The following article, “How the Left Can Win Back the Working-Class: In a new book Joan Williams says Democrats can win back ground lost to Trump without abandoning their values” by Adam Gabatt, is cross-posted from The Guardian:

Democrats can win back sections of the working class they lost to Donald Trump without compromising their commitment to equal rights and compassionate government, according to a new book.

They can do so by seizing control of rightwing talking points and reframing debate around issues like the climate crisis and LGBTQ+ rights.

The left can fight back, too, against how the right wing has claimed masculinity – offering an alternative to Trump’s bellicose interpretation of what it means to be a man.

Such is the verdict of Joan C Williams, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, whose work focuses on social inequality and race and gender bias. Her book, Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, is due out in May.

Democrats have too often talked about issues in abstract language or in ways that don’t resonate with people’s lives, Williams writes. On climate, some Democrats and liberal “elites”, Williams says, can talk too frequently about vague risks of global warming rather than discussing the real world impact on people’s lives.

When it comes to immigration, talking points about increasing cultural diversity in the US have found little appeal with the white working class, in particular. That’s a voting bloc which has found Trump particularly alluring, and Democrats, Williams said, have failed to make the case that immigrants may well be just as proud of living in America, if not more, than people who have lived here for generations.

Williams gave the example of how Democrats should present climate policies – an issue that Trump, Republicans and the rightwing media have categorized as a waste of money and inconsequential to Americans’ lives.

“Do you talk about climate change as: ‘There are climate deniers that deny science and in their ignorance, are taking us to a toasty future?’ Or do you talk about climate change as creating situations where farmers can no longer farm what their grandfathers farmed – how you have a situation where insurance companies are refusing to offer fire insurance to middle-class people?” Williams asked.

Similarly, Democrats can reclaim messaging over masculinity, Williams believes. Part of Trump’s appeal is his image as a tough, hyper-masculine guy, whether talking tough about confronting foreign leaders, bullying members of even his own party or telling crowds at his rallies to beat up protesters, or claiming that he would be among those marching to the Capitol ahead of what became the January 6 insurrection.

There’s little evidence that Trump is actually the strong figure he presents himself as: he’s nonconfrontational when firing people, often doing so by tweet rather than in person; he avoided the Vietnam draft because of alleged bone spurs; and he left the January 6 rally in a car as his fired-up supporters set off for the Capitol.

Still, his messaging has been effective. But Williams thinks it can be countered without simply mirroring Trump’s puffed-up rhetoric.

“You can characterize Trump’s behavior as not seemly for a grownup man. You can [say] that seemingly behavior for a grownup man is not whining, being strong enough to stand up for yourself, and those you love, and the values that you all share,” Williams said.

“That’s what being a grownup man is all about. That’s not selling out our values.”

The phrase working class is frequently interpreted as describing white, blue-collar workers in the US, despite Black people being more likely to be working class than white people – something historian Blair LM Kelley explained in her book Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class.

Black working-class voters have not followed the exodus from the Democratic party to Trump that the white working class or, to a much lesser extent, Latino working-class people have.

But Williams writes that despite consistent support for Democrats from Black Americans, that support should not be taken for granted. She believes that Democrats’ positions on some issues are more likely to reflect the positions of white elites rather than Black, Latino or white, working-class voters, who may hold conservative views on issues like abortion.

The left can appeal to working-class people of all races in similar ways, Williams said. In Outclassed, she quotes Ian Haney López, a scholar on race whose work on “race class narrative” suggests that the left can engage Black, Latino and white working-class voters by emphasizing that the right wing has deliberately set out to divide them in order to distract from economic policies that have created devastating income inequality in the US.

And despite some working-class voters holding conservative beliefs on social and cultural issues, Williams said Democrats do not have to abandon their principles on things like equal rights for LGBTQ+ people, support for women’s rights and commitment to racial equality in order to appeal to what she refers to as “middle-status voters”.

“I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it. I mean, the debate in the United States now is that [some Democrats] are saying: ‘Just talk about the economy. Don’t talk about culture at all.’ And that’s because they assume that if they talk about culture, they have to appeal to these middle-status voters in the same way the far right does – by, for example, bullying trans kids, and they don’t want to do that.”

Williams says “that’s a failure of imagination” and that the left needs to “find our own ways of connecting with these middle-status voters.”

Something telling, Williams notes, is that the Gadsden flag, a yellow flag emblazoned with a coiled snake and the words ‘Don’t tread on me,’ has been co-opted by the right as a stance against government interference and is frequently flown at Trump rallies.

“This is a standard flag among Trump-voter types. Well: ‘Don’t tread on me, butt your nose out of my family.’ Are we talking there about abortion? Or how parents can raise their kid, if the kid is gender non-binary? We don’t talk about that,” she said.

“It’s a process of imagination, of understanding what the values are of the folks who are flocking to the far right and rethinking how we can build bridges, respectful bridges to them, without becoming the far right.”

In “Here’s What Senate Democrats Should Be Doing to Fight Trump; Senate rules were explicitly designed to protect the minority. Democrats should exploit them mercilessly to slow Trump and Musk before they destroy the country,” Aaron Regunberg writes at The New Republic: “Democrats have additional tactics they can, and must, start deploying. As groups like Indivisible have been highlighting, the U.S. Senate is an institution designed to protect the rights of the minority party. That means Democratic senators have an arsenal of procedural tools they should be weaponizing to disrupt and delay Republicans’ agenda in protest of Musk’s infiltration of our federal payment systems….Perhaps the most significant tool Democratic senators could use to throw sand in the gears is the denial of unanimous consent. Unanimous consentis the framework by which the Senate operates. Technically, all of the basic day-to-day functions of the Senate—from scheduling votes to moving bills forward—require time-consuming procedural steps like roll-call votes and debates. But senators agree, or unanimously consent, to skip over these processes. If Democrats deny unanimous consent, they can grind Senate business to a crawl….Democrats in the Senate could use quorum calls to disrupt the flow of GOP business. Officially, according to Senate rules, business can’t be conducted without a majority of senators present on the Senate floor. Most of the time, nobody asks for a quorum, as there are rarely a majority of senators on the floor. But any senator can request a quorum check at any time, making the clerk do a full roll call of all the senators. If fewer than 51 respond, Senate business stops until there’s a majority….as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has argued, these actions can force the GOP to “fight for every single step” because “the slower they go, the less they can break.”

At The Guardian, read “Here’s how Democrats should fight back against Trump” by Margaret Sullivan, who says: “Some Democrats in a new generation are punching back hard, and in so doing, showing their colleagues how to overcome their reputation for spineless dithering.” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy “has been relentless in calling out exactly what’s happening and why, especially in the shocking weeks since Trump took office….“We have days to stop the destruction of our democracy,” Murphy raged at a protest Tuesday in front of the US treasury building in Washington. “It’s the people who rule, not the billionaires….“Democrats need to throw every possible wrench into the plans of Trump, Musk and their Republican cultists in Congress,” argued scholar Norm Ornstein in the Contrarian newsletter. “Doing so will also underscore how serious the threat is to our system, thereby forcing media to cover it.” As the Virginia congressman Don Beyer suggested on Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast podcast from the New Republic: “Put those things that used to be routine and make them not routine until Trump stops breaking the law.”….In other words, attack on multiple fronts, including through leveraging the power of Democratic state governments. Most of all, prepare for the midterms elections next year by honing a strong, populist message….And lead with convincing voices that can motivate the public….if the public believes there is no determination to fight back, Trump’s destruction will continue unabated.”

