There’s an old saying that, when you point your finger at someone else, your thumb is pointing back at you. In a perverse way, it characterizes the Democratic search for scapegoats following losses to Republican presidential candidates.

“It’s the crazy progressives who tanked Democratic prospects, with their looney woke policies.” Or, “No, it’s the pandering to conservatives which makes Democrats look corrupt to working-class voters.” If you suspect that both are partly true, you may be guilty of rational analysis.

Democrats have screwed up badly on a range of “cultural” issues, implementing unpopular policies like lax enforcement of America’s borders. On the other hand, palling around with Liz Cheney did not secure the coveted 270 EVs for the Donkey Party leader.

I may be wallowing in the false equivalency fever swamp here. But really, there is rarely a one-dimensional explanation for big political changes.

One factor that gets overlooked in pundit analysis is that people expect more from Democrats, and they don’t expect much from Republicans. It’s a lot easier for Democrats to disappoint voters, than it is for Republicans to do likewise. The bar is a lot lower for Republicans. A great many of their voters expect them to do nothing, and they almost always meet these low expectations.

Nearly all of the significant social and economic reforms passed during the last century were passed and signed into law by Democrats, frequently over the opposition of Republicans. If you think this is an exaggeration, quick, name a popular legislative reform that was passed by Republicans over the opposition of Democrats. That’s why you see memes like the one below, and there are zero memes depicting ‘Great Republican Contributions to the Lives of America’s Working People.’

Yes, Democrats have recently screwed up this legacy with excessive wokism. Think of the recent presidential election as a painful and costly course correction. But it’s more likely that Democrats will learn the lesson and recalibrate than it is that Republicans will become the enduring party of American workers and their families.

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:

I never cease to be amazed at the touching faith of many Democrats in the wonder-working powers of economic populism. In the wake of Democrats’ stunning defeat by the hated Trump and his allegedly fascist party, this brand of magical thinking has risen again within the Democratic ranks. Sure, the argument goes, the party has lots of problems but there is nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by turning up the volume—way up—on an economic populist pitch. That will finally convince the lamentably unfaithful working class that their real interests lie with their old pals the Democrats.

It certainly makes sense that in our current populist era, Democrats need to be responsive to that populist mood. But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populism by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats who don’t want to make hard choices. Here are four reasons why Democrats should discard this magical thinking as quickly as possible and devote their energies to strategies that might actually work.

1. Economic populism cannot solve the cultural leftism problem. In a post-election YouGov survey of working-class (non-college) voters for the Progressive Policy Institute, 68 percent of these voters said Democrats have moved too far left, compared to just 47 percent who thought Republicans have moved too far right. It’s a fair surmise that working-class sentiment about the Democrats’ leftism is heavily driven by the party’s embrace of cultural leftist positions across a wide range of issues (immigration, crime, race, gender, etc.) given how unpopular these positions are among those voters.

And in a widely-noted finding from a post-election survey by 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 cultural focus was the most powerful reason.

In the same poll, overwhelming majorities (67 to 77 percent) of swing voters who chose Trump thought the following characterizations of Democrats were extremely or very accurate: not tough enough on the border crisis; support immigrants more than American citizens; want to take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants; want to promote transgender ideology; don’t care about securing the border; have extreme ideas about immigration; aren’t doing enough to address crime; and are too focused on identity politics.

It’s magical thinking that simply changing the subject to economics will evaporate the Democrats’ many cultural liabilities. Culture matters—a lot—and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.

Instead, for many working-class voters to seriously consider their economic pitch, Democrats need to convince them that they are not looked down on, that their concerns are taken seriously and that their views on culturally freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. That’s the threshold test for many of the working-class voters Democrats need to reach and Democrats have flunked it over and over.

That’s why changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook they detest. Convincing voters of the latter is much harder and more uncomfortable for Democrats. But it has to be done.

2. Economic populism will not produce a big turnout dividend. Many Democrats have looked at the 2024 election results, noticed that Harris, relative to Biden, lost more votes than Trump gained across the two elections and concluded the Democrats’ loss was really about poor turnout. Comforting solution: more economic populism please! That will, it is alleged, galvanize the higher turnout among Democratic-leaning voters needed in future elections.

But was turnout really the problem? As Nate Cohn points out, even under generous assumptions, lower relative Democratic turnout likely explains no more than a third of lower Democratic support. And critically, nonvoting attrition among 2020 Biden voters is inextricable from vote-switching to Trump. Both reflected dissatisfaction with Harris, the Democrats, and the record of Biden administration.

[L]ow turnout among traditionally Democratic-leaning groups—especially nonwhite voters—was a reflection of lower support for Ms. Harris: Millions of Democrats soured on their party and stayed home, reluctantly came back to Ms. Harris or even made the leap to Mr. Trump. And if those who stayed home had voted, it wouldn’t have been an enormous help to Ms. Harris, based on Times/Siena polling linked to validated records of who did or didn’t vote.

Clearly, the turnout problem, such as it was, was an indicator of broad dissatisfaction with Harris and her party. As noted above, that broad dissatisfaction cannot and will not be solved by sprinkling the magic elixir of economic populism onto the currently existing Democratic Party and its tarnished brand. There will be no turnout dividend separate from fixing that brand.

3. Economic populism will do nothing to fix Democrats’ governance problems. Pretty much by definition, economic populism in whatever form has little to do with making Democratic governance of states and, especially, cities any better. Democratic governance is not, to say the least, synonymous with public order, low crime, and effective and efficient administration of public services. Quite the contrary. Progressive domination of deep blue cities instead has become synonymous with poor governance across the board. Josh Barro:

I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them…Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system…even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it…The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets…[S]chools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything—and it’s really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels. And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population—we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy.

Ouch. No wonder Democratic-governed large metros, including and especially New York City, swung so heavily to the right in the last election. Fixing this has nothing at all to do with economic populism and everything to do with getting better at governing. That will not be easy with the array of Democratic-oriented interest groups who benefit from the current system (I’m looking at you non-profit industrial complex!) and of course the innumerable regulations that undermine efficient public services and prevent the building of needed housing and infrastructure.

