Having followed the ups and downs and twists and turns of House passage of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, I offered some thoughts at New York of where things stand for Republicans and for Democrats:

Republicans are in a state of euphoric self-congratulation over House passage of what’s known as the Big Beautiful Bill.

Politico Playbook, the Beltway’s daily bread, referred to the GOP Speaker of the House as “Magic Johnson” for his last-minute deal-making and cat-herding in securing its passage by a single vote, which happened before a Memorial Day deadline that many had thought unrealistic. He’s sharing credit, of course, with The Boss, Donald Trump, who wheedled and threatened and thundered in the presence of BBB holdouts at several key moments. In the end, for all the interminable talk of “rebellious” GOP factions unwilling to support the gigantic bill as either too vicious or not vicious enough, the price of collective failure was just too high for nearly all of them.

But now, of course, we are about to be reminded that Congress is a bicameral institution, and despite Republican control of both chambers, there are enough issues in the Senate with the carefully balanced Jenga tower the House built to endanger the edifice anew. And when the Senate does produce its version of BBB (the informal but very real deadline is July 4), the two bills will have to be reconciled, and the final product passed by both Houses and sent to Trump for his signature. This needs to happen before the arrival of the so-called X Date — likely in August — when the Treasury finally breaches the statutory debt limit, which is increased in the BBB.

As a former Senate employee, I can assure you that members and staff of that body have enormous institutional self-regard, regardless of party, and will not accept take-it-or-leave-it demands from the petty little pissants of the House. Beyond that, it’s important to understand that what makes “reconciliation” bills like BBB possible is the ability to avoid a Senate filibuster, and there are arcane but very real rules, policed by the non-partisan Senate parliamentarian, about what can and cannot be included in a budget reconciliation bill. So some changes may become absolutely necessary.

More importantly, the very divisions that came close to derailing the bill in the House exist in the Senate as well, with some special twists.

One of the most powerful House factions was the SALT caucus, a sizable group of Republicans from high-tax blue states determined to lift or abolish the cap on SALT (state and local tax) deductions imposed by the 2017 tax cut bill. They were able to secure an increase in the cap from $10,000 to $40,000 (with an inflation adjustment over the next ten years), a juicy treat for upper-middle-income tax itemizers with big property-tax bills, costing an estimated $320 billion. There are no Republican senators from the big SALT states, but there are a lot who deeply resent what they regard as a subsidy for free-spending Democrats in the states most affected. Maybe they’ll care enough about GOP control of the House to throw a lifeline to vulnerable members like Mike Lawler of New York or Young Kim of California, who have made SALT a big personal campaign-trail issue. But there are limits to empathy in Washington.

Another red-hot issue in the House was the size and nature of Medicaid cuts, with the BBB winding up with big cuts mostly accomplished via new “work requirements” that will cost millions of low-income people their health insurance. Senators are divided on Medicaid as well, notes Politico:

“GOP Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine have all warned they have red lines they will not cross on Medicaid and that they believe the House bill goes beyond ‘waste, fraud and abuse.’ The alignment between Hawley, a staunch conservative, with moderates like Murkowski and Collins, underscores how skittishness over changes to the health safety-net program is resonating across the ideological spectrum.”

There are similar problems with the SNAP (food stamp) cuts that shift many billions of dollars of costs to the states. And the way BBB structure the SNAP cuts the cost-shift will be particularly egregious for states with high “error rates” for SNAP paperwork and benefit determinations. Three states with two Republican senators each, Alaska, South Carolina and Tennessee, could really get hammered. They won’t be happy about it.

But at the same time, the HFC hard-liners, who were the very last faction to cave in to Trump’s pressure on the BBB, have counterparts in the Senate with their own complaints about the roughly $3 trillion the BBB adds to the national debt, notes Politico:

“Sen. Ron Johnson … is pushing for a return to pre-pandemic spending levels — a roughly $6 trillion cut. The Wisconsin Republican said in an interview he knows he won’t get that level of savings in the megabill but wants to tackle a chunk under the budget reconciliation process and then set up a bicameral commission to go ‘line by line’ to find the rest.

“Johnson also believes he has the votes to block a bill that doesn’t take deficit reduction seriously, pointing to Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Rick Scott of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky as senators sharing his concerns.”

If Mike Johnson is “magic,” Ron Johnson is “poison.”

On top of everything else, the budget resolution the Senate passed to set up its version of BBB includes an accounting trick that basically means the two chambers are operating from very different baseline numbers. The Senate’s insistence on “current policy scoring” means $3.8 trillion worth of expiring tax cuts that will be resurrected are deemed as “revenue neutral,” a fancy term for “free.” Perhaps the Senate parliamentarian will blow up that scam, but if not, it will cause problems in the House.

These are just the most obvious BBB problems; others will emerge as senators use their leverage to shape the bill to reflect their own political needs and the grubbier desires of the wealthy interests Republicans tend to represent. And for all the talk of the House being the body in which Republicans have no margin for error or division (two voted no and one voted “present”), the same number of GOP senators, four, could blow up the BBB. It’s going to be a long, wild ride, and the only people in Washington who know exactly what to say about the BBB are Democrats. No matter what tweaks Republicans make, the final product is still going to “cut safety net programs to give the wealthy tax cuts” while borrowing money to do so. That’s just baked into the cake.

The following article, “A Comprehensive New Data Analysis Into Why Harris Lost in 2024” by Amy Walter, is cross-posted from The Cook Political Report:

After every major presidential and midterm election, the Democratic data firm Catalist releases a comprehensive analysis of the composition and partisan leanings of the electorate. What distinguishes their analysis from election night exit polling is that it integrates data like vote history, Census data and Catalist’s own polling and modeling, which can give us a more fulsome view of who joined the electorate, and — as importantly — who dropped out of it.

The Catalist “What Happened” report, shared first exclusively with The Cook Political Report, finds that Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 loss was due to two key factors: She lost roughly two points of support among those who turned out in 2020, and new and infrequent voters failed to materialize for Democrats as they had in previous elections.‬ For the first time in Catalist’s dataset, both infrequent and new voters — groups that tend to be younger and more diverse than the electorate at large — fell below 50% support for a Democratic presidential candidate.

What Happened

The Obama Coalition Turned Into the Trump Coalition

Back in 2012, Barack Obama’s campaign had a mantra — a younger, more diverse electorate was the key to reelection. Had the 2024 electorate been in place in 2012, the team in Chicago would’ve been over the moon. The electorate last fall was three points less white than it was 12 years ago. What’s more, the youngest cohort of voters by generational breakdown made up 36% of the electorate (compared to 18% in 2012), while the oldest cohort was just 39% (down from 57% in 2012).

And, yet, that coalition was much friendlier to Donald Trump than to any other GOP nominee.

So what happened?

Men — Especially Men of Color — Shifted Towards Republicans

Overall, Harris performed six points worse among men than Biden did. But that falloff was significantly more pronounced among Latino men (-12) and Black men (-7). Among white men without a college degree — a group that is traditionally the least friendly to Democrats — the slippage was least dramatic (-3).

Women Didn’t Rally for Harris, and Latina Women Moved Right

Despite the historic nature of her candidacy as the first woman of color to be nominated for president, women greeted that fact with more of a shrug. Harris’ vote share among women was basically the same as the share Biden got in 2020, except for a noticeable decline in support from Latinas. She also slightly underperformed Biden among Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women (-4) and failed to do any better with Black women than Biden did.

Younger Voters, Especially Voters of Color, Shifted Right

Even as many in the TikTok generation embraced Harris’ “coconut tree” meme, she failed to capture the imagination or support from young voters that Biden enjoyed in 2020. Among all young voters, Harris underperformed Biden by six points, but the gap was much larger among younger Latino (-12) and AAPI (-9) voters. Among Black and white younger voters, the drop-off in support from 2020 was less severe (-4).

