From Politico comes a warning for Democrats, “Why Europe’s center left can’t stop losing” by Aitor Hernandez-Morales and Jacopo Barigazzi, who write:

Europe’s social democratic parties are collapsing — and their leaders don’t seem to know how to reverse the trend.

For much of the 20th century, center-left parties rooted in trade unions and industrial labor were among Europe’s dominant political forces.

But today, many of them are politically unrecognizable — or in dire straits.

The latest example is Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, which last week suffered a dramatic slump in national elections. Although the party scored the most votes overall, its results were the worst since 1903.

Working-class electors frustrated by the party’s inaction on cost-of-living issues gravitated to the far-right Danish People’s Party, while left-wing voters frustrated with Frederiksen’s willingness to partner with the center right and take a hard line on migration defected to the Green Left.

Giacomo Filibeck, secretary-general of the Party of European Socialists — the pan-European entity comprising all of Europe’s national social democratic parties — told POLITICO the poor results were attributable to “anger” over the governing center-left party’s handling of the affordability crisis. The issue had become more pressing “due to the war in Iran, which raised energy prices and more,” he said.

Vagn Juhl-Larsen, a local-level Social Democrat party chairman in Denmark, put it more bluntly. “Voters have no respect for a party that does not pursue its own politics,” he said, slamming the Social Democrats’ leadership for giving up on “red” political values.

The situation in Denmark is hardly unique.

After 35 years of uninterrupted rule, Germany’s Social Democratic Party lost its hold on the industrial state of Rhineland-Palatinate in last week’s regional elections, where debate over the stagnant economy dominated the campaign. That defeat followed a March 8 thumping in Baden-Württemberg, where the SPD got just 5.5 percent of the votes cast.

In France, meanwhile, the center left claimed key cities such as Paris and Marseille in this month’s municipal elections, but remains missing in action at the national level. Over the past decade the once-dominant Socialist Party has declined so steeply that it was forced to sell its historic headquarters to pay off debts, and today controls just 65 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly.

“The center left does not seem to know where it fits in Europe right now,” said political analyst Rodrigo Vaz, a former deputy attaché at Portugal’s permanent representation to the EU. “And that identity crisis has led it to defend policy programs that are indistinguishable from those of the center right — a strategy that is neither clear, nor appealing for voters.”

The centrist dilemma

Europe’s center left was built on industrial workers, union members and working-class communities — a base that once powered leaders like Willy Brandt and François Mitterrand.

But that world no longer exists. Since the mid-1980s, deindustrialization has shrunk the traditional blue-collar workforce, while union membership has declined across the continent. Europe’s social democratic parties have yet to find a coherent response to the changes in their traditional voting bloc.

“The center left has yet to come up with a new social contract, one that addresses the concerns of modern-day society,” Vaz said. “There’s no clear narrative on where social democrats stand on automation, artificial intelligence or the future of work.”

More here.

If you look back from the day-to-day grind of political news at the big picture of Republican policy priorities right now, it’s amazing how much militarism at home and abroad we are seeing, as I pointed out at New York:

With all the bickering between Republicans over the Department of Homeland Security shutdown, it’s easy to miss something pretty important. Now Trump and congressional Republicans are attempting to pre-fund ICE and the Border Patrol for three more years without a single new “guardrail” on the conduct of immigration-enforcement agents. Since they are using the budget-reconciliation process to get this done, Democrats will have zero leverage over ICE practices until Trump has left office, even if they flip one or both houses of Congress this November.

So the struggle over immigration-enforcement policy that flared up when masked agents started killing U.S. citizens in Minneapolis is essentially over for the time being. Perhaps as a matter of public relations the administration will try to rebrand “mass deportation” as something else, but there’s no reason to believe they won’t proceed full speed ahead in doing the dirty work of rounding up, incarcerating, and removing millions of immigrants, many of whom came to America legally. Indeed, there is a new MAGA-aligned coalition arising that is pressing for a major increase in deportation goals, likely by targeting the employers of undocumented immigrants. No matter the packaging, armed and masked agents hunting down immigrants on an unprecedented scale will continue.

Meanwhile, there’s no question Trump’s second term has elevated war-fighting to job No. 1. The president is gambling vast political capital on an unpopular and strangely aimless conflict with Iran that has embroiled the entire Middle East and put America’s relationship with its long-standing NATO allies on life support while risking economic calamity as well.

