At Daily Kos, Emily Singer shares some poll stats, which bode poorly for Republicans: As Donald Trump prepares to take the oath of office for a second time, he claims to have a “massive” mandate to enact his destructive agenda. But new polling shows that’s far from the truth….A NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll released Wednesday shows that just 44% of Americans view Trump favorably, while 49% view him unfavorably. That’s nearly identical to the 45% approval rating Trump has in Civiqs’ tracking poll….The fact that Trump is viewed unfavorably before he even takes office is a warning sign for his tenure. The start of a presidential term is usually when a president is at their high-water mark of approval…..The NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll has other warning signs for Trump….Just 31% of Americans say the tariff policy Trump plans to enact would help the economy. That should be a flashing red warning light for Trump, showing that Americans will likely blame him if those tariffs cause prices to skyrocket, as economists expect….What’s more, 62% of Americans oppose Trump’s plan to pardon people who either pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes for their role in the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021….It’s not just Trump who is unpopular among voters. Trump’s Cabinet nominees are also underwater….Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense, has just a 19% approval rating in the NPR/PBS News/Marist College survey. And the survey was conducted before Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, when Democratic senators laid bare the nominee’s abhorrent behavior of alleged sexual assault, womanizing, on-the-job drinking, and misogynistic remarks….Trump’s co-president, Elon Musk, is broadly unpopular. Only 37% of Americans have a favorable view of him, while 46% view him unfavorably, according to the poll. That’s also a warning sign for Trump.’

If you were wondering “Who were the strongest Senate and House candidates of 2024?,” Nathaniel Rakich brings the answer at 538?abcnews.com: “One general trend here is that Democratic Senate candidates tended to punch above their weight. Democrats outperformed Harris in 23 of the 32 races in the table, helping them to win Senate races in four states that Trump carried: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. A big reason for this is probably that Democrats had more incumbents running for reelection than Republicans did (15 to 8), and, while incumbency advantage isn’t what it used to be, it’s still not nothing….” Here’s the chart showing the derails, minus color coding:

“Democrats certainly don’t want to replicate the destructive, hyperpartisan style that has characterized the GOP,” Julian E. Zelizer writes in “Partisanship Has Worked for Democrats Before. It Can Again” at The New Republic. “As a party that is committed to the continued role of government in American life and the imperative of governance, Democrats must rightly insist on maintaining guardrails that contain their own fiercest instincts. They don’t want to become a second party willing to send the nation into financial default simply to score partisan points; nor do they want to undermine the integrity of democratic institutions in the short-term pursuit of power….But in the space between bipartisanship and hyperpartisanship, there is a wide-ranging world of responsible partisanship within which congressional Democrats can operate, as became clear in the recent struggle over government funding….What are some of the partisan strategies Democrats can deploy in the year ahead? Most important will be for congressional Democrats to remain disciplined. Voting the party line and remaining on the same page will be essential if the House and Senate caucuses want to act as a coherent bloc, as they did with this battle over the continuing resolution, thereby forcing narrow Republican majorities to take the difficult positions that Trump will push on them. Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer need to make clear that any member who decides to go rogue will lose support from the party. Jeffries and Schumer must work closely with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to leverage the purse strings as rewards for loyalty….Given the stakes of the battle ahead, they must make clear to all Democrats that any serious dissension will come at a high cost. Democrats should work in unison to force issues onto the floor, such as proposals for additional federal investment in deindustrialized areas, to push Republicans into uncomfortable positions that will reveal the limitations of their populist agenda.”

The following article by Robert Reich, professor of public policy at U. Cal, Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor, is cross-posted from Alternet.org:

Trump will try to take credit for the Biden economy. Don’t let him. And don’t let Republican enablers of Trump or the media give him credit, either.

In 2017, Trump inherited a strong economy from President Obama and never stopped congratulating himself for it. He claimed that “we created the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

Rubbish. Trump tanked the economy with his trade wars and his botched pandemic response.

Now, Trump is inheriting an even stronger economy.

On Friday, the Department of Labor reported that the nation added 256,000 jobs in December, significantly more than economists expected.

The total number of jobs created under Biden’s four years is 16.6 million. That makes him the only president in history to have presided over an economy that created jobs every single month.

He has also presided over the lowest average unemployment rate of any president in a half-century, ending at 4.1 percent.

The nation gained more jobs in Biden’s four years than it did under Trump’s first term of office, or under either of Barack Obama’s or George W. Bush’s terms of office.

Working-age women are now employed at record levels.

The gap in employment between Black Americans and their white counterparts is at the lowest level ever.

Biden has also presided over an economy that has grown faster and created more jobs than any other advanced economy around the world. Under Biden, the American economy grew faster than did the pre-pandemic Trump economy.

Yes, the United States and every other country had to deal with inflation, but Biden brought inflation down to below 3 percent — lower than in most other countries.

