“You wouldn’t know it if you limited your reading to The Liberal Patriot,” Harold Meyerson writes in “The One Type of Democratic Identity Politics That Will Actually Work: If they want to win back the working class, they need to get in touch with its justifiable anger,” at The American Prospect. ” but the action these days in identity politics is all on the right. By importing white South Africans while expelling immigrants of color, by sacking the Black and female leaders of our armed forces while putting the Pentagon in the hands of a white nincompoop, by stripping the government’s archives of records of Black achievement and heroism while retaining the stories of pre-desegregation whites, Donald Trump has worked mightily to restore the white identity politics that was the norm in America before the 1960s…Electorally, the Republicans’ white identitarianism, both abetted and mitigated by their attacks on cultural elites, enabled them to capture enough working-class votes to put Trump back in the White House and win both houses of Congress. The groups benefiting (both actually or supposedly) from the Democrats’ identity politics fell short of constituting an electoral majority, while the moderately populist economics the Democrats preached and sometimes practiced didn’t put them over the top, either. Despite its failure to deliver any tangible benefits, the Republicans’ one-two punch certainly resonated with angry and frustrated electors who understood that the economic prospects—i.e., the life prospects—they confronted were far more limited than those of their parents’ generation. Nothing that mainstream Democrats had on offer touched any of that anger, or even came close…The shift of income over the past half-century from wages to investment, the decline of unions, the increasingly plutocrat-friendly character of the tax code, the corporate-and-bank control of trade policy, the ever-rising political clout of the rich—these are the real causes of the working class’s distress, and shouldn’t be all that hard for the Democrats to address, and legitimately and powerfully connect to working- and middle-class anger…It’s not as if there hasn’t been a ready-made slogan for this form of Democratic identity politics. I think “We are the 99 percent” will do quite nicely. As both policy and politics, that’s the Democrats’ road back to power.”

In “What Caused Democrats’ No-Show Problem in 2024? New data sheds light on the policy preferences of nonvoting Democrats in the last election. It may disappoint some progressives,” Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella write at The Nation: “Democrats are still trying to figure out what went wrong in the 2024 election. Did the party swing too far to the left or not far enough? Was the Democrats’ defeat due to a failure to turnout base voters or a failure to persuade swing voters?…Answers to these questions typically fall on factional lines. Center-Left analysts,like Nate Cohn or David Shor, favor the “persuasion” theory. They have long argued that Democrats failed because of the party’s inability to convince non-Democrats to vote for them, chiefly because their messaging and political positions were too progressive. Moderation or placing a greater emphasis on bread-and-butter economic issues is their suggested medicine…On the other side, progressives like The Nation’s Waleed Shahid and Kali Holloway have argued that Trump’s victory is owed to Democratic voter malaise. Because the party didn’t give their base anything to be excited about, Democrats stayed home. As Holloway concluded, “The people who really decided the 2024 election are the ones who didn’t vote at all.” These commentators’ preferred solution is to energize the base with more progressive appeals…So who’s right? It’s complicated. But new data from the Cooperative Election Study (CES) can get us closer to an answer. The CES is a high-quality survey with a sample-size large enough (60,000 respondents) to permit fine-grained comparisons between subgroups in the US adult population.

“With it,’ Guastella and Abbott continue, “we’re able to get a clearer picture of who voted and how they felt about the issues…To begin, it seems likely that the plurality of nonvoters in the 2024 presidential election were indeed Democrats, as the political scientist Jake Grumbach and his coauthors have recently shown. Here is a point for the progressives…But while “energize the base” advocates are right that more Democrats stayed home than Republicans, they assume that these nonvoters abstained because Democrats didn’t run a sufficiently progressive campaign. To get a sense of whether Democrats who sat out the 2024 presidential election might have been moved to participate if the party had offered a more left-wing policy agenda, we can compare the policy preferences and demographics of voting and nonvoting self-identified Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents…Contrary to what left-wing optimists had hoped, Democratic nonvoters in 2024 appear to have been less progressive than Democrats who voted. For instance, Democratic nonvoters were 14 points less likely to support banning assault rifles, 20 points less likely to support sending aid to Gaza, 17 points less likely to report believing that slavery and discrimination make it hard for Black Americans, 17 points more likely to support building a border wall with Mexico, 20 points more likely to support the expansion of fossil fuel production, and, sadly for economic populists, 16 points less likely to support corporate tax hikes (though this group still favored corporate tax hikes by a three to one margin). Overall, nonvoting Democrats were 18 points less likely to self-identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Here is a point for the centrists…But wait, does all this mean that nonvoting Democrats stayed home in 2024 because Democrats’ policies were tooprogressive? Not necessarily; while the CES data gives us the ability to judge issue preferences, we can’t use it to determine issue salience. That is, we don’t know which issues were most important to voters nor even if candidates’ issue positions were important factors in nonvoters’ decision to sit out the election.”

Fredreka Schouten reports that, “Shut out of power in Washington, Democrats grapple with how to win over young men and working-class voters” at CNN Politics, and notes: “One effort from a group of veteran Democrats envisions a $20 million project to woo young men. Another liberal organization is on a 20-state listening tour to reach working-class Americans…The Democratic National Committee, meanwhile, is in the throes of what its new chairman, Ken Martin, calls an extensive “postelection review” — examining not only the missteps of the party and the campaign of 2024 presidential nominee Kamala Harris but also the broad Democratic-aligned ecosystem that he said spent more than $10 billion in the last election, only to be shut out of power in Washington…Nearly seven months after Republicans won the White House and both chambers of Congress, Democrats are still coming to terms with the reasons behind their stinging defeats and looking for ways to claw back some power in next year’s midterm elections. Intraparty debates are raging about the words Democrats use, the policies they should promote and even the podcasts they join…The Democratic Party’s standing has fallen dramatically, with its favorability rating hitting 29% in March, a record low in CNN’s polling dating to 1992. That’s a drop of 20 points since January 2021, when President Donald Trump ended his first term…And a CNN poll released Sunday shows Americans are far more likely to see Republicans than Democrats as the party with strong leaders. In a further sign of trouble for the party, the CNN survey shows the dim view of Democrats’ leadership is driven by relatively weak support from their own partisans. Republican-aligned adults, for example, are 50 points likelier than Democratic-aligned adults to say their own party has strong leaders…The nonprofit arm of American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic opposition research group, has heard similar concerns from voters as part of a $4.5 million “Working Class Project” that’s taking its team to 20 states…A common perception among those in the American Bridge focus groups “is the idea that ‘Democrats don’t care about people like me, that their first, primary goal is for other groups they consider at risk, who are not like me,’” said the organization’s president, Pat Dennis.'”

