Bill Scher writes at The Washington Monthly that “Democrats should not look at poll numbers about general immigration sentiments and conclude the Garcia case and its horrific particulars is a political loser. The party has a moral and constitutional case to make against the Trumpian authoritarian approach to government. For that case to have any legitimacy—for it to not be dismissed as cheap political point scoring—Democrats must act on the principles they have long articulated…Throughout the 2024 campaign, Democrats warned that if elected Trump would behave like a dictator and undermine the foundations of American democracy. They were right, and now he is. It’s not the time to act as if constitutional checks and balances are no longer important because it doesn’t poll as well as some other issue… Will the 2026 and 2028 elections more likely turn on the economy? Yes. Isn’t it the case that Trump is sandbagging the economy with arbitrary tariffs? Yes. Shouldn’t Democrats focus on that? Yes. But Democrats can do that while also calling out Trump’s abuses of power… In fact, Democrats can easily tie Trump’s disregard for the economy with his disregard for Garcia’s human rights. They can say, “Instead of lowering our prices like he promised to do, Trump and his Republican allies are obsessed with raising the cost of all imported goods and abducting people legally in America and sending them to foreign prisons.”… Fortunately, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have unequivocally stated Garcia should be returned home. They should continue to set that tone and encourage their colleagues to keep up the pressure until justice is done.”
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain has an article at Jacobin, in which he writes: “In the labor movement, at our best, we have a different way of doing politics. We don’t make politics about personalities or parties; we see politics as a negotiation. We don’t sit down to negotiate with corporate executives because we like them or trust them. We focus on what we need as a working class and what the hell it’s going to take to get it, and we do that whether we’re sitting across from the friendliest CEO or the meanest Wall Street con artist…Politics is just like contract negotiation. You win what you have the power to fight for, and that’s exactly the situation we find ourselves in right now…We’re negotiating with the Trump administration; our approach to President Donald Trump is no different than our approach was to President Joe Biden, and it’s no different than our approach at Stellantis or Columbia University or General Dynamics…I keep hearing people say, “UAW loves Trump now,” or “The UAW only supports Democrats.” It’s all bullshit. Our union has a clear North Star, and that’s the working class. The working class’s issues don’t change because somebody has a D or an R next to their name…We’ve seen some reckless and chaotic activity on trade from this administration, and there’s a lot of fear of disruption. But what we have to remember is that disruption is not new to factory workers in this country — disruption is what we’ve been living with for thirty years under a free-trade disaster…It doesn’t mean we support reckless random tariffs. I don’t believe that’s the answer to all this. But there is a reason for tariffs, and it’s also a mistake to just defend the status quo, especially when it comes to free trade…We have to end this free-trade disaster, and we don’t care if it’s a Democrat or a Republican who ends it.”
Fain continues, “It’s not enough for politicians to talk a good game about wanting to bring back jobs — they need to be good union jobs, with good standards. And we have good reason to be suspicious that the Trump administration is not interested in supporting the right to organize or bargain…Because here’s what we’ve seen so far from the Trump administration: we’ve seen the destruction of bargaining rights for a million federal workers. That’s not good for the working class. We’ve seen attacks on the National Labor Relations Board, including illegally firing a board member, leading to deadlock on workers’ cases. That’s not good for the working class. We’ve seen attacks planned on Social Security,Medicare, and Medicaid, programs that millions of workers depend on. That’s not good for the working class…We’ve seen the absolute trampling of constitutional rights. We have seen the First Amendment go up in smoke at college campuses — with detentions, deportations, expulsions, and firings of people who dared to speak out against and protest against a war, just to call for a cease-fire. We have seen the right to due process disappear as working people are deported for no crime and no reason. That’s not good for the working class…When we speak out against these actions, we get called liberals by the right-wingers; when we speak out in support of tariffs, we get called right-wingers by the liberals. People say we’re flip-flopping or doing a 180. The truth is, what we are doing is acting with integrity…We disagree with 99 percent of what the Trump administration is doing, when it comes to attacks on labor and working-class people and attacks on free speech…But no matter what party you voted for, understand there is a direct line between the free-trade disaster and the political chaos in this country. Plant closures and mass layoffs resulted in intense pain and suffering and anger for hundreds of thousands of working families in our country. All that pain and anger had to go somewhere — a lot of it went to support Donald Trump for president…We need to build a political movement that can put the working class first, and to do that we’re going to need working-class people to step up, to speak up, and take on corporate America, from the bargaining table to the ballot box.”
In “The daunting task facing Democrats trying to win back the working class,” Christian Paz writes at Vox, via yahoo.com: “It’s perhaps the most urgent reason Democrats lost in November: The party has solidly lost the support of working-class voters across the country and doesn’t have a solid sense of how to win them back…Now, a group of Democratic researchers, strategists, and operatives are launching a renewed effort to figure out — and to communicate to the rest of their party — what it is that these voters want, where they think the party went wrong, and how to best respond to their concerns before the 2026 election cycle…Led by Mitch Landrieu, former Democratic lieutenant governor of Louisiana and former mayor of New Orleans, the Working Class Project plans to offer guidance over the next few months on how to build “a more sustainable majority” in future elections…Last year marked the first time in nearly 60 years that the lowest-earning Americans voted for the Republican presidential candidate over the Democratic one…“Since President Obama was first elected in 2008, Democrats have seen over 25 percent in net loss of support among working class voters,” Landrieu explains in the project’s launch announcement. “In other words, for two decades, Democrats have been on a downward slide among the very voters whose interests we champion and who benefit most from our policies.”…Housed within the liberal opposition research firm and Super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, the Working Class Project is primarily focused on research, polling, and focus group works. They’re focused on reaching and listening to voters in 21 states: the traditional seven battleground states, seven safely Democratic states with large shares of white and nonwhite working-class voters (which drifted right last year), and seven solidly Republican states.”