Americans have every reason to be outraged at decades of policies that prioritized corporations over people. But the Biden administration cracked down on corporate price-gouging, monopolization, and trickle-down nonsense.

All this means that Trump begins his second presidency with the best economy a president has inherited in living memory.

Will he claim credit for it? You betcha.

In addition, some of the most important Biden initiatives will start to pay off only during the Trump presidency (assuming Trump doesn’t reverse them).

Biden took on Big Pharma by capping out-of-pocket drug costs for millions of seniors on Medicare. That lowered the price of 64 drugs. These changes will take place throughout 2025. More drugs are scheduled to get cheaper in the following years.

Will Trump claim credit? Of course he will.

Biden’s infrastructure law will give us better roads, bridges, public transit, and broadband access. But most Americans won’t see those improvements for a year or two, well into Trump’s term of office.

Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act will provide more American-made semiconductors, but we won’t see them for a few years, so during Trump’s presidency.

Biden’s clean energy initiatives will also pay off with greater fuel efficiency and less pollution. But here again, not for several years.

Will Trump claim credit for these successes as well? Do birds fly?

His whole life, Trump has taken credit for things he simply inherited, starting with his own personal fortune.

Just as he avoids accountability for the bad stuff he’s done, such as his attempted coup against the United States, he congratulates himself for the good stuff others have done.

If Trump doesn’t wreck the economy with his bonkers tariff plans or cruel mass deportations, you can be sure he’ll take a bow for what Biden built.

Don’t let him. Don’t let Republican politicians claim credit. Don’t let the media allow Trump or other Republicans to claim credit. Speak out. Remind America that these good things happened because of Joe Biden.

Thomas B. Edsall has a must-read column, “Trump’s Return Is a Civil Society Failure” at The New York Times. Among his insights: “A key question emerging from the 2024 elections is whether the Democratic Party is significantly — or even permanently — wounded. Can it return to fighting trim in 2026 and 2028?….A post-election YouGov poll commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, sent a clear message to party loyalists….YouGov asked 5,098 working-class voters (defined as those without college degrees) — primarily in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, along with 881 people elsewhere in the nation — to evaluate the political parties on measures of trust and commitment….Asked which party they trusted “more to improve the economy, protect Americans from crime, handle the issue of immigration,” majorities of respondents chose the Republican Party, ranging from 55 to 34 percent on the economy to 57 to 29 percent on immigration….Asked whether the Democratic Party or the Republican Party was “in touch or out of touch” and “strong or weak,” majorities of working-class voters described the Democrats as out of touch (53 to 34 percent) and weak (50 to 32) and the Republicans as “in touch” (52 to 35) and “strong” (63 to 23).

Edsall continues, “More significant, on two survey questions that previously favored Democrats — whether the party “on my side or not” and which party respondents trusted “to fight for people like me” — the Democrats lost ground to Republicans. Fifty percent of voters participating in the survey said that the Republican Party would fight for people “like me,” while 36 percent said the Democratic Party would….Thirty-four percent of those polled said that the Democratic Party was on their side, and 49 percent said it was not. Fifty percent said that the Republican Party was on their side, and 37 percent said it was not….In an essay accompanying the release of the poll, Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote:

The most lethal attack ad of the presidential campaign was a clip from a 2019 interview in which Kamala Harris explains her support for publicly funded sex-change surgery for prisoners, including detained immigrants. The kicker: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

Edsall poses the big question, “Did the Trump campaign’s focus on inflation, immigration, crime and transgender rights succeed in pushing the public image of the Democratic Party farther from the mainstream, no longer concerned with the day-to-day issues of the middle class?”

Edsall adds, “One clearly troubling development for Democrats is the failure of President Biden’s economic initiatives to win votes in either red or blue counties….While inflation was profoundly damaging to Democratic prospects in 2024, Biden administration programs like the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act paid large dividends to the regions of the country that had been economically suffering the most ­— red America……..Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, wrote by email that

a substantial fraction of Trump (MAGA) supporters believe that demographic change and changes in gender norms are a threat to their way of life and to their status in American society. Most importantly, Republicans (and influencers) have successfully convinced many people that Democrats and liberals are directly responsible for creating and supporting the social forces that they are frightened of.

Edsll notes further, however, that  “In a reflection of the scope of dispute on these issues, Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, declared in an email: “I fundamentally disagree with the proposition that Trump’s re-election is a watershed moment marking the demise of the progressive cause.”….Instead, Kupchan argued, “Trump’s victory reflected an anti-incumbent wave, not a decisive rightward shift.”….Neil Malhotra, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote by email that

the idea that the Democratic Party is a tarnished brand or that the Democratic Party is nearing collapse is highly overrated. An unpopular incumbent administration lost a close election. This has happened countless times in American history, and we have not claimed that a party was on its deathbed.

