washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

There is a sector of working class voters who can be persuaded to vote for Democrats in 2024 – but only if candidates understand how to win their support.

Read the memo.

The Daily Strategist

April 3, 2025

Teixeira: Throw the Groups Under the Bus!

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 Liberal Patriot

Democrats have lost two of the last three presidential elections to Donald J. Trump. Donald Trump! And they now face a governing trifecta of House, Senate, and presidential control by their (semi-fascist?) opponents.

Clearly, something has gone dreadfully wrong. A clue can be found in the shocking decline of nonwhite working-class (non-college) support for Democrats in this election. Harris carried nonwhite working-class voters by a mere 32 points, a 16-point decline from Biden’s 48-point margin in 2020. (Obama carried them by 67 points in 2012!) This latest decline swept across both black and Latino working-class voters.

What on earth is going on? Whatever happened to Democrats’ identity as the party of the working class? After all, it has been Democrats’ seemingly unchallenged hold over the nonwhite working class that has made that identity even semi-plausible, as white working-class voters have slipped farther and farther away from the party. But now that’s gone too.

Trump dominated the working-class vote in 2024. And look what’s happened to the Democrats’ image over time:



As another indicator, look at this one:



Yup, the party of the working class no longer. So why might working-class voters, especially nonwhite working-class voters, be finding it ever more difficult to see the party as their tribune? A key reason is the overriding sense that Democrats’ priorities have changed over time and that the welfare of the working class is no longer front and center in their calculations. This chart illustrates the shift:



Democrats of course argue that while their cultural views may have shifted left over time and some of these views may be unpopular (actually, most are), they are nevertheless just as focused on the welfare of the working class as they’ve ever been. This ignores the basic reality of opportunity costs. The time, energy and resources spent on the Democrats’ cultural left agenda is time, energy, and resources taken away from promoting the economic welfare of the working class. Working-class voters are well aware of this tradeoff, even if progressive activists and “the Groups” are not. As a result, working-class voters tend to connect their economic criticisms of the Democrats to the party’s apparent preoccupation with cultural issues pushed by their liberal college-educated supporters—issues working class voters either don’t care about or are actively hostile to. This connection is clearly dragging the Democrats down with these voters.

The salience of this connection is demonstrated by post-election data from the Blueprint strategy group. The third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”. And among swing voters, this concern about focus was the most powerful reason.



And look at what swing voters who chose Trump thought were extremely or very accurate criticisms of the Democratic Party:



A recent article by Jennifer Medina in the New York Times illustrates how these views are expressed by nonwhite working-class voters:

“Democrats flipped,” said Daniel Trujillo, who owns a barbershop in East Las Vegas and watched many of his customers shift from supporting Barack Obama to favoring Mr. Trump. “They went from being for the working class to, if you’re not college-educated and have money, you’re not worthy.” He said he had watched with delight as his customers increasingly warmed toward Mr. Trump.

“The right turned blue-collar and went full border-control, strong-economy and law-and-order,” Mr. Trujillo added. “Who doesn’t want that?”

Who indeed? Later in the article, Medina notes:

Even as they held onto their faith in the American dream, many nonwhite working-class voters said they had come to see the Democratic Party as condescending, overly focused on issues irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. They bristled over social issues like the concerns of transgender children or the party’s focus on abortion rights. They felt scolded by liberals on Covid precautions—and crushed by the pandemic’s economic fallout.

Some sounded every bit as aggrieved as the white working-class voters who first fueled Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, voicing similar complaints about migrants being given easier access to housing and food than homeless veterans living on the streets.

These views and their antagonistic relationship to Democratic orthodoxy are further illustrated in an excellent article by Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “The End of Denial: How Trump’s rising popularity in New York (and everywhere else) exposed the Democratic Party’s break with reality,” that focused on the red shift this year in the Queens borough of New York City. He observes:

Through the resistance years and into the COVID era, liberal institutions from universities to media organizations to nonprofits cathartically swung left, which bred further denial about what voters cared about and were experiencing. A partial catalogue of progressive denialism, listed in no particular order: that alienating left-wing positions or rhetoric were confined to college campuses; that the externalities of pandemic shutdowns, such as grade-school learning loss, were overblown; that the rapid adoption of new gender orthodoxies, especially in settings involving children, was not a popular concern; that the “defund the police” movement would be embraced by communities of color; that inflation was overstated; that the pandemic crime wave was exaggerated; that concerns over urban disorder represented a moral panic; that Latinos would welcome loosened border restrictions.

Van Zuylen-Woods’ reporting indicates how absurd this denialism is when matched against the lives—the “lived experience”, as it were—of ordinary residents of Corona, Queens:

Carlos Bermejo owns an Italian Latin restaurant called La Pequeña Taste of Italy. Bermejo, who emigrated from Ecuador, says the street vendors undercut his sales and the streetwalkers deter customers and attract crime. “In the summer, in the window, maybe like ten ladies,” he said. Inflation was another concern: Facing rising costs of his own, he says he had to hike the price of his standard aluminum-container takeout from $10 to $12. When I asked whom he voted for, he looked at me like I was kidding: “Donald Trump. You gotta do that. Everybody knows that.”

Several blocks away, the manager of a grocery store complained of a spike in thefts—he didn’t want me to use his name to avoid risking further incidents—as well as of street vendors pouring their grease directly into the sewer, which he said attracted rats that wound up in his store basement. He says he voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump this time around. Carmen Enriquez, a substitute teacher from Ecuador who lives nearby in what is technically Elmhurst, says she’s a registered Democrat who voted Republican this year for the first time. She complained that migrants had received free shelter and benefits while existing residents struggled. She directed her ire at not only the Biden administration but also Ocasio-Cortez, who appeared at a local rally last year to support migrant vendors, and State Senator Jessica Ramos, who co-sponsored a bill several years ago to decriminalize sex work…

One of the most interesting people I spoke with was 57-year-old Mauricio Zamora, who lives just off vendor-packed Corona Plaza on 103rd Street. Zamora runs a Facebook page and an active WhatsApp group for an organization he founded called Neighbors of the American Triangle, named after a minuscule nearby park he started maintaining during the pandemic when it became a magnet for drinkers…

He says that thanks to the chaos on Roosevelt, he has been getting fined for random garbage in front of his home, which he owns. He feels some of his local representatives, meanwhile, have prioritized tolerance over law and order. Using our translator now, he claimed they showed up only for “LGBT mobilization or when the lady prostitutes do a rally.”

In short, Democrats have lost the plot in the view of more and more nonwhite, especially nonwhite working-class, voters. How can they find it again? The obvious answer would be to sever the party’s connection to unpopular and unworkable social policies and re-establish a focus on the material welfare of working-class voters.

The simplest way to do this, in turn, would be to forcefully denounce said policies and unambiguously break from the forces in the party that are pushing these policies—“the Groups” and their allies that insist being a Democrat is inseparable from being a progressive as they define it. But this is hard because it entails conflict and conflict with the Groups is something Democrats have been determined to avoid.