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

The release of the new data and report from Catalist has underscored the extent of Hispanic defection from the Democrats over the last two presidential cycles. We’ve seen massive drops in Democratic support from pretty much every subgroup of Hispanics, albeit with some variation: working-class Hispanics more than the college-educated, women (interestingly) more than men, younger Hispanics more than older ones, and urban residents more than those in the suburbs. But all the defections have been substantial—at least 22 margin points and usually much more between 2016 and 2024.

The Catalist data are confined to standard demographic subgroups so can’t tell us about variation among Hispanics by factors such as ideology. But the Blue Rose Research data, released just prior to the Catalist data, can and the results are astonishing. According to their data, Democratic support dropped by a gobsmacking 46 points among Hispanic moderates, from +62 to +16, between 2016 and 2024. As David Shor has pointed out, Hispanic moderates’ political behavior is now quite close to that of white moderates.

What’s going on here? Here’s Patrick Ruffini’s take:

In 2020 and 2024…realignment came for nonwhite voters. A basic tenet of the Democratic Party—that of being a group-interest-based coalition—was abandoned as the party’s ideologically moderate and conservative nonwhite adherents began to peel off in a mass re-sorting of the electorate…[T]hese voters were now voting exactly how you would expect them to, given their ideologies: conservatives for the party on the right, moderates split closer to either party.

This explanation for political realignment should concern Democrats deeply, because it can’t be fixed by better messaging or more concerted outreach. The voters moving away from the Democrats are ideologically moderate to conservative. Their loyalty to the Democratic Party was formed in a time of deep racial and inter-ethnic rivalry, when throwing in with one locally dominant political party could help a once-marginalized group secure political power. The system worked well when local politics was relatively insulated from ideological divides at the national level. But this wouldn’t last forever—and national polarization now rules everything around us.

This seems exactly correct to me and makes it easier to see why Hispanic moderates increasingly resemble white moderates politically. They are voting their ideology and political views not their group identity. This is further illustrated by examining Hispanic moderates’ more specific political views.

1. Hispanic moderates think the Democrats have moved too far left. In a 2024 YouGov survey for The Liberal Patriot and Blueprint, three in five Hispanic moderates agreed the Democratic Party had moved too far left on economic issues and about the same felt they’d moved too far left on “cultural and social issues.”

2. Hispanic moderates are hawkish on illegal immigration. In the same survey, more of these voters thought “America needs to close its borders to outsiders and reduce all levels of immigration” than believed “people around the world have the right to claim asylum and America should welcome more immigrants into the country.” Most Hispanic moderates endorsed a combination of border security and more legal immigration.

Also in that survey, net support (support minus oppose) among Hispanic moderates for a proposal to “use existing presidential powers to stop illegal migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border” was 59 points (63 percent to 4 percent). Similarly, Hispanic moderates supported by 36 points restricting “the ability of migrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum.” And they backed deputizing “the National Guard and local law enforcement to assist with rapidly removing gang members and criminals living illegally in the United States” by 34 points.

3. Hispanic moderates are tough on crime and supportive of law enforcement. Hispanic moderates supported by 53 points a proposal to “increase funding for police and strengthen criminal penalties for assaulting cops.” These voters even supported by 17 points a draconian proposal to “change federal law so that drug traffickers can receive the death penalty.”

4. Hispanic moderates are opposed to Democrats’ stance on transgender issues. In a 2023 YouGov survey for The Liberal Patriot, voters were offered the following three choices:

• States should protect all transgender youth by providing access to puberty blockers and transition surgeries if desired, and allowing them to participate fully in all activities and sports as the gender of their choice;
• States should protect the rights of transgender adults to live as they want but implement stronger regulations on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors; or
• States should ban all gender transition treatments for minors and stop discussion of gender ideology in all public schools.

The first position here, emphasizing availability of medical treatments for trans-identifying children (euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming” care) and sports participation dictated by gender self-identification, is unquestionably the default position of the Democratic Party. Indeed, to dissent in any way from this position in Democratic circles is still enough to earn one the sobriquet of “hateful bigot”—or worse. Yet less than a fifth of Hispanic moderates (19 percent) endorse this position. Nearly twice as many of these voters endorse the strictest position: that medical treatments for transgender children should simply be banned, as should discussion of gender ideology in public schools. And 45 percent favor the second position, advocating stronger regulation on puberty blockers, transition surgeries, and sports participation for transgender minors. Together, the latter two positions make it four-to-one among Hispanic moderates against the Democratic position.

5. Hispanic moderates want cheap, reliable energy not a renewables revolution. Cost and reliability is what Hispanic moderates really care about when it comes to energy. Given four choices of their energy policy priorities in a 2024 YouGov climate issues survey for AEI’s Center for Technology, Science and Energy, 49 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them. Another 25 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Together that’s 74 percent of Hispanic moderates prioritizing the cost or reliability of energy. In contrast, just 21 percent thought the effect on climate of their energy consumption was most important. (Another 4 percent selected the effect on U.S. energy security).

