The wild parade of mid-decade re-redistricting that Donald Trump initiated this year has happened more in Republican than in Democratic states. But there’s a surprising late entry in the sweepstakes in Virginia, as I explained at New York:

With all the appalling things going on every day in Donald Trump’s America, it’s tempting to view the nationwide scramble to redraw congressional maps before the 2026 midterms as just another typical incident of partisan gamesmanship. But it’s actually quite unusual. Since at least since the beginning of the 20th century, states rarely conducted redistricting other than after the decennial Census and the subsequent reapportionment of U.S. House seats between the states. Court decisions occasionally forced a mid-decade redistricting (particularly during the sadly distant heyday of the Voting Rights Act). But when then–U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay engineered a redistricting of the Texas House delegation in 2003 to help Republicans reconquer Congress in 2004, it was a national scandal.

So when President Donald Trump ordered Texas Republicans to suddenly upturn the state’s congressional map because he knew his party was likely to lose control of the House in 2026, it was a very big deal. And when he subsequently ordered Republicans to do the same thing in every single state where they had the power to pull off such blatant, minority-disenfranchising power grabs, it touched off a wild arms race between the two parties that may not subside until candidate filing deadlines for 2026 have passed. Having flipped up to five House seats in Texas, and one in Missouri, Republicans are now looking at the possibility of rewriting maps in Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Democrats are retaliating with a big redistricting push in California, also aimed at netting five seats, which will be approved or vetoed by voters on November 4. Democrats in Maryland, Illinois, and New York are thinking about joining the gerrymandering jamboree.

But the best sign of how out of control the redistricting craze has become is the out-of-the-blue plan now emerging from Virginia, where Democrats are considering a truly mad dash to flip two or three House seats before the midterms, as the New York Times reports:

:The next front in the nation’s pitched battle over mid-decade congressional redistricting is opening in Virginia, where Democrats are planning the first step toward redrawing congressional maps, a move that could give their party two or three more seats.

“The surprise development, which was announced by legislators on Thursday, would make Virginia the second state, after California, in which Democrats try to counter a wave of Republican moves demanded by President Trump to redistrict states to their advantage before the 2026 midterm elections …

“Democrats now hold six of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats. Redistricting could deliver two or three additional seats for the party, depending on how aggressive cartographers choose to be in a redrawing effort.”

This is happening less than two weeks before a general election in Virginia in which every statewide elected office and every seat in the lower chamber of the legislature are up for grabs. Democrats have extremely narrow margins of control in both chambers, which isn’t expected to change on November 4. But the sudden gambit seems to have taken Democratic gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger by surprise. In Virginia, the governor (until January that’s Republican Glenn Youngkin) plays no role in the passage of constitutional amendments, which is what the Democratic plan will require.

The timetable is difficult. Democrats will need to approve the proposed constitutional amendment next week. Then they would have to pass it again in the next legislative session that begins in January. Only then can they schedule a referendum timed to enact the measure before candidate filing for the midterms ends. No telling when the actual proposed maps will be made public. There is absolutely no margin for error at any step. But that’s how frantic people in both parties have become to get control of the chain reaction Trump began with malice aforethought.

The stakes are huge because of the literally incredible things Trump might do in the last two years of his presidency if his slavishly submissive party continues to hold a governing trifecta beyond the midterms. The longer implications are ominous too, if it becomes routine for parties to repeatedly change congressional (and ultimately, state legislative) maps in order to maintain or seize power regardless of the overall contours of public opinion. It will be quite the white-knuckle ride.

The following post, “Argentina and Rural America’s Awakening: Suddenly, Trump’s contempt for his base is showing” by Paul Krugman, is cross-posted from paulkrugman.substack.com:

Is rural America starting to fall out of love with Donald Trump?

Policy wonks like me have spent decades pointing out that if rural Americans voted based on their informed self-interest, they would be supporting Democrats, not Republicans. Republicans are constantly trying to eviscerate Democrat-supported programs that benefited rural states like Medicaid spending, SNAP (the supplementary nutrition program formerly known as food stamps), and school lunches. Trump is also cutting subsidies for green energy programs like solar farms and wind turbines – subsidies that disproportionately went to red states. Iowa gets 63 percent of its electricity from wind!

Moreover, these programs in effect subsidize rural areas with dollars earned in urban areas: because rural areas have lower incomes than urban areas, rural Americans pay relatively little of the taxes that finance these programs. So Democratic “big government” is highly beneficial to the heartland.

Yet economic self-interest has been swamped by “rural consciousness.” This consciousness rests on a belief that highly educated urban elites don’t understand or value rural culture and rural lives. And I will admit that this belief contains a grain of truth. Urban elites are unlikely to fully understand the attachment of rural Americans to a particular place and its time-worn rhythms of life. Ensconced in salaried jobs, urban dwellers are unfamiliar with the constant anxiety of being a farmer or a small business owner in the heartland. Decades of being battered by the economic changes — deindustrialization, farm consolidation and corporatization, depopulation, loss of community ties, along with the loss of jobs, particularly “male-coded” jobs – have left rural Americans feeling adrift, marginalized and resentful.

And this created an opening to be exploited by the right wing. Much like how Trump peddled fantasies of a manufacturing resurgence or the return of coal-mining jobs, MAGA leveraged the deep discontent within rural America to inculcate the belief that only Republicans, and Trump in particular, respect rural voters. But this is false: MAGA actually holds its most loyal voters in contempt.

And the reality of this contempt is starting to show through — not, at least so far, via the One Big Beautiful Bill’s savage cuts to health care, which will be especially devastating to rural areas, but via the Trump administration’s bizarre fixation on aiding President Javier Milei of Argentina.

The truth is that rural America is even more dependent than urban America on the programs now on the chopping block. The nonpartisan Economic Innovation Group has mapped out where in America people depend for a large share of their income on government transfers: the counties where a lot of income comes from government programs, indicated in yellow, are overwhelmingly in rural areas, while the places where such aid plays a relatively small role (light blue) mainly correspond to major metropolitan areas:

Source

Why has rural America become increasingly dependent on government aid? The main answer is declining economic opportunity, which has led to an exodus of young people, leaving behind an older population that relies on Social Security and Medicare. Even younger rural residents have low incomes that make them eligible for mean-tested programs, above all Medicaid and food stamps.