The 2024 elections, Malhotra continued, were

nothing compared to the 1980s when the Democrats lost three consecutive landslide presidential elections. In the 1930s, the Republican Party was shut out of power across the country except for the Supreme Court, and the party survived.

Edsall quotes James M. Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Affairs, who argues, “The question, then, is not why the Democrats lost the White House, but why the center is not holding across industrialized democracies. The list of culprits is long. Rapid globalization. Waves of immigration that exceed the capacity of countries to absorb them. Growing income inequality. Technological change that diminishes the employment prospects for unskilled workers and will soon diminish the prospects for skilled workers. Social media that give disproportionate attention to extreme voices….So, yes, the liberal project is endangered, but it is endangered in both its right-of-center and left-of-center versions.”

In “Why Trump is getting more popular,”  G. Elliott Morris writes at 538/abcnews.com:

According to 538’s average of polls of Trump’s favorability rating, 47.2 percent of American adults have a favorable view of the president-elect, compared to 47.4 percent who have an unfavorable view. That means his net favorability rating — the difference between these two numbers — is now the highest it has been since our tracking began on Jan. 30, 2021. It’s also higher than his average net approval rating — a related but different metric that measured how many Americans approved of his job performance while he was president — was at any point after Feb. 2, 2017. Trump, in other words, is at or near an all-time high in popularity.

“Net favorability” notwithstanding, Trump isn’t getting favorable reviews from a majority of respondent in the poll average. He’s probably getting a little pre-honeymoon bump as he approaches Inauguration Day. I’m a bit surprised, however, that more people aren’t bothered by his sorry cabinet picks.

Morris writes more convincingly that “Trump’s rising popularity since Election Day 2024 is particularly notable. He has gained roughly 8 percentage points of net favorability in the average poll since Nov. 5. The president-elect’s net favorability was at -8.6 points then — around where he was for most of last year. An 8-point bounce is quite a feat in this day and age of stable public opinion; in all our tracking,” One has to wonder how many people are not paying any attention, which is the optimistic scenario, compared to the possibility that the public actually likes his cabinet picks.

Morris speculates that “Trump is being evaluated more generously now because of the post-election glow but that his ratings will fall once he assumes office and starts enacting policies and sucking up more oxygen. But only time can bear this theory out.” Sure, Trump could get lucky, particularly if the good will from Biden’s infrastructure upgrades start to kick in.

However, Morris brings it down to earth in writing “similar boosts in the past have not lasted long. Trump’s victory was in fact much smaller than his supporters have mythologized, and some of his promises — like that to pardon the people imprisoned on charges related to the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — are still very unpopular. If his favorability rating follows the usual track, and/or he attempts some of his more unpopular policies, Trump may find himself quickly at odds again with the American public.”

In any case, smart Democratic strategy shouldn’t change much because of Trump’s favorables: Ditch the unpopular culture war policies, ideas and photo-ops, and get more focused on fighting inflation and all  that can help win more support from working-class voters.

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:

For the last decade, Democrats and the left have ever more eagerly embraced a climate catastrophist narrative on energy policy. That narrative may be summarized as follows:

Climate change is not a danger that is gradually occurring, but an imminent crisis that is already upon us in extreme weather events. It threatens the existence of the planet if immediate, drastic action is not taken. That action must include the immediate replacement of fossil fuels, including natural gas, by renewables, wind and solar, which are cheap and can be introduced right now if sufficient resources are devoted to doing so, and which, unlike nuclear power, are safe. Not only that, the immediate replacement of fossil fuels by renewables will make energy cheaper and provide high wage jobs.

People resist rapidly eliminating fossil fuels only because of propaganda from the fossil fuel industry. Any of the problems with renewables that are being cited, such as their intermittency and reliability, are being solved. This means that as we use more renewables and cut out fossil fuels, political support for the transition to clean energy should go up because of the benefits to consumers and workers.

That’s been the mantra that’s dominated Democrats’ policy commitments on energy and their rhetoric and philosophy on climate issues. Indeed, it is not uncommon for Democrats to apply the term “climate denialist” to those who, while they accept the reality of global warming, refuse to endorse the climate catastrophist mantra and its maximalist policy agenda.

So what have the Democrats gained from their fervent advocacy for climate catastrophism? Not much. Sure, they did manage to pass the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act which pumped hundreds of billions of dollars—if not over a trillion—into the renewable energy and electric vehicle industries.

But the needle is moving very slowly indeed on a renewables-based clean energy transition. During the Biden administration, the share of renewables in the country’s primary energy consumption has increased only very modestly from 10.5 percent to 11.7 percent. And the share of energy consumption from fossil fuels remains over 80 percent just as it does in the world as a whole.

It is just very hard to bring that share down quickly while keeping an advanced industrial economy chugging along. That’s why, despite the Biden administration’s professed commitments, energy realities have forced them to preside over record levels of oil production (both on federal lands and overall), record natural gas production, and record LNG exports.