Speaking of regulations, economic populism has nothing to say about the radical reform we need in the country’s regulatory and permitting structure so that, well, stuff could actually get done. As Ezra Klein points out:

The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later—four years—the first 28 stations opened.

Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.

Appalling. There are innumerable other examples. How about the $42 billion allocated in the 2021 infrastructure act to provide broadband access to underserved, primarily, rural areas? Three years later, almost nothing’s been done. Or how about the $7.5 billion allocated by the IRA to build half a million EV charging stations? So far, a grand total of seven! This should be completely unacceptable.

As should the failure of the bipartisan Energy Permitting Reform Bill of 2024. The bill would have facilitated the building of renewable energy infrastructure, particularly long-distance transmission lines, as well as new fossil fuel infrastructure. But the environmental groups blocked it so we’re still stuck with the same old glacially slow and inefficient permitting regime for energy infrastructure, ensuring that the goals of the IRA, of questionable feasibility to begin with, will certainly not be met. In the immortal words of Bob Dole: “Where’s the outrage?”

This is a problem that most assuredly will not be fixed by a generous dose of economic populism. Not even close.

4. Economic populism is inadequate as populism. We are certainly in a populist era and it makes sense to respond to that mood. But it does not necessarily follow that Democrats can effectively speak to that mood simply by bashing the rich (“the billionaire class”), insisting they pay their fair share, and advocating for programs aimed at middle- and working-class voters, rather than corporate priorities. Many voters, including swing voters, are certainly sympathetic to such a pitch. But what this approach leaves out is that the populist sentiments of voters go much deeper than that.

To put it bluntly, voters, particularly working-class voters, harbor deep resentment toward elites who they feel are telling them how to live their lives, even what to think and say, and incidentally are living a great deal more comfortably than they are. This is not the rich as conventionally defined by economic populism but rather the professional-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power. By and large, these are Democrats in Democratic-dominated institutions. Looked at in this context, truly populist Democrats might want to say, with Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is a bitter pill for most Democrats to swallow. In today’s America, they are the Establishment even if in their imaginations they are sticking it to the Man and fighting nobly for social justice. The failure to understand that they themselves are central targets of populist anger leads Democratic elites and activists to overestimate the efficacy of economic populism and interpret populism on the right as driven solely by racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. That’s more comfortable than realizing millions of populist voters hate you. But they do.

Coming to terms with this reality—while unpleasant—will help Democrats overcome their current tendency toward magical thinking. Assuming they want to. Magical thinking may not lead to effective politics but it can be mighty comforting.

“The hoary phrase “loyal opposition” still means something, and that loyalty is to the country and its Constitution, not to one person,’ E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his column at The Washington Post. “This is where thinking about how to contain Trump should start. Resisting his most egregious policies will remain appropriate, but defending, rebuilding and renewing should be the keynotes this time….The first priority must be to minimize damage to the nation, protect constitutional rights whenever they’re threatened and safeguard the institutions of democratic government. Next, his administration should be exposed whenever it uses lovely words such as “reform” and “efficiency” to disguise the wholesale dismantling of popular and necessary programs. And Trump must be held accountable to the working-class voters who helped him win….But his choices for so many key jobs already signal that Trump 2.0 is on track to be far more extreme than the original. That should call forth more activism, not less….The national Democratic Party should play its part by backing the state parties already doing effective organizing down to the precinct level — the Wisconsin and North Carolina parties are among the standouts — and embedding such efforts elsewhere, especially in places where the party is in tatters. Writing off nearly half the states is no way to win the Senate. To create models for rejuvenation, the party should start with Iowa, Montana, Nebraska and Kansas, all of which have Senate races in 2026….And a heretical thought: As they rebuild, Democrats should acknowledge that in places where their brand is badly broken, independent candidates, particularly for the Senate, might have a better chance of building an alternative coalition to Trumpism. Senate candidate Dan Osborn lost in Nebraska this year running as a pro-worker independent, but his nearly 47 percent of the vote should be seen as a prologue, not a failure….The seeds of progress will be planted by those who respond forcefully, creatively and fearlessly to Trump’s second act.”

Irie Sentner reports that “Democratic governors (and 2028 hopefuls) gather to chart path under a Trump administration” at Politico, and writes: “Democratic governors are preparing to thread a fine line between standing up to President-elect Donald Trump’s Republican trifecta in Washington and collaborating with the incoming administration….Immediately following the election, some Democratic governors launched plans to “Trump-proof” their states, and in a memo released this week, Meghan Meehan-Draper, DGA’s executive director, wrote that Democratic governors would be the “Last Line of Defense” against the incoming GOP trifecta in the federal government….Blue-state governors have been explicit that they intend to try to block some Trump policies — efforts that will also likely raise their own profiles. Pritzker and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis are leading an organization to “back against increasing threats of autocracy and fortifying the institutions of democracy that our country and our states depend upon” — and although the privately-funded group is non-partisan, the implications are clear….But with the election loss still smarting, the event implicitly raised the question of who might have the right formula for the next one. Inslee said the governors are “focused on the election cycle for governors right now.” Still, he acknowledged that “the day after every election is the beginning” of the next one.” And with congressional politics bogged down in  partisan divisions, Democratic governors will likely have more opportunities to distinguish themselves as presidential candidates.