There shouldn’t be any shame about the fact that rural America is subsidized by more affluent parts of the nation. That is, after all, what a national social safety net is supposed to do. But it should make rural voters oppose politicians who support Project 2025-type plans to rip up that safety net, which will deeply impoverish already poor regions and degrade life even for those not personally receiving aid — for example, by leading to the closure of many rural hospitals, making health care inaccessible even to those who still have health insurance.

Yet rural voters went overwhelmingly for Trump last year. Why?

Many clearly felt that educated urban elites don’t understand their lives and values — which is true. Most people in New York or Los Angeles don’t have a good sense of what life is like in rural America. But the reverse is also true: Many, perhaps most rural Americans imagine that the surprisingly safe and livable city where I’m writing this is a crime-ridden hellscape, that Chicago and Portland are “war zones,” and so on.

Rural voters may also have imagined that they would be protected from the harsh treatment being meted out to blue cities. After all, our political system gives rural voters disproportionate influence. Wyoming and the two Dakotas combined have roughly the same population as Brooklyn, yet they have 6 senators while Brooklyn has to share two senators with 16 million other New Yorkers.

For both reasons, rural voters either tuned out or refused to believe warnings that a Trump victory in 2024 would be catastrophic for the heartland, that crucial programs would be eviscerated and the agricultural economy would be devastated by Trump’s trade wars.

I thought that rural voters might finally start to realize that they have been taken for a ride when the cuts began kicking in. This will begin to happen next month, when the 22 million Americans, many of them in rural areas, who receive subsidies to help buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act will see their premiums soar, on average by more than 100 percent. It will happen even more dramatically late next year (after the midterms), when the big cuts to Medicaid and food stamps kick in.

An aside: When I went to the relevant government page to look up food stamp data, I was confronted by this banner:

Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.

This is not how government for the people is supposed to work, and we shouldn’t lose our sense of outrage.

But back to a possible rural awakening: It may be starting ahead of schedule, thanks to, of all things, the Trump administration’s efforts to bail out Argentina’s Javier Milei.

The attempt by Trump and Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, to rush $20 billion to Argentina isn’t a big deal compared with the planned savage cuts to crucial programs. But it’s a graphic demonstration of the administration’s hypocrisy. After all the America First rhetoric, all the insistence that spending must be slashed, suddenly we’re sending lots of money to a foreign nation in which we have no real interest except for the fact that its president is a MAGA favorite. I don’t know how many voters are aware that these moves are in large part an attempt to bail out Bessent’s hedge-fund buddies, but I think the sense of something wrong and corrupt is leaking through.

Furthermore, from farmers’ point of view, Argentina is a rival — a big soybean exporter at a time when Trump’s trade war has locked our own farmers out of China’s market.

And as emphasized in a recent conversation between Greg Sargent and a rural Democratic activist, farmers have been shocked and outraged by Trump’s casual suggestion that he might start buying Argentine beef to sell in the U.S. market. That conveys the impression that Trump doesn’t care at all about his most loyal followers — an impression that is completely correct.

We shouldn’t expect rural America to suddenly do a 180 and abandon Trump. Sargent sends us to a lament from one rancher who calls the idea of buying Argentine beef an “absolute betrayal” — but begins by saying to Trump, “We love you and support you.” The sheer extent to which rural Americans have been hoodwinked will make it hard for them to admit their error.

But there are at least hints of a rural awakening. And for the sake of the nation urban and rural Americans share, it can’t come fast enough.

In “Trump Claims He’d Give His $230 Million Justice Department Grift to Charity. Yeah, Right.The president, who has a history of reneging on charitable pledges, ran his own family foundation into the ground,” Inae Oh and Dan Friedman write at Mother Jones: “On Tuesday, shortly after the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump is demanding $230 million from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to reimburse him for legal costs related to earlier federal investigations against him, the president claimed he would donate any such funds to charity. “I’m not looking for money,” he told reporters. “I’d give it to charity or something. I would give it to charity, any money.”…Does Trump grasp the impropriety at play? His bid to appear magnanimous suggests that he knows it doesn’t look good for a president to shake down the Justice Department for taxpayer money, particularly amid a shutdown, and especially as his administration slashes Medicaid and food stamps…His effort to put a generous spin on this blatant grift—there is no compelling evidence that the DOJ’s investigations were launched improperly—belies Trump’s long, sordid history of stiffing contractors, and, even more notoriously, the court-ordered dissolution of his namesake charitable arm over a “shocking pattern of illegality.” Read more here.

From “The Headless Party: Inside the Democrats’ Search for Identity in the Age of Trump” by Jolynda Wang at ThePolitic: “The Democratic Party finds itself in a leadership vacuum. The 2024 presidential election was a devastating loss that brought Donald Trump back to the White House, Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress, and the Supreme Court solidly conservative. Having no clear frontrunner for 2028 and no unified message for the midterms, the question of who might fill the void looms large for Democrats…“We need a leader. But even more than that, we need a vision for the future that transcends the politics of Donald J. Trump,” said Holly Page, the former executive vice president of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). “Start talking about ideas that nobody else is talking about yet and change the playing field.” She emphasizes that there is no “black and white answer to leadership” in the Democratic Party…“What we need more than anything else is not just a central figure, but a strong communicator who will challenge the left and the dominant ideology embraced by the party right now,” said Page…Under the current administration, [UC Law Professor Joan] Williams said that “Democrats have a tremendous amount of ammunition to be talking about how the economy isn’t great.”…“That should be an opening for Democrats to center economic issues,” she said. “Democrats have to position themselves to be able to be seen as an attractive alternative, which they haven’t managed to do consistently yet.” More here.

