At Rawstory, Matthew Chapman takes a look at James Carville’s New York Times op-ed on Democratic strategy, and underscores Carville’s argument that Dems have a “more subtle and simple tool…to play the long game.” As Chapman notes, quoting Carville:

“The Republican Party flat out sucks at governing. Even Tucker Carlson agrees with this. For all the huffing and puffing on the campaign trail in 2016, the first Trump administration largely amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy, 500 miles of a border wall and a destructive pandemic gone viral. George W. Bush got us into a harebrained war in Iraq and then tried to privatize Social Security while letting our financial system drive smack into the Great Recession. And George H.W. Bush governed his way into a one-term presidency because of the economy.”

Chaman notes further, that “Trump is already falling into the same pattern, Carville argued, abandoning his campaign promises to increase public safety and simply firing droves of key federal workers as a power play, all while assembling “the most incompetent cabinet in modern history.”

How do Democrats fight this? Well, Carville said, they don’t.

“With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead,” he [Carville] wrote. “Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss us….Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat….Democrats, let the Republicans’ own undertow drag them away.”

Chapman explains, “This stands in contrast to Dems’ approach in Trump’s first term in which, Carville argued, “we spun ourselves up into a tizzy” over every issue and were too unfocused for voters to pay attention.”

Chapman adds, “Carville concluded by arguing Democrats should fight like boxing champion Muhammad Ali, the master of the “strategic retreat.” “Facing George Foreman who was rolling off 37 knockouts and 40 wins, Ali deployed the famous ‘rope-a-dope’ strategy, retreating to the ropes of the ring, evading punches right and left, absorbing small jabs, until Foreman’s battery was depleted — and in the eighth round deployed a decisive knockout blow. It’s Round 1. Let’s rope-a-dope, Dems.”

Democrats obviously don’t have a lot of leverage over the disastrous decisions that Trump, Musk and their congressional allies are making. But they must use what they have instead of throwing up their hands and relying on the courts, as I argue at New York:

It’s a demoralizing time to be a congressional Democrat. As the Trump-Musk-Vought demolition team continues to dismantle federal government functions and fire personnel, the Republicans who control Congress are standing by passively despite the explicit and implicit threats to their own authority represented by DOGE raids, OMB-ordered freezes and layoffs, and presidential executive orders asserting total control over spending. They may whine about it, but they aren’t willing to buck Trump, who so far seems to be chuckling with pleasure at DOGE’s excesses and even egging Musk on. Meanwhile, Democrats have been excluded categorically from the formal budget process whereby Congress makes long-term fiscal plans, which are designed to be enacted in a huge package (which cannot be filibustered) via a strict party-line vote.

But Democrats in Congress have one big leverage point: Annual appropriations bills, providing the money to keep the federal government going, have to pass both chambers of Congress and can indeed be filibustered in the Senate, which means 41 of the 47 Democratic senators have the absolute power to say no. Democrats have additional leverage in the House, where the tiny GOP majority, combined with an assortment of Republican fiscal hard-liners who never vote for spending bills, means appropriations bills can’t pass without Democratic votes. As the assault on the federal government and on Congress developed in the first days of the second Trump administration, Democrats appeared to be aware of their leverage and ready to use it, as reflected in a comment by Senator Patty Murray to Punchbowl News earlier this month:

“Democrats are, as always, committed to responsibly funding the government, but it is extremely difficult to reach an agreement on toplines — much less full-year spending bills — when the president is illegally blocking vast chunks of approved funding, when he is trying to unilaterally shutter critical agencies, and when an unelected billionaire is empowered to force his way into our government’s central, highly-sensitive payments system [at the Treasury Department]. Democrats and Republicans alike must be able to trust that when a deal gets signed into law, it will be followed.”

With the stopgap spending authority enacted in December due to expire on March 14, now is the time for Democrats to use their leverage to refuse any deal that doesn’t include meaningful curbs on executive usurpation of congressional spending powers. Yes, if executed, this gambit could result in a government shutdown, and Republicans from Trump on down (including those who love all government shutdowns as a way to show how useless government actually is) would seek to blame it on the minority party, despite the GOP’s comprehensive, swaggering control of Washington. But at a time when Democratic constituencies are screaming from every rooftop that they expect their representatives in Washington to do something, refusing to go along with spending bills that the administration will just brush aside seems like a no-brainer.

But now that the moment of truth is approaching, there are signs some congressional Democrats are inclined to flinch in the face of a GOP-engineered choice to shut it or gut it, as Politico explains:

“Democrats are insisting on the guardrails for Trump and Musk amid deep anger on the left about the president’s unilateral dismantling of the federal government. Following a meeting of top GOP appropriators and party leadership Wednesday morning, Republicans officially rejected the proposal.

“Democratic leaders now face a dilemma: Do they hold firm, refrain from bailing Republicans out and allow an unpopular shutdown? Or do they fold and risk the ire of liberal voters eager to see the party stand their ground against Trump and Musk? So far, they are treading carefully.”

In this case, carefully appears to be a synonym for fearfully. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries sure isn’t drawing any lines in the sand:

“[Jeffries] deferred to House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut when asked Wednesday whether Democrats could support a funding deal that doesn’t restrain Trump and Musk.”