This is foolish, not least because the theory upon which this deference was based—that the Groups actually represented groups of voters—was incorrect. As Ezra Klein, generally a loyal liberal Democrat, has been compelled to admit:

[I]t’s very important to look at the power of this nonprofit complex in the Democratic Party. Because part of what that power has been based on…is a sense that the way to understand what …collections of voters want…is by listening to what the groups purporting to represent them want…

“[I]n the case of nonwhite voters, it proved really, really deceptive. So the groups that were, in a sense, representing Hispanic voters within the Democratic coalition — they were part of what was leading Democrats, many of them in 2020, to say they were going to decriminalize border crossing, unauthorized border crossing. But that wasn’t what Hispanic voters wanted.

It was many of the groups representing Black Americans that pushed the Democratic Party toward “Defund the Police” rhetoric…But that was never popular, and certainly is not now popular, among Black Americans.

And so there’s been this dynamic where you have these groups that are claiming to speak for very, very wide swaths of the electorate and persuading Democrats of things that those parts of the electorate simply don’t believe. In the room where the Democrats are sort of making these decisions, you have staffers from these groups, and they’re often maybe the only Black person in the room or maybe the only Hispanic person in the room, so they’re granted a degree of deference.

But it has proved to be a misleading form of politics. Because these aren’t mass-membership groups. And this is a place where I think the Democratic theory, political theory, has just actually and truly failed. The Democratic Party moved into a position of thinking it was doing more than it ever had before to win over the allegiance of this multicultural electorate.

And it has lost huge amounts of support among that very same multicultural electorate. Because the people it was listening to as its guide to how to win them over were nonrepresentative.

In short, it was a catastrophic error which should now be rectified. And that will inevitably entail conflict. Adam Jentleson put the issue squarely in a recent New York Times op-ed:

Democrats cannot [achieve electoral dominance] as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power…Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate…

[W]hen Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test…

The same year, a coalition of groups including the Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party demanded that all Democrats running for president embrace decriminalizing border crossings. When candidates were asked at a debate if they would do so, every candidate on the stage that night raised a hand (except Michael Bennet). Groups like Justice Democrats pushed Democrats to defund the police and abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Positions taken a few years ago are fair game in campaigns, and by feeding into Republican attacks these efforts helped Mr. Trump and left the people and causes they claim to fight for under threat.

In other words, if anyone was being thrown under the bus, it was the very voter groups the Groups purported to represent! It’s high time for Democrats to turn the tables and throw the Groups under the bus. It’s the road back to the working class if the Democrats care to take it. Otherwise, they’ll be stuck being America’s educated, affluent party relying on their redoubts in blue metropolitan areas for political support. That would be a sad fate indeed for America’s historic party of the working class.


RFK Jr. May Be Denied Confirmation for Being Formerly Pro-Choice

There are no actual Democrats in Trump’s Cabinet so far, but he’s hoping to appoint an ex-Democrat to run HHS. As I noted at New York, RFK Jr. is in trouble for not abandoning abortion rights far or fast enough.

Donald Trump’s shocking nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head up the vast Department of Health and Human Services led to a lot of concerns about his suitability and ideological compatibility with the MAGA folk that would surround him at the Cabinet table. Kennedy’s reflexive hostility to vaccines puts him at odds with many Republicans. His complaints about Big Pharmaagribusiness giants, and use of pesticides by farmers have earned him some enemies who are very influential in the Republican Party. And his denunciation of processed foods as child-killing evils has to personally annoy the Big Mac aficionado of Mar-a-Lago.

But even if none of those longtime controversies surrounding the former Democrat make him radioactive among the Senate Republicans who would have to confirm him for HHS, he’s also in considerable trouble with one of the GOP’s oldest and most important allies: the anti-abortion movement. Suspicion of him in that quarter is natural, since Kennedy for many years maintained a standard Democratic position favoring abortion rights, though it was never an issue that preoccupied him. Then, as a presidential candidate who drifted out of the Democratic primaries into an independent bid, he was all over the place on abortion. He made remarks that ranged from unconditional support for the right to choose even after fetal viability to support for a three-month national ban to various points in between.

At a minimum, anti-abortion activists would like to pin him to an acceptable position, but they also seem inclined to secure concessions from him in exchange for declining to go medieval on his confirmation, as Politico explains:

“Abortion opponents — concerned about Kennedy’s past comments supporting abortion access — have two major asks: that he appoint an anti-abortion stalwart to a senior position in HHS and that he promise privately to them and publicly during his confirmation hearing to restore anti-abortion policies from the first Trump administration, according to four anti-abortion advocates granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. And Kennedy, according to a fifth person close to the Trump transition, is open to their entreaties.”

He’d better be. Despite Trump’s abandonment of the maximum anti-abortion stance during his 2024 campaign, the forced-birth lobby remained firmly in his camp and has maintained even more influence among Republican officeholders who haven’t “pivoted” from the 45th president’s hard-core position to the 47th president’s current contention that abortion policy is up to the states. Indeed, you could make the argument that it’s even more important than ever to anti-abortion activists that Trump be surrounded by zealots in order to squeeze as many congenial actions as possible out of his administration and the Republicans who will control Congress come January. And there’s plenty HHS can do to make life miserable for those needing abortion services, Politico notes:

“At a minimum, anti-abortion groups want to see the Trump administration rescind the policies Biden implemented that expanded abortion access, such as the update to HIPAA privacy rules to cover abortions, as well as FDA rules making abortion pills available by mail and at retail pharmacies. … The advocates are also demanding the return of several Trump-era abortion rules, including the so-called Mexico City policy that blocked federal funding for international non-governmental organizations that provide or offer counseling on abortions, anti-abortion restrictions on federal family-planning clinics and a federal ban on discriminating against health care entities that refuse to cover abortion services or refer patients for the procedure when taxpayer dollars are involved.”

Anti-abortion folk could overplay their bullying of Kennedy and annoy the new administration: The Trump transition team has already vetoed one of the Cause’s all-time favorites, Roger Severino, for HHS deputy secretary, though it may have been as much about his identification with the toxic Project 2025 as his extremist background on abortion policy. It probably doesn’t help that objections to Kennedy for being squishy on abortion were first aired by former vice-president Mike Pence, who has about as much influence with Trump 2.0 as the former president’s former fixer Michael Cohen.

As for Kennedy, odds are he will say and do whatever it takes to get confirmed; he’s already had to repudiate past comments about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, including a comparison of his new master to Adolf Hitler (a surprisingly common problem in MAGA land). Having come a very long way from his quixotic challenge to Joe Biden in 2023, Kennedy really wants to take his various crusades into the new administration, at least until Trump inevitably gets tired of hearing complaints from donors about him and sends him back to the fever swamps.


What Really Sank Harris

From “The Left Didn’t Sink Kamala Harris. Here’s What Did” by Waleed Shahid at The Nation:

In the aftermath of Kamala Harris’s loss, many pundits and politicians are turning to a familiar scapegoat. Critics like Adam Jentleson, a former aide to senators Harry Reid and John Fetterman, claim that “woke” advocacy groups made Democrats adopt extreme policies and drove voters away from the Democratic Party, sealing Donald Trump’s victory. But the truth is simpler—and more uncomfortable for the Democratic establishment. Despite the noise, voters didn’t reject Harris because of leftist rhetoric or activist slogans. They rejected her because she and her party failed to address the economic pain of working-class voters, who chose change over more of the same.

