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

Last July, I wrote a piece asking, in the wake of Democrats’ catastrophic defeat in the 2024 election and the obvious need for serious party-wide change, “Is Our Democrats Learning?” At the time, I saw little evidence that Democratic learning was, in fact, taking place.

Posing this question again in early spring 2026, it is my sad duty to inform you that our Democrats continue not to learn. If anything, they are increasingly adamant that such learning is not even necessary. Their mantra now might be, paraphrasing that old joke about the British: “No learning please, we’re Democrats.”

The proximate reasons for this complacency are not hard to discern. Trump and many of his administration’s actions are very unpopular and voters’ views on the economy, their most important issue, are dire. Consistent with these sentiments, Democrats did well in the 2025 elections, continue to clean up in special elections, and appear poised to have a very good election this coming November.

These favorable political winds have made it a great deal easier for Democrats to ignore the need for change. Surely the American people have now woken up, are rejecting Trump and Trumpism once and for all and will never be seduced by right populism again.

But we’ve heard all that before haven’t we? In 2018. In 2022. And now in 2026 with gusto. How quickly they forget.

There was a brief shining moment right after the 2024 election when it did seem like the scale of the debacle would force a real reckoning within the party. But that trend quickly dissipated as #Resistance fever gripped the party, the usual suspects mounted stiff resistance to any revision of party positions and momentum shifted to the energized progressive left within the party.

Currently, the desire for change seems to be hovering around zero, as more and more Democrats have convinced themselves that their problems have essentially been solved. Here at The Liberal Patriot, we know all about that. Funding for our modest enterprise, always precarious, has now completely dried up. Our view that the party has neither solved its problems nor is even very close to doing so has tanked our appeal among partisan Democratic donors, even reform-oriented ones, who now tend to regard us with suspicion. A little heterodoxy is fine but there’s a limit! Hence: no money.

So we are forced to close our doors. The Liberal Patriot, alas, will be no more. “[P]assed on…no more…ceased to be! [E]xpired and gone to meet [its] maker!…Bereft of life…rests in peace!…kicked the bucket…shuffled off [its] mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!” You get the idea: we are now an ex-site.

To wrap things up, let’s review some of those Democratic problems that have not been solved. This is but a selection from a broader rogues’ gallery of problems that continue to bedevil the party.

The culture problem. This is a big one. The yawning gap between the cultural views of the Democratic Party, dominated by liberal professionals, and those of the median working class voter is screamingly obvious. One approach to this problem would be to actually change some of the Democratic Party positions that are so alienating to those voters.

Nah! That would be way too simple plus would create fights within our coalition plus…we’re on the right side of history aren’t we so why the hell would we change our correct, righteous positions? Democrats have instead chosen a different path, aptly summed up by Lauren Egan:

It didn’t take long after the 2024 election—in which their party lost the White House and the Senate—for Democratic leaders to identify the problem: The party had drifted too far to the left on social and cultural issues.

It also didn’t take them long to come up with a solution: simply to shut up about it…

[I]n my conversations over the past few weeks, strategists and campaign staffers I’ve talked to across the country have argued that in order to win back working-class voters, Democrats just need to jiu-jitsu uncomfortable cultural questions about race or gender into criticism of the billionaire class…

The shut-up-and-pivot approach is not without merit. As its proponents see it, people vote largely on economics…But the dismissiveness of cultural issues as not ‘real issues’ that actually matter to voters—and therefore not worthy of formulating an opinion on—has left some party operatives on edge. They worry that by not engaging, Democrats will continue to be perceived as condescending and untrustworthy. They fundamentally don’t believe that the party can win back working-class voters and prevent a lasting GOP majority by pretending these issues simply don’t exist.

Those unnamed party operatives are correct. The shut-up-and-pivot approach won’t solve the underlying problem, even if in the short-term it may be adequate for leveraging thermostatic reaction against the Trump administration. It is trading short-term gain for long-term pain.

The working-class and rural voter problem. This brings us to the Democrats’ working-class and rural voter problem, also screamingly obvious from long-term trends and the results of the 2024 election. Of course, Democrats take comfort from the copious evidence that many of these voters are now having second thoughts about their support for Trump and the GOP. This can be seen both in low Trump approval and future Republican voting intentions relative to those voters’ 2024 levels of Trump support.

But there is little evidence that declining enthusiasm for Trump has been matched by increased enthusiasm for the Democrats among these voters. Indeed, a careful recent study by Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams for the invaluable Center for Working-Class Politics finds that “waverers”—those Trump supporters who now say they are not planning to vote Republican in 2028—are overwhelmingly not supporting the Democrats but rather supporting neither party or generally disengaging from politics.

In short, Democrats have not yet made the sale among these voters even if they do bank some improvements in working-class support in 2026 as seems likely. They are still viewed with suspicion among these voters and not regarded as “their” party. Current Democratic efforts to reverse that perception are limited by the party’s preference for candidates who simulate a populist working-class affect while still having the “correct” positions on cultural issues—in other words, a liberal professional’s idea of what a rural or working-class person should be like.

