents are arresting dishwashers, gardeners, day laborers and seamstresses.

“That’s just weakness, weakness masquerading as strength. Donald Trump’s government isn’t protecting our communities. They are traumatizing our communities. And that seems to be the entire point.”

Then the governor pivoted to the national implications:

“If some of us can be snatched off the streets without a warrant, based only on suspicion or skin color, then none of us are safe. Authoritarian regimes begin by targeting people who are least able to defend themselves. But they do not stop there.

“Trump and his loyalists, they thrive on division because it allows them to take more power and exert even more control. …

“[T]his isn’t just about protests here in Los Angeles. When Donald Trump sought blanket authority to commandeer the National Guard. he made that order apply to every state in this nation.

“This is about all of us. This is about you.”

Newsom provided a subtle but unmistakable contrast with those who have responded to Trump’s provocations and power grabs by seeking compromises, making concessions, or changing the subject, as CNN observed:

“Newsom, people familiar with his thinking say, wants California to hold the line after some universities and law firms facing White House pressure reached concession deals with the administration.

“’What Donald Trump wants most is your fealty. Your silence. To be complicit in this moment,’ Newsom said in remarks released Tuesday evening. ‘Do not give into him.’”

It’s possible Trump’s war on California won’t be front of mind in a week or a month, but it’s more likely he and his allies will continue to demonize a state that Trump mocks for its struggles with wildfires and a metropolis that DHS secretary Kristi Noem calls “a city of criminals.” Every day this continues, with or without the deployment of troops or more terror tactics from ICE, Trump makes the California governor nationally relevant and potentially presidential. And nobody has spent more time preparing for this moment than Gavin Newsom.

From “‘Weak’ and ‘Woke’: Dems Seek to Improve Standing With Working Class Voters” by David M. Drucker at Dispatch: “Trump topped Harris by just 1.5 percentage points nationwide, failing to crack 50 percent of the vote. But underneath the hood, the demographic shifts away from the Democrats, and to the GOP, were startling…“Post-election polling by Navigator Research on the Democratic brand found that 58 percent of Americans believe the party ‘prioritizes other groups of people that don’t include me.’” Our Democratic brand was also seen as too elite and coastal. This election ran a freight train through the idea that demographics alone will determine our political destiny,” [former New Orleans Mayor Mitch] Landrieu wrote. “Population shifts could exacerbate our electoral disadvantages.”…The president lured them in part with populist proposals like eliminating income taxes on tips and overtime pay, but also by validating their views on cultural issues, such as opposing transgender girls’ participation in female sports.”

At The Nation, Chris Lehmann’s article, “The Democrats’ Class Trip to Nowhere: A sparsely attended forum about the working class held at a $40 million think tank—yep, sounds about right” described the CAP forum as little differently: “The fact that the enormously pressing question of Democrats’ loss of support and credibility among workers drew but a half-hearted trickle of knowledge workers was also telling. All three stories of the CAP meeting space had been filled a few months ago with people keen to see billionaire Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker auditioning man-of-the-people talking points ahead of an expected 2028 presidential run. Here, by contrast, a clutch of perhaps 30 attendees watched a prerecorded introduction from Action Fund chair Neera Tanden, who had hosted Pritzker but had a scheduling conflict for this discussion. As it happened, the gathering was scheduled against a far better attended gathering that bore vivid testimony to the challenges facing the revival of Democrats’ fortunes among working-class supporters: The WelcomeFest, the self-advertised “largest public gathering of centrist Democrats,” had convened just a few blocks away from CAP headquarters; any wonkish boulevardier monitoring both events would have no doubt about where the party’s organizing energy and resources abided.”

“Nearly one in five American workers earns less than $17 an hour, the latest minimum wage increase proposed in Congress, but raising the minimum wage has been shown to improve wages for up to a third of all American workers,” Gara Lamarche and Saru Jayaraman note in “Needed: A People’s Project 2029” at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. “And nearly half (45 percent) of American workers earn less than $25 an hour, which is less than the minimum needed to cover the cost of living if you have just one child even if you’re living in the least expensive county in the United States, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. But in the case of winning elections, it’s not just that raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do—it’s also popular. For instance, in the 2020 election, Donald Trump won the state of Florida easily, but a measure to increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 also won—and by a significantly wider margin. It’s a red flag when progressive policies are more popular than progressive and center-left candidates. It’s a sign that those candidates aren’t seen as championing those issues…There’s ample evidence that Republicans and the right realize this, too. Arguably that’s why Donald Trump pledged during the campaign to end taxes on tips—even though 60 percent of tipped workers don’t make enough money to pay taxes. And that’s why Trump and the GOP have that proposal in their “big, beautiful” budget bill that will slash taxes for the rich while gutting Medicaid, the latter of which will hurt far more low-wage workers than ending taxes on tips will help. And recently, social media lit up with claims that Trump was raising the minimum wage to $25 an hour—unfounded, but nevertheless enthusiastically spread by the MAGA universe…the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour hasn’t gone up in 16 years.”

