Some nuggets mined from “Polls show rising regret among Trump’s 2024 voters” at msn.com:

Polls from YouGov/UMass Amherst and Strength in Numbers-Verasight reveal a steady erosion of confidence among Trump’s 2024 voters. In April 2025, 74% were “very confident” in their vote, but that figure has dropped to 62%, with 16% saying they would change their choice if given the chance. Regret is most pronounced among younger voters and Hispanics, doubling from last year’s levels in some surveys.

Who is expressing regret and why it matters

•Regret is highest among Trump voters under 30 years old (17%) and Hispanic voters (16%)

•Between 1 in 8 and 1 in 6 Trump voters express some measure of regret

•If these voters desert the GOP in 2026, it could trigger a wave election for Democrats

…CNN polling shows Trump’s approval among working-class white voters has dropped from 63% in early 2025 to just 49% now. Disapproval is also high among his 2024 voters on key issues: 30% on the economy, 28% on Iran, and 39% on inflation. Analysts link the decline to dissatisfaction with the Iran war, economic policies, and perceived betrayals of campaign promises.

…Gallup data shows Americans rank politics, not the economy, as the nation’s biggest problem, a divergence from global trends. Analysts say political instability—driven partly by Trump’s tariffs, trade wars, and foreign policy—has worsened economic pressures. This political dissatisfaction correlates with Trump’s high economic disapproval rating, suggesting governance concerns are fueling voter regret.

What the closure of The Liberal Patriot says about a party that can’t stop #Resisting.

This article by Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin is cross posted from The Boston Globe:

John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira are the cofounders of The Liberal Patriot, an online political newsletter that was published from 2021 to early 2026.

After the 2024 election, there was a moment when Democrats seemed mildly reflective about their political situation. The reality was stark. After vanquishing Trump in 2020, the party had managed to squander unified control of government with acute policy failures on issues ranging from immigration and the COVID response to inflation and the overall economy. And Democrats compounded the problem with far-left positions on issues like crime, transgender rights, and race that turned off more voters than they attracted, contributing to a strong perception that the party was woefully out of touch with working- and middle-class values.

As much as voters did not like the prospect of a second Trump term, they despised the Biden and Harris administration even more, particularly after an aging President Biden’s highly visible decline. Subsequently, Democrats lost voters across the board in 2024, with notable declines among Black and Hispanic men (22-point and 19-point shifts to Republicans, respectively), lower-income voters (a 14-point shift to Republicans), 18- to 29-year-olds (also a 14-point shift to the right), and non-college educated voters (a 7-point shift). The only two demographic groups of note that moved toward Democrats in the last election were white women (a 1-point shift) and women 65 years or older (a 5-point shift).

The historic party of America’s working class had reduced itself to a caricature of decrepit leaders, policy incompetence, and cultural elitism disconnected from the economic needs and social desires of everyday families. You would think this situation would lead party officials to confront what went wrong and to go through a serious process of policy and political regeneration. You would be wrong. Although some party members considered the dire state of their brand and economic message among voters in the aftermath of their defeat, many party officials and activists downplayed the second loss to Trump as merely an inflation-related fluke outside their control.

The Democratic National Committee deep-sixed its official autopsy of the 2024 election, saying it would be a “distraction” from helping the party move forward. Democratic heads went firmly into the sand. “Resistance” mania took over the party as Democrats chose to unite around nonstop criticism of Trump rather than devise a popular vision for governing that could win back the working-class voters of all races they’d lost to the president. The left grew in confidence — or arrogance depending on your point of view — insisting that economic populism alone would win the day and that few changes if any were needed in the party’s social agenda on immigration, transgender rights, race, and crime. The left’s basic strategic goal remains dispensing with moderates, displacing the establishment, and bashing “billionaires” and Israel repeatedly — not reforming the party to make it more attractive to a broad swath of working Americans who hold more conservative cultural views.

Yet how can Democrats move forward and build a sustainable electoral majority if they won’t even try to understand or accept what they did wrong in the first place?