This is not exactly a “hell no.” More explicitly, Vermont Senator Peter Welch spelled out how Democrats might rationalize a surrender of their leverage, per Punchbowl News:

“‘What makes us think if we put more language in there, [Musk is] gonna pay any attention to that? He’s on a lawless rampage, and there’s nothing stopping him,’ Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) told us. ‘The big question will be if he faces a judicial order and disregards it.’”

This is another way of just throwing up one’s hands and hoping the courts rein in the stampeding chief executive and his turbulent agents. In the meantime, presumably, Democrats can cut their little deals on spending, keep the federal government open, and hope for the best.

If that’s the way the wind is blowing among congressional Democrats, it may represent an extreme version of the belief that the voters don’t care anything about the Constitution or lawful behavior and can be mobilized only to resist Trump by extremely specific cuts in services or programs they value. But if there’s a silver lining to the vast power Elon Musk has been given by the 47th president, it’s that his indifference and even hostility to the very concept of government having any value is so blatant as to shock even the most diffident or inattentive voter. Here’s how my colleague the longtime Musk watcher John Hermann puts it:

“[H]e wants to fire as many people as possible. Punishing workers is a cause and a purpose unto itself, inseparable from a grandiose conflation of personal desires and successes with the fate of humanity. It’s an ecstatic project with an accelerationist character. “I am become meme,” he declares, as his team of private-sector loyalists harasses federal employees with spiteful emails threatening to get rid of them. The message from the largest employer in the country to its disfavored employees could not be much clearer: You are waste, you are fraud. We want to make a spectacle of your misfortune. We cannot wait to fire you.” 

Musk is already unpopular, and he doesn’t really care if the pain suffered by government workers or the “parasites” who depend on the benefits or services they provide make his project a political handicap for Trump and the GOP. Shining as bright a light on what DOGE is doing as possible is really the only play for the opposition party right now. If that means daring Republicans to trigger a government shutdown that MAGA folk will not be able to stop themselves from conspicuously enjoying, so be it.

 

Are there any lessons for U.S. Democrats in the experience of Europe’s left-center political parties? To help address this question, read Justus Seuferle’s “How the Right Hijacked the Working Class for Culture Wars: The alliance between reactionary forces and the working class is not built on shared economic interests but on a manufactured sense of cultural identity” at Social Europe. As Seuferle writes, “Unlike the post-war era’s material politics—marked by fair wages, strong social safety nets, and democratic expansion—the culturalisation of politics does not lead to tangible material change….This transformation recasts political issues as cultural ones, not only diverting attention from material concerns like wages and social security, but also reshaping fundamentally economic matters into cultural narratives. The latest casualty of this shift is the worker—once defined by economic conditions, now reimagined as a cultural identity….Two competing ideas about the worker dominate contemporary discourse. The first—predominantly found in the United States—is cultural; the second, once prevalent in Europe, is material. The cultural definition, often reflected in self-identification surveys, hinges on the colour of one’s collar. It distinguishes between blue-collar and white-collar workers—those who work with their hands versus those in bureaucratic or intellectual roles. Under this framework, even a small business owner can be considered a worker. The only criterion is a sense of cultural belonging tied to one’s type of work….The misconception that the political right represents the working class stems from the confusion caused by the cultural definition. When identity becomes the central axis of political classification, the struggle for economic justice is reduced to a battle for recognition. The fact that the term “worker” originally denoted a structurally disadvantaged position is now lost in the shallow glow of tribal belonging….In reality, what would materially benefit workers are strong unions, high wages, robust labour protections, good public infrastructure, and universal unemployment insurance to give workers the ability to refuse exploitative jobs—forcing employers to raise wages. Instead, Vance offers only the hollow currency of recognition….The outcome is a hollow anti-elitism, reduced to performative opposition, with no substantive policies to improve workers’ lives.”

In “Trump’s Historically Bad First Month of Polls Should Terrify Republicans,” Bill Scher writes at The Washington Monthly: “President Donald Trump’s net job approval average, in both the Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight averages, has slid about 7 points over the first month of his second term, leaving his approval rating just barely above his disapproval….This is a historically bad beginning for a presidency. The only worse example is Donald Trump’s first presidency….Who cares about poll numbers anymore, you might ask. Congressional Republicans should. They are on the ballot next year, and the GOP could easily lose control of the House. If Trump does not defy political gravity, he could drag them down, as he did in his first term….Presidential polling honeymoons always end, but rarely so fast….Trump’s numbers are sinking because he has swiftly implemented radical policies many people do not want. According to the Washington Post-Ipsos poll, the public opposes mass civil service firings, shutdowns of federal agencies, including the foreign aid conduit USAID, banning transgender people from military service, and scrapping diversity programs. Only 34 percent of respondents approved of Elon Musk’s involvement in the administration, while 57 percent believe Trump has “gone beyond his authority as president.”….Trump’s hold on Republican officeholders remains strong. I doubt many of them support Trump’s echoing of Russian narratives about Ukraine or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan for annual 8-percent cuts in the military budget over the next five years. But they are afraid to say as much and risk the president’s wrath and a primary challenge….Yet a continuing presidential poll slide with a midterm election on the horizon could, and should, focus the mind not just on the president’s temperament but the voters. Trump could become a dead weight to the GOP. Congressional Republicans in swing districts and those not necessarily seen as vulnerable today should think about what has been unthinkable: creating some distance between themselves and Trump.”