An excerpt from “100 days, 100 ways Trump Has Hurt Workers” by “Celine McNicholas, Samantha Sanders, Josh Bivens, Margaret Poydock, and Daniel Costa at the Economic Policy Institute: “During the first 100 days of his administration, Trump has taken actions that reduce workers’ wages and deteriorate their labor conditions. Most directly, Trump reduced the minimum wage for federal contractors, which could cost these lower-wage workers anywhere from 25% to 60% in pay cuts. He also repealed an order directing agencies to prioritize “high road” employers—i.e., employers that agree to pay workers the prevailing wage and provide benefits like paid leave and health insurance—in awarding federal contracts. Trump also eliminated federal incentives for programs that provide workers on federal projects with training opportunities for higher-wage skilled trade occupations…Further, Trump and DOGE have attacked critical worker protection agencies including those responsible for worker health and safety standards. Specifically, Trump fired nearly two-thirds of the staff (roughly 870 employees) at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), an agency created to ensure safe and healthy working conditions. This reduction essentially eliminated divisions of the agency focused on the health and safety of miners, firefighters, and health care workers. Trump also stalled the implementation of a rule that would protect miners from silica exposure, leaving miners less safe and at greater risk for black lung disease. And Trump fired 90% of the staff at an office in the Department of Labor (DOL) who ensure that federal contractors abide by anti-discrimination laws and canceled grants for programs to combat forced and child labor around the world, which also protect jobs and workers in the U.S. by deterring unfair competition from imports produced with forced labor.”

The following article, “ICE: Crossing State Lines to Incite Riots. The only disorder the National Guard will find comes from the deporters” by Editor-at-Large Harold Meyerson, is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

Let’s be clear about who, exactly, the agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been arresting in and around Los Angeles. On Friday, they raided downtown L.A.’s fashion district, where seamstresses and retail clerks, some of them undocumented immigrants, are clustered. On Saturday, they made arrests outside a Home Depot in Paramount, a working-class L.A. suburb where day laborers, some of them undocumented immigrants, assemble daily to get work on small-scale construction projects.

The microscopically thin pretext behind the Trump administration’s deportation policies is that they’re targeting criminals and gang members. The problem is, groups of seamstresses and construction workers are not commonly construed as gangs. That’s why, despite having made hundreds of arrests, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security can only claim, without evidence, that five detainees are gang members. For now, what they have is a whole mess of seamstresses and odd-job construction workers in their lockups.

When ICE agents swarmed the downtown fashion district on Friday, there was no discernible protest. The same was true at a West L.A. Home Depot that received three ICE trucks on Saturday, something that has gotten no attention locally or nationally, but which my colleague David Dayen learned about from talking to laborers there. (The laborers scattered and the trucks left without incident.) But when ICE swarmed the Home Depot in Paramount on Saturday, there was a backlash.

Paramount is one of the almost entirely Latino small cities abutting the Long Beach Freeway, which connects the port to East Los Angeles. A number of those cities consist almost wholly of immigrants, some naturalized, some documented, some not. Politically, these cities tend to elect moderate Democrats to the legislature and small-business owners to their local governments. As someone who chaired the Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America during the last decades of the previous century, I can attest that we had few if any members from the Long Beach Freeway towns, and I suspect that those towns still don’t harbor a significant number of radicals.

At least during the first hours of Saturday’s protest, I think it’s highly likely that most of the protesters were simply residents who didn’t want to see their family members, friends, and neighbors seized and deported. The Los Angeles Times reported that passing motorists honked in support of the protests. To them, the guys who’d regularly turned out for day-labor work represented a significant share of their community. (On Sunday, the ranks of protesters swelled around L.A.’s Civic Center to include clergy, elected officials, and union activists. Thousands spilled along downtown streets and onto the 101 Freeway by Sunday afternoon.)

If you listen to Trump and his governmental and media minions, you’d think these protesters were rioters. Trump actually said they were rioters who were looting. Neither ICE nor any of the police agencies on the spot have reported a single instance of looting, however, and if this was a riot, it sure didn’t look like one. I led the coverage and did extensive on-the-ground reporting, for both L.A. Weekly and The New Republic, of the huge 1992 L.A. riots in the wake of the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King. Those riots continued for days, with or without the police. This, by contrast, is purely a protest of the presence of federal agents.

At Gov. Pete Wilson’s request, the National Guard was activated in 1992 to patrol riot-torn areas. But this time around, where will the National Guard—called in not by the governor but by the president—be activated to patrol? The resistance that’s being mounted only comes into existence when and where ICE pops up to make its catchall sweeps, in communities that will turn out to protest due to their relationships with those arrested. In other words, unlike virtually any previous riot, either real or imagined, in American history, the feds can turn them on and off at will, simply through their actions.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT TRUMP and his grand inquisitor, Stephen Miller, have worked assiduously to engineer. Their politics—in Miller’s case, his raison d’être—is based on demonizing the other. In this case, the object of Miller’s demonization are those immigrants he presumes to be unpopular, and, he hopes, the Democrats who defend them, or at least defend their right to a day in court. Trump and company have long argued that they’re responding to an invasion of some sort. To that end, they’ve highlighted the actual convicted felons or gang members they’re rounding up. When the invaders turn out to be seamstresses and roofers, they’ve felt an even greater need to fabricate an emergency. Deploying the National Guard helps to give the appearance of an emergency, perhaps sufficient to eclipse the absence of an actual emergency against which the Guard is supposed to defend.

In Los Angeles and California, they’ve certainly targeted terrains where there’s sure to be a backlash, including among the Democratic pols they so wish to demonize. Latino immigrants, both documented and not, have become an integral part of the L.A. economy and community over the past nearly 40 years; in some ways, the center, the established order. That’s why both the LAPD and Los Angeles County sheriffs have made clear they will do nothing to help the feds make immigration arrests. On Saturday, the LAPD released a statement that began, “Today, demonstrations across the City of Los Angeles remained peaceful, and we commend all those who exercised their First Amendment rights responsibly.” The cops would never have made that statement if they’d believed it ran afoul of L.A. public opinion. (Protesters are another matter, and the situation on the 101 Freeway is likely to result in substantial arrests.)