“With just over a month until government funding expires,” Nicholas Wu and Mia McCarthy write at Politico, “Democrats remain divided on whether they should use the threat of a government shutdown as a political cudgel as they try to push back on President Donald Trump and billionaire ally Elon Musk….Key progressives want to use every point of leverage the minority party has at its disposal to push back against the slashing of federal agencies being undertaken by Trump’s budget office and Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”….“It is the Republican majority’s responsibility to gather the votes necessary for them to pass their agenda. I do not believe that Democrats should be helping,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “Given the Republican majority’s attempts to completely gut the federal government, any concession necessary for the Democratic Party to assist them in passing a CR must be incredibly substantial.”….“These guys are in charge, running around, bragging about a mandate, so they should put on their mandate pants and pass whatever they want to pass but if they want us [to help keep the government open], they have to work with us,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). This is about give and take — about a compromise. And if they don’t want to do that, then they’re on their own.”….“No House Democrat wants to shut down the government,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) told reporters Tuesday morning. But he added that there’s “very little appetite to help Republicans when we don’t trust that Donald Trump is going to spend the resources that we’ve allocated.”

At Salon, former congressman Tim Roemer shares “After the big loss, what’s next? An open letter to the Democratic Party: We can bring the party together — and win — if we’re willing to address inequality and advocate for radical change,” and writes: “We must improve our connection to and our communications with the middle class and blue-collar voters….We must be aggressive and tenacious once again, in the tradition of historic and inspirational leaders like Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., by advocating for radical change in housing, education, health and labor rights….Defending the overall status quo at a time when the American Dream is slipping away for so many working Americans is politically tone-deaf and dangerously out of touch. Defending the status quo on rental rates and home prices, especially if you want the votes of middle-class people or voters under 40, is insane….We did not convey a message of fresh and viable economic change for working people. …Democrats need to be the working-class voice of frustration and their hammer for change….most Americans desperately want to hear about what we will do to curb rising housing prices, reduce escalating egg prices, keep gas prices low and fix out-of-control college costs. Food, energy, housing and education are core voting issues, especially when you experience them as reducing your choices and chewing up your family budget….Voters want to hear what we will do to protect their current job and create new ones. They want lower prescription drug costs and less Medicare bureaucracy….Rebuilding our economic message is the key to winning. The American Dream remains achievable, but the ladder required to climb up and grab it requires modernizing and repairing. The rungs on that ladder have always been education, jobs, housing and health care. Let’s learn from this past election, fix the mistakes we have made through the past several cycles, and propose a positive economic agenda for reaching the American Dream.”

I’m on record as suggesting that Democrats not waste too much time on recriminations over 2024 while the wolf of Trump 2.0 is at the door. But there are some lessons relevant to the challenges right before them, and I tried to discuss at few at New York:

The ritualistic “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party” that ensued after the Republican election victory of 2024 was cut somewhat short by the brutal realities of the real-life consequences of letting Donald Trump regain power with a Republican-controlled Congress and all sorts of ridiculous claims of an absolute mandate to do whatever he wanted. But, in fact, while factional finger-pointing might have been are a self-indulgent luxury an opposition party living under the MAGA gun can’t afford, there are some lessons from the election results that are important to internalize right now. Here are a few.

Mobilizing the Democratic base isn’t enough to stop Trump

For much of the 2024 campaign, a lot of observers believed that the only way Trump could win was if Democrats failed to mobilize their party base, either out of complacency or because key constituencies were disgruntled with Joe Biden (and, to a lesser extent, with Kamala Harris once she became the presidential nominee). An enormous amount of money, time, and effort went into securing maximum turnout among young, Black, and Latino voters on the theory that if fully engaged, they’d win the day. And in the end, these constituencies did turn out reasonably well (a bit less than in 2020, but more than in 2012 or 2016). Trouble was, too many of them voted for Donald Trump.

No, Trump didn’t win Black, Latino, or under-30 voters overall, but his performance in all those groups improved significantly as compared to 2020. Among Black voters (per AP Votecast, the most reputable exit poll), he doubled his percentage of the vote, from 8 percent to 16 percent. Among Latinos, his percentage rose from 35 percent to 43 percent. And among under-30 voters, his share of the vote jumped from 36 percent to 47 percent. Meanwhile, the GOP advantage in the Donkey Party’s ancient working-class constituency continued to rise, even among non-white voters; overall, Trump won 56 percent of non-college-educated voters. The Democratic base fractured more than it faltered. And there were signs (which have persisted into early 2025 polling) that defections have made the GOP the plurality party for the first time in years and one of the few times since the New Deal.

While rebuilding the base (while expanding it) remains a crucial objective for Democrats, just calling it into the streets to defy Trump’s 2025 agenda via a renewed “resistance” isn’t likely to work. Many former and wavering Democrats need to be persuaded to remain in their old party.

Trump really did win the two most essential arguments of the 2024 election, on inflation and immigration

Republicans have massive incentives to pretend that all their messages struck home, giving them an argument that they enjoy a mandate for everything they want to do. But the honest consensus from both sides of the barricade is that demands for change to address inflation and immigration were the critical Trump messages, with doubts about Joe Biden’s capacity to fulfill the office and Kamala Harris’s independence from him exacerbating both.

What we’ve learned in 2025 is that Trump has considerable public backing to do some controversial things on these issues. A 2024 poll from Third Way showed a majority of swing voters agreed that excessive government spending was the principal cause of inflation, a huge blow to Democratic hopes that rising costs could be pinned on corporations, global trends, supply-chain disruptions, or, indeed, the previous Trump administration. But this wasn’t just a campaign issue: Trump took office with some confidence that the public would support serious efforts to reduce federal spending and make government employees accountable. And the fact that (so far) his approval ratings have held up despite the chaotic nature of his efforts to slash federal payrolls is a good indication he has some wind at his back, at least initially.

If that’s true on inflation, it’s even truer on immigration, where solid majorities in multiple polls support (in theory, at least) the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. If the administration was smart enough to limit its deportation campaign to those convicted of violent crimes, it would have overwhelming public support. But Democrats should fully accept they didn’t just lose votes on this issue in 2024: They lost an argument that persists.

That is why it is critical that Democrats point to evidence that Trump’s own agenda (particularly his tariff policies) will revive inflation that had largely been tamed by the end of the Biden administration, while focusing their immigration messaging on vast overreach, inhumane excesses, and ethnic profiling of Latinos by Team Trump in its efforts to deport immigrants.

Swing voters are not moved by constitutional or “threat to democracy” arguments

Joe Biden in his 2024 presidential campaign (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Kamala Harris as his successor) put considerable stock in playing on public concerns about the threat to democracy posed by Trump as evidenced by his conduct on January 6, 2021, and his lawless behavior generally. While these arguments found traction among voters already in his corner, there’s little evidence they mattered much at all to the voters who decided the election in Trump’s favor. Indeed, a considerable percentage of voters worried about a broken political system viewed Trump as a potential reformer as much as an insurrectionist or autocrat.