This is where our publication The Liberal Patriot (TLP) came in. Started at the beginning of the Biden administration, TLP sought to help the Democrats reform themselves to better reflect the interests and values of working-class Americans — the vast majority of voters in this country — and to reject the extreme ideas of the college-educated elites who had taken over the party in recent decades.

The Liberal Patriot warned Democrats about the political effects of their open asylum policies on immigration. We warned them about the negative consequences of spending gazillions of dollars on dubious social schemes like “net zero” climate mitigation and student debt relief. We warned them about the limitations of “Bidenomics” and the political dynamics of soaring inflation. We warned them about negative reactions to their extreme positions on transgender rights, including their support for biological males playing in female sports. And we warned them that young people and working-class voters of all races were turning from the party and toward Trump.

At every turn, party elites and activists rejected our analysis and counsel and instead chose to pretend as if nothing were wrong with the Democratic brand and its approach to elections and majoritarian politics. Others said our diagnosis of the party’s problems might be correct, but since we didn’t embrace a narrow vision of populism fervently enough, we were “old and out of touch.”

They believe that “thermostatic” opposition to Trump has put the party back in the driver’s seat and that the more “authentically” left its candidates behave, like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the better the party can beat back the “fascists” and “authoritarians.”

The Liberal Patriot way of being “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America” — or economically nationalist and culturally moderate — did not find many adherents in the Democratic Party. So we recently folded the publication after more than five years and nearly 1,500 newsletters published.

We have no regrets about the analysis and political advice we offered Democrats. We grounded it all in empirical facts about the electorate and commonsense policy solutions to help Democrats rebuild a truly working-class party. Maybe they just aren’t interested in this approach. That’s how politics often works out.

Democrats will almost surely win one or both branches of Congress this fall and then will face a monumental choice in 2028: Reform the party to garner a broad mandate from the center-left and center-right of the electorate or continue to resist the current government and attempt to turn hatred of Trump into an Electoral College victory. We believe reform is the only way to fix the long-term challenges facing Democrats and begin the arduous process of regaining the trust of American voters. But we’re also realists and recognize that this advice may go unheeded by an elite political class that too often values resistance and orthodoxy over reason and heterodoxy. Let’s hope that some 2028 candidates are at least open to reconsidering Democrats’ strategic and policy objectives, for the country needs two strong and viable political parties to best represent the diverse interests of Americans.

In “Democrat James Talarico leads both Republicans in Texas US Senate race,” Gabby Birenbaum writes at Salon: “Democratic state Rep. James Talarico is leading both of his prospective Republican opponents in a new poll of Texas’ U.S. Senate race — though the result is within the margin of error in either scenario, suggesting a close contest in November…The poll, conducted by Texas Public Opinion Research from April 17 to 20, found Talarico leading Sen. John Cornyn by three percentage points, 44% to 41%. The Austin Democrat leads Attorney General Ken Paxton by a margin of five percentage points, 46% to 41%. The survey included 1,018 likely general election voters and had a margin of error of +/-3.3 percentage points…TPOR is a nonpartisan public opinion research group directed by Democratic strategist Luke Warford. No Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since 1994, and in recent cycles, polls have routinely offered rosy projections for the minority party that are not borne out in November…Still, Democrats are hopeful that President Donald Trump’s flagging approval ratings, paired with backlash from Latino voters over the economy and the White House’s immigration policies, will create an environment more akin to 2018, when Democrat Beto O’Rourke came within 3 points of unseating GOP Sen. Ted Cruz…Cornyn and Paxton are competing in a May 26 runoff to be the Republican nominee for Senate and take on Talarico, who won a competitive primary of his own in early March. A handful of polls throughout the cycle, some nonpartisan and some sponsored by Democrats, have found Democratic candidates with narrow leads or within the margin of error in hypothetical general election matchups…Talarico’s support is heavily powered by voters of color, college-educated Texans and independents. Among Black voters, Talarico leads Cornyn by 51 percentage points and Paxton by 56 percentage points. Among Latino voters, Talarico leads Cornyn by a 32-point margin and Paxton by a 27-point margin.” More here.

