Weekly Mailbag

Matt: Why do you think someone like Matt Yglesias went on Mehdi Hasan's show in the first place? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

I have a great deal of respect for anyone who is willing to go into the lion’s den and make their case to a large audience that is likely to be unsympathetic to their views, especially if the primary interlocutor has a history of arguing in bad faith and doesn’t seem interested in a productive discussion. It’s why I credit Democrats like Pete Buttigieg for regularly appearing on Fox News or Republicans like Scott Jennings for playing the odd man out on CNN, despite knowing they’ll face tough questioning by hosts on networks that largely do not share their values or beliefs.

I think we need more of that. At a time when more and more people have retreated into increasingly insulated, ideologically homogeneous information ecosystems, there’s a case to be made for showing up and introducing perspectives they likely rarely hear. When your side fails to do this, it leaves a vacuum that more partisan voices on social media and cable news are happy to fill, often with caricatures of people like you and the views you hold.

Right now, few moderate Democrats would likely dispute that their influence over the party has diminished while the far left’s has grown. There was a brief window after Trump’s election in 2024 in which a large plurality of Democratic voters wanted to see their party become more moderate. But that window quickly closed after he took office, and many Democratic voters channeled their anger at Trump into support for more left-wing candidates.

So there’s an argument that moderates have no choice but to engage with the left, even on its home turf. Showing up in hostile spaces and making your case may not win you many converts overnight, but some people will likely respect you for at least engaging with them. And you never know whose minds you might change in the process.

-Michael

Jim: What reforms did the Democratic Party make between 2004 and 2008?

Jim seems skeptical of TLV’s perspective that the Democratic Party needs to engage in serious, structural reform ahead of 2028. His perspective echoes others who believe Democrats should be fine in 2028, either because of the natural swing of the electoral pendulum back toward them or because the party can expect to capitalize on voter anger or exhaustion with Trump in two years—just as they are poised to do this year.

Let me concede one point: that perspective could prove correct. Trump’s second term has been politically disastrous for the Republican Party, and I expect they will pay a penalty for it next Tuesday. It’s also true that in our era of political volatility, Democrats could be the beneficiaries of normal electoral dynamics and win in 2028 simply by being the out-party.

However, if Democrats win in that fashion, they’ll be merely perpetuating a trend that TLV’s Ruy Teixeira has dubbed “politics without winners.” Rather than making a serious attempt to reform the party—by shedding the more unpopular elements of left cultural politics or doing more robust outreach to groups of voters who have proven over the past decade to be less loyal than Democrats assumed—they would be choosing the path of least resistance: simply capitalizing on the other party’s unpopularity. Republicans more or less did the same thing in the lead-up to 2024, which is arguably why they entered office without a coherent governing agenda and have failed to convince voters that they take their number one issue—inflation—seriously.

This is why we believe it’s important for the party to look beyond just the next election and take The Long View: genuine reform offers a better chance of long-term success. So how did Democrats approach this challenge after their second consecutive defeat to George W. Bush in 2004, before going on to win decisively in the 2006 midterms and 2008 presidential election?

A big factor is that they made a serious effort to compete everywhere. DNC Chair Howard Dean famously launched the 50-State Strategy, which sought to identify and recruit candidates and build party infrastructure all across the country, including in places Democrats had previously written off. Of course, today’s party is making an effort to do the same this cycle, which is good!

But a key difference between today and the post-2004 period is that Democrats back then made a concerted effort to find candidates who were genuine moderates or even conservative-leaning and thus good fits for redder states and districts. Think of Heath Shuler (North Carolina), Brad Ellsworth (Indiana), Bobby Bright (Alabama), Travis Childers (Mississippi), and Walt Minnick (Idaho)—all of whom represented heavily rural, conservative districts, and whose wins helped Democrats build a massive trifecta by 2009.

If Democrats want to expand their capacity to build robust, durable majorities, they should look for candidates like this in all corners of the country.1 They would make it so that moderate and conservative-leaning candidates feel just as at home in the party as DSA members increasingly do. But there seems to be little appetite for this in today’s Democratic Party.

For now, many Democrats are content to stay the course and ride the politics-without-winners pendulum: winning when the country gets tired of Republicans, but remaining on a shaky foundation that could crumble once they find themselves in charge and facing headwinds of their own.

-Michael

2 things from this week

Only Principles, Not Tribalism, Can Save Us – Erez Levin

In the real world, we cannot take our ball and go home. We do not have the luxury of total separation. We share the same economy, work in the same offices, live in the same neighborhoods, and inhabit the same constitutional republic. We are stuck with each other. In a free, diverse society with competing factions, differing priorities, and clashing interests, conflict is inevitable. The only way a pluralistic democracy survives that friction is by agreeing in advance on neutral principles to balance those competing demands.