Unsurprisingly given this pattern, it turns out that Hispanic moderates just don’t care very much about the climate change issue. In the survey, voters were asked to assess their priorities for the government to address in the coming year. Among 18 options, climate change ranked 14th, beating out only global trade, drug addiction, racial issues, and the problems of poor people.

In terms of general energy strategy, when presented with a choice among three options—a rapid green energy transition, an “all of the above” energy policy, and emphasizing fossil fuels—Hispanic moderates strongly prefer an “all of the above” approach to energy policy including oil, gas, renewables, and nuclear. Only a fifth support a rapid transition to renewables—actually less than support flat-out stopping the renewables push. Hispanic moderates’ preference for an “all of the above” energy strategy is reinforced by their answers to a binary question asking if they preferred using a mix of energy sources versus phasing out fossil fuels. The overwhelming judgement: 71 to 29 percent against eliminating fossil fuels.

No wonder these voters favor by 34 points more domestic production of fossil fuels like oil and gas.

Consider that moderates are the dominant ideological group among Hispanics, far larger than either liberals and conservatives. These views are the views of the Hispanic median voter. Democrats ignore that at their peril—they will either adjust or risk losing even more support among Hispanics who are no longer content to vote their identity.

The following article, “What Do Black Working Class Voters Say About the Democratic Party? What we’ve heard in seven Black voter focus groups across five states” 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.

Last week, we shared new focus group data from Latino voters in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas that found serious concerns with Democrats’ priorities.

This week, we are sharing insights we’ve gathered in focus groups with Black working class voters across five states.

Catalist’s new report analyzing 2024 voter data found that Democratic support among Black voters nationally dropped 11 points from 2012 to 2024 – and even larger, 16 points among Black men.

Among young Black voters, the erosion is even greater – with Democratic support dropping 12 points overall, and nearly 20 points among young Black men.

While Black voters still overwhelmingly back Democrats, this slippage raises questions about why their support is eroding – and what Democrats can do about it.

To better understand, we held focus groups with Black men and women in five states – Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Of the 52 voters we heard from, 11 switched from supporting Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024, 8 voted third party in both elections, and two didn’t vote at all. Anyone who was screened into the groups had expressed negative feelings towards Democrats, indicating they were persuadable voters in the 2026 midterms.

Here’s some of what we heard…

DISILLUSIONMENT WITH THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY FOR NOT DELIVERING RESULTS

Relatedly, many of the Black men we heard from seem to believe that Democrats pander to their racial identities as Black men but fail to speak to their economic identities, which alienates them from the party. As one man in North Carolina succinctly put it, “At my age, I don’t care if I’m not included. I wanna make my money. I wanna be able to support my family.” Similarly, some voters, especially the men, expressed concern that Democrats were more focused on what they saw as helping poor Black people with handouts than on helping Black working people gain upward economic mobility.

And like we have heard in almost all our working class focus groups so far, many Black voters, especially Black men, believe that the Democratic Party has become too “woke.” They viewed Democrats as overly focused on liberal cultural wars that, at best, they don’t feel impacted by and, at worst, they deeply disagree with.

DEMOCRATS ARE SEEN AS WEAK

Many of the Black voters we heard from who were inclined to support Democrats were frustrated by their sense that Democrats were “soft,” seeing them as failing to fight for – or stand for – anything.

This overall sense of Democrats’ weakness almost certainly feeds into the perception that Democrats aren’t delivering results.

MANY STILL BELIEVE SOME POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES ABOUT DEMOCRATS – OFFERING A BASELINE FOR REGAINING TRUST

RESULTS ARE KEY TO REBUILDING TRUST AND REGAINING SUPPORT

Encouragingly, many of the working class Black voters we heard from were not as hardened against the Democratic Party as many other groups we’ve heard from so far. Some still expressed optimism that they can find reasons to support Democrats in the future. Yes, they’ve become disillusioned by Democrats’ ineffectiveness, and like many of the other groups we’ve heard from, they are growing concerned with Democrats’ priorities. They think Democrats don’t deliver, but still beg for their vote come election time. But they still maintain some positive associations with the party and primarily express a desire to see Democrats be strong and focused on tangible results, especially on economic issues.

With so many Black working class voters saying they don’t see Democrats making an impact to improve their lives, it’s clear Democrats need to do better at showing real deliverables to help them. And we’ve consistently heard from Black voters that they want Democrats to focus more on upward economic mobility and a little less on social issues, even if they agree those are important. Democrats also should make Black men’s economic aspirations a higher priority.

It’s clear that, with these voters – like many others we’ve heard from – it is important for Democrats to articulate bolder visions of what they are for and demonstrate more grit in fighting for it.

Being old and all, I remember a lot of intra-Democratic arguments over the decades. An allegedly brand new one brought back memories, as I explained at New York:

If you are an aficionado of wonky policy debates, or perhaps if you are a civically active Californian, you may have heard there’s a debate going on in left-of-center circles over a so-called “Abundance Agenda.” That term was coined in 2022 by Derek Thompson, whose recent book with Ezra Klein, entitled Abundance, has helped raise interest (and some hackles) over its tenets. Put briefly, “abundance” advocates believe progressive politics needs to be refocused around producing public and private goods that broadly raise living standards, instead of insisting on narrow and legalistic group agendas that often frustrate the operations of government, particularly with respect to prosperity-enhancing public projects.

The leading edge of this debate has been the issue that is in danger of consuming California politics: the massive regulatory and legal obstacles to creating an adequate supply of affordable housing for sale or rent. But as my former colleague Jonathan Chait points out at The Atlantic, the recent experience of the Biden administration has really intensified concerns that progressives are sabotaging themselves by embracing interest-group-driven roadblocks to getting things done:

“Biden had anticipated, after quickly signing his infrastructure bill and then two more big laws pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into manufacturing and energy, that he would spend the rest of his presidency cutting ribbons at gleaming new bridges and plants. But only a fraction of the funds Biden had authorized were spent before he began his reelection campaign, and of those, hardly any yielded concrete results.