The candidacy of Graham Platner for the Democratic Senatorial nomination in Maine is a good illustration of this dynamic. As James Billot notes:

Platner likes to present himself as a gruff, no-nonsense prole who, like Cincinnatus abandoning his plow, felt compelled to enter the race by the sheer weight of national misery. After bouncing between several schools in Maine, he enlisted in the Marines in 2004 and served in Iraq and Afghanistan. A brief spell at George Washington University, a stint tending bar, and another War on Terror tour (this time with the private military company formerly known as Blackwater) followed before he returned home to become an oyster farmer. It was only after Democratic consultants “discovered” him—in a video for a local group opposing a Norwegian company’s plan to build a large salmon farm off his hometown of Sullivan—that he entered the political arena.

What tends to be omitted from this narrative is that his upbringing wasn’t quite so hardscrabble. Platner’s grandfather was a renowned architect, known for his work in modernist interior design; his father, Bronson, is an Ivy-educated lawyer and Democratic donor; his mother, Leslie Harlow, is a local activist and entrepreneur runs a restaurant in Bar Harbor, which happens to be the main client for Platner’s oysters. Thanks to the family largess, he enrolled at the elite Hotchkiss School before moving to another private school six months later—a fact he tries to play down.

OK, from an affluent professional family, attended Hotchkiss, sells his oysters to his mom’s upscale restaurant—now that’s a proletarian. Albeit an exemplary proletarian who wants to abolish ICE, supports biological boys in girls sports and generally sees debate about Democrats’ unpopular cultural positions as a “billionaire-funded distraction.” That’s the kind of working-class dude that gives liberal Democrats the warm fuzzies; actually-existing rural and working voters less so as polling data from the primary race indicates.

No wonder that, as Billot summarizes:

For all the campaign’s talk of winning over Trump voters and bringing back the popular classes, his coalition is composed mostly of #Resistance liberals, college students, and crunchy retirees. That may be enough to win the primary, and perhaps even the general. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for a durable re-realignment, or evidence that Democrats have rediscovered a winning formula for 2028.

Even in a rural town that had supported Trump, Billot could not find any Republicans at a rally for Platner.

Everyone I spoke to was a lifelong Democrat, their first rally likely predating Jimmy Carter. They were less worried about finding common cause with the other side than about Trump putting them in concentration camps. Others even asked Platner, hopefully, if the army might consider mutinying.

We’ll likely see more of these faux working-class candidates who strike a populist tone but are otherwise culturally compatible with the priorities of professional class Democrats, whose formidable infrastructure and fundraising clout can make or break them. That will ensure that Democrats remain mostly uncompetitive in the red rural and working-class states Democrats need to carry to have a prayer of taking and keeping the Senate and, increasingly, to prevail in the Electoral College where voting strength is flowing away from high education blue states.

The trans “rights” problem. Every once in a while, some Democratic politician ventures a mild dissent from the trans activist agenda. Without exception, they are met with a brick wall of intense intra-party opposition which typically results in a hasty retreat by said politician. It is truly a litmus test issue.

Read more…

Public opinion continues to sour on Trump, and the Iran War is making it worse, as I explained at New York this week:

Three weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, it’s going badly for Donald Trump: spiraling energy prices, confused messaging, diplomatic disarray, and ever-lengthening timelines for conclusion of the conflict. The war is as unpopular as Trump himself, though the administration is urging the media and the public to focus solely on its military successes. The commander-in-chief’s public approval is already weakening, with the worst very likely still to come. And things aren’t going very well on the home front, either, between gas-price shocks and long waits for screening at airports caused by a fight in Congress over the administration’s outrageous immigration enforcement practices.

In the Silver Bulletin polling averages, the president’s net job approval dropped to a new second-term low last week, and fell still more this week (it’s now at minus-16.7 ; at RealClearPolitics Trump’s average net job approval has also reached a second-term low of minus-15.0 percent). The mix of pollsters — some of whom would show Trump as relatively popular under any conceivable circumstances — builds some instability into the president’s numbers, but the overall trend lines are pretty clear. His job-approval average (now at 40.0 percent at Silver Bulletin) has been under 43 percent since mid-December; his job-disapproval average (now at a second-term high of 56.7 percent) has been over 54 percent since the beginning of the year. His current job-approval rating is lower than that of any president at this point in his first term dating back to World War II. That includes his own first term.

The war isn’t helping him. Now that it’s been part of the daily news for a while, the percentage of Americans with no opinion about the war has dropped steadily, and we can get a sense of the underlying level of support. It’s net negative in every recent poll. In the most recent surveys, the percentage of Americans supporting the war ranges from a low of 33 percent at the Daily Mail, to 35 percent at Reuters/Ipsos, to 37 percent at Economist/YouGov, to 40 percent at CBS News and Emerson, to 43 percent at Morning Consult. Polls with crosstabs invariably show strong support among self-identified MAGA folk (78 percent, according to a March 16 Economist-YouGov survey), with declining support among Republicans generally (73 percent) and Trump 2024 voters generally (69 percent). In the same poll, support for the war drops to 25 percent among Hispanics, 23 percent among independents, and 22 percent among those under the age of 30.