Lauren Egan writes in “How Maine Became a Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party” at The Bulwark: “BY THE TIME GRAHAM PLATNER walked onstage at the Governor Hill Mansion this past Monday, the room had hit capacity…The grand colonial revival house was built in 1901 for Maine’s forty-fifth governor; nowadays, it’s used as an event venue. But on this night, it was an incubator of energy, political chatter, and a humidity not customary for the usual early-fall chill in this part of the country. Platner wore a henley, rolled up just enough to show off one of his many forearm tattoos. His dirty-blond hair was damp from having ducked outside in the rain to speak to the dozens of people who didn’t make it in the door…“I’m Graham Platner and I’m from Sullivan,” he cheekily said to a crowd of a couple hundred people. The introduction was unnecessary. They’d seen his viral social media clips and his launch video for U.S. Senate. And whether out of curiosity, inspiration, or something in between, they’d decided on that random Monday evening to come see this oyster farmer, harbormaster, and Marine veteran…“I just want to make it very clear that I do not view myself as a politician,” Platner said, kicking off his stump speech. “I certainly didn’t live a life in preparation for this. And I really thought that, frankly, just living in Sullivan, living the simple, fulfilling life that my wife and I have been able to build, that that was going to be it.”…AS MUCH AS ANY RACE in the country, this primary for the Senate seat in Maine has come to resemble the crossroads—and opportunities—for the Democratic party. At stake is one of the few seats that Democrats believe they can flip: Susan Collins’s. But there are huge divides over how the party thinks it can achieve that…“Graham Platner, in a lot of ways, is like a political consultant’s idea of what a guy from Maine looks like,” Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic consultant, told me. “The fact of the matter is, Janet Mills is popular. Janet Mills has gotten stuff done and she’s gotten elected statewide. If the stakes are as high as everyone keeps saying they are, why on earth would we cast her aside?”…As a two-term governor, Mills doesn’t just have name recognition and deep political connections. She has a lot of credit from earlier this year when she stood up to President Donald Trump at the White House, particularly at a time when other Democratic leaders and institutions were acquiescing to his demands.” More here.

“Just 38 percent of respondents said they approve of the president’s handling of the economy, while 57 percent disapproved and 5 percent did not provide an opinion,” Max Rego reports in “Trump approval on economy hits new low: Quinnipiac poll” at The Hill. “Trump’s previous low on the economy was a 39 percent approval rating, a mark he hit four times — including last month— since the start of his first term in 2017…The respondents were split along partisan lines: 88 percent of Republicans and just 2 percent of Democrats approved of the president’s handling of the economy. Only 30 percent of independents backed Trump on the issue…The survey, conducted Oct. 16-20 via phone, consisted of 1,327 registered voters. It has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points…Since returning to office in January, the president has imposed sweeping tariffs on trading partners around the world, impacting a variety of industries…The tariffs, intended to boost domestic manufacturing, have heavily impacted American businesses and consumers. A Goldman Sachs analysis from earlier this month said that American consumers and businesses will shoulder 55 percent and 22 percent of the tariff costs this year, respectively. The report also projected that U.S. firms will pass on their costs to consumers in the coming months.”

I know it’s close to Halloween, but the weird vibes emanating from Democrats about the New Jersey gubernatorial race seem too frightful to be real, as I explained at New York:

Off-year gubernatorial elections are often treated as major bellwethers for the next presidential or midterm elections. So there’s a lot of interest in this year’s contests in New Jersey and Virginia. Both states have leaned Democratic at the presidential level in recent years; Republicans last carried Virginia in 2004 and haven’t won New Jersey since 1988. But both states also have a recent history of swinging against the party controlling the White House in gubernatorial contests. The non–White House party has carried 11 of the past 12 governor’s races in Virginia and eight of the past nine in New Jersey. The exceptional winners were Democrats Terry McAuliffe in Virginia in 2013 and Phil Murphy in New Jersey just four years ago.

These states are different even though they often move in tandem. Virginia is the last state with a one-term limit on governors’ terms, which probably increases the “nationalization” of gubernatorial races since there are never any incumbents. They also have different demographics, though both states have significant non-white voting blocs and large and often political crucial suburbs. Until very recently, Virginia was thought to be a near lock for Democrat Abigail Spanberger, in part because she’s a suburban centrist running a well-oiled campaign against the erratic Republican lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears. But the other factor was Virginia’s heavy federal-employee presence, which hurts Republicans thanks to the unparalleled hostility of the second Trump administration toward the so-called deep state (made vivid first by DOGE’s Elon Musk and then by OMB director Russell Vought, both big-time bureaucrat-haters). Virginia Republican despair has been at least temporarily dispelled by a scandal involving violence-laden texts by Democratic-attorney-general candidate Jay Jones. But the damage probably won’t extend much beyond Jones himself.

There’s a more negative vibe in New Jersey, though, where Democrat Mikie Sherrill is facing Jack Ciattarelli in the governor’s race. Ciattarelli significantly exceeded expectations and polls in his 2021 challenge to Murphy. And the president he is now firmly embracing, Donald Trump, cut his losing margin in the Garden State from about 16 points in 2020 to just under six points in 2024. As Ron Brownstein notes, this is one place (others are Texas and Florida) where you could discern a general broadening of the GOP coalition:

“Trump somewhat improved his showing in 2020 over 2016 among minority voters nationwide, especially those without a four-year college degree. In 2021, Ciattarelli in particular advanced further from those beachheads. He significantly narrowed Murphy’s advantage from 2017 in Passaic and Hudson, the two New Jersey counties with the largest share of Hispanic residents, and improved even in Essex, the county centered on Newark, which has a large Black population. In 2024, Trump ran even better than Ciattarelli in all three of those counties, even becoming the first GOP presidential nominee in the 21st century to win Passaic.”

In 2022, Democrats lost one highly marginal U.S. House seat in New Jersey after redistricting made it “redder.” But they did relatively well otherwise, which complicates the “trending red” narrative, unless you accept the GOP rationalization that this particular election was dominated by an abortion issue that has since receded in significance.

More important, the idea that Ciattarelli will build on his gains in 2021 and Trump’s gains in 2024 to win in November involves ignoring the larger phenomenon of backlash against the party controlling the White House. Are Republicans in New Jersey somehow stronger now than Trump was in November 2024, when he lost New Jersey (albeit by “only” six points)? CNN’s Harry Enten uses favorability numbers to suggest that the always-unpopular Trump isn’t really more unpopular than he has ever been. But given the change of party control of the White House, it’s now Trump’s job-approval numbers that are more relevant, and they are not good, and that’s particularly true among the non-white voters who trended toward Trump in 2024. We don’t have that much publicly released New Jersey data, but nationally Trump’s 2024 gains were concentrated among the “low-propensity” voters least likely to turn out in a non-presidential election. It stands to reason that some of them won’t show up for an off-year gubernatorial contest.