How it happened

For much of the 2024 election, the Harris campaign was convinced that they could win if the electorate looked similar to 2020, while the Trump campaign was eager to expand the electorate. In other words, Harris wanted an electorate heavily populated with frequent voters, while the Trump team wanted an electorate filled with voters who have not participated as much in major elections.

According to Catalist, the electorate was indeed more populated with frequent voters than at any point in the last three presidential elections. The share of the electorate that were so-called “super voters” — those who voted in all of the last four major elections — was 47%, compared to just 38% of the electorate in 2020. More importantly, Harris did better among these voters than any previous Democratic nominee since 2016, capturing 50% of the vote, compared to Biden’s 49% and Hillary Clinton’s 47%.

The least frequent voters also made up less of the electorate overall in 2024 (11%) than in 2020 (16%) and 2016 (15%).

Both of those data points — the large share of “super voters” and the smaller share of less frequent voters — suggest that Harris should have been successful in 2024.

So why wasn’t she?  Because Harris not only underperformed Biden among those who were brand new to voting, but also among people who had voted in anywhere from one to three of the last four elections.

Super Voters Were Older, Less Racially Diverse, and Less Urban

So why did Harris underperform with all types of infrequent voters, not just those who hadn’t voted in any previous election? The Catalist data shows that less frequent voters are more likely to be younger, live in an urban area, be a person of color, and not hold a college degree. In other words, there is a direct correlation between Harris’ underperformance with younger, urban and voters of color and the fact that they make up a disproportionate share of infrequent voters.

For example, in 2024, 78% of the voters who voted in the last four elections were white, compared to 67% of those who voted in two of the last four elections and just 62% who voted in none of the last four elections.

A Lot of Biden Voters Stayed Home, and New Voters Were the Least Democratic Ever

For the last 12 years, Catalist analysis has found dropoff voters (those who voted in the previous presidential election but don’t show up in the current one) have been disproportionately Democratic-leaning. But in the last three presidential elections, Democrats made up for that loss by replacing them with brand new voters, who also leaned heavily Democratic. This is how Democrats were able to win the popular vote in every one of those elections.

In 2024, however, that “churn” in the electorate didn’t benefit Harris. According to Catalist, 30 million 2020 voters didn’t cast a ballot in 2024. That 30 million was also a very Democratic-leaning group, giving Biden an estimated 55.7% of the vote in 2020. Harris was unable to make up for those lost votes with new voters because 1) there were only 26 million new voters; four million fewer than those who dropped out and 2) the new voters gave Harris just 48.5% of the vote, falling below 50% for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in Catalist’s dataset.

It’s these “churn” voters that Catalist concludes both parties should be focused on in 2026 and beyond.

“The Republican playbook has historically counted less on refreshing these rotating marginal voters,” writes Catalist, “but these data suggest that may become a more important part of their electoral coalition.”

And, while they suggest that “future Republican candidates may not be able to replicate Trump’s performance,” future Republican campaigns now have a roadmap to victory — something they didn’t have before Trump re-imagined the GOP coalition.

Note: Catalist is a Democratic organization, but its data and analysis is trusted across partisan lines and among election data experts. Their partisanship does mean that their data is delivered entirely in terms of Democratic vote share rather than a comparison of the two parties. For more on Catalist’s methodology, click here. 

There were a number of interesting takeaways from the latest detailed 2024 election analysis, but I focused on the very big picture at New York:

Researchers are just now gaining access to complete data on what actually happened in the 2024 elections via voter files and Census materials.

The progressive data firm Catalist just issued its report on 2024, and much of what it tells us is a familiar story by now:

“Overall, we find that the Democratic Kamala Harris / Tim Walz ticket retained key parts of the Biden 2020 coalition, but at lower levels among a specific, interconnected set of subgroups, including young voters, men, voters of color, less frequent voters, urban voters, and voters living outside the major battleground states. No single demographic characteristic explains all the dynamics of the election; rather we find that the election is best explained as a combination of related factors. Importantly, an overarching connection among these groups is that they are less likely to have cast ballots in previous elections and are generally less engaged in the political process.

“While these groups tilted toward Donald Trump and JD Vance, Harris retained support among more consistent voters, particularly in battleground states. Together, these dynamics allowed the Trump / Vance ticket to secure a narrow popular vote plurality and a sweep of the major swing states.”

The details, of course, are still interesting, particularly when Catalist gets down into the demographic weeds:

“Over the past several general elections, Democratic support has continued to erode among voters of color. Drops from 2020 to 2024 were highest among Latino voters (9 points in support), lowest among Black voters (3 points), and 4 points for Asian and Pacific Islander groups (AAPI) … As with other demographic groups, support drops were concentrated among the younger cohorts of voters, particularly young men. For instance, support among young Black men dropped from 85% to 75% and support among young Latino men dropped from 63% to 47%.”

But sometimes important data points emerge only when you look at them from 30,000 feet. Given all that we know about the erosion of public trust in institutions, steadily negative perceptions of the direction of the country, a long-term trend away from partisan self-identification, and the savage and alienating tone of contemporary political discourse, you’d guess that voter participation would be sliding into a deep ditch. But it isn’t:

“The 2024 election was a continuation of incredibly high turnout following Trump’s surprising victory in 2016, particularly in the battleground states. Since the start of Trump’s first term, voters have remained highly engaged in the political process.

“According to data from the United States Election Lab compiled by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald … voter turnout spiked from 60% in 2016 to 66% in 2020 — the highest voter turnout in over a century, higher than any election since women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights era. Turnout dropped to 64% in 2024, but this drop was concentrated in non-competitive states, with some battleground states exceeding their 2020 turnout.”

So in a country where so many citizens seem to hate politics, voting is occurring (in relative terms) at historically high levels. Catalist doesn’t go into the possible explanations, but three come to mind right away.

First, despite recent Republican efforts to go back to a system dominated by in-person voting on Election Day, convenience-voting opportunities have steadily spread with voting by mail and/or in-person early voting available nearly everywhere, increasingly without conditions. In most jurisdictions, registering to vote has gotten easier in the 21st century, though, again, recent Republican initiatives to require documentary proof of citizenship and promote frequent “purges” of voter rolls definitely threaten to reverse that trend.

Second, competitive elections tend to produce higher voter turnout, particularly at a time of partisan and ideological polarization, when the stakes associated with winning or losing are heightened. Six of the seven most recent presidential elections have been very close either in the popular vote or the Electoral College or both. Control of either the House (2006, 2010, 2018, and 2022) or Senate (2002, 2006, 2014, and 2020) has changed in every midterm election of the 21st century. This level of instability over such an extended period of time is unusual and arguably galvanizing.

Third, the amount of money going into voter mobilization and persuasion in national election cycles has been steadily rising. The campaign-finance tracking site OpenSecrets has shown that in inflation-adjusted dollars, total spending has nearly tripled between 2000 and 2024 in both presidential and midterm elections. 2020 was actually the most expensive election ever with $7.7 billion (again, in inflation-adjusted dollars) going into the Trump-Biden race and $10.6 billion devoted to congressional campaigns. The slightly lower number for 2024 may have been attributable to the incredibly intensive targeting of resources on the seven battleground states, where, overall, as Catalist showed, turnout actually went up a bit from 2020.

These three factors do not, of course, take into account the much-discussed possibility that Donald Trump and his radicalized party are responsible for excited or fearful hordes of Americans going to the polls. But while voting patterns in Trump-era midterms are a bit different from those in the presidential elections when his name has been on the ballot, turnout has been elevated in the midterms, too. Indeed, the leap from a national turnout rate of 37 percent in 2014 to 50 percent in 2018 (dropping only a bit to 46 percent in 2022) remains one of the largest and most astonishing jumps in voter engagement in living memory.

Will these patterns change when (presumably) Trump leaves the scene in 2028? Nobody knows. But the anecdotal impression that Americans have grown tired of politics, and even government, during the Trump years hasn’t translated into unwillingness to vote.