At The Hill, Ashleigh Fields’s “Democrat on Trump’s ballroom: ‘My constituents can’t afford f—ing groceries or utility bills’” captures a bit of the growing outrage over Trump/GOP”s effort to force taxpayers to pick up part of the tab for his gilded ballroom construction at the White House. “Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) on Tuesday railed against a push to fundPresident Trump’s White House ballroom, citing affordability concerns in her state and nationwide…“My constituents can’t afford f—ing groceries or utility bills, and he now wants to spend taxpayer money on a ballroom?” McBride told MeidasTouch in an interview…“They shouldn’t use a potential tragedy to try to secure funding from taxpayers for the president to have Great Gatsby parties in the White House,” she added, referring to the Saturday shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner…On Monday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) proposed a bill that would earmark $400 million to build the ballroom along with an underground military facility and Secret Service annex in case of national emergency. Trump’s original plan for the ballroom was for it to be completely funded by private donors and corporations, with the promise of recognition inside the space…The South Carolina Republican said taxpayers should pay for the infrastructure and donors could pay for decor and furnishings…Lawmakers said donor provisions “remain unclear” and asserted the “opaque nature of this scheme reinforces concerns that President Trump is again selling presidential access to individuals or entities, including foreign nationals and corporate actors.”

Oliver Millman reports that “Trump’s attempt to crush clean energy progress not going to plan, experts say: US generated more power from renewables including solar and wind than gas last month in a first” at The Guardian. “Donald Trump has wielded the full might of his administration to crush the progress of clean energy, which he has called a “scam” and “stupid”. But there are signs this assault is not going to plan…In March, the US generated more of its electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind than it did via gas, the first time clean energy has surpassed the planet-heating fossil fuel for a full month nationally, according to data from the Ember thinktank…While this was just one month, it follows a record 2025 for renewable energy. The pipeline of new power coming online in the US is overwhelmingly green this year, too, with 93% of all electricity capacity added in 2026 set to come from solar, wind and batteries. Just 7% will come from the fossil fuels that are dangerously overheating our world…The undaunted pace of the renewables rollout comes as the Trump administration’s attempts to stymie the industry have floundered in court…Last week, a federal court in Massachusetts blocked a slew of Trump’s anti-renewables actions, such as barring solar and wind projects on federal land. This follows the resumption of five major offshore wind farms, a form of energy the president has long reviled as “ugly”, that the administration had ordered to halt…All of this has boosted optimism among clean energy advocates who have felt under siege during Trump’s second term…Wind, solar and batteries are now far cheaper and quicker to construct than gas and coal plants, causing a market “tipping point” that Trump cannot reverse, according to Davidson…The US’s budding clean energy sector had been left shellshocked by Trump’s hostility after he returned to the White House and enacted sweeping rollbacks to environmental rules in a bid to bolster the fossil fuel interests who donated heavily to his presidential campaign.”

“The false choice between “moderate” and “progressive” has trapped Democrats in an irrelevant debate while democracy hangs in the balance,” Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach write in “How Not to Defeat Authoritarianism” at The Boston Review. “The real divide isn’t left versus center—it’s whether Democrats view Trump as an aberration to be waited out or as an authoritarian threat that requires an extraordinary response. Journalist Ronald Brownstein recently identified this fault line: those who view authoritarianism as a “distraction” from kitchen-table issues versus those who see it as the existential crisis defining all other questions. The “distraction” camp still operates by 1990s rules, counseling moderation and patience, trusting failed institutions…This brings us back to a crucial point: successful anti-authoritarian movements don’t win by moderating their positions on a traditional left-right axis but by creating an entirely new one. They mobilize previously disengaged citizens by framing the struggle not as a contest over policy, but as a fight for the fundamental fairness of the system itself…Democrats can keep debating whether to stand five degrees or fifteen degrees left of center, fine-tuning messages drowned out by the latest Trump spectacle. They can chase moderate voters our data shows won’t materialize while their base stays home. They can maintain faith that reasonableness will eventually triumph…Or they can accept the evidence: the old rules are dead. In a nationalized media environment with an authoritarian movement capturing one major party, electoral politics has become existential conflict. This requires not moderation but mobilization, not positioning but purpose, not just messaging but genuine reform to prove that Democrats will fight for democracy itself by first attacking the corruption that rots it from within…You defeat them by being more determined and by uniting the country against their most visible vulnerability: their corruption…The choice now is to transform the party’s strategy to meet the scale of the threat, or to fail. In this contest, failure is not just an electoral defeat; it may be the end of democratic self-governance.”