Will AI kill us all—or just make mathematicians obsolete? – Sergiu Klainerman

AI’s recent advances have fueled predictions of human intellectual obsolescence and fears for the future of mathematics. I argue that, impressive as these achievements are, they do not establish AI’s capacity to invent new concepts and theories or sustain autonomous recursive self-improvement. Human intelligence also involves judgment, imagination, and embodied experience that standard measures fail to capture. Mathematics extends beyond proving theorems: its creative core lies in conceptual discovery and understanding. AI can strengthen this enterprise, but realizing its promise requires protecting attribution, open exchange, confidentiality, and mathematical training. I propose an academic AI consortium to provide powerful research tools with enforceable guarantees safeguarding unpublished ideas.

2 things from the archive

The Problem With Democrats’ Favorite Policy Proposal – Marc Novicoff

Outside Democratic politics…universal child care has limited appeal. Most parents of young children don’t use center-based child care, and they don’t want to. Making day care free, while offering nothing to stay-at-home parents, appeals to the educated, urban, affluent voters who have come to make up the Democratic base, but not to the electorate at large. Universal child care, in other words, might not be the political winner that Democrats seem to think it is.

Are We Really on the Path to AGI? – Yuval Levin

I’m a recovering political scientist whose work is focused on the health of American political and social institutions. But in the course of exploring the possibility of a short book about the social and ethical challenges inherent in our society’s early engagement with AI — a book that would not pretend to substantial expertise about the technology but would reflect on the risks involved in taking shortcuts around vitally formative work — I have had the opportunity to explore some of the literature being produced by leading thinkers and practitioners in AI, and also to engage with a few such people personally. The experience has taught me a lot, and has shed light on my own limitations of knowledge and ability.

1 data visualization

• A New Way to Understand the Election: Times Voter Trends

When the dust settles on election night, the story won’t simply be about who won, but who decided the outcome: Which demographic groups shifted the most, stayed home or delivered the decisive votes to the winners?

This year, we’re going to tell the demographic story of the election as we never have before. We will publish a new comprehensive portrait of how each of the key demographic groups in the country voted, called Times Voter Trends. It will break down estimates for the results of U.S. House and Senate elections by age, race, education and gender in every state in the country.

As the Democrats steam ahead to a big election victory, spirits are high in all sectors of the party. So high, in fact, that I have taken some incoming from Matt Yglesias and Ben Krauss of Searchlight, among others, for being unduly pessimistic about the extent to which the party is resolving its underlying problems. Am I? It’s certainly possible, but I have some questions.

1. Do Democrats understand how much of their victory will be attributable to thermostatic reaction against the Trump administration rather than any confidence in the Democrats? That seems obvious to me but, in all likelihood, large sectors of the party will see clobbering the Republicans as an enthusiastic endorsement of their agenda. That typically leads to overplaying your hand, with predictably bad results.

2. Are Democrats willing to stand up to the progressive/DSA left after the election? Speaking of overplaying your hand, we can be sure that the rising left of the party will claim their politics have been vindicated. They will argue that, far from handicapping the Democrats, the party’s increased identification with the left has only produced success. As AOC exuberantly put it, “If Abdul can win in Michigan, anyone can win anywhere.” Greg Casar, chair of the House Progressive Caucus, has promised weekly votes on major progressive legislation, enthusiastically saying, “I want us to be passing so much.” Other Democrats did not stand up to the far left prior to the election—will they do so afterwards?

3. Can Democrats effectively address “affordability”? The overwhelmingly dominant theme of Democrats’ 2026 campaigning was affordability. But can they really do much about it, even assuming they control both houses of Congress after the election? Realistically, no, given that Trump will still be President. That will disappoint voters who instead will be treated to an endless succession of messaging bills suggesting that Democrats not only wish to roll back some of Trump’s less popular measures but also propose a mind-boggling array of new programs, subsidies, and regulations. None of this will make life more affordable for ordinary voters who will simply tune out the Congressional theatrics.

4. Can Democrats embrace bipartisanship and the permitting bill (BAAJA)? If anything useful is actually done after the election, it would have to be bipartisan. The obvious possibility here is the Bipartisan American Affordability (that word again!) and Jobs Act (BAAJA), aka the permitting bill. This is a concrete action that would take attention away from the Democrats’ laundry list of spending and regulatory ideas and over time would likely do more for affordability than most of these ideas. But resistance is developing among the usual suspects in the climate and environmental NGO space and their congressional allies. Can Democrats stand up to the groups (finally) and make this bill happen? I’ve got my doubts.

5. Can Democrats find their way back to economic growth? Democrats’ 21st-century project has largely prioritized goals other than economic growth. They have instead prioritized things like fighting climate change, reducing inequality, pursuing procedural justice, and advocating for various identity groups instead. For example, the “Deciding to Win” report analyzed word frequency in the party’s platforms since 2012 and found a 32 percent decline in the appearance of the word “growth,” versus a 150 percent increase in the word “climate,” a 1,044 percent increase in “LGBT/LGBTQI+,” a 766 percent increase in “equity,” an 828 percent increase in “white/black/Latino/Latina,” and a 333 percent increase in “environmental justice.”

