Media coverage of the outcome of the 2024 presidential election does not point to a good year for women in politics. Despite widespread anger about the Dobbs decision, Kamala Harris was defeated, while Trump won a healthy majority of male voters. But Harris did win the votes of women by a margin of 10 percentage points, vs. 13 for Hillary Clinton and 15 percent of Biden. However, Harris lost white women voters by a margin of 5 percent.

Looking at the 2024 elections in general, it was a pretty good year for women in politics. As Simone Pathe, Renee Rigdon and Arit John write in “Fewer women will serve on Capitol Hill, but they’re setting new records in the states” at CNN Politics,

While Vice President Kamala Harris fell short of the Oval Office, women in executive office are setting a record – with 13 female governors set to serve in 2025 after the election of Republican Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire. (President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, however, could change that.)

Further down the ticket, 2,467 women across the country will serve in state legislatures – more than ever before, according to CAWP. That’s still just about a third of legislators – more than the roughly quarter of Congress that is female – but similarly far short of the 53% of the 2024 electorate that was female.

Further, “94 Democratic women were elected to the House, while 31 Republican women were elected, fewer than the 34 who served on Election Day 2024. Overall, Democratic women far outnumber Republican women in Congress.”

Pathe, Rigdon and John add that “More than half of [state] legislators in Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado will be women, as a result of the 2024 general election. And 12 states are in the range of 40%-50%, nearing equal representation….Women are expected to be about 50% of Democratic state legislators, according to CAWP’s preliminary data, but only about 20% of Republican legislators….Three states will have majority-women legislatures in 2025: Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. All of them have Democratic majorities and, as Dittmar noted, they have state-based programs to recruit and help female candidates.”

Looking toward the next elections, it’s hard to sort out the strategic implications of the way women voted in 2024, other than the conclusion that growing percentages of women in state legislatures should eventually produce increased acceptance of women statewide candidates, which is probably good for Democrats. At the presidential level, Harris came within 1.6 percent of winning the popular vote, close, but still a consolation prize, as long as the Electoral College continues to distort U.S. politics.

As a longtime Georgian and longtime observer of the 39th president, I wrote an obituary of the remarkable Jimmy Carter for New York:

Jimmy Carter was America’s oldest ex-president and had by far the longest former presidency. Indeed, his remarkable life — which ended today after 100 years — can be divided into the stretches before (38 years) and after (43 years) he held public office, with a comparatively short stretch of public service (four in the Georgia state senate, four as governor, and four as president, plus a couple of stints of campaigning) between those two eras. While his ascent to the presidency was in many respects astonishing, his record as a politician was at best mixed: He won one statewide political contest in Georgia and lost one, then won one presidential election and lost one. Assessments of his presidency never quite turned positive in hindsight, and for many years he continued to hold controversial positions on the ultimate hot-button international concern, the Middle East. Most recently, the return of inflation in the early 2020s brought back memories of one of the more painful aspects of his administration’s record.

Yet the man always known by the informal name of Jimmy became and remained a beloved figure in his postpresidency, owing in no small part to his dogged efforts to combat such basic scourges of the human condition as war, disease, political corruption, and homelessness.

Carter was born in 1924 on a large family peanut farm near the hamlet of Plains in southwestern Georgia, the son of an experienced farmer and entrepreneur, Earl, and a trained nurse, Lillian, the remarkable woman who eventually found fame by joining the Peace Corps at age 68 as her son ran for governor. He helped in his family’s agricultural and commercial ventures while growing up. (One, which he was later to revive and expand, was wine-making, unusual for rural Baptists at the time.) Though a dutiful son of the land, Carter longed for travel, and after some preliminary higher education, he gained admission to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1943, graduating in the top 10 percent of his class in 1946, shortly after World War II ended. Around the same time, he married Rosalynn Smith, a friend of his sister’s from Plains, and the couple soon began a family that ultimately included three sons and a daughter.

Carter was well embarked on a naval career (notably serving on the research staff of Hyman Rickover, the “father of the nuclear Navy,” whose hands-on taskmaster management style made a deep impression on the young officer) when his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, leading Carter to secure a discharge and return to Plains to take over the family farm and businesses. By the end of the 1950s, he was both prosperous and restless, and he became involved in civic and political life. He entered politics at the larger tail end of Jim Crow, when it didn’t take much to get a reputation as a relative liberal on racial matters. Carter quietly qualified by supporting the desegregation of his own Southern Baptist congregation and refusing to join the militantly racist White Citizens’ Council movement when it reached his county. By the time he got to the state senate in 1962 (a judicial intervention aimed at a rival’s fraud forced a second election), he was known as a strong supporter of President John F. Kennedy.

But in Carter’s initial and subsequent campaigns prior to his election as governor, he was hardly a profile in courage on racial matters. In his first gubernatorial bid, in 1966, he cleverly positioned himself between the self-described liberal ex-governor Ellis Arnall and the notorious segregationist Lester Maddox. (I was a kiddie volunteer for that first statewide Carter campaign.) He narrowly missed making a Democratic runoff against Arnall mostly because of Republican crossover votes for Maddox, who was deemed the Democrat that GOP nominee Bo Callaway could most easily defeat. When write-in votes for Arnall forced the election into the legislature under Georgia’s archaic and poorly written Constitution, Carter joined most (but not all) Democrats in casting a party-line vote for the buffoonish racist Maddox. I was shocked to hear my hero’s voice clearly announcing a vote for “Lester G. Maddox” on the live radio broadcast of the balloting, and I did not support his subsequent gubernatorial effort.

Carter barely stopped running between 1966 and 1970, and he confirmed his twin reputations for cautious ambivalence on racial issues and impressive (if cynical) political skills. This time, his principal opponent was former governor Carl Sanders, who had earned the loyalty of Black voters during a relatively enlightened first term. While Carter was quietly wooing some of the same Black civil-rights leaders who would later spearhead his presidential run, his public campaign focused on a populist appeal to white rural and small-town voters who disliked “Cufflinks Carl” for his corporate ties and his racial moderation. Most notoriously, Carter supporters widely distributed photos of Sanders celebrating a victory with Black players from the Atlanta Hawks, the NBA team he partially owned. Carter also went out of his way to express solidarity with Alabama’s George Wallace, who was running an overtly racist campaign in 1970 to recapture power in Montgomery. Carter consolidated conservative white voters and nearly won a majority against Sanders in the first round of primaries, then dispatched the former governor handily in a runoff.

But upon taking office (after a pro forma general-election victory over Republican TV newsman Hal Suit), Carter engineered a sharp left turn on racial issues, making this blunt statement in his 1971 inaugural address:

“I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over … No poor, rural, weak, or Black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”

Thanks to his reputation for quiet decency on racial matters and the strength of his outreach to civil-rights leaders, his campaign demagoguery, not this new departure, was widely viewed as tactical and disposable.