No one is saying that all the “woke” talk was popular. When there is a fairly close presidential election in which the popular vote margin in swing states is hovering around three percent, any factor could make the difference. It’s just that rapidly declining purchasing power for  consumers is the most powerful Democrat-defeater. Shahid argues further,

Contrary to establishment narratives, the Democratic leadership has often resisted advocacy organizations pushing for bold reforms on immigration, Big Tech, climate, debt, healthcare, rent, mass incarceration, Palestinian rights, and for policies like the Build Back Better agenda. This tension isn’t just about differing priorities—it reveals the actual balance of forces in the party. Corporate donors on Wall Street and Silicon Valley pour billions into campaigns, shaping agendas to suit their interests. A consultant class reaps millions from flawed strategies and failed candidates yet continues to fail upward, perpetuating a pattern of mediocrity. They, not progressives, are the roadblock preventing Democrats from becoming a populist force that could disrupt the status quo and win back voters of all stripes.

It was these elements within the party that kneecapped the Democrats’ most ambitious efforts to help ordinary Americans. The Biden administration entered with huge plans, notably Build Back Better, which would have delivered immediate relief: expanded child tax credits, free community college, universal child care and pre-K, paid leave, and more. Progressives pushed mightily for Build Back Better to pass. It was centrist obstruction—namely Senators Manchin and Sinema—that blocked those policies. The result was a patchwork of long-term measures like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, whose benefits won’t be felt until 2025 at the earliest, if at all. By failing to pass Build Back Better, Democrats lost the chance to deliver easy-to-understand, tangible economic benefits and solidify their image as the party of working people.

And it was corporate Democrats—particularly lobbyists like Harris’s brother-in-law, former Uber executive Tony West, and David Plouffe—who held the most sway over Harris’s campaign. They advised her to cozy up to ultra-wealthy celebrities, Liz and Dick Cheney, and Mark Cuban, and avoid populist rhetoric that could have distanced her from the corporate elites who dominate the party. In 2024, the biggest spenders in Democratic Party politics weren’t progressives—it was AIPAC, cryptocurrency PACs, and corporate giants like Uber, all of whom poured millions into Democratic campaigns without regard for public opinion or the will of the people.

Shahid says that “the focus was on issues like democracy and abortion, which, while important, couldn’t by themselves capture the priorities of working-class voters.” Shahid adds that “The backlash against “wokeness” often rests on vague critiques, offering little more than cultural hand-wringing without any clear solutions.” In a close election, excessive ‘wokeness,’ punctuated with ads portraying the Democratic candidate in photo-ops as a clueless wokester, can defeat a campaign. But economic insecurity is a far more compelling and pervasive threat to middle class voters.

As Stanley Greenberg recently put it, “Despite Trump’s effective campaign on his agenda, the cost of living was still the top worry by far—fully 18 points above immigration and the border….I could not get people to understand the significance of our base voters putting the cost of living 20 points higher than the next problem.”

Put in poker terms, Harris was dealt a pair of eights, and she played her hand fairly well. But Trump had a couple of nines.


Trump Overreach Could Make Any Political Realignment Impossible

In a continuing effort to outline what the 2024 election returns did and did not mean, I offered some objections at New York to some of the triumphalist talk from MAGA-land.

While claiming victory on Election Night (this time credibly), Donald Trump was unrestrained in his interpretation of what it all means: “We had everybody, and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment, uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.”

As Lee Corso likes to say on College GameDay when one of his colleagues makes a confident prediction about how a football game will turn out, “Not so fast.”

The more you look at the election returns — which are still evolving as millions of votes are counted in California — Trump’s accomplishment remains impressive considering his chronic unpopularity and the long comeback he pursued after his 2020 defeat. But historic realignment isn’t the right term for a victory that could have been undone had Kamala Harris won a relatively small number of additional votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump’s steadily declining national popular-vote margin will wind up, according to Nate Silver’s estimate, at around 1.4 percent (lower than Hillary Clinton’s 2.1 percent in 2016), with his total votes at less than a majority and 3 percent more than he won in 2020. Again, that’s good for someone with Trump’s spotty record but pretty clearly attributable to his being the “change” candidate when the electorate was in an especially sour mood and angry about short-term trends in the economy and immigration.

Trump’s much-ballyhooed gains among Democratic “base” groups are significant but no better than those posted by George W. Bush 20 years ago before his party lost control of Congress and four years before Democrats reclaimed the White House in a near landslide. So perhaps the best way to characterize the situation is that Trump will have the opportunity to build a durable GOP advantage in a country that has been closely divided between the two parties for much of this century. But there are serious questions as to whether he has a plan for pulling it off or the self-restraint to avoid blowing up his coalition altogether.

As John Judis and Ruy Teixeira (who know a lot about premature realignment claims, having made their own in a famous 2002 book called The Emerging Democratic Majority) point out in a New York Times op-ed, Trump’s announced agenda isn’t particularly well designed to keep his 2024 coalition together, much less expand it:

“[T]here are plenty of issues that could fracture this coalition. Even immigration cuts both ways. He might try to carry out his promise of deporting millions of illegal immigrants, a project that could not just wreak havoc among families and in communities but also cause economic chaos.

“Or take tariffs. Mr. Trump’s working-class voters who lament the loss of jobs to China have supported his trade initiatives, including his plan to slap as high as a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. But Mr. Trump’s first-term tariffs provoked retaliation from China and angered Republican farmers and Senate Republicans. Much higher tariffs could meet with opposition from Mr. Trump’s high-tech backers, who depend on the Chinese market, and from his financial donors, who still have investments in China. Unlike most Republican initiatives, tariffs, if successful, work by imposing short-term costs in prices in order to achieve long-term gains in jobs from otherwise endangered industries. It’s the short-term costs — another round of inflation, this time imposed by Mr. Trump — that might endanger the Republican coalition.”

Trump faces other obvious pitfalls, such as his “concept of a plan” to replace Obamacare with some health-care system that will likely shrink coverage and impose vast new costs on vulnerable people. As Judis and Teixeira note, Trump’s allies want to do a host of unpopular things — from RFK Jr.’s desire to ban vaccines to the anti-abortion movement’s hopes for banning abortion pills. Trump’s own promises to demolish federal aid to education and gut civil-service protections for millions of federal employees may please his MAGA “base” but not so much the new voters he temporarily attracted this year. And above all, there’s the question of whether the 45th and 47th president, who has run his last campaign, really cares enough about the long-term strength of the Republican Party to rein in his and his closest supporters’ more politically reckless tendencies. Judis and Teixeira discuss that factor as well:

“The final obstacle to a strong realignment is Mr. Trump himself, who is consumed with the quest for power and self-aggrandizement and appears eager to seek revenge against his detractors. Many of his difficulties during his first term stemmed from his own misbehavior, and he continues to revel in division and divisiveness.”

The challenge is hardly unique to Trump. Any electoral winner has to decide whether to expend the political capital victory brings on achieving goals regardless of the potential backlash or instead move cautiously to consolidate power. Nothing about Trump and his early steps (a Fox News gabber to run the Pentagon? Elon Musk acting as de facto vice-president?) suggests caution or a willingness to delay gratification; they in fact look strongly like overreach or, to use the classical term, hubris. Twenty years ago a triumphantly reelected Bush announced he would use some of his evident political capital to launch legislation to partially privatize Social Security. It backfired spectacularly and began the process whereby Bush squandered his election victory and blew up the many predictions of a permanent political realignment in his party’s favor. Trump and the GOP could avoid the same fate, but not if they think the incredibly hard work of breaking America’s partisan gridlock has already been done in a single election.