At the moment, most office-holding Democrats and (more quietly) many Republicans are aghast at how Trump has gone about pursuing his agenda early in 2025, with a blizzard of executive orders, a federal funding freeze, and a blank check issued to eccentric billionaire Elon Musk to disrupt federal agencies and intimidate federal employees. Again, Trump is drawing on long-standing public hostility toward the federal government and to the size and cost of government as a spur to inflation and a burden on taxpayers. Fighting him with alarms about his violation of legal and constitutional limitations on presidential power is unlikely to work with an electorate unmoved by Trump’s earlier scofflaw attitude. Voters must be convinced in very concrete terms that what he is doing will affect their own lives negatively. As with tariffs and the immigration policy, Trump’s tendency to overreach should provide plenty of ammunition for building a backlash to his policies.

The desire for change in an unhappy country is deep-seated

In 2024, as in 2016, Trump managed to win because unhappy voters who didn’t particularly like or trust either presidential candidate (or their parties) in the end chose to produce a change in party control of the White House and of Congress. In office, Trump and his allies will try to perpetuate as long as they can the illusion that they are still fighting for “change” against powerful interests aligned with the Democratic Party, even though it’s Republicans who control the executive and legislative branches of the federal government and also dominate the U.S. Supreme Court. The idea that Team Trump is a brave band of insurgents speaking truth to power is undermined very specifically by the fact that its chief disrupter, Musk, is the richest man in the world and the first among equals of a large band of plutocrats surrounding the president.

As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn observed during the transition to the second Trump administration, many of the same anti-incumbent tendencies that put a thumb on the scale for the GOP in 2024 will now work for the opposition:

“The president’s party has retained the White House only once since 2004, mostly because voters have been unsatisfied with the state of the country for the last 20 years. No president has sustained high approval ratings since [George W.] Bush, in the wake of Sept. 11 …

“Looking even further back, the president’s party has won only 40 percent of presidential elections from 1968 to today. With that record, perhaps it’s the winning party that really faces the toughest question post-election: How do you build public support during an era of relatively slow growth, low trust in government and low satisfaction with the state of the country?”

Based on his conduct since returning to the White House and his well-known narcissism, it’s not all that clear that the 47th president even cares about building public support as he ends his political career. That may give him the freedom of the true lame duck, but it also means Democrats can batten on his broken promises and the disappointments they will breed. The 2028 presidential candidate who may be in real trouble is the Republican who succeeds the 2024 winner.

 

The following article, “Polls Keep Showing Americans Want Elon Musk and DOGE Out of Government” by Julianne McShane, is cross-posted from Mother Jones:

Yet more evidence shows Elon Musk and his cronies at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are unpopular with many Americans.

Nearly half of people who responded to a new CBS/YouGov poll out today said they want Musk to have less influence over government spending and operations, including nearly a third who think they should have none at all. The poll found that 18 percent of respondents said that Musk and his DOGE acolytes should have “not much” influence on government operations and spending, while 31 percent said they should have none at all. Predictably, the support differed along partisan lines: Nearly three-quarters of Republicans surveyed said Musk and DOGE should have “a lot” or “some” influence, whereas more than two-thirds of Democrats said they should have “not much” or “none.”

This comes as the latest bit of mounting evidence showing many Americans don’t want Musk running the government: Just this week, a poll from the Economist/YouGov also showed that 51 percent of Americans believe Musk has a lot of influence in the government, while only 13 percent want him to have that much influence; 46 percent, on the other hand, don’t want him to have anyinfluence. Another poll released this week from progressive advocacy groups Groundwork Collaborative and Public Citizen in partnership with Hart Research found 54 percent of voters have an unfavorable opinion of him, with a majority also saying he has too much influence and involvement in the government and that they have less favorable opinions after learning about the lack of oversight regulating potential conflicts of interest with his companies as well as the ability of DOGE to access unclassified information.

Last month, a Quinnipiac University poll found 53 percent of respondents disapprove of Musk’s prominent role in the Trump administration, and another January poll, from the Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center, found that a majority of Americans don’t want Trump relying on billionaires or family members for policy advice and have an unfavorable opinion of Musk.

All in all, this is not surprising, given that, as Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery wrote earlier this week, nobody voted for Musk, an unelected tech billionaire. The latest data offers a clear rebuke to the hurricane of chaos that Musk and his cronies at DOGE and across the federal government have unleashed since President Trump’s inauguration.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, that chaos has included trying to pay federal workers to quit their jobs; attempting to gain access to US Treasury data; threatening to shutter USAID, a federal agency tasked with supporting critical humanitarian and development work around the world; taking over the Education Department, which Musk claimed on X the other day “doesn’t exist”; and threatening reporters who report critically on DOGE. (And given that the department is reportedly staffed by Gen Z fanboys and former staffers of Musk—one of whom, Marko Elez, resigned on Thursday after the Wall Street Journal unearthed openly racist posts on an account linked to him, before Musk promptly rehired him the next day—there has been plenty to cover.)

The CBS/YouGov poll released Sunday showed other Trump policies that are also unpopular: 52 percent of respondents said they oppose building large detention centers to house people awaiting decisions on whether or not they’ll be deported; only 13 percent said the US trying to take over Gaza, as Trump proposed this week, would be a good idea (47 percent called it a bad idea, and 40 percent said they’re unsure); 66 percent said Trump is not focused enough on lowering prices; and large majorities said they oppose new US tariffs on goods from Mexico, Europe, and Canada (economists have said those tariffs will likely raise prices for American consumers).

But in a news release from the White House Sunday, responses to those data points were invisible. “Americans Are Loving the New Golden Age,” the press release claimed, touting Trump’s 53 percent approval rating, the 70 percent of poll respondents who said Trump is doing what he promised on the campaign trail, and the majority approval for his mass deportation plan and his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict. (Never mind that those assertions would seem to be in conflict with some of the other findings mentioned above—such as the limited support for his floated plan to take over Gaza.)

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt shared the headline from CBS on X: “Trump has positive approval amid ‘energetic’ opening weeks; seen as doing what he promised,” it read. Leavitt’s enthusiastic promotion of it was curious given that, just a few days ago, her boss said in a post on Truth Social that CBS should “lose its license” over a 60 Minutes interview the network did with former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. (Trump filed a lawsuit against the network, alleging that the 60 Minutes interview was deceptively edited to make Harris look better; CBS denies those allegations and this week released the raw footage and transcript of the entire interview, which it also provided to the Federal Communications Commission upon request.)

The White House’s promotion of the latest CBS poll—and its refusal to seriously engage with public criticisms of Musk, along with other points of contention—offers a clear example of its hypocrisy regarding its attacks on journalism and truth: What Trump’s acolytes see as favorable to him get labeled as legitimate, whereas anything more critical gets branded “fake news”—or simply ignored.

When it comes to Musk, they’ve continued to defend him—and showed how unseriously they seem to be taking his position in the highest levels of government. At a press briefing this week, Leavitt said that Trump was clear on the campaign trail about the role Musk would play in his administration. Separately, when a CNN reporter asked Leavitt what kind of security clearance Musk has, if he passed a background check, or if the DOGE team members raiding the Treasury Department or USAID had security clearances, she said she didn’t know and would have to check. The White House does not appear to have clarified those points yet.