The perpetual debate over how the 2026 midterms are developing took an odd turn after Virginia’s gerrymandering vote, and I wrote about it at New York in pursuit of some clarity.

In the wake of the GOP’s defeat in Virginia’s recent gerrymandering initiative, a dangerous illusion is arising once again in the Republican ranks: the idea that base mobilization alone can deliver electoral victory.

This is a perpetual temptation for ideologues on both the left and right sides of the spectrum. Why bother with having to compromise your principles in the pursuit of all those confused and selfish swing voters when you can just double down on a hardcore message that motivates the party base to rush to the polls? This has been a particularly durable fantasy for Republicans in recent years since nobody panders to the base like Donald Trump. He has, of course, won two out of three presidential elections without paying the usual lip service to bipartisanship or even to public opinion.

This idea popped up after the Virginia voting because it’s clear turnout in deep-red parts of the state was indeed elevated, making the final result closer than many had anticipated. And thus the highly influential Republican strategist Patrick Ruffini spotted a potential path to victory — or at least a better result — in November:

“Absent a victory, Virginia provides Republicans with a rare optimistic counterpoint to the building narrative of a Blue Wave. If the fight is framed the right way, Republican voters will turn out the same or better relative to Democrats than 2024, even with an unpopular president in the White House. And if they recreate this performance even to some degree, they are virtually assured control of the U.S. Senate and will hold their own in the House, with a fighting chance to keep their majority …

“Republicans beating the spread has less to do with coming up with better defenses of Trump’s policies than it does with getting Republican voters off the sidelines by convincing them that giving Democrats power is really a threat.”

Ruffini’s ray of hope for a base-mobilization triumph in November was reinforced by widespread GOP claims that Republicans stupidly let themselves be outspent in Virginia. The one asset the GOP definitely has going for it as the midterms approach is a vast financial advantage in national-party-committee and super-PAC assets, completely obliterating the Democratic advantage in individual candidate fundraising. Might a combination of an ever-raging Donald Trump, a party message warning that a Democratic win will spell an end for America as a country, and unlimited money do the trick? It sure sounds simpler than the hard, perhaps impossible work of convincing swing voters that Trump’s agenda of tariffs, wars, and demonization of minorities will be good for America.

But as left-of-center number cruncher G. Elliott Morris explains, Ruffini’s take is not a convincing interpretation of what happened in Virginia on April 21, much less what might happen nationally in November. For one thing, the close results in Virginia may have resulted more from confusion and ambivalence about the referendum among Democrats and especially independents than from supercharged GOP turnout:

“A State Navigate poll (fielded April 10-13) showed true independents breaking hard against the referendum — 56% against and 32% for. Those same independents had favored Spanberger by 24 points in our late October 2025 poll.

“And this is the problem with treating the referendum as a proxy for partisan preference. The same voter who voted for Spanberger in a normal partisan election may be unwilling to authorize a Democratic gerrymander five months later.”

More generally, Democrats have been consistently winning or overperforming in 2025 and 2026 elections by persuading swing voters, not just by turning out the party base:

“A better reading of the evidence is that turnout is helping Democrats at the margins, while persuasion is doing the heavy lifting. That’s exactly what you’d expect in a midterm where the president is dramatically unpopular, voters are sour on the direction the country is heading, and Democratic-leaning voters are highly motivated to impose a check on Trump’s power.

“So the Virginia referendum shouldn’t be read as a warning that Republicans can solve their 2026 problem by juicing base turnout. Democrats aren’t just turning out better; they’re winning over vote-switchers at an incredibly high rate.”