Political Strategy Notes

At The American Prospect, Stanley B. Greenberg makes the case that “Donald Trump Won as the Champion of Working-Class Discontent,” and writes, “Donald Trump won the 2024 election because he was the change candidate who championed working-class discontent. He also successfully branded Kamala Harris, so voters worried about the kind of changes she would bring….Harris had been speaking to more powerful currents of working-class discontent, and that put her in the lead. She promised to help with the cost of living, blamed monopolies for inflation, and vowed to shift power from the billionaires to the middle class. But she became ambivalent about championing those changes. That allowed Trump to regain momentum and win….I do not believe Trump’s winning coalition will endure. Trump won a mandate on immigration, prices, and anti-“woke” policies, but he’s can’t maintain all of those priorities. Prices won’t rapidly fall unless there’s a damaging recession. His policies may raise interest rates, mortgage payments, and credit card debt. Tariffs may raise prices. And Trump is going to give the billionaires and big corporations the sweetest tax cut possible and make it as hard as possible for workers….The Biden administration acted impressively to address the pandemic and provide unprecedented levels of household support. Legislative action reduced health care expenses, invested in infrastructure and advanced manufacturing, encouraged the climate transition, and made big corporations pay more tax. The regulatory agenda showed support for unions and checks on monopolies. But Biden’s job approval was taken down by inflation and migration, like so many other leaders around the world, though other elements of his presidency contributed to his having the lowest approval for a president seeking re-election in recent memory….OUR ELECTION WAS DOMINATED BY TWO ISSUES. The most important was the hard-working middle class being hit by high prices and the cost of living, while big corporations make super profits at its expense. The second was the border, and the perception that immigrants were both responsible for rising crime and prioritized for public services, while U.S. citizens went to the back of the line. Both issues saw a double-digit rise in their importance….Despite Trump’s effective campaign on his agenda, the cost of living was still the top worry by far—fully 18 points above immigration and the border….I could not get people to understand the significance of our base voters putting the cost of living 20 points higher than the next problem. If you don’t start there, they won’t listen. Working people are struggling to pay the bills each month or stay out of poverty. They are looking for empathy and for you to battle the bad guys.”

More election analysis from “The Working Class Has Left the Building” by Jared Abbott at Jacobin: “Remember back in 2016 when Chuck Schumer confidently asserted that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia”? If there was any doubt before, there is none now: Senator Schumer was wrong….All signs indicate that Donald Trump made substantial inroads among the working class in November. The best data currently available from AP VoteCast indicates that the Democrats’ share of non-college-educated voters fell from an already low 47% in 2020 to 43% in 2024. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris maintained strong support among college-educated voters, receiving 56% of their vote. Interestingly, given the Harris campaign’s considerable efforts to reach female voters, the data suggests that her support among college-educated women actually fell 4 percentage points relative to Joe Biden, whereas her support from college-educated men was only 1 point lower than Biden’s. Among college-educated white men, we even see a slight improvement over Biden in 2024….If we look at income rather than education, the change is even more significant: support for Harris among voters making less than $50,000 per year fell to 48%, a 6-point decline from Biden in 2020. By contrast, voters making more than $100,000 per year showed only a very slight dip in support between 2020 and 2024, from 54% to 53%.” Yes we know, exit poll data has all kinds of problems, so much so that some poll analysts consider them basically worthless. But for now, it is all we have until the Catalist data comes out next year.

Carmen Nobel addresses the question, “In the 2024 US election, which sources informed voting decisions the most?” at Journalists Resource: “Between Aug. 30 and Oct. 8, a team of researchers at four universities surveyed thousands of American adults and asked the following question: When making a decision about voting, including candidates for office and ballot initiatives, what is your most important source of information?….The online survey was conducted as part of the Civic Health and Institutions Project, which provides national and state-level opinion and behavior data on a wide variety of topics. Also known as CHIP50, the project is a joint collaboration of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University; the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School; Harvard Medical School; the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University; and the Department of Political Science and Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University….Among the key findings of the latest CHIP50 survey, which collected 25,518 responses from Americans across the U.S.:

  • Discussions with friends/family and news stories were the top two primary sources of election information in 2024, at 29% and 26%, respectively. Recommendations from clergy (2%) and social media (9%) were among the other primary sources.
  • Democrats and Independents were more likely to rely on news stories as their primary source of election information than Republicans. A larger percentage of Republicans listed friends and family as their primary source of election information than did Democrats or Independents.
  • Americans who had not attended college were more likely to rely on friends and family for election information than Americans with more formal education, who were more likely to rely on the news media.
  • Asked specifically which news media sources were most important to them when making a voting decision, 41% of respondents selected national TV news as the top news media source.

“Across US states, the reliance on national news for election information was highest in
Connecticut (26%), Massachusetts (26%), and Nevada (25%), while the states where people were most likely to rely on local news were Hawaii (14%), Louisiana (13%), and South Carolina (12%),” the researchers write.

Michael Tester explains “How immigration swung voters of color to Trump” at 538: “Analysts have proposed several different explanations for those shifts, including sexism within communities of color, pessimistic views of the economy and inflation, disinformation, social class and the ongoing ideological sorting of nonwhite conservatives into the Republican Party. While there’s probably merit in some of these, my analyses suggest that one of the biggest factors behind Trump’s growing support from nonwhite voters may be opposition to immigration….There are two main reasons for this. First, nonwhite Americans’ attitudes about immigration moved sharply to the right during President Joe Biden’s term. That resulted in a much larger pool of Black and Latino voters who were receptive to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Second, voters of color with conservative immigration attitudes were especially likely to defect from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 — even after accounting for other plausible reasons for these changes….As politicians and the media shifted from criticizing unpopular Trump-era policies like family separation to expressing concern about the record number of border crossings under Biden, Americans’ opinions moved in a similar direction….Those sizable shifts were not limited to any single racial or ethnic group, either. In fact, the chart below shows that the percentage of white, Latino and Black Americans who agreed with the statement “immigrants drain national resources” all increased dramatically from June 2020 through December 2023 in YouGov’s biweekly tracker surveys….This same trend appears in the 2016 and 2024 exit polls as well (the 2020 exit poll did not ask about immigration). The share of Black voters who preferred deporting unauthorized immigrants to offering them a path to citizenship doubled from 12 percent in 2016 to 24 percent in 2024. Meanwhile, the share of Latinos said the same increased from 17 percent to 27 percent….We’ll need more post-election data to help pinpoint the causes and durability of Trump’s surging support from voters of color. But these preliminary findings strongly suggest that immigration attitudes are a big piece of the puzzle. They also dovetail with prior political science research showing that voters of color who had shifted to Trump from 2016 to 2020 had more conservative views about race and immigration….So, even though voting was less polarized by race and ethnicity in 2024 than it’s been in the past, racial attitudes and opinions about immigration are more important than ever in explaining many people’s votes.”


Yglesias: A common sense economic agenda for Democrats

The following article by Matthew Yglesias is cross-posted from slowboring.com:

Having written a nine-point Common Sense Democrat Manifesto, it now falls to me to explain in greater detail what I mean.