But if Democrats continue attacking Musk and the role of oligarchy in the Trump administration, as they did this week, the White House may have no choice but to confront the discontent around Musk and DOGE head-on.

Correction, Feb. 9: This story originally misstated the proportion of Democrats in the CBS poll who said Musk and DOGE should have not much or no influence in government.

One of the central concerns of The Democratic Strategist has been to explore ways that Democrats can regain the support of a healthy majority of working-class voters, including white working-class voters, a group which accounts for about half of the electorate. Toward that end, Andrew Levison has a new TDS Strategy Memo entitled “Democratic Political Strategy is Developed by College-Educated Political Analysts Sitting in Front of Computers on College Campuses or Think Tank Offices . That’s Why the Strategies Don’t Work.” Levison, author of influential works of political analysis, including “The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support,” argues that nearly all of the previous political analysis of white working-class voters “is profoundly and painfully superficial” because “It essentially visualizes working people as if they were isolated individuals sitting in their living rooms watching TV or reading a newspaper and thoughtfully evaluating the political messages and policy proposals that they see presented.” Further, Levison writes: “What is entirely ignored in this way of conceptualizing how workers make political choices is the massive effect of social and community life, of neighborhood and community institutions and a voter’s personal history and experience on their political perspective – on how daily interaction with friends, neighbors, co-workers and others in a workers’ neighborhood, workplace and community shape that person’s political attitudes.”

This is a very different perspective than the common wisdom embraced and regurgitated by many political analysts. As  Levison notes further, “At first glance these articles appear to offer a vast range of distinct suggestions but when examined more closely can be seen to fall into three basic categories:

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:

Three months after the Democrats’ electoral drubbing, the party is still reeling—leaderless, rudderless, and historically unpopular. Only 33 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, the lowest rating since CNN first asked the question in 1992. Republicans have led in party identification for three straight years, which hasn’t happened in nearly a century. And the GOP is outregistering Democrats in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina.

Think party pooh-bahs realize it is time for urgent change? Think again.

Viral video clips from the Democratic National Committee’s election for a new chair this past weekend seemed like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college. In one, outgoing DNC chair Jaime Harrison explains how the presence of a gender nonbinary candidate affected the committee’s gender-balance rules. (“The nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.”) In another, every candidate for chair blamed Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump on racism and misogyny.

The DNC settled on 24-year-old school-shooting survivor David Hogg as one of its new vice chairs. Here is Hogg’s take on why Democrats did badly among Gen Z voters:

We had to grow up worrying about dying in a school shooting today, or dying of climate change tomorrow, and then being crushed by student debt and the housing crisis in between. . . and I think on the issue of Gaza in particular, it was emblematic of the fact that people felt like we were not listening to them—that we didn’t care.

Hogg is almost as out of touch as the winning candidate for DNC chair, Minnesota’s Ken Martin. He confidently asserted: “We’ve got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with the voters.”

In short, all the early signs point to a party that has learned nothing from defeat. If only the Democratic Party were wearing lapels, because then someone could grab them, shake hard, and yell: “What part of ‘the voters just rejected your fixation on identity politics’ do you not understand?”

Yet the simple recognition that they lost in November for a reason still seems inadmissible in the party’s deliberations about how to deal with Trump 2.0. Instead, they give every indication of doubling down on their least popular policy agenda items and the resist-everything-all-the-time strategy that yielded disastrous results for them last time.

Unless Democrats acknowledge that much of what Trump says and does is not only popular but also, here and there, good policy, they can never recover. They should seek compromise on issues where Trump holds the policy and political high ground, reserving hard opposition for the areas where voters are least likely to agree with him—such as blanket tariffs on U.S. trading partners, which are neither justified nor popular.

The party should heed the acerbic advice of the great Democratic congressman Barney Frank: “If you care deeply about an issue, and are engaged in group activity on its behalf that is fun and inspiring and heightens your sense of solidarity with others, you are almost certainly not doing your cause any good.”

In other words, if it feels good, don’t do it.

With that advice in mind, here are four rules of the road to help Democrats navigate the next four years.

1. Avoid the name-calling

Let’s start with something easy: Don’t drop the F-bomb. Democrats must resist the urge to characterize Trump or his policies as “fascist”—as Kamala Harris did in the home stretch of the presidential race. Why? For a start, it’s not true. Trump may have authoritarian tendencies. But—if the term is to retain any meaning—that is very different from being a fascist. A cursory acquaintance with twentieth-century history should make that clear. (If you have any further doubts, please consult Richard Evans’ three-volume history of the Third Reich.)

If Trump is a fascist then all that he does must be part of his heinous fascist plot, and all of it must be resisted all the time. California House Democrat Robert Garcia demonstrated this approach last week when he ruled out any compromise: “I think the idea that we’re talking about holding hands with Donald Trump and extremist Republicans and like, kumbaya, I think is a huge mistake. We know what he’s going to do. We should oppose that and be very vocal and tough and push back.” The F-bomb has another political disadvantage: It disparages everyone who voted for Trump by implication.

It is my sad duty to remind the gathering legions of anti-fascist fighters: it didn’t work last time and it won’t work this time. “Trump, Trump, Trump, fascist, fascist, fascist, Trump, Trump, Trump, racist, racist, racist” has repeatedly failed to stem the populist tide—most recently just a few months ago in the Harris campaign. This time is not different.

The path to durable victory is what it was before: convincing voters you are a moderate and reasonable alternative to Trump.

2. Moderate—starting with immigration

That moderation should start with a decisive issue in the last election: immigration. Voters want a secure border and an end to runaway illegal immigration. They believe Democrats don’t. In his first days in office, Trump tightened border security with a series of executive orders; his administration has started to implement deportations targeted at criminal immigrants; and he signed the Laken Riley Act, which is named after the Georgia nursing student murdered by illegal Venezuelan immigrant Jose Ibarra in 2024. (It provides for the detention and possible deportation of illegal immigrants charged with certain crimes, as Ibarra was. In a chemically pure example of what is wrong with the Democrats, Joe Biden apologized for referring to illegal immigrant Ibarra as illegalrather than the approved undocumented.)

So far, Democrats have done little to address voters’ suspicions that they don’t take border security seriously. The Laken Riley Act passed the House and the Senate with the support of only a handful of Democrats. They have offered close to no support for Trump’s executive orders tightening up border security and ongoing deportation actions. An honorable exception is Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, who not only voted for the law but attended the Act’s signing ceremony. He has said it is “common sense” that violent illegals “all need to go.”

The party could twin a serious, unapologetic commitment to border security with opposition to inhumane treatment of detainees, excessive deportation (e.g., of the Dreamers), and unpopular steps like eliminating birthright citizenship. But that would require meeting Trump halfway—something most Democrats still refuse to do.

3. Partner with Trump when he’s right—like on DEI

It’s a similar story with DEI and affirmative action. In a series of executive orders, Trump has set about dismantling DEI and affirmative action within the federal government and for federal contractors. Democrats appear willing to lie down on the railroad tracks on this one. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Trump’s actions with the disingenuous argument that DEI is merely an expression of the American values in the Constitution. That’s absurd. DEI is of comparatively recent vintage and the programs are now indelibly associated with racial preferences, oppression hierarchies, ideological indoctrination, and language policing. Those aren’t American values at all.