While racially enlightened, Carter’s governorship (limited at the time to a single term) was to a significant extent focused on the dry process issue of government reorganization. He successfully proposed to consolidate 300 state agencies into 22. He made small but politically significant gestures in areas ranging from the equalization of public-education revenues to prison reform and environmental protection.

Meanwhile, like most southern (and not a few northern) politicians in both parties, Carter opposed busing to achieve school desegregation. He nonetheless kept himself in the national political news as an exemplar of “New South” Democratic governors (whose ranks included Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Reubin Askew of Florida, and John West of South Carolina) who were outmaneuvering the old segregationists of their own party while heading off Republican gains in the region that threatened Democrats’ national viability. They were the first truly “national” Democrats in the South since the party had fully abandoned its ancient willingness to support, or at least tolerate, Jim Crow.

Carter’s astonishing rise to the presidency just two years after a meh single term as governor of a Deep South state was a testament to both his unique positioning in a Democratic Party struggling with realignment and the political skills he and his advisers often showed even as they were being mocked as backwoods rubes. Team Carter exploited the emergence of the Iowa caucuses as a pre–New Hampshire nominating contest and out-organized the field there. He then took advantage of national Democrats’ desire for someone to end the threat of Wallace’s presidential candidacy by securing support for one-on-one contests with the Alabaman in the South, which Carter won with the regionally resonant slogan “Don’t send them a message. Send them a president.” He used crucial support from the Atlanta-based King-family network of civil-rights stalwarts to head off attacks on his dubious background on racial matters and turned criticism of his lack of experience into an asset among voters still furious at Watergate-era Washington. Even his Baptist piety became a selling point among both Evangelicals (who had not yet begun their mass exodus to the GOP) and voters inclined to believe his “I’ll never tell you a lie” pledge.

But it was in the general-election contest against Gerald Ford that Carter’s unique regional political appeal became crucial, as I explained in a meditation on the 2020 revival of the southern Democratic Party:

“[Carter] defeated Wallace in most southern primaries and then gained his endorsement, subsequently putting together a mind-bending coalition of Black and conservative white voters united by regional pride (between Andrew and Lyndon Johnson, no president was elected from a state that had been part of the Confederacy). Carter won every state of the former Confederacy (producing huge swings compared with Hubert Humphrey’s performance in 1968 and George McGovern’s in 1972) except Virginia; he won the border states of Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri as well as southern-inflected areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania that helped keep those states in the Democratic column.”

It is unlikely that any other Democrat could have won the presidency in 1976, and Carter won by an eyelash. Yet like other regional or ethnic-racial pioneers, his peak of support among the home folks was a thing of the past once he took office. Thus began a troubled four years.

Carter’s one-term presidency had its ups and downs and was rarely stable or predictable. Yes, he inherited a lot of economic trouble from the Nixon and Ford administrations, but his response to double-digit inflation (involving some austerity measures and a lot of austerity talk) divided Democrats, particularly when the Carter administration deprioritized full employment and put in place a Federal Reserve Board chairman (Paul Volcker) determined to use a tight monetary policy to tame inflation, triggering a recession.

This economic turbulence and a closely associated energy crisis (both kicked off by the Arab oil boycott of 1973–74 and a subsequent huge price spike in petroleum products) led Carter to indulge his inner Baptist deacon and sternly lecture Americans about the need for belt-tightening and self-discipline. For one famous week in 1979, he holed up at Camp David summoning advisers and elected officials in preparation for what was later known as the “malaise speech” (though he did not use that term). He struggled regularly with congressional Democrats, who joined with Republicans in sufficient numbers to kill his proposals for a stepped-up federal consumer-protection effort, standby gas-rationing powers, and canceling major water projects he deemed unnecessary. As he had in Georgia, Carter emphasized government-reorganization schemes and did succeed in creating new Cabinet-level Departments of Education and Energy.

But foreign policy was an unusually large focus for Carter as president, leading to some of his biggest triumphs and setbacks. He invested enormous amounts of capital and personal time into engineering the 1978 Camp David Accords, the landmark Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement signed by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. (It has, extraordinarily, held for more than four decades.) Earlier that year, after a long, tense negotiation, he secured Senate ratification of a treaty to relinquish the Panama Canal to Panama. Beyond establishing any individual bilateral relationships, Carter introduced human rights as a key consideration in U.S. foreign and defense policy, modifying the strict anti-Communist priorities of his immediate predecessors.

Carter’s interactions with Iran characterized the ambiguities of his presidency, helping him beat Ted Kennedy in the 1980 Democratic primaries but putting an exclamation point on his general-election defeat.

Kennedy had been leading Carter two-to-one in primary polls in mid-1979 when the Massachusetts senator all but decided to run; Carter’s combative streak was engaged, and he went out of his way to tell journalists that if Kennedy ran, “I’ll whip his ass.” But a few days before Kennedy’s official announcement, Iranian student revolutionaries took 66 Americans hostage in Tehran in response to Carter’s decision — against the caution of his advisers — to let the deposed Shah of Iran into the U.S. for cancer treatment. The hostage-taking launched a simmering crisis that did not end until the last day of Carter’s presidency. The international emergency did bolster the incumbent’s public standing, particularly among Democrats, and Carter’s “Rose Garden strategy” of running for renomination without holding personal campaign events worked, at least initially. He won 14 of the first 15 caucuses and primaries (losing only Massachusetts), in part by rebuilding his biracial coalition of support in southern and southern-inflected states.

Kennedy made a comeback in the later primaries, and voters grew tired of the hostage crisis (particularly after a rescue attempt went bad in April) and the country’s chronic economic problems. Kennedy won New York, Pennsylvania, California, and New Jersey, but it wasn’t enough to defeat the incumbent. Still, he didn’t concede until the convention and managed to avoid the traditional arms-raised unity gesture with Carter as the proceedings ended.

Carter had his moments in the general-election contest with Republican Ronald Reagan (and his low points, as when he briefly slipped behind independent candidate John Anderson in the polls), managing to keep the race competitive until late in the campaign despite an assortment of ongoing crises in domestic and foreign policy. There were persistent rumors then and later (and recently, spurred by Carter’s transition to end-of-life care, a confession from an associate of Republican power broker John Connally) of Republican efforts to talk the Iranian regime out of a hostage release prior to the election, but the outcome was probably sealed in any event.

In their one debate, Reagan famously called for voters to make the election a referendum on “the last four years,” and right at the end of the race, Carter’s numbers collapsed. Reagan won by nearly ten points, carrying 44 states.

Although he left office at only 55, Carter never gave a thought to running again. His vice-president, Walter Mondale, won the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination but lost 49 states in the general election, which proved the country was undergoing a partisan realignment. Carter’s strength in the South had masked it earlier, keeping Democratic losses from being much worse. But Carter didn’t brood about his difficulties as president and embraced a simple if robust postpresidential agenda that kept him in good stead for over four decades.