I chose to start the list with a point about economics, because I really think there is a profound and fundamental divide between the Slow Boring perspective, which is to complain about the Democratic Party’s positioning on cultural issues because I want to see Democrats win elections and help poor people, and the Free Press perspective, which is to complain about Democratic Party positioning on cultural issues because they want to see Republicans win elections and cut rich people’s taxes.

But I also put it first because I think some sectors of the left harbor weird fantasies about the possibilities of politics grounded in “populist” economics. One set holds to a sort of red-brown fantasy, in which they fuse with social conservatives and bring back the left wing of the Dixiecrats. Another set, the one that was more influential with Biden-era Democrats, holds that if you’re somehow just populist enough on economics, you can short-circuit people’s brains and they’ll stop noticing that you disagree with them on cultural issues.

Neither of these works, because the pure left-populist approach to economics is itself not a satisfactory answer to the economic question. Thus, the first point of the manifesto:

Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.

Democrats want and need to be a party that stands up for the little guy, for the person who, in Bill Clinton’s memorable phrase, works hard and plays by the rules. And that absolutely involves progressive economic policies. Conservatives are just way too eager to write off poor kids, sick people, and the elderly and disabled in pursuit of low taxes. They are also way too indulgent of businesses that pollute or perpetrate fraud. And they tend to stand with incumbents, the heirs to inherited wealth, and rent-seekers. But contrary to the attitudes of the hard left, a growing and dynamic private sector is really important. Americans are much richer than Europeans, and that matters. Middle-class people tend to leave San Diego for San Antonio in pursuit of bigger, cheaper houses, and that matters. It also matters that poor people can get Medicaid in San Diego but not in San Antonio.

You need an economic agenda that does both: a rapidly growing economy with a safety net that ensures people aren’t left behind.

The growth mindset

I think these tweets by Lee Hepner from the American Economic Liberties Project about why he hates YIMBYs are telling. He and Nathan Proctor, who works on right- to-repair issues at US PIRG, are not articulating a typical objection to new housing in a neighborhood, like “I’m worried about traffic” or “what if it creates problems for my kids’ school.” They are articulating a fundamental, principled disagreement with the idea that economic growth is important. They say American society has enough “energy, wealth, stuff, etc” and that all we need is a purely redistributive politics.

I think it’s important to note that Proctor and Hepner are not working on climate policy. Most readers here are familiar with the “degrowth” talking points in some climate activist spaces, and Democrats rightly reject that approach. But these guys work on competition policy, and here they are degrowthing. Not because YIMBYism conflicts with the right to repair or antitrust enforcement, but because the core principle of YIMBYism is that growth — more and better housing — is important, and they see this as antithetical to their views.

This is a tragedy, because antitrust law and competition policy are genuinely important.

It’s a real problem that right-wing politics has become too indulgent of businesspeople’s desire to engage in anticompetitive practices that raise prices and restrain output. We need aggressive enforcement of rules against cartels and anticompetitive mergers and abuse of dominant positions in low-competition markets to secure an advantage in more competitive spaces. This stuff is important precisely because it’s important to economic growth. And the same is true of plenty of other progressive ideas:

  • Investment in basic science
  • Good schools and good infrastructure
  • Internalizing pollution externalities
  • Transparent markets and rules against fraud
  • Macroeconomic stabilization policy

These things are important for growth and prosperity. There is a warm and cuddly side to progressive economic policy that’s about caring for the vulnerable. But there is also a tough-minded side that’s about true public goods and securing the commons. And what you do not want to do is just be prog-maxing randomly. To say that vigorous antitrust enforcement is important is not to say that maximal levels of antitrust enforcement are optimal. And the same is true of environmental rules and spending on public goods and everything else. There’s a temptation to just throw growth under the bus to avoid making choices or exerting discipline. And there are people who sincerely (and wrongly) believe that growth doesn’t matter and that we can just redistribute our way to heaven.

The need to govern

The Biden Administration was not in the grips of hard anti-growth ideology.

But it has, in important ways, been adrift in the interest group fog since the passage of the American Rescue Plan. People can, and will, forever debate the wisdom of a demand-side stimulus that large. But it happened, and it happened very early in the Biden Administration. And while demand-driven growth is great, once you max out demand, you need to aim for supply-driven growth. And they just didn’t do that. The White House considered coming out for Jones Act repeal, but the president personally didn’t want to do anything that was anti-union. They took a look at the bipartisan permitting reform bill, and they weren’t exactly against it, but they also weren’t exactly for it, because they didn’t want to cross the environmental groups. They came out in favor of YIMBY principles, but they couldn’t come up with very much to do about it, because the federal government doesn’t run zoning.

And even while talking about housing costs, they raised tariffs on imported Canadian lumber. They reinterpreted the Waters of the United States rule in a way that homebuilders say is bad for supply. They put expensive rules in place to accelerate electric car adoption, even while alienating the owner of the world’s most important electric car company to please labor unions, while also alienating blue collar union members over cultural issues.

I remember getting a briefing in advance of the 2024 State of the Union. The administration team was, naturally, touting their various efforts to address struggles with the cost of living, and many of their ideas seemed plausible, but they all struck me as ideas that could have been on a progressive laundry list cooked up in 2017. So I asked what they had that I could say a Democratic administration wouldn’t typically propose, except for their recognition that Americans were struggling with inflation.

They had nothing.

The one that has stuck in my craw for years is student loan cancellation. This policy was explicitly pitched by its architects as an economic stimulus measure.

When Biden first won the election and I thought he’d be struggling to secure adequate stimulus from Congress, I thought this was a good idea, because it could be done without a Senate majority. But then ARP passed — you don’t need stimulus anymore!

I get why the president didn’t want to say, “I promised student debt forgiveness and I understand that people will be angry at me if I break that promise, but the truth is the country is now wrestling with inflation, and I have to do the right thing.” But to pour extra fiscal stimulus on the fire when the country is struggling with inflation, just because you promised to do it back in 2019 when the situation was completely different, is wildly irresponsible. On the regulatory front, as I’ve written before, it’s not just that Biden didn’t want to tackle sacred cows like the Jones Act — he made Jones Act rules stricter. Politicians love to talk up Buy American in speeches, but Biden is a true believer who wrote the strictest-ever rules in subtle legal ways.

I’ve been accused of being a soulless monster who doesn’t believe in anything. But on core economic management, it was the Biden Administration that acted hyper-politically rather than genuinely prioritizing the biggest problem facing the country.

Caring for the needy

Taking this out of election retrospective territory, the other question here is what’s worth the risk. I’ll concede that a fully refundable Child Tax Credit is not great politics. But I do think that, if passed, it would prove quite durable, like the Affordable Care Act. If I were a House member being asked to risk my career over something, then I think a huge and probably durable cut in child poverty would be a reasonable thing to ask me to take a risk for. I’d be proud to stop Medicaid cuts. These are solid progressive issues that make sense as priorities.

But I also think it’s important to get means and ends straight.