Nor have Democrats been rewarded with a political bonanza for their embrace of climate catastrophism. Quite the contrary. They just lost the presidential election to an opponent who says “drill, baby, drill” and whose priority is cheap, abundant energy—not clean energy. And Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Energy is Chris Wright, CEO of a fracking company, who has been forthright in his advocacy of energy realism, or as he puts it, “energy sobriety.”

It’s interesting to look at Wright’s actual views on climate and energy because they represent what Democrats’ climate catastrophism is now up against. While Wright has been accused of being a climate denialist, this is not, as noted above, because he refuses to accept the reality of global warming but rather because he does not accept the Democrats’ current climate catastrophist narrative and policy approach. Here is what he actually says:

The expansion of the global energy supply by adding fossil fuels has greatly improved the human condition; it also brought the risk of climate change caused by increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases…. Climate change is a real and global challenge that we should and can address.

And his basic stance on meeting this challenge is:

Two things are required for positive progress on climate change: a sober understanding of the issue and the tradeoffs required, and massive improvements in energy technologies that can deliver low-carbon energy that is also low cost, reliable and secure.

That seems….pretty reasonable. Here’s his own 10 point summary of his perspective:

1. Energy is essential to life and the world needs more of it!

2. The modern world today is powered by and made of hydrocarbons.

3. Hydrocarbons are essential to improving the wealth, health, and life opportunities for the less energized seven billion people who aspire to be among the world’s lucky one billion.

4. Hydrocarbons supply more than 80 percent of global energy and thousands of critical materials and products.

5. The American Shale Revolution transformed energy markets, energy security, and geopolitics.

6. Global demand for oil, natural gas, and coal are all at record levels and rising – no energy transition has begun.

7. Modern alternatives, like solar and wind, provide only a part of electricity demand and do not replace the most critical uses of hydrocarbons. Energy-dense, reliable nuclear could be more impactful.

8. Making energy more expensive or unreliable compromises people, national security, and the environment.

9. Climate change is a global challenge but is far from the world’s greatest threat to human life.

10. Zero Energy Poverty by 2050 is a superior goal compared to Net Zero 2050.

Again, all pretty reasonable and empirically defensible though one could quibble here and there with how he formulates some of his points. But I would not quibble with his last point; it underscores the moral problems with the standard climate catastrophist/net zero approach. Lifting up the billions in the world who suffer from energy poverty and the stunted lives and living standards such poverty produces is or should be a moral imperative—a moral imperative about which net zero definitionally has nothing to say.

But Wright’s approach is more than a strong empirical and moral competitor to Democrats’ approach—it also overlaps in important ways with emerging voter sentiment about these issues. This is particularly true among working-class (non-college) voters where Democrats have rapidly been bleeding support. Consider these data from a YouGov survey conducted for an AEI project comparing scientific understandings of energy and climate with dominant public narratives on these issues and comparing both to the views of actual voters.

The survey found that, by 74 percent to 26 percent, working-class voters prefer an energy approach that uses a mix of energy sources including oil, coal, and natural gas along with renewables to an approach that seeks to phase out the use of oil, coal, and natural gas completely.

In terms of the energy they consume, cost and reliability are way, way more important to working-class voters than possible effects on the climate. Given four choices, 41 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them and 35 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Just 17 percent thought the effect on climate of their energy consumption was most important and 6 percent selected the effect on U.S. energy security.

In terms of proposals to mitigate the effects of climate change, getting to “net zero” as quickly as possible is relatively unimportant to working-class voters. Asked to consider proposals to reduce the effects of global climate change, these voters were least likely to say “getting the U.S. to net zero carbon emissions as quickly as possible” was very important to them personally (26 percent), fewer than said “limiting the burden of regulations on business” was very important (33 percent). Working-class voters were most likely by far to say keeping consumer costs low (66 percent) and increasing jobs and economic growth (60 percent) were very important aspects of climate mitigation proposals.

Consistent with many other surveys, the YouGov survey found that climate change as an issue has very low salience to working-class voters. Voters were asked to evaluate a list of 18 issue areas and rate their priority for the president and Congress to address in the coming year. As a “top priority,” dealing with global climate change ranked 16^th out of these 18 areas among working-class voters, well behind strengthening the national economy, fighting inflation, defending the country from terrorist attacks, and keeping Social Security financially sound—and also behind reducing health care costs, dealing with immigration, improving the educational system, keeping energy costs low, reducing the budget deficit, reducing crime, improving how the political system works, improving the job situation, strengthening the military, dealing with the problems of poor people, and dealing with drug addiction. The climate issue only ranked above global trade and issues around race.