This is remarkably short-sighted. The key to substantially improving living standards for the working class—once the Democrats’ prized goal and really whom “affordability” should be geared toward helping—is precisely more economic growth, especially higher productivity growth. It is therefore completely unrealistic for Democrats to think they can accomplish their ambitious goals without centering the goal of economic growth.

Can Democrats make the pivot back towards growth? Their laundry list of affordability programs/subsidies/regulations does not inspire confidence, but the permitting bill, if passed, would be a step in the right direction.

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6. Can Democrats advance a coherent policy toward AI? Speaking of productivity growth, the most plausible path to higher productivity lies in diffusing this technological marvel, a new general purpose technology (GPT), throughout the economy. But Democrats seem far less concerned with this than incorporating data center opposition and “AI safety” concerns into an overarching economic populism. That works for campaign purposes, but they will ultimately need a coherent policy that is responsive to public concerns while ensuring the American economy and workers reap a large AI dividend. Can Democrats dial down the populism and find their way to an agenda that taps the potential of this transformative technology? So far, we haven’t seen it.

7. Can Democrats transition away from the energy transition? As the 21st century has unfolded, more and more of Democrats’ policy plans have centered around combating climate change and promoting a rapid clean energy transition. The claim has been that the clean energy transition is not only virtuous but would also drive the economy forward. That has not been the case, and now many of their policies have been rolled back, with little negative reaction from voters, especially working-class voters.

Can Democrats give up on their obsession and accept that a rapid clean energy transition, facilitated by the IRA and successors, is not in the cards? This could be difficult—climate and environmental NGOs are determined to claw back the IRA provisions abrogated by the Trump administration, including the extremely unpopular EV credits. More generally, climate catastrophism and hostility toward fossil fuels are the reigning philosophy of these groups and their many congressional supporters. That could easily come back in a big way after the election. In fact, I’d be surprised if it didn’t.

8. Can Democrats articulate a viable immigration policy? Democrats are sure they oppose the actions of ICE (and many simply want to abolish the agency), but not much else is clear about their immigration policy. Can they keep the border as successfully closed as Trump has done? How will they handle asylum and irregular immigration pathways like TPS and parole? Are they willing to deport any illegal immigrants besides violent criminals? Or do illegal immigrants who are not violent criminals simply get to stay here forever (which is really a soft version of open borders)?

Democrats will be under enormous pressure from advocacy groups and most of the party’s left to move immigration policy back toward Biden-era openness. Those who want to move toward reform and a tougher policy will have a huge fight on their hands. And forget fundamental changes like a skills-based immigration system that would align the national interest with immigration flows. That would be a bridge too far for many in the party today.

9. Will Democrats try to bring back DEI and affirmative action? Trump moved aggressively against DEI programs and anything with any connection to racial and gender preferences. Activists and advocacy groups will aggressively lobby to bring all of this back, despite the basic unpopularity of affirmative action and DEI-based preferences. Can Democrats resist this pressure, especially given that almost nobody in the party has been willing to dissociate themselves from these programs and take a clear stance for merit-based outcomes? This seems doubtful.

10. Will Democrats be able to move toward the center on trans issues? Democrats are far out on a limb on trans issues, from biological boys and men in girls and women’s sports to medicalization of minors for gender dysphoria. These policies and the embrace of gender ideology (one’s “gender identity” is their “true” sex, and so on) that underlies them are both massively unpopular—but more or less the official positions of the Democratic Party. Even mild heterodoxy on these issues is rare and only tolerated as a tactical campaign adjustment in conservative areas. There is already growing evidence that many Democrats are champing at the bit to push back on Trump’s restrictive actions on these issues and get policy back to where it was when he came into office. My guess is that the Democratic energy will be all behind this restoration of the status quo ante and essentially nil on actually moving to the center on these issues.

11. Can Democrats embrace cultural positions that resonate with the working class? As the last part of this analysis suggests, this will be very, very difficult. Much of the reason for this is that most Democrats don’t consider cultural issues real issues. To reach the working class, they believe, is simply a matter of talking about economics, which represents their real interests, while cultural matters are but a smokescreen for the machinations of the billionaire class. This is woefully wrong and shows how clueless—and condescending—many professional-class liberals are about working-class voters. It is also highly flawed politically: a massive research study by Jared Abbot and Joan Williams, based on 40,000 interviews, found that “embracing cultural positions that resonate with the working class” would be the biggest contributor to Democrats winning back working-class voters, greater even than prioritizing working-class economics.

Despite this, I do not expect Democrats to come to their senses and align their cultural positions with those of working-class voters. That would be very uncomfortable, while they are very comfortable talking about affordability and the billionaire class.