There is some talk that Sherrill is either running a bad campaign or is unexciting to Democratic-base voters — or both. But as Brownstein points out, Sherrill, like Virginia’s Spanberger, is a strongly positioned candidate this year:

“Spanberger and Sherrill are both centrist Democrats with national security backgrounds who were elected to the House of Representatives as part of the 2018 blue wave. Both have run careful, disciplined campaigns that have drawn criticism from some Democrats for failing to ignite much enthusiasm or passion, but also praise from analysts in both parties for avoiding missteps …

“Sherrill and Spanberger have each maintained a predominant focus on the cost of living. That contrasts with their Republican opponents, who have attempted to revive several of the wedge issues that have benefited the GOP in recent years.”

So why is there such pessimism, bordering on incipient panic, about Sherrill among Democrats? She has been comfortably leading in polls other than those taken by the notoriously pro-GOP Trafalgar-InsiderAdvantage and Quantus Insights outfits, and she’s leading even in those. But some Democrats fear the polls never entirely capture Trump or pro-Trump votes. Beyond that, there is something I can describe only as a sort of superstitious belief that Trump has changed everything, repealing all the rules we used to understand about how elections are won and lost. Check out this take on Sherrill by Politico’s Michael Kruse:

“What at the outset of her political ascent was a formula that looked like a model — former Navy helicopter pilot, former prosecutor, suburban mother moderate in ideology and mien — at this messier, storm-the-gates moment marked by economic populism and TikTok histrionics, often can feel as if it falls flat. ‘She’s playing the politics,’ as twentysomething Jersey City mayoral candidate Mussab Ali put it, ‘of 2018.” And it’s 2025.'”

Some of this angst about Sherrill could simply reflect intraparty tension that has little to do specifically with New Jersey, as younger and more outspokenly progressive Democrats yearn for the candidate nominations they feel centrists have squandered (though Sherrill dispatched a couple of leftward rivals in the June primary). But you could also argue that Democrats are still in trauma over what happened nationally in 2024. Since they can’t believe a convicted felon campaigning on a pledge to seize authoritarian powers to pursue vengeance against his enemies actually won the presidency, they fear anything’s possible now, particularly if their candidates aren’t as loud and vicious as the president their opponents adore.

Like Virginia, New Jersey is competitive enough that upsets are possible on November 4. But its Democrats should stop spooking themselves once Halloween has passed.

The following stub of the article, “Can These Two Women Turn It Around for Democrats?” by Thomas B. Edsall, is cross-posted from The New York Times:

One thing is clear: If either Mikie Sherrill or Abigail Spanberger loses her bid to become governor in November, the Democratic Party is in trouble heading into the 2026 congressional elections. Both Democratic nominees would appear to be ideally suited to capture majorities in the centrist electorates of New Jersey and Virginia.

Sherrill and Spanberger, both elected to Congress in 2018, are moderates, even if they don’t always appear to be on the campaign trail. Together with their fellow Democrats Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Elaine Luria of Virginia, the four were known in the House of Representatives as the mod squad, in contrast to the group of very progressive members of Congress aligned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez known simply as the squad. Other nicknames for the mod squad included the badasses caucus and, in more formal recognition of their military, security and C.I.A. backgrounds, task force sentry.

Sherrill and Spanberger have relatively unusual resumés for contemporary Democrats: Sherrill as a Naval Academy graduate, helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor; Spanberger as a postal inspector and C.I.A. officer.

Recent polls show Sherrill leading her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, a former member of the New Jersey General Assembly who lost a bid for governor in 2021, by a cumulative average of four percentage points, with the race tightening recently. Spanberger is ahead of Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican nominee and Virginia’s lieutenant governor, by 6.2 points.

While both Democrats are ahead, Republicans have been making gains in New Jersey and Virginia, and each candidate faces what would ordinarily seem to be majority electorates whose commitment to the party has frayed since the 2024 election.

“Both gubernatorial contests are tests of the brand that Democrats believe is best suited for their comeback,” Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia and editor in chief of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, wrote by email:

The brand Democrats are selling this year is moderate-liberal, national security-experienced politicians who are known more for policy preferences than fiery rhetoric. No Mamdani-like nominee in either state. If this centrist brand can’t sell well in two modestly Democratic states when a G.O.P. polarizer like Trump is in the White House, then Democrats will have to move on to some other brand for 2026.

Given an unsteady, probably declining economy and Trump’s divisiveness, with strong Democratic distaste for almost everything associated with this administration, the Democratic nominees ought to be elected handily. To me a solid victory is upper single digits or low double digits (though the latter may be expecting too much).

In addition to testing voters’ perception of the Democratic Party, which remains deeply negative despite growing disapproval of President Trump, the two contests for governor will test the enthusiasm of the MAGA electorate. White working-class voters turned out in strength in both states in the 2021 governors’ races and in the 2024 presidential contest, sending a wave of anxiety through the ranks of party leaders and strategists.

Read more here.

CQ-Roll Call’s Daniela Altimari explains why “2026 could be breakout year for blue-collar Democratic women,” cross-posted here via the Las Vegas Sun:

WASHINGTON — On the campaign trail in a southwestern Arizona swing district, Democrat JoAnna Mendoza often recounts her hardscrabble upbringing.

She began working alongside her farmworker parents, clearing weeds from the cotton fields, when she was still in grade school. Her family relied on government aid and food banks. She joined the military at 17, partly as a way to escape poverty.

“I carry that struggle with me to this day,’’ said Mendoza, a 49-year-old single mother who is challenging Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani in the 6th District. “I have not forgotten my roots and there are a lot of folks out there like me who have very similar stories.’’

As Democrats chart a course out of the wilderness following steep 2024 losses, the party is counting on candidates from blue-collar backgrounds to win back working-class voters anxious about the high cost of living and angry at a political class they view as indifferent to their day-to-day difficulties.

In fact, brawny guys with progressive politics, anti-establishment swagger and a toughness born of adversity — not to mention an affinity for tattoos, beards and flannel — are having a moment in the run-up to the midterm elections.