Finally, by 30 points (59 to 29 percent) working-class voters flat-out favor more domestic production of fossil fuels like oil and gas. But only 15 percent of these voters are aware that the Biden administration increased oil production on federal lands. However, when informed that the U.S. has, in fact, increased domestic production of oil and gas in the last several years, they are delighted. Almost three-quarters (73 percent) of working-class voters said “this is a positive development, which brings good jobs for U.S. workers, ensures our energy supply and helps the U.S. support our allies who need similar resources” compared to 27 percent who thought “this is a negative development, which brings more pollution, climate change, and continued reliance on fossil fuels.”

How about that. Perhaps instead of hiding this achievement away Democrats should have featured it. Their failure to do so obviously has a lot to do with the climate catastrophist narrative they have felt obliged to embrace and defend. That narrative is clearly getting in the way of Democrats’ ability to reach working-class voters and is leaving an open lane for Chris Wright’s version of energy realism.

Can Democrats wean themselves away from climate catastrophism and their obsession with net zero? It could be difficult. Their net zero commitment stems from the extremely high priority placed on this goal by the educated elites and activists who now dominate the party. These elites and activists—unlike working-class voters—believe that nothing is more important than stopping global warming since it is not just a problem, but an “existential crisis” that must be confronted as rapidly as possible to prevent a global apocalypse. President Biden said in September, 2023:

The only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next 20—10 years. That’d be real trouble. There’s no way back from that.

He also said in November of that year:

I’ve seen firsthand what the reports made clear: the devastating toll of climate change and its existential threat to all of us. And it is the ultimate threat to humanity: climate change.

More frightening than nuclear war, eh, from which there ispresumably a way back? Up and down the Democratic Party, rhetoric has been more similar than not to Biden’s absurdly histrionic take. That’s an awful lot of rhetoric to walk back.

It also seems unlikely that the climate movement, with its intransigent radical wing, is going to do much to help Democrats do a reset on on these issues. Instead it seems like they’re inventing new ways to make their movement irrelevant to normie voters. A recent innovation is “intersectional environmentalism” which emphasizes how “injustices happening to marginalized communities and the earth are interconnected”. Somehow that’s going to result in a movement “rooted in joy and radical imagination and community building.”

Intersectionalism and a radical politics of joy? This does not sound like a movement prepared to grapple with reality. The reality is that climate change policy, to be politically successful, must be embedded in and subordinate to, the goal of energy abundance and prosperity. In other words, as energy abundance is pursued, efforts to mitigate climate change should be undertaken within those constraints, rather than pursuing climate change as the paramount goal and trying for energy abundance within those limits. There’s a big difference and only the former approach offers a viable way forward for Democrats.

Such an approach will require Democrats and the left to develop a more realistic understanding of what is feasible in terms of climate action. There is no point in setting goals and timelines that cannot be met. Discarding these will make it much easier to pursue an energy abundance path that also includes reasonable progress on reducing emissions over what will undoubtedly be a very lengthy time period. Democrats would be well-advised to develop this path—their own version of energy realism—rather than pursuing the dead-end of climate catastrophism. The latter is and has been a loser. Energy realism will beat it every time.

Watching Jimmy Carter’s state funeral on January 9 was a sad and sometimes inspiring experience. But given what’s about to happen on January 20, it also served as a reminder about presidential conduct, as I explained at New York:

The state funeral of the 39th president, Jimmy Carter, at the National Cathedral in Washington had all the trappings of the traditional suspension of political warfare in the face of death. Every living ex-president (and most of their vice-presidents) was there, which led to hallucinatory moments like Barack Obama amiably chitchatting with Donald Trump as they sat next to each other in the pews. Among the many eulogies to the Georgian, one that definitely stood out was one written before his own death by the 38th president, Gerald Ford, Carter’s Republican opponent in 1976, who wrote movingly of the partnership and friendship the two men formed during their long post–White House years. It was both sad and touching that the current chief executive, Joe Biden, reached back nearly a half-century to his own endorsement of Carter’s presidential candidacy in the year he defeated Ford.

But it was impossible to forget for a moment that the solemn event that brought this disparate audience together was occurring just 11 days before the re-inauguration of Donal Trump. The incoming president differs in so many respects from Jimmy Carter, and his return to power is a living repudiation of so much of what Carter believed in.

In his own view, Carter’s inveterate truthfulness was his most important personal virtue; “I’ll never lie to you,” he often said when running for president in a country anguished by Tricky Dick Nixon’s administration. Whether or not Carter was able to live up to this lofty commitment to honesty, it contrasts dramatically with Trump’s extremely flexible attitude toward facts and refusal to take personal responsibility for the consequences of his sins (on one infamous occasion, he could not come up with a single thing he had ever done that required divine forgiveness).

Carter’s great legacy in international affairs was his effort to anchor U.S. foreign policy in universal human rights. Trump rejects any standard for foreign policy other than the most naked national self-interest and has gone out of his way to dismiss global standards banning the torture of prisoners of war and military strikes on civilian populations.