In “Majority of US companies say they have to raise prices due to Trump tariffs,” Lauren Aratani writes at The Guardian: “A majority of US companies say they will have to raise their prices to accommodate Donald Trump’s tariffs in the US, according to a new report…More than half (54%) of the US companies surveyed by insurance company Allianz said they will have to raise prices to accommodate the cost of the tariffs. Of the 4,500 companies across nine countries, including the US, UK and China, surveyed by Allianz only 22% said they can absorb the increased costs…The unpredictability of US trade policy has also dented exporters’ confidence. The survey found 42% of exporting companies now anticipate turnover to decline between -2% and -10% over the next 12 months, compared to fewer than 5% before 2 April “liberation day” – when Trump unveiled his tariff policy…Though Trump has pulled back on many of the levies he initially proposed, key tariffs remain in place, including a 10% universal tariff on all US imports, a 30% tariff on Chinese imports and extra tariffs on specific industries like metal and auto parts…Inflation data from April showed that US price increases remained roughly level for the month. Economists say that it will take a while for tariff-related price increases to show up in data and companies have started to say they will pass some of the cost of tariffs onto consumers…“Monthly business surveys … do indicate that companies will eventually pass on most of the tariff increases by the summer,” said Maxime Darmet, a senior economist at Allianz Trade.”

“New studies show what’s at stake if Medicaid is scaled back,” Leslie Walker reports at npr.org, and shares some good messaging points for Dems: “Two research studies published this month add important data to the fierce political debate over Medicaid in Washington, D.C.Each study — one published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, and the other released as a working paper from the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research — offers evidence that Medicaid, the public insurance program that covers more than 70 million low-income and disabled Americans, is saving people’s lives.,,As Congress considers major changes to the program, these findings underscore the importance of treading carefully, said Harvard University economist Amitabh Chandra, who was not involved in either study…The National Bureau of Economic Research paper, by Angela Wyse, an economist at Dartmouth College, and Bruce Meyer, a University of Chicago economist, focused on the millions of low-income adults who gained Medicaid coverage in states that expanded the program under the Affordable Care Act. After examining a dataset of 37 million people, the authors found:

• People who gained Medicaid coverage via the ACA expansion were 21% less likely to die in a given year of enrollment than peers who did not get the health coverage.
• States that chose to expand Medicaid saved 27,400 lives between 2010 and 2022.
• States that declined to expand Medicaid in 2014 missed the chance to save 12,800 more lives.

…Together, the two research papers highlight a tough reality for congressional Republicans as they continue to consider a slate of possible Medicaid cuts to fund their other policy priorities…No matter how they shrink the program, whether by making federal funding less generous or paperwork more onerous, this new evidence suggests that some people are likely to get hurt.” For more information about both studies, read the rest of the article right here.

If you haven’t paid much attention to the Republican’s tax bill and wonder who it helps, check out Matt Egan’s CNN Politics report that “The 10 richest Americans got $365 billion richer in the past year. Now they’re on the verge of a huge tax cut.” As Egan writes, “Despite a brief market scare, the richest 10 Americans got $365 billion richer over the past year, according to a new analysis from Oxfam…The stunning increase in wealth amounts to a gain of roughly $1 billion per day for those billionaires…By contrast, the typical American worker made just over $50,000 in 2023. Oxfam found that it would take a staggering 726,000 years for 10 US workers at median earnings to make that much money…The findings put an exclamation point on the nation’s wealth inequality and come as Republicans debate a costly bill that nonpartisan experts say will make the rich even richer and deeply cut nearly $1 trillion from key safety net programs…“Billionaire wealth has increased astronomically while so many ordinary people struggle to make ends meet,” Rebecca Riddell, senior policy lead for economic and racial justice at Oxfam America, said in the report…Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and CEO of Tesla, accounts for just over half of the total wealth gains, with his net worth spiking by $186.1 billion over that span. An analysis last fall found that Musk, a pivotal figure in President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire.”

At Mother Jones, in “For Trump, le Grift, C’est Moi: The White Tablecloth Theory of Dirty Politics applies here,” David Corn outlines the extent of Trump’s corruption: “Trump has engaged in record-setting levels of corruption, as he mixes his business interests with his day job. It’s as if the presidency is a mere side hustle to his main gig of maximum personal enrichment. His trip to the Middle East this past week was more a venture of Trump, Inc. than a presidential mission. His Trump Organization is developing projects in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—the three nations on his Mideast tour—while hooking up with firms tied to these Arab governments…His family business is also cutting lucrative crypto deals with Arab partners. As my colleague Russ Choma recently reported, Eric Trump, who runs the Trump Organization now, was recently in Dubai and announced that MGX, a UAE-based investment fund, would invest $2 billion in crypto exchange Binance using a “stablecoin” created by the Trumps’ crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. The deal could net the Trump family hundreds of millions, as the transaction lends enormous credibility and liquidity to their crypto business. MGX isn’t just any UAE-based investment fund. It’s chaired by Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and brother of the Emirates’ ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.” Corn continues, “Let’s not forget the Saudi investment fund that kicked in $2 billion when Jared Kushner started his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, which subsequently attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in backing also from Qatar and the UAE…Never has a president been so financially intertwined with foreign governments. No wonder he praised Mohammed bin Salman, the murderous ruler of Saudi Arabia, as a “gentleman.” After all, he’s helping Trump and his family make millions. And, as we all know, Trump agreed last week to accept a $400 million gift airplane from Qatar. Any slice of this would have been unthinkable for an American president in the past. But not with Trump. The latest grift is just another drop on an already huge pile of grift.”

The following article, “What Democrats Can Learn From Morena,” by Juan David Rojas, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

On June 2, 2024, Claudia Sheinbaum was elected Mexico’s first female and Jewish president. Her party, the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena), secured landslides at virtually all levels of government. Just five months later across the Rio Grande, former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party lost to Donald Trump and the GOP. Democrats’ 2024 loss culminated a post-pandemic backlash against incumbents—with the left-wing Morena representing a notable exception. The party, moreover, has bucked the trend of Brahminization among left-of-center parties that cater to college-educated professionals at the expense of a bygone working-class constituency.

Founded in 2014 by the political juggernaut Andrés Manuel López Obrador—known popularly as AMLO—Morena would become wildly popular in the ensuing decade. In 2015 following congressional midterms, the party held just 35 of 500 seats in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. By 2018, Lopez Obrador became the first self-described leftist to win the presidency in almost five decades, securing 55 percent of the vote. President Sheinbaum—AMLO’s successor and protege—won by a margin of 33 points, representing 61 percent of votes cast. A Gallup poll found that AMLO ended his term with an 80 percent approval rating while Sheinbaum has enjoyed even higher marks of 85 percent. Morena and its allies now control 24 of 32 state governorships, 530 of 1113 state legislative seats, and two-thirds of both houses of congress.

What explains the appeal of the most popular political movement in the Americas? Ask legacy media and you’ll find extended diatribes on Mexico’s purported “democratic backsliding” under Morena. Ask apologists of leftist tyrants—such as Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega—and they will explain that Morena’s success is the obvious result of its righteous anti-imperialism. In reality, the party maintains a meticulous commitment tofiscal responsibility, democratic governance, and material populism. In the same vein, AMLO’s 2018 victory was the culmination of decades of coalition building as well as the cumulative failings of his predecessors.

After 2000, the end of one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) spawned a competitive multiparty system centered around the centrist PRI, conservative National Action Party (PAN), and leftist Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD). Until AMLO’s election in 2018, no party won more than a plurality for either the presidency or congress. In 2000, AMLO was elected PRD Mayor of Mexico City, where Sheinbaum served as his environment secretary. He received widespread recognitionfor reducing poverty, expanding infrastructure and improving public security.