From “Americans voted for Trump, but don’t support his agenda: Our look at nearly 300 poll questions finds Trump is more popular than Trumpism” by G. Elliot Morris at 538/abcnews: “Looking at all the polls that have been released since Trump took office, we find that while Americans express support for some of Trump’s immigration policy and broad government reform in principle, they oppose most of what he has done in his first month as president….I began by combing through every publicly available political poll that has been released since he took office on Jan. 20. Specifically, I was looking for any question that asked respondents if they supported* an action that Trump had taken or promised to take. As of Feb. 25 at 2 p.m. Eastern, this review yielded over 270 questions from 49 different polls. 538 has made the data for this analysis publicly available here ….I found 63 questions asking about Trump’s immigration policies, ranging from such topics as the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have been accused of committing violent crimes (supported by 89 percent of voters, according to an Ipsos/Washington Post poll conducted Feb. 13-18) to the removal of undocumented immigrants who arrived to the U.S. as children (44 percentage points underwater, 70-26 percent, according to the same poll) to whether immigrants removed from the country should be held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, while they await transfer to their home countries (average support of just 37 percent across three polls)….Generally the broadest policies possible, such as “deporting all immigrants” and “sending the military to the border to help with immigration,” score rather well with the public (52 percent approve and 36 percent disapprove of using military force at the U.S.-Mexico border in the average poll)….But as pollsters get more specific, net approval of those policies tends to fall and go underwater. The AP found, for example, that deporting all undocumented immigrants “even if they will be separated from their children who are citizens” has just 28 percent of Americans in support and 55 percent in opposition. And arresting immigrants while they are at church or school is opposed by more than half of Americans. Excluding questions that ask about the military or Trump’s declared state of emergency on the southern border, the public opposed Trump’s immigration policies by about 1 point on average….Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants (a power he does not have) is underwater by 12 points on average, with 39 percent of adults approving and 50 percent disapproving of the order.”

Morris adds further, “According to an AP-NORC poll conducted shortly before Trump took office, 67 percent of adults think the U.S. government spends too little on Social Security; 61 percent say too little on Medicare; 65 percent too little on education; 62 percent too little on assistance to the poor; and 55 percent too little on Medicaid. Yet these are the programs Republicans are targeting for cutting in order to offset reduced revenues from lower taxes on corporations and richer Americans….Trump’s allies and conservative commentators have run into a classic finding in political science: Voters are “symbolically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” That is, they support liberal social programs and government spending at higher rates than they identify as liberals; to put it in inverse terms, people are more likely to call themselves conservative than they are to support the average conservative policy. It is also generally easier to sell people on vague language and abstract goals (“Reduce the size of government! Make programs more efficient!”) than it is to sell them on the steps it would take to accomplish them (“Fire a ton of people! Make benefits harder to get!”)….A related divide is how people feel toward Trump the man versus how they feel toward his agenda. According to 538’s average of presidential job approval polls, 48.1 percent of adults currently approve of Trump and 47.4 percent disapprove. However, in our new dataset of Trump issue polls, average support for his agenda is 7 points underwater, with just 38 percent supporting his policies and executive orders and 46 percent opposing them….Our new data sheds light on the question of whether the American people voted for everything they’re getting under Trump or whether they supported him for other reasons. Given his agenda is currently 11 points lower than the vote share he won in the 2024 presidential election (49.8 percent), the most likely answer is that this isn’t what Americans had in mind when they voted for him.”

As we all watch the ongoing assault on the federal government, I keep asking myself: “Did Trump really campaign on this?” I looked into it at New York, and I think this should be a question Democrats ask regularly.

Amid the chaos of federal hiring freezes, grant freezes, the wild DOGE effort to arbitrarily slash federal payrolls and cancel programs and contracts, and congressional Republican efforts to cut trillions of dollars in spending to pay for tax cuts, you frequently hear that Americans are getting what they said they wanted in November. Even if you laugh, which you almost have to do, at Donald Trump’s absurd claims of an incredible, unprecedented landslide victory and an unlimited mandate to do anything he wants, laws be damned, there remains an underlying sense that he told voters what he’d do and they either supported it or weren’t paying attention.

But that’s just it: Trump didn’t do that. Yes, he promised the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, pledged to melt down the polar caps with a “drill, baby, drill” energy policy, and made it pretty clear any sort of anti-discrimination efforts are as doomed as U.S. support for Ukraine. Trump told voters a lot of things; some of it was dead serious, and other bits were probably for entertainment value. But he did not promise a slash-and-burn austerity budget and a radically downsized federal government. And Trump certainly didn’t reveal that he would give Elon Musk, his campaign’s chief funder, personal power to take over federal agencies and terrorize their personnel, mugging and laughing like a cartoon villain the whole time.