“More than two years after signing the infrastructure law, Biden was ‘expressing deep frustration that he can’t show off physical construction of many projects that his signature legislative accomplishments will fund,’ CNN reported. The nationwide network of electric-vehicle-charging stations amounted to just 58 new stations by the time Biden left office. The average completion date for road projects, according to the nonprofit news site NOTUS, was mid-2027. The effort to bring broadband access to rural America, a centerpiece of Biden’s plan to show that he would work to help the entire country and not just the parts that had voted for him, had connected zero customers.”

The fateful failure of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda contributed, of course, to the opportunity Donald Trump had to become president again and launch his own very different BBB. And as Chait observed, that realization led to a lot of reconsiderations of prior assumptions:

“Policy wonks, mostly liberal ones, began to ask why public tasks that used to be doable no longer were. How could a government that once constructed miracles of engineering—the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge—ahead of schedule and under budget now find itself incapable of executing routine functions? Why was Medicare available less than a year after the enabling legislation passed, when the Affordable Care Act’s individual-insurance exchange took nearly four years to come online (and had to survive a failed website)? And, more disturbing, why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?”

The obvious conclusion is that if “the government has tied itself in knots … enormous amounts of prosperity could be unleashed by simply untying them.” But “untying them” would offend the progressive interest and identity groups who had built up an edifice of safeguards against potentially abusive government power, and whose entire approach to politics involved defending each other’s regulatory and legal turf. So any effort to ride roughshod over these safeguards, even in the most unimpeachably progressive causes like battling homelessness, has drawn a lot of fire from the left and “the groups” (as various interest and identity advocates are often called).

The rivalry between “common purpose” liberals seeking to do good things quickly through government, and progressives affiliated with various “groups,” is a lot older than the arguments over “abundance.” Reading Chait’s description of a progressivism that “seeks to maintain solidarity among its component groups, expecting each to endorse the positions taken by the others” reminded me instantly of one of the best political speeches I ever heard, at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who said his piece before delivering his endorsement to party presidential nominee Michael Dukakis:

“When I was a child growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, my grandmama could not afford a blanket, she didn’t complain and we did not freeze. Instead she took pieces of old cloth — patches, wool, silk, gabardine, crockersack — only patches, barely good enough to wipe off your shoes with. But they didn’t stay that way very long. With sturdy hands and a strong cord, she sewed them together into a quilt, a thing of beauty and power and culture. Now, Democrats, we must build such a quilt.

“Farmers, you seek fair prices and you are right — but you cannot stand alone. Your patch is not big enough. Workers, you fight for fair wages, you are right — but your patch of labor is not big enough. Women, you seek comparable worth and pay equity, you are right — but your patch is not big enough.”

And on through the litany of groups he went … students … Blacks and Hispanics … gays and lesbians, in every case their “patch” was not big enough alone. Jesse Jackson’s very clear vision was a Democratic Party that was a coalition of groups linking arms to protect their stuff, their solidarity more important than any particular thing that they might do together. And that’s the entrenched and emotionally compelling point of view the abundance advocates are trying to overcome. It’s a struggle that is also evident in separate discussions over the morality of policy positions that leave any vulnerable group less than fully empowered, such as restricting athletic opportunities for transgender women, a wildly popular but deeply offensive position from the point of view of progressive solidarity.

But here’s the thing: The current emergency created by Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory has given the abundance camp a powerful new argument. Had Joe Biden been able to implement his BBB and show results, might his performance on the economy have been viewed as superior to Trump’s? Possibly so. And if Democrats during his administration had made a visible effort to “reinvent government” to make it more efficient, would hostility to bureaucracy and alleged “runaway government spending” have been a potent issue for Trump? Possibly not.

What we do know is that Trump’s victory gave us an administration that is systematically working to destroy all the causes “the groups” hold dear. A total revocation of environmental regulations is underway in an ongoing frenzy to “drill baby drill.”  “Civil rights” are beingredefined as exclusively for the protection of straight white Christians and Jews, while transgender folk are literally being defined out of existence. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is blowing up government and delegitimizing the very idea of public service. Everyone’s “patch is not big enough” today, but out-of-power Democrats can’t do much about it. “The groups” might develop an overriding stake in making things work and restoring the credibility of both the public sector and the progressive movement that built it over the decades. It could mean political as well as economic abundance for all.

 

From “The Psychology of Party Decline” by John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot: “A key aspect of groupthink is the suppression of dissenting voices and rejection of information that doesn’t fit the group’s consensus. Members of both parties and people in a multitude of different institutions are susceptible to this particular psychological malady. After 2020, Democrats didn’t want to hear about the effects of their party’s screwy cultural program on working-class voters, so they didn’t look for it or attacked people who made these arguments as insufficiently committed to the partisan cause. Democrats also didn’t want to hear about reams of polling data and qualitative studies showing that their core campaign themes around “Bidenomics” and threats to abortion rights and democracy didn’t resonate with key voting groups that would ultimately decide the election. So, the leading party members said decline wasn’t happening or told people to yell louder about how good the economy was doing and how much of a threat Trump was to reproductive choice and democracy. Both of these approaches proved to be losing strategies, as was predicted by many party dissidents and neutral analysts at the time…But if a party can’t or won’t confront its own debilitating psychological deficiencies, it will never improve. The road to recovery starts with Democrats learning how to accept and analyze the mounds of data and election results showing that large numbers of Americans no longer trust the party, don’t like many of its candidates, and disagree with much of the party’s recent economic and cultural agenda. Donald Trump figured out how to exploit these weaknesses, even with his own manifest problems accepting reality.”