Polls reinforce Morris’s argument and undermine Ruffini’s. Independents, a voter category in which Trump nearly broke even with Kamala Harris in 2024, are now very consistently expressing unfavorable opinions of his job performance by better than two-to-one margins. A significant segment of Trump 2024 voters are now showing buyer’s remorse. Just as important, the idea that the GOP can outperform Democrats in base turnout seems implausible as well. Putting aside the atypical Virginia balloting over the complex issue of congressional redistricting, polls are showing that Republicans have a long way to go to match, much less exceed, Democratic enthusiasm to vote, as an April 22 Marquette Law School survey found:

“Democrats hold an advantage in plans to vote in November, with 77% of Democratic registered voters saying they are certain to vote while 65% of Republicans are equally likely to cast a ballot. A similar difference appears for enthusiasm about voting in November, with 50% of Democrats saying they are very enthusiastic compared to 33% of Republicans, among registered voters. This turnout and enthusiasm advantage boosts Democrats’ edge among those most likely to participate in the fall elections.”

If Republicans want to avoid disaster in November, they need a swing-voter persuasion as well as a base-mobilization strategy. It’s not clear Trump knows how to do anything other than preach to the MAGA choir while making promises to swing voters that he cannot or will not keep.

In “Trump is stepping carefully into the weeds of marijuana legalization,” James D. Zirin writes at The Hill:

Unlike England, from which we cribbed our legal system, America has a dual sovereignty system — the states and the federal government. Often, this leads to inconsistent statutory regimes.

For example, as of this year, 24 states — including a handful of red states— have legalized cannabis for recreational purposes. Additionally, around 40 states have legalized cannabis for medical use.

Congress was always suspicious of marijuana. The lawmakers bought the testimony of psychiatrists who called it a “gateway drug” used, as beat poet Allen Ginsberg put it, by “angel headed hipsters destroyed by madness starving hysterical naked … looking for an angry fix.”

…Moral perceptions change with the times. Bill Clinton, before taking office, had to confess that he once took a puff but famously claimed that he “didn’t inhale.” Barack Obama openly admitted to smoking marijuana during his youth, discussing it in his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father.” He contrasted his behavior with Clinton’s stating, “When I was a kid, I inhaled. That was the point.” The voters elected them anyway.

…Since December, there had been little movement to reschedule the drug, frustrating lobbyists and cannabis producers. But Trump’s executive order aims to move marijuana to the same statutory cabin where some common prescription painkillers like Tylenol with codeine reside.

The announcement did for cannabis stocks what the opening of the Strait of Hormuz did for the broad market. Shares of cannabis industry companies surged, with Canopy Growth rising 23 percent, and Tilray Brands soaring 15 percent.

…Most Americans support relaxing restrictions, but critics note that some support for legalization has eased. In 2022, polls said 60 percent of adults supported legalizing marijuana, including 46 percent of Republicans. This month, an Economist/YouGov poll  reported 53 percent of adults supported legalizing the drug, including 35 percent of Republicans.

…The push for legalization is hardly a new-found social concern. It’s all about the money. Marijuana companies donated at least $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Industry leaders like Kim Rivers of Trulieve, known as the “Starbucks of weed,” have forged close ties to the administration.

Read more here.

Jared Abbott, a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics and a contributor to Jacobin and Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, argues, “Class Dealignment Hasn’t Gone Away”  at Jacobin: “Working-class voters may be having second thoughts about MAGA, but they’re still abandoning the Democratic Party. Democrats’ reliance on college-educated suburbanites is arithmetically insufficient and politically unsustainable…Whatever short-term movement we see in the polls, the structural trend that has defined American politics for decades remains firmly in place: working-class voters continue to abandon the Democratic Party. The 2024 election confirmed and accelerated this pattern among non-white working-class voters, and the fact that the Democrats aren’t reaping the rewards we’d expect from Donald Trump’s disastrous poll numbers (at least not yet) is a clear sign of the party’s continued working-class woes…The most basic measure of partisan alignment is party identification, or whether voters think of themselves as Democrats, Republicans, or Independents. On this measure, the trend toward dealignment is unambiguous. Data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), stretching back to the early 1970s, show that working-class Americans, defined as those without a college degree and in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution, identified as Democrats at rates as high as 65%. That share stayed well above 50% until 2016. By 2024, however, that figure had fallen to 42%, dropping an alarming 9 percentage points between 2020 and 2024. Over the same period, college-educated, upper-income voters moved in the opposite direction, with their Democratic identification rising to a whopping 68% by 2024…The General Social Survey (GSS), using an entirely different measure of class based on occupation, confirms the same pattern. Whether you define the working class as manual, service, and clerical workers (the “traditional” definition) or expand it to include more highly credentialed workers like teachers and nurses, the downward trend is the same. No matter how you define the term, working-class identification with the Democratic Party has fallen to historic lows.” Read more here.