It wasn’t in the Trump campaign platform

There were 20 planks in the Trump-Vance 2024 campaign platform. None of them involved gutting the federal budget and firing tens or hundreds of thousands of federal employees.

• Plank No. 6 promises “large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!” but says nothing about the high-end and corporate tax cuts Trump is now pushing or, even more crucially, how to pay for them.

• Plank No. 9 pledges to “end the weaponization of the government against the American people” (a pretty clear hint that the new administration regards Trump supporters and only Trump supporters as “the American people”). Perhaps that suggests forced turnover in the Department of Justice, but nowhere else.

• Plank No. 15 pledges to “cancel the electric car mandate and cut costly and burdensome regulations,” but again, this is a million miles away from reductions across federal agencies.

• Plank No. 16 calls for ending “federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.” Instead of this very specific pledge, we’re getting a governmentwide demolition of anything related to gender or race and the firing of any employees who dare utter a list of ideologically forbidden words.

There’s nothing in the platform remotely resembling DOGE, the Office of Management and Budget’s effort to wrest the spending power away from Congress, or the radical shifts in resource allocations necessary to implement a radical federal budget by Congress.

It wasn’t in the RNC platform, either

Was there anything like what we are now seeing in the (more detailed) Republican National Convention platform? There is this one sentence in the section on inflation: “Republicans will immediately stabilize the Economy by slashing wasteful Government spending and promoting Economic Growth.” Okay, that’s in the ballpark, but every candidate in either party opposes “waste.” That doesn’t suggest the arbitrary $2 trillion savings goal Musk has advanced or the $1.5 to $2 trillion of spending cuts contained in the draft House budget resolution under consideration right now. For the most part, the party platform (and Trump’s campaign rhetoric) suggests that “unleashing” energy production is the real key to controlling inflation and growing the economy. And the document includes both a variety of new spending initiatives and redundant promises to leave Social Security and Medicare alone (Medicaid is not mentioned in either the campaign or party platforms).

Trump didn’t talk about it on the trail

How about Trump’s own utterances? His acceptance speech in Milwaukee was a 90-minute presentation of his case for returning to the White House. Again, there was no real hint that massive federal spending cuts would be deployed to deal with inflation or reduce budget deficits; instead, Trump plainly said wildly increased energy production would slay inflation and that tax cuts would pay for themselves through increased growth. In accordance with his focus on energy policy, Trump did make one specific spending cut promise: “They’ve spent trillions of dollars on things having to do with the Green New Scam. It’s a scam … And all of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, we will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams and we will not allow it to be spent on the meaningless Green New scam ideas.” So yes, he did warn us about that, though again, there was no sense that federal spending was at crisis levels requiring radical austerity budgeting; it was more a matter of spending being directed to ideologically unacceptable goals.

Trump and his campaign spilled many millions of words via speeches, ads, and surrogate appearances without giving any real indication that a pre-Trump tea-party-style attack on federal spending, programs, and personnel was in the offing. But you know who did provide some pretty clear warning signs of the chaos to come? The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint.

Decimating the federal government is a Project 2025 plan

One of the four major “promises” addressed in Project 2025’s main report (Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise) is “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.” The foreword to this document argues for executive-branch usurpation of congressional authority over federal spending with this justification of power grabs to come: “The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its turf.”

Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, penned a chapter on the office of the president that treats as paramount the goal to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” by any means possible. A subsequent chapter on “Managing the Bureaucracy” calls bluntly for an end to the civil-service system as we have known it, and other chapters envision radical reductions in federal involvement in domestic-governance areas ranging from education to housing to transportation. The entire document faithfully reflects a pre-Trump conservative austerity agenda as old as the original opposition to the New Deal and as recent as George W. Bush’s and Paul Ryan’s assaults on entitlement programs. But it’s not what Trump campaigned on; indeed, he repeatedly disclaimed any knowledge of or agreement with Project 2025’s work, notably in this July 2024 Truth Social post:

“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Yet a Politico analysis of early Trump executive orders found 37 separate Project 2025 recommendations embedded in them, some lifting language directly from its published recommendations.

Much of what the Trump administration is doing right now is an amalgam of Project 2025’s goals achieved initially through the patented chaos tactics of Elon Musk and subsequently by Trump appointees under Russ Vought’s direction. If it can get its act together, the Republican-controlled Congress is expected to rubber-stamp legislation that decimates the federal government in part to finance tax cuts and in part for the sheer ideological hell of it. Some Trump voters may be happy with this massive bait-and-switch. But for others, it will come as a nasty surprise.

The following article, “DEI Is a Failure Because the Civil Rights Movement Wasn’t About Elite Diversity: The tide is turning against modern diversity bureaucracies. But that’s not necessarily bad news for progressives, at least if they believe in the goals of the civil rights movement” by Zaid Jilani, is cross-posted from substack.com:

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is being challenged, as President Donald Trump recently enacted an executive order that requires his administration to crack down on and remove diversity-oriented offices and policies across the federal government.

To many liberals, Trump’s order is distressing.

“I have to assume that ‘pursuing DEI efforts’ means hiring anyone who isn’t a white man?” asked The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie about the administration’s new initiative to crackdown on DEI.