And aside from the political (and human) costs of Trump’s horrifying new emergence as a warlord, it’s costing a lot of money too — to the point where it’s crowding out other priorities in a federal budget already drowning in red ink, as Trump’s own budget for the next fiscal year will demonstrate, Bloomberg reports:

“President Donald Trump is preparing to release a fiscal year 2027 budget plan on Friday that will frame his party’s midterm election message around a massive defense buildup, partially paid for by cuts to domestic agencies.

“A governing vision that directs tax dollars to the Pentagon amid an unpopular Iran war represents a political risk for the White House, especially against a backdrop of spiking gasoline prices. Trump could also face resistance from within his own party over envisioned cuts to health and science agencies that Congress rejected last year on a bipartisan basis.”

Trump has sworn since his first presidential bid that he won’t touch the “third rail” of cuts in Social Security or Medicare. So his twin devotion to mass deportation and a huge and regularly deployed military means everything else is literally under the gun. The president seems frustrated with the inability of people to understand this simple matter of arithmetic, as NBC News has reported:

“President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s ‘not possible’ for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to ‘take care’ of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending.

“The president’s remarks were delivered to attendees at a private Easter luncheon at the White House, where Trump also accused Democratic-led states of fraud.”

“He went on to say that he told Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, ‘don’t send any money for daycare, because the United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. You got to let a state take care of daycare, and they should pay for it too.’”

It’s reasonably clear a significant majority of Americans have priorities other than mass deportation and “whatever wars.”

No wonder the president’s job-approval ratings are in free fall. A militarized America is not what a lot of Trump 2024 voters bargained for. They will be heard from in November.

From “Bashing billionaires isn’t helping progressives win the working class” by Will Marshall, founder and president of Progressive Policy Institute, at The Hill:

The Working Class Project, which has extensively surveyed non-college workers’ attitudes, is skeptical that the left’s pitchfork populism will make it more receptive to Democrats. “They do believe that our political system is broken — and that it has been influenced by the rich and powerful to make things easier on those at the top while failing to deliver for those at the bottom.”

they really want us to crack down on corruption and those who abuse the system to benefit themselves.”

As a white man from Texas put it in one of the project’s focus groups, “Politicians use billionaires as scapegoats for their own failures of not fixing the tax code, not fixing issues with this country.”

Nonetheless, progressives insist that Democrats can only reach non-college voters by amping up the volume on class warfare.

There’s a lot at stake in statehouses in November, as I explained at New York earlier this week:

There will be 36 gubernatorial elections in November with each party defending 18 governorships. The overall partisan balance is currently close with Republicans holding 26 governorships and Democrats 24. Each party has a clear and achievable goal. The GOP is trying to avoid the usual midterm pattern of losses by the party controlling the White House (which has happened in 16 of the past 20 midterms), while Democrats are seeking their first national majority of governorships since their catastrophic losses in 2010.

Since governors have their own agenda and they command media attention that most members of Congress can only envy, national partisan divisions aren’t strictly transferable to gubernatorial elections. But in this day and age, straight-ticket voting is still ascendant and partisanship matters, as Sabato’s Crystal Ball observes in looking at the 2026 races:

“Republicans hold 22 of the 25 governorships in states that voted for Donald Trump all three times he was on the ballot (the exceptions are Kansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina), while Democrats hold 17 of the 19 states that never voted for Trump (New Hampshire and Vermont are the exceptions).

“Of the half-dozen states that backed presidential candidates from both parties in the last three elections, Democrats hold four (Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) and Republicans hold two (Georgia and Nevada). So Democrats are competitive with Republicans in the overall count despite there being more red states than blue states because they are doing better in the swing presidential states and they are a little more extended into redder states than Republicans are extended into bluer states.”

Among the red states with Democratic governors, two of them (Kentucky and North Carolina) are not holding gubernatorial elections in 2026. The current two-term governor of Kansas is Democrat Laura Kelly, who is term-limited and has benefited enormously from divisions in the GOP ranks. If Republicans can stay united, they will be favored to capture this governorship. Similarly, deep-blue Vermont’s very popular (and non-MAGA) Republican governor, Phil Scott, hasn’t announced his plans for 2026. If he retires, Vermont will almost certainly elect a Democrat.