The LAPD’s Special Order 40, which forbids L.A. cops from cooperating with ICE and its ilk, was promulgated in 1979, for the simple reason that if contacting the cops brought with it the prospect of deportation, a lot of immigrants in need of assistance wouldn’t reach out, and a lot of crimes would go unreported. The LAPD chief under whom that order was promulgated, by the way, was the famously right-wing Daryl Gates, who led a brutal and racist department, but who nonetheless realized that crime suppression required no cooperation with the forces of deportation.

So it would require federal cops, as Trump and Miller understood, to provoke the confrontations from which they hoped to politically profit. If the predictable community backlash were to take the form of nonviolent civil disobedience as practiced by Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin, that would present them with a higher hurdle to credibly cry “riot!” That level of discipline in protest, of course, is hard to observe if it’s the protesters’ brothers and fathers who are being hauled away.

Even as demonstrators have assembled around the building where those seized for deportation are incarcerated, and their anger has reached the level of the occasional thrown rock, the protest is confined largely to that one area, and that one xenophobic, authoritarian policy. If these “paid troublemakers,” as Trump characterized them on social media, are to be quelled, it shouldn’t require thousands of National Guard troops—much less the Marines, whose deployment Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has considered—to police the roughly two-block area where they’re protesting.

Even when the resistance has come straight out of the King-Rustin playbook, that hasn’t deterred Trump’s cops from accusing the resisters of violence. At Paramount, ICE made 44 arrests of people they accused of being in the U.S. illegally, and one arrest of a citizen for allegedly forcefully obstructing them. In fact, that arrestee stood in front of one of their vehicles as it sought to move forward.

A day earlier in downtown L.A., a man was pushed to the ground by an ICE agent, hitting his head on the concrete pavement and requiring hospitalization. He turned out to be David Huerta, a veteran of SEIU’s storied janitorial locals who has since become the president of SEIU’s California State Council, which represents 750,000 California workers. They decided to arrest Huerta, either because they sought to transfer blame to the one protester whom they had actually injured, or because it’s Trump policy to arrest prominent Democrats (union leaders are close enough) in an attempt to associate them with the forces of disorder. Or both.

WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE. In the decade preceding the Civil War, the residents of Northern states resisted the efforts of the federal government to compel them to help Southern slave owners capture former slaves who’d escaped to the North. In 1850, the Southern-dominated Congress and a pro-Southern President Millard Fillmore enacted the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring not just Northern police officials but all Northern citizens to aid in the seizure of Blacks who’d successfully escaped chattel slavery.

The North actively resisted these efforts. Boston abolitionists formed the Anti-Man-Hunting League, which hid escaped slaves and sought to impede the slave-hunters and the federal troops whom Fillmore deployed to help them out. But the resistance wasn’t confined to the abolitionist minority. According to historian H. Robert Baker, there were whole neighborhoods of Milwaukee, Chicago, and Boston that became “no-go zones for slave catchers,” so great was the level of local resistance. As I wrote in these pages seven years ago, “Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, and Wisconsin all enacted ‘personal liberty laws’ forbidding public officials from cooperating with the slave owners or the federal forces sent to back them up, denying the use of their jails to house the captives, and requiring jury trials to decide if the owners could make off with their abductees.”

In the 1850s, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act violated the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, which gave states the power to enact laws not specifically preempted by federal authority. What Trump and his troopers are engaged in now is the same kind of violent enforcement at complete variance with the local, state, and regional sentiment. The Tenth Amendment, however, doesn’t reserve immigration issues to the states; they clearly fall under the purview of the federal government, as does the president’s right to declare an emergency enabling him to employ troops domestically—a consummation for which Trump and Miller have long devoutly wished. If California Gov. Gavin Newsom is to take them to court, I suspect it will have to be on the grounds that there’s no emergency, or at least no emergency that Trump and his minions aren’t fomenting themselves.

Whether that argument will prevail in the courts is far from certain; my hope is that it prevails in the court of public opinion.

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

It may be starting to dawn on at least some Democrats that their heavy bet on renewable energy and “net-zero” emissions has been a huge political loser.

Early last month, 35 House Democrats voted alongside their Republican colleagues to kill a law in California—a version of which has been adopted by 11 other states—mandating that all new car and truck models sold in the state would have to be “electric or otherwise nonpolluting” by 2035. The Senate later followed suit, with Michigan Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin breaking ranks to join the GOP in ending the mandate.

The Democratic response, at least outside California, was relatively muted. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer’s complaints about ending the EV mandate were mostly grounded in dull, procedural complaints about whether Congress had overstepped its powers. There wasn’t a lot of the screeching we’ve heard in recent years about how, as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it in 2019, the “climate crisis” was “the existential threat of our time.”

What a difference a few years makes. The “Green New Deal,” that much-ballyhooed proposal to essentially restructure the entire economy around renewable energy, is dead and buried. President Donald Trump is deregulating the energy sector, eliminating renewable energy subsidies as fast as he can, promoting fossil fuel production, and withdrawing from international energy agreements. And he’s doing so with little attention from the media or protests from Democrats.

So what gives? Why are Democrats retreating on an issue that was, until very recently, so central to their agenda?

I’ll tell you why: It’s because Americans, in poll after poll, and now election after election, have shown that their views on a rapid renewable energy transition oscillate between indifference and outright hostility.