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

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

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

Most voters, especially working-class voters, believe, like Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” A 2022 University of California Dornsife survey found that more than 90 percent of Americans agree that America should strive for color-blind tolerance. But many Democrats dismiss the idea of color blindness as either hopelessly naive or itself a racist dog-whistle.

4. Embrace energy abundance

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

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

If Democrats can’t accept that much of this is both popular and necessary, they will be unable to mount a credible response where Trump’s energy plans go off the rails. For example, pausing wind but not other energy projects makes no sense from an “all-of-the-above,” energy abundance perspective. And just gutting the energy provisions of the IRA wholesale is neither wise nor necessary. Ted Nordhaus and Alex Trembath note:

Somewhere between half and three-quarters of projected Inflation Reduction Act spending over the next decade will be for wind, solar, and electric-vehicle subsidies. These are all mature, cost-competitive technologies that don’t need further subsidization. Cutting their subsidies could amount to somewhere between $300 billion and $650 billion in savings.

But Congress should maintain federal incentives for promising less-mature technologies, such as nuclear and geothermal energy and natural-gas plants with carbon capture. Doing so would rebuild the bipartisan consensus for energy innovation that prevailed in congressional politics for decades.

That would be a worthy goal for Democrats to promote. And in the end it might do more for emissions reduction than a quixotic attempt to defend renewables and EV subsidies to the death.

More generally, Democrats don’t need to—and shouldn’t—ignore climate change. But a winning message must be embedded in, and subordinate to, voters’ overriding priorities: energy abundance and prosperity. Polling clearly shows that this is the mainstream view—but among Democrats it is still, at best, a niche position.

What’s true of immigration, DEI, and energy is true in many other areas. The trick is knowing when to say “okay” to Trump, and when to say “no.” Democrats sometimes seem to understand this. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a recent interview, “Trump will screw up,” urging his colleagues to be patient. Even Jeffries seems to appreciate the point of this, at least in theory. “We’re not going to swing at every pitch,” he said last week. By Monday, though, he sounded a lot less restrained, unveiling his plans to push back against “far-right extremism that is being relentlessly unleashed on the American people.”

Amid all the denial that dominated the contest for DNC chair, there was a breath of realism from Adam Frisch, a Democratic former Congressional candidate in a rural Colorado district who over-performed the top of the ticket but still lost his 2024 race. “Twenty big cities, Aspen, and Martha’s Vineyard—that’s what’s left of the Democratic Party,” he told The Wall Street Journal recently.

If Democrats want to rebuild their shattered party, they have no choice but to exercise restraint and choose their fights with Trump wisely. The alternative is four years of garment-rending, continued isolation on a few islands in Blue America—and, in 2029, a fresh batch of candidates for DNC chair blaming the latest electoral disaster on racism and misogyny.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is now a contributing writer.

William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck, two of the Democratic Party’s most astute strategists, make their case for ‘Renewing the Democratic Party,” cross-posted here from The Third Way:

A time comes for every political party when its policies and dominant assumptions no longer meet either the public’s expectations or the needs of the times. We believe that the Democratic Party has reached one of these moments and stands in urgent need of renewal.

This renewal involves more than communications, organization, and mobilization. It will require the party to ask itself hard questions about the reasons for its dwindling support among groups it has long taken for granted, to reflect on declining public confidence in government as a vehicle of progress, and to think anew about its policy agenda in an era of rapid change, at home and abroad. This process will be neither quick nor easy, which is why it must begin now.

The purpose of Democratic renewal is not only to win the next election. It is to build a party that can command a sustainable majority over a series of elections based on an agenda that successfully addresses the central issues of our time.

The Key Challenge to a Sustainable Democratic Majority: Losing the Working Class

As the 2024 election has made clear, the populist revolution that Trump has spearheaded within the Republican Party is reconfiguring the coalitions of both parties, to the Democrats’ disadvantage.

For the first time since the mid-20th century, the central fault line of American politics is neither race and ethnicity nor gender but rather class, determined by educational attainment. But in the intervening half century, the parties have switched places. Republicans once commanded a majority among college-educated voters while Democrats were the party of the working class. Now the majority of college educated voters support Democrats. Meanwhile, the troubled relationship between the Democratic Party and white working-class voters that began in the late 1960s now includes the non-white working-class as well, as populist Republicans are expanding their support among working-class Hispanics¹ and an increasing share of African American men. Making matters worse, several groups of Asian Americans shifted to the right as their concern mounted about crime in public spaces and attacks on test-based admissions to elite public high schools.²

The sorting of partisan preferences based on educational attainment is bad news for Democrats, demographically and geographically. Fewer than 38% of Americans 25 and older have earned BAs, a share that has plateaued in recent years after increasing five-fold between 1960 and 2020.³  And so, it appears, has the Democratic share of the college graduate vote (57% in 2020, 56% in 2024) even as the Republican share of the non-college vote surged from 51% to 56%. Meanwhile, non-college voters still make up 57% of the electorate, a figure that rises to 60% in the swing states.⁴

If Democrats cannot build a broader cross-class alliance, one that includes a larger share of non-college voters, their future is not bright. At the presidential level, they could end up confined to states with high densities of college-educated voters, leaving them far short of an Electoral College majority. Although Democrats won all the states with shares of BA degree holders at 40% or higher in 2024, there were only 12 of them, none swing states. By contrast, Democrats won only one of the 29 states with BA shares at 35% or lower while prevailing in seven of the 10 states with college attainment between 36 and 39%.⁵ And because ticket-splitting between presidential and senatorial races has become more infrequent, the new class-based politics bodes ill for Democrats’ U.S. Senate prospects as well.

The new class-based politics is reinforced by the fact that prosperity in twenty-first century America is concentrated in metropolitan areas where the workforce is educated, innovation is strong, and the information economy dominates. Our Brookings colleagues looked at all the counties in America and found that in 2024 the richer counties voted for Harris while the poorer counties voted for Trump.⁶ As the table below, taken from their recent report, illustrates, this trend has been going on for some time. Today, 60% of America’s wealth is concentrated in only 382 of the country’s more than 3000 counties. These wealthy counties are densely populated, which explains why Harris’ popular vote was competitive, but they are found in either deep blue states or as islands of high education and prosperity in deep red states.

National Trends

Donald Trump won a surprisingly broad-based victory in 2024. He received 3.1 million more votes than he did in 2020 and, contrary to the expectations of many, won the popular vote by 2.3 million. He bettered his share of the popular vote by 3.1 percentage points, coming within 0.1 point of winning an outright majority while sweeping all seven swing states, some by substantial margins. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris’s share of the popular vote was 3 points lower than Joe Biden’s in 2020.