The gerrymandering follies roll on, now in Florida. At Politico, Mia McCarthy, Ali Bianco and Riley Rogerson report that “Florida Republicans make peace with proposed new House map,” and write: “Some House Republicans spent weeks warning against a drastic redraw of Florida’s congressional map…Now that it’s out — with Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting as many as four Democratic seats for a GOP takeover — they’re mostly keeping any criticism to themselves…“I think they did a pretty good job,” said Rep. Gus Bilirakis, who said he was one of the Florida Republicans whose district changed “quite a bit…“But I think they could touch it up a little bit, too,” he added…Rep. Scott Franklin said he is set to represent his third constituency in four terms. He still lives within the confines of the 18th district, he said, though it is much smaller in area…“Mine gets significantly less red than it was,” Franklin said. “But it’s still a conservative performing seat.”…DeSantis’ map still has to be approved by the Florida legislature, and it’s almost certain to face challenges in court. But many of the states’ 20 Republicans are already making peace with new districts that will be at least slightly more competitive…Many warned that redrawing the existing GOP-favored map to pick up more than one or two Democratic seats could dangerously dilute the Republican vote. And at least one, Jacksonville-area Rep. John Rutherford, said targeting four “could be a bit much.” More here.

In “Give Workers the Right of First Refusal,” Bhaskar Sunkara writes at Democracy: “For most workers, the defining economic experience is not the level of after-tax inequality in the abstract, but instability and the feeling of powerlessness in the modern economy. Factories are closed, offices relocated, and plants sold off not only when they fail, but often when ownership changes or financial incentives shift. The people who depend on those firms—for income, yes, but also as a font of individual and local identity—absorb the consequences, while the decision itself remains firmly out of reach…If Democrats want a reform that will shape our national political conversation and how the party is perceived, they could champion demands more closely tied the point of production. One concrete way to do that would be to establish a federal right of first refusal for workers to buy their workplace when it is being sold, closed, or relocated, paired with access to standard-form public financing that makes that right real…This policy does not mandate worker ownership, abolish markets, or require ideological buy-in from the people it affects. It simply recognizes that when a firm can plausibly continue operating, the people who built it and rely on it should have a legally enforceable opportunity to keep it running.” More here.

In “National Trust says it won’t drop suit against Trump’s $400M White House ballroom after DOJ request,” Meg Kinnard reports at apnews.com: “Preservationists are pressing ahead with their lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s planned $400 million White House ballroom, declining a request by the Department of Justice to withdraw the complaint following the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday…Trump and other conservatives have made a renewed push for the ballroom in the wake of Saturday’s media dinner shooting, arguing it exposed the difficulties in ensuring presidential security at large events outside the White House grounds, and urging the National Trust for Historic Preservation to drop its lawsuit…Top Justice officials said the government would ask a court to dismiss the lawsuit “in light of last night’s extraordinary events” if the Trust did not voluntarily drop it…Trust attorney Gregory Craig declined that request, writing to the Justice Department that the legal issues at the heart of the lawsuit are unchanged…“What Saturday’s awful event does not change is that the Constitution and multiple federal statutes require Congress to authorize construction of a ballroom on White House grounds, and that Congress has not done so,” Craig wrote…The preservation group sued in December, a week after the White House finished demolishing the East Wing to make way for a ballroom that Trump said would fit 999 people. Trump says the project is funded by private donations, although public money is paying for a below-ground bunker and security upgrades…In its lawsuit, the Trust argued that Trump had overstepped his authority by moving forward with the project without first getting approval from key federal agencies and Congress.” More here.