Cost and reliability is what voters really care about when it comes to energy. Given four choices of their energy policy priorities in a 2024 YouGov climate issues survey, 37 percent of voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them. Another 36 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Meanwhile, just 19 percent thought that the effect of their energy consumption on the climate was most important.

These views are especially pronounced among the working-class (non-college) voters that Democrats are desperate to claw back from Trump. Given the four choices posed, 41 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them and 35 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Together, that’s a whopping 76 percent of the working class prioritizing the cost or reliability of energy over effects on the climate.

In a separate question, voters were most worried, by far, about the effects on energy prices from reductions in fossil fuels and increased use of renewables. And again, these concerns were more intense among working-class voters.

Unsurprisingly, given this pattern, it turns out that voters just don’t care very much about climate change, at least as a political issue. As part of that 2024 YouGov survey, voters were asked to assess their priorities for the government to address in the coming year. Among 18 options, climate change ranked 15th, beating out only global trade, drug addiction, and racial issues.

In fact, voters are deeply reluctant to put up with even minor changes to their energy bills to fight climate change.

When asked if they would be willing to pay $1 more to protect the climate, only 47 percent said yes, with a solid majority of the working class opposed to even paying that much. Raise the price to $20 and just 26 percent (21 percent among the working class) are willing to pony up the extra cash. Support keeps dropping as the price tag gets higher: Only 19 percent of voters said they were willing to spend an extra $40 a month, and a mere 11 percent said they’d be willing to pay another $100.

Consistent with these results, a September 2024 New York Times/Siena poll found that two-thirds of likely voters supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” And similarly, support for increasing fossil fuel production was particularly strong among working-class voters: 72 percent of these voters backed such a policy. Support was even higher among white working-class voters (77 percent).

And remarkably, the poll found support for fossil fuels was also strong among liberal-leaning constituencies: 63 percent of voters under 30 said they wanted more oil and gas production, as did 58 percent of white college graduate voters and college voters overall.

In fact, the Times survey found substantial majority support for more fossil fuel production across every demographic group they measured: among all racial groups, in every region of the country, in cities and suburbs and rural areas, and regardless of education levels.

So what have the Democrats gotten from their fervent embrace of climate catastrophism and renewable energy over the last decade? Not much.

Sure, they did manage to pass the misleadingly-named Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which pumped hundreds of billions of dollars—if not over a trillion—into the renewable energy and electric vehicle industries. But the share of renewables in the country’s primary energy consumption increased only very modestly under Biden, from 10.5 percent to 11.7 percent. And the share of energy consumption from fossil fuels remains over 80 percent, just as it does in the world as a whole.

It’s just very hard to bring that share down quickly while keeping an advanced industrial economy chugging along. That’s why, despite the Biden administration’s professed climate change commitments, energy realities forced it to preside over record levels of oil production, record natural gas production, and record liquid-natural gas exports. (The YouGov survey found that most voters were not aware that this actually happened during the Biden administration but, when informed that it did, there was a strongly favorable reaction.)

Democrats have not yet fully absorbed the implications of these shifts and how the tide has decisively turned against their energy policies. Sure, there is a modest cohort in the party that has bowed to political reality and supports scrapping EV mandates, but the overwhelming proportion of the party remains committed to the unrealistic and unpopular net-zero goals that drive its energy policy agenda. Blue-state governors continue to roll out ambitious renewable energy plans, along with lawsuits and legislation to recover “climate change damages” from fossil fuel companies.

This is madness. As the great Vaclav Smil has observed:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

What is really needed is a program for energy abundance that prizes cost and reliability over maximalist climate change goals. Yet most Democrats still seem blithely unaware of the fundamental lack of support from voters for their current approach. You’d think the massive April 28 blackout of Spain and Portugal’s renewables-dependent electricity grid would encourage them to hit the pause button on those plans before such a disaster hits the United States, which would completely discredit the renewable energy push.

There is, however, a politically sound way for Democrats to fight climate change. And it involves taking a page from the Obama administration, which adopted the “All-of-the-Above” energy strategy, aimed at achieving “a sustainable energy-independent future” through “developing America’s many energy resources, including wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, hydropower, nuclear, oil, clean coal, and natural gas.”

The YouGov survey shows that 71 percent of voters still approve of this approach, strongly favoring the U.S. using a mix of energy sources including oil, coal, natural gas, and renewable energy. Only 29 percent preferred a strategy that looks to phase out fossil fuels completely.

What voters want—and need—is abundant, cheap, reliable energy. So when Democrats advocate for something that seemingly runs counter to that, they will lose elections. No amount of effort to tie every natural disaster to climate change is likely to generate the support needed for what is sure to be a lengthy energy transition.

Climate change is a serious problem, but it won’t be solved overnight. As we move toward a clean energy economy with an all-of-the-above strategy, energy must continue to flow into American homes. That means fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will continue to be an important part of the mix.

Democrats, hopefully, are starting to get the message: that it’s time to cast off the party’s delusions and meet energy realities—and voters—where they are.

The following article, “Polling Conundrums: Activist Government, Sí; Democrats, No!” by Harold Meyerson, is cross-posted from, The American Prospect:

There’s good news for liberal economics today, as well as bad news for Democratic Party economics, and all-around confusion about the public’s take on economics. The good news comes from some polling analysis released today by the Center for American Progress (CAP). The bad news, along with a smidgen of good, comes from a new poll conducted for CNN. The confusion comes when you try to reconcile the two, though I’ll take a stab at it at the end of this On TAP.