So these are my questions. Am I too pessimistic about the Democrats or merely realistic, given that it’s a long way back to the working class? You be the judge.

• The ongoing fight for the future of the Democratic Party

• The rise of the DSA

• Populism and the growing anger at societal elites

• The Republicans’ prospective 2028 primary field

• The state of the Never Trump movement

And plenty more. We hope you enjoy their conversation, and be sure to check out Charlie’s own Substack newsletter, To The Contrary, and his book, How the Right Lost Its Mind.

Starting next week, the Friday Five will take a slightly different form as we work to make it a more community-driven feature. We’ll continue to share links to articles and other journalism we think are worth your time, while also soliciting recommendations from you, our readers, and incorporating some of them in our list.

We’ll also be adding a “mailbag” feature, where we—and occasionally some of our friends from the Welcome team—answer your questions about topics and themes that we regularly cover, from electoral politics and the Democratic Party to moderation, polarization, the working class, and more.

To recommend an article or submit a question for our mailbag, leave a comment on any TLV post published in the seven days leading up to the Friday Five. We’ll collect our favorites and include them in future editions.

And as always, we want to thank you for being a reader of The Long View. If you like what we’re doing here and are willing to do a little more than simply read, we’d greatly appreciate your becoming a paid subscriber today.

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2 things from this week

Europe Can’t Appease Protesters Anymore [paywalled] – Dario Marino

At stake in the current crisis is the legitimacy and sustainability of Western Europe’s political and economic model. In the postwar decades, robust economic growth allowed legislators to extend social programs, which shared the benefits of economic growth immediately with them. During France’s Trente Glorieuses from 1945 to 1975, which coincided with Italy’s Miracolo Economico, output grew fast enough that each concession cost only a small share of the growing economy.

But in the wake of the 1968 protests that shook France and the rest of Europe, economic growth faltered. The regulatory state expanded, unions and other interests were able to extract ever more concessions, and a greater share of the economic pie was needed to appease the periodic demands of strikers and protesters. For a time, even with anemic economic growth, debt could be used to buy peace, shifting the problem to the next administrations and generations. What could not be paid for with economic growth was covered with debt. The establishment of the European Union only incentivized further increases in debt, due to the lower perceived default risk.

Today, the bill is coming due. All European countries are seeing an increase in bond yields as the interest they have to pay returns to pre-EU levels. Some might hope that productivity increases from artificial intelligence will unleash enough economic growth that debt will be paid without any painful reforms. But the more likely scenario is that European countries will need to take a less tolerant approach to violent disruption.

They Fled Trump’s America. Now They Regret It. – Sarah Manavis

Thousands of Americans have…relocated to Europe in the last few years. Some left seeking adventure; others, the promise of a “slower” lifestyle outside the American grind. But, for many, these reasons were just bonuses to another kind of escape: political refuge in the wake of Trump’s second term. […]

For left-leaning Americans concerned about Trump’s reelection, relocation to Europe was presented as a lifeboat: Some claim you can live gentler, freer, and, most of all, morally lighter. Celebrities, including Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, and Rosie O’Donnell, all fled the US for political reasons. Courtney Love announced she was applying for UK citizenship in early 2025, describing the political climate at home as “frightening.” Digital nomad visas introduced after the pandemic in countries like Spain, Greece, and Portugal have made the jump logistically easier. […]

But while Trump 2.0 has more than fulfilled the worst nightmares of many Americans who left, online posts reflect a growing number of them are quietly—and at times apologetically—plotting a move back home, if they haven’t already returned.

2 things from the archive

Get the Middle East out of my politics! – Noah Smith

Today is September 11, the anniversary of the terror attacks 25 years ago. Though I don’t agree with the leftist line that those attacks were blowback from American involvement in the Middle East, it’s unquestionable that 9/11 inaugurated an era of heavy U.S. involvement in that area of the world — the Iraq War, the follow-up war against ISIS, the War on Terror, greater support for Israel, an increased military presence in the region, and finally the war against Iran.

I don’t believe that all of that involvement was a bad idea — in particular, as I’ll argue, the War on Terror, including the fight against ISIS, was generally successful and necessary. But overall, the era of heavy U.S. involvement in the Middle East has been a disaster for U.S. power and prestige, and it’s time for that era to end. […]

[It] is simply bad for America. We have so many pressing issues to worry about — Trump’s corruption and authoritarianism, inflation, AI, etc. We should not be nominating Democratic politicians based on whether they support Israel or Palestine; we should be nominating them based on their stances on issues of direct relevance to Americans, and on their ability to oppose Donald Trump. Furthermore, mobilizing Muslim and Jewish voters to vote based on Israel/Palestine, rather than on issues of importance to Americans in general, provides fuel for rightist attacks on both groups.