Some astute observations from Ilyse Hogue’s “Are Those Young Men Gone Forever?” at Democracyjournal.org: “Like their female counterparts, white men voted at margins comparable to 2020, and Black men’s support for the Democratic ticket dropped off only slightly. The biggest swings were a massive 35-point shift by Latino men toward Trump, according to CNN exit polls, and a 13-point shift to Trump by voters under 30, powered overwhelmingly by young men….How the Trump campaign pulled off this victory—by sidestepping on abortion, redefining freedom, and aggressively courting men—not only explains what just happened. It tells us a lot about the state of the MAGA coalition and where they intend to go next….Trump’s backers voted for him in spite of his position on abortion, not because of it. Support for abortion rights remains strong in this country, with men tracking only slightly behind women in how highly they rank their importance. Ballot measures strengthening abortion rights won in seven out of ten states the day Trump won the election, including in Missouri, where Trump won with over 58 percent of the vote….In state after state where the ballot measures showed up, a significant number of voters split their tickets, voting for abortion rights and for Donald Trump….The future of GOP power, Trump’s team sensed, lay elsewhere. Part of that future is a subset of Latino men and women who historically supported Democrats but are more comfortable with traditional masculinity and patriarchy….The Trump campaign deeply internalized the seismic shift going on among men under 30….Millennial and Gen Z men went into COVID experiencing declines in educational outcomes, upended social status, and high rates of depression. They emerged from quarantine to record-high inflation, a bleak jobs outlook, and a vast surplus of time banked in online forums. There they discussed a liberal culture that had embraced an identity-based hierarchy of oppression that left them at the bottom and a #MeToo movement that many felt made them guilty until proven innocent.”

A bit of election postmortem wisdom from “Why Did Trump Really Win? It’s Simple, Actually” by Michael Mechanic at Mother Jones: “But why, you might ask, would someone living on the edge vote for Republicans, whose wage-suppressing, union-busting, benefit-denying policies have only tended to make the poor and the middle class more miserable?….And why in the name of Heaven would they vote for Trump, a billionaire born with a silver spoon in his mouth who has lied and cheated his way through life? A man whose latest tax-cut plans—though some, like eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security income, can sound progressive—will be deeply regressive, giving ever more to the rich and rationalizing cuts that will hurt the poor and middle class and accelerate global climate chaos….The reason, my friends, may well be that those on the losing end of our thriving economy don’t see it as thriving. Historically, every election cycle, when reporters fan out to ask low-income voters in swing states what they are thinking, the message has been roughly the same: Presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, come around here every four years and talk their talk, and then they leave and forget about us when it comes to policy….Now that’s not entirely fair, because the Biden administration actually has done a good bit for working people and families of color, and has proposed all sorts of measures to make the tax code fairer and reduce the wealth gap (both the racial one and the general one)—including increasing taxes and IRS enforcement for the super-rich. But one can only get so far with a split Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on your team, and a rival party that would just as soon throw you into a lake of fire as support your initiatives.”

With Senate confirmation hearings of Trump’s motley crew of Cabinet-level nominees, one issue Democrats will need to confront right away is when and whether the appointees’ often-exotic religious views are an appropriate subject for discussion. I offered some simple guidelines at New York:

Amid all the hotly disputed allegations that he has a history of excessive drinking and inappropriate (or even abusive) behavior toward women, Donald Trump’s defense-secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth, has another potential problem that’s just now coming into view: His religious beliefs are a tad scary.

Early reports on Hegseth’s belligerent brand of Christianity focused on a tattoo he acquired that sported a Latin slogan associated with the medieval Crusaders (which led to him being flagged as a potential security problem by the National Guard, in which he served with distinction for over a decade). But as the New York Times reports, the tattoo is the tip of an iceberg that appears to descend into the depths of Christian nationalism:

“’Voting is a weapon, but it’s not enough,’ [Hegseth] wrote in a book, American Crusade, published in May 2020. ‘We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must …’

“In his book, Mr. Hegseth also offered a nod to the prospect of future violence: ‘Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.’”

His words aside, Hegseth has chosen to associate himself closely with Doug Wilson, an Idaho-based Christian-nationalist minister with a growing educational mission, notes the Times:

“[After moving to Tennessee two years ago] the Hegseth family joined Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a small church opened in 2021 as part of the growing Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. The denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a pastor based in Moscow, Idaho; his religious empire now includes a college, a classical school network, a publishing house, a podcast network, and multiple churches, among other entities …

“In his writings, Mr. Wilson has argued that slavery ‘produced in the South a genuine affection between the races,’ that homosexuality should be a crime, and that the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote was a mistake. He has written that women should not ordinarily hold political office because ‘the Bible does say that when feminine leadership is common, it should be reckoned not as a blessing but as a curse …’

“Mr. Hegseth told [a] Christian magazine in Nashville that he was studying a book by Mr. Wilson; on a podcast Mr. Hegseth said that he would not send his children to Harvard but would send them to Mr. Wilson’s college in Idaho.”

All this Christian-nationalist smoke leads to the fiery question of whether Hegseth’s religious views are fair game for potential confirmation hearings. Would exploration of his connections with a wildly reactionary religious figure like Doug Wilson constitute the sort of “religious test … as a qualification to any office or public trust” that is explicitly banned by Article VI of the U.S. Constitution? It’s a good and important question that could come up with respect to other Trump nominees, given the MAGA movement’s cozy relationship with theocratic tendencies in both conservative-evangelical and traditionalist-Catholic communities.

Actually, the question of the boundary between a “religious test” and maintenance of church-state separation came up conspicuously during the first year of Trump’s earlier presidency in confirmation hearings for the then-obscure Russell Vought, whom Trump nominated to serve as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (he later became director of OMB, the position to which Trump has again nominated him for the second term). Bernie Sanders seized upon a Vought comment defending his alma mater, Wheaton College, for sanctions against a professor who said that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.” Sanders suggested that showed Vought was an Islamophobic bigot, while Vought and his defenders (included yours truly) argued that the man’s opinion of the credentials of Muslims for eternal life had nothing to do with his duties as a prospective public servant.

This does not, to be clear, mean that religious expressions when they actually do have a bearing on secular governance should be off-limits in confirmation hearings or Senate votes. If, for example, it becomes clear that Hegseth believes his Christian faith means echoing his mentor Doug Wilson’s hostility to women serving in leadership positions anywhere or anytime, that’s a real problem and raising it does not represent a “religious test.” If this misogyny was limited to restrictions on women serving in positions of religious leadership, that would be another matter entirely.