Lopez Obrador later ran for president in 2006 and 2012 in a coalition with the hard-left Labor Party (PT) and progressive Citizen’s Movement (MC). In 2006, AMLO lost with 36.06 percent of the vote to PAN-candidate Felipe Calderon’s 36.69 percent in an election marked by irregularities. In 2012, he secured 32.4 percent, losing to the PRI’s 39.2 percent under Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN).

Peña Nieto went on to reform welfare, education, and energy policy in a unity coalition with the PRI, PAN and PRD. The notorious 2013 energy reform allowed private firms to compete with the state oil and electricity giants Pemex and CFE. The nationalist wing of the PRD—including AMLO and Sheinbaum—denounced the betrayal by the party’s congressional leadership and founded Morena. For context, the Mexican left has championed state control of the country’s energy sector since its 1938 nationalization by President Lázaro Cárdenas—an idol within the governing coalition.

Having lost two consecutive elections to both the PAN and the PRI, Lopez Obrador cultivated a big-tent coalition in support of Morena, one that would promote ideological diversity on cultural issues while maintaining a shared, populist vision on material concerns. Lopez Obrador himself was widely regarded as traditionalist-to-conservative on moral and social matters. Ahead of congressional midterms in 2015, he stated that issues such as abortion and gay marriage were “not very important” to the newly formed Morena.

The party joined a coalition with the PT and the conservative Evangelical Social Encounter Party (PES); the rump PRD and progressive MC subsequently allied with the PAN in a comparable big-tent coalition. An indefatigable populist in the spirit of William Jennings Bryan, AMLO visited all 2,477 of Mexico’s municipalities ahead of the 2018 election where he promised to usher a “Fourth Transformation,” a reference to the preceding Mexican Revolution, Reforms of Benito Juarez, and War of Independence. The 4T—itself a shorthand for the governing coalition—would overturn 40 years of neoliberalism augured by the PRI and PAN.

Between 1976 and 1994, the minimum wage lost 75 percent of its inflation-adjusted value before stagnating until 2018. In the eyes of policymakers, low wages and weak labor rights would maintain Mexico’s comparative advantage under NAFTA and prevent a repeat of the spiraling debt and inflation of the 1980s. Morena rejected these paradigms and hiked the minimum wage from $2,650 pesos a month in 2018 to $8,400 (about $500 USD) in 2025—in real terms, a 150 percent increase. The administration also passed reforms promoting unionization and banning subcontracting, itself a convenient method for employers to avoid paying workers bonuses and other benefits.

The result was that real wages in Mexico rose 40 percent by the start of Sheinbaum’s term. Inflation, moreover, returned to pre-pandemic levels of 4 percent by 2023, with unemployment falling to a record low of 2.5 percent since 2024. All the more remarkable is the fact that GDP growth in Mexico has been mediocre, averaging less than two percent a year since 2018. And yet, wages under the PRI and PAN were so low that hikes have also benefited businesses large and small due to the subsequent boom in the country’s internal market. Unsurprisingly, both AMLO and Sheinbaumhave received high marks for their management of the Mexican economy.

A master in branding, Lopez Obrador also slashed government bureaucracy under the moniker of “Republican Austerity.” Unlike the oxymoronic Department of Government Efficiency, which has pursued destructive cuts for their own sake, Republican Austerity served the discrete purpose of streamlining redistributive efforts. Middlemen, including foreign NGOs, were axed from the distribution of means-tested cash transfers, which were reformed into universal programs such as an old-age stipend for seniors 68 and older.

The administration also executed a mass building spree, often using the military to circumvent red tape. Megaprojects such as the Maya Train, Tehuantepec Interoceanic Corridor, and Olmeca oil refinery were deliberately situated in poor southern states to attract jobs, tourism, and investment. Consequently, Mexico’s south has grown at a faster rate than other regions for the first time in decades.

None of this has compromised the country’s finances. Despite the pandemic, Mexico’s debt-to-GDP under Morena has remained stable at 50 percent, with the country’s cumulative budget deficit averaging just 3.5 percent. Refusing to also raise taxes, Morena enforced an aggressive crackdown on corporate tax evasion, with revenues from large firms doubling since EPN’s term. In contrast to the endless boom and bust of its Latin American peers, low but stable growth under the penny-pinching Morena has delivered lasting results. A 2024 report from the World Bank found that 10 millionleft poverty during AMLO’s term.

To tout these achievements, Lopez Obrador continued a tradition from his time as mayor: daily press conferences known as mañaneras. An avid admirer of the New Deal, the mañaneras served a similar function as FDR’s fireside chats, allowing AMLO to lash out at a mostly hostile media and set the government’s agenda. The three-hour affairs consisted of everything from history lectures to screeds against the corrupting influence of ‘el nintendo’ on Mexican youth.

While left-wing and materially populist in substance, much of the bible-quotingpresident’s rhetoric was moralistic and conservative in form. In his telling, privatizations and financial deregulation were part and parcel of rule by a cosmopolitan, technocratic elite that disdained workers’ traditional values. “[Mexican] cultural, moral, and spiritual values come from the people and the family, not from academia or the media—and especially not from politics or economic elites. It comes from the people,” he said during a 2021 mañanera.

In Mexico, opposition toward the former president came almost exclusively from middle- and upper-class professionals. An idiosyncratic friend of Donald Trump, AMLO was also universally hated by American centrists and progressives for policies deemed “problematic.” On energy, his government rejected the twin evils of market and climate fundamentalism. Under the PRI and PAN, market reforms and insufficient investment in state refineries led oil production to decline from four million barrels per day in 2004 to two million by 2013, ballooning Pemex’s debt and leading to a greater reliance on U.S. oil imports.

The subsequent privatization of Mexico’s energy market in 2014 led to an even greater fall in production, as the inefficient Pemex failed to adequately compete with foreign multinationals. As in California after the 1990s, the imposition of competition within CFE’s natural monopoly led electricity prices to jump 35 percent by 2017. AMLO subsequently rescued Pemex, increased oil production, and began construction of the aforementioned Olmeca refinery, though the latter has been plagued with delays and accidents.

Read more…

At Semafor, David Weigel reports that “James Malone’s victory in a Pennsylvania special election this year was a Democratic triumph. The small-town mayor broke the GOP’s grip on Lancaster County, flipping a [state senate district]…that Donald Trump had carried by 15 points. Gov. Josh Shapiro, who campaigned for Malone, thanked Pennsylvanians for rejecting “the extremism and division coming out of DC.”…Last week, shortly after being sworn in, Malone voted with four other Democrats and every Republican for the Save Women’s Sports Act. Like legislation that had passed in the US House, and in dozens of other states, it limited female sports from kindergarten through college to “biological females.” Malone had told constituents that he planned to vote for it, and LGBTQ rights groups had urged him to reconsider, but it passed easily…The Trump administration is enforcing a binary definition of sex and gender, reversing pro-trans Biden-era policies, from the military to the locker room. In Congress, just two Democrats, both moderates from Republican-trending seats, have voted with them, supporting legislation to bar transgender athletes from women’s sports…But in the states, a growing number of Democratic state legislators have supported Republican-led bills. They’ve been condemned by pro-LGBTQ+ groups, and rarely explained their votes. And they’ve been given some space by their party.”

In January, The U.S. House passed legislation to restrict transgender students from playing on women’s sports teams by a  218-206 vote, along party lines. Only two Democrats voted with the Republicans. Then in early March, as Frank Thorp and Sahil Kapur report at nbcnews.com, “Senate Democrats voted unanimously to block a Republican-led bill Monday evening that would prohibit federally funded schools from allowing transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports…In a party-line vote of 51-45, Democrats filibustered the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, introduced by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. It fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance as Democrats dismissed it as a distraction and a cynical political move…Four senators didn’t vote: Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va.; Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo.; Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich.; and Peter Welch, D-Vt…The outcome means the legislation — which passed the House in January and mirrors an executive order issued by President Donald Trump — won’t go any further. But the failed vote is likely to become a political talking point for Republicans in upcoming elections after they used the issue of transgender rights as a cudgel in the 2024 campaign…A New York Times/Ipsos poll conducted in January found broad opposition to transgender athletes in asking respondents whether “transgender female athletes — meaning athletes who were male at birth but who currently identify as female” — should be allowed to compete in women’s sports. In response, 79% of American adults said they “should not” be allowed, while 18% said they “should be allowed.”