What the United States needs, now more than ever, is general disengagement from the Middle East — an end to military adventures, a dialing back of support for Middle Eastern “allies” (including Israel), and a forceful rejection of Middle Eastern issues in American domestic politics.

Geography of Opportunity – Joel Kotkin and Michael Lind

The migration of people and businesses has continually rewoven America’s national fabric; this process has been part of our story even before the revolution. People and firms now move to suburbs, exurbs, and even small towns. Urban cores struggle to create economic opportunities for their residents while most new business concentrates elsewhere.

These trends contradict the long prevailing notion that dense inner cities are destined to dominate the future. Numerous forces have undermined this premise. One is the rise of remote workers, who now account for more than three times the number of those who commute to work by transit. Expensive new urban rail transit projects have not increased the share of commuting by transit in nearly all cases.

Urban cores have not died, but urbanism’s trajectory is clearly shifting. Great legacy cities like New York will survive, but it is the communities on the suburban periphery, planned new cities, and restored small cities that are shaping the American future more than ever. Many of these new residential and commercial areas are not traditional “cities,” as epitomized by Manhattan, Paris, or London.

But the urban landscape is always changing; it is not eternally fixed.

1 data visualization

How far off were the final midterm polls? – Patrick Ruffini

We’re in the last 3 weeks when polls get graded. I built a tool that breaks down polling error in the last 2 midterm cycles in the last 3 weeks. Nationally, the polls were pretty good, but red state polls were too blue and blue state polls too red.

And this is exactly the pattern we’re seeing in current polls: Dems bullish on Kansas and Rs bullish on Minnesota. But history suggests this mean reversion is an illusion, even when the polls overall are pretty good. This aspect of polling error isn’t random.

This also looks at polls of Governor’s races. It’s a bit more random as Governor’s races are, but the same story.

Overall, Senate polls in the average red state missed by 2.7 points in a pro-Democratic direction in 2018 and 5.5 points in 2022. Errors going the other way were 2-3 points.

The last time it voted for a Republican for federal office was 26 years ago, it’s represented by Bernie Sanders in the Senate, and it voted for Kamala Harris by 32 points. And yet, it has a Republican Governor, who is also concurrently the most popular Governor, and probably Republican, in America. Phil Scott is an electoral giant precisely because of his moderation and good governance.

Some Vermont Democrats have learned this lesson as well, and none better than State Senator Thomas Chittenden, who represents the Chittenden- Southeast district in the Vermont Senate.1

Sen. Chittenden doesn’t care much for the party line - he consistently does what he feels is in his district and state’s best interest. In a heavily regulated state that isn’t known for being welcoming to economic development, he’s championed cutting through redundant regulations and zoning laws to move Vermont forward. Even in a Democratic supermajority with a Republican governor, he was known for not overruling his popular governor’s veto. And evident from his family’s history, few understand the state better than he does.

In other news…

• Join us November 10th in Washington, DC for our Promise to America celebration.

• Listen to Promise to America Signer Rep. Tom Suozzi use the Promise in his debate to defend against Republican accusations he’s a socialist. One of many examples of candidates using the Promise to win the trust of voters.

• No Going Back PAC, Trump’s Super PAC for this cycle, is pulling its ads from Promise Signer Jamie Ager’s North Carolina district in a sign of confidence for Jamie. This is the only district this cycle that has gone from Safe Republican → Toss-up → Republican Triage, and it’s exactly because of Jamie’s values.

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That’s where Welcome and Blue Dog Action spent three days with Bobby Pulido for the fourth episode of Battleground, Welcome’s series on the races that will decide the majority. Pulido is a Tejano music legend, a Latin Grammy winner, and he’s running for Congress in Texas’s 15th District, one of the hardest seats on the map for a Democrat.

The District Democrats Were Told to Give Up On

Texas’s 15th District stretches from the Rio Grande Valley up toward San Antonio. After decades as a Democratic stronghold, Monica De La Cruz flipped it in 2022, and in 2024 Donald Trump carried it by 18 points. Republicans redrew the lines in 2025 and made it even redder.

Many wrote off South Texas and Latino voters. Pulido never bought that. He knew that an authentic conservative Democrat could win the seat back, even while his primary opponent Dr. Ada Cuellar tried running to his left in the primary. In a district overwhelmingly Hispanic, Pulido is committed to common sense and kitchen table issues. As Michael Baharaeen wrote for the Long View last week, Hispanic voters swung right in 2024, and they’ve been swinging back left stronger than any other group since then. Race raters including the Cook Political Report now call this seat a toss-up.

Why Pulido Fits This District

Pulido isn’t running as a national Democrat. He’s running as the kind of Democrat South Texas used to vote for: conservative on social issues and focused on working families, the price of groceries, and an immigration system that works without tearing families apart.