More generally, if nominees for high executive office follow their faith in adjudging homosexuality or abortion as wicked, it’s only germane to their fitness for government offices if they insist upon imposing those views as a matter of public policy. Yes, there is a conservative point of view that considers any limitation on faith-based political activism in any arena as a violation of First Amendment religious-liberty rights. But those who think this way also tend to disregard the very idea of church-state separation as a First Amendment guarantee.

Critics of Christian nationalism in the Trump administration need to keep essential distinctions straight and avoid exploring the religious views of nominees if they are truly private articles of faith directed to matters of the spirit, not secular laws. It’s likely there will be plenty of examples of theocratic excesses among Trump nominees as Senate confirmation hearings unfold. But where potential holders of high offices respect the lines between church and state, their self-restraint commands respect as well.

At The Pennsylvania Capital-Star, Kalena Thomhave interviews Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO and current president of the Organizing Group, a political consulting firm that helps labor unions get out the vote and win campaigns. An Excerpt:

On the union vote, there was a lot of media discussion about how union members are migrating to Trump despite the Biden administration doing so much for unions. 

First off, union members voted for Harris in pretty strong numbers. Across the three blue wall states, [there was a] significant performance by union members.

In Pennsylvania, union members made up 18% of the electorate. So, almost one out of five votes cast came from union households, and they voted 52 to 47 for Harris, which is better than the Biden vote was in 2020, [when] Biden lost union households to Trump 49 to 50 in Pennsylvania. So, she actually did better.

In Wisconsin, Kamala Harris won union voters 53 to 46 — better than Clinton did in 2016 and not quite as good as Biden did in 2020, but still a nine-point margin among union voters in the state. In Michigan, Harris won [union voters] 55 to 44 — not quite as good as Biden did in 2020, but much better than Clinton in 2016.

Trump has eroded the union vote a little bit, but not in substantial numbers. The media rush to judgment before the election based on some polls suggesting that union members had abandoned the Democrats, it’s just wrong.

What are your thoughts on unions like the Teamsters not endorsing Harris?

The Teamsters, as was well reported, stayed neutral. So did the firefighters. But there were 50 unions that supported Kamala Harris.

The Teamsters released a poll that said that [nearly] 60% of their members were supporting Trump, and [indicated] that’s why they decided to stay neutral. I’ve seen a lot of union member polls over the more than 40 years I’ve been doing this work. Unions might start off with their members behind 10, 15, or 20 points.

But then you put your program into gear and communicate with your members — in this case, for example, point out that Trump supports right-to-work and that Trump ran one of the most vehemently anti-union administrations in the history of the country. And then contrast that with Harris’ record and the fact that Harris cast the deciding vote on the legislation that saved the pensions for hundreds of thousands of union members, including Teamsters.

It was inexcusable that the union didn’t take the opportunity to communicate to their members and explain to them what was at stake in this election. Because if they had done that, they would have moved those numbers. No union leader could look at these two candidates and with any degree of honesty suggest that one of them wouldn’t be better for working people.

You said that Democrats need to be doing the work in the trenches with workers. What does that look like? 

I think it is walking picket lines. I think it’s showing up at union halls. I think it’s gathering groups of working people together and sitting with them and listening to them — doing town hall meetings around your district or state and hearing what people have to say. It means standing united with working people and letting them see who’s really on their side.

Over the next couple of years, it’s going to be standing strong against what’s going to be a vicious assault on a range of worker’s rights. There are going to be attacks on [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration], overtime pay, the National Labor Relations Board, funding the Fair Labor Standards Act, and federal workers’ unions.

What has been your approach to mobilizing union and working-class voters? 

With our voter engagement program, In Union, we provide voters with a year of information — we don’t just start talking to them around the election. We give them tips on their families saving money, we provide them with information about unions on the front lines, we give them ways to hold politicians accountable and to fight back. And then we gradually get into communicating about the election itself. We never make endorsements, but we provide people with good, sound information and well-documented citations.

Read the rest of the interview right here.

In the swirling collection of suggestions for what Democrats ought to do to stage a comeback, one in particular caught my eye for obvious reasons, and I wrote a reaction at New York.

As is the case after every disappointing election cycle, we see multiple attempts underway to steer Democrats in a better direction. Most often, they involve timeworn Democratic factional advice, ranging from the hearty perennial progressive recipe of a sharpened economic “populist” message designed to freeze or reverse the decades-long working-class drift toward the GOP, to the equally well-known centrist prescription aimed at seizing a majority of persuadable swing voters, including some Republicans.

How, exactly, Democrats are supposed to incorporate and carry out such advice is usually left a little unclear. Presumably 2028 presidential candidates will test various strategies in the primaries, which is how ideological battles in the major political parties tend to get resolved.

But at least one group of centrist Democrats are planning to organize a more gradual and less top-down party makeover, or at least a force to push back against the strategies they deem futile or counterproductive. The New York Times reported:

“Seth London, an adviser to some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, wrote a private memo addressed to ‘Discouraged Democrats’ arguing that the party should ‘begin with a complete rejection of race- and group-based identity politics.

“The sweeping four-page memo, obtained by The New York Times and earlier reported by Politico, was both widely forwarded and a source of controversy in Democratic circles.

“’Democrats have increasingly focused on the priorities of core party activists over the common voters we claim to represent,’ wrote Mr. London, who has spent the last three weeks working with other Democratic strategists to build what he envisions as a ‘a party within the party’ of media companies, donors and advocacy groups that support charismatic, moderate officeholders.”

When you look at the “party within the party” London proposes to build, there is a very specific model he has in mind, and it’s focused more on elected officials than the Times take on it might suggests. The model is the Democratic Leadership Council, and the structure is a “leadership committee of federal and state elected officials” determined to act as a party faction in opposing identity-politics litmus tests and advancing “common sense” policies that are attractive both to swing voters and to the entrepreneurs who are essential partners in carrying them out.