Carter had a wonk’s passion for tinkering with government operations to make them more efficient and responsive. Trump is indifferent to the minutiae of governing, and his big reform initiative is to give tech bros Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy license to blow up whole agencies and radically reduce spending as ends in themselves.

In the long arc of political history, Carter is renowned for leading his own southern region out of the darkness of Jim Crow and building a mind-blowing coalition of civil-rights activists and ex-segregationists. Even if you believe Trump is without personal prejudice, he has very clearly made politics safe for a resurgence of racism and has made the pursuit of racial justice and equality a target of legal action and mockery.

As every eulogist at Carter’s funeral emphasized, he was a man of deep and abiding Christian faith, teaching Sunday school back in Plains for many decades. He wasn’t transactional in his religiosity; he took positions on social and cultural issues that led his fellow evangelical Protestants to abandon him and his party, and he led his own congregation out of its traditional denomination when that larger church refused to treat women equally. If Trump has any personal religious convictions, they are largely a secret, and he has formed a highly transactional relationship with conservative Christians, who are forever rationalizing his manifest impiety. Until his wife’s death, Jimmy Carter closed every day reading the Bible in Spanish with Rosalynn. Trump’s relationship with Holy Scripture (other than misquoting it) is mostly limited to hustling expensive Bibles to his devoted followers.

The American presidency is a collection of men with all sorts of varying personalities and backgrounds, and it’s entirely possible someone wildly different from Jimmy Carter is what this country needs. But it’s hard to undertake comparisons of the ex-president who just died and the ex-president who is about to re-enter the White House and see anything other than a devolution in integrity, fidelity to civic and religious traditions, and willingness to work with others peacefully. As Biden succinctly said in his eulogy, Carter’s “enduring attribute” was “character. Character. Character.” What sort of character is Donald Trump?

In the current issue of Washington Monthly, Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris spotlights “Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself,” and writes, “For many years, outside observers, including the editors of this magazine, have warned that the Democratic Party cannot win if it continues to hemorrhage the support of working-class Americans. The results of the November election should put an end to any debate about this….

The tragedy is that as president, Joe Biden did a lot to try to bring back these voters. He openly supported unions and was the first sitting president to walk a picket line. He pushed through major legislation to fund infrastructure and manufacturing projects that would produce, he said again and again, good-paying jobs that you don’t need a college degree to get—and by design these projects were disproportionately located in red areas. He signed other bills that put cash in the pockets of average Americans, including a short-lived but successful child tax credit. He began a revolution in competition policy that took on corporate power and greed in favor of small businesses and employees. When he dropped out of the race, Kamala Harris picked a running mate with working-class rural roots and proposed to help ordinary Americans buy a first home, start a new business, and secure protection from corporate price gouging…. Yet despite all of this, Donald Trump not only won the election but also gained ground with working-class Americans of every race and gender and in every part of the country.”

Here’s a teaser from one of the ‘ten new ideas,’ “Medicare Prices for All: Want a real raise? Slash health care costs by tying employer plans to Medicare rates” by Phillip Longman:

….Everyone complains about the high price of drugs and hospital stays. But few people are aware of how hidden health care costs that don’t show up in the Consumer Price Index are profoundly eroding their purchasing power.

To understand how this giant rip-off works and how to fix it, you need some background. Most working- and middle-class Americans receive their health care coverage through employer-sponsored insurance plans. Most of us covered by such plans know full well that we are perpetually being asked to pay higher deductibles and co-pays. Most of us also know when our premiums go up. Individual workers covered by such plans typically pay around 20 percent of the cost of the premium in the form of a paycheck deduction. Workers who insure a spouse and two children under an employer plan typically see about 32 percent of the cost of the premium deducted from their paycheck.

….The employee-benefits expert Syl Schieber has calculated how much rising health care costs have lowered what he calls the “kitchen table” income of workers with employer-sponsored health care plans—that is, the income they have available each month to pay for housing, groceries, gas, and other day-to-day expenditures. He finds that due to the wage suppression caused by the rising cost of their health care plans, lower-income workers with family coverage had $2,500 less kitchen table income in 2019 (adjusted for inflation) than they brought home two decades earlier. In effect, health care inflation gobbled up all of the meager raises they received as they gained seniority, and more.

….Since 2010, health care costs for the average family of four with an employer-sponsored plan have risen by more than $13,000, or over 71 percent. Currently, the cost for individuals covered by such plans is rising by 6.7 percent a year, roughly double the official rate of inflation. No wonder so many Americans, even those “privileged” enough to have employer-sponsored health insurance, feel like the economy is not working for them.

….What can be done? Abolishing our employer-based health care finance system and replacing it with something like a government-financed, “Medicare for All” program might be a good idea. But it hardly needs saying that it is a political nonstarter at the moment.