But on the other side of the gender divide, Mendoza and a handful of Democratic female candidates also are building campaigns around economic populism rooted in humble origin stories and blue-collar backgrounds.

“You don’t have to have a beard in order to connect with voters,” said Jessica Mackler, the president of EMILY’s List, which backs Democratic women who support abortion rights. Voters, she added, are looking for “people who understand their lived experiences and are ready to fight back.”

A decisive demographic

Every election cycle has its coveted demographic: The 2018 midterms during Donald Trump’s first term saw suburban moderates power a blue wave that propelled a group of centrist women with national security backgrounds to victory.

This time, it’s working-class voters. Long a core Democratic constituency, they drifted to the right in 2016. The shift ramped up in 2024, when Trump received the backing of 66% of white voters without college degrees, according to an analysis of exit polls conducted by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

Trump also performed particularly well among men, winning 55 percent of the male vote compared with his 46 percent support among women, a study by the Pew Research Center found.

The blue-collar Democratic men running in some of the nation’s most competitive House and Senate races are trying to break the GOP’s hold on working-class voters by playing up their unvarnished gruffness and embracing populist policies rooted in their lived experience. Many of them are political outsiders who have shown an eagerness to buck their party’s leaders.

There’s Graham Platner, an oyster farmer from Maine who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and is waging a populist campaign to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins. There’s Bob Brooks, who held a series of low-wage jobs – delivering pizzas, tending bar and working in a warehouse among them – before becoming a firefighter and launching a bid to unseat GOP Rep. Ryan Mackenzie in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. And there’s Nathan Sage, a former mechanic and Marine and Army veteran who grew up in a trailer park and is seeking the Senate seat Iowa Republican Joni Ernst is vacating.

Others who fit the mold include Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic who led a strike at the Kellogg’s cereal plant and is running as an independent against Nebraska Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts, and former Secret Service agent Logan Forsythe, a Democrat seeking an open Senate seat in Kentucky, who picked tobacco at age 7 and taught himself to repair engines at 13.

“We’re in this moment where there’s obviously a kind of a hypermasculinity to a lot of the messaging,’’ said Jean Sinzdak, the associate director at the Center for American Women and Politics.

A message that resonates

Just like their male counterparts, this cycle’s cadre of Democratic blue-collar women are aiming for authenticity while pushing a message that the economy is stacked against working people.

Francesca Hong is a Wisconsin state representative, a single mother and a restaurant worker who’s campaigning for governor on a populist plank. Known for her outspoken, and occasionally profanity-laced, social media posts, Hong said she’s running to “fix a rigged system that puts oligarchs over workers and small businesses.”

Across the state line in Minnesota, flight attendant, state representative and single mother Kaela Berg is striking a similar theme.

“I know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck, to worry about rent, to go through a global pandemic without health care, and to fight for my son in a school system stretched too thin,’’ Berg said in announcing House campaign for an open battleground Twin Cities district.

At a time of rising inflation and deep insecurity over the economy, such approaches are more likely to resonate with voters, Sinzdak said.

“Women from working-class backgrounds really speak to a particular set of voters in a big way, because they can speak authentically about their experience [and] their economic vision,” Sinzdak said.

And women are often the ones handling household budgets and arranging care for children and aging parents, “so they really understand these financial pressures,’’ Mackler said.

Or, as Mendoza puts it, “they’re pissed, and they’re scared, and they’re stressed out.”

Former Rep. Deb Haaland, who served as Joe Biden’s Interior secretary and is now running for governor of New Mexico, said economic concerns are front and center for voters.

“Affordability is one of the big issues, with all the tariffs and the price of groceries really going up,’’ she said. “I understand what it’s like for people when they say it’s hard to make ends meet. I understand what it’s like for them if they have to put groceries back at the checkout line because they don’t have the money to pay for them.”

Haaland is open about her own past economic struggles.

“I raised my kids as a single mom. I struggled to make ends meet. I know what it’s like to be on SNAP benefits, and I was able to give birth to my child because of Medicaid,’’ she said, adding that, at 64, she has yet to fully pay off her student loans.

Building their ranks

Working-class women remain underrepresented in Congress. But in recent years, two have found success, albeit from opposite points on the Democratic Party’s ideological spectrum: New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a former bartender and server and an outspoken progressive, and Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, the co-owner of an auto repair shop and a political moderate.

Despite the growing prominence of working-class candidates, some Democrats say party leadership has been too cautious in their recruiting efforts — and too willing to reject those from unconventional backgrounds.

Democrats “do a lot of credentialing around who can raise the most money or what your networks are,’’ said Rebecca Cooke, a Democrat making her third attempt to flip a pivotal Wisconsin district currently held by Republican Derrick Van Orden, “when we should be asking what kind of candidates are most representative of the districts.

Cooke, who grew up on an Eau Claire dairy farm and paid for college by patching together tuition payments from Pell Grants and scholarships and holding multiple jobs, lamented the low numbers of candidates with blue-collar roots.

“Why don’t we have 50 candidates from working-class backgrounds?’’ she said. “We need more people who are going to stand up to the ultra-wealthy.”

You can find one of the best recent articles about Democratic strategy, Andrew Levison’s strategy paper, “Anti-Trump Political Strategy in Red States Must Include Many Independent Candidates” with excellent sidebars, right here at TDS. As Levision writes, “As the initial shock of Trump’s victory has passed Democrats are now responding to his aggressive extremist agenda by recognizing that active resistance is necessary and that Democrats must try to regain support in working class and rural districts that shifted even further toward Trump in2024 than in 2020.1…Within this growing consensus, however, a profoundly important argument is emerging: itholds that in a significant number of cases anti-MAGA candidates in red state districts should run as independents rather than as Democrats…The recent spark behind this view was the candidacy of Dan Osborn in Nebraska. Osborn, a trade union leader who led a major strike before entering politics ran as an independent rather than as a Democrat and combined a solidly class conscious economic populism with culturally traditional positions on a number of social issues such as immigration, guns and crime. Although he fell short of winning a majority, Osborn did dramatically better than most Democratic candidates in deep red areas…His example is now cited as a model by a growing group of progressive activists that includes Bernie Sanders, Washington Post commentator E.J. Dionne and top Democratic data guru, David Shor…In one of his dramatic “Fight Oligarchy” mass meetings that have drawn over 100,000 people in recent weeks, for example, Sanders said the following:“One of the aspects of this tour is to try to rally people to get engaged in the political process and run as independents outside of the democratic party…”Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne echoed the view: A heretical thought is that as they rebuild Democrats should acknowledge that in places where their brand is badly broken independent candidates, particularly for Senate, might have a better chance of building an alternative coalition to Trumpism than running as Democrats. Senate candidate Dan Osborne lost in Nebraska running as a pro-worker independent but his nearly 47% of the vote should be seen as a prologue not a failure.”