One big question in the more numerous purple states with competitive 2026 governor’s races is whether a national Democratic breeze will flip what the Cook Political Report calls toss-ups in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. All five of these states were carried by Joe Biden in 2020 and by Donald Trump in 2024. Here’s a closer look at these crucial races.

Arizona

Arizona is an intensely competitive state with a vibrant MAGA culture — sometimes too vibrant, as Democrat Katie Hobbes’s 2022 win over Kari Lake illustrated. Now, Hobbes is running for reelection with decent but not overwhelming job-approval numbers (53 percent approve, 35 percent disapprove, according to Morning Consult). The big development has been among her Republican challengers with the very wealthy and arguably more electable Karrin Taylor Robson dropping out recently. That made former House Freedom Caucus chair Andy Biggs the GOP front-runner, though Congressman David Schweikert is also in the race. Handicappers had considered this contest a toss-up, but most have now re-rated it as leaning Democratic with the arch-reactionary Biggs the likely GOP nominee. The primary is on July 21, with no runoff requirement.

Georgia

Brian Kemp has held on to Georgia’s governorship for eight years despite unfavorable shifts in the state’s political demography and Trump’s hostility toward him. (The president tried but failed to purge Kemp from office in 2022 after the governor joined Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Georgia.) Kemp twice defeated Democratic rock star Stacey Abrams. Now he’s term-limited, and the battle to succeed him has become a wild multi-candidate brawl. Among Republicans, Raffensperger and another 2020 non-election-denier, state attorney general Chris Cox, were facing Trump endorsee and state lieutenant governor Burt Jones in a relatively quiet race. Then a self-funding billionaire health-care executive, Rick Jackson, jumped into the contest and began running abrasive ads aimed at both Jones (whom he called lazy and corrupt) and Raffensperger (ads simply call him “Judas”). Georgia, importantly, does require a majority vote to win party nominations, so in this crowded race a May 19 primary is all but certain to lead to a June 16 runoff. Right now, Jackson (who is trying to get Trump to back off his exclusive Jones endorsement) and Jones are leading the polls, but Raffensperger and perhaps Carr still have a shot at a runoff spot.

Watching the Republicans somewhat from the shadows is a sizable Democratic field that formed even before Abrams declined a third gubernatorial run. The clear front-runner is former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is doing especially well among the large Black Democratic-primary electorate. Hoping to make a runoff against Bottoms are former state lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan, a party-switcher who pivoted hard against Trump but is trying to live down past conservative policy positions; Black political pioneer Michael Thurmond, most recently CEO of the large Atlanta suburb DeKalb County; and state legislator Jason Esteves, an up-and-comer who is both Black and Latino. Going into the cycle, Republicans were thought to have an advantage in this race, but between the name-calling and mud-throwing of GOP candidates and a midterm pro-Democratic breeze, that has changed.

Michigan

What makes the race to succeed term-limited Democrat Gretchen Whitmer unusual is the independent candidacy of former Detroit mayor (and until recently a Democrat) Andrew Duggan. With a business background and a record associated with Detroit’s economic comeback, Duggan has significant labor backing and some appeal to voters in both (and beyond both) major parties. But you get the sense he’s drawing more from Democratic front-runner and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who is campaigning as a center-left can-do pol in the mold of Whitmer. As a result, Republican front-runner John James (a two-term congressmen who built name ID and a strong identity as a Black conservative with two losing but credible Senate races in 2018 and 2020) is running slightly ahead overall in three-candidate polls. James is having to fight off several other Republican candidates, including 2024 presidential aspirant Perry Johnson. Michigan’s primaries aren’t until August 4, and there is no majority-vote requirement. Duggan will probably either fade by November or become a seriously competitive candidate who could win.

Nevada

Nevada could be an important barometer for 2026. Trump carried the state in 2026, and his signature “no tax on tips” initiative is especially popular here. There’s a reasonably popular incumbent Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, whose electoral base is in Democratic-leaning Las Vegas. But iffy economic prospects and a pervasive cost-of-living crisis in Nevada are creating a big Democratic opportunity in 2026. Early polls show Lombardo essentially tied with the Democratic front-runner, two-term attorney general and former legislator Aaron Ford, the first Black politician to hold a statewide elected office in Nevada. Ford does have a significant primary challenger in Washoe County (Reno) commission chair Alexis Hill, who is running notably to the front-runner’s left. But Ford’s advantage in name ID, endorsements, and fundraising is probably too much for any challenger to overcome before the June 9 primary.