Compared to Biden’s performance in 2020, Harris lost ground in almost every demographic group, with especially severe losses among young adults⁷ and non-white voters, particularly Hispanics and Black men. Moreover, Harris’s non-stop efforts to mobilize women on the abortion issue fell well short of its goal, even though large majorities continued to vote for the pro-choice position on referenda. Indeed, Harris’s margin among suburban women, a major campaign target, was 4 points lower than Biden’s had been four years earlier.⁸

To be sure, Trump’s victory fell well short of the landslide he often claims. Kamala Harris won 48.4% of the popular vote, falling short of Trump’s share by just 1.5 points. Some Democratic leaders are trying to put a sunny spin on this result.⁹

But the fact remains that Trump has improved his vote total and vote share in both presidential elections since his surprise Electoral College victory in 2016, disproving pundits who spoke confidently about the “low ceiling” of his popular support. And he is winning the public argument about the issues on which he has run consistently for decades—trade, globalization, and immigration.

A single statistic sums up the Democratic Party’s decline. Between 1976 and 2020, Democrats consistently led Republicans as a share of the presidential electorate. Republicans won elections only when they garnered significant support from Democrats, as Ronald Reagan did in 1980 and 1984 and George H. W. Bush did in 1988. The 2024 election interrupted this longstanding trend: Republicans constituted 35% of the electorate compared to just 31% for Democrats. Donald Trump got only 4% of votes cast by Democrats, but this poor performance didn’t come close to costing him the election.¹⁰

This break with the past reflected more than the sharp 2024 decline in Democratic turnout. During the past three years, Republicans have led Democrats in party identification for the first time since 1991.¹¹ If they can mobilize their base and do reasonably well among independents, they now can win elections without reaching across party lines. Whether or not Donald Trump was aware of this trend, he sensed that turning out the party faithful would be enough to win. To this end, he pursued a relentless strategy of intensifying rather than broadening his support, and it worked.

The Swing States Versus the Rest of the Country

Drilling down below the national aggregates, we find that the 2024 election was actually two separate and very different contests—one in the seven swing states, the other in the rest of the country. In the latter, where advertisements and voter mobilization were scarce, support for Harris collapsed from the high-water mark Biden had established, especially in blue states. In the swing states, by contrast, the Harris campaign came very close to equaling Biden’s performance in the aggregate. This wasn’t enough, however, because Trump improved significantly from his 2020 showing.

In many of the blue states, Trump’s vote total expanded modestly if at all while Harris’s collapsed relative to Biden’s performance four years earlier. In Illinois and New Jersey, Harris received about 400,000 fewer votes than Biden. In New York, Harris fell short of Biden by 600,000. And in California, the shortfall reached an astonishing 1.8 million votes, a drop of 16.5% from 2020.

By contrast, Harris performed well in most of the swing states. She got more votes than Biden in three swing states (Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin), fewer than Biden in three swing states (Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania), and virtually tied him in Nevada. Her vote total in the swing states trailed Biden’s by just 47,000—three tenths of one percent. But fatally for her presidential prospects, Trump improved on his 2020 showing in the swing states by nearly one million votes—6.2%.¹² While Harris lost them all, it would be more accurate to say that Donald Trump won them, with a message strong enough to overcome the Harris campaign’s edge in funds and organization.

The implication of the swing state outcomes is clear: as Democrats ponder the way forward, their challenge is not only to repair their weaknesses but also to develop an agenda and message appealing enough to counter the strength that Republicans showed in 2024.

As President Trump began his second term, he enjoyed substantial support from the American people, and so did his party.  In contrast, the Democratic Party hit new lows in public approval. At the end of January 2025, only 31 percent of the people had a favorable opinion of the party, compared to 57 percent unfavorable.  Among Independents, the favorable/unfavorable split was 22/59; among men, 22/67.  After an intensive Democratic outreach throughout the Biden administration, the party scored only 39 percent approval among women, barely better than the Republicans’ 37 percent.  The party cannot hope to recover until unless it finds a way to improve its brand.¹³

Why Harris Lost

Optimists may argue that Kamala Harris’s defeat stemmed from a series of unfortunate events without broader significance for the future of the Democratic Party. If Joe Biden had not, in 2024, engaged in a presidential debate in which he appeared to have aged substantially, if he had honored what many Democrats thought was a tacit promise to serve only one term, if he had announced his intention not to run after the 2022 election, if there had been a presidential primary that gave the winner not only public exposure but also time to plan for the general election, if Harris had found more effective ways of distancing herself from President Biden and explaining why she had abandoned her past positions—the 2024 contest could well have turned out differently.

These arguments have merit—up to a point. For example, a wide-open primary in 2023 and 2024 may have attracted candidates free to tackle the key issues of inflation and immigration more aggressively and without the constraints that a sitting vice president faces.

But these might-have-beens do not absolve Democrats from the disagreeable but necessary task of facing their underlying weaknesses and their opponents’ strength. In 2024 an attractive if flawed candidate lost to a former president with legal woes and personality defects who had been impeached twice and defeated for reelection, allowing a former incumbent to return to the White House for the first time since 1892.

If President Trump fails to fulfill the promises that drove his campaign, Democrats could defeat his successor in 2028. But this would merely perpetuate the destructive status quo of narrow, ever-shifting majorities that undermine successful governance. Democrats must work to build a sustainable majority. This means more than playing better the cards they now hold. They need a reshuffled deck and a new deal.

A year after the Biden presidency began, the authors of this memo published “The New Politics of Evasion: How Ignoring Swing Voters Could Reopen the Door for Donald Trump and Threaten American Democracy.”¹⁴ In that article, we warned Hispanic voters could continue to move away from the Democratic Party. We noted Democrats’ weakness among working-class voters, especially in the swing states. We suggested that contrary to the belief of many Democratic leaders and activists, Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 did not herald a new progressive era in either economics or culture. “For reasons of education, income, and geography,” we argued, too many Democrats were “far removed from the daily experiences and cultural outlooks of non-college voters.” And we showed that Democrats’ weakness among working-class Americans threatened to overwhelm their gains among voters with college degrees.

The 2024 election results confirmed our fears and revealed structural weaknesses in the Democratic Party as serious as those that were revealed in George H. W. Bush’s victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988. They require an equally comprehensive response.

In this context, we turn to a more detailed analysis of the factors that undermined Kamala Harris’s chances.

Inflation and Immigration

There is wide agreement that inflation and immigration hurt Harris’s chances, but the administration’s defenders argue that both higher prices and mass migration were global phenomena over which President Biden and Vice President Harris had little control. We disagree. Several well-known economists who served in prior Democratic administrations—for example, Larry Summers and Jason Furman—argued that Biden’s stimulus bills were excessive and therefore inflationary, a point recently conceded by the president’s chief economic advisor.¹⁵ To be sure, these bills were passed in the shadow of a national trauma—the COVID-19 epidemic—and the impulse to spend money was powerful. The Biden administration acted quickly to ease the COVID-induced interruption of supply chains, the one concrete action they could take to ease inflation. But as President Jimmy Carter found many decades ago, the president’s toolbox for dealing with rapid inflation once it has begun is pretty bare.

Given the lack of effective policy options, the administration was too slow to acknowledge the pain being felt by Americans beset by high grocery store and gasoline prices. Because so many Democratic voters now come from the upper middle class, the Administration overlooked the fact that inflation hits working-class voters, who live from paycheck to paycheck and spend most of their income on necessities, especially hard. In this context, the administration’s ill-conceived effort to sell “Bidenomics” was a fiasco that succeeded only in making the president and the party appear out of touch.

While there is some uncertainty whether Biden could have done more on inflation once it emerged, there is none on the question of immigration.