The CAP study looked at responses to questions about economic policy from voters both with and without college degrees—from both sides, that is, of the increasingly paramount gap in American politics—and found cross-class support for a number of liberal economic positions. (The surveys they studied included those of both pre- and immediately post-2024-election voters.) Fifty-eight percent of working-class voters and 61 percent of the college-educated believed the decline of unions had hurt American workers; 67 percent of working-class respondents and 58 percent of college grads supported a $17 federal minimum wage; 63 percent of the working class and 64 percent of graduates favored higher taxes on those making at least $400,000 a year; and roughly 75 percent of each group supported expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income Americans.

But this cross-class concurrence didn’t have much effect on the actual voting of these two classes. Fifty-six percent of college grads cast their votes for Kamala Harris, while 56 percent of the non-grads (who greatly outnumbered the grads) voted for Donald Trump. At minimum, this suggests that despite voters having ranked the economy as their number one concern, the economic policies listed above didn’t figure very much in their economic assessments (at least, when compared to the cost of living), or weren’t identified as policies that Democrats favored and Republicans opposed, or, very probably, both.

This weekend’s CNN-sponsored poll highlights the Democrats’ inability to brand themselves as the party with economic policies that benefit the working and middle classes. To be sure, the public is not in a libertarian mindset: Asked whether they believe that “the government is trying to do too many things” or that “government should do more to solve problems,” they opt for more problem solving by a hefty 58 percent to 41 percent margin. So, advantage Democrats? No.

When asked which party better reflects their view on handling the economy, they prefer Republicans over Democrats by a 7 percent margin. That’s down from a 15-point Republican margin in 2022, when prices were soaring, so the Democrats’ disadvantage may still reflect public discontent with prices. Still, when you contrast Americans’ support for activist government with their discontent with the party that’s historically been the party of activist government, you’re almost compelled to reverse a venerable and fundamental rule of American public opinion: As propounded by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril in 1967, it asserts that Americans are philosophically conservative but operationally liberal. For the moment, that seems to have been flipped on its head.

This topsy-turvy moment comes with some caveats, however. First, since Trump took office again, there’s no question that Republicans in general and Trump in emphatic particular have been the activists, while Democrats have scrambled to find ways to respond and counter him. Asked which is the party that can get things done, 36 percent said the Republicans, while just 19 percent said the Democrats. The GOP, of course, has trifecta control of government, while the Democrats lack even a recognized leader—and their last leader, Joe Biden, wasn’t up to the task of promoting even widely popular policies like building new factories, roads, bridges, and broadband.

In a larger sense, though, Democrats have yet to make a compelling story of the economic shifts of the past half-century—the shift of income and wealth to the upper classes and the mega-rich in particular, at the expense of everybody else. Public support for discrete policies that stand little chance of enactment—labor law reform, higher minimum wages, paid family leave—won’t have much effect on voting habits unless there’s a plausible chance for their becoming law, and until they’re fitted within a credible and compelling story of the changes to American life. What stands out about the efforts of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, what makes their talks different from those of most Democrats, isn’t their “radicalism” but rather their ability to place the thousand unnatural shocks that Americans regularly experience within an explanatory narrative about the shift in wealth and power that’s dominated the past 50 years of American life.

For their part, Republicans do have a story, whose implausibility hasn’t meant it’s ineffective. It’s the immigrants’ fault, and that of welfare cheats (never mind that welfare, as such, has dwindled to a trickle). The particulars of a progressive populist story are there for the taking, with the added benefit that the culprits—Wall Streeters and other wielders and champions of financialized capitalism—are already widely and justifiably loathed. But building a progressive populist movement requires Democrats to talk about the role that finance and kindred institutions have played, which most Democrats are still reluctant to do. If they’re going to benefit from the public’s anti-libertarian, anti-oligarch turn, however, they’re going to have to Bernie-fy themselves. That doesn’t mean they have to support Medicare for All, but they do have to go after the corporatization of medicine, the pernicious role of private equity, the pricing practices of pharma, and the way those institutions’ money dominates politics—and then invite the public to draw its own conclusions. If Democrats are ever going to reclaim the advantage that once came to them as the champions of pro-working-class economics, they’re going to have to go big.

One of the more outrageous Trump power grabs yet is occurring without much public attention, so I gave it a shout at New York:

With all the chaos that has pervaded the federal bureaucracy in Trump’s second term, some very basic MAGA “reforms” may have escaped attention. The best known is the reimposition of the so-called Schedule F, an initiative adopted late in the first Trump administration (and promptly revoked by Joe Biden) that reclassified around 50,000 civil service positions into political appointments. But as Don Moynihan explains, that initiative just makes it easier to fire “deep state” bureaucrats who haven’t bent the knee to the new regime. A broader hiring initiative has just been announced by the Office of Personnel Management, which is basically the federal government’s HR agency. Called the Merit Hiring Plan (reflecting the wording of the Trump executive order that mandated it), the initiative has many interlocking provisions aimed at simplifying and, well, politicizing federal hiring practices, partly to kill, bury, exhume, and kill again anything that looks like DEI policies, but also to build a spanking-new federal workforce composed of “patriotic,” hardworking proles.

What leaps right off the page and punches you in the mouth is the initiative’s new rules for federal job applications. All applicants for jobs graded at GS-5 or higher (or roughly 94 percent of federal jobs) will have to answer (in less than 200 words each) four essay questions. Two are pretty banal, involving testaments to applicants’ work ethic and examples of efficiencies they’ve achieved in prior jobs. A third raises some eyebrows:

“How has your commitment to the Constitution and the founding principles of the United States inspired you to pursue this role within the Federal government? Provide a concrete example from professional, academic, or personal experience.”