The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), where I worked as policy director for over a decade in the late 1990s and early aughts, functioned from 1985 until 2011 as the kind of centrist pressure group London seems to envision recreating. Its initial goal (other than serving as a sort of clubhouse for Democratic politicians unhappy with the national party) was to create the conditions for a Democratic return to the White House at a time when pundits spoke of a Republican “Electoral College Lock.” But once that goal was accomplished under DLC co-founder and all-around star Bill Clinton, the group focused more on state-leadership development, and on burnishing its think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (which still exists), as an idea lab for Democrats, particularly on issues that more orthodox progressive Democrats tended to ignore (including crime, education reform, and national security). The DLC had a large if diffuse influence on all sorts of Democrats, but the group faded after a period when it was mainly known for divisive lefty-bashing, and for pro-market views on the global economy that didn’t look so good after the Great Recession and the subsequent voter backlash against globalization.

So is something like a “new DLC” a good idea right now? It’s a question worth asking, but on balance I’d say no. We are in a very different political moment than the founders of the DLC confronted. In 1985, Democrats were reeling from a presidential election in which its nominee had lost 49 states and was beaten by over 18 percentage points in the national popular vote. It was the second straight landslide loss to Ronald Reagan, viewed by Democrats at the time as a conservative extremist. But at the very same time, Democrats did relatively well down ballot. They picked up two U.S. Senate seats despite the Reagan landslide and won a House majority of 35 seats. They controlled 34 of 49 partisan governorships after this terrible election, and also controlled 66 of 98 state legislative chambers. The problem, DLC founders agreed, was that a failed national party had become detached from a still-successful state and local party, and the first step toward recovery was to rebuild the national party on the shoulders of its more successful politicians, who were far more in touch with voters than the party-committee identity-group and ideological litmus-test commissars who wielded power nationally.

While there were isolated situations (particularly in a few Senate races) where down-ballot Democrats did significantly better than Kamala Harris in 2024, there just wasn’t the sort of wholesale return to ticket-splitting that suggests the only problem is in Washington, D.C. In all the elections of the Trump era, the top of the Democratic ticket was stronger than it was in the 1980s while the bottom was weaker. There is no obvious cadre of better-connected or more successful elected officials who can lead the donkey back to victory.

The prescriptions the DLC offered Democrats back in the day are also a bit obsolete. In the most prominent DLC-published diagnosis of the party’s problems, Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck’s The Politics of Evasion, the culprit identified was the refusal of Democratic elites to come up with credible policies on the economy and national security, leaving these urgent concerns to be dominated by the GOP. While you can argue that today’s Democrats have identified with the wrong economic policies and made some missteps in the White House regarding global threats to national security, there’s really no “evasion” going on. And for all the ancient talk of progressives only being interested in the party “base” while centrists care about “swing voters,” it’s pretty clear all Democrats hunger and thirst for all votes, but have different definitions of “swing” and “base” voters and different understandings of what makes them tick.

But the single biggest reason the time isn’t ripe for a “new DLC” goes to the heart of what Seth London seems to envision, as progressive critic David Dayen argues at The American Prospect:

“While much of the vision is laid out in vague platitudes — ‘a future-focused narrative,’ ‘rooted in hard work’ and ‘the pursuit of the American Dream’ — where he is most clear, London aligns his movement with the ‘abundance agenda,’ pushed by a series of groups favoring supply-side liberalism through removing regulatory barriers to a host of common needs, while rejecting the concept of ‘socializing’ the provision of health care and housing and education. (London has consulted for Arnold Ventures, a key funder of the abundance agenda, led by former Enron trader and hedge fund manager John Arnold.) The memo commits to ‘social insurance for those who need it,’ an unconcealed reference to means testing.”

I strongly object to the frequently heard lefty smear of the DLC as a brothel of “corporate whores,” but there’s no question its corporate funding base created a lot of perception problems for the group and for Democrats who aligned with it (even though the DLC went out of its way to defy donors on issues ranging from cap-and-trade to health care to tax cuts to “corporate welfare”). And there’s also no question their (our!) irrational exuberance about the New Economy and financial deregulation discredited key parts of what was otherwise a sensible policy portfolio. Similar problems, it must be admitted, afflicted other center-left “reform” efforts like Britain’s New Labour movement under Tony Blair, which was heavily influenced by Clinton’s New Democrats (the final and best brand for DLC Democrats, which alas, is probably not reusable).

To be very blunt about it, Democrats will not regain the White House or Congress under the conspicuous leadership of folks from Wall Street or Silicon Valley, however well-meaning they may be. You don’t have to be attracted to what passes for progressive economic “populism” these days (and generally speaking, I’m not) to recognize this is a moment in the history of the Party of the People when a focus on those very people should be paramount. Indeed, one of the DLC’s early slogans was that Democrats should represent “the values and economic aspirations of the middle class”; that’s not a bad starting point for revival.

Beyond the specific strategy chosen for that revival, it’s important to recognize that Democrats overall are in much better shape than they were in 1985. It’s as close to a scientific certainty as you can get that Republicans will lose their slippery hold on the U.S. House in 2026 and with it the governing trifecta that makes them so terrifying at present. Trump is more likely than any president in living memory to overreach and make mistakes that erode his base of support and (quite possibly) damage the living standards that were such a huge part of the problem facing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris this year. While it’s always healthy to discuss what went wrong in an electoral defeat and debate policies and political strategies, a descent into formal factional combat that London seems to contemplate is both unnecessary and counterproductive. For now, the best way to oppose Trump is to maintain a united opposition party prepared to exploit the mistakes that are sure to come.