The issue has been made more problematic for Dems by the rapidly increasing popularity of women’s sports. Democrats want to be supportive of legitimate LGBTQ human rights, and hold on to the votes they have been getting from that constituency. But resistance to allowing biologically-born males to compete against women and girls for sports medals, trophies and scholarships is growing. Most  men have size and musculature advantage that many voters believe provides an unfair edge in athletic competition with females. The injustice against females was eloquently captured in the photo of self-declared transgender swimmer Lia Thomas being presented a medal for winning an NCAA female swim meet, while much smaller female runner-ups look on. During the 2024 presidential race, the Trump campaign spent more than $20 million on ads that ran more than 60 thousand times, some on televised NFL and College games, which said Kamala Harris supported taxpayer-funded transgender operations for prison inmates. “Kamala is for they/them,” one ad says. “Trump is for you.” The intent of the ad was to “brand” Harris and Democrats as a political party that puts transexuals above other voters. It may have helped Trump win some states. For Democrats, the political calculation for the 2026 elections is whether they win or lose more votes because of their support for rights/privileges of transgendered athletes over the rights of women and girls. As with all controversial issues facing Democrats, the central moral question is fairness. Is allowing transgendered athletes to compete against women and girls really fair toward females, who are more than half of the population?

From “Democrats: How to rebuild a damaged brand” at The Week comes this highly opinionated editorial: “Democrats might be tempted to take solace” from President Trump’s tumbling poll numbers, said Noah Rothman in National Review. “They shouldn’t.” While Trump’s net approval rating has sunk more than 5 percentage points since he took office in January, to about 45 percent, Democrats are doing even worse, with only 33 percent of voters viewing the party favorably. Since Democrats held a healthy 6-point lead over Republicans at this point in Trump’s first term, that’s bad news for the party’s 2026 midterm prospects and proof that “the well of mistrust Democrats cultivated in the Biden years goes deep.” To win back voters, top lawmakers have offered only “impotent theatrics.” Sen. Cory Booker and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries staged a pointless 12-hour sit-in on the U.S. Capitol steps to protest the Trump agenda, while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer went on TV to tout a “very strong letter” he wrote to the president. They clearly have no idea how to “repair their party’s image.”…JB Pritzker does, said Renee Graham in The Boston Globe. In a speech to New Hampshire Democrats last week, the Illinois governor blasted the “simpering timidity” of party leaders in the face of Trump’s authoritarian threat and called “for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption.” And he slammed “do-nothing Democrats” who want to blame the party’s 2024 losses “on our defense of Black people and trans kids and immigrants—instead of their own lack of guts and gumption.” It’s an electrifying wake up from the “Schumer stupor” and sure to be welcomed by Democratic voters and left-leaning independents, 74 percent of whom think elected officials aren’t pushing back against Trump hard enough. Democrats should give Pritzker “a serious look as a presidential candidate,” said Perry Bacon Jr. in The Washington Post. A billionaire from a deep-blue state, he may not be the ideal nominee for 2028. But “he’s great for the party now.”…A message of “all resistance, all the time” will not fix the “working-class-size hole” in the Democratic coalition, said Ruy Teixeira in The Liberal Patriot. Freshman Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego has an approach that could do the job: The Marine veteran criticized the Biden administration for lax border enforcement, has railed against Trump’s government cuts, and is “unafraid to highlight the non-woke priorities of Latino working-class men who all want, as he put it, a ‘big-ass truck.'” Progressive primary voters may not tolerate such “apostasy,” and the mission of detoxifying the Democratic brand “may not matter” if Trump’s approval rating keeps nose-diving. But outrage alone is not a winning strategy.”

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:

In late October of last year, I published a piece called “The Progressive Moment Is Over.” I observed:

It wasn’t so long ago progressives were riding high. They had a moment; they really did. Their radical views set the agenda and tone for the Democratic Party and, especially in cultural areas, were hegemonic in the nation’s discourse. Building in the teens and cresting in the early ‘20s with the Black Lives Matter protests and heady early days of the Biden administration, very few of their ideas seemed off the table…As far as progressives were concerned, they had ripped the Overton window wide open and it only remained to push the voters through it. In their view, that wouldn’t be too hard since these were great ideas and voters, at least the non-deplorable ones, were thirsty for a bold new approach to America’s problems.

So they thought. In reality, a lot of these ideas were pretty terrible and most voters, outside the precincts of the progressive left itself, were never very interested in them. That was true from the get-go but now the backlash against these ideas is strong enough that it can’t be ignored. As a result, politics is adjusting and the progressive moment is well and truly over.

The 2024 election, held not long after, seemed to provide an exclamation point on my observations. But, to paraphrase President George W. Bush, “Is our Democrats learning?” Let’s revisit some of the points I made in that article on the end of the progressive moment and rate how well—or poorly—Democrats have responded.

1. Loosening restrictions on illegal immigration was a terrible idea and voters hated it. Aside from the economy, no issue loomed as large in the Democrats’ 2024 election drubbing than the immigration issue. Voters thought Democrats had completely lost the plot on illegal immigration and utterly failed to control the border. Voters cast their ballots accordingly, clearly preferring a much tougher approach to illegal immigration, including not just closing the border but deporting illegal immigrants already in the country.

Since Trump’s election, the southern border has been mostly closed and illegal immigration over the border slowed to a trickle. Support for this development from Democrats has been tepid to non-existent. As for deportations of illegal immigrants, some Democrats have ventured support for deportations of illegal immigrants, at least those implicated in criminal activity.

But even here, enthusiasm has been notably lacking. Take the Laken Riley Act which has passed Congress and is now law. Laken Riley was the Georgia nursing student who was murdered by illegal Venezuelan immigrant Jose Ibarra (recall that Biden, under pressure from the left, apologized for referring to illegal immigrant Ibarra as “illegal” as opposed to the approved nomenclature of “undocumented”). The legislation named after her provides for the detention of illegal immigrants charged with theft-related crimes, assault on a police office or acts causing death or bodily harm to an individual. Just 12 Democrats in the Senate and 46 Democrats in the House were willing to vote for the Laken Riley Act, with the left of the party, heavily concentrated in blue states, conspicuous by its absence.

By a very wide margin, Democrats’ most conspicuous interventions in the immigration area have been on specific wrongful or unjustified deportations like that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Mahmoud Kalil. The former case in particular has become a cause celebre among Democrats, with Democratic politicians like Senator Chris Van Hollen traveling to El Salvador to protest his wrongful deportation. Certainly, it is not debatable that Garcia was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, even though he had entered the US illegally and even though there were some indications of gang affiliation and domestic abuse in his record, since there was a court order specifically against deporting him to that country. However, making him the focus of Democratic immigration activism is a dubious approach to refurbishing the Democrats’ image of laxness on illegal immigration.

Trump has certainly given Democrats plenty of fodder to register their indignation about wrongful or unjustified deportations. Most voters would assume that if Democrats got back into power, such wrongful deportations would stop. But they would probably be much less sure Democrats would proceed with justified and desirable deportations. And they would probably wonder if a future Democratic administration would actually keep the border under control or just revert to the chaos of the Biden years. Democrats are doing little so far to assuage such concerns.

My grade for Democrats on improving their immigration image: D

2. Promoting lax law enforcement and tolerance of social disorder was a terrible idea and voters hated it. In the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd and the nationwide movement sparked by it, the climate for police and criminal justice reform was highly favorable. But Democrats, taking their cue from progressive activists, blew the opportunity by allowing the party to be associated with unpopular movement slogans like “defund the police” that did not appear to take public safety concerns very seriously. This was twinned to a climate of tolerance and non-prosecution for lesser crimes that degraded the quality of life in many cities under Democratic control.