In terms of what happens next in the Middle East, polls consistently show majorities of Americans opposing the introduction of U.S. ground troops. The recent Economist-YouGov survey, for example, shows 64 percent of Americans opposing that development, and even a slight plurality of MAGA supporters opposing it. A more nuanced set of questions from Reuters-Ipsos, however, indicated that if ground troops are limited to “special forces” operatives, it wouldn’t be as strongly unpopular: While only 7 percent of Americans would support a “large-scale invasion,” 34 percent would support a “special forces only” deployment (a percentage that rises to 63 percent among Republicans, aside from the 14 percent who would back a full-on invasion).

Aside from the war, Trump’s approval numbers on specific issues remain underwater and relatively stagnant. According to the Silver Bulletin averages, he’s at net minus-9.8 percent (a bit better than when ICE atrocities were dominating the news) on immigration, minus-21.7 percent on the economy, and a dreadful minus-32.7 percent on inflation. These last two numbers bear watching if, as expected, high gasoline and other energy prices persist and other economic indicators remain shaky as the war drags on.

The generic congressional ballots showing party preferences in votes for the U.S. House remain solidly if not overwhelmingly pro-Democratic. Silver Bulletin pegs the Democratic advantage as 5.3 percent; it’s at 3.8 percent at Decision Desk HQ and 4.8 percent at Real Clear Politics. For what it’s worth, at this point in 2022 RCP gave Republicans a 3.5 percent advantage in the generic congressional ballot, and the GOP ultimately posted a net gain of nine House seats and flipped control of the chamber. With Republicans holding a mere two-seat majority in the House right now, there’s a lot of reason for Democrats to be optimistic about breaking up the GOP trifecta in November.

From “Trump’s TACO Tuesday sees him cave to Republican pressure on deal with Democrats to solve airport chaos. White House official says president will now reverse course on his hard-line over a DHS deal as airport security lines cause headaches nationwide” by John Bowden at The Independent:

Donald Trump reversed course and will accept an offer from Democrats to reopen parts of the Department of Homeland Security, excluding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and end the nation’s growing airport delays, a White House official said on Tuesday.

Homeland Security, which includes both ICE and the Transportation Safety Administration, has been in shutdown mode since February as Democrats have refused to vote to authorize ICE funding unless a set of reforms to immigration enforcement operations and tactics were made nationwide. Among those reforms is a requirement that ICE obtain judicial warrants before conducting searches and an end to roving enforcement operations.

That has left the nation’s airports in turmoil as TSA agents have gone unpaid and are calling out sick and quitting in droves, resulting in hours-long security lines at the nation’s busiest airports. Trump, meanwhile, has deployed ICE agents to the airports as a supplement, even though those agents are not trained in security screening. As a result, congressional discomfort over the increasingly dire situation in the nation’s airports is weakening resistance on both sides of the aisle, as senators seek an off-ramp to the deadlock.

Democrats on Monday offered the White House and Senate Republicans a deal that would reopen every part of DHS, excluding ICE, and allow Republicans to attempt to reauthorize funding for ICE through a budget reconciliation package that would only require 50 votes to clear the Senate. A White House official told NewsNation on Tuesday that the president had decided to accept the offer.

The flip-flop from Trump — the kind of reversal on a hard-line stance that has come to be known as TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) among his critics — came a day after he insisted that Republicans not “make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats” and urged them to work through the Easter break if necessary to force through his voter ID initiative.

More here.

Democrats reportedly offered at least ten different compromises to end the mess at the nation’s airports. All of the people who have waited four hours in Airport lines and longer, while watching ICE agents check their phones and hang around the food courts, are not going to get their time back. The episode provided an instructive illustration of how much Trump values the time of Americans who had to travel this week. The only question is will they remember the lesson in November.

From “Lessons From Old Machines and Modern Activists Can Save Dems’ Ground Game” by Chuck Rocha, President and Founder of Solidarity Strategies and Jake Braun, CEO of JBC Campaigns and the former deputy national field director for Obama for America 2008, at Campaigns & Elections: “Field organizing in the Democratic Party has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. Until the 1970s, contacting voters for national elections could reliably be handled at scale by only a few groups in the Democratic coalition: urban political machines and organized labor…National leaders from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson entrusted much of their political fate to these “machine” bosses like Ed Flynn, Tom Pendergast, Richard Daley and George Parr… These machine groups were critical to national election success because they could reliably scale voter contact across key battleground states. Less obvious today is that they were also effective because they employed local party faithful – often through patronage – who developed personal relationships with voters…These folks understood their neighborhoods, knew how to persuade residents and ensured that once convinced, those voters turned out on Election Day. This focus on human-to-human interactions turned out to be grounded in hard, scientific evidence. Academic research from the 1970s through 2024 consistently demonstrates that human-to-human interaction has the largest impact on voter behavior of any campaign tactic…  In the 1980s and 1990s the machines disintegrated in corruption scandals and organized labor’s membership declined. After two devastatingly close losses to George W. Bush at the turn of the century, party tacticians like David Plouffe assessed the inability to reliably scale and contact targeted voters across battleground states as an existential threat to the 2008 Obama Campaign. Plouffe brought field organizing in-house and scaled it to reliably contact millions of voters across the battle ground states.