Indeed, the term DEI has at times become a sort of racist shorthand for corners of the online far-right, where people who in some cases were elected to office by the voters are derided as DEI hires simply because they’re nonwhite Democrats.

But not every critic of DEI is motivated by white resentment. Many people criticize these programs because they have little positive impact on diversity, anyway, and there’s a bunch of evidence that diversity trainings can actually make people more prejudiced.

The outcomes of Trump’s maneuver, however, remains to be seen because the devil is in the details.

Does removing DEI from the federal government mean eliminating potentially discriminatory programs? Or will the order end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater as it guts organizations that do have some proven benefit, like government teams that help protect the rights of disabled employees?

I would argue that the anti-DEI efforts we’ve seen pop up across the country over the past few years are capable of doing both things, and only time will tell what the Trump administration ends up achieving with its new anti-DEI directive.

But something is lost in this debate, where you have conservatives on one side railing against programs and practices they believe discriminate against white men and promote mediocrity and liberals on the other side defending DEI as an extension of the civil rights movement that guarantees the rights of minorities.

The reality is that DEI is only tangentially related to the rights and opportunities of minorities. The civil rights movement was not about diversifying corporate or government offices with a few black or brown faces in places of power.

It wasn’t about diversity trainings where employees roll their eyes as someone hired by HR lectures them for three hours about their privilege.

It was about redistributing power to the masses of people who don’t have it, including white people.

Read more here.

Some messaging points from Frank O’Brien’s “Progressives: We Have to Drive Efforts to Confront the Working Class Disconnect” at progressivesonmessage.substack.com:  “People living paycheck to paycheck and feeling unheard and unseen by many Democrats aren’t wrong. In November, their frustration boiled over triggered by inflation….No messaging shift will work unless Democrats back it up with action. We must push for an economic populist agenda and against policies that stack the deck against hard-working people….We need Democrats who can give voice to the needs and aspirations of people struggling with economic uncertainty as easily as they represent people worried about climate change or the spread of authoritarianism. And they need to talk about economic hardship in a much more visceral, emotional way….We have to advance steps that don’t ask people to wait around for years before feeling the impact. And we have to aggressively sell that agenda….We didn’t lose by standing with trans kids dealing with outrageous harassment and heartbreak. We lost because we didn’t demonstrate the same kind of empathy and concern for working-class families worried sick about how to pay their bills, feed their family and carve out a brighter future for their children….Sure, standing up for peoples’ rights doesn’t mean taking the bait every time our opponents try to draw us into crazy conversations.”

At Roll Call, Daniela Altimari, Mary Ellen McIntire and Niels Lesniewski share some insights from recent polling, including “A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday brought bleak news for congressional Democrats: Just 21 percent of voters approve of the way they are doing their jobs. Democratic lawmakers are underwater even with their own base, notching a 49 percent disapproval rating among registered partisans….Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are enjoying a honeymoon of sorts, the Quinnipiac survey found. In the early days of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House and the GOP governing trifecta, 40 percent of voters give Republicans in Congress positive marks. Among Republicans, that number shoots up to 79 percent….Democrats in Congress have been here before. They endured a shellacking in the 2010 midterms and saw Republicans win full control of Washington in 2016. But since March 2009, when Quinnipiac first asked this question, their job approval rating has never dipped this low….The former leader of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party [Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin] released a blueprint this week for fighting Trump and regaining momentum. The plan relies heavily on winning back working-class voters by painting the president as an out-of-touch advocate for the ultra-rich.”

“Post-mortems of Democrats’ performance consistently referenced a political realignment in U.S. politics, which included a rightward shift in voting patterns, notably among working-class men of all demographics,” Tanner Stening writes in “Can progressives and moderates bridge the growing divide in the Democratic Party?” at Northeastern Global News. ” That shift is certain to have an effect on the losing party. Looking at global patterns, Johnson says that center-left parties generally slide further to the right as right-wing parties do well in elections….“I imagine they will primarily focus on economic issues and specific federal programs and be wary of focusing on the sorts of dramatic proposals or social issues with which the party’s progressive wing is associated,” she says…. But there is also the danger in overstating the Republican victories in 2024, says Costas Panagopoulos, distinguished professor of political science at Northeastern and co-author of “Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era.”….Panagopoulos and Beauchamp note that the momentum swings over the last several cycles still point to a narrowly divided electorate — and a sense that “anything can happen” over the next four years….In the 22 midterm elections from 1934 to 2018, the incumbent’s party lost 28 House seats and four Senate seats on average, data shows. Should the Democrats perform well in the midterms, it will help them build back a coalition capable of challenging the Republicans in 2028.”