In his New York Times opinion essay, “‘I Even Believe He Is Destroying the American Presidency’,” Thomas B. Edsall spotlights some troubling questions about America’s future because of Trump’s mismanagement: “Paul Rosenzweig, a deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and a lecturer in law at George Washington University, was even more pessimistic, writing in an email that he feared that…the damage is permanent. Not because it cannot be fixed — it can be with effort. But rather because nobody will ever trust the United States again that something Trump-like won’t recur. Would you as a young person take a federal job today? Would you as a foreign student trust that you could attend university in the United States safely? Would you as a European government trust the United States to maintain the security of your secrets?” Tough questions and good talking points for Democrats in making the case for voting against Republicans and for Democrats next year.

“With Republicans holding competitive, eat-their-own primaries in the midterms next year, Democrats in the South see an opening to court moderates who are souring on the GOP,” Liz Crampton writes in “Democrats are looking to make gains in the South next year. It could be their last shot. A new class of Democratic party chairs see repairing the party’s relationship with the working class as key to its political comeback” at Politico. “In Texas, state Attorney General Ken Paxton is challenging the establishment-aligned Sen. John Cornyn, and the Georgia GOP primary field is quickly becoming crowded as Republicans attempt to oust Sen. Jon Ossoff. While holding Georgia will be tough and flipping Texas even harder, there’s still an opportunity for the left…A new class of Democratic leaders in the South is pitching voters on their party’s proposals to lower costs and increase wages, while casting blame on Republicans for an unsettled economy under President Donald Trump. They say that strategy is key not just for the midterms, but part of solving an existential threat for Democrats if they want to stand a chance in coming years at regaining national power…Longer-term population shifts in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas that went to Trump in November mean those states are poised to gain congressional and Electoral College seats. Florida — which many Democrats concede is a solidly GOP state — could also expand its influence. Democrats in these states are now warning that failing to mount a comeback could mean that winning the White House after the 2030 Census would be far more difficult…The fix, according to a dozen Democratic leaders in the South, is to refocus the Democratic Party on the economy and border security — two areas of strength historically for the GOP. Kendall Scudder, a 35-year-old progressive who took over the Texas Democratic Party in March, said Democrats must “do everything we can to show that when we get out of bed in the morning, we eat glass to fight back and protect the working people of this state.”

Also at Politico, check out “Dems roll out ads hitting Republicans on Medicaid,” in which Elena Schneider writes: “Democrats are preparing to launch an ad war against Republicans over President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”…House Majority Forward, the nonprofit affiliated with House Democratic leadership and House Majority PAC, will start running digital ads next week attacking House Republicans voting to cut Medicaid spending, according to a spokesperson for the group. The ads will appear in 25 battleground districts in California, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin…Protect Our Care, another Democrat-aligned group, has already spent $10 million on Medicaid-related TV ads in swing seats, and they’re planning to expand on that ad buy next week, according to a person directly familiar with the decision who was granted anonymity to speak freely. Unrig Our Economy, another Democratic group, is already airing a radio ad attacking Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) for her vote to move the bill out of committee, and they’re expected to run more ads like it against Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-N.J.) and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.)…“The core argument in the midterms and the TLDR on this budget is it’s the largest cut to Medicaid in history,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “As people find that out, they know it’s not a nipping or tucking of the program, it’s a fucking of the people on it.”

Sometimes the job of a political writer is to knock down ludicrous ideas. I took on one of the latest examples at New York:

Four months after his inauguration, Donald Trump’s second administration is facing several trials and troubles that could determine whether it’s a success or a failure. There’s the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (the official name, believe it or not), the House version of the budget-reconciliation bill meant to implement Trump’s legislative agenda, which struggled to passage last week and faces new problems in the Senate. There are the legal challenges to a vast number of Trump power grabs. And there’s the anxious waiting game to see if the president’s tariff program will goose consumer prices, shake markets, and possibly even trigger a recession.

With so many fraught matters up in the air, you have to figure that Republicans were thrilled at the chance to shift the focus to Joe Biden.

This opportunity emerged from two sources. The first was the intense promotion of a classic Washington insider tell-all book, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again. The second was the sad announcement that the former president has been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer. Unanswered questions about the discovery of Biden’s cancer, and whether it could have or should have been disclosed to the public earlier, led Republicans to ask (sometimes after pro forma expressions of sympathy) if there had been some sort of “cover-up.”

The question of Biden’s fitness to finish his first term as president and run for a second is obviously legitimate. Democrats are as interested in this issue as Republicans; they spent many months debating how big a problem Biden’s age might become, and then how to cope when his health issues became manifest during a crucial presidential debate. Precisely for that reason, the idea that Biden’s condition was some sort of closely held secret that required a vast conspiracy to hide is a bit absurd, as Mark Leibovich noted in The Atlantic:

“It’s pretty much impossible to ‘cover up’ for something that is hiding in plain sight. Democrats could trot out as many White House officials as they wanted to claim I was with the president just this morning, and he was sharp as a tack and running circles around staffers less than half his age. But whenever Biden was allowed to go out in public—a rarity, which itself was a red flag—the public’s preexisting consensus about his infirmity was only reinforced.”

It’s kind of like Trump’s unhinged social-media posts. I don’t know the exact process behind this habit or whether anyone in his circle tries to restrain him, but it cannot be covered up.

Yet excited journalists, presumably egged on by Republican politicians and maybe even some Democrats who want pots stirred, are already speculating that “the Biden cover-up” could loom over the 2028 presidential election. You know, the election that will happen over three years from now, which in Trump years is like three decades. Here’s how The Hill put it:

“Former President Biden’s cancer diagnosis has done little to quell concerns about his decision to run for reelection, and many in the party acknowledge the issue is likely to dog them as they look toward 2028. …

“While the news of Biden’s illness was met with an outpouring of condolences from both sides of the aisle, it also sparked new questions surrounding the Biden team’s handling of his health and underscored the degree to which scrutiny over the former president will persist through the next White House election.

“’I think Democrats, whoever they are, need to be ready for this question,’ Democratic strategist Maria Cardona said of attention on Biden’s 2024 decisions.”