Crime did not loom as large as immigration in the 2024 election, but it was still a significant drag on Democratic fortunes. In the lead up to the election, a Democracy Corps survey of battleground states and congressional district found battleground voters favored Trump and the Republicans over Biden and the Democrats by 12 points on “feeling safe” and by 17 points on “handling crime.” The survey also asked these voters what they would worry about the most if Biden won the election. Topping the list was “the border being wide open to millions of impoverished immigrants, many are criminals and drug dealers who are overwhelming America’s cities.” But a very close second—just a point behind—was “crime and homelessness being out of control in cities and the violence killing small businesses and the police.” Among black, Hispanic and Asian voters as well as among white Millennials, moderate Democrats and political independents, crime and homelessness worries actually topped the list.

Democrats have made some attempts to rehabilitate their image in this area but their biggest assist has come from the voters themselves who have tossed out excessively lenient Democratic public officials in a number of blue municipalities and replaced them with moderate Democrats who are more willing to enforce the law and crack down on public disorder. It’s slow going though and most Democrats are still reluctant to embrace an unapologetic law and order stance. Not for them former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s felicitous slogan: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.” That’s too bad because voters really do want law and order—done fairly and humanely, but law and order just the same. Voters are still suspicious that Democrats are truly with the program.

My grade for Democrats on improving their crime and public order image: C-

3. Insisting that everyone should look at all issues through the lens of identity politics was a terrible idea and voters hated it. In the last decade, huge swathes of a Democratic Party increasingly dominated by progressives became infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those engaging in them. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s justified or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized group or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

This doesn’t make much logical sense and it has led the Democrats to take a number of positions at odds with the concerns of ordinary voters. Voters overwhelmingly believe illegal immigration by anyone is wrong and should be deterred not indulged as Democrats have frequently done. They believe crimes should be punished no matter who commits them, public safety is sacrosanct and that police and policing are vital necessities not tools of oppression. They believe, with Martin Luther King, that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” and therefore oppose discrimination on the basis of race no matter who benefits from that discrimination. They believe biological sex is real no matter who claims it isn’t, that spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved, and that medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available simply on the basis of declared gender identity, especially for children.

But Democrats don’t seem inclined to back down on their commitment to identity politics. Take their reaction to Trump’s efforts to dismantle DEI and affirmative action within the federal government and for federal contractors. Democrats appear willing to lie down on the railroad tracks on this one. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Trump’s actions with the disingenuous argument that DEI is merely an expression of the American values in the Constitution. That’s absurd. DEI is of comparatively recent vintage and the programs are now indelibly associated with racial preferences, oppression hierarchies, ideological indoctrination, and language policing. Those aren’t American values at all.

Tolerance, anti-discrimination and equal opportunity, on the other hand, are—precisely what Democrats used to advocate. Defending these principles against Trump and his inevitable tendency to encroach upon them as he pursues his agenda would be a worthwhile and popular stance for Democrats. But first they must recognize that Trump’s drive for a color-blind, merit-based society is extremely popular while affirmative action and DEI are not.

Instead, Democrats are repeating their misguided, ineffectual response to the 2023 Supreme Court decision that barred race-based affirmative action in college admissions. At the time, Jaime Harrison, then-chair of the DNC, “condemned” the Supreme Court for what he described as “a devastating blow for racial justice and equality.” Jeffries said the ruling showed the court was “more interested in jamming their right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.”

Jeffries could not have been more wrong that opposition to affirmative action is an expression of a fringe “right-wing ideology.” In fact, racial preferences are very, very unpopular with ordinary Americans and have been for a long time. In polling from Pew in 2022, an overwhelming 74 percent thought that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. A majority of all non-white racial groups agreed. Affirmative action also lost badly in a referendum in deep-blue California in 2020. Supporters of a measure to repeal the state’s ban on affirmative action outspent opponents by ten to one, but the measure still failed.

The usual overreach by the Trump administration is giving the Democrats cover as they circle the wagons on this one. But their inability to change their stance at all on these issues will probably lead voters to believe that everything they don’t like about affirmative action and DEI will come roaring back once Democrats get back into power.

Even more tone-deaf is the Democrats’ determination not to give an inch on trans issues. But voters, particularly working-class voters, hate the pronoun police, strongly disagree that trans-identified biological boys should be able to play girls sports and don’t support the easy availability of “gender-affirming care” (e.g., puberty blockers, hormones, surgery) for minors. A recent New York Times poll found that 80 percent of working-class (non-college) respondents opposed transgender birth males playing in women’s sports and 75 percent opposed allowing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to be prescribed for anyone under 18.

For all that, only two (2!) House Democrats—both conservative Hispanic Democrats from Texas—could find the wherewithal to vote for The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act which would prohibit the participation of biological men and boys in women’s and girls sports. Even Massachusetts Democratic representative Seth Moulton, who had raised questions about having biological boys in girls sports, did not vote for the bill presumably because of pressure from the left (they viciously attacked him for being a “Nazi”, transphobe, etc, etc.) And in the Senate, every single Democrat voted to kill the bill. Talk about being out of step with public opinion.

In the latest example of this madness, Maine Democrats in their House of Representatives voted to censure and then disenfranchised Republican representative Laurel Libby (i.e., wouldn’t count her votes in legislative roll calls) because of her social media post about a trans-identified male who had won a girls’ pole-vaulting competition.

My grade for Democrats on improving their identity politics image: F

4. Telling people fossil fuels are evil and they must stop using them was a terrible idea and voters hate it. Since the days of Barack Obama and an “all of the above” approach to energy production, Democrats have embraced quite a radical approach to energy issues. They have embraced the view that climate change is not a dynamic that is gradually advancing, but an imminent crisis that is already upon us and is evident in extreme weather events. It threatens the existence of the planet if immediate, drastic action is not taken. That action must include the immediate replacement of fossil fuels, including natural gas, by renewables, wind and solar, which are cheap and can be introduced right now if sufficient resources are devoted to doing so, and which, unlike nuclear power, are safe. Not only that, the immediate replacement of fossil fuels by renewables will make energy cheaper and provide high wage jobs.

This entire argument is highly dubious and voters, particularly working-class voters, don’t buy the policy claims here at all. They far prefer a gradual, “all-of-the-above” approach to transitioning the energy system to the frantic push for renewables and electric vehicles (not to mention heat pumps, electric stoves, etc.) that characterizes progressives’ Green New Deal-type thinking. In a survey conducted by YouGov, just a quarter of working-class (non-college) voters embraced the Democrats’ current approach, emphasizing ending the use of fossil fuels and rapidly adopting renewables. This was actually less than the number (29 percent) that flat-out supported production of fossil fuels and opposed green energy projects. The dominant position by far was an all-of-the above approach that called for cheap, abundant energy from many sources, including oil, gas, renewables, and nuclear, favored by 46 percent of voters.

The hard fact is that the standard Democratic hostility to fossil fuels is not widely shared by ordinary voters, who are fundamentally oriented toward cheap, reliable and abundant energy. In a 2024 result from the New York Times/Siena poll, two-thirds of likely voters said they supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” Or how about this remarkable result from an NBC poll. Testing a wide range of policy proposals to see whether voters would be more or less likely to support a candidate who espoused them, the most positive response among voters was to a proposal to expand domestic oil and natural gas production. By a very wide 67 percent to 15 percent margin, voters said they would be more likely, rather than less likely, to support a candidate who wanted to expand fossil fuel production!

Trump has taken steps that he says will increase fossil fuel production and make energy more abundant. He plans to eliminate many of the subsidies and regulations that are designed to accelerate the transition to green energy and electric vehicles. And he has restricted environmental review processes to reduce the costs of big energy and infrastructure projects.