There are reports of a shiny new Republican strategy for the midterms that I assessed with a jaundiced eye at New York:

Logically, the first option any governing political party should pursue to maintain its hold on power is to do a good job, specifically on issues the public — not just the party base but swing voters — cares about most. By that standard, Donald Trump and the GOP aren’t doing a particularly good job given his poor and ever-eroding job-approval ratings during the 15 months of his second term in office.

What makes the GOP’s record worse is that the president, who dominates his party like no other chief executive ever, has really struggled to identify policy priorities that are within shouting distance of what a majority of voters appear to want. In returning Trump to office, voters made it clear that they’re longing for significantly lower living costs, a stable economy, and stronger border control. Instead, they’re getting rising energy and grocery prices, huge and destabilizing tariffs, a violent mass-deportation initiative, an unwanted and aimless war, and a crusade to make voting harder, to mention just a few of the president’s recent preoccupations. Trump is so far off the obvious path to improved popularity that returning there between now and the midterm elections in November may be impossible.

So now the White House is turning to plan B. The midterm message Team Trump is settling upon, according to CNN, will be music to the president’s ears since it’s based on conflict, lies, and relentless pandering to his base:

“Top Trump advisers are plotting an electoral push centered on messaging the midterms as a stark choice between the two parties’ platforms, rather than a direct referendum on the success of Trump’s presidency, according to four people involved in the private planning. …

“The strategy is driven by internal polling showing that Republicans still hold a trust advantage over the Democratic Party on some key issues, even as Americans have soured on Trump and his performance overall.

“The Trump team’s plans seem to tacitly acknowledge that the president has lost significant ground with voters over the last year, and that more energy needs to be put toward attacking Democrats as a result. Trump’s diminished approval ratings were not the subject of any extensive discussion during the Waldorf meeting, people in the room said.”

To put this more directly, Republicans are going to try to convert the midterms from a “referendum” to a “choice” election by demonizing Democrats.

This is hardly an original idea: Unpopular administrations always try to shift attention to the opposition. It has occasionally worked in the past, at least partially. But it’s doubtful the conditions exist for it to work in 2026.

To be very clear, the president’s party almost always loses ground (at least in House races and usually others) in midterms, even if it has some sort of long-term advantage over the opposing party. There have been exactly two midterms since World War II when the president’s party gained House seats: in back-to-back midterms in 1998 and 2002. In both cases, the president in question (Bill Clinton in 1998 and George W. Bush in 2002) had unusually high job-approval ratings. In 1998, Republicans were overextended in the wake of their 1994 landslide and made themselves especially unpopular by planning to impeach Clinton over a sex scandal. In 2002, Americans were still transfixed by the September 11 attacks, making them tend to cling to the incumbent president, whose party also had a long-standing advantage on national security issues.

There’s little reason to imagine Trump will be an exception to that rule (aside from the fact that his party lost 40 House seats in his first-term midterms in 2018 when his job-approval ratings were about where they are today). One reason for midterm losses by the president’s party is a natural tendency by a slice of the electorate to seek a counterbalancing force to presidential power. No president, not even Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard Nixon, has sought, exercised, and gloried in presidential power quite like Trump. His party controls Congress and hasn’t even tried to share power (and thus responsibility) with the opposition. Given today’s chronically sour public attitudes toward government, it’s a really bad time to be in charge.

Another way presidential parties in the past have at least mitigated midterm congressional losses is by stressing local issues and the value of incumbency. Straight-ticket party voting based on national issues is now at an all-time high, and incumbency is as much a handicap as an advantage.

Still another way to deflect voter backlash against the party in power is to identify and attack exercises of residual power by the opposition party. A classic example occurred in 2022 when a U.S. Supreme Court majority crafted by Donald Trump during his presidency abruptly abolished the constitutional right to an abortion. This became a powerful issue benefiting Democrats in the 2022 midterms, when they lost just nine net House seats and actually gained one net Senate seat. On other occasions, shared power can lead to shared voter disdain: The aforementioned Democratic gains in 1998 occurred when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. The shoe is clearly on the elephant’s foot in 2026.