His principal vehicle was the Carter Center, a nonprofit organization created in 1982 in partnership with Atlanta’s Emory University; he and Rosalynn Carter served as co-founders. Its three main international programs have centered on conflict resolution (in areas ranging from North Korea–U.S. nuclear cooperation, to the restoration of democracy in Haiti, to disputes between Sudan and Uganda and between Colombia and Ecuador), election monitoring (in 39 countries), and health initiatives. The center has led efforts to eradicate deadly diseases like Guinea worm and to help diagnose and treat others like river blindness and trachoma. It has also fought to reduce the stigma of mental illness in the U.S. and beyond. In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the Carter Center’s efforts to “find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” He also continued his work for Middle East peace, leading to the one big controversy surrounding his postpresidential years: allegations that he was hostile to Zionism and to Israel itself, which grew stronger with the publication of his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

Another postpresidential commitment of Carter’s (and Rosalynn’s) involved Habitat for Humanity, a Georgia-based NGO that had long been doing modest work to build housing for the homeless. The Carters began working with Habitat in 1984 and over the years helped it expand its programs to all 50 states and to 70 countries. We’ve all seen those celebrated photographs of Carter framing up walls. During the 1992 presidential campaign, I was having dinner at the Atlanta political hangout Manuel’s Tavern, and I asked a waiter about all the security loitering around a back room. “Jimmy’s back there showing Clinton and Gore how to drive a nail,” the waiter replied; sure enough, the next day, the three men held a Habitat event nearby and nary a nail was missed.

Yet the nongovernmental entity to which Carter devoted the most years was probably the Baptist Church. He taught Sunday school off and on at the Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains from its founding in 1977 as a church that welcomed Black worshippers. As the Southern Baptist Convention became militantly conservative in the 1980s and ’90s, Carter eventually broke any identification with the SBC (especially objecting to its refusal to ordain women as ministers) and became a leader of the moderate spinoff group the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

Carter’s legacy as a president and a politician is substantial but not entirely settled. He was prescient in a number of policy areas, notably the search for a comprehensive energy strategy and his strong stance on human rights as a touchstone of U.S. foreign policy. He was also a personal diplomat of great courage and skill. From a political perspective, he was the key bridge figure between the Jim Crow era of southern politics and the biracial Democratic coalitions that followed; the Democratic victories in Georgia in 2020 — including the election of a Black U.S. senator — must have gratified him immensely. But Carter also exemplified centrist and even conservative strains in the Democratic Party that persisted while white Democratic racist politics largely vanished.

What made Carter’s postpresidential career so popular, however, was the simple sense, shared far beyond his own region or party, that he was a fundamentally good man who eschewed riches and power for a more humble path to righteousness.

Morgan Stephens shares “How Democrats can win back the working class” at Daily Kos: “Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut is calling for a break from the economic neoliberalism of the past. He joins a growing list of progressives who argue that Democrats must prioritize the needs of working-class Americans to stay relevant in today’s political climate of staggering economic inequality….He also highlighted what he sees as a false choice between unfettered market capitalism and socialism, proposing a middle ground: “common-good capitalism.” This vision, according to Murphy, would ensure that economic rules value workers just as much as shareholders and that certain sectors—such as health care—should not be commoditized for profit. “I think that’s the winning argument for Democrats,” Murphy concluded….Democrats like Murphy are right to assume Americans feel economic discontent. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, wealth inequality has steadily increased for those at the top, with the wealthiest 5% of Americans owning a staggering two-thirds of the wealth distribution. Meanwhile, wages have remained stagnant, and home ownership is unattainable.” Stephens adds, “At its core, populism claims the system is rigged against the average, working-class citizen in favor of wealthy “elites.” Defining features of populism are a disdain for the ruling class and a focus on the working class, critiques of government and corporate institutions, nationalism and identity politics, and perhaps, most importantly, an overall sense of economic discontent.”

An excerpt from “New progressive chair says Dems don’t have to abandon trans folks to reconnect with working class” by Greg Owen at lgbtqnation.com: “The progressive movement needs to change,” he told NBC News in an interview on Wednesday before his election to chair the influential caucus. “We need to re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up.”….“So when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did — with Republican help,” Casar said. “We need to connect the dots for people that the Republican Party obsession with these culture war issues is driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”….And he asserted Democrats can do it “without throwing vulnerable people under the bus.”….That response may have been in answer to his colleagues Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) laying blame for Democrats’ losses in part on Vice President Kamala Harris’ stance on trans rights….Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear also recently backed away from his support of health care for trans inmates — mandated by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution barring cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners….During the election, Republicans spent over $215 million on attack ads highlighting the Democrats’ and their standard bearer’s support of trans rights.”

If you were wondering “Why Democrats Are Losing Americans Without a College Degree—and How to Win Them Back,” Neil Krauss and Jon Shelton provide some answers at The Nation, including: “The Democrats have been losing white non-college-graduates for some time. But when we consider racial disparities in educational attainment in relation to voting patterns, there is an equally troubling pattern emerging: In 2016, Clinton won voters of color without a college degree by 56 points. In 2020, even with Biden’s over-performance relative to Clinton, Trump still narrowed the gap in this demographic to 46 points. In 2024, Trump closed the gap even further, to just 30 points (and only 24 points in Wisconsin). That’s massive. In 2024, whatever has turned white non-college-graduates off Democratic candidates is now happening for other racial groups, as well. And that’s really bad news for Democrats, considering that the majority of American adults don’t have a college degree….To win back working-class voters—particularly those with less formal education—Democrats must clearly commit to a vision and a narrative that prioritizes meaningful economic security for working people. In 2016 and 2024, Trump capitalized on the Democratic Party’s failure to offer a transformative economic vision for workers, especially for those without bachelor’s degrees….What Democrats must do, instead, is to offer a big transformative vision, and stick to it for as long as it takes to actualize it. Offering such a vision is not as daunting as it sounds. Rather, the Democrats need to tap into their own history of changing the nation’s economic tapestry, through traditions like the New Deal and Great Society, which made them a majority party for decades, to improve the livelihoods of the people who do all the work.”

Krauss and Shelton continue, “Democrats can side with corporate interests, or they can win elections. But they cannot do both…Economic inequality and insecurity are typically framed in terms of inflation, and it’s true, the cost of nearly everything skyrocketed during Covid and never came down, despite inflation’s coming down to normal levels well over a year before the election. But inflation is largely a problem because so many workers have so few mechanisms—like collective bargaining—to ensure that they can keep, or purchase, a larger slice of what the economy produces….Regardless, this election hardly realigned American politics. Remember that Trump was defeated in 2020 after offering absolutely nothing for working people as president. Rather, when we consider the last three presidential elections in tandem (each time the effective incumbent lost), it becomes clear that most Americans are voting, with desperation, for any political party that seems to prioritize their economic livelihoods….Nationally, Democrats must do what they have done in Wisconsin: show up at our union meetings and picket lines and connect economic messages directly to those of unions, so working people can see their livelihoods connected with Democrats. Democratic candidates need to publicly and vocally show up to help organize new workers in unions, too, so we can build a more vibrant labor movement capable of building political power for the long term.”