Much of this has both merit and popular support. Democrats, however, have been unremittingly hostile. They are letting the usual suspects at environmental and climate change NGOs dictate their response. Alas for them, voters care more about cheap, reliable energy than fighting climate change. They are willing to consider electric vehicles, but resent any regulatory attempt to force them to give up gas-powered vehicles. And Trump is right: environmental regulations really have become a shocking drag on building practically anything in this country—be it energy-related projects, transportation infrastructure, or housing.

If Democrats can’t accept that much of this is both popular and necessary, they will be unable to mount a credible response to Trump’s energy plans where they overreach or go off the rails. Moreover, on current evidence, voters would not be unjustified in concluding that a Democratic return to power would mean a continuation of Democrats’ commitment to a rapid renewables-based energy transition which voters do not support and do not believe will deliver what they want: cheap, reliable and abundant energy.

My grade for Democrats on improving their energy policy image: F

I hate to be a tough grader on all this but that’s how it looks right now. The progressive moment is still over. It’s just Democrats don’t seem to realize it. When they’ll wake up is anybody’s guess.

Hard to believe I’ve now lived in California long enough that I can be nostalgic for the recent past. But something just happened that made me wonder if Golden State Democrats are at a turning point, as I suggested at New York:

Governor Gavin Newsom and many other California Democrats hoped that their state could serve as a defiant alternative to the reactionary bent of the second Trump administration, one that proudly stands up for their party’s values. But fiscal realities (including many under the influence of their enemies in Washington) still matter, and a new announcement from Newsom, as reported by the Associated Press, illustrates the limits of state-based progressivism in the Trump era:

“Gov. Gavin Newsom wants California to stop enrolling more low-income immigrants without legal status in a state-funded health care program starting in 2026 and begin charging those already enrolled a monthly premium the following year.

“The decision is driven by a higher-than-expected price tag on the program and economic uncertainty from federal tariff policies, Newsom said in a Wednesday announcement. The Democratic governor’s move highlights Newsom’s struggle to protect his liberal policy priorities amid budget challenges in his final years on the job.

“California was among the first states to extend free health care benefits to all poor adults regardless of their immigration status last year, an ambitious plan touted by Newsom to help the nation’s most populous state to inch closer to a goal of universal health care. But the cost for such expansion ran $2.7 billion more than the administration had anticipated.”

The steady expansion of Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, which is being at best “paused” right now, reflected two different but mutually reinforcing progressive values: a slow but stead crawl toward universal health-care coverage in the absence of a national single-payer system, and a concern for the needs of the undocumented immigrants who play so prominent a role in California’s economy and society. In particular, California Democrats have embraced the argument that health care should be a right, not some sort of earned privilege, in part because health insurance helps keep overall health-care costs down in the long run by promoting early detection and treatment of illnesses while avoiding expensive emergency-room care. Because federal Medicaid dollars cannot be used to provide services for undocumented immigrants, California (like six other states that cover significant numbers of adults, and 13 others who cover children) has used state dollars to pay for them.

California Democrats were in a position to expand Medi-Cal thanks to the legislative supermajorities they have enjoyed since 2018, which is also when Newsom became governor. But the latest expansion has proved to be fiscally unsustainable as statewide budget shortfalls loom. Newsom has been quick to attribute the latest budget woes to revenues losses caused by Trump’s tariff policies. But the broader problem is that, unlike the federal government, California must balance its budget, even though many of the factors influencing spending and revenues are beyond its control. And the problem is likely to get worse as the Trump administration and its congressional allies shift costs to the states, a major part of their strategy for reducing federal spending (to pay for high-end federal tax cuts).

There’s a specific emerging federal policy that probably influenced Newsom’s latest step: Congressional Republicans are very likely to adopt a punitive reduction in Medicaid matching funds for states that are using their own money to cover undocumented immigrants. The details are still under development, but the provision could hit California pretty hard.

Numbers aside, this episode represents a potential turning point in California’s progressive political trends, reflecting Trump’s better-than-expected showing in the Golden State in 2024 along with the passage of a ballot initiative increasing criminal penalties for drug and theft offenses and the rejection of an increase in the state’s minimum wage. There’s even some optimistic talk among California Republicans about breaking their long losing streak (dating back to 2006) in statewide elections next year. That’s pretty unlikely given the high odds of an anti-Trump midterm backlash, but the fact that the heirs of Ronald Reagan are even dreaming dreams is a bit of a surprise.

It’s also possible that the ever-ambitious Newsom doesn’t mind calibrating his own ideological image toward the perceived center in his final days as governor (he’s term-limited next year). He and other California Democrats can only hope that economic trends and what happens in Washington give them a choice in the matter.

 

The following article, “Kamala Could Have Won: She was poised to claim the presidency, but Joe Biden and a disastrous campaign defeated her” by Stanley B. Greenberg, founding partner of Greenberg Research, Democracy Corps, and Climate Policy & Strategy, American Prospect board member and New York Times best-selling author and co-author, with James Carville, of ‘It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!,’ is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

Kamala Harris was poised to win the 2024 presidential election when her message included America getting control of its border and her championing economic and political change.

In her campaign launch addressing the economy and in her DNC acceptance speeches, she made the cost of living singularly important, showed empathy, and offered concrete policy solutions. She promised that Congress would enact the bipartisan border control bill. She embraced President Biden’s expanded Child Tax Credit and attacked Donald Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires. Her speeches made the election a battle for the middle class. She was laser-focused on the cost of living, while portraying—correctly, as we are seeing today—Trump tariffs as an inflationary tax on imports. She made that the principal fight of the campaign.

And after her debate against Trump, Harris moved into a three-point lead nationally and, critically, ahead in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

But it was not to be.

Two books, one by Chris Whipple, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, and the other by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, show the disastrous decisions that put Donald Trump in the White House. I will also describe my efforts with various participants to impact those decisions.

You need to read both these important books to understand the 2024 election. Harris could have won, but her campaign had so many 180-degree turns and was so burdened by Joe Biden’s continued presence in the campaign that she lost. The lessons for Democrats are painful.

Allen and Parnes had strong access to the managers and campaign operations for both Biden and Harris, making the book indispensable to understanding the campaign’s many turns. Harris kept on Biden’s campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon. That fateful decision contributed mightily to the disaster.

But Whipple’s will be the more important book because it had better access to the advisers closest to Biden, understands the implications of changes in message and strategy for the election, and effectively uses other research to tell a fuller picture.

The further I read in these books, the angrier I grew with the Biden advisers who failed to act as his senescence accelerated, while Biden’s deep personal insecurity and paranoia produced a preposterous campaign based on his accomplishments, in what was really a change election. I was also maddened by the apparent sexism of the Biden team that assumed his vice president could not win the presidency, disastrously delaying his exit from the race.

Now, 2024 was a tough year for incumbent parties all over the world. The highest inflation in 40 years rated 20 or 30 points above the next problem in polls. All saw surges in refugees and illegal immigration. Conservatives successfully whipped up a frenzy about the elite’s “woke” liberal policies.

They were all sinking Biden. James Carville and I still speak every morning, and we were depressed, certain Biden would lose. James went on every show to vent. Despite the daunting problems, both books portray Biden—as well as Trump—as men with few doubts. And the advisers and managers are depicted as “loyalists” helping the leaders achieve their goals. In particular, Ron Klain was depicted in both books as the adviser fighting the hardest and longest to keep the president in the race.

But that does not capture the reality of doubts, fractures, and debates that I saw personally. I sent regular emails to the White House and the Biden campaign, including Anita Dunn, Ron Klain, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, John Anzalone, and later, Ted Kaufman and Chris Dodd. After Biden withdrew, I wrote to David Binder, Harris’s chief pollster, and later, Lorraine Voles, Harris’s chief of staff.