In the general election, Lombardo will be saddled with incumbency in a less-than-ideal election year, and Ford must cope with negative publicity over out-of-state travel during his long tenure in public office. But it’s likely to be as close as the 2022 election, when Lombardo edged out the then-incumbent Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak. Nevada is that kind of state.

Wisconsin

Democrats have been on a recent upswing in the quintessential battleground state of Wisconsin, making gains against entrenched Republican majorities in the legislature and in the judiciary. But one key position they’ve held for eight years now, the governorship, is up for grabs in 2026 with incumbent Tony Evers choosing to retire. Republicans have quickly coalesced around the gubernatorial candidacy of House Freedom Caucus congressman Tom Tiffany, whom Trump endorsed in January. But Democrats have a huge field with no real favorite. The best known candidate by far is former state lieutenant governor Mandela Barnes, who lost a 2022 Senate race to Ron Johnson that a lot of observers expected him to win. But with an August primary (there is no runoff requirement in Wisconsin), there’s plenty of time for other candidates to challenge him. One to watch is Mandela’s successor as state lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, a suburban Milwaukee politician who has made Medicaid expansion her signature issue. Another is David Crowley, who became Milwaukee County’s first Black executive in 2020 at the age of 33. There are also two viable candidates from the progressive bastion of Madison. One is state senator and veteran abortion-rights champion Keldra Roy. And another is state legislator and professional chef Francesca Hong, a self-identified socialist.

A February Marquette Law School poll of the Democratic gubernatorial field showed Hong with 11 percent, Barnes with 10 percent, and no one else out of single digits; 65 percent were undecided. A TIPP poll in March matching Tiffany against three Democrats showed him leading Hong by 3 percent but trailing Barnes by 2 percent and Rodriguez by 3 percent. So this race has a long way to go.

The gubernatorial races highlighted above aren’t the only potentially newsworthy contests, of course. Republicans are thought to have a solid advantage in Ohio, where Trump has won three times and Republicans have controlled the governorship since 2010. But likely GOP nominee and 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is in a very close race with former state health director Amy Acton. Similarly, in Iowa, where the bottom has fallen out for Democrats since 2014, state auditor Rob Sand, the only Democratic statewide elected official left, has a shot at the governorship thanks to the very unpopular performance of retiring incumbent Republican Kim Reynolds and the large GOP field lining up to replace her. Perhaps the weirdest possibility in the whole country is in California, where a scattered ten-candidate field in the state’s nonpartisan top-two primary could in theory send two Republicans to the general election and lock out the Democrats, who have an enormous majority in the electorate. So don’t get too fixated on congressional elections. There’s plenty of drama down-ballot.

In “American Consumers Will Pay for Trump’s War with Iran. The front line for many is at the grocery store, the gas pump, and in our electronics,” Jeff Nesbit writes at The Contrarian: “For the American consumer, the real Strait of Hormuz tax won’t just be paid at the pump. It will be felt in the pharmacy and the grocery checkout line as well…The most immediate threat is to the American dinner table. Approximately one-third of the world’s fertilizers traded by sea, including urea and potash, are currently stranded behind the blockade. This disruption has arrived at the worst possible moment: the northern hemisphere’s spring planting season…In the Midwest, farmers are facing a brutal calculus. With urea prices jumping about 50%, the cost of planting corn (a nitrogen-heavy crop) is skyrocketing…This isn’t just a problem for farmers. It’s a precursor to higher prices for beef, poultry, and pork, all of which rely on corn for feed. With no real end in sight for the war, we’re looking at a scenario in which a maritime blockade in the Persian Gulf dictates the price of a gallon of milk in Ohio…Further into the typical U.S. household, the tech sector is bracing as well. Qatar, for instance, accounts for roughly 30% of global helium capacity, a resource that is currently offline because of infrastructure damage that could take years to repair.” More here.