I support certain policies that aren’t free market, because they’re necessary to ensure the interests of poor people. But it doesn’t make sense to turn all of these policies into a principled critique of free market economics. A lot of left intellectuals clearly find YIMBYs annoying because the idea of a capitalist solution to a major problem annoys them. But working people don’t need a principled debate about the role of the free market in society, they need higher material living standards. Regulations that limit the supply of health care providers are one way that the wealthy and powerful use their privilege to entrench their interests. The same is true of NIMBY rules. And the dockworkers opposing port automation earn significantly more than the average American. These are all leaky buckets of upward redistribution.

You can’t take the politics out of politics, and we’re never going to have a purely technocratic regime. But if you’re a Democrat and you’re trying to think things through on the merits, “How does this impact poor kids and struggling workers?” is a pretty good lodestar.

I think that leads us to see that the social safety net is incredibly important, but so are other things. Population movements to the red states are telling us something important about the cost of overregulation, especially but not exclusively, in the housing sector. Regulatory protections can be very important, but rigorous cost-benefit analysis is also important. Economic growth and consumer goods matter a lot. Stopping cartels from jacking up prices helps poor kids a lot. Trying to create a comprehensive price control regime so lawyers can get over on businessmen does not. Investing in effective educational institutions is great. Providing open-ended subsidies to college and universities and telling yourself it’s “neoliberalism” to demand any kind of measurable result is not.

And to deliver a common sense agenda of broad economic uplift, you also need to be in touch with common sense moral values. Which we’ll get to as we work our way through the manifesto’s remaining eight points.


Political Strategy Notes

Jonathan Smucker urges “Democrats, next time try fighting for the working class: The Democratic Party’s decision to abandon working class voters is bearing the expected disastrous results” at aljazera.com. He begins by quoting his father: “I’m tired of feeling like I’m going to get jumped on for saying something wrong, for using the wrong words,” my dad confided, becoming uncharacteristically emotional. “I don’t want to say things that will offend anyone. I want to be respectful. But I think Trump is reaching a lot of people like me who didn’t learn a special way to talk at college and feel constantly talked down to by people who have.”….At 71 years old, my dad is still working full time, helping to run a delicatessen at a local farmers’ market. He didn’t go to college. Raised Mennonite and socially conservative, he is nonetheless open-minded and curious. When his cousins came out as gay in the 1980s, he accepted them for who they are….My father would never dehumanise and scapegoat transgender people, immigrants, or anyone else, but he understood a key ingredient of Trump’s rhetorical strategy: When Trump punches down at vulnerable groups of people, he presents himself as punching up at condescending cultural elites – the kind of elites strongly associated with the Democratic Party….Like me, my father has now voted against Donald Trump three times in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania. Like me, he was unhappy about all three Democratic nominees he felt obliged to vote for – and deeply disappointed by the party and its leadership….In the summer of 2016, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer smugly claimed that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin….The strategy failed spectacularly in 2016 and again in 2024….Ambiguous anti-elitism – again, focused primarily on cultural elites – is absolutely central to Trump’s narrative strategy. His populism is fake inasmuch as it lets economic power off the hook, “punching up” instead at cultural elite targets, like the news media, academia, Hollywood, and Democratic politicians….It works partly because economic power can feel abstract; people tend to feel resigned to it, like they do to the weather. Social elitism, on the other hand, has a human face and condescension is experienced viscerally.”

“The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters,” Smucker continues, “requires showing that you are in their corner. For people to believe that you are really in their corner, you have to consistently name and pick visible fights with powerful culprits, like Wall Street, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, as well as the politicians in your own party who are in their pocket….Even as Biden broke from the prescriptions of neoliberalism in important ways early in his administration, we still see a lingering hesitancy among top Democrats to call out the culprits who have rigged our economy and political system and left America’s working class in the dust….The reality is that the Biden/Harris administration didn’t deliver nearly enough to help working people, especially to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis. And they didn’t effectively narrate what they did accomplish – and what more they attempted to do – primarily because they prefer not to name or pick open fights with the powerful people who stood in the way….Why are Democrats so resistant to naming powerful culprits and owning a popular economic narrative? The reasons go beyond familiar critiques of “Dems are just bad at messaging.” In short, the neoliberal era did a number on the fighting spirit of the party of the New Deal….Today’s Democratic Party holds mixed and contradictory loyalties, as it hopes to hold onto both the multiracial working class that constitutes its historical base of strength and power, and the donor class that is its current source of funding. In an era of historic inequality, when most Americans believe the system has been rigged by the few against the many, there’s not a message that will inspire the multiracial working class without also turning off at least some of the party’s donor base.”

In “Donald Trump’s Victory and the Politics of Inflation,” John Cassidy writes at The New Yorker: “In March, I was a guest at a dinner discussion organized by a progressive advocacy group in New York. As the talk turned to Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, another attendee brought up the skewed media coverage of the President’s economic record, which seemed to be a source of vexation for nearly everyone around the table. I readily agreed that positive news about jobs, G.D.P., and Biden’s efforts to stimulate manufacturing investment—of which there was plenty—wasn’t receiving as much attention as it deserved, particularly compared with the voluminous coverage of inflation. But I also pointed to governments from across the political spectrum in other countries, such as Britain, Germany, and France, that had experienced big rises in consumer prices. Inflation, it seemed, was poison for all incumbents, regardless of their location or political affiliation….At that juncture, I was still hopeful that, with the U.S. inflation rate falling back toward pre-pandemic levels, there was enough time for public sentiment to shift, and for Biden’s approval ratings to recover. It never happened, of course. According to the network exit poll, conducted by Edison Research, seventy-five per cent of the voters in last week’s election said that inflation had caused them moderate or severe hardship during the past year, and of this group about two-thirds voted for Donald Trump….Kamala Harris and the Democrats joined Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, and a number of other incumbents that have been punished by disaffected voters. According to the Financial Times, “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years.”….To be clear, I’m not arguing that economic factors were solely responsible for the U.S. result. Immigration, the culture war….But anger at high prices clearly played an important role, which raises the question of what, if anything, the Biden Administration could have done to counteract the global anti-incumbency wave….William Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who worked in the Clinton Administration, said last week that Biden should have pivoted much earlier from emphasizing job creation to focussing on the cost of living. “He was trapped in a very traditional ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ mind-set,” Galston said. “It was a fundamental mistake.”….Ultimately, however, none of these things dislodged the public perception that over-all prices were still too high and that Biden and Harris, if not entirely responsible, were convenient vehicles for voters to take out their frustration on….The great irony, of course, is that the candidate who is promising to raise prices further by imposing blanket tariffs on imported goods emerged as last week’s victor.”

NBC News’s Alex Seitz-Wald reports in “After Democrats lost the working class, union leaders say it’s time to ‘reconstruct the Democratic Party” that “Defining the working class is tricky in a postindustrial economy. But whether they are measured by income or educational attainment, President-elect Donald Trump won working-class voters overall while he made strong gains among nonwhite working-class voters like Hispanics and Asian Americans…. As recently as 2012, non-college-educated voters were splitting their votes evenly or even slightly in favor of Democrats. This year, they broke 2-to-1 for Trump over Harris, according to NBC News exit polls. And while former President Barack Obama won 57% of people making $30,000 to $49,999 in 2012, Trump won that income bracket 53%-45% this year….“If you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on NBC News “Meet the Press.”….“The narrative that he was able to craft was almost right out of the labor unions’ playbook in terms of focusing on the economy and jobs, bringing manufacturing jobs back, getting tough on China, making sure that working families can put more money in their pocket,” said Liz Schuler, the president of the AFL-CIO, the massive labor federation that includes 60 unions that together represent 12 million people….“If you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the Democratic Party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said on NBC News “Meet the Press.”