In “To stop Trump, Democrats must reinvent themselves,” at The Hill, Will Marshall writes “Democrats, yoked to the status quo, are extraordinarily unpopular. Less than a third of Americans view the party favorably, while 57 percent disapprove. Independents are even more likely to express negative views. During the Biden years, Republicans also erased the Democrats’ longstanding advantage in party registration….Progressive activists nonetheless are pressuring party leaders to make a show of resisting the Trump-Elon Musk blitzkrieg on the federal government. This is tricky: Democrats are duty-bound to speak out against Trump’s unconstitutional usurpation of legislative power. But they must also avoid falling into the trap of defending a federal bureaucracy most Americans believe is badly broken….   The same risk applies to other key issues voters trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle — what to do about the economy, immigration, crime, energy and climate, schools and cultural friction around race and gender….Non-college voters far outnumber college grads. That’s why the Democratic coalition is shrinking and retracting into its urban bastions, conceding vast swaths of the country to Trump and the Republicans. Trump won 31 states last year, to Kamala Harris’s 19….Democrats should forge a new agenda for economic and social reform that puts ordinary working Americans first….They don’t want handouts; they want abundant economic growth and opportunity that expands the middle class, not the upper class. They want policies that are pro-worker and pro-business, reward hard work, support stable families, encourage entrepreneurial risk-taking and keep America on the cutting edge of innovation.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Democrats are roaming in the political wilderness and seem bewildered on how to find their way out. More resistance? More moderation? More lawfare? More denunciations of fascism/authoritarianism/lawlessness? Look for ways to compromise? Don’t look for ways to compromise? Shut down the government? Don’t shut down the government? Better messaging of Democratic positions? Actually change Democratic positions? It’s all so confusing!

It needn’t be. There’s one simple question—a sort of test—that would illuminate the path forward for Democrats.

What would the working class say (WWWCS)?

Let me explain.

The WWWCS test is not so hard to do but it does entail getting outside of the liberal college-educated bubble so many Democrats live within, particularly as experienced on social media, in activist circles and within advocacy, nonprofit, media and academic institutions. Look at actual public opinion data—not as summarized by someone you know or something you read. Look at focus group reports. Talk to actual working-class people—there are lots of them! Listen to your intuitions about how working-class people would likely react to policies and rhetoric currently associated with the Democrats —not how you think they should react. Think of family members or people you grew up with who are working class. Try to get inside their heads. They are less ideological, more focused on material concerns, more likely to be struggling economically, less interested in cutting edge social issues, more patriotic and generally more culturally conservative. All this makes a difference.

The “what-would-the-working-class-say” test can tell you a lot about whether Democrats are on track with their approach. If the test indicates that Democrats are advocating or saying something that is likely unpopular, off-putting and/or just lacks salience with working-class people, that policy or rhetoric is probably on the wrong track. Conversely, if the test indicates that working-class people are likely to view what Democrats are advocating/saying as desirable, in tune with their values and actually important to their everyday lives, that is a very good sign.

So that’s the test. Here’s why it’s so damn important.

As noted in an excellent new report by Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck:

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 Hispanics and an increasing share of African American men….

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. And so, it appears, has the Democratic share of the college graduate vote (57 percent in 2020, 56 percent in 2024) even as the Republican share of the non-college vote surged from 51 percent to 56 percent. Meanwhile, non-college voters still make up 57 percent of the electorate, a figure that rises to 60 percent in the swing states. [Note that the figures for eligible voters are actually quite a bit higher—RT]

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 percent 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 percent or lower while prevailing in seven of the 10 states with college attainment between 36 and 39 percent. [Note that the only swing state in the 36-39 percent group, North Carolina, was carried by Trump—RT] 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.

Here’s the visual on the difference between high and low education states:

Notice anything different about the two maps? The point about Senate implications cannot be emphasized enough. My Liberal Patriot colleague Michael Baharaeen recently did a crackerjack job of running down the Senate maps for 2026-2030. The Republicans have abundant pickup opportunities in low-education, working class heavy states while Democratic opportunities are slimmer and generally involve knocking off Republicans in the same kind of low-education states. This is daunting to say the least.

Read more…

The following article, “How About a Daily Democratic Message?” by Robert Kuttner, is cross-posted from The American Prospect:

There’s an interesting idea floating around on social media about how to rescue the Democrats from a wilderness of mixed messages and relentless media stories of Democratic disarray. But actually bringing this idea about sheds light on the thorny structural challenges that the opposition party faces.

The idea is that “the Democrats” should designate a single spokesperson, or perhaps rotating spokespeople, to give a daily press conference with a few clear talking points. That would presumably become the day’s main political story and give Democratic opposition to Trump more focus and clarity. So far, so good.

A number of the social media accounts have suggested Pete Buttigieg, who is deft at articulating a substantively progressive message as just plain common sense. Trump’s wrecking crew provides a target-rich environment, to say the least.

But let’s play out making this idea happen. For starters, who are “the Democrats”? Who would appoint this spokesperson or -people, and using what criteria?

There is a Democratic National Committee, with a talented new chair in Ken Martin, but the DNC does not make this kind of decision. The Senate and House leaders, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, are the closest thing to national leaders.

Let’s assume that Martin, Schumer, and Jeffries meet and decide that this is a good idea. Then begins the problem of herding cats.

Schumer and Jeffries would have to get buy-in from their respective caucuses. Multiple demands would surface. Lots of different people with presidential aspirations would want the role of daily spokesperson. All would agree on just one thing. It can’t be just Pete Buttigieg.