Between 2020 and 2023, migration and arrivals at the border surged.¹⁶ Several factors were no doubt responsible, but among the most important was that Democrats had been staunch critics of Trump’s border policies, especially his policy of family separation. In a world of instant communications, even in the poorest countries, the change in American leadership and policy after the 2020 election was not lost on people trying to escape poverty and violence, and they came to the United States in record numbers. As immigrants overwhelmed the border, opposition by progressive advocacy groups to tougher border enforcement or asylum reforms helped deter the president from acting until the political costs of inaction became prohibitive.

Unlike inflation, where President Biden’s policy tools were weak, he had plenty of authority to act at the border. The effective immigration restraints Biden implemented in 2024 could have been put in place years earlier.¹⁷ In fact, as the border was being overrun, Democrats in Congress, seeing the chaos and the effect on their constituents, agreed with Republicans on one of the toughest immigration bills ever. Once Trump torpedoed the bill, Biden’s insistence that he couldn’t act because he didn’t have the legal authority to do so only added to the public perception that he was weak, and his shift toward a tougher stance in 2024 undermined the claim that he lacked legal authority.

Democrats need to understand just how badly the Biden administration’s mishandling of immigration hurt Kamala Harris’s chances in 2024, not only among white voters, but across the board. Political scientist Michael Tesler has shown that between 2020 and 2024, the percentage of Hispanic and Black voters who agreed that “immigrants drain national resources” increased dramatically and that this shift moved voters of color to Trump.¹⁸ A Progressive Policy Institute survey found that by a narrow margin, working-class Hispanics actually preferred Trump to Harris on immigration.¹⁹ A Financial Times survey found that while 80% of white progressives believe that “immigration to the US should be made easier,” only 30% of Hispanics agree.²⁰ Even in deep-blue California, 63% of Hispanics now consider unauthorized immigrants to be a “burden,” contributing to the large shift of Golden State Hispanics toward Trump.²¹

Nowhere has the impact of shifting Hispanic opinion been more dramatic than in Florida, a former swing state. In 2012, Barack Obama carried Florida by 1 point. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost it by 1 point. In 2020, Joe Biden lost by 3 points. In 2024, Kamala Harris lost the Sunshine State by a stunning 13 points, 56-43, mainly because Hispanics deserted her for Donald Trump. In 2020, Joe Biden carried Florida’s Hispanics by 7 points, 53-46. This year, Harris lost them by 14 points, 56-42.

Without regaining an edge among Hispanics, who now constitute almost one-quarter of Florida’s voters, Democrats have no chance of recapturing Florida in the foreseeable future. But to do so, they must discard obsolete ideas about the interests and preferences of this increasingly influential bloc, the majority of whom are now native-born citizens. Years ago, we predicted that Hispanics would turn out to be the Italians of the 21st century, and now it is happening.

Read more…

This has been quite the chaotic week or so, and one of the byproducts of the nihilistic conduct being displayed by Donald Trump and his allies has been a decided end of Democratic cooperation, and I welcomed that development at New York:

Following the time-honored ritual of giving a new president a “honeymoon,” a good number of prominent Democrats made friendly noises about their nemesis after Donald Trump’s November election victory. Some, like Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, seemed inclined to cross the partisan barricades whenever possible, praising Trump’s dubious Cabinet nominations, calling on Joe Biden to pardon Trump to get rid of his hush-money conviction, and even joining Truth Social. Others, notably Bernie Sanders, talked of selective cooperation on issues where MAGA Republicans at least feigned anti-corporate “populism.” Still others, including some Democratic governors, hoped to cut deals on issues like immigration to mitigate the damage of Trump’s agenda. And one congressional Democrat, the normally very progressive Ro Khanna, promoted cooperation with Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, at least with respect to Defense spending.

This made some sense at the time. After all, Democrats, having lost control of both Congress and the White House, didn’t have much power of their own, and there was always the chance that having achieved his improbable comeback, Trump would calm down and try to become a normal chief executive in his final term in the job.

Now it is extremely clear that is not the case. The past chaotic week or so has convinced most Democrats that Trump has zero interest in compromise, bipartisanship, or even adherence to the law and to the Constitution. Musk and his Geek Kiddie Corps are ravaging agency after agency without the slightest legal authorization; OMB is preparing its own unilateral assault on federal benefits that don’t fit the Project 2025 vision of a radically smaller social safety net; and congressional Republicans are kneeling in abject surrender to whatever the White House wants. Democrats are resigning themselves to the mission of becoming an opposition party, full stop, making as much noise and arousing as much public outrage as they can. They shouldn’t be credited all that much for courage, since the new regime has given them little choice but to dig in and fight like hell.

OMB’s January 27 memo freezing a vast swath of federal programs and benefits, inept and confusing as it was, kicked off the current reign of terror. It reflected (and was likely dictated by) the belief of Trump OMB director nominee Russell Vought that the president can usurp congressional spending powers whenever he deems it necessary or prudent. Yet Congressional Republicans went along without a whimper. House Appropriations Committee chairman Tom Cole, who would have gone nuts had a Democratic president threatened his role so audaciously, said he had “no problem” with the freeze. The federal courts stepped in because OMB’s order was incoherently expressed, but there’s no question the administration will come back with something similar. As a sign of belated alarm over OMB’s direction, Senate Budget Committee Democrats boycotted Vought’s confirmation vote in reaction to this challenge to the constitutional separation of powers. After Republicans gaveled him on through without a whisper of dissent, Senate Democrats held an all-night “talk-a-thon” to recapitulate past and present concerns about Vought, a self-described Christian Nationalist and one of the principal authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a radically diminished federal government. He will be confirmed by the full Senate anyway.

Musk’s guerrilla warfare on the federal workforce and the programs they administer made the OMB power grab unfolding at about the same time look like a walk in the park. Even as his landing teams of 20-something coders took control of multiple agency IT systems and fired anyone who got in their way, Musk himself was on X making wild charges about the programs he was short-circuiting and all but cackling like a cartoon villain over his unlimited power. When Ro Khanna upbraided him for his lawlessness, he responded as you might expect, tweeting at Khanna: “Don’t be a dick.”

Khanna’s centrist Democratic colleague from Florida, Jared Moskovitz, had actually signed up for service on the DOGE oversight panel Mike Johnson created, despite its clear purpose as an ongoing pep rally for Musk. Now he’s out, as Punchbowl News reports:

“I need to see one of my Republican colleagues in the caucus explain the point of the caucus, because it seems that Elon doesn’t need them, because it seems what Elon is doing is destroying the separation of powers. And I don’t think the DOGE caucus at this moment really has a purpose … Whether I stay in the caucus, I think is questionable. I don’t need to stay in a caucus that’s irrelevant.”

Meanwhile, as all this madness was unfolding from the executive branch and its outlaw agents, congressional Republicans have been laboring through the process of putting together budget legislation to implement whatever portion of Trump’s agenda that wasn’t rammed through by fiat. Democrats are not being consulted at all in these preparations to produce a massive bill (or bills) that is expected to pass on a party-line vote and that cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Because of the immense leverage of the House Freedom Caucus over this legislation, the plans keep shifting in the direction of deeper and deeper domestic spending cuts at levels never discussed before. Per Punchbowl News:

“Speaker Mike Johnson and the House Republican committee chairs initially proposed between $500 billion to $700 billion in spending cuts as part of a massive reconciliation package. Yet conservative GOP hardliners rejected that, saying they wanted more. They’re seeking as much as $2 trillion to $5 trillion in cuts.”