Teixeira and Judis: Trump’s ‘Historic Realignment’ Doubtful

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and John B. Judis, a former editor of The New Republic and author of major works about contemporary politics, is cross-posted from The New York Times.

In his victory speech last week, Donald Trump declared that a “historic realignment” in American politics had occurred. His claim has been echoed by Republican intellectuals. In a podcast the day after, Michael Needham, the chairman of American Compass, said, “We are seeing the realignment come to mind.”

As writers who once made an argument for a potential emerging Democratic majority, we are especially curious when a new one comes up — and because of our own experience, we treat claims by Mr. Trump and others of a durable Republican realignment with some skepticism.

There are two meanings for a realignment claim. The first is that the parties’ coalitions have changed. This is undeniable, but the changes really began during the period from the 1970s through 1994. During that time, portions of the white working class began their journey from the Democratic to the Republican Party. They were originally called Reagan Democrats.

Alternately, many college-educated voters began leaving the G.O.P. for the Democrats. Geographically, the South, once solidly Democratic, came to lean Republican, while Northern states, once dominated by liberal or moderate Republicans, became more Democratic.

That process has continued. In the last decade, we have seen a significant slice of Hispanics vote Republican. In 2024, the AP VoteCast survey found that Mr. Trump won 43 percent of the Hispanic vote and 48 percent of Hispanic men. He also got 16 percent of Black voters and 25 percent of Black men. He got 33 percent of the vote from minorities who had not graduated from college. These figures suggest that the Republicans’ working-class support cannot be described as just white.

Democrats in turn have begun to build support not just among professionals but also among broader swaths of the college educated. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden in 2020, carried college-educated white voters. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost these voters.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning.

These two coalitions have been roughly equal in size, and the parties have alternated in power according to the effectiveness of the campaigns and the salience of certain issues. In 2020, Mr. Biden benefited from Mr. Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. In 2024, Mr. Trump benefited from Ms. Harris’s identification with the inflation and high levels of illegal immigration under the Biden administration.

There is, however, a stronger meaning of “realignment.” That is not only when the party coalitions change, but also when one party’s coalition comes to dominate American politics. It becomes an enduring majority party the way the Republicans did in 1896 and the Democrats did in 1932, controlling over more than a decade, with only a few interruptions, the presidency and both houses of Congress. This is probably what Mr. Trump had in mind when he boasted of a “historic realignment.”

There are reasons to doubt that what happened on Nov. 5 is that sort of realignment.

Realignments depend on several conditions. The opposing party must be in disarray, as the Republicans were in 1932. The Democrats are certainly in a funk, but they were also in a funk after 2016 and came back to win the House in 2018 and the presidency in 2020.

More important, the majority party must be able to enact policies that benefit and hold together the party’s diverse constituencies, as the Democrats’ New Deal did. Franklin Roosevelt provided economic assistance to workers and white farmers in the South, the urban North and the rural West.

Mr. Trump’s and the Republican Party’s coalition consists of the working class (primarily but not exclusively white); traditionally Republican small-business people, including farmers; upper-level private-sector white-collar workers; and a wealthy donor classdrawn from finance and real estate, fossil fuels and most recently, high technology. The donor class is important. In Mr. Trump’s campaign this year, according to Open Secrets, about 70 percent of his contributions came from large donors.

As a candidate, Mr. Trump possessed a striking ability as a shape-shifter, able to take several positions at once on a variety of topics and still inspire aspirations from a range of people. In the context of a campaign, he is a highly talented political entertainer, a sort of conjurer.

But stepping into the White House and governing is a very different context. What Mr. Trump is promising for his second term — the actual choices he will have to make about policy — and the makeup of that coalition do not appear to be the building blocks of a durable majority coalition. Combined, they appear to have great potential for a crackup.

Some proposals could unite elements of the coalition. For example, immigration policy. Some of business supporters depend on a growing immigrant labor market, including undocumented workers, but Mr. Trump can potentially satisfy them by enlarging guest worker programs.

Mr. Trump can also maintain support of his coalition by opposing climate-change regulation, a stance that unites many blue-collar workers and businesses, including farms, that depend on petroleum-based products. One of Mr. Trump’s principal backers, Elon Musk, gave Mr. Trump a pass on removing the subsidies for electric vehicle purchases that Mr. Musk seems to think would hurt legacy car companies and not his own.

But there are plenty of issues that could fracture this coalition. Even immigration cuts both ways. He might try to carry out his promise of deporting millions of illegal immigrants, a project that could not just wreak havoc among families and in communities but also cause economic chaos.

Or take tariffs. Mr. Trump’s working-class voters who lament the loss of jobs to China have supported his trade initiatives, including his plan to slap as high as a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. But Mr. Trump’s first-term tariffs provoked retaliation from China, and angered Republican farmers and Senate Republicans. Much higher tariffs could meet with opposition from Mr. Trump’s high-tech backers, who depend on the Chinese market, and from his financial donors, who still have investments in China. Unlike most Republican initiatives, tariffs, if successful, work by imposing short-term costs in prices in order to achieve long-term gains in jobs from otherwise endangered industries. It’s the short-term costs — another round of inflation, this time imposed by Mr. Trump — that might endanger the Republican coalition.

On health care, some Republicans still want to repeal Obamacare. JD Vance has talked about reforms that could remove important protections for many Americans with pre-existing conditions. As Mr. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress found out in the 2018 midterms (when the G.O.P. lost control of the House), potentially imposing hardship on the working-class base through policies that threaten its access to health care — or education or child care — is not a winning electoral strategy.

Many business backers of Mr. Trump and his congressional allies are hostile to any labor regulation, including for health and safety, and to conventional environmental regulation. They would be unhappy with a significant increase in the minimum wage. In Mr. Trump’s campaign, he promised a raft of tax exceptions for workers and Social Security beneficiaries, but some congressional Republicans are already expressing skepticism about the costs of these promises.

To hold his coalition together, Mr. Trump and whoever aspires to succeed him also need to retain a modicum of public approval outside of what are currently Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters. To do that, he has to marginalize what could be called the “kooks.” Ronald Reagan succeeded in keeping his coalition together and winning re-election at least in part by consigning a single representative of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority to a junior position in the Education Department. Mr. Trump was not successful in doing this during his first term, and he may prove even less successful in his second term.

Robert Kennedy Jr. is already promising that Mr. Trump will push to ban fluoride in water. There is talk of banning or restricting vaccines. These would not be popular measures. Think tanks housing Mr. Trump’s allies have been talking about banning the abortion pill from the mail, gutting the Department of Education, censoring books and ideas, and the dismantling of what is called the administrative state.

The final obstacle to a strong realignment is Mr. Trump himself, who is consumed with the quest for power and self-aggrandizement, and appears eager to seek revenge against his detractors. Many of his difficulties during his first term stemmed from his own misbehavior, and he continues to revel in division and divisiveness.