The following article, “New Year’s Resolution for Democrats: Be Honest and End the Myth that Door Knocking is Real ‘Ground Game’” by Scott Goodstein, Founder & CEO of CatalystCampaigns.com, is cross-posted from scottgoodstein.medium.com:

Once upon a time, in a precinct long, long ago, there was a campaign that built voter contact programs solely from those who lived in the targeted neighborhood. The entire community shopped at the same grocery stores and even saw one another at the bank, gym, and library. In other words, this was totally different from today’s “ground game,” manned by people who drive from hours away, armed with clipboards, shiny new campaign t-shirts, and ready to tell residents exactly how they should vote.

While a ton of articles have been written about the importance of the “ground game” in the final days of the Harris campaign, no one is discussing the increasing problems and decreasing rate of return of this tactic. Time Magazine’s October election article, “Democrats Bank on Ground Game Advantage in Pennsylvania,” opens with the author observing that “most of the people on Elana Hunter’s list weren’t answering the door,” but does not dig into the actual problem. The same is true with campaign analysis in hundreds of other news outlets. The New York Times wrote a lengthy piececomparing Vice President Kamala Harris’ in-house door-knocking operation to the Trump campaign’s outsourced field operation. The article highlights both sides bragging about how many doors they knocked on and how much paid staff was hired. But, neither side (nor the writers) discuss how few people answer their doors or even care what the stranger is selling.

This analysis misses the real problems of modern-day door knocking: Voters don’t open their doors anymore, voters do not know their neighbors, and undecided voters are more skeptical than ever when it comes to talking about politics.

As Democrats, we should know that a last-minute paid “ground game” that gets dropped into the battleground days before an election hasn’t worked in years.

Year-round precinct work with “local captains” who knew their “turf” and how each neighbor would vote disappeared as the campaign industry grew and political parties stopped building traditional ward systems. Instead, they were replaced with volunteers and paid voices that only knocked on doors during major elections. This transition from a known, trusted neighbor to an unknown door knocker has made modern campaigning a data-driven competition that ignores effectiveness as it optimizes toward knocking on the most doors.

Nonetheless, message and messenger still matter in all aspects of campaigns, especially in the field. Door-to-door salesmen are a relic of history (Even the legendary Fuller Brush company started transitioning out of door-to-door sales in 1985).

Public safety studies show neighborhoods are more responsive to community policing programs when public safety officers know the people they serve. Why would political campaigns be different?

Technology has also had a major impact on door knocking. It’s now been a decade since the invention of video door camera technology. According to a 2024 Consumer Reports study, 30% of Americans use video door cameras. These changes in neighborhood dynamics and consumer behaviors are realities that must be faced.

The rite-of-passage, where a volunteer gets lost in below-freezing weather canvassing an unknown precinct or gets bitten by a dog while knocking on doors, needs to be relegated to history. While campaign war stories are fun, it’s time to be honest about the changing times and begin a new chapter: These age-old tactics are neither sacred nor effective. If no one is home or no one is answering their door even if they are home, political campaigns need to change with the times.

To win more elections, target voters with appropriate messages and messengers. It’s time to explore better ways to use scarce time, people, and money to achieve the desired victory. Are there better places to send volunteers to work more efficiently and rally potential voters?

This is not to say that field organizing should be discarded or that campaigns should go completely digital. (Lots of criticism is being written on the current problems with these newer tactics that will hopefully be fixed.) But, as the Democratic Party’s messaging and mobilization are transformed, an honest assessment of all tactics is needed to understand what works and create better ways to win.

Remember, just because a tactic worked on one campaign, it will not always continue to work the same four years later. We have tried this with auto-calling and text messaging technologies and know they have diminishing returns each cycle. Now is the time to dig deep and have honest conversations with field organizers and volunteers to learn what tactics need to be retired and start adopting new approaches.

Let’s stop pretending that more “fake neighbors” door-knocking is the solution to the Democrats’ problems and focus on how to best reach targeted voters with a message that resonates, delivered by respected voices that matter, while we have time now to build a real organic field effort.

As Democrats, we should know that a last-minute paid “ground game” that gets dropped into the battleground days before an election hasn’t worked in years. It didn’t work on Howard Dean’s well-funded 2004 campaign that flew tons of staff and volunteers to Iowa. It’s now 20 years after the infamous Dean scream, and we continue to blindly follow the same failed “orange cap” tactics of these past campaigns: inserting last-minute volunteers and door-knocking teams instead of thinking about how to create long-term community-based approaches.

We all have to grow up at some point and face the truth. Or you could keep believing in Santa Claus and see what gift he brings you in the next election cycle.

The following article, “Democrats must make working Americans a better offer” by Will Marshall, founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute, is cross-posted from The Hill:

Americans voted for radical change in November, and judging by the chaos he’s already generated before taking office, Donald Trump might give them more than they bargained for. Can Democrats offer a saner alternative?

So far, the signs aren’t encouraging. Instead of taking a hard look at how they managed to lose to the most ethically tainted and unpopular presidential candidate in memory, many in the party seek refuge in self-exonerating excuses.

President Biden was too old. Kamala Harris didn’t have time to wage a real campaign. Republicans and Elon Musk dominated social media and flooded the campaign debate with lies and bigoted attacks on immigrants and transexual people. The high cost of living warped voters’ perception of the nation’s economic health.

And anyway the race was still close, even if Harris failed to win a single battleground state, Trump cut his losing margins in blue cities and states, and Latino and Black voters without college degrees continued to defect to the Republicans.

This is the politics of evasion — the recurrent tendency of badly whipped parties to blame everything but their own failure to make a convincing case to voters that their ideas and governing commitments would serve them best.

Many progressives, for example, are loath to admit that Biden’s economic policies had anything to do with the loss. In their view, he was right to spend trillions to revive a pandemic-stricken economy, reduce inequality and combat climate change, sideline trade in favor of industrial policy, launch an unsuccessful attempt to break up America’s most dynamic tech companies and side reflexively with unions in labor disputes.

It was just bad luck that inflation came out of nowhere to mug working families, preventing them from appreciating all that Biden and the Democrats had done for them. Instead, a 20 percent rise in prices put them in a mood to punish incumbents.

Well, that’s one possibility. A more plausible one is that the president and his advisors fell victim to the establishment fallacy of “deliverism” — the notion that passing a slew of multi-trillion-dollar spending bills in Washington would impress working families and show that the “system” was working for them at last.