As chief of staff early in Biden’s term, Klain pushed for economic messages that empathized with voters’ pain and promised to help lower prices. He tried to reverse the changes in immigration policies that were producing millions of new border encounters. He was not alone. And he too felt that President Biden’s legacy could be best achieved by him not running for re-election.

By late 2023, two-thirds of the country thought we were on the wrong track, so before Thanksgiving I wrote a report named “The Change Campaign That Can Contest America.” Klain wrote, “I agree with this 100% and have been pressing an argument similar to this with Jeff [Zients] and Mike [Donilon].” Feel “their pain and stand for change.” But “they are not there. You have to move Mike considerably.”

After watching President Biden praise the economy for two years straight, I responded ironically. How is it going? “You have conducted an experiment—speaking positively about the economy for two years. Your overall approval rating has only declined every month.” Klain agreed but added, “In 2020, Biden was a change candidate. But today, he is the incumbent preaching stability. And a lot of black people in our country want to shake things up.”

The Biden media firm ran ads on how the Inflation Reduction Act saved you money and raised taxes on big corporations. It got strong positive reactions from voters. But I also tested Biden declaring, “We are now living through the strongest—fastest—most widespread and equitable recovery in American history.” It brought Biden’s approval rating down further.

Finally, in December that year, I wrote a letter to share with the president, saying Biden has a historic domestic legacy and could have an international one as well. Trump will be difficult to beat, and “his sole mission will be the destruction of your legacy.”

Klain responded, “This has been my view for almost a year, but Michael [Donilon] sees it differently.” Who else in the team felt that Biden should retire? Maybe most.

Joe Biden

In February 2024, President Biden’s campaign organized a session at the Democratic House members’ retreat to discuss their election plans. The campaign put sheets listing “Biden’s Top Ten Accomplishments” on all the tables.

Usually, the president loved these meetings with members where he went back and forth on policy and politics, ran late, and did a rope line. But this year, the president took only three softball planted questions, and he answered from a prepared text.

What comes through powerfully in these books is a Joe Biden who is extremely personally insecure and constantly looking for evidence of his success and approval. Accordingly, he blocks out negative information, and therefore ended up out of touch with public perceptions in 2024.

As a result, his advisers could not give the honest reason for why he should not have run: He was one of the most unpopular presidents in history; he would certainly lose and take many of his Democratic friends with him. Instead, they pointed fingers, saying Biden had a “path to victory,” but not with a disunited party and so many major leaders saying he should drop out.

That in turn bred an atmosphere of paranoia, and an enemies-list dynamic where critics were booed in campaign offices. It led the president to feel frustrated and unappreciated, wanting to defend himself in public and demanding Harris speak positively of their shared accomplishments. He freely interrupted White House press briefings to talk about good economic news. Biden also wanted to exact retribution for those not loyal, particularly former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama. They were not viewed as patriots.

In reading the books, I wondered what the Obama advisers who had joined the Harris campaign were doing.

Allen and Parnes’s Fight depends heavily on reports by the Biden managers that treat that side of Biden as normal, while Whipple focuses more on Biden’s aging and ability to do the job.

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As the 2026 midterms move closer, it’s time to recalibrate expectations now and then, and there’s now a glimmer of hope that Democrats could flip the Senate as well as the House, as I explained at New York:

Much of the early coverage of the 2026 midterm elections dwells on the fight for control of the U.S. House. The current GOP majority in that chamber, after all, is very fragile, and historically the president’s party almost always loses House seats in midterms. Busting up the Republican governing trifecta that is working to implement Donald Trump’s agenda is both a realistic and an important goal for Democrats, who gained 41 net seats and flipped the House in the 2018 midterms after Trump’s first election.

If Republicans do lose the House next year, they won’t be able to enact “big beautiful” budget-reconciliation bills that Democrats can’t filibuster. But if the GOP holds on to the Senate, Trump can still get his judicial- and executive-branch appointees confirmed, and Republicans can block any Democratic legislation with ease. Thanks to the peculiarities of the Senate landscape, in which only a third of the chamber is up every two years, Republicans have a good chance of maintaining control of the Senate, even if 2026 turns out to be a fine year for the Democratic Party. In 2018, after all, Republicans posted a net gain of two Senate seats despite getting pasted in House races.

At this point the 2026 Senate landscape is very favorable to the GOP. Yes, it must defend 22 Senate seats. But as Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times points out, 20 of them “are in states that Mr. Trump carried by at least 10 percentage points in 2024.” The authoritative Cook Political Report rates 19 of these 20 seats as “solid Republican,” meaning the races shouldn’t be competitive at all. Meanwhile, Democrats must defend two seats in states Trump won in 2024 (Georgia and Michigan), and four of their seats (in Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire) have no incumbent running. Flipping the Senate would require a net gain of four seats (thanks to Vice-President J.D. Vance’s tiebreaking vote), and the arithmetic for doing that with just three competitive races for Republican-held seats is daunting, to put it mildly. Democrats need to win all seven of the races Cook rates as competitive and then somehow make a safe Republican seat unsafe.

But as Nate Silver observes, Democrats could have a very strong wind at their backs in the midterms:

“I’m a fan of what groups like Cook and Crystal Ball do. But having been in the forecasting game for a long time, they have what I consider to be a persistent bias. Namely, they tend to assume a politically neutral environment until there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary.

“This assumption is wrong. It ignores years and years of history of the president’s party performing poorly in the midterms.”

Silver calculates the average midterm advantage of the non–White House party since 1994 as 4.4 percent in the House national popular vote but suggests that Trump’s history of subpar job approval (even if he doesn’t blow up the economy or threaten the future of democracy) and Democratic overperformance in recent non-presidential elections should bump up the Democratic edge: “In fact, the pattern looks a lot like 2018, when Democrats won the popular vote for the House by 8.6 points.”

A national wave of anything like that 2018 percentage could change the Senate landscape significantly:

“States like North Carolina and Georgia actually become ‘lean D.’ And while the next tranche of states — Florida, Ohio, Texas, Iowa and Alaska — are still ‘lean R,’ it’s not by such a large margin that you’d write the Democrats’ chances off.”

At that point, the path to a Democratic Senate is a matter of candidate recruitment and possibly sheer luck. One place to watch in particular is Texas, where John Cornyn is facing an existential primary challenge from the state’s attorney general, right-wing scandal magnet Ken Paxton, in what is sure to be a nasty, expensive, and competitive race. It could also provide an opening for a Democrat like Colin Allred, who ran a creditable campaign against Ted Cruz last year and might run for the Senate again. If former senator Sherrod Brown attempts a comeback in Ohio, it’s likely he could provide a stiff challenge to recently appointed Republican senator Jon Husted. And in Alaska, the state’s unique top-four/ranked-choice voting system gives any centrist Democrat in a good year a shot against Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan, who, according to a recent poll, isn’t terribly popular. One possible candidate, Mary Peltola, won a statewide House seat in 2022 (defeating Sarah Palin) before narrowly losing it last year.

Candidate recruitment will matter in some of the contests where Democrats have a particular reason to be optimistic. Beating Thom Tillis in highly competitive North Carolina won’t be as much of a reach if popular former governor Roy Cooper runs against him. And in Georgia, incumbent Democrat Jon Ossoff has high hopes of a divisive Republican primary to choose his opponent among relatively little-known candidates, now that both Brian Kemp and Marjorie Taylor Greene have given the race a pass. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, Republicans failed to convince Governor Chris Sununu to run for the seat being vacated by Jeanne Shaheen, which probably means the GOP nominee will be retread Scott Brown, who lost Senate races in Massachusetts in 2012 (following his shocking special-election win in 2010) and in New Hampshire in 2014.

A lot can change between now and November 2026 in terms of both individual Senate races and the national political landscape. At present, you’d have to say the Democratic odds of flipping the Senate along with the House have gone from none to slim — but that’s still a very real opportunity for the party.