Rocha and Braun continue, “However, after Barack Obama, party leaders largely ignored the third core requirement: building sustained relationships between activists and voters…After the 2012 campaign, field operations became bureaucratized and layers of management multiplied to ensure scale and reliability.  Success was increasingly defined by pristine bureaucratic process rather than vote totals. For example, canvassers began knocking doors in the middle of weekday afternoons to demonstrate to the burgeoning Democratic Party bureaucracy that every door had been knocked, even though almost no voters are home in the middle of a weekday afternoon…  Consequently, answer rates at the door hovered around 5 percent in 2024  down from about 30 percent just a few cycles earlier. Field became a self-licking ice cream cone where one bureaucratic process fed another and goals shifted from conversations that drive votes to metrics that drive bureaucratic processes…Field was dead in the national Democratic Party…As our bedrock constituency of working-class voters turned more Republican in 2024, it’s crucial we both maximize turnout among our base and persuade swing voters. Both of these tasks require face-to-face interactions. Caller ID and Ring cameras are ubiquitous, and Americans have retreated from community groups that could impact voting behavior, so human-to-human interactions at the door are critical. To address this, during the 2025 New Jersey campaign, in Passaic County, we tested a simple premise: return to what works, but execute with modern tools.

Braun and Rocha add, “First, we made the radical decision to knock doors when people were home: evenings and weekends…Second, we reduced bureaucratic processes and used technology common in other industries to manage and quality-control canvasser work. This lowered overhead, allowing us to charge the campaign less and pay canvassers more. Higher pay and bonuses reduced turnover and kept activists on doorsteps talking to voters…Third, we kept canvassers in the same turf. This increased answer rates at the doors, which is just common sense.  If a stranger knocks on your door once, you may ignore them. But if you repeatedly see the same person in your neighborhood and hear that your neighbors had positive conversations with them, you are more likely to open the door on the second, third or fourth attempt… Conversation quality improved as well. Canvassers remembered prior interactions and understood which issues mattered most to specific voters…The results were significant. Passaic County swung 30 points in 2025 versus the prior trend dating back to 2017. We are under no illusion that canvassing did 30 points.  Trump did that. However, compared to other parts of the state where these tactics were not implemented, our contact rate reached 18 percent—nearly four times the national party nadir of 5 percent. We estimate that added roughly 8,000 votes to the final tally relative to comparable counties…,As a party, we must stop wasting money on field programs that value bureaucratic process over electoral outcomes.  Instead, we must take a page from the old machine bosses and modern activists alike and both reliably scale voter contact efforts while at the same time facilitating relationships between activists and voters…,Only then will we be able to recreate the ground game that installed progressives like FDR and Obama in the White House.” More here.

In “GOP Grows More Unpopular, More Desperate. Feeling cornered, Republicans are willing to try anything but shift to policies Americans want,” Jill Lawrence writes at The Bulwark: “The SAVE America Act is the latest of many voter-suppression ploys from Donald Trump, a hot mess of a president determined to rule America at all costs and for however long he wants. He is pressuring congressional Republicans to pass the bill, which would require documentary proof of citizenship (usually a passport or official birth certificate) in order to vote. A 2024 survey found that over 21.3 million eligible voters nationwide—roughly 9 percent of the total—don’t have such documentation or easy access to it. It’s an open question which party would be hurt more if SAVE manages to become law…All this for a cause—“election integrity”—that scored literally 0 percent in a January poll asking registered voters to name the most important problem facing the country…What is wrong with Trump and so many in his party? Would it kill them to rethink a policy or two? Must they cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, which is enormously popular across the political spectrum, to give an average tax cut of $100,000 to the top 1 percent, when nearly two-thirds of Americans say the rich should pay more? Did Trump really need to start an unprovoked war against Iran that most Americans oppose, with no GOP pushback? And why does Trump keep railing against voting by mail, which is how 48 million people cast their 2024 ballots?…The political upshot is that after winning a surprising share of price-sensitive working-class white and Latino voters in 2024, and persuading at least some pundits he had wrought a miraculous realignment, Trump has now lost them. “The voters Trump gained in 2024 are now his worst defectors,” analyst G. Elliott Morris wrote last week, based on his polling (with Verasight) of over 7,000 U.S. adults from May 2025 to February 2026…“Trump’s presidency should be viewed as an anti-worker presidency,” Morris added. “I don’t say that from a partisan perspective, but based on the numbers.” Numbers like 108,000 manufacturing jobs gone, despite Trump’s promises to “revive” manufacturing, and policies that are driving up prices instead of making life more affordable.” More here.

From “Trump casts a mail ballot again in Florida even as he calls the method ‘cheating.’ The president cast a mail ballot in an upcoming Florida special election, according to county records” by Jane C. Timm at nbcnews.com:

President Donald Trump cast a mail ballot in an upcoming Florida special election, according to Palm Beach County records, as he publicly condemns the voting method as fraudulent.

“Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating. I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all,” Trump said Monday.

Public records indicate his mail ballot was received and counted by election officials in Palm Beach County, where he is registered to vote, though the records don’t detail how it was delivered to election officials.

It’s a familiar refrain — and action — from Trump, who has often criticized mail voting as rife with fraud. He has used such rhetoric to push a massive elections overhaul bill in Congress called the SAVE America Act.

…This isn’t the first time Trump has voted by mail while condemning the method: He did so in 2020, too.

At that time, NBC News asked Trump how he reconciled his criticism of mail-in voting with the fact that he voted by mail.