Aaron Blake explains why “Why Trump might regret his historic visit to the Supreme Court” at CNN Politics: “Presidents have avoided attending oral arguments to negate even the appearance of trying to unduly influence a coequal branch of government. But Trump is happy to browbeat whomever it takes to get what he wants. And he’s reserved some of his most pointed recent criticisms for Supreme Court justices he appointed who have occasionally ruled against him…Trump seemed to want to send a signal to judges, who have increasingly proven his biggest obstacles in his second term. The fact that he chose to attend even amid the war with Iran — and hours ahead of a primetime address to the nation on the conflict — would seem to reinforce that…But combined with a series of adverse recent court rulings, his presence at the Supreme Court risked reinforcing how little he can control the judicial branch…The policy at issue on Wednesday was Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship. On the president’s first day back in office last year, he sought to effectively overturn the more-than-century-old interpretation that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to the children born to noncitizens on US soil…Trump left the hearing shortly after Sauer wrapped up and as the justices began questioning ACLU national legal director Cecillia Wang…We’ll likely have to wait until June or July to hear what the court rules. But based on the arguments, it seems possible the decision could be even more lopsided than Trump’s 6-3 defeat in the tariffs case…It would even seem possible, judging by Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s questions, that all three Trump appointees could rule against him.” Regardless of the merits of the “anchor baby” argument, Trump’s attending the session will probably add to his image as a  reckless president who doesn’t respect the separation of powers or anything else in the Constitution.

Also at CNN Politics, Ariel Edwards-Levy shares “What Americans thought about Trump’s Iran strategy before his Wednesday address,” and writes, “Just one-third of the public believes President Donald Trump has a clear plan to handle the situation in Iran, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, underscoring the deep skepticism ahead of his Wednesday night White House address on the war…Americans’ already broad disapproval of US military action in Iran has grown since the start of the war, the poll found. Just 34% of Americans now say they approve at least somewhat of the US decision to take military action in Iran, down 7 points from a CNN poll conducted just after the start of the war. Disapproval has risen to 66%, with strong opposition climbing 12 points to 43%…With a growing share of the public now calling a long-term military conflict between the US and Iran at least somewhat likely, most Americans are wary of deepening involvement. A 71% majority say they’d oppose Congress authorizing spending $200 billion to fund further US military action in Iran, as the Pentagon has proposed. A similar 68% are opposed to sending ground troops into Iran…Democrats and independents remain broadly opposed to the US deploying ground troops, but Republicans also break narrowly against the idea. Even Republicans identifying themselves as part of the “Make America Great Again” movement tilt against ground troops: 32% oppose the idea while 25% favor it. Among non-MAGA Republicans, 56% oppose it, with 20% in favor…Trump’s approval rating for handling the situation in Iran sits at 33%, just below his overall 35% approval rating and his 36% rating for foreign policy. And 33% now say they approve of his handling of the role of commander in chief. That’s down 8 points from a January poll taken in the immediate aftermath of US military action in Venezuela and 5 points below his previous presidential low. About 6 in 10 say he has gone too far in trying to expand America’s power over other countries, little changed since January.” More here.

In “The House: 11 Rating Changes in Democratic-Held Seats; Non-Presidential Party Typically Doesn’t Lose Many of Their Own Seats in Midterms,” Kyle Kondik writes bat Sabato’s Crystal Ball that “this isn’t going to be a year like 2006, when the president’s party didn’t flip any seats, and the Republicans could very well end up exceeding the average presidential party seat gain since 1954 (a modest five seats), with redistricting being a major reason why. Democrats, meanwhile, are already favored in six Republican-held seats in our ratings, all but one of which—the open NE-2, from which Republican Rep. Don Bacon is retiring—were made bluer by redistricting, most notably by the new Democratic gerrymander in California. NE-2, at Harris +4.5, was the bluest district won by a House Republican in 2024…But beyond these aforementioned districts, one would not expect Republicans to cut much further into current Democratic districts, particularly because this is not shaping up to be a year like 1998 or 2002, exceptionally good midterms for the presidential party. Rather, it looks more like a normal midterm, as President Trump’s approval rating is only barely above 40%, with a little bit of recent slippage coinciding with the strikes on Iran and subsequent gas price increases. Democrats generally have had the wind at their backs in elections held so far this cycle, although it’s also fair to note that their roughly 5-point lead in congressional generic ballot polling is not as robust as it was in 2018…Since we looked above at the challenges for the presidential party in flipping seats defended by the non-presidential party, we’re going to focus on Democratic-held seats in today’s rating changes…we continue to await what could be a very impactful U.S. Supreme Court decision on the fate of majority-minority districts. But the longer we wait—another decision announcement day came and went yesterday without the decision being released—the less likely it is that the decision has a big impact on 2026, whatever the ruling ultimately says. But this is still a wild card for 2026…Democrats remain favored to flip the majority in November, which has been our assessment of the race for the House since we released our initial ratings nearly a year ago.” More here.