Tom Vilsak on “Why Democrats Don’t Get Rural America” at Politico: “I think the challenge that we have in rural America is that we talk a lot about programs and not about vision. And I will, if you don’t mind, take you all the way back to my first race for governor in 1998. I ran and I was way behind and nobody thought I had a chance of winning. And I went out and I talked about making Iowa the food capital of the world. And I had a media guy who at the time was not well known [David Axelrod]. He and my pollster were not very happy with me for talking about the food capital. They basically said, nobody understands what it is and you should be talking specifically about class size reductions, property tax relief and expanding access to health care. I continued to talk about it. I won that race by 6.5 to 7 percent. I’m pretty sure that 7 percent were the people I was talking to who knew the vision. They didn’t quite understand what it was, but when you have a vision, it is what a leader does. A leader takes you from here to there, tells you where you’re going to go and allows you to fill in the detail….But if you want to be president of the United States, if you want to represent this country and you want to do what everybody says they wanna do which is to bring the country together and end this us-and-them thing, you’ve got to be able to reach out and reach across and be credible. But you can’t be credible if what you’re selling is a program. You’ve gotta be selling a vision and that vision has to not be what you think but based on what you know about these people, you know matters to them. And what matters to them is the ability to say to their kids: you don’t have to leave. You can come back. And you can have a good life here.”

“For years, Democrats have wrestled with declining support from non-college-educated voters, a demographic that once formed the party’s backbone,” Brianna Westbrook writes in “Why Democrats lost in 2024: Lessons from Phoenix and the working class” at The Arizona Mirror. “This trend was starkly evident in the 2024 presidential race, where turnout among working-class Democrats hit historic lows….While the party centered its campaign on social issues and climate initiatives, it failed to adequately address the economic struggles that dominate the lives of millions. The result was widespread alienation among working families, many of whom opted to sit out the election….

To win back this critical demographic, Democrats must:

1. Focus on universal economic policies: Policies like Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage (adjusted for inflation) and robust labor protections remain immensely popular across the political spectrum. Democrats must make these initiatives central to their platform.
2. Challenge corporate power: A bold stance against corporate monopolies, as championed by Warren, can galvanize voters frustrated by rising costs and stagnant wages. Breaking up monopolies and regulating Wall Street should be presented not as niche issues but as critical to the everyday lives of working families.
3. Invest in grassroots campaigning: Hernandez’s victory underscores the importance of building trust through local organizing. Rather than relying on consultants and glossy ads, Democrats should empower community leaders to engage directly with voters.
4. Reframe the narrative: The language of class struggle, long championed by Sanders, resonates with voters who feel left behind. Democrats must articulate a clear vision of economic justice, uniting voters around shared struggles rather than dividing them with identity-focused messaging alone.”

At Brookings, John J. Dilulio writes in “The 4 working-class votes,” “If Democrats are determined to fret and sweat about where they stand with working-class voters, the exit poll data would justify them worrying—not about some pro-Trump or pro-GOP multiracial working-class coalition, but about Latino voters….Trump was a landslide winner with working-class white evangelicals, but his single biggest gain in 2024 over 2020 was among white evangelical women with college degrees….Democrats who emphasize pro-worker/pro-family policies and messages do better with voters than otherwise comparable Democrats who don’t.”….exit polls show that working-class voters, defined as voters without a college degree, split 56% for Trump to 42% for Harris. The same polls tell us that white working-class voters favored Trump over Harris by 66% to 32%, and that Trump won a larger share of working-class Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020…..The white working-class electorate consists of two distinct voting blocs: white evangelicals without college degrees and all other whites without college degrees. The latter bloc, which encompasses working-class white catholics and other non-evangelical whites without college degrees, is slightly larger than the former bloc….As I have documented elsewhere, in 2016 and 2020, Trump won a majority of white evangelical working-class voters, but he lost a majority of white non-evangelical working-class voters. He lost them again in 2024….Among Latinos, the only subgroup that did not bolt from the Democratic fold was college-educated Latino women, who favored Harris 63% to 33%, a 30-point margin identical to the one they gave Biden in 2020….But Trump’s victory in 2024, his more than 76 million votes and his swing-states sweep, is owed the most to white evangelicals. White evangelicals voted for Trump more than four to one, constituting more than a third of his 49.9% share of the popular vote….his single biggest gain in 2024 over 2020 was among white evangelical women with college degrees…. Having suffered a double-digit drop in college-educated white evangelical women’s vote between 2016 and 2020, in 2024 he turned a 6-point spread in Trump’s favor against Biden (53% to 47%) into a 50-point spread in his favor against Harris (74% to 24%)….So, in the 2024 election, a majority of white evangelicals without college degrees once again favored Trump, but majorities of blue-collar Black, Latino, and non-evangelical whites did not.”

Dilulio adds, “Still, I believe that there are at least three things one can credibly say about the 2024 presidential election results at this stage. First, as we have already established, contrary to so much of the commentary, Trump won a vast majority of white evangelical voters without college degrees, but Harris won majorities among blue-collar Blacks, Latinos, and non-evangelical whites; second, Harris did better with the electorate as a whole than has hitherto generally been acknowledged; and, third, it would seem that, other things equal, Democrats who emphasize pro-worker/pro-family policies and messages do better with voters than otherwise comparable Democrats who don’t….Despite being the first Black woman to run for president as the nominee of a major party; despite running in place of a highly unpopular first-term sitting president whose record she could neither easily run on nor run from; and despite running what many observers judged to be a tactically mistake-ridden campaign yoked to easy-to-attack anti-majority opinion positions on hot-button issues such as transgender women being allowed to compete on women’s teams in sports; Harris won more than 74.3 million votes, constituting 48.3% of the national popular vote to Trump’s 49.9%; and lost Pennsylvania by 1.7%, Wisconsin by 0.8%, and Michigan by 1.4%….So, a less than 0.8% shift her way in the national popular vote would have tied Trump’s tally, and a less than 1% shift her way in the three “blue wall” states would have added 44 electoral votes to the 226 she received and made Harris the next president…. In addition to winning working-class majorities among non-evangelical whites, Blacks, and Latinos, Harris beat Trump among union workers 57% to 41%. As I have explained elsewhere, most Americans now see the decline in private-sector unionization (from about a third of all workers in the mid-20th century to 17% in the mid-1980s to just 6% now) as bad for America; 70% of working-class Americans approve of unions; and an estimated 60 million nonunionized workers would like to have the opportunity to join a union.”