…Trump blamed the expansion of mail-in voting during the pandemic in 2020 for his loss in his second presidential bid, though there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in American elections. Since then, mail has been at the center of Trump’s repeated false claims about election security.

…Voters cast ballots through the mail in at least 32 countries, according to tracking by a Swedish organization, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, which says it “supports democracy worldwide.”

Apparently. Trump’s influence in his upscale home district is limited. As The Guardian’s Dan Anguiano reports in “Democrats flip seat in Florida state house in district that includes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago“:

Democrats managed to flip a seat in the Florida state house in the district that is home to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago.

Emily Gregory, a Democrat, defeated Republican Jon Maples, who had an endorsement from the US president, in the special election in Florida’s 87th state house district. The Associated Press called the race on Tuesday evening, with Gregory, a public health expert and small business owner, leading by more than 2 percentage points.

The Republican who previously held the seat had won by 19 percentage points in 2024.

Trump voted in the race via mail-in ballot, despite criticizing the practice as “mail-in cheating” during an event in Tennessee this week. The president has long attacked voting by mail, describing it as a scam and arguing it creates fraud in elections. He still opted to vote by mail in the race although he was recently in Palm Beach, where early in-person voting was under way until Sunday.

The president had urged voters to back Maples, a financial adviser who describes himself as an “America-First patriot”. Maples had faced scrutiny in recent weeks over allegations that he did not live in the district in which he was running, claims that he denied.

Democrats have said that Gregory’s win shows voters frustrated over rising costs are moving away from Trump and the Republican party.

“Mar-a-Lago just flipped red to blue, which should have Republicans sweating the midterms,” Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said on social media. “A Trump +11 district in his own backyard shouldn’t be in play for Democrats, but tonight proves Republicans are vulnerable everywhere.”

More here.

At Strength in Numbers, G. Elliott Morris writes in “Trump has lost working-class whites” that “new data from the University of Michigan’s monthly Survey of Consumers shows consumer sentiment cratering to an index value of to 55.5 in March, with survey director Joanne Hsu correlating the decline with higher inflation expectations in interviews conducted after the strikes. This chart shows people are getting really worried about gas prices in particular, but also inflation in general…And gas is just the latest blow. The February jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed payrolls declined by 92,000 — the third time in five months that the economy has shed jobs. This month, unemployment ticked up to 4.44% (dangerously close to rounding to 5%). Year-over-year CPI is running hotter, and that’s before you account for (a) the fact that the BLS changed data sources for legal services last month, leading to an artificially lower inflation reading or (b) the full impacts the war with Iran will have on everything from food to building materials…“On day one, we’re bringing prices down,” Donald Trump promised crowds throughout 2024. But every major piece of data we have on prices is going in the opposite direction…New national data from the Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll finds that as Trump’s policies are making voters’ lives more expensive — not less — they’re turning on him fast. As I wrote on March 10, the voters Trump gained in 2024 are now his worst defectors…In this week’s Deep Dive, I explore additional race-by-income data on Trump’s approval, showing you how the president has lost ground — particularly with the white and Hispanic working-class voters he promised his presidency would rescue…”

“Until the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran took center stage,” Justin Vassallo writes in “Is Economic Nationalism Fading Among Voters?” at The Liberal Patriot, “Trump’s unyielding faith in tariffs had become his party’s chief liability heading into the midterms. In some ways this was unsurprising, given their broad scope and negative impact on grocery prices and other household goods. Yet the discontent also reveals the growing chasm between the allure of economic nationalism in the abstract and support for its practice à la Trump. Trump, it must be remembered, owed his rise to the liberal establishment’s conflicted response to the twin forces of deindustrialization and globalization. On top of his pledge to radically curb immigration, he successfully campaigned on overturning the global trade order in 2016 and did so even more emphatically in 2024…Many economists warned that his agenda threatened to reignite inflation, scramble supply chains, and raise input costs for domestic manufacturers. But it was to no avail. Despite the Biden administration’s attempts to piece together its own “post-neoliberal” trade and industrial strategy, millions of Americans—not least younger men who had no memory of the debates over NAFTA and China joining the WTO—appeared willing to try Trump’s brasher approach, regardless of the turbulence and complications likely to transpire…Trends since Trump’s return to office suggest the appetite for such experimentation has waned precipitously. Sixty percent of Americans “strongly or somewhat approve” of the Supreme Court’s ruling against Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to a recent YouGov survey; a new survey commissioned by The Guardian shows seven in ten Americans believe they are paying higher prices because of tariffs. Other polls similarly indicate around two thirds of Americans oppose Trump’s handling of trade policy, with strong pluralities reporting they don’t think it will revive manufacturing at all. Trump’s base has become restive, too. In recent weeks, Trump has received some of his lowest approval ratings among working-class whites since he first galvanized their swing to the GOP.”