What makes the “choice election” strategy especially tempting to Team Trump is that savaging the radical-left opposition as a gang of woke criminal-coddling traitors could in theory drive up Republican turnout by making the midterms a holy war while eroding swing-voter support for Democrats or at least dampening their turnout. But the historical record is clear: Refocusing midterm voters on the party out of power rarely works, and when it does, there are unusual reasons for it working. Trump himself is undoubtedly focused on every single thing that happened in the Biden presidency that offended or threatened him. Voters generally are not.

Does that mean residual public concerns about Democrats are worthless to Trump and the GOP? No, not at all. They’d be wise, however, to save their attack lines for 2028. Presidential contests truly are “comparative”; in these elections, swing voters tend to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of both parties rather than lashing out at the people currently running the country. That’s cold comfort to Trump, of course, since he won’t be on the ballot in 2028 and in any event has never been able to contain his rage at the opposition for two minutes, much less for more than two years.

The following article stub for “Trump’s Coalition is Cracking” by former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and The Working Class Project, is cross-posted from The Working Class Project:

After a big win on redistricting this week in Virginia, we’re back with another update from The Working Class Project – the largest and most-extensive effort in the Democratic Party to understand why working-class voters are trending away from Democrats, and how we can win them back.

Last fall, we published a summary of our initial research and recommendations for a practical, informed path forward. Earlier this month, we launched a slate of new research through The Working Class Project — and the timing couldn’t be more urgent.

With midterms now in front of us, Democrats face a defining question: Can we make a credible, lasting case that we stand with working people? Not just in our rhetoric, but in our policies, our priorities, our outreach, and our willingness to be honest about where we’ve fallen short?

The data coming in right now tells a complicated but, frankly, hopeful story — if we pay attention.

Democrats are winning and over-performing in elections up and down the ballot, from coast to coast and everywhere in between. Here’s what we’re watching.

Trump promised he would lower costs. He said he would end foreign wars. He said he would bring back American manufacturing.

His policies have led to the opposite. And his 2024 coalition is taking note.

In 2024, white voters without a college degree supported Trump by 34 points. The lowest-income voters (households making under $50,000) broke for Trump in record numbers in 2024, with a Republican winning that group for the first time since the 1960s. But that trend is now reversing — and it’s reversing hard and fast. His approval with voters earning under $50,000 a year is now over 20 points underwater. Today, his advantage with white non-college voters has also all but evaporated — his approval rating among this group sits barely above water.

These are the voters Trump promised to rescue. He said he would “fix it.” But they’re not feeling rescued. And the economy is surely not fixed for them.

Read more here.

The New Republic and Greg Sargent explain “How Trump Accidentally Handed Dems Their Big Win in Virginia. The “vote yes” campaign featured Trump in all of its closing ads in areas where it ran up huge numbers. Voters know who started this war,” and write:

“Trump, of course, urged Texas Republicans last summer to gerrymander to help the GOP hold the House, then pressed other red states to follow suit. That prompted Democrats to retaliate in blue states. Trump initiated this arms race. So by declaring the Virginia initiative “not good,” he inadvertently confirmed the actual Trump-GOP position: Republicans should be permitted to rig elections to their maximum benefit, and Democrats should roll over and accept it…It’s fitting that Trump laid this bare so clearly. Because as it turns out, Trump is perhaps the primary reason that the referendum passed

In the “vote yes” campaign’s final days, 100 percent of the ads that aired in Northern Virginia markets heavily emphasized or featured very prominent imagery of Trump, a source familiar with ad buy information tells me. “Trump’s mug was all over the communications that voters were receiving, specifically among the lion’s share of the voters we needed,” the source says. “Trump’s name and face were plastered all over the mess he made.”…It was largely Northern Virginia that put the referendum—which passed by a narrow three points—over the top. The most heavily populated areas there—Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, Arlington, Alexandria—all voted for it by big to enormous margins, contributing nearly 600,000 of the “yes” side’s total of nearly 1.6 million votes.” More here.