Democrats can’t really do anything other than expose the extent and the effect of such cuts in the forelorn hope that a few House Republicans in particularly vulnerable districts develop their own counter-leverage over the process. But whatever emerges from the GOP discussion will have to be approved by OMB, where Russell Vought will soon be formally in charge. There’s just no path ahead for Democrats other than total war.

They do have their own leverage over two pieces of legislation Trump needs: an appropriations bill to keep government running after the December stopgap spending bill (which Musk nearly torpedoed in an early demonstration of his power) runs out, and a measure increasing the public debt limit. These bills can be filibustered, so Senate Democrats can kill them. There are increasing signs that congressional Democrats may refuse to go along with either one unless Trump puts a leash on Vought and Musk and perhaps even consults the Democratic Party on the budget. If there’s a government shutdown, it couldn’t be too much worse than a government being gutted by DOGE and OMB.

Republicans hope that Trump’s relatively strong popularity (for him, anyway) will keep Democrats from defying him. But they may not be accounting for the 47th president’s erratic character. On any given day, he may do something completely bonkers and deeply unpopular, like, say, suggesting the United States take over Gaza, expel its population, and build a resort development.

In “Democrats Launch Plan To Win Back Working Class,” Kahleda Rahman writes at Newsweek: “The leading super PAC supporting House Democrats in next year’s midterms has launched a $50 million fund aimed at winning back working-class voters….The House Majority PAC’s investment, which it has dubbed the “Win Them Back Fund,” is “focused on ensuring that we win back working-class voters across the congressional battlefield,” according to a Monday memo. It comes two years after it began the 2024 election cycle with funds for House seats in New York and California….The memo said that one of the “major roadblocks we have faced as a party has been declining support among a multiracial group of working-class voters.”….But it noted that some House Democrats including Representatives Adam Gray, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Don Davis “continue to overperform with this crucial bloc of voters,” demonstrating that House Democrats “can win back this coalition of voters with the support of strategic investments in recruitment, research, and programming.”….The memo said, “the House Republican agenda—including tariffs and taxes that would raise costs on families and force steep cuts to programs like Medicare, Social Security, and veterans’ benefits, would hurt working-class voters and only benefit the ultrarich—and awareness of that reality is key to our success with these voters….The super PAC’s memo included a list of 14 Republicans the fund will initially target, saying they represent districts where working-class voters would be “especially hurt” by the Republican policies….Mike Smith, the president of the House Majority PAC, said in a statement to Newsweek: “We’re laying a marker down with our Win Them Back Fund—this is a priority. Crafting and developing a credible working-class message through an economic frame is the single best thing we can do as a party.”

Les Leopold explains “Why Working People Need a Political Movement of Their Own” at Common Dreams, and writes: “It would be suicidal, some argue, for the working class to abandon the Democrats. Better that they exert pressure so that the Democrats become genuine economic populists. For that to happen, realistically, it must be proven that Democrats can win elections on a populist platform in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin….But Sherrod Brown, a very strong economic populist, lost his Senate seat in Ohio in 2024. Did populism drag him down? Brown, who lost by 3.6 percent, certainly ran better than Harris, who lost Ohio by 11.2 percent. Brown believes, however, that he was done in by NAFTA, the free trade bill pushed for and signed by Bill Clinton in 1993….The power of NAFTA, not the working-class racism, is also what delivered the South to the Republicans, according to Nelson Lichtenstein in his new book on the Clinton years, A Fabulous Failure. Even after Nixon used his racist Southern Strategy to lure the South away from the Democrats, Lichtenstein notes that congressional representation in the southern states was still evenly split between the two parties. After NAFTA demolished the southern textile industry, however, most of the South abandoned the Democrats….The Democrats also have failed to redevelop decimated areas by directly creating jobs, as the New Deal did during the Depression. Job stability is not something either political party cares about, because corporate interests come first, but the issue hurts the Democrats more because of its historical claim as the party of working people….Working people, union and non-union alike, can still be mobilized through civic engagement to express their hopes and desires. Workers could join something new, like a new Workers Populist Alliance, to develop and put forth a working-class agenda….The billionaire class has two political parties. Working people need one of our own.”

Democrats should energetically publicize that military veterans are included in the Trump-Musk  seizure of data pertaining to all U.S. government payments. As Rebecca Kheel writes at military.com: “Over the weekend, Musk and his team gained access to the system that the Treasury Department uses to make all U.S. government payments. The system includes taxpayer data, such as Social Security numbers, for nearly every American, which naturally includes scores of veterans. On top of that, information about VA disability and retirement benefits, Medicare and Medicaid payments and any other government benefits veterans might receive would be swept up in the system….”Anyone who’s receiving payments from the federal government, first and foremost, is likely to be concerned that payments that they are obliged to receive might not show up, either intentionally because they’re getting blocked for some reason that’s not explained, or even unintentionally, because they’re giving admin access to a critical piece of our federal infrastructure to random coders off the street, which violates like every principle of cybersecurity and administration of these systems that exists,” said Alan Butler, executive director and president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit privacy advocacy group….”With this takeover, Musk can now access veterans’ personal data — from where they live, to their bank account info, and the amount of their earned VA benefits,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said in a statement. “Veterans risked their lives to defend this country, and they deserve more than to have unaccountable billionaires playing with the benefits they earned and rely on.” Read on here.

It’s not going to happen and it’s just a distraction from the Administration’s barrage of unpopular recent initiatives. But Kevin Liptak, Alayna Treene and Jeff Zeleny explain “How Trump arrived at his stunning idea to ‘take over’ the Gaza Strip” at CNN Politics: “President Donald Trump’s idea — announced Tuesday evening at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — was formulated over time, people familiar with the matter said, and appeared to originate with the president himself. It was only the latest reminder that policy ideas often start with Trump, rather than slowly build through national experts before ultimately reaching the Oval Office for discussion….“The president has said he’s been socialing this idea for quite some time. He’s been thinking about this,” his press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday….The proposal for Gaza has not come up in private meetings Trump has held with GOP members of the Armed Services Committees, aides said, even though the ceasefire and broader challenges across the Middle East were key points of discussion as late as last week….Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was traveling in Guatemala, heard the idea for the first time as he watched Trump’s news conference with Netanyahu on television. The Middle East has been dramatically reduced from his portfolio, with Witkoff, the president’s longtime friend, serving as the US envoy to the region….A day after Trump made his comments, [national security advisor Mike] Waltz suggested it had been in the works for some time….“We’ve been looking at this over the last weeks and months, and frankly he’s been thinking about it since October 7,” Waltz said Wednesday on CBS….In public and private conversations over the last year, Trump has repeatedly highlighted the value of Gaza’s seaside location, suggesting it was prime real estate for development….Sending US troops to the region would be in stark contrast to Trump’s long-held critique of nation building and foreign entanglements. He was among the sharpest critics of Republican orthodoxy of national building during the George W. Bush administration.”