From “Working People Are Leaving MAGA, But Where Will They Go? Working class voters need a home, but the Democratic Party refuses to build them one” by Les Leopold at Common Dreams: “Run more working-class candidates in the Democratic Party?…That’s what most progressives argue for. They believe that such candidates can attract these disgruntled workers back into the Party. As one progressive campaign operative said to me, “Our goal is to once again make the Democratic Party the party of the working-class.” That’s also what the League of Labor Voters and the Working Families Party are trying to do…But it’s an uphill struggle. According to the Guardian:…“Millionaires make up less than 3% of the general public but have unified majority control of all three branches of the federal government. Working-class Americans, on the other hand, make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded….For every former bartender like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there are thousands of ambitious candidates who are well-off members of the bar…The Democratic Party brand is in big trouble. In the study the Labor Institute conducted with the Center for Working-Class Politics (again with Jared Abbot, that boy gets around), 70 percent of the 3,000 voters surveyed in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin had negative things to say about the Democrats. And a hypothetical Democratic candidate ran 8 percent behind an independent candidate even when they said exactly the same things…That makes it next to impossible to launch Democratic working-class candidates in the 130 congressional districts in which the Democrats already lose by more than 25 percent. In those areas, the Democratic Party is not just dying, it is dead…I’m not holding my breath. I truly believe that it will be much harder to wean the Democratic Party from its wealthy donors and consultants than it will be to run independent working-class candidates in red areas. But that prediction won’t matter until more working people, and their allies, jump into the fray as independents.”

In “Why Trump’s Approach to Affordability Is One Big Illusion,” Layla A Jones writes at Talking Points Memo: “More than one year into that second term, U.S. voters and politicians are now grappling in real time with a conundrum out of Washington: What happens when a president who doesn’t think affordability is a real problem tries to fix it?…“He thinks he has a political problem but not a policy problem,” Michael Negron, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who studies affordability, told TPM. “And so you can see that in the policy ideas, because either they’re often not attacking the central problem or they’re small or complicated and not really going to do much for people.”…Consumer sentiment in February plummeted 13% compared to the previous year and was down 21% from January 2025, according to the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index. At 35%, Trump’s approval rating on the economy is the lowest it’s been during his second term, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll published last Wednesday…The president’s marquee legislative priorities, from mass deportation to federal workforce reduction and sweeping tariffs, stack the deck against affordability. To address voter grumblings, the Trump administration, experts told TPM, is constructing a house of cards…After Democrats won consequential elections nationwide and gained voter shares in red regions of the country in November’s elections, Trump infamously wrote affordability off as a hoax, a “new” word and concept employed by Democrats to drum up anti-GOP voter engagement…In state and local elections, Democrats blew out races that were supposed to be close and Trump’s winning 2024 coalition showed significant signs of splitting, in part after low- and middle-income voters swung away from the GOP…Trump’s most obvious priorities either contribute to inflation, depress wages and employment, or both. There’s the aggressive anti-immigration enforcement actions which have seen tens of thousands of people — and workers — removed from the U.S. Economists predicted that Trump’s tariffs would drive up prices, though most of those price hikes have been eaten by companies who’ve yet to pass the full cost of imports to consumers…Rather than empathize with voters whose trust polls reveal he’s losing, Trump waved off energy price concerns as “short-term” and a “very small price to pay” in a Truth Social post.”

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

Democrats once understood the importance of economic growth. That’s because growth, particularly productivity growth, is what drives rising living standards over time. Democrats sought to harness the benefits of growth for the working class, not to interfere with the economic engine of progress. They believed in the future and the possibilities for dramatic improvement in human welfare.

Democrats’ 21^st century project has, at its core, been dedicated to other goals. They now prize goals like fighting climate change, reducing inequality, pursuing procedural justice, and advocating for immigrants and identity groups above promoting growth. For example, the “Deciding to Win” report analyzed word frequency in Democratic Party platforms since 2012 and found a 32 percent decline in the appearance of the word “growth” compared to a 150 percent increase in the word “climate,” a 1,044 percent increase in “LGBT/LGBTQI+,” a 766 percent increase in “equity,” an 828 percent increase in “white/black/Latino/Latina,” and a 333 percent increase in “environmental justice.”

This is remarkably short-sighted. The key to substantially rising living standards for the working class—once the Democrats’ prized goal—is precisely more economic growth, especially higher productivity growth. You cannot make up for that by redistribution nor by simply spending more money on government programs. A fast-growth economy provides more opportunities for upward mobility, generates better-paying jobs, creates fiscal space for priorities like infrastructure projects, and, as Benjamin Friedman has argued, has positive “moral consequences” by orienting citizens toward generosity, tolerance, and collective advance. Slow growth has the opposite effects.

It is therefore completely unrealistic for Democrats to think they can accomplish their goals and build support without centering the goal of economic growth. Attempts to elide this problem have resulted in heavy reliance on chimerical projects like a rapid green transition which have not and cannot deliver the benefits of overall growth. Or, as in the Biden administration, just spending money on various party priorities and hoping for the best. (“Make Spending Money Great Again,” did not work.)

With that in mind, it is instructive to examine the Democrats’ latest economic proposals and see where they fall short—and frequently massively so.

Start with “affordability”—the Democrats’ mantra of the moment. One does not have to be a cynic to see that affordability is not a program but a slogan, designed to take advantage of voters’ strong dissatisfaction with the Trump administration’s economic management. They feel the prices they pay for key commodities are no better aligned with their incomes than they were under Biden (perhaps worse)—and they weren’t happy about it then.