Then the further mixed blessing of diversity in all its forms would kick in. There would be pressure to pick spokespeople from different regions, races, genders, ideologies. Instead of clarity, we’d get a circus.

Let’s make the heroic assumption that the party leadership could somehow surmount this challenge and pick just three rotating spokespeople.

My nominees would be Jamie Raskin, Gretchen Whitmer, and Pete Buttigieg. See the superb extended interview with Raskin in Politico. He is the most eloquent and best-focused anti-Trump Democrat we have. But I digress.

There is the further challenge of message. Do we just leave that up to the messengers, or must they clear it with some kind of committee?

The anti-Trump talking points are clear enough. He is putting your health at risk with fringe appointees and wreckage of essential public-health agencies. He plans to take away some of your health insurance and Social Security to finance more tax cuts for his billionaire cronies. He is wrecking the economy and inviting a stock market crash. He is destroying America’s most reliable alliances and helping global adversaries.

I wish that his trampling of the rule of law, his vindictiveness, and his cruel separation of immigrant families with Gestapo-style ICE raids were at the top of the list. They surely are for Prospect readers. But for the general public, alas, the more powerful message is how Trump’s crazy actions harm you.

A further challenge is the Democrats’ affirmative program. Yes, we need a few bold commitments that would help ordinary people directly and provide a vivid contrast with Trump. Our friend Tom Geoghegan, writing in The Nation and urging Democrats to keep it big and simple, proposes a 50 percent increase in Social Security benefits and a law prohibiting the firing of wage and salary workers except for cause. At the top of my list would be canceling student debt.

But here’s the problem with that tactic. The press would quickly point out that none of this stands any chance of passage, and many elected Democrats would distance themselves from Hail Mary pass proposals.

If the Democratic leadership could agree on a small rotating cast to provide a consistent narrative on the personal menace of Trump to ordinary Americans, that would be a possible start.

These aren’t the happiest days for Democrats, but the impact of so much wild lawlessness by Trump 2.0 should be offset a bit by indications the 47th president and his minions may be a bit over their skis, as I discussed at New York:

During the first month of his second term, Donald Trump’s popularity started out mildly positive but has slowly eroded, according to the FiveThirtyEight averages. As of January 24, his job-approval ratio was 49.7 percent positive and 41.5 percent negative. As of Thursday, it’s 48.7 percent positive and 46.2 percent negative, which means his net approval has slipped from 8.2 percent to 2.5 percent. The very latest surveys show a negative trend, as the Washington Post noted:

“Trump’s approval ratings this week in polls — including the Post-Ipsos poll and others from Reuters, Quinnipiac University, CNN and Gallup — have ranged from 44 to 47 percent. In all of them, more disapprove than approve of him.

“That’s a reversal from the vast majority of previous polls, which showed Trump in net-positive territory.”

Given all the controversy his actions have aroused, that may not be surprising. But he has some vulnerabilities behind the top-line numbers, mostly involving ideas he hasn’t fully implemented yet.

His proposals tend to be popular at a high level of generality but much less popular in some key specifics. For example, a February 9 CBS survey found 54 percent supporting his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict, but only 14 percent favoring his idea of a U.S. takeover of Gaza. Similarly, a February 18 Washington Post–Ipsos poll found 50 percent of respondents approving of his handling of immigration, but only 41 percent supporting the deployment of local law enforcement for mass deportations, and only 39 percent supporting his push to end to birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants.

Across a broad range of polls, Elon Musk’s assault on the federal bureaucracy is relatively unpopular. A February 19 Quinnipiac survey found 55 percent of registered voters believe Musk has too much power. An Emerson poll gave Musk a 41 percent job-approval rating, and an Economist-YouGov poll gave him a 43 percent favorability rating.

But by far Trump’s greatest vulnerability is over his management of an economy where renewed signs of inflation are evident, and where his policies, once implemented, could make conditions worse. Already, his job-approval ratings on managing the economy are slipping a bit, as a February 19 Reuters-Ipsos poll indicated:

“[T]he share of Americans who think the economy is on the wrong track rose to 53% in the latest poll from 43% in the January 24–26 poll. Public approval of Trump’s economic stewardship fell to 39% from 43% in the prior poll …

“Trump’s rating for the economy is well below the 53% he had in Reuters/Ipsos polling conducted in February 2017, the first full month of his first term as U.S. president.”

And a mid-February Gallup survey found 54 percent of Americans disapproving Trump’s handling of the economy and 53 percent disapproving his handling of foreign trade. More ominous for Trump if the sentiment persists is that negative feelings about current economic conditions are as prominent as they were when they helped lift Trump to the presidency. The WaPo-Ipsos poll noted above found that 73 percent of Americans consider the economy “not so good” or “poor,” with that percentage rising to 76 percent with respect to gasoline and energy prices and 92 percent with respect to food prices.

Republicans and independents will for a time share Trump’s claims that the current economy is still the product of Joe Biden’s policies, but not for more than a few months. A particular controversy to watch is Trump’s tariff wars and their potential impact on consumer prices. As the CBS survey showed, sizable majorities of Americans already oppose new tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and Europe, with tariffs on China being an exception to low levels of support for that key element of Trump’s economic-policy agenda. And the same poll showed 66 percent of respondents agreeing that Trump’s “focus on lowering prices” is “not enough.” He may have forgotten already how he won the 2024 election.