Nathaniel Rakich and Amina Brown explain why “The 2024 presidential election was close, not a landslide” at 538/abcnews.go.com. An excerpt:

As we’ve gotten more data and had the time to put the 2024 election in perspective, the truth has become clear: Yes, the 2024 presidential election was close. With more ballots counted, Trump’s national popular vote lead is down to 1.6 points, and Harris could have won if she had done just a couple of points better in just a few states. Any argument that the 2024 election was a “landslide” is misleading. It relies on a combination of recency bias and using the wrong measuring sticks.

High expectations for Democrats in the popular vote, along with the widely circulated maps showing big swings toward Trump in virtually every county in the country, may have played a big role in setting those early narratives that Trump had notched an overwhelming win. Another was probably the media’s repeated warnings before the election that it might take days to project a winner. While that very easily could have come to pass, we may have overemphasized the point. It was also always possible that a winner would be projected on election night, which is of course what happened.

After it took until the Saturday after Election Day for media outlets to project that Biden had won the 2020 election, the relatively early projection in 2024 (ABC News projected him as the winner at 5:31 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday) probably made Trump’s win seem more decisive. But once again, that’s recency bias at play. The 2024 election actually took longer to project than all but three presidential elections since 1976. Apart from the interminable 2000 (when the race came down to a recount in Florida that didn’t end until Dec. 12) and 2020 elections, only 2004 kept us in more suspense.

….All in all, the idea that Trump won an overwhelming victory in 2024 is less grounded in the data and more based on a sense of surprise relative to (perhaps miscalibrated) expectations.

Why perceptions of the 2024 election matter

The debate over the closeness of the 2024 election may seem academic — Trump won; who cares if it was a landslide or not? — but it could have a very real impact on the ambitiousness of Trump’s second term. Boasting about the scope of his win, Trump claimed in his victory speech that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate” to govern — a narrative that caught on in the media and with many voters, too. In a mid-November poll from HarrisX/Harvard University, 71 percent of registered voters said that Trump had a mandate to govern, including 50 percent who said he had a “strong mandate.”

Trump is just the latest in a long line of presidents-elect trying to convert electoral success into political capital to pass their agendas. There’s just one problem: Political scientists who have studied the idea of presidential mandatesgenerally agree that they’re made up. It’s basically impossible to ascertain what voters had in mind when they went to the ballot box and whether a candidate’s win was an explicit endorsement for a specific policy or approach to governing.

And according to research by 538 contributor Julia Azari, a professor at Marquette University, there is no relationship between how often a president-elect claims a mandate and how big their victory was. In fact, Azari even found that presidents are more likely to claim mandates when they are in a politically weak position, as a sort of act of desperation to claim that their policies have public support.

But research has also found that, much like Tinker Bell, mandates can exist if enough people believe that they do. According to political scientists Lawrence Grossback, David Peterson and James Stimson, when there is a media consensus that an election carries a mandate, Congress responds by passing major legislation. Azari and Peterson have further found that politicians themselves, like Trump, can push Congress to action as well, simply by insisting that they have a mandate. And per Azari, when a president-elect insists that he has a mandate, it is often accompanied by major expansions of presidential power.

In other words, regardless of how close the 2024 election was in reality, Trump’s claims to a mandate suggest that Republicans are planning to govern like they won in a landslide.

Democrats would also likely claim a mandate, had they won the popular vote by 1.6 percent. But that wouldn’t be true, either. And with a margin of victory that small, you can blame almost any issue for Harris’s loss.

Trump should have nominated more Democrats and Independents for his cabinet to give non-Republican voters at least some buy-in. That would have been the smart move. Instead, he went the other way, the “in-your-face, Dems” route, pushed by the hyper-partisan ideologues in his orbit. Any hope that having Musk and Kennedy in his inner circle might temper their influence appears to be unfounded.

As a red county Democrat, I have long wondered how many actual Democrats really advocate “open borders,” public funding of transexual surgery or “defunding the police,” to name just a few of the albatrosses that have been hung around Democratic candidates’ necks in recent elections.

In my more conservative county, the answer is ‘not many’. Yet polls tell us that these beliefs are held by significant numbers of Democrats. I guess they are in the cities and suburbs and disproportionately in California. At the same time, however, it feels like spotlighting such excessively ‘woke’ policies and their adherents may give the public a false impression of the breadth of such beliefs among Democrats. I still suspect it is a loud, but tiny minority that amplifies this ‘woke’ vibe among Democrats.

In reality, the term “woke” as currently used, provides yet another example of a slang word originating in the Black community, then distorted and amplified by whites to mean something else. As originally used, ‘woke’ means ‘educated.’ Now it is used by conservative critics to disparage crazier white liberal attitudes.

The net effect is to slime Democrats as crazy-ass wokesters. Apparently, it’s not a tough sell, especially when a billionaire is flooding the zone with thousands of TV ads pushing that message.

At Vox, Andrew Prokop addresses the harm done by forms of ‘wokism’ in his article “Are progressive groups sinking Democrats’ electoral chances?” Prokop writes:

Specifically, they claim, progressive interest and activist groups have both moved too far left and grown far too influential in the Democratic coalition, pushing the party to adopt stances out of step with the median voter on a range of different issues. This, they say, has backfired electorally and will ultimately hurt the people the groups claim to want to help.

“Many of today’s lawmakers and leaders have come up at a time when alienating the groups is seen as anathema, but they should start seeing it as both right and necessary,” former Democratic staffer Adam Jentleson wrote in the New York Times in November.

Other commentators — Jon Favreau, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Ruy Teixeira — have made similar points. Some, like Yglesias and Teixeira, have been criticizing the influence of such groups for years.

Yet this critique has been met with an impassioned backlash from progressives and leftists. Some, like Waleed Shahid, argue the blame is misplaced and the supposed power of these progressive groups has been exaggerated. “The Democratic Party has long been shaped by far more powerful forces — corporate interests, lobbyists, and consultants — whose influence has neglected the real crises facing everyday Americans,” Shahid wrote for The Nation.