Hence the slogan “affordability.” If voters don’t feel things are affordable, well, we’ll promise to make things affordable. Of course, that’s not much of an economic program and, by definition, has nothing to do with growth. The result has been a grab bag of price caps and controls, subsidies and new regulations that may or may not do much to make everyday life more affordable but at least signal that Democrats want to do something about the problem. Long-term beneficial effects on the economy are neither claimed nor likely.

Nearly as popular as affordability—and frequently twinned with the affordability pitch—is a populist denunciation of the rich and big companies who are alleged to be responsible for high prices and nearly everything else that’s wrong with the economy. As James Talarico, Democratic candidate for the Senate in Texas put it:

What I would say is that the only minority destroying this country is the billionaires…We are all focused on the wrong 1 percent…Trans people aren’t taking away our healthcare. Undocumented people aren’t defunding our schools…It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians.

Countless Democratic politicians have made variations of this claim. But such claims have no logical connection to a coherent economic program and certainly have nothing to do with economic growth. What they do connect to is, well, taxing the rich. In particular, there is now a vogue for wealth taxes in Democratic circles including the notorious “billionaires tax” in California, a ballot initiative that would levy a 5 percent tax on net worth over $1 billion using estimates inflated by voting control rather than economic interest.

Going further, Democrats on the national level have twinned taxing the rich with free money and that old Republican favorite, tax cuts. The Bernie Sanders-Ro Khanna proposal would go California one better and makes the 5 percent wealth tax annual rather than a one-time levy, directing the revenue toward, among many other things, “a $3,000 direct payment to every man, woman and child in a household making $150,000 or less — $12,000 for a family of four”. Free money—now that’s an economic program!

Read more…

For the most part, 2028 presidential polls aren’t that meaningful. But for one once-and-possibly-future presidential candidate, signs of home state weakness could be significant, and I wrote about it at New York:

There’s an old tradition in American politics whereby the last presidential nominee is referred to as the “Titular Leader” of the party, to be displaced, if at all, at the next party nominating convention. According to that tradition, Kamala Harris is owed considerable deference if she chooses to attempt a comeback in 2028. It’s hardly unprecedented for a losing major-party presidential candidate to win subsequent renomination: it’s happened eight times in U.S. history, most recently in the very election Harris lost. And anyone would have to admit that Harris’s defeat came with rather a large Joe Biden-sized asterisk.

Still, there’s a lot of merited skepticism about a Harris return to the biggest arena in politics in 2028, aside from doubts as to whether she will even try it. It’s not like she’s actually won a contested presidential nomination before: in 2019 she dropped out of the race before voters voted, and in 2024 she inherited the nomination when it was too late for anyone to challenge her. Yes, she’s doing relatively well in early 2028 polls (though suspiciously, her best showings invariably seem to be polls conducted by overtly pro-Republican outfits like Rasmussen Reports, I&I/TIPP and Harvard-Harris), but a lot of that is probably due to name ID rather than a sober assessment of alternatives. But there’s one constituency that knows her very well: her home state of California, where she served in public elected office from 2002 until her elevation to the vice presidency in 2020. And initial polling there doesn’t look particularly golden for Kamala Harris.

A Politico survey of a Democratic presidential test ballot in California released on March 12 showed Harris trailing her friendly career-long rival Gavin Newsom by a 28 percent to 14 percent margin. Harris barely led Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (12 percent) and Pete Buttigieg (11 percent) in the poll. And there was worse home-state news for the former vice president:

“She struggles even more in a concurrent survey of POLITICO’s audience of key political and policy influencers in the state, including political staffers, lobbyists, policy advisers and others — the kind of people most familiar with the former state attorney general and U.S. senator.

“Harris, whose rise in politics had mirrored Newsom’s for decades back to their early days in San Francisco, until she was chosen as vice president, draws support from just 2 percent of political and policy influencers likely to vote in the Democratic primary, compared to 17 percent who back Newsom, according to the survey.”

Actually, in the California “influencer” survey, Harris ran not only behind Newsom, AOC and Buttigieg, but behind Mark Kelly, Josh Shapiro, Andy Beshear, J.B. Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore and Rahm Emanuel. That is some bad home cooking.

One poll could be an outlier, but now there’s another: a new survey from the respected Berkeley-IGS polling operation shows Harris running a mediocre fourth:

“28% of the state’s Democratic voters now select Newsom as their first choice to be their party’s nominee should he launch a bid for president in 2028. New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez places a distant second at 14%, followed by former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg at 11%.

“Former Vice President and California Senator Kamala Harris trails, receiving just 9% support among Democratic voters in her home state, while Arizona Senator Mark Kelly places fifth at 7%.”

This kind of standing in a place where she has appeared on statewide ballots five times is concerning. Yes, you can argue that she has a national base beyond California, especially among Black and Asian-American voters. But her lack of strong support in the largest state in the union, which happens to be her own, will be of considerable concern to donors, activists and other power brokers with a role to play in 2028. If Harris wants to run again, she should mend some fences in California.