For one thing, those voters are deeply mistrustful that the “deep state” has their interests at heart. According to a YouGov poll commissioned by my organization, they also believe that heavy public spending helped to spark the upsurge in prices — a view shared by Larry Summers and other prominent economists who note that the chief economic dilemma Biden faced on taking office wasn’t weak demand, but insufficient supply.

Some liberals argue that they were done in by cultural politics rather than the economy. Indeed, a post-election analysis by More in Common found that Americans overwhelmingly believe that Democrats care more about advancing progressive social causes than the kitchen table interests that preoccupy working families.

In fact, that wasn’t the case in 2024 — Democratic voters like Republicans cited inflation and the economy as their top concerns. But the public’s skewed perception reflects the outsized influence of progressive activists, who have associated Democrats with positions on immigration, crime and race and gender that are toxic to working-class voters.

The breadth of Trump’s victory suggests the right answer to the question of why Harris lost is “all of the above.” Democrats were seen as defending a status quo inimical to working families’ interests and values, and as wielding power in Washington mainly for the benefit of educated and wealthy elites.

That helps to explain why Democrats suffered from wide deficits of public trust on almost all the issues that working class voters cared most about.

PPI’s post-election analysis, based on polls and focus groups with working class voters, shows that they trusted Republicans more than Democrats to improve the economy (55-34); make housing more affordable (45-37); protect Americans from crime (54-31); handle immigration (57-29); keep Americans safe from foreign threats (55-30); handle Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; and fight for working people (48-39).

By a whopping 62-43, non-college voters saw Republicans as the more patriotic party. And by nearly 2-to-1 they identified Trump and the Republicans as strong and Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats as weak.

In short, Democrats have dug themselves in a very deep hole and must change direction dramatically to regain their competitiveness.

Blurring the line between hyperbole and fantasy, Trump claims he won an “unprecedented and powerful mandate to govern.” While solid, his victory was no landslide. Moreover, Trump remains underwater in terms of personal approval, which is extraordinary for someone who’s just won a presidential election.

Nonetheless, Democrats should focus now on their own vulnerabilities, not Trump’s amply documented flaws. Their coalition is inexorably shrinking, demographically and geographically, as non-college voters head for the exits.

Trump’s antics and misrule will no doubt create tactical openings for Democrats to take the offensive. But their strategic challenge now is to draw up a new governing blueprint that centers on America’s non-college majority.

Democrats must show they get how those voters feel and what matters to them, and offer concrete remedies to the problems working families in middle America define as urgent, rather than the post-material preoccupations of progressive elites.

They also must stop reflexively defending the programmatic status quo at a time when working families feel forgotten and disrespected by Washington policymakers and want to see fundamental changes in politics and government.

Instead of simply expanding government, it’s time for Democrats to remake themselves as a forward-looking party of change and radically pragmatic reform across the full range of what government does and fails to do well.

For Democrats, the only way to win back working Americans is to make them a better offer.

The death of Jimmy Carter brings a much-needed reminder that American presidents, including Democrats, have on occasion provided object lessons in integrity, decency and compassion. In fact, it’s hard to identify another American President who cared more about human suffering and did more, post-presidency, to help alleviate it. Carter was not an impressive president in terms of concrete reforms that were enacted during his one term. And he was brutally shellacked by Reagan in 1980. And like President Biden, another decent man, who got more done in his one term than Carter, he was undone by inflation (as well as the Iran hostage crisis). I can still remember the SNL parody in which Dan Akroyd, playing President Carter, evoked laughter with the rant, “Inflation is our friend.” And that’s a point worth engraving on the portal of the DNC’s headquarters: “Inflation is a Democrat-killer.” Democrats need a more forceful strategy for fighting against it, so come what may, they at least appear to be fighting it with substantial reforms. Pretending it doesn’t exist did not work out well for Carter or Biden. His shortcomings notwithstanding, President Carter will be rightly revered for his fundamental decency, commitment to peace (Nobel Peace Prize winner) and humanitarian works, in the starkest possible contrast to the incoming president-elect.

At The National Catholic Reporter,  Michael Sean Winters probes the question, “Can Catholics save the Democrats?,” and writes:  “It is not a new question. I wrote a book about it in 2008: Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats. There was overlap in my diagnosis then with the assessments from Judis, Teixeira and Hunter this year. But Catholic social teaching contains a moral imperative that more secular diagnoses lack: The Gospel compels us to stand with the marginalized and to be at least suspicious of the wealthy and the powerful. In 2024, it became painfully obvious that the Democrats are now the party of the well-to-do and the privileged, and that is no place for a Christian….So, Catholics, do you want to stand with those who claim to speak for the marginalized, or do you actually want to identify with the marginalized?….What is more, Catholic social teaching provides a morally coherent set of ideas and beliefs that would help the Democrats embrace more liberal economic policies and avoid more extreme cultural ones.” Catholic and Black Baptist Churches are the two religious constituencies which express the most concern about poverty and economic injustice, so Winters has a point, although Catholics can also be found among the most hard-hearted right-wingers.

Winters continues, “Pope Francis famously said that neoliberal economics is “an economy that kills.”….The pope has also made clear that Christians cannot harbor any animus to anyone, that the church must welcome everyone. He is well-known for hosting transgender sex workers…..But he also has condemned gender ideology. Welcoming someone does not require subscribing to their ideology. The Democrats’ problem on the transgender issue was not really with people who are transgender. It is with the way academics and others demand that people discuss, or not discuss, issues surrounding transgender ideology….The Democrats would never embrace the pope’s fierce opposition to abortion, but they might recognize that someone of his moral seriousness should have all of his moral convictions respected, even if they can’t be shared. Nor, in America, could we embrace the fullness of Catholic social teaching’s understanding of how an economy should work. But we could move in that direction. Same for just war theory….The Catholic Church from before the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council might not be of much help in building a national mythos broad enough to enlist the support of most Americans. But 60 years of interreligious dialogue since the close of Vatican II has provided at least some Catholic thinkers with the ability to engage those with different theological and ideological starting points, and build common understandings….Here, then, are the essential ingredients for a Democratic Party that can win national elections:

• Articulate an economic populism that appeals to voters and craft policies that will improve the economic prospects of working-class Americans.
• Moderate its hardline, academic-driven approach to cultural issues.
• And help fashion a national narrative that is capacious enough to embrace the hopes of all Americans.”