….So here’s the solution. Just mandate, going forward, that all employer-sponsored plans pay providers the same, or close to the same, prices Medicare does. And further mandate that employers share the enormous resulting savings with their workers.”

Read more here.

One of these days, when everyone gets tired of yelling at each other about cultural violations, some smart political leader is going to pick up the long-neglected torch of industrial policy, figure out how to sell it to the public and mobilize a majority consensus for a new industrial policy. Meanwhile, it wouldn’t hurt for Democrats to educate themselves about the possibilities. Toward that end, a new book, “Industrial Policy for the United States” by liberal Marc Fasteau and conservative Ian Fletcher is getting some buzz. Consider this teaser from the publication’s web page: “Industrial policy is based on viewing the economy not as one single thing, which is the usual way to view it when people talk about inflation being X% or economic growth being Y%, but as an intricate network of specific industries, some of which are more important than others….The key here is that nations are locked in a ruthless rivalry to possess the most valuable industries. These are not only those important for national security, like aircraft building, but those that generate the highest profits and the most good jobs….foreign nations like China, Japan, Germany, and others use a wide range of policies to grab and hold onto the best industries. For example, they lock America out of their markets with trade barriers, often hidden, to keep the sales for themselves.  They subsidize their exports, overtly and covertly, to build volume and destroy American competitors. They fund not just pure science, but the development of new technologies right down to the factory floor. (Sometimes, they steal technology from us!) They rig their banking systems to build up industry, not financial speculators. (Why don’t we? See Chapter 18.) They don’t try to send all their people to college, but teach them the skills for sophisticated, modern manufacturing industries….Industrial policy is neither liberal nor conservative, and this book is forthrightly bipartisan. Both Trump (tariffs) and Biden (the CHIPS Act) took some small steps in the direction of industrial policy. These moves were a success, but America needs to go much further in this direction and probably will. ​Therefore, this book is the key to understanding how much of the economic agenda of the next 30 years will unfold, what will work and what won’t, and why.”

We can be confident that President Biden will do all that he can in the few remaining days of his presidency to help Los Angeles County recover from the devastation caused by the seven fires which are creating a natural disaster of unprecedented proportions in southern California. President-elect Trump, however, is already using his bully pulpit to blame Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom for the disaster, as if there was something he could do about the freakish weather and ocean conditions that fed the ferocious windstorms. Los Angeles County is the largest County in the U.S., with more than 9.6 million people. Only 10 of the 50 states have more people than L.A. County, and one of them is California. Nobody knows how much money the recovery from this disaster will cost, when all of the recovery expenses are paid, nor what portion will be covered by private fire insurance. But the devastation is so vast that taxpayers will surely pay a large proportion of the final expenses. What Democrats must do is unify against all Republican efforts to short relief aid and foment chaos in L.A. County, hoping that voters will blame California Democrats for Republican failure to fund the recovery. Democrats have always stood for supporting recovery efforts following natural disasters, as a fundamental principle of national patriotism, and now, more than ever, they are challenged to honor that commitment, as they have so often done in red states like Florida.

From “The Federal Reserve Thinks Trump is Going to Make Inflation Much Worse” by Malcolm Ferguson at The New Republic: “Officials at the Federal Reserve are worried that Trump’s policies will cause inflation to rise once again. Recent meeting notes included four separate mentions of the economic impact of changes on immigration, inflation, and trade policy, according to CNBC reporting….“Almost all participants judged that upside risks to the inflation outlook had increased,” the minutes said. “As reasons for this judgment, participants cited recent stronger-than-expected readings on inflation and the likely effects of potential changes in trade and immigration policy.”….Trump has been making broad threats about hardline tariffs against China, Canada, and Mexico, as well as promising mass deportations and deregulation. All of these things are causing the Fed to move carefully….Officials noted that they still expect inflation to get down to 2 percent, but not until 2027 at the earliest.” High inflation, or diminished consumer purchasing power, if you prefer, was the leading cause of Trump’s election victory in November. But soon high inflation will be his to own, and it’s up to Democrats to make sure that happens. it will likely be the pivotal issue of the 2026 midterm elections. If Democrats don’t seize the opportunity, there will be no one else to blame.

In “Sanders doubles down on attacks on Musk over H-1B visas: ‘Dead wrong,’ Lauren Irwin writes a The Hill: “Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is doubling down on his attacks against tech billionaire Elon Musk over H-1B visas, telling him he’s “dead wrong” about the employment visa….In an op-ed published Wednesday on Fox News, Sanders highlighted the ongoing debate about H-1B visas and other guest worker programs as President-elect Trump prepares to implement his immigration plan….The H-1B visa is a temporary, non-immigrant work permit that’s become part of the political debate. …Some say the visa attracts professional talent to the U.S., and others say the program allows employers to hire outside the country and pay workers less than they would if they hired an American citizen….Sanders said that H-1B visas are not intended to employ the “best and brightest” but instead replace American workers with people who can be paid lower wages and people who “often live as indentured servants.”….“If there is truly a major shortage of skilled tech workers in this country, why did Tesla lay-off over 7,500 American workers last year – including many software developers and engineers at its factory in Austin, Texas – while applying to hire thousands of H-1B guest workers?” Sanders wrote.”