Jonathan Cohn reports in “Dems Quietly Start Their Next Big Health Care Effort: They want to undo the damage done by Trump—and some are laying the groundwork for bigger reforms,” in The Bulwark’s The Breakdown:

THERE ARE SIGNS that the deate about health care in America is about to get out of the rut it’s been in for about fifteen years—and that Democrats are preparing for the moment when it does.

Ever since 2010, the most high-profile fights in Washington have been about the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid. Mainly that’s because Donald Trump and the Republicans keep attacking those programs—as they did last year when they enacted the largest-ever cuts to Medicaid, then refused to extend lapsing “Obamacare” subsidies that had helped millions to get coverage, and reduced premiums for many millions more.

Democrats are determined to reverse those two steps, somehow, and you can expect them to make that a rallying cry in their campaigns for November’s midterm elections. But at least some Democrats don’t want to stop there. On March 19, a dozen of the party’s senators released an open letter announcing their intention to develop policies that would address a broader topic: The underlying increase in health care costs that is affecting everybody, not just people who are uninsured, on Medicaid, or buying coverage at HealthCare.gov.

The roughly 170 million Americans who get coverage through their employers are now paying (directly and indirectly) an estimated $27,000 a year on average for a family policy. “The American people need relief from rising premiums and deductibles that are forcing families into financial ruin,” the Senate Democrats wrote in their letter. “They also want an insurance system that doesn’t require them to jump through hoops and hack through red tape every time they need care.”

That may sound like a bunch of frothy boilerplate, given that the letter contained no specifics. But it’s not just these Democratic lawmakers who say it’s time to have a broader conversation, one that goes beyond undoing what Trump and the Republicans have just done. You hear the same thing from prominent analysts and advocates like Anthony Wright, president of the pro-coverage, pro-consumer organization FamiliesUSA.

“I do think people recognize that, as we wage the fight to defend coverage and consumer protection and specific communities under attack, that we don’t fall into a trap of defending the status quo that people thought rightly was broken,” Wright told me in an interview. “We need to show that we have a plan, not just to repeal bad stuff, or even to rebuild—but to reimagine what the health system should look like.”

That kind of reimagining can’t happen right away. Trump and the Republicans seem incapable of putting forward serious reform proposals, unless they involve hacking away at insurance coverage for people who need it. And the first chance Democrats might have to govern with a trifecta is nearly three years away. But it’s with an eye to that possibility that Democrats and their allies are starting to plan now—to make sure they are “prepared to take action on these issues the next time Democrats have an opportunity,” as the Senate Democrats put it in their letter.

And there’s an unmistakable parallel here, to a politically similar time when Democrats and their allies started laying the groundwork for future legislation. “This moment feels a bit like twenty years ago,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, told me in an interview, “when groups of policy experts, advocates, and politicians started to talk about health care ideas that ultimately coalesced into the passage of the Affordable Care Act.”

But the challenge is different this time, and in some ways more difficult. Reducing health care costs inevitably involves reducing the flow of money into somebody’s pockets, which just as inevitably angers powerful constituencies and industry groups. Democrats aren’t even close to having a consensus on what to do. And 2029 is a lot closer than it might seem.

Read more…

In “As birthright citizenship goes to Supreme Court, here’s how Americans feel about it,” Domenico Montanaro writes at npr.org: “The Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday on whether all children born in the United States can continue to automatically receive citizenship…The decision, not expected for months, could reshape what had been a longtime, constitutionally enshrined practice that has been challenged by the Trump administration…Public opinion on the issue is complicated. Americans are heavily in favor of granting citizenship to children born to parents who were also born in the U.S. — or to those who immigrated to the U.S. legally. But they are split on — or much less in support of — automatic citizenship for children born to parents who immigrated illegally…Public opinion is nuanced on birthright citizenship and can depend on how pollsters ask the question…When surveys ask about birthright citizenship in general, people largely say they are supportive. But that support begins to crumble when respondents are asked about the parents’ legal status — with significant divisions by party, race, age and how they get their information…A Public Religion Research Institute survey from December found two-thirds are in favor of granting citizenship “regardless of their parents’ citizenship status.” A large-sample poll by Civic Health and Institutions Project, or CHIP50, a survey done in conjunction with multiple universities, found 59% in favor of keeping it…But both showed higher support than other surveys, and both mentioned in their questions that the right is found in the U.S. Constitution.”