Pulido is unique: Democrats can’t run a Latin Grammy winner in every district. But that wasn’t always an asset. On primary night, De La Cruz scoffed that this election wasn’t about “who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera.” Pulido turned it into a movement. He asked families to invite him, and he got a thousand requests in a day. He told us the count is now about 5,000 requests to participate in family quinceañeras.

As he put it when he launched: “You can gerrymander the district, but you can’t gerrymander Tejano culture.”

“With all due respect to my campaign manager and my campaign teams, the biggest political move made in this campaign has been made by my opponent, because we would have never thought about that had she not tried to insult me.”

— Bobby Pulido, The Singer Who Can Turn Texas Blue

What We Saw

The episode follows Pulido through three days on the trail. He tells his story from the beginning: how a song he recorded as a favor to his father turned into a record deal, how South Texas voters think about immigration, and how he makes the case that South Texas’s immigration fight is an affordability fight too: you can’t build the houses that bring prices down without the workforce to build them. And he closes a campaign event the only way Bobby Pulido could, singing with his father.

At the Democratic gala “Noche Azul,” Pulido is unapologetic about his position in relation to the perceived national Democratic Party:

“I watched Congresswoman Monica la Cruz win in 2022, and I knew that it was going to be very difficult for a Republican to actually represent this area. And I think one thing that unites us all as Democrats is we have heart. We don’t just care about ourselves. We care about other people. That’s why I’m a Democrat.

“Now, I’m going to be honest with you. Are we the party of inclusivity? Are we? We should be. We should be the party of inclusivity. That also means the party of inclusivity of thoughts. Not all Democrats think the same, but we do have common things that unite us. I don’t care if you’re a Democratic socialist or if you’re if you’re a Progressive or like a Blue Dog Democrat like myself. I care about other people, but I’m a conservative Democrat .

“And it bothers me: They told me ‘South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley is red.’ Bullshit. They gerrymandered this district. And boy, were they ever so wrong because we’re going to flip this seat.”

His reason for running is the simplest one in politics. “Either I was going to be the guy that sat there on the couch really angry about what I was seeing,” he told us, “or I was going to do something about it.”

Today, in this district Trump won by 18 points, a new poll released October 21st — commissioned by the San Antonio Express-News, El Pais and the nonprofit Puente News Collaborative — found that likely voters favor Pulido 51% to 44% over Republican Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz.

Watch, share, and help

Election Day is November 3. Early voting in Texas is already underway, and this race could come down to a few thousand votes.

• Watch the full episode, and send it to your friends who need a reason for hope.

• Share it on Substack and Twitter.

• Subscribe so you don’t miss future Battleground episodes.

• Give directly to Pulido and Welcome’s other candidates doing the work to flip Trump-won seats.

The Long View’s Ruy Teixeira recently sat down with former Democratic Governor of Tennessee Phil Bredesen and former Republican Governor of Tennessee Bill Haslam to discuss next month’s midterm elections, with a focus on how issues like cost of living, AI, and culture are fueling the rise of populism on both the left and right.

You can find the full podcast episode, which includes a separate conversation with friend of TLV Patrick Ruffini (with whom Ruy chatted just last week), here.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the governors’ conversation with Ruy.

Gov. Phil Bredesen: Bill, I want to start today with something I’ve been noticing, and I’m curious if you’ve been seeing the same thing. Everywhere I go, people are pretty frustrated right now. And it’s not the frustration I remember from maybe 20 years ago when I was more involved in political office. Do you see that?

Gov. Bill Haslam: 100%. There’s a frustration, and I’d combine it with a serious drop in trust of institutions of all kinds, from the military to the church to the media to Congress to business. The level of [trust] in institutions has diminished incredibly, and a lot of terms are thrown around, but maybe the key one is this idea of “populism.”

Bredesen: Right. There does seem to be something going on underneath all this that’s driving it. Obviously, you have housing costs, which if you step back and look at them have become absurd, just unrealistic for so many people. You’ve got AI moving very fast, and lots of people are freaking out; they’re so worried about what’s going on there. Energy policy, immigration, all those kinds of things.

Haslam: Yeah, and what’s interesting to me is I see it play out in my party—this tension between what I’d call traditional Reagan conservatives and the folks who are identified in the MAGA wing of the party who are totally skeptical of big institutions across the board, including big business, which has traditionally been seen as a Republican bulwark.

Bredesen: And I think the same thing is happening on my side of the aisle, too. Democrats have spent a lot of time being the party of credentialed expertise—trust the institutions and trust the process. And there’s a real appetite right now for something that sounds a lot less like that and more like, “I hear you, and I’m gonna fight for you.”

Haslam: So I think the question for today and what we want to talk about is, are the old coalitions breaking apart in the Republican and Democrat Parties? I do argue all the time that there are no more party elders on either side. People always say, “Well, what’s the party gonna say?” There’s no voice like that. The second is, does this populist approach contain any answers in terms of how to build something better? Or is it just about burning down what’s there now?

Bredesen: Well, first of all, do you think we’re not party elders?