In similar vein check out “How the left can get its mojo back: Listen to working-class people of faith” by Nathaniel Manderson, who writes at Salon: “Everyone is trying to figure out what happened in the wake of the November election and what needs to be done to getting this country back on track. My advice is simple. Listen to the working-class people who are struggling, especially the folks at the bottom of the economic ladder, and even more specifically working-class people of faith. For all his hypocrisy and all his flaws, Donald Trump knew how to listen. Most liberals don’t….The working-class people of faith I’m talking about are blue-collar folks of all races, colors and backgrounds who tend to believe in something bigger than themselves. They have been drifting further right ever since Trump came into the picture, while the left, as I see it, has lost touch with what the Democratic Party used to stand for in word and deed. Contemporary liberals seem baffled that they’re losing working-class people of faith to Trump….when I see working-class people of faith who believe they are being ignored or overlooked by the structures of power in our society, I completely understand their desire either to stay out off politics altogether — or try to blow it up, by voting for the guy who seems intent on disrupting the system….While I realize that “woke” has become a right-wing cliché, that has happened for a reason. Liberal need to “woke” themselves  and start to recognize that they have lost the support of working-class people of faith because they stopped listening and speaking to them, and only show them contempt rather than respect. There are a lot of us, and we are not deplorable. We are tired, broke, hard-working Americans, and we feel ourselves losing. Listening to us is the only way to reclaim the integrity of liberal values, and the pathway to reclaiming the American dream.”

Ronald Brownstein explains on camera how “Trump Is About to Betray his Rural Supporters” at Local 3 News. Brownstein also has a paywall article, “Many Trump voters still have doubts about him. Can he hold them?” at CNN Politics. And here’s a stub of another paywalled Brownstein article, “The Potential Backlash to Trump Unbound: A returning president who expects to govern without constraints leaves his opponents hoping to benefit from the blowback” at The Atlantic: “Donald trump will return to office facing far fewer constraints than when he entered the White House in 2017. The political, legal, institutional, and civic forces that restrained and often frustrated Trump during his first term have all palpably weakened. That will be a mixed blessing for him and for the Republican Party….There’s less chance that forces inside or outside his administration will thwart Trump’s marquee campaign proposals, such as mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, big tariffs on imports, and sweeping rollbacks of climate and other environmental regulations. But there will also be fewer obstacles to the kind of polarizing ideas that got stopped during Trump’s first term. On numerous occasions, his own aides intervened to prevent the president from, for example, deploying the military to shoot racial-justice protesters, firing missiles into Mexico against drug-cartel facilities without authorization from the Mexican government, or potentially quitting NATO. Republicans in Congress thwarted parts of his agenda, as when senators blocked his attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The courts ruled against some policies, such as separating the children of undocumented migrants from their parents at the southern border….This time, Trump’s fate will be much more in his own hands. If he can deliver greater economic stability for working families, while avoiding too many firefights on militant MAGA priorities, strategists in both parties agree that he will be in a strong position to consolidate the gains he’s made among traditionally Democratic constituencies, such as Black, Latino, and younger white men.”

An excerpt of “The Democrats Have a Crime Problem. Blame the Media. How news coverage fuels the widespread, misguided perception that crime is up and cities are unsafe” by John Pfaff at The New Republic: “In Democrats’ seemingly endless election postmortems—and in the postmortems on the postmortems—a persistent theme has been to blame the reddening of blue states like New York and New Jersey on crime in their big cities. On Pod Save America, the political commentator Ezra Klein emphasized the importance of taking crime seriously as a factor in voters’ decisions. To explain why he wasn’t surprised by blue states’ “sharp red shift,” he said: “Because if you just talk to anybody who lives in them, they are furious. And this idea that, like … ‘Crime is actually down, this is all just Fox News’—like, shut the fuck up with that.” Klein argued that when it comes to crime and criminal justice policy, fact-checking is a political dead end for Democrats. Instead, Democrats need to “talk to some people who live near you” and grasp “the sense of disorder rising”—a disorder fueled by migrants, homeless encampments, turnstile jumping, and crime in general. In San Francisco, he noted, “the fury is overwhelming.” As evidence, he pointed to the losses of reform prosecutors and the defeat of San Francisco Mayor London Breed….At bottom, Klein’s claim was that it’s bad politics to respond to people’s fears about crime by saying that crime is actually down (even though it is) or by pointing out that their fears are the product of misleading press coverage (even though they are). In other words, facts don’t matter, the vibes do, and we need to govern in response to the vibes….Crime is not like inflation, a phenomenon everyone experiences because everyone buys stuff. Instead, crime is densely concentrated geographically and among certain people, in the areas that suffer the most from poverty, unemployment, and government disinvestment.” Read more here.

Laura Jadeed shares some insights regarding “How Democrats Can Win Back the White Working Class: Moving left on economic issues may be the key to winning over blue-collar voters of all races” at New Lines Magazine, including: “If rising enthusiasm for unionization is any indication, the white working class is already more progressive than most pundits think. Support for unions — which culture war proponents have tried to brand as “un-American” for their Marxist and socialist roots — has gone from 48% in 2008 to 70% this year. While Democrats are still more likely to support unionization than Republicans, the majority of low-income Republicans now believe that America’s decades-long trend of decreasing unionization is bad for workers. While the proportion of unionized American jobs has remained at around 10% since 2021, union election petitions filed increased by 53% — from 1,638 to 2,510 — between 2021 and 2022 alone, suggesting that it is anti-union regulations, not worker preferences, that keep the number of union jobs from rising higher. Recent surveys suggest that working-class voters support progressive economic policies when the proposals are stripped of liberal jargon; a July poll in swing states showed that 59% of voters without a college degree support free college education, 63% support single payer healthcare, and 76% support a cap on rent increases. This may help explain why a quarter of white voters for President Barack Obama without a high school diploma defected to Donald Trump in 2016. These candidates have little in common but both effectively used the language of economic populism.”

In “Teamsters president reveals how ‘arrogant’ VP Harris lost the party, and the vote,” Joe Dwinell writes at The Boston Herald: “Democrats have an ego problem, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien says….The head of the nation’s largest union said the party that once stood for the working class has “somehow lost their way” and it just cost them the election….He told the Herald Tuesday that the party of AOC — New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and VP Kamala Harris failed to grasp today’s political climate….“They feel it’s a birthright that they would get our support,” he said. “It’s troubling. They can’t dictate how voters should think….“It’s the fault of some Democrats who just forgot where they came from,” the Boston native added. “They need to be a little humble about it.”….The Herald reached out to O’Brien on Christmas Eve as his interview with Tucker Carlson was going viral. In that sitdown, O’Brien confirmed he was told by Harris pre-election that she wasn’t going to abide by the Teamsters’ full set of questions and answers….That roundtable, held after President Biden announced he wasn’t going to seek reelection, was cut short with the VP only answering a quarter of their 16 questions. Trump answered all of them, the New York Post added. ….“On the fourth question, one of her operatives or one of her staff slips a note in front of me — ‘This will be the last question.’ And it was 20 minutes earlier than the time it was going to end,” O’Brien told Carlson….“And her declaration of the way out was, ‘I’m going to win with you or without you,’’ O’Brien added….“Damn. I thought I was arrogant. That’s really arrogant,” Carlson responded.”

The following article, “Americans are unhappy with the state of health care and insurance” by Monica Potts, Cooper Burton, Holly Fong and Amina Brown, is cross-posted from abcnews/538:

When Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect in the Dec. 4 murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was arrested and taken into a Pennsylvania courthouse in an orange jumpsuit, he turned to the crowd of reporters and onlookers on the street and yelled that his arrest was “an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience.”