Levison adds, “And leading Democratic data analyst David Shor also agreed: If you look at Nebraska the biggest single over performance that we had was Dan Osborne running as an independent. He outperformed the top of the ticket by 7.1%…we’ve only ever tried this strategy of running candidates who are not formally tied to the Democratic Party in extremely red states but I think it’s something we have to seriously consider more broadly…Many Democrats will immediately and passionately reject this idea. Their argument, in essence, will be that the problem is not actually the Democratic Party “brand” in the abstract but rather specific policies, messages and candidates. If these specific areas of weakness are corrected it should make it possible for Democratic candidates to win even in strongly red state districts and areas…This view actually a combination of two distinct arguments: First, it is widely felt among Democrats that the broad Democratic “brand” has deep historical and emotional roots that extend from the New Deal era of Franklin Roosevelt and the successful passage Civil Rights, Voting Rights and Medicare in the 1960s to Barack Obama’s campaigns that championed the “Rising American Electorate” of women, People of Color, environmental advocates and GLBTQ Americans. This enduring progressive tradition is embodied in the deeply held vision of the Democratic Party as a “Big Tent Coalition.” For many Democrats this basic progressive vision of the Democratic Party as a Big Tent Coalition is the essence of the basic Democratic “Brand.” In their view this vision is profoundly valuable and must not be abandoned. Second, whatever the current level of popularity of the party, by correctly fine tuning the Democratic platform, message and selection of candidates, it is held that Democrats should be able to successfully appeal to working class voters. There should be no need for candidates to run as independents.”

Further, Levison writes, “The extensive ethnographic field research conducted by the new generation of sociologists found, however, that this was simply not how workers actually made political choices. In the 1950s and 1960s many working class voters were blue collar workers deeply embedded in a social world and community life that was shaped by tight-knit working class neighborhoods, trade union halls, Democratic precinct captains and liberal Catholic churches all of which reinforced the view that the Democratic Party was “the party of the working man.” It was this social and community reinforcement and not any armchair contemplation of TV ads and newspaper reports that had made workers loyal to the Democratic Party.3… By the 1990s and 2000s, on the other hand, this tightly knitted social world had largely disappeared and sociological research dramatically revealed that the younger generations of workers—the children and grandchildren of the “working class Democrats” of the 1950s and 60s—no longer had any memory of or loyalty to the vision of the Democratic Party as a “Big Tent Coalition.” On the contrary, they felt profoundly isolated, abandoned and ignored by both political parties and wanted, above all else, candidates who they felt they could trust because they were passionately committed to representing these workers’ very distinct political perspective. Trump clearly understood this and cynically filled the vacuum…The alternative is a more sociological approach that begins by asking a basic question: Are there basic sociological differences between the attitudes of MAGA voters and non-MAGA voters who nonetheless support the GOP? The first group is beyond persuasion, the second is not.”

In the concluding section of Levison’s analysis, he notes that “in deep red states the problem is not simply that voters in these areas overwhelmingly vote for Republicans. It is that major elements of GOP and specifically MAGA ideology have become so pervasive and familiar in everyday life that many voters—even if they disagree with certain particular ideas—simply cannot imagine that there is any sensible political alternative to voting for candidates who espouse the GOP and MAGA perspective. For many Republican voters this view has become synonymous with what they feel all “normal” or “sensible” people should view as acceptable. Many people in red state areas genuinely feel that “no sensible person could really support all that crazy stuff that Democrats believe”…Moreover, in the past even deeply conservative people in small towns and rural areas who firmly rejected Democratic candidates nonetheless still considered local Democrats to be “normal” – their neighbors and co-workers, their children’s schoolteachers and little league coaches, shopkeepers on main street and so on. This is increasingly no longer the case. The pervasive current view of Democrats as completely “alien” or “crazy” in many red state districts now stands as a profound roadblock to even the most preliminary attempts to develop a Democratic presence in these areas. It empowers a political “race to the bottom” as GOP candidates, freed from the need to debate with moderates compete instead to “out-extreme” each other…In fact, there is now a boringly standardized Republican playbook for attacking any Democratic candidate. Republican TV ads simply show lurid scenes of crime, riots and waves of immigrants followed by images of the Democratic candidate standing side by side with Nancy Pelosi,Barack Obama or some other well-known Democrats during the Democratic convention or other events. The commercial then ends with bucolic images of the Republican candidate with his family posed in front of a pickup truck, ranch, farm or small town city street. Narration is basically unnecessary. Regardless of how much a Democratic candidate proclaims his or her independence from the overall stances of the party, they cannot escape the identification with the national brand…Independent candidates like Osborn confound this Republican strategy. They can be attacked as “false flag” secret Democrats but, when they emphatically assert their independence and uphold positions clearly at variance with the national Democratic agenda, the garish smear ads simply don’t work as well…As a result, independent candidates like Osborn have a profoundly important role to play in the coming period and must be encouraged. The anti-Trump coalition must be as broad as possible and Democrats simply do not have the luxury of demanding political purism.”Read Levison’s entire article right here.

The following article, “Democrats and “The Vision Thing: Do they have one?”  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:

Cast your mind back to the halcyon days when American politics revolved around George H.W. Bush and his delightful locutions. A quintessential Bushism was when he referred to his (hard-to-define) overarching goal as the “the vision thing.” He wasn’t sure what it was and neither was anyone else.

Today’s Democrats have a similar problem. Nobody really knows what they stand for besides being really, really against Trump. That makes it hard to have a recognizable vision for the country since it’s a purely negative politics. What kind of society are Democrats aiming for and how would ordinary people find their place in it?