 

Two of the surest ways to fail in national politics are to preside over high inflation or high unemployment. President Biden gave us an object demonstration in the political danger of inflation. Now, Trump seems to be maneuvering into position to do both. Ironically, he will likely get more benefit from Biden’s infrastructure initiatives than Biden got, because the employment bump will kick in in during the months and years ahead. But with his rash of government lay-offs, Trump-Musk have awakened new fears  of unemployment much larger than the actual danger of it. When sudden mass layoffs in any industry, including government, become the lead news story, the fear spreads and then the market trembles. He would be in much deeper trouble without the infrastructure upgrades Biden secured. It’s a bit early to blame Trump for rising inflation, since, in his own words, “I’m only here for two and a half weeks….I had nothing to do with it.” However as Ed Mazza reports at HuffPo, Trump bragged that “I will immediately bring inflation down on Day 1….Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down.” And it seems a safe bet that Trump’s mass deportations and blanket tariffs are not going to help keep prices down. We are not going to see a lot of guys in red maga hats bringing in the harvest. Nor will adding a surcharge on Canadian lumber help reduce housing prices. One of the post-it notes often seen on the desks of successful small business people says “Under-promise, Over-deliver.” For years Democrats have done the reverse and have paid dearly for it. Now it is the Republicans’ turn.

At The Guardian, Lauren Aratani reports that “A quarter of US shoppers have dumped favorite stores over political stances: A new poll also found that four in 10 Americans have shifted spending to align with moral views in recent months,” and writes: “Americans are changing their shopping habits and even dumping their favorite stores in a backlash against corporations that have shifted their public policies to align with the Trump administration, according to a poll exclusively shared with the Guardian….Four out of 10 Americans have shifted their spending over the last few months to align with their moral views, according to the Harris poll.

• 31% of Americans reported having no interest in supporting the economythis year – a sentiment especially felt by younger (gen Z: 37%), Black (41% v white: 28%) and Democratic consumers (35% v 29% of independents and 28% of Republicans).

• A quarter (24%) of respondents have even stopped shopping at their favorite stores because of their politics (Black: 35%, gen Z: 32%, Democratic: 31%).

More Democrats (50%) indicated they were changing their spending habits compared with Republicans (41%) and independents (40%). Democrats were also more likely to say they have stopped shopping at companies that have opposing political views to their own – 45% of Democrats indicated so, compared with 34% of Republicans….It is a sign that consumers with liberal views are starting to use their wallets in response to politics in the private sector.”

John L. Dorman reports at Business Insider: “When [Sen. Reuben] Gallego was asked why many voters concerned about the economy seemingly had little issue with an administration filled with the ultrawealthy, the Arizona lawmaker said personal wealth is aspirational for many voters….”People that are working class, poor, don’t necessarily look at the ultrarich as their competitors,” he said. “They want to be rich someday.”….He said those voters would give Trump, Musk, and their allies the benefit of the doubt until they were personally impacted by governmental actions….Gallego also predicted that Trump would face political backlash over the GOP’s long-sought tax bill, which could include $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and potential spending reductions for programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program….”That’s when you’re going to see people saying, ‘No, no, no, that’s not what I want,'” he said….Gallego defeated Lake last November even as Trump flipped Arizona red in his victory over then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the key swing state….The first Latino to represent Arizona in the Senate, Gallego outpaced Harris with Latino voters and male voters. The lawmaker attributed his success to his work to engage with voters everywhere, especially as it related to their economic concerns.”

In “America Needs a Working-Class Media: Catering to rich audiences is not serving us,”  Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, writes at the Columbia Journalism Review: “America needs a working-class media. It’s something that has preoccupied me for years. If we thought of it as precariat media, we would also include the falling middle class that I have called the middle precariat (including most freelance writers right now). After the 2024 election, the punditocracy has seemingly rediscovered the working-class voter for the second time—following Donald Trump’s first victory, when J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy emerged to “explain” the rage of those left behind economically. Neither time, however, did they “rediscover” the value of working-class journalists…. The identity crisis of the Democratic Party—and debate over the extent to which the party should identify with the working class—unfolds as I write this; see Bernie Sanders’s, Faiz Shakir’s, and other progressive politicians’ and media figures’ refrain that the party pursued donors and ignored the working class in the 2024 electoral campaign. And if that balance of power must change, the media should be similarly realigned….What would that media look like? It would be one where economic reporters are embedded in blue-collar communities and neighborhoods rather than financial districts, and source networks built around people with direct experience instead of outside analysts. Centering inflation coverage around wage stagnation rather than the stock market and written for people who live paycheck to paycheck. Healthcare reporting would be conducted by those who have experienced medical debt. Labor reporting that represents workers not as mute sufferers but as true experts. Housing that is considered from the perspective of the renter, not the landlord or developer….As Christopher Martin, author of the 2019 book No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, told me: “Media has increasingly centered on a class audience rather than a mass audience.”