He was presumably referring to Americans’ experiences with the health care system, and the public reaction to Thompson’s murder has put a fine point on just how many Americans are very unhappy with it. When news about the predawn, execution-style shooting in Manhattan broke, the reaction online was largely driven not by sympathy for Thompson, but by Americans’ frustrations with the health care system and insurance industry — as a flood of social media users shared stories of denied health insurance claims and health care costs spinning out of control.

In fact, the shooting came at a time when health care seemed to be experiencing a bit of a surge in importance among Americans after the election. The share of registered voters who named it as the most important issue facing the country in YouGov/The Economist tracking polls had gradually declined from around 10 to around 7 percent throughout 2024, and even fewer, 4 percent, said it was the top issue specifically in determining their vote in the election. But after the election, that number has gone back up to between 8 and 11 percent.

A YouGov poll last week also found that more Americans, 49 percent, had an unfavorable view of the American health care system than the 42 percent who had a favorable one. Other polling suggests that Americans are as unhappy as they ever have been in recent years with the current state of health care. And while many Americans pointed fingers at the opposing party for the problems they see, more than 6 in 10 overall agreed that pharmaceutical and health insurance companies, as well as corporate executives like Thompson, were to blame for problems in the American health care system.

The U.S. remains unique among its peer nations in relying on a for-profit health insurance system and, as Mangione’s own writings alluded to, many Americans have expressed rage at a system that can deny coverage for people’s medical treatments while making shareholders and CEOs very rich. Despite decades of presidents trying to ensure universal access to health insurance, about 8 percent of Americans remained uninsured as of last year, and a higher percentage, about a quarter of American adults, said they or a family member had struggled to afford health care over the past year, whether they were insured or not.

By and large, Americans are unhappy with the costs of care and often find their insurance difficult to use. The share who rated the quality of health care in this country as “excellent” or “good” was just 44 percent in Gallup’s annual health and health care survey, conducted Nov. 6-20, its lowest point since 2001, when Gallup began asking the question. Even fewer, 28 percent, said the same about health care coverage — i.e., what insurance programs do — the lowest it has been since 2008, two years before the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the signature Obama-era legislation that overhauled health insurance by expanding Medicaid, requiring health insurance companies to cover certain levels of care, subsidizing premiums for low- and middle-income families and banning practices like refusing to cover preexisting conditions.

A growing share of Americans in Gallup’s surveys seem to want the government to take action to improve health care access: 62 percent said it was the federal government’s responsibility to ensure all Americans have health care, the highest it’s been since 2007. Republicans are the least likely to agree with this sentiment — 32 percent said so, compared to 90 percent of Democrats and 65 percent of independents — but those numbers have increased by around 20 percentage points among all three groups over the past decade or so.

Perhaps surprisingly, YouGov polling found that around two in three Americans are at least somewhat satisfied with their health insurance plans — but that topline figure doesn’t capture a lot of nuance. For example, 89 percent of those with Medicaid were satisfied with their health coverage, compared to 75 percent who are covered by an employer-sponsored plan. Unsurprisingly, those who had had an insurance claim denied were also more likely to be dissatisfied with their coverage.

And despite many being mostly satisfied with the plans they have, a high number of Americans still experience problems using them. KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization, found in a survey last year that 58 percent said that they had at least some trouble using their insurance in the previous year — including issues like denied claims or difficulty accessing in-network providers — and nearly half of whom said their biggest problem was not resolved to their satisfaction. Overall, 18 percent of Americans with health insurance had experienced a denied claim, and those were more common among people with private or employer-sponsored insurance. Around a quarter of those who’d had a claim denied suffered serious consequences, like a decline in health or not receiving recommended medical care.

Plus, around half of insured adults had at least some difficulty understanding components of their health insurance. Unsurprisingly, around 9 in 10 Americans said they support more government rules to require companies to make insurance easier to use, such as by maintaining up-to-date provider directories.

It’s in this context that President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican Party will go into office with sweeping but vague plans to overhaul health care — including to potentially overturn the Affordable Care Act. But while replacing the law has long been something of a GOP rallying cry, it’s not clear how the public feels about it. Gallup found that Americans are fairly split on whether they’d prefer a system that relies on private insurance (49 percent) or a government-run health care system (46 percent). The ACA itself remains highly polarizing but popular among the public more than a decade after its passage.

Fifty-four percent of Americans in Gallup’s most recent survey approved of the legislation, near the record high of 55 percent reached in 2017 and 2020. Specific policies under the ACA have broader support. For example, a YouGov poll from Dec. 5 found that a plurality, 46 percent, wanted government-subsized health insurance, like that provided by the ACA, to be expanded, while 19 percent said it should remain as is and only 13 percent said it should be reduced. That included 53 percent of Republicans in favor of keeping or expanding government-subsidized insurance and only 25 percent in favor of reducing it.

— Monica Potts

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

In the wake of the Democrats’ drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you’d assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions.

Questions like: Is America a “white supremacist” society? Is it racist to question levels of immigration? Are citing one’s personal pronouns necessary? Is anyone who questions the differences between trans women from biological women a bigot who should be expunged from polite society? For each of these questions, the answer for the overwhelming majority of Americans is an obvious no. But in elite Democratic circles, it’s a different story. For a party pondering its unpopularity, you might think that this gap would be a good place to start.

Well, if the six weeks since the election is anything to go by, you’d be wrong. Instead, much of the party is maneuvering to change as little as possible on the cultural front. Why? Because many of today’s Democrats are culture denialists. That is, they do not consider cultural issues to be real issues. Instead, they see them as fictions, distractions, or expressions of bigotry that are to be opposed, not indulged.

Consider Greg Casar, the new chair of the powerful Congressional Progressive Caucus. In a recent interview with NBC News, Casar urged the Democrats to “re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up.” He said that “when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did—with Republican help.” Casar said that “the Republican Party obsession” with culture war issues is “driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”

Massachusetts Democratic representative Jim McGovern echoed Casar’s thoughts recently with this rhetoric about Republicans: “They want to blame trans people? Guess what? Trans people aren’t the ones raising people’s grocery prices. Big corporations are.” Republicans, he added, “want to blame immigrants. . . . Immigrants aren’t the ones denying health insurance claims. . . . it’s the billion-dollar insurance companies that do that.”

Get it? These aren’t real issues. They’re just distractions ginned up by Republicans for nefarious political purposes. The logical conclusion of this argument is that Democrats don’t need to actually change their position on any “culture war” issue. Instead, they just need to change the subject and talk about mustache-twirling corporate villains.