It’s worth recalling what happened in Britain to Boris Johnson and the Tories. After nearly a decade in power, they won an overwhelming victory in 2019 by detonating Labour’s “red wall” of working-class support. It looked as if the Tories were on the verge of realigning British politics. Five years later, it’s Labour that enjoyed an overwhelming victory, and Mr. Johnson himself, primarily because of his own misbehavior, is out of politics.

Or take the Democratic Party and the notion of an emerging Democratic majority. Political observers saw the foundations of that majority in the coalition of Barack Obama. Not so many years later, that aspiration is shattered. The same could happen to Mr. Trump and the Republicans.

If Mr. Trump fails to achieve a realignment, it would mean, in 2028 and beyond, the continuation of the unstable equilibrium that has plagued American politics for decades. Democrats’ dream of an enduring majority may have died with Ms. Harris’s defeat. But Mr. Trump’s dream of a historic Republican realignment may not survive his second term.


Presidential Race Was Closer Than Many Seem to Realize

It really doesn’t help Democrats recover from the 2024 election defeat to exaggerate its dimensions. So I issued a few cautionary notes at New York.

As is inevitable in any losing presidential effort, a lot of the fingers being pointed at Democratic culprits are aimed at the Harris-Walz campaign, with a big negative assist from the former Biden-Harris campaign that was terminated in July. Some critics think Kamala Harris failed sufficiently to “pivot to the center” when the Trump campaign was pounding her as “radical communist”; others believe she erred by failing to go hard-core lefty populist. Still others seem to be certain she should have junked her billion-dollar ad blitz and instead appeared on a few dozen podcasts.

The reality is that while the Harris-Walz campaign was national in scope, its efforts (as were those of the Trump-Vance campaign) were concentrated to an extraordinary degree on the seven universally recognized battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that decided the election. So if her campaign had any positive net impact, you should be able to see it there. And as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump calculated a couple of days after Trump was declared the winner, you actually can see it if you compare these states to the country as a whole:

“The Post’s model estimates that, when all of the votes are counted, only one state, Colorado, will have seen its vote margin shift to the left. Every other state and D.C. will have shifted to the right.

“The last time an election saw that uniform a shift was in 1992, when all but one state shifted to the left as Bill Clinton was elected president…..

“On average, states are likely to end up having shifted about 4.6 points to the right since 2020….

“[T]he states where the shift toward Trump was the smallest included many of those that were the closest in 2020 — that is, the swing states. States that had a margin of 3 points or less in 2020 moved to the right by 3.4 points on average. States where the margin in 2020 was larger than that moved to the right by an average of 4.8 points.”

There are three significant implications of these patterns. First, the shift to Trump was indeed a national wave, albeit a limited one in most states (big exceptions being Florida, Texas, and New York, where Trump’s gains were supersize); his national popular vote margin has already fallen to 1.9 percent with votes still out. Second, the Harris campaign appears to have mitigated the swing to Trump precisely where it (and she) had the most intense activity. To the extent the campaign mattered, it was a net positive.

The third implication, which is more implicit than explicit in the numbers, is that the Democratic ticket was battling a national political climate that was fundamentally adverse, making the campaign a painful uphill slog that was disguised by slightly askew polling and the famous Harris “vibes.” As Cook Political Report editor-in-chief Amy Walter told my colleague Benjamin Hart in a post-election interview, for all the initial excitement, Harris began her late-starting campaign at a significant disadvantage:

“Fundamentally, it does come back to Biden and the administration. He’s an unpopular president, and an unpopular president doesn’t win reelection. The only thing possibly preventing the unpopular president from losing is that he’s challenged by a more unpopular candidate. Where Trump fits into this is that, yes, he’s still unpopular. But — and we noted this before Biden dropped out and then it started happening again in October — in retrospect, people think of Trump’s presidency more favorably than they did even when he was president. They may have not liked Trump and what he stands for or what he does, but as they put it in context now, thinking, Well, compared to what we have now, was it better or worse? — they say, ‘Well, at least stuff was less expensive.’

“And the only way you counter that is if you have a candidate on the Democratic side who’s not part of the incumbent party.”

Harris worked hard to depict herself as a “change” candidate, but that was always going to be a tough sell. With a little luck, she might have been able to squeak by in the Electoral College (she lost the three “Blue Wall” states by less than 2 percentage points) even while losing the national popular vote, just as Trump did in 2016. But nobody should blame her for failing to overcome the dead weight of an administration too many voters considered a disappointment if not a failure.


Consider New Directions for Democratic Activism and Party-Building

A lot of Democratic voters are feeling disappointed and drained with an inevitable sense of futility that accompanies an electoral defeat. Many are wondering if they should even bother with political activism going forward. It can be dispiriting, especially after losing one of the most important presidential elections in American history.

You will probably hear some political activist friends say they are quitting and getting focused on other things. But now is the wrong time for quitting Democratic politics. Now is the time to get involved in building a stronger, well-rooted Democratic Party. Now is time to admit the errors of the past, but not to dwell on them. Now is the time to open up new directions for party-building.

Sick of presidential disappointments? Check out local races. Democrats are still behind in state and local government representation. Let’s get more Democrats elected to our city councils, state legislatures and congressional districts. Let’s elect more Democratic judges and prosecutors. Let’s get involved in local leadership development. Let’s find more young people to run for office. Let’s give more money to beginners in Democratic politics. Let’s sink deeper roots in our communities.

As a red county resident, I’ve noticed that meetings of our local Democratic Party are very short on younger members. I suspect County Democratic parties all across the U.S. would say the same thing. There should be more conscious exploration of ways to attract  young people. Some creative thinking and activism is needed here. Every county and state party should have a hard-working youth recruitment committee.

Another much-neglected area of needed activism is rebuilding the labor movement. It is no accident that Republicans have worked so hard to crush unions. In addition to their wanting to keep wages low, they know that unions provide Democrats with manpower and money. Weakening unions diminishes both.

Every worker should have union representation, and that should be more of a priority for all Democrats. Democrats should educate themselves about the labor movement and its fascinating history, and then resolve to do something this year to promote union membership in his or her profession or former profession.

A third project that merits more Democratic support is fighting voter suppression, particularly in Mississippi and Louisiana. Georgia’s electorate is now about one-third Black, which was instrumental in Democrats winning two U.S. Senate seats –  and majority control of the U.S. Senate – in 2020-21. But Mississippi and Louisiana now both have an even higher percentage of eligible Black voters than Georgia. Rank and file Democrats nationwide, not just leaders, should make financial contributions to Democratic candidates and county and state parties in MS and LA.

These are just three possible new directions for Democratic party-building. There is plenty of room to explore other new paths for building local Democratic groups. Form issue-focused caucuses in local Democratic organizations for environmentalists, health care activists, anti-corruption projects, foreign policy concerns and many others.

Presidential races may be where big media is focused. But it’s not where the seeds of lasting change are sown. Democrats understandably focus much time, money and effort on presidential elections. But that’s not the most effective way to strengthen the party. Tall trees with shallow roots are the most likely to fall.

When I visited an Amish farm many years ago, I remember the tour guide saying that Amish farmers grew more produce per square foot than farmers anywhere else. One of the primary reasons was that they dug a little deeper than other farmers, which gave the roots a head start and more nutrients. The same is likely true for politics.

Lets dig a little deeper as Democrats, so that one day in the not too distant future, we will reap a bountiful harvest with a durable working majority that can move America forward.