Here’s a stub of  “What US Spending on the War in Iran Could Fund Instead” by Nick Popli at Time magazine:

From “The White Working Class Is Quiet Quitting Trump. Alas, that doesn’t necessarily mean Democrats are winning them back” by Timothy Noah at The New Republic: “Bill Clinton was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win the white working class (conventionally defined as “white non-college voters,” i.e., white voters who lack a college degree). In 1992, Clinton won 55 percent of this cohort, and in 1996 he won 53 percent. No Democratic presidential candidate has won the white working class since, even though it was once a core Democratic constituency. A lot of people say the reason is that Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Act into law and normalized trade relations with China, thereby beggaring American factory workers…One of these people appears to be Robert Reich, who by his own admission didn’t achieve all that much for working people as Clinton’s Labor secretary from 1993 to 1997. “The Democratic party … abandoned the working class,” Reich told the journalist Kara Swisher last summer. “To some extent I allowed it to happen. I didn’t fight as hard as I should’ve fought. Deregulating finance and allowing global trade to dominate the way it did and taking our eyes off monopolization and not really encouraging unionization as much as we should have. I mean, all of these ways contributed to disempowering millions of people in this country and ultimately helped lead to Donald Trump.”…To say the Democrats lost the white working class after 1996 is not to say the Democrats lost the entire working class. A lot of people conflate these two groups, but the working class, which was overwhelmingly white when its political influence stood at its peak in the mid-20th century, is a lot less white now. And although the working class stopped voting reliably Democratic after the 1960s, no Democrat in the last century ever got himself elected president without winning the working-class vote—with one exception.”

Noah notes, further: “The exception was Joe Biden in 2020. It’s a great irony, since Biden was the most pro-labor president since Harry Truman and had a strong affinity for working class people. Even so, Biden won the 2020 election while losing the working class–which is to say, the overall multi-ethnic working class—to Trump, 47 to 51. My boss, TNR editor Michael Tomasky, has concluded from this that Democrats can win in 2028 with less than a working-class plurality. In Tomasky’s view, “all a future Democrat needs to do” is match Biden or gain a point or two more. But I think Biden’s 2020 victory without a working-class plurality was a fluke, and that Democrats must keep chasing working-class majorities. Working-class voters were, after all, 57 percent of the electorate in 2024 (when Kamala Harris lost them to Trump, 43-56 percent). To win the most votes you tend to need the biggest constituencies…Winning back Latinos and Blacks who drifted to Trump in 2024 shouldn’t be that hard. In October Axios reported Blacks (84 percent) and Latinos (70 percent) to be the two groups most dissatisfied with the country’s direction under Trump, and in January the BBC reported that Latino support for Trump had dropped from 49 percent at the start of his presidency to 38 percent. And that was before the Iran war sent oil prices through the roof.”

In addition, Noah writes, “A survey this month by Jared Abbott of the Center for Working Class Politics and Joan C. Williams, emeritus law professor at University of California San Francisco, found that among those who voted for Trump in 2024, 45 percent of Black working class voters and 28 percent of Latino working class voters said they won’t vote Republican in 2028. “Wavering rates are highest,” they wrote in Jacobin, “where race and class intersect: Low-income, noncollege black and Latino voters — the very people whose shift toward Trump was most celebrated by Republicans — are the most likely to leave.” In last year’s Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, nonwhite working class voters drove Democratic victories. The conventional wisdom going into election night was that Mikie Sherrill was struggling to close the deal with New Jersey voters; she ended up winning handily, and Latino voters were a big reason why…Winning back working-class white voters is of course, a much taller order But Trump is making that easier, too, with every passing day. According to G. Eliott Morris, a former data analytics guy at The Economist and Five Thirty-Eight, low-income white voters favored Trump by 22 points in 2024. Now Trump’s 4 points underwater with them—a 26-point swing. Middle-income white voters have swung 14 points away from Trump; they favored him by 16 points in 2024 but today favor him only by 2 points…A Marist poll last month told the same story. Fully 49 percent of white working-class respondents said they disapproved of the job Trump’s doing (46 percent approved). Out of the 49 percent who disapproved, 42 percent said they “strongly” disapproved.” Read more here.

In “Health Care Is the Way for Democrats to Win,” Anahita Dua writes at The Progressive: “As a surgeon, I see every day what happens when policies and politicians fail patients. When people are in pain, they don’t want talking points. They want solutions. And they want leaders who understand what it means to sit with someone who is scared, hurting, and out of options… That is why health care is more than just another campaign issue. It is the clearest path through which the Democrats can win back control of Congress in 2026…Last fall, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the expiration of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies at the end of 2025 would leave millions more Americans without health care coverage and force many families to pay thousands more each year just to keep their current coverage…Estimates from KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation) predicted that marketplace premiums under the ACA could rise by more than 75 percent for many enrollees due to these lost credits. Employer-based health insurance is no refuge either. The average annual premium for family coverage is now close to $27,000, with workers paying a growing share out of their pockets…But the lived reality behind those numbers is what Americans feel every day. It is the parent choosing between asthma medication and groceries. The small business owner who can’t afford to offer insurance coverage anymore. The woman in a red state driving hours for basic reproductive care. The cancer patients who now must drive two hours for chemotherapy because their local hospital has closed…The result is that health care costs now rank among voters’ top concerns in battleground districts from Arizona to Pennsylvania. This is why Democrats should be focusing their attention on this issue, with support from groups such as mine, Healthcare for Action…If Democrats want to win in 2026, they must double down on health care and focus on the root of our country’s illness: the steady gutting of our health care system by Trump, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and MAGA Republicans.” Read more here.