Montanaro adds “Other surveys have found less support. For example:

• An NPR/Ipsos poll last year found a slim majority (53%) against endingthe practice with 28% in favor. (It asked if people supported or opposed ending the practice.)

• The Pew Research Center showed that more than 9 in 10 support birthright citizenship for those born to parents who immigrated to the U.S. legally, but — by a 50%-49% margin — were divided on giving it to those born to parents who are in the country illegally. (Pew asked if certain groups should or should not be considered U.S. citizens.)

• A YouGov poll had 51% in favor with 39% opposed. But that dropped considerably for those not in the country legally. Just 31% said they were in favor of granting citizenship to babies of people who are “undocumented,” as the survey put it, and only 25% for tourists visiting the U.S. (YouGov also did not mention that birthright citizenship is in the Constitution in its questions.)”

Montanaro notes further, “Many polls fairly consistently show majorities of Democrats, Latinos, Black Americans and those who are younger are in favor of birthright citizenship, while majorities of Republicans, especially white Republicans, are against…For example, Pew found three-quarters of Democrats in support of granting citizenship to children of those who immigrated illegally, but only a quarter of Republicans supported it…There is a split among Republicans, though. Only 18% of white Republicans are in favor, but 55% of Republican Hispanics are in favor…By race regardless of political party, Pew found three-quarters of Latinos and 61% of Black Americans were in favor of birthright citizenship for those whose parents immigrated illegally, but only 48% of Asian Americans and 42% of whites were…CHIP50, similarly, found 8 in 10 Democrats support birthright citizenship “regardless of their parents’ immigration status,” but only 39% of Republicans in favor. (It also found a much higher percentage of Asian Americans — 63% — in favor. YouGov found only 53% of Democrats in favor when the parents are “undocumented immigrants,” and an even lower 13% of Republicans supported that.)…Those under 50 were in favor of birthright citizenship if the parents “immigrated illegally” by a 58%-41% margin, according to Pew. But almost 6 in 10 of those 50 or older were against it…There was also a divide depending on how long the respondent has been in the United States. Two-thirds of second-generation Americans in Pew’s polling were in favor. But 55% of those who are third generation or higher were against it.”

From “Want to understand immigration enforcement in 2026? Read these 5 reports” by Austin Kocher at Journalist’s Resource, his subsection, “Immigration Enforcement in the First Nine Months of the Second Trump Administration  by Graeme Blair and David Hausman. Deportation Data Project, January 2026: “The Deportation Data Project, based at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law — in collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles — has been one of the most important initiatives in the immigration space over the past year. Their core contribution has been making the data available in the first place…Through repeated FOIA requests and litigation — they sued ICE when the agency failed to respond — they have obtained and published individual-level enforcement data that the administration has otherwise refused to share transparently. Without this project, we would have very little reliable information about what the Trump administration is doing on immigration enforcement…It’s really valuable that the team fought to get this data and took the time to analyze it. Given their deep knowledge of the datasets — and the limitations of the data — this report provides an authoritative summary and analysis that will be useful to researchers, journalists, and anyone trying to understand the full picture of what has happened over the first nine months of the second Trump administration…

• Interior deportations increased by a factor of 4.6. Street arrests, meaning arrests on sidewalks, at workplaces, and in communities — rather than transfers from jails and prisons — increased by a factor of eleven. For the two decades prior to 2025, ICE had relied overwhelmingly on custodial transfers for its interior enforcement. Street arrests at this scale are, as Blair and Hausman put it, “a new phenomenon.”
• Arrests of people without any criminal conviction increased sevenfold. Arrests of people with violent crime convictions increased by only about 30%. The shift away from targeting people with convictions was evident in both street arrests and custodial transfers.
• Once detained, virtually no one was released. Release within 60 days of arrest dropped from 16% to 3%. Voluntary departures increased by a factor of 21, a pattern the authors attribute to the coercive pressure of indefinite detention with no prospect of release. In July 2025, ICE issued guidance asserting that anyone who had entered between ports of entry was ineligible for bond regardless of how long they had lived in the U.S. Despite hundreds of federal court opinions finding this policy illegal, ICE and immigration courts have continued to apply it.