This is pretty rich coming from an administration whose leader has suggested he may not have to uphold the Constitution in his own job (notwithstanding that it was right there in his oath of office). In addition, the “founding principles of the United States” is a fairly subjective notion. But there’s a fourth essay question that takes the cake:

“How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role? Identify one or two relevant Executive Orders or policy initiatives that are significant to you, and explain how you would help implement them if hired.”

Now keep in mind that Trump’s EOs include such matters as the demonization of law firms and individuals who have crossed Donald Trump in the past. Would it be kosher for someone applying for a GS-6 gig to write a few sentences about how she or he will help implement Executive Order 14246, “Addressing Risks for Jenner and Block”? Expanding the scope of essays into presidential “policy priorities” adds an element of rather extreme subjectivity into the process. Do Trump “policy priorities” include items like his frequently repeated insistence that federal judges (particularly those he appointed) owe him 100 percent loyalty, or that Canada should become the 51st state? Do they extend to the policy priorities of his Cabinet members, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA anti-vaccine and anti-fluoride initiatives?

While much is unclear about this question, what’s unmistakable is that all federal job applicants are essentially being instructed to demonstrate their personal commitment to Trump and his erratic if very loud worldview. This isn’t just a hortatory gesture either; the OPM memo announcing the Merit Hiring Plan sets up monitored benchmarks for agency compliance beginning this month. As Moynihan notes, this is wildly unprecedented:

“I cannot think of anything like this level of politicization being formally introduced into the hiring process. Under the George W. Bush administration, it was a scandal when appointees in the Justice Department were caught scanning candidate CVs for civil servant positions to try to discern their political leanings. Now they will just ask them to explain how they can serve President Trump’s agenda. Within the space of a generation, backdoor politicization practices went from being a source of shame to a formal policy.”

Without much question, a No Democrats Need Apply policy would be in place. But it would guarantee massive turnover in the federal workforce the minute a Democrat — or even a Republican who isn’t a Trump mini-me — is elected president:

“With this policy, any future President would know that some portion of their workforce was selected because they had expressed explicit support with their predecessor, and an agenda that the current President might disagree with. For all the Republican complaints about rooting out “the deep state” or “Democrat holdovers” the policy specifically encourages selection into permanent civil service based on political leanings that will invariably run contrary to future Presidents. They want to build their own deep state!”

To put it another way, this Merit Hiring Plan institutionalizes a spoils system beyond the wildest dreams of the corrupt political bosses of the distant past. It deserves a lot of attention right now, if only to warn the poor schmoes who might want to apply for some lower-level federal job that they’d better bone up on their Trump EOs and get ready to pucker up and pledge allegiance. And of course, they better bury any past Democratic associations while they are at it.

“The results of an initial round of research shared exclusively with POLITICO — including 30 focus groups and a national media consumption survey — found many young men believe that “neither party has our back,” as one Black man from Georgia said in a focus group,” Politico’s Elena Schneider writes in “Democrats set out to study young men. Here are their findings. A widely mocked project to get under the hood about why Democrats are losing young men has sobering results.”  Schneider adds, “Participants described the Democratic Party as overly-scripted and cautious, while Republicans are seen as confident and unafraid to offend…They also said they now feel overwhelmed by economic anxiety, making “traditional milestones,” like buying a home or saving for kids’ college, “feel impossible,” an analysis of the research said…“The degree to which those economic concerns are also impacting how they think about themselves and quote-unquote success of being a man, and living up to their own expectations or the expectations of their family or society,” [pollster John] Della Volpe said. “There’s another layer of economic anxiety that I don’t think I fully saw until now.”…Young men’s feelings of crisis are connected to their exodus from the party, SAM’s research suggests. SAM’s national survey found that just 27 percent of young men viewed the Democratic Party positively, while 43 percent of them viewed the Republican Party favorably. The polling sample included 23 percent self-described Democrats, 28 percent Republicans and 36 percent independents…In last year’s presidential election, the gender gap leapt to 13 percentage points nationally, up from 9 percentage points in 2020, the Democratic firm Catalist found in its final 2024 analysis that men’s support for Kamala Harris dropped by 6 points, winning just 42 percent of men — the lowest on record in recent elections.”

Alex Gangitano reports on the GOP split in “Musk calls for killing House’s ‘big, beautiful bill’” at The Hill: “Elon Musk on Wednesday called for killing the House’s “big, beautiful bill” and for a new spending bill to be drafted after he threw a wrench into GOP leadership’s plans to pass President Trump’s bill of legislative priorities by July 4…“A new spending bill should be drafted that doesn’t massively grow the deficit and increase the debt ceiling by 5 TRILLION DOLLARS,” Musk said on his social platform X…He later added on X, “Call your Senator, Call your Congressman, Bankrupting America is NOT ok! KILL the BILL.”…Musk, who was at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), called the legislation passed by the House “pork-filled” and a “disgusting abomination” on Tuesday. His stinging criticism doubled down on his previous comments that the bill undermines the cost-cutting efforts of DOGE…Musk’s criticism gave political cover to the fiscal hawks in the Senate who were already critical of the legislation, including GOP Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.), Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.)…Paul said Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that if four conservatives band together, they could force Senate GOP leaders to agree to bigger spending cuts and possibly “separate out” language to raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion…Similarly, Lee called for the Senate to “make this bill better.”…The group wants to see deeper spending cuts while other Republicans, like Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Jerry Moran (Kan.), are worried that House language to cut Medicaid spending will hurt their constituents.”