An Associated Press item even predicted that the issue would “become a litmus test for the next leaders in his party.”

Assuming the beginning of Trump 2.0 is any indication of what is to come, assessments of the 47th president, not the 46th, are going to dominate the next midterm elections and then the next presidential cycle as never before, and that’s saying a lot. Keep in mind that in 2024, millions of persuadable voters had dismissed as irrelevant or as ancient news the fact that one of the two major-party candidates had spoken provocatively about a “stolen election” to a mob that then sacked the U.S. Capitol. In 2028, they are not going to be dwelling on what Democrats knew or didn’t know in 2024 about Biden’s mental acuity or possible cancer diagnosis.

Some 2028 Democratic presidential candidates will likely hail from far-away state capitals where they were not in a position to closely monitor the president’s ability to remember names or work into the late evening. And even Democratic members of Congress or Cabinet members had at most episodic interactions with the 46th president. Unless some member of Biden’s family or someone from the inner core of his White House staff runs for president, candidates will likely be able to brush off questions about his mental state, much as Pete Buttigieg did this week by saying Biden was no worse in private than in public, as far as he knew.

This doesn’t mean that Biden’s physical and mental condition and allegations of a “cover-up” won’t live on as urgent topics in MAGA-land. It’s like the various scandals real and imagined that hounded Bill and Hillary Clinton; assorted contrived conspiracy theories involving Barack Obama’s place of birth, upbringing, and teleprompter use; and the invidious narratives built up on social media and book-length “exposés” about other devil figures in the conservative imagination, from George Soros to Nancy Pelosi to Kamala Harris. The Biden “cover-up” will always serve as Republican porn, a bad-faith question to fire at Democrats when nothing else is available. But if swing voters in 2028 are still thinking about it, that means Democrats will have done a terrible job of giving them something else to think about.

 

Some excerpts from “The Democratic Party Is Literally Dying” by Jeet Heer at The Nation:

The following article, “The Democrats’ Great Debates: How to contain Trump and defend democracy? What to stand for affirmatively as an opposition party?,” by Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School, is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

There are now two parallel debates about the role and future of the Democratic Party. One has to do with how fiercely and by what means Democrats should resist Trump. The other is about what Democrats should stand for going forward.

For a time, the accommodationists in the party had a modicum of credibility. Maybe there were areas of common ground?

That posture was undermined by Trump’s increasing destructiveness and his habit of making a deal and then demanding more. Advocates of having the Democrats stand back and let Trump destroy himself, such as James Carville, now look silly.

The coup de grâce was the extraordinary April 27 speech by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a man known more as a liberal than a radical but now sounding like Bernie Sanders on steroids. Space precludes my quoting the entire speech, but you owe it to yourself to watch it. In part, Pritzker said:

I understand the tendency to give in to despair right now. But despair is an indulgence that we cannot afford in the times upon which history turns. Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now.

These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox, and then punish them at the ballot box. They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact—because we have no alternative but to do just that—that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors.

Cowardice can be contagious. But so too can courage.

After that speech, I don’t know how any self-respecting Democrat can say we need to seek common ground, or argue as Carville does that Democrats should just get out of the way and wait for Trump to fail.

The other great debate among Democrats is over what Democrats should stand for affirmatively. And that ideological debate is substantially a proxy for the fight over how much influence Wall Street Democrats should have in dictating the party program.

The ideology of neoliberalism—deregulation of finance, globalization on corporate terms, fiscal conservatism—ruined the Democrats as a credible tribune of working people and set us on the road to Trump. There was a real-time test of neoliberalism as economic policy for all but the rich, and it failed. But neoliberalism is the zombie that won’t die.

We see that on an intellectual level with forays like that of Jason Furman, the sidekick of Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, with a widely quoted piece in Foreign Affairs magazine attacking Biden’s industrial policy as ineffective and inflationary. The piece, which could win some kind of award for sheer intellectual dishonesty, was demolished by several point-by-point rebuttals, most effectively by Jared Bernstein.

The New York Times, in an appalling roundtable piece titled “How Four Democrats Who Saved the Party Before Would Do It Again,” gave space to four architects of the Clinton neoliberal strategy to argue that the road back to power for the Democrats was to learn from Clinton’s “New Democrat” success. Please. Clinton, in the words of the title of a definitive book co-authored by Nelson Lichtenstein was a “Fabulous Failure.” Aided by Rubin and Summers, Clinton brought us financial deregulation, which in turn brought us the 2008 financial collapse.

And then Obama, having fatally brought back the Rubin-Summers-Furman economic team, understimulated a deeply depressed economy, bailed out the banks rather than cleaning them out, pivoted to deficit reduction in 2009 long before the economy was back to full employment, and tried to double down on corporate free trade. Obama was admirable in many ways, but his economic program was not one of them. And the economic wreckage for regular people led directly to Trump.

The kindest thing this crew could do would be to just shut up. But of course they are not going away. For them, Biden’s interventionist program was a temporary anomaly, and the task is to get back to the true path of neoliberalism.

Of course, that sort of program will not inspire voters. It would have little credibility, except for the fact that it serves the interests of immensely powerful people. And behind the ostensible battle of ideas is a raw battle of power—how much sway will Wall Street Democrats have in defining what the party of the people stands for?

The curtain was pulled back on the real debate last week on a shameful bipartisan bill called the GENIUS Act, giving even more license to crypto. This piece by our colleague David Dayen tells the full story. Several Democrats have signed on to the crypto bill, not out of principle but because the crypto industry has spread around so much money to so many legislators of both parties. The bill was greased for quick passage in the Senate.

But then Trump, with unerring timing, unveiled his latest stablecoin, called USD1, a grotesque example of the conflicts of interest that permeate the crypto industry. And so several embarrassed Democrats, with a helpful push by Dayen’s investigative reporting, got off the bill, which is stalled—but only for the moment. It is likely to pass, with Democrats only getting an amendment on stopping Trump’s corruption that is designed to fail.