The problem this presents is underscored by recent survey results from the Searchlight Institute. Their survey queried respondents on what each party wants for your life, covering marriage, having children, being able to retire, being able to regularly go on vacation, having a good job, owning a home, being your own boss, owning a car or truck, feeling stable in your personal life, and creating wealth for your children. Together these attainments make up the basics of what has traditionally been seen as a good life.

The chart below shows how Democrats stack up relative to Republicans on these various attainments. The news is not good for Democrats; indeed, it’s terrible. One of the only “advantages” Democrats have on the chart is that respondents are more likely to say Democrats want none of these attainments for their life. Other than a modest three point advantage on “feeling stable in your personal life,” Democrats are behind the GOP on every other life attainment.

As the Searchlight Institute memo on these data notes:

The outlook gets worse and worse for Democrats the further down the list you travel. The picture that’s painted is one in which voters increasingly see Republicans as the party best suited to helping them build lives of material prosperity and personal achievement.

The Searchlight memo refers to this as the “doomsday” chart for what it betokens about Democrats’ extraordinary inability to inspire ordinary Americans. They simply do not believe Democrats have a coherent vision for how they can “build lives of material prosperity and personal achievement” in a world rocked by rapid technological change and social upheaval.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the outlook does not improve when you narrow this analysis to working-class (noncollege) Americans. As before, the lone Democratic “advantage” is that respondents are more likely to see Democrats as wanting none of the various attainments for their life. And without exception, Democrats trail Republicans on specific life attainments, with notably larger gaps among the working class than the overall population on having a good job, being able to retire, being able to go regularly on vacation, owning a home, and being your own boss.

These patterns make sense when you compare what voters think is important to what they believe is important to Democrats. This chart from Searchlight (corroborated by earlier data from the New York Times and from David Shor/Blue Rose Research) tells the tale. Three of the four issues voters believe are most important to Democrats—climate change, abortion, and LGBTQ+ issues—are least important to voters. If that’s the Democrats’ “vision thing,” voters aren’t buying.

And especially working-class voters aren’t buying. As shown in the charts below from Financial Times analyst John Burn-Murdoch, the Democrats’ identification as the party that represents the working class has declined dramatically over time, while their identification with and focus on sociocultural issues has risen equally dramatically. No wonder Democrats can’t seem to present a compelling vision to the working class; these voters quite rightly see Democrats as preoccupied with issues that are not theirs.

But as the charts above also show, there is an exception to this general pattern: health care. Here is an issue that is both important to voters and perceived to be important for Democrats. Might Democrats somehow transmute this issue into the vision they need for voters?

Certainly focusing on health care could provide some political benefit for the Democrats and is way better than focusing on other issues that are now closely identified with the party. But is it really a substitute for an overarching vision that the party can sell to voters?

This seems doubtful. Voters are searching for a way forward for themselves, their families, their communities and their nation that would restore American purpose and dynamism in a chaotic, populist age. And Democrats’ vision is to restore Obamacare subsidies and protect Medicaid? This smacks of trying to rerun an outdated 20^thcentury playbook in a vastly changed 21^st century where the big issues have changed and America is locked in competition with the formidable rising power of China.

Nate Cohn identifies some of what is lacking:

Health care hasn’t been front and center for years. In the final New York Times/Siena poll of the 2024 campaign, less than one percent of voters said health care was the most important issue to their vote [open-ended question]…Ever since Mr. Trump came down the escalator, the basic political conflict between the two parties has changed to something very different than the one that put health care at the fore…

[H]ealth care is unlikely to return to the center of American politics—not anytime soon. Oddly enough, one way to tell is that Republicans seem unusually willing to compromise on Democratic demands. This has given the impression that this shutdown is going better for the Democrats than is typical…Republicans are so willing to compromise only because opposition to government-subsidized health care is no longer a defining issue for conservatives. It’s not 2013 anymore…

[P]olitics today is about the issues that propelled the rise of conservative populism, like immigration or the backlash against “woke,” and the issues provoked by the rise of conservative populists, like executive power and democracy…[C]onservative populists—not only in the United States, but around the postindustrial world—have deliberately sought to neutralize the 20th-century debate over the social safety net…

This story on health care is part of a broader pattern in American politics during the Trump era. On issue after issue, the defining fights of the 20th-century Democratic Party have mostly been resolved, and usually resolved in favor of the Democrats…For a long time, Democrats succeeded politically by promising to protect postwar prosperity against conservatives who would roll back Medicare and Social Security, or against unfair trade deals that shipped jobs overseas. With Mr. Trump promising to protect entitlements and campaigning against free trade, this winning Democratic playbook is gone.

Trade, immigration, the rise of conservative populists and a new left, and Mr. Trump’s own actions have supplied the beginnings of a new political conflict. There’s reasonable political ground for Democrats on many of these issues, but…Democrats would rather turn back the political clock, and fight over health care.

As Cohn implies, that’s just not gonna work…and it certainly doesn’t provide “the vision thing” for 21^st century Democrats. What might?

That is a tough question Democrats should be thinking about nonstop, not falling back on chestnuts from the previous century. Probably the best ideas so far have been put forward by the loosely-organized abundance movement. But as I have noted there are some serious shortcomings to the movement as it is presently constituted: it elides brutal cultural issues where Democrats’ unpopular stances satisfy their professional class supporters but repel everyone else; it tends to privilege abundance that those supporters prize, like abundant clean energy, rather than the abundant life working-class voters are looking for; and it is more technocratic than inspirational in the way a proper vision should be.

As I suggested in that earlier piece “an emotional, morally-charged, and nationalistic drive to radically transform our failing system, promote a new era of national development and grand accomplishments and leave the Chinese in the dust” is more like it.

I am attending the Progress 2025 conference this week. It will be interesting to see if the progress movement has something like that on offer. I shall report back.

All our debates over Democratic strategy are strictly dependent on protection of our right to oppose the current administration at all, as I explained at New York:

When looking at judicial review of Trump 2.0’s many audacious power grabs, it’s easy to get bogged down and tangled up in legalisms. Constitutional law is complicated. Federal court procedures are not designed to cope with unprecedented assertions of presidential power advanced almost hourly in places all over the country.