“Most companies are already raising prices or plan to because of tariffs, data shows,” Alex Harring reports at CNBC.com: “Data from the New York Federal Reserve shows a majority of companies have passed along at least some of President Donald Trump’s tariffs onto customers, the latest in a growing body of evidence indicating the policy change is likely to stretch consumers’ wallets…In May, about 77% of service firms that saw increased costs due to higher U.S. tariffs tariffs passed through at least at least some of the rise to clients, according to a survey conducted by the New York Fed that was released Wednesday. Around 75% of manufacturers surveyed said the same…In fact, more than 30% of manufacturers and roughly 45% of service firms passed through all of the higher cost to their customers, according to the New York Fed’s statics…Price hikes happened quickly after Trump slapped steep levies on trading partners, whether large or small. More than 35% of manufacturers and nearly 40% of service firms raised prices within a week of seeing tariff-related cost increases, according to the survey…The New York Fed’s survey is the latest in a salvo of data releases and anecdotal reports that have shown companies’ willingness to pass down cost increases despite pressure from Trump not to do so…Nearly nine out of 10 of the 300 CEOs surveyed in May said they have raised prices or planned to soon, according to data released last week by Chief Executive Group and AlixPartners. About seven out of 10 chief executives surveyed in May said they plan to hike prices by at least 2.5%…“The administration’s tariffs alone have created supply chain disruptions rivaling that of Covid-19,” one respondent said in the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing survey published Monday.”

Some observations from “Resurrecting the Rebel Alliance: To end the age of Trump, Democrats must relearn the language and levers of power” by Barry C. Lynn at Washington Monthly. “The task ahead for Democrats is not merely to resist and slow the predations and destructions of President Trump. It is not merely to knock the Republicans out of power in 2026 and 2028. It is to establish a new political economic regime which ensures that our liberty and prosperity are never again threatened by any homegrown oligarch or autocrat. And Democrats must do so in a world filled with great enemies, eager to exploit the chaos sown here in America by Trump and the oligarchs, to topple us…None of this will be possible until Democrats first fully recover America’s original language of liberty. Doing so is the only way to relearn the wisdom about power and political economic structure baked into this language. It’s the only way for Democrats to convince the American people they actually understand how to make their lives better, and have the courage to act. And the only way Democratic elites can prove they understand their own responsibility for today’s crisis, and fully grasp the threats to their own lives and the lives of their own children…Reformers tend to blame political cowardice on cupidity and corruption. What I’ve learned over the past 25 years is that fatuousness, especially when combined with lack of imagination, often plays a much bigger role…Yes, Democratic Party elites’ failure to recognize the continuing bite of inflation played a big role in Harris’s loss. But the Democrats’ inability to speak honestly about the threats posed by concentrated power left much more than prices unaddressed…When voters turned to the Democratic Party, by contrast, they heard the treacly language of charity—of condescension—delivered in the tones of a courtier class that itself stands on unfirm ground…Since the election, Democrats have been presented with three options for retaking power. The first, courtesy of James Carville, is to play possum till the hillbillies miss us. Second, championed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is to oppose everything Trump does, everywhere, all at once. Third is to cozy up to good oligarchs, so they can shelter us until the MAGA storm blows over. This thanks to Ezra Klein and the “abundance movement.” …The better path is to honestly admit the radical nature and full immensity of the political threat we face, which is the direct merger of the power of the private monopoly and the state. And our own complicity in creating this crisis. And all the ways the old libertarian thinking continues to lead us back into darkness, superstition, and savagery.”

As a long-time fan of Iowa politics, I was delighted to see some good news for Democrats appear in that once-competitive state, and wrote about it at New York:

Up until now, Iowa has been the poster state for Donald Trump’s alleged electoral revolution. Prior to Trump’s first race, it went Democratic in six of the seven presidential elections (and went Republican only by an eyelash in the other). Then Trump carried the state by 9.5 percent in 2016, by 8.2 percent in 2020, and by 13.2 percent in 2024. The red tide in the land of corn wasn’t strictly at the presidential level, however. As recently as 2018, Democrats won three of Iowa’s four U.S. House seats. Since 2022, all four have been occupied by Republicans. In 2016, the GOP won its first Iowa state government trifecta since 1998, and has held it ever since. And after the 2014 elections, Republicans held both U.S. Senate seats for the first time since 1984, thanks to the defeat of Tom Harkin’s hand-picked Democratic successor, Bruce Braley, at the hands of a state legislator with a background in hog farming and distinguished National Guard service, Joni Ernst.

Now an embarrassing gaffe from Ernst may have helped open the door to a 2026 midterm comeback by Iowa’s downtrodden Democrats. At a town hall meeting, Ernst dismissed a highly predictable question about the possibility of deaths ensuing from her party’s proposed cuts in Medicaid and SNAP benefits by snarkily saying, “Well, we are all going to die.” Worse yet, when her remarks spurred outrage and a lot of attention, she doubled down in a contemptuous Instagram post:

This hasn’t been a great year for the junior senator from Iowa. Before she sneered at the idea of poor people dying, she provided a profile in cowardice when threats of a MAGA primary challenge changed her almost overnight from a key Armed Services Committee skeptic of Defense-secretary nominee Pete Hegseth into a cheerleader for his confirmation. And now her previously 100 percent–sure reelection race in 2026 is attracting some potentially serious competition, as the Cedar Rapids Gazette reports:

“State Rep. J.D. Scholten, D-Sioux City, announced Monday a run for the seat held by Republican Sen. Joni Ernst since 2015.