Unfortunately, this useful and instructive fiasco is the exception. Corporate influence on Democrats remains widespread and substantially hidden.

If the party of the people is to regain credibility with the people, it needs to escape this corporate captivity. Democrats need to sponsor policies that are more persuasive as measures to improve the lives of regular people than Trump’s policies. Should that be so hard?

Joseph O’Sullivan notes that “Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is on a quest to bring back the Blue Dogs: The Democratic congresswoman’s strategy of appealing to working-class rural moderates won her Washington’s 3rd District,” and asks. “Will it work anywhere else?” at cascadepbs.org. As O’Sullivan explains, “Standing beneath towering shelves of kegs in the back of Vancouver’s Loowit Brewing, U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has just given a thank-you talk to her supporters after squeaking through another tight election. As she wraps up her remarks in that December gathering and pauses for questions, a man in the crowd speaks up: “I’d like to see you expand the Blue Dog Coalition … I think that’s exactly what we need at the broader level.”…The Blue Dog Coalition, an ever-shifting group of moderate and independent House Democrats, might not be a household name. But it’s not the first time the auto-mechanic-turned-congresswoman, who won reelection even as her southwestern Washington District voted for President Donald Trump, has heard a comment like this… “I have had so many people come up to me in D.C., and be like, ‘Hey, you know, I think we should, like, maybe start something that’s oriented around people in the trades and who are working for a living,” Gluesenkamp Perez said to the crowd. “And I’ll slowly put on my Blue Dogs hat, ‘Like you mean what we’ve been doing?’”…In 2022, Gluesenkamp Perez’s first win shocked the political world. A young mother, auto-shop owner and Latina from rural Skamania County with little political support managed to win an open seat that had been held by a Republican for a decade…As the Democratic Party struggles to respond to its November losses, aging leadership and the Trump administration’s aggressive attempts to expand executive power and impose its will, Gluesenkamp Perez and the handful of Blue Dogs are offering a different brand of politics to expand the party’s tent…The congresswoman and her colleagues are also trying to do something more ambitious than next year’s elections: They want to deliver a policy agenda that serves working people and brings more rural voters back to the Democratic Party for the long term.”

O’Sullivan adds, further, “Retaking the House might be the easiest of Democrats’ challenges, with the party needing to pick up just three seats in a midterm cycle – when the president’s party often loses seats…But as population growth has shifted toward big, Republican-leaning states and the GOP’s redistricting efforts have made it harder for Democrats to win, the party faces a steep challenge in expanding their appeal. One need only look at the U.S. Senate, where on paper, Democrats have little discernible path to a majority in the near future…It remains to be seen whether Gluesenkamp Perez’s political approach will translate beyond Washington’s 3rd Congressional District – which includes all of Clark, Cowlitz, Lewis, Pacific, Skamania and Wahkiakum counties as well as a nibble of Thurston County. Meanwhile, when the representative defends her seat again next year, she’ll face a new dynamic…Late last month at a Vancouver town hall, the congresswoman drew protests and anger from constituents upset about her vote for the SAVE Act, a Republican-sponsored bill aimed at securing elections from voter fraud. Gluesenkamp Perez will have to hold together her fragile coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans against what is likely to be a fresh GOP opponent…In a phone interview a few hours after she questioned Bessent, the congresswoman said that “Tariffs are one tool, but to actually bring back domestic manufacturing is going to require, you know, some of the antitrust work.”…”It’s gonna require permitting reform,” she added. “It’s gonna require shop class in junior high.”…That Gluesenkamp Perez and other Blue Dogs, like Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, don’t necessarily reject some Trump policies might leave some Democrats with heartburn – but that’s part of their appeal to voters in conservative-leaning districts.”…Today, there are 10 Blue Dogs, hailing from Texas, New Jersey, California, Maine, Washington and Georgia.” Make this entire article your must-read for the day.

In “How Trump’s megabill transfers wealth in the US,” Tami Luhby and Zachary B. Wolf report at CNN Politics: “Here’s a look at how the “one big, beautiful bill” takes benefits from lower-income Americans in order to cut taxes, primarily for the wealthy…But CBO’s initial estimates found that the package’s tax measures would increase the deficit by $3.8 trillion over a decade, while other provisions would cut nearly $1 trillion in federal support for Medicaid and food stamps over that period…Medicaid, which provides health insurance to low-income Americans, would face the largest cuts in the package, with CBO projecting a nearly $700 billion reduction in federal spending. Meanwhile, food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, would face a $267 billion cut in federal support…The bill would also increase spending for defense, immigration enforcement and homeland security, while pulling back on federal spending in some other areas…Overall, the bill would add $3.1 trillion to the nation’s debt, including interest, over the next decade, according to an early independent analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget…Cuts to Medicaid and food stamps would decrease government support for low-income Americans, while tax reductions would benefit high-income households in the coming years, according to a Congressional Budget Office report…Currently, if Congress doesn’t act, most Americans would see their taxes increase because the individual income tax cuts from the 2017 bill are set to expire at the end of this year. The House package would make permanent essentially all of those provisions.” Read more here.

However, Democrats do have an opportunity to exploit divisions among Senate  Republicans, as Ed Pilkington reports at The Guardian: “Donald Trump has been warned by fiscal hawks within his own party in the US Senate that he must “get serious” about cutting government spending and reducing the national debt or else they will block the passage of his signature tax-cutting legislation known as the “big, beautiful bill”…Ron Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin who rose to prominence as a fiscal hardliner with the Tea Party movement, issued the warning to the president on Sunday. Asked by CNN’s State of the Union whether his faction had the numbers to halt the bill, he replied: “I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit.”…Trump has invested a large portion of his political capital in the massive package. It extends the 2017 tax cuts from his first administration in return for about $1tn in benefits cuts including reductions in the health insurance scheme for low-income families, Medicaid, and to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) food stamps….The bill squeaked through US House by just one vote on Thursday. It now faces a perilous welcome in the upper legislative chamber…Sunday’s admonitions from prominent senators angered by the failure to address the budget deficit bodes ill for Trump’s agenda given the tightness of the Republicans’ congressional majorities. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, can afford to lose only three votes from among his party’s 53…Thune has indicated that changes to the bill might be needed to bring refuseniks on side. That in turn could present the House speaker, Mike Johnson, with a headache.”