Haslam: We are, but the argument would be that I don’t know that people are listening—I don’t want to say that just about us but across the board. There’s not only no longer a smoke-filled backroom. There’s no one who says, “Well, we gotta figure this out. Let’s go sit down and talk about it.” It truly is much more of a free-for-all atmosphere in both parties.

Bredesen: Yeah, and the word “populism” gets thrown around so much, and I’m not sure whether it’s just this cycle’s label for what different parties believe in or whether there’s something underneath it. I think it’s something we need to explore with our guests: what does this actually mean?

Haslam: Couldn’t agree [more]. And I think the voters are now—you’re starting to see a little bit of a tide shifting about, okay, what does that actually mean and how is it going to make it better?

Bredesen: I think we need to bring some people in who know something about this subject.

Bredesen: Bill, our next guest is Ruy Teixeira, who’s a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute studying political demography and party coalitions and the American electorate for four decades. Back in 2002, he and John Judis wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, and two decades later they wrote Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, something I think I should have read. Ruy spent nearly 20 years at the Center for American Progress and now co-writes The Long View with Michael Baharaeen. He is also a contributing columnist to the Washington Post.

Ruy, welcome to You Might Be Right. Thank you for being here.

Ruy Teixeira: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Bredesen: I want to just start out with a framing question for this. We’re talking about populism today. How do you define it? Is it an attitude of anger toward elite institutions? Or is there a coherent political philosophy underlying it? How do you describe it?

Teixeira: There is absolutely no coherent political philosophy. That’s why there’s populism of the left, populism of the right, populism all over the place. It’s primarily an attitude toward elites, the sense that it’s the people versus the elites, and the elites are corrupt, and the institutions they run are corrupt. And what populism implicitly is always saying is “we the people” have to unite against the elites and break their control over the country, or “our” country, which is being ruined by the elites who [don’t] really care about “us.”

So that [apply to] many different political philosophies, spanning from the far left to the far right, depending on what you think the solutions are or what the fundamental problems with the elites are.

Haslam: And is the populism of the left and the populism of the right, are those distinct things? Or is it more just about being anti-elite and upset about the economic and cultural dislocation? Are they distinct or are they the same?

Teixeira: I think they can be quite distinct. Populism on the right, typically at this point, it may include—and frequently does include—anger at economic elites, in the sense that they’re betraying the interests of the ordinary people. But also it’s typically got a very heavy cultural overlay, in a sense that not only are the elites corrupt in terms of their economic policies but their cultural policies, their cultural ideas, their priorities are very, very removed from what ordinary people want. And those elites are imposing those values upon us, and they must be fought against.

On the left, a classic economic populist line would be the “billionaire class” like Bernie Sanders always talks about. The fundamental enemies are the people who control vast amounts of capital and wealth. And they are the real problem. And everything else is just a diversion from that. And frequently that’s linked up with a whole raft of different policies, from taxing the rich to spending gobs and gobs of money on social programs.

So there’s a lot of policy variation, but the target of the anger of the left-populists is typically the capitalists, the wealthy, the people who really control the levers of economic power—and through that are really controlling the political class. That’s pretty key to their outlook.

Bredesen: Populism historically has surged during times of economic dislocation. And in talking about this, you’ve touched on how that may be an element of it. Do you think what’s driving this now—is it economic dislocation that’s causing it? Or is it something more about loss of voice and control, of people feeling like they’re not being heard? What’s driving this issue?

Teixeira: Well, I think it’s all of the above. If you look at the way people are viewing the economy, particularly working-class voters in this century, and especially since the Great Recession of 2008–2009, there’s a real sense that for a lot of these people in a lot of these places—again, particularly working-class people—that the whole system is rigged against them, it’s passing them by, they’re not doing well while the coastal elites with their cushy NGO jobs are doing great. And they resent that deeply.

If they are happier with their own lives economically, this would be less of a big deal. But they’re not happy. They do feel pressed. They do feel like their economic mobility isn’t keeping up with their family’s need and what they had in mind for their future. And many of them live in communities that have been adversely affected by the way that the economy has evolved.

I think also part of that clearly is that if you look at the cultural values and priorities of elites in the broad sense—not really the people who have all the money, but the people who dominate the media, the NGOs, the foundations, the universities, the people who are basically the arbiters of what is and is not correct culturally to think—the people with populist feelings, and there are many, tend to feel like these are priorities that [are] not my priorities. And it’s fine for them to be the priorities of the people who live in the People’s Republic of Brooklyn, but why are they making me absorb all this stuff? And why do I have to walk on eggshells unless I pay obeisance to all these priorities?

So there is a very deep resentment of what they perceive to be the cultural elites who are telling them how to live their lives, what to say, what to think. I think that’s very real. And look, we don’t have Donald Trump without that. There’s just no way, no matter what the level of economic discontent was.