Still, the administration is not close to its stated goal of deporting one million people per year. At the most recent rate, the government would deport under 300,000 people annually. That is unprecedented in this century, but well short of the political rhetoric.” More here.

In his opinion essay, “Why Are So Many Democratic Politicians So Far Out of Touch?” at The New York Times, Thomas B. Edsall explains how Democrats sealed their own defeat in 2024 by bungling transgender issues:

Why don’t more Democrats explicitly moderate their stands on transgender rights, immigration and other issues? Those who maintain far-out positions are well to the left of the electorate and its emblematic median voter. The trans issue clearly weakened Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, leaving her open to devastating pro-Trump ads.

In the case of one of the most disputed rights claimed by some parts of the transgender activist community — transgender women’s participation on women’s sports teams — Democrats have clear liberal grounds to challenge that claim, by asserting that they are protecting a woman’s right from unfair competition.

But this phenomenon — drifting far from the median voter — is hardly limited to the left. There are many factors behind the reluctance of both Democrats and Republicans to shift to the center.

For one thing, donors, especially the growing legions of small donors, prefer more extreme candidates. Adding additional pressure, what have come to be known as “the groups” — advocacy organizations on the left and the right — demand fealty to policies that are sometimes politically costly; they threaten to support primary challengers to run against those who defy their authority. On a psychological level, Democrats and liberals are morally committed to protecting marginalized groups from harm and defending racial and sexual minorities.

Before exploring these pressures, let’s go to the dominant political fact of life working against moderation, which is that there are decisive majorities in both the House and the Senate that have no interest in abandoning more extreme stands. Many Democrats and Republicans won their seats with the promise to fight the partisan opposition until hell freezes over.

Edsall has much more to say about Democrats bumbling into extremist stereotypes, and he quotes TDS frequent contributor Ruy Teixeira extensively, and adds:

The one issue that has rapidly gained salience in the Democratic debate over moderation is transgender rights.

There is overwhelming evidence from polling that strong majorities of the electorate oppose discrimination against trans men and women in employment and education, reinforced by a firm conviction that trans people should be treated as equal members of society.

At the same time, majorities of voters oppose allowing trans women to join women’s sports teams, to allow trans men and women to use bathrooms based on their gender identity and to allow the assignment of criminally convicted trans women to women’s prisons.

Victor Kumar, a professor of philosophy at Boston University, argued in a July 2025 essay published on his Substack Open Questions that the backlash against the trans movement was

exacerbated by tactical errors. It was a mistake to insist that any concern about youth medical transition is transphobic. To habitually take the bait on marginal issues like trans-inclusive sport, particularly at elite levels. To deny that cis women can reasonably desire sex-segregated spaces in locker rooms, shelters and prisons. To adopt a maximalist politics of pronouns that shames people for honest mistakes.

Going into the midterm elections and the presidential contest two years from now, there is what can best be called a widespread churning in Democratic and liberal circles over transgender issues.

The Searchlight Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank founded last year, published “The Path Forward for Transgender Rights” on Thursday, a call for retrenchment on trans issues by Mara Keisling, the now retired founding executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality and a senior fellow at Searchlight. Keisling wrote:

There is broad support for protecting trans people from discrimination in housing, access to credit, employment and for ensuring that adults have access to the health care they need.

That said, Americans hold conservative attitudes where certain policies related to gender identity and transgender rights are concerned. Voters are especially focused on kids — from the bathrooms they use to the sports teams they may join, and access to hormone treatments and other forms of health care.

What, then, should the transgender movement do? Keisling:

We need to reset our approach to advocacy, public education and policy development regarding the rights and acceptance of transgender Americans. This means shifting our primary focus to education while continuing to try to enshrine core civil rights protections into statute.

On issues such as sports participation and kids’ access to health care, we should accept that we have more work to do to win hearts and minds, and focus on pursuing the smartest possible approach to bring more Americans over to our side.

The intense desire among Democratic voters to win puts some wind behind Keisling’s views, especially in the 61 competitive (or at least somewhat competitive) House districts, 28 of which are currently held by Democrats. Those races will determine which party controls the House in 2027. But given the power of the forces against moderation in the 374 safe districts, her agenda will be easier to admire than enact.

Read more here.

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.