Many senior figures on the party’s left have skipped discussions of cultural issues altogether, instead publishing progressive policy wish lists. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont thinks Democrats should talk more about billionaires. Rep. Ro Khanna is betting on a “New Economic Deal” that would emphasize high-paying jobs for the middle class. Senator Chris Murphy thinks the key to a Democratic revival is advocating for the breakup of corporate power. Other Democrats suggest a relentless focuson “kitchen-table” issues. (Ah, what would Democrats do without that fabled kitchen table?) The general idea is that talking more about economic issues, typically in a populist vein, will win back the working class and obviate the need to change anything else.

Or perhaps the real problem, some Democrats argue, is that the party hasn’t communicated its wonderful positions adeptly and thoroughly enough. With the right spin, maybe their positions on everything, from the economy to transgender issues and immigration would be popular. This seems to be the view of the two leading candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Ken Martin, head of Minnesota’s Democratic Party (technically its Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), has a10-point plan that calls for a “massive narrative and branding project.” Ben Wikler, head of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, believes Democrats must “become the narrator” of their own brand.

This all seems reasonable enough but, cutting through the verbiage, nowhere do these candidates for the DNC chair concede the party’s cultural vulnerabilities. When reading their pitches for the powerful post, it’s as if those problems don’t exist.

The outgoing DNC chair takes things even further. Since the election, Jaime Harrison has strenuously resisted the idea Democrats should abandon “identity politics,” saying they represent how “people of color” see Democrats fighting for them. Invoking his status as a black man, he remarked: “That is my identity. . . . it is not politics. It is my life. And the people that I need in the party, that I need to stand up for me, have to recognize that. You cannot run away from that.” In other words, Democrats should double down on so-called culture war issues like race and gender that are so off-putting to voters. This is a strange recommendation since, as Democrats have become ever more associated with identity politics, they have been doing ever more poorly among non-white voters, especially non-white working-class voters. Their advantage among the latter group has declined by more than half since 2012.

Read more…

Boston College historian and sub stacker Heather Cox Richardson comments on the Musk-Trump budget resolution meltdown: “Passing continuing resolutions to fund the government is usually unremarkable, but this fight showed some lines that will stretch into the future….First of all, it showed the unprecedented influence of billionaire private individual Elon Musk over the Republicans who in 2025 will control the United States government. Musk has a strong financial interest in the outcome of discussions, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he had included Musk as well as President-elect Trump in the negotiation of the original bipartisan funding bill….Then Musk blew up the agreement by issuing what was an apparent threat to fund primary challengers to any Republican who voted for it. He apparently scuttled the measure on his own hook, since Trump took about thirteen hours to respond to his torpedoing it….Musk expressed willingness to leave the government unfunded for a month, apparently unconcerned that a shutdown would send hundreds of thousands of government workers deemed nonessential into temporary leave without pay. This would include about 800,000 civilian employees of the Pentagon, about 17,000 people from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and those who staff the nation’s national parks, national monuments, and other federal sites….Federal workers considered essential would have to continue to work without pay. These essential workers include air traffic controllers and federal law enforcement officers. Military personnel would also have to continue to work without pay.”

At Common Dreams, Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution, the nation’s largest grassroots-funded progressive organization, argues that “The core of that reform message” Democrats deploy should being with: “Banning Dark Money in Primaries: Working-class voters have no reason to trust a party whose primaries are shaped by billionaire-funded super PACs. Eliminating dark money ensures that our candidates win based on voter support, not corporate influence. We’ve seen too many examples where races are flooded with big money to crush popular (progressive) candidates….Investing in State Parties and Grassroots Organizing: The first step to rebuilding working-class coalitions is investing in organizing infrastructure—direct voter outreach based on authentic solutions and supporting grassroots leadership in every state. A 50-state strategy means strengthening state parties and empowering organizers, not handing millions to out-of-touch consultants….Committing to a Progressive Platform: To win back working families, Democrats must champion and deliver on the issues that impact their lives—Medicare expansion, living wages, affordable housing, union rights, and climate justice, to name a few. These policies are not only popular; they are essential to solving the economic pain fueling Trump’s appeal….Increasing Transparency and Accountability: For too long, DNC resources have been squandered on expensive media buys and elite political insiders. A reformed DNC must be accountable to its base and transparent about how it spends its resources—resources that belong to grassroots Democrats.”

Dustin Guastella, research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623, writes at The Guardian  that “it will not be enough for the left to protest the billionaire economy. An honest assessment of progressive liabilities is in order. Those on the left must confront the cultural elite that has pushed the party away from workers on all sorts of non-economic issues. While Trump and his billionaires won’t be able to adequately represent the economic interests of the working class, liberals must recognize that their party doesn’t represent their values. The Democrats captured by highly credentialed clerics has led them to embrace the cultural values of an aristocratic elite. From crime, to climate, to gender politics, and the border, mainstream liberal opinion is much further from the views of workers than many liberals are willing to admit. And this too is a class story….s the Democratic party transformed itself from the party of the New Deal to the party of Nafta it embraced a new constituency: progressive professionals. Since Bill Clinton, liberals presided over the offshoring of high-wage blue-collar jobs in manufacturing. They watched as abandoned factories, and the towns that once relied on them, slowly oxidized. As the Rust belt stretched across the heartland, Democrats helped to subsidize the growth of a new elite primarily concentrated on the coasts. They pushed for policies that pulled the economy away from blue-collar industries and toward more “dynamic” sectors primarily in information technologies.”

Guastella continues, “They fashioned a “new economy” through public policy, and attracted a new constituency as a result. They hoped that as high-wage jobs disappeared, they would be replaced by new high-tech careers; as the party lost blue-collar voters, they invested in white-collar professionals. They got what they wished for….the folkways, mannerisms, and tastes of salaried high-income professionals have come to define the party, and now serve as a powerful repellent for working-class voters. Indeed, not only has the embrace of the knowledge class led to the economic neglect of the working class but the aggressive advocacy of professional class cultural values has played a major role in pushing working-class voters away….Simply put, progressive elites have remade the party to reflect the cultural and aesthetic preferences of blue-blooded liberals, and then made these preferences the priority. Ironically, some highly educated Democrats now embody the definition of “conservative” in their defense of these “woke” priorities: they defend the status of the affluent and the educated, the stand for the preservation of a profoundly powerful elite. If Democrats have any hope of winning back working-class voters they will need to confront this liberal aristocracy as much as they protest the corporate money grab of Republican plutocrats….There is promising evidence that workers may be more progressive on economic issues than in the recent past, and in relation to their professional-class peers. As a forthcoming analysis from the Certified Workers’ Compensation Professional program shows, workers do embrace progressive economic positions. Meaning, those on the left have an opportunity to develop an appealing populist economic program. Such a program would confront the very structure of the job market, ending mass layoffs, automation, and offshoring. It would advocate for rebuilding the industrial heartland, providing high-wage jobs for workers at all levels of education, not just for professionals in “smart” coastal hubs. And it would seek to strengthen union rights, revitalize social programs, lower costs and improve education.”