I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that Donald Trump’s grip on political history is slippery at best. But at New York I went to the trouble of demolishing his claim that the Panama Canal Treaty cost Jimmy Carter the presidency:

In his rambling press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday, Donald Trump said some very curious things, to put it mildly. One claim about Jimmy Carter is just wrong. Following up on his recent threats to retake control of the Panama Canal if Panama doesn’t lower shipping fees and eliminate any Chinese involvement in managing the passageway, the president-elect twice asserted that Carter lost his reelection bid in 1980 primarily due to his sponsorship of the treaty that returned the canal to Panama.

I have no idea where Trump got this idea, but it makes little sense. The Panama Canal Treaty, initially negotiated by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, was signed and ushered through the Senate by Carter in April 1978. It was ratified by a 68 to 32 margin, with Republican Senate leader Howard Baker playing a key role (conservative icon William F. Buckley was another key backer of the treaty). Yes, the treaty was initially unpopular, but it became less so after its ratification. And while Ronald Reagan opposed the treaty, and made it a campaign issue against incumbent Republican Ford during the 1978 GOP primaries, it wasn’t a big deal at all by 1980, as Ron Elving recently observed at NPR:

“Reagan remained opposed to the Panama deal but ‘noticeably muted his rhetoric in 1977 when the treaties were finally signed by President Jimmy Carter,’ according to Lou Cannon, the reporter and biographer who covered Reagan more closely and for longer than anyone. In President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, Cannon reports that ‘Reagan’s interest in the Panama Canal declined after the issue had served its political purpose.’ Cannon has written that Reagan’s pollster told him the issue was primarily of interest to hard-core conservatives. By 1980, Reagan had that category locked up.”

If the treaty had been calamitous for Carter, you’d think he would have paid a big price during the 1978 midterm elections that immediately followed the Senate debate on the subject, but in fact, Republican gains in those midterms were modest, despite a lot of other issues bedeviling Democrats, along with a historic realignment that was already underway in Carter’s home region. Indeed, contra Trump’s assumption that foreign policy cost Carter the White House in 1980, there were plenty of more prominent reasons for the outcome aside from the much-discussed and deeply embarrassing hostage crisis. The economy was in terrible shape in 1980, with an unemployment rate of 7.1 percent, an average inflation rate of 12.67 percent, and average home-mortgage rates of 13.74 percent. That alone almost certainly doomed Carter’s reelection. But aside from that, he had to weather a tough primary challenge from Ted Kennedy; a third-party candidacy from ex-Republican John Anderson that wound up taking away more votes from the incumbent than from the challenger; and an inevitable loss of support in southern-inflected parts of the country following his precedent-breaking win in 1976.

Subsequently Reagan did nothing to unravel the Panama Canal Treaty, and by the time the canal was fully turned over to Panama at the end of 1999 (with Carter present), it was a largely noncontroversial event.

For his own mysterious reasons, Trump clearly wants to inflate the significance in American politics of the Panama Canal issue, past and present. Unfortunately, the main participants in the debate over the Canal Treaty aren’t around to dispute his claims. It’s a shame that Trump has chosen to cast a shadow on Carter’s state funeral later this week by mischaracterizing one of his key accomplishments as a career-ending disaster.

The following article, “Key elections to watch in 2025” by 538’s Geoffrey Skelley is cross-posted from abcnews.go.com:

The 2024 election may be over, but the electoral hamster wheel will keep on spinning in 2025. In the past, elections that occur the year after a presidential race have often presented opportunities for the party that lost the White House to make gains or hold onto power in places it already controls, and 2025 is no different.

Statewide races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey sit at the top of the 2025 marquee, and Democrats and Republicans, respectively, will hope that recent trends in those states point to success this fall. Meanwhile, Wisconsin will host a race that will determine whether liberals or conservatives control the state’s highly contested Supreme Court. Millions of other voters will also decide on the next mayors of their cities, including the country’s largest city, New York. Lastly, we can already anticipate at least three special elections in the House. Here then is an early look at what’s to come now that the calendar has turned to January.

State elections

Virginia

Virginia’s gubernatorial elections are unique because the Old Dominion is the only state that prevents incumbent governors from seeking immediate reelection. As a result, these races are always open-seat contests that test each party’s strength just a year after the presidential contest — which has usually benefited the party not in the White House. Dating back to 1977, that party has won all but one of 12 gubernatorial contests in the state, with Democrats’ narrow win in 2013 serving as the lone exception. And in each of those contests, the national opposition party has gained ground relative to its statewide performance in the presidential election a year earlier.