“Other state lawmakers, Sen. Zach Wahls from Coralville and Rep. Josh Turek of Council Bluffs, have been talked about as possible challengers for Ernst but so far Nathan Sage, an Iowa Army and Marine Corps veteran, and Scholten are the only ones to make it official. …

“’After her comments [on Medicaid and SNAP] over the weekend, I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but that’s when I just said: This is unacceptable and you’ve gotta jump in,’ Scholten said.”

Scholten came within three points of knocking off the raging nativist Steve King back in 2018 in a deeply conservative western Iowa district. Two years later, he lost decisively to Republican Randy Feenstra, who purged King in a primary, but still performed credibly, before winning a state legislative seat in 2022.

Ernst is far from the only Iowa Republican incumbent feeling some heat right now. Three-term U.S. House member Mariannette Miller-Meeks lost three congressional races before finally winning in 2020 by a grand total of six votes. In 2024, despite Trump’s long coattails, she won by the smallest margin of any Republican House member who didn’t actually lose (799 votes). She looks extremely vulnerable if there is even the slightest pro-Democratic midterm trend. And her two-term colleague Zach Nunn (who won narrowly in both 2022 and 2024) looks vulnerable too. One 2024 preview based on varying national scenarios has both Miller-Meeks and Nunn losing if there is a Democratic “ripple,” much less a “wave.”

There’s an open governorship in Iowa in 2026 as well, as Republican incumbent Kim Reynolds leaves office with the opprobrium of having been rated the least-popular governor in America by Morning Consult. State Auditor Rob Sand, the only statewide elected Democrat at present, is running for the governorship, as is the aforementioned congressman Randy Feenstra. It could be a close race. While the demographic fundamentals of Iowa (which has a large white working-class population with relatively few nonwhite voters) have helped drive the state into Trump’s arms, reaction to his policy agenda (especially the trade war and mass deportations, which threaten the vital agribusiness sector) could drive it away.

Iowa Democrats are unlikely to suffer from overconfidence, but if they are tempted to get smug, they can remember the moment of excitement in 2024 when legendary Iowa pollster Ann Selzer showed Kamala Harris actually leading Trump among likely voters just before Election Day. It didn’t work out that way. At this point, just a thoroughly competitive election year would be a good showing for the Democratic Party in Iowa.

The following article, “What Most Concerns Working Class Voters About the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” – and What Dem Message Works? In open-ended online discussion boards, working class voters expressed serious concerns with the bill’s impacts on Americans’ health care” by Ian Sams and the Working Class Project, is cross-posted from The Working Class Project:

We’re back this week with another update from the largest research effort to understand why working class voters are trending away from Democrats.

We have shared a lot in recent weeks about what people in our in-person focus groups have had to say about the Democratic Party – for example, Latinos in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, or Black voters across five states. Give those a read if you haven’t yet.

But this week we’re sharing brand-new data about the so-called “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” being pushed by President Trump and Republicans in Congress.

For months, as part of our comprehensive efforts to listen to working class voters across the country, we’ve been conducting online research known as “Qualboards.”

What is a “Qualboard,” you might understandably ask? Simply put, it’s an online discussion forum. Think of it as similar to an interactive message board like Reddit.

A moderator posts written questions on different issues and topics, and participants respond by posting comments with their thoughts in their own words. Participants can also respond to each other’s comments. It’s a great way to get working class voters’ unvarnished and personal views on stuff.

So last week, as the House was on its way to passing the GOP spending bill, we asked 27 working class voters in our Qualboard about it. All 27 voted for Trump in 2024.

Here’s some of what we learned…

TOP CONCERN FOR WORKING CLASS VOTERS: MILLIONS LOSING HEALTH INSURANCE

Participants were provided 11 facts about the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill” and asked to choose three things that concerned them most.

Their top concern was that the bill could kick as many as 13 million Americans off their health insurance. It wasn’t just people getting booted from insurance that ranked highly. The bill’s impacts on health care were consistently rated as top concerns, including others like:

• Raising health insurance premiums for millions of middle-class Americans by ending tax credits that help people afford health insurance,
• Raising out-of-pocket health care costs for millions by increasing copays for most health services, and
• Cutting billions of dollars in funding for rural hospitals and nursing homes, potentially forcing many to close.

Combined, no issue raised as high a concern as health care.

These sentiments echoed what we have heard from voters in our in-person focus groups, where participants were also unaware of the potential cuts and upset to learn about them. Many immediately launched into personal stories about how the cuts would harm them or someone close to them.

ANOTHER MAJOR CONCERN: CUTTING TAXES FOR THE RICH, WHILE CUTTING INCOMES FOR WORKING PEOPLE

They largely believe that the system is rigged against regular working people just trying to make a decent living and move up the economic ladder. They aren’t looking for handouts, and in fact, express frustration that political leaders don’t focus enough on helping the working class gain upward economic mobility. They aspire to and don’t vilify wealth, but they simply do not think the already-wealthy need more tax breaks.

SO WHAT DEMOCRATIC MESSAGE ABOUT THE BILL WAS MOST CONVINCING TO WORKING CLASS VOTERS?

Here’s how voters reacted to hearing this message:

Other messages that more intensely emphasized corrupt special interests or leaned on personal resentment toward billionaires were less resonant.