Others argue that inflation — a global phenomenon — was the main reason for Harris’s defeat, so a groups-focused diagnosis misses the point. And yet others argue that progressive groups represent morally righteous causes that Democrats should not abandon — for instance, that moderation would amount to throwing marginalized groups “under the bus.”

In “The key voter shifts that led to Trump’s battleground state sweep,” Steve Kornacki writes at nbcnews.com: “For President-elect Donald Trump, there’s a clear story that runs through each of the seven battleground states that he swept on his way to recapturing the White House….He managed to drive up even further what were already sky-high margins with his white, blue-collar base while harnessing historically broad nonwhite voter support to erode the Democratic base in cities and diversifying suburbs….And for Vice President Kamala Harris, the battleground picture is one of regression — a widespread failure to match Joe Biden’s 2020 performance, with her gains largely isolated to areas centered on the wealthier, college-educated white voters who increasingly make up her party’s backbone.” Kornacki surveys the seven swing states, and writes of Pennsylvania: “Overall, Pennsylvania shifted 3 points to Trump between 2020 and 2024. But the movement was most pronounced in the eastern part of the state, where Trump posted seven of his 10 biggest county-level improvements compared to four years ago….Key to this: Deep inroads with Latino voters that helped Trump erode the massive advantage that Democrats depend on in cities throughout the region….In Philadelphia itself, Harris won by 59 points, 79%-20%. But that was down from Biden’s 81%-18% win four years ago, amounting to a net reduction in the Democratic margin of around 50,000 votes. That drop-off alone effectively erased more than half of Biden’s 81,000-vote statewide margin. Sixteen percent of Philadelphia residents are Latino, and a review of precinct-level results from NBC News’ Decision Desk found that Trump’s gains in the city were heavily concentrated in majority-Latino neighborhoods

“In smaller, Latino-heavy cities in eastern Pennsylvania,” Kornacki continues, “Trump made big strides, including double-digit improvements in the state’s three Hispanic-majority cities….Puerto Ricans are the main Hispanic subgroup in Allentown and Reading, while Dominicans are heavily concentrated in Hazleton, a city that was less than 5% Hispanic just 25 years ago….Trump also flipped Bucks County, which has a larger share of white voters without college degrees than the other three Philadelphia collar counties. And he drove up what were already robust margins in Pike County, where growth has been fueled by in-migration from New Jersey and New York residents….Democrats, meanwhile, were banking on even deeper support in the giant, higher-end Philadelphia suburbs. While Chester and Montgomery counties each went for Harris by double digits, her margin fell several points short of Biden’s in both. Her campaign had also identified emerging suburbs in the south-central part of the state, near Harrisburg, as growth targets. Instead, Harris merely treaded water in them.”

it looks like we are stuck with the Electoral College, which has given Republicans a significant edge in recent presidential elections, for the foreseeable future. With that in mind, Democrats should pay close attention to shifting demographics between the 50 states. Toward that end, James Cirrone cites “The five states Americans are moving to in droves” at The Daily Mail, and notes: “Americans are increasingly being pulled to the southern United States, with five states in particular attracting the most transplants….Florida and Texas had the most people move within their borders in 2023, according to a new migration survey from the National Association of Realtors (NAR)….Florida saw a net inflow of 372,870 people last year, while 315,301 went to Texas, according to the report, which analyzed US Census data….North Carolina welcomed 126,712 new residents in 2023, and has been established previously as another fast-growing state….Home to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina gained 91,853 more people last year….Georgia rounded out the top five, adding 88,325 people to its growing population….Tennessee came in at number six with a net migration of more than 76,000, followed by Arizona (57,814), Alabama (36,128) and Oklahoma (31,967)…. Ohio came in tenth and was the only state north of the Mason-Dixon Line to make the list, after drawing in a net migration of 28,718….Much of the dialogue around Americans moving south assumes they are searching for warmer temperatures and sunnier skies, but that isn’t the entire picture….According to the report, only one percent of those who moved said they did so because of climate-related reasons….The most common things that got people to pack up and go were ‘housing reasons’ (42 percent), ‘family reasons’ (26 percent) and ’employment reasons’ (16 percent)….The South has become the most populous region in the US, thanks almost entirely to Florida and Texas.”

In similar vein, read “Wealthy millennials are flocking to Florida and Texas—and no one wants to live in New York or California” by Jane Their at Fortune. As Their writes, “With no state income tax at all, Florida and Texas are the No. 1 and No. 2 destinations for high-earning millennials on the move, according to a report from SmartAsset. Using data from the IRS and the 2021 tax year, SmartAsset measured net migration patterns (the inflow of new high earners minus the outflow) among young professionals ages 26 to 35 bringing in at least $200,000 a year. Florida gained a net 2,175 people in this cohort; Texas gained a net 1,909….Meanwhile, the nation’s biggest economies, New York and California, withstood the biggest net losses at 5,062 and 4,495 young high earners, respectively. But they aren’t exactly desperate for young blood, as the two states are still home to the most young high earners by a vast margin….None of this may come as much of a surprise if you’ve listened to any of the anecdotal narratives that Florida and Texas have become the new New York and California as remote workers left their cramped urban apartments during the pandemic. The two southern states boast year-round warm weather, ample open space, and (of course) no income tax—ideal for young earners who are first and foremost focused on saving and contributing to their retirement accounts. It’s made the states enduringly ideal locations for those who don’t have to show up in their Manhattan or San Francisco offices to earn their hefty paychecks….Here are the top 10 cities where young professionals are moving, ranked by net gain:

1. Florida (2,175)

2. Texas (1,909)

3. New Jersey (1,048)

4. Colorado (754)

5. North Carolina (721)

6. Connecticut (660)

7. Washington (464)

8. Tennessee (441)

9. Arizona (321)

10. South Carolina (318)”