But now a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in a ruling that halted a National Guard deployment in Chicago, wrote some sentences that cut through the fog like a powerful search light and reached the real point of contention:

“Political opposition is not rebellion. A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest. Such conduct exceeds the scope of the First Amendment, of course, and law enforcement has apprehended the perpetrators accordingly. But because rebellions at least use deliberate, organized violence to resist governmental authority, the problematic incidents in this record clearly fall within the considerable day-light between protected speech and rebellion.”

In other words, the judges (one of whom was appointed by Trump, another by George H.W. Bush) slapped down as absurd the administration’s claim that protests against ICE’s activities in Chicago constitute a “rebellion” that warrants otherwise illegal deployments of military force in a U.S. city. And neither Donald Trump nor Pete Hegseth nor Kristi Noem nor Tom Homan nor Pam Bondi can turn these protests into the equivalent of the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War, or a foreign invasion. Nor can Texas governor Greg Abbott, who is eager to send his own National Guard units to Democrat-governed Illinois in what amounts to a war between the states.

It’s increasingly clear that treating political opposition as a rebellion is at the heart of the administration’s legal case for the militarization of political conflict that goes well beyond protests against ICE raids. In MAGA-speak circa 2025, the “Democrat Party” is now the “Radical Left,” and everything it does is presumptively illegitimate and probably illegal. Just yesterday White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt bluntly asserted that “the Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” Earlier this week House Speaker Mike Johnson said the peaceful No Kings rally in Washington planned for October 18, which will feature massive displays of Old Glory and countless patriotic gestures, is insurrectionary: “This ‘Hate America’ rally that they have coming up for October 18, the antifa crowd and the pro-Hamas crowd and the Marxists, they’re all going to gather on the Mall.”

This follows onto the threats of repression broadcast by the president and by his top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Both men blamed this crime by a deranged individual on Trump opponents writ large, with Miller going so far as to suggest that calling his boss “authoritarian” was an illegal incitement to the kind of violence that murdered Kirk, and an act of “terrorism.” Trump’s subsequent executive order called for a literal war on “antifa,” the shadowy and scattered network of protesters, that is useful in the ongoing clampdown precisely because it’s nowhere and everywhere. Meanwhile, his so-called secretary of War called in the entire leadership of the U.S. armed forces to mobilize them for duty against the “enemy within.” This entire escalation of rhetoric, to be clear, is the logical culmination of the president’s relentless campaign of demonization throughout the 2024 campaign that treated opponents as anti-American, anti-Christian crooks who were deliberately destroying the country and importing millions of criminals to steal elections.

Suffusing this militant attitude is the pervasive belief in MAGA circles that Trump’s narrow 2024 victory represents a mandate to do whatever he wants. It’s unlikely, in fact, that the swing voters who pulled the lever for Trump because they wanted lower gasoline or grocery prices or better border control bought into the full Trump 2.0 agenda, which is why his job-approval numbers are well underwater. But even if they did buy the whole enchilada, the 49.8 percent of voters who backed Trump do not have the right to revoke the constitutional rights of the remaining 50.2 percent. That would be true, moreover, had the 47th president actually won the “historic landslide” he keeps mendaciously claiming.

The words of the Seventh Circuit judges really do need to become a rallying cry against the administration’s efforts to use every bit of power it can amass to silence and intimidate opponents and critics. Political opposition is not a rebellion and doesn’t justify a repression that turns half the country into suspected terrorists. This president has more than enough power to pursue his policies without ruling like a king. Enough is enough.

In this stub of his article at Jacobin, Jared Abbott explains why “It’s Still Possible to Rebuild a Working-Class Majority“:

What is the best way to build working-class power when labor’s leverage over capital is near a historic low? With private-sector union density at just 5.9 percent, the structural weakness of the labor movement imposes severe limits on progressive political possibilities in the medium term. Rebuilding labor must be a central priority of any long-term strategy. But even the most innovative organizing efforts — alongside promising tactics like ballot initiatives or worker cooperatives — cannot, on their own, deliver a major shift in class power.

Such a breakthrough requires favorable political conditions and a large working-class base that sees the value of both unions and strong government programs to expand economic security. In other words, labor organizing cannot succeed at scale without a supportive legal and political environment — one created by majoritarian coalitions capable of enacting reforms, confronting corporate power, and proving to a skeptical working class that progressive governance delivers. That kind of transformation will take years, even decades. But in the short term, building political power for working people — especially in purple and red states — is essential.

To make this possible, progressives must prioritize an economic populist approach, led by credible — ideally working-class — candidates and anchored in durable local infrastructure, particularly in the regions where they have struggled most.

Why Progressives Must Rebuild Support Among the Working Class

Progressives cannot afford to ignore the political consequences of working-class dealignment from the Democratic Party. While the magnitude of this shift varies depending on how the working class is defined, the underlying trajectory is consistent and alarming. Class dealignment is real and increasingly multiracial, especially since the 2024 election when non-white men shifted decisively toward the Republican Party.

Working-class dealignment matters for several reasons. First, it makes it much harder for progressives to win national elections. The structure of the US political system — particularly the Electoral College and the Senate — gives disproportionate power to states with large working-class electorates. Without winning back significant numbers of these voters, progressives are unlikely to secure durable governing majorities. In 2020, working-class voters (defined as those without a four-year college degree) made up the majority of the electorate in all five key swing states — and working-class whites alone constituted outright majorities in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. According to my analysis of Cooperative Election Study data, Joe Biden’s gains among working-class voters in Arizona and Georgia from 2016 to 2020 were 2.3 and 8.5 times larger, respectively, than his overall margin of victory in those states. Similarly, American National Election Study (ANES) data show that 72 percent of battleground state voters who switched parties between 2016 and 2020 were noncollege graduates. Without holding or expanding their current share of the working-class vote, Democrats’ odds of winning national majorities remain slim.

But the stakes go beyond electoral math. As political commentator Andrew Levison has argued, ceding the traditional working class to Republicans deepens the far right’s hold over communities where progressive voices have already grown scarce. In red, working-class districts, the absence of credible progressive alternatives enables the spread of far-right narratives — not just at the ballot box, but through churches, schools, social media, and everyday conversation. Once progressive ideas disappear from the local political culture, it becomes significantly harder to reestablish them. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle of alienation and extremism that threatens the social fabric and increases the political cost of inaction.

Read more here.