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Bredesen: My own experience talking to people is that, in sort of the old way of talking about it, it’s less about the one percent—I don’t think people care all that much about whether a Bill Gates or Elon Musk or something have a lot of money. I think of it more as the 80 percent and the 20 percent.

Teixeira: Yes.

Bredesen: That there’s 20 percent of the population that is educated and, as you described, has a great job with an NGO somewhere up in Virginia or whatever. And that that is more the source of the resentment than a few very wealthy people who are throwing their wealth around. Am I wrong about that? I don’t mind being told I’m wrong.

Teixeira: No, I think that’s right. If you talk to normal people, normie voters, that’s really where they’re coming from. Unlike Bernie Sanders, and unlike some of the flamethrowers in the Democratic Party who just love to toss around this stuff, they don’t wake up in the morning and think, “I really hate Bill Gates. I really hate the tech overlords. I just hate anyone who has a gazillion dollars.”

That’s not what they think. They think, “There’s a certain stratum of the country that’s actually really doing well, and I would like to have that lifestyle. I don’t want to be Bill Gates, but I’d love to be as comfortable as those people seem to be. And I deeply resent that I can’t seem to get there.” And I think this is part of the real, underlying problem with left-populism—is that they really do have a theory of the case that is just wrong on how normal people feel about this stuff.

Haslam: But I think those folks on the left and on the right, they might not wake up feeling that way about Bill Gates or Elon Musk. But they do wake up thinking the system is rigged. I think that’s what Trump was able to tap into so well. Folks on the left and the right say that the system is rigged. So if we’re prescribing the antidote to that, what’s the message that you would give to folks who just say, “Sorry, the system’s rigged, and folks like me are never going to get ahead. Folks like the people I run around with are never going to get ahead.”

Teixeira: I think the issue of fairness does run very deep. That’s not only a fundamental political value; it’s a human value. Deep research shows that this is just baked into our genes—the sense that someone gets something they didn’t work for and took advantage of me, I deeply resent that. [It] goes back to the tribal days.

So I think people are very exercised by the issue of fairness. And if you want to convince them that the system is not rigged, you may have to admit that in some ways it is rigged! Because there are things that are unfair. There are people who have unfair advantages. There is corruption. There are people gaming the system, all the way from the poor up to the rich.

I think part of the problem the Democrats have, for example, is they’re very into the idea that the rich are rigging the system—[they] have several billion dollars more than they should have. But they’re not really responsive to the idea that there are people on the other end of the spectrum who are in fact gaming the system, be it the poor, illegal immigrants, or whatever.

I think people’s sense of fairness extends from low to high. And I think that as a political proposition, you would have to make it clear that you stand against the unfair gaming of the system no matter who is doing it. And by God, we’re going to stop that. And we’re going to make sure that you, the ordinary Joe or Jane working-class person, the ordinary middle-class person, you are going to get dealt a fair hand and then you get ahead by your own efforts. There’s no preferences here; there’s no handouts for anybody. But we’re going to make sure you have the ability to get ahead as far as your God-given abilities can take you.

That’s old-fashioned stuff, but it’s what people believe. We want to support those people who work hard and play by the rules—that old Bill Clinton formula. I think people love that. They just don’t believe they have it anymore.

Bredesen: In this rise of populism discussion, a new element has injected itself over the past couple of years, which is AI, or artificial intelligence, which seems to have been particularly good at provoking this anger that you’re talking about. How do you think that the arrival of that has impacted this populist movement in this country and in others?

Teixeira: Well, I think at least here—it hasn’t had quite the impact in a lot of other places—but here it’s become a hot-button, heavily impregnated with populism kind of issue. It’s basically the tech overlords are doing what they want. They’re going to raise my electricity bills. They’re going to ruin my community. It’s remarkably untethered. And plus, the whole issue of AI safety gets walked into that, where people just don’t know what the hell’s going to happen—potentially it’ll come for my job.

So it’s a constellation of things that really do scare people. And it seems to me that the correct position about AI is that this is a general-purpose technology—it’s going to be impossible to get rid of, nor should we want to. And it has potential productivity-improving benefits and it will make us all richer over time. This is an actual source of economic growth that would work if handled properly. This is a little different from the Democrats’ obsession with the clean-energy transition, which was never really the growth engine that they thought it would be. This is really potentially a growth engine.

So how do you both respond to the populist upsurge of distaste for data centers and AI, while still keeping in mind that this is a growth engine for the economy that could pay big benefits over time? How do you convince people you’ll both have guardrails and appropriate regulation, and you’re gonna take advantage of the potential economic growth benefits of AI? I think that’s a very tough conversation to have, particularly right now. I don’t see hardly anyone who’s saying something that sounds plausible on this. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are gleefully getting out their baseball bats and beating up on data centers.

Haslam: Let me ask you one final question we ask all of our guests taken from the name of the podcast—Howard