Farewell to the “rising American electorate.”

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:

Right after the 2024 election, I wrote the following based on the limited data that were available at the time:

At one point in the initial rollout of Harris’s campaign, there was much happy (joyful?) talk of getting the band back together—the return of the mighty Obama coalition. The “rising American electorate” would have its revenge on Trump, the Republicans, and their retrograde supporters from declining demographics.

That’s not exactly how it worked out. Instead, Trump won every swing state and the election, carried the national popular vote and made dramatic headway among key demographics that were supposed to buoy the rising American electorate. In short, the rising American electorate didn’t rise, it crashed.

As Democrats dig out from their debacle, it’s important for them to understand just how far away they now are from the salad days of the Obama coalition. In 12 short years, they have lost two of three elections to Donald Trump and huge chunks of support from key demographics, including most of their rising constituencies. They need to face the uncomfortable fact that not only did the Obama coalition not come back, it’s likely never coming back. It’s time for a new coalitional strategy—a strategy that starts with rebuilding their support among working-class Americans of all races and forcefully jettisoning all the political baggage that is preventing them from doing so.

Since then, a lot more data have been released including just this week Catalist’s detailed estimates of demographic group performance and trends in the 2024 election. How does my analysis hold up in light of these more complete and reliable data? Pretty darn good I think. Here are some of the particulars from the new Catalist data which illustrate the extent of the Democratic coalition’s decline since 2012 (all figures based on the two party vote). There’s no sugar-coating it: these are disturbing data for a party that thought it was on the verge of a lengthy period of political dominance and now can’t beat a deeply flawed and widely disliked candidate like Trump.

Black voters. Obama carried black voters in 2012 by an amazing 93 points. Harris managed only a 71-point margin. Democratic decline: 22 points.

Latino voters. Obama carried Latinos by 35 points; in 2024, the Democratic margin was down to just 8 points. Democratic decline: 27 points. It is interesting that the overall decline since 2012 is fairly similar between blacks and Latinos; however, essentially all of the decline for Latinos was post-2016 while the black decline has been more or less continuous.

Working-class (non-college) voters overall. Obama was the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the working class as a whole (2-point margin); every presidential election since then has seen steadily worsening Democratic performance among these voters. In 2024, Democrats lost them by a solid 10-point margin. Democratic decline: 12 points.

White working-class voters. The traditional trouble spot for Democrats; Obama lost them by 20 points, which went up to 27 points in this election. Democratic decline: 7 points (which contrasts with the 8-point gain over the time period with white college-educated voters). However, the white working-class decline pales in magnitude when compared to the decline among nonwhite working-class voters.

Nonwhite working-class voters. Obama cleaned up among nonwhite working-class voters, carrying them by 64 points in 2012. In the 2024 election the margin was down to 32 points, exactly cutting the 2012 Democratic advantage in half. This is perhaps the most remarkable trend of them all. A Democratic Party that can’t keep voters that are both nonwhite and working class in the fold is a Democratic Party whose presumed purpose is rapidly vanishing.

Latino working-class voters. The primary locus of this decline was among Latino working-class voters. These voters gave Obama a 38-point advantage in 2024, much higher than among the Latino college-educated. In 2024 this crashed to a mere 6-point advantage for Harris. Democratic decline: 33 points, two and a half times the decline among the Hispanic college-educated.

Young voters. Obama carried voters under 30 by 25 points; in 2024, the Democratic margin fell to 11 points. Democratic decline: 14 points.

Of course, this is comparing an age group that had a different generational composition in the two elections. But this should provide little comfort to Democrats. The 18-29 year old age group in the 2024 election was composed almost entirely of Gen Z voters, supposedly the leading edge of a generational shift that would make the voting pool ever more Democratic. In 2012, the 18-29 year olds who provided Obama’s 25-point margin were all members of the Millennial generation. In 2024, those Millennial voters were entirely contained in the 30-44 year old age group, where Democrats eked out only a 5-point advantage. So much for the generational theory of political dominance.

Black young voters. Black voters under 30 gave Obama a 91-point margin in 2012. Harris carried them by a comparatively modest 66 points. Democratic decline: 25 points.

Latino young voters. In 2012, Obama dominated Hispanic voters under 30 by 51 points. In 2024, the Democratic margin among these voters was just 14 points. Democratic decline: 37 points.

Male voters. Obama lost male voters in 2012 by 5 points; in 2024 the Democratic deficit among men reached 16 points. Democratic decline: 11 points. It’s important to note that the Democratic advantage among women was essentially the same over the two elections. Therefore, while it is true that the gender gap has widened over the time period (from 16 to 27 points), the widening of the gender gap between 2012 and 2024 is entirely attributable to Democrats doing worse among men, not to doing better among women. This is an uncomfortable fact for Democrats to face, but face it they must.

Black male voters. While black female voters have also shifted right over time, the shift among black men has been far larger—about two and a half times the size. In 2012, Obama carried black men by 91 points; the Democratic margin crashed to 58 points in 2024. Democratic decline: 33 points.

Latino male voters. Latino men have also shifted harder right than their female counterparts. Obama enjoyed a 25-point advantage among Hispanic men in 2012. In the 2024 election, Harris actually lost these voters by 6 points. Democratic decline: 32 points.

The “rising American electorate” strategy has failed. So much for Plan A. We’ll see if the Democrats have a Plan B. On current evidence, I’m not optimistic.

Read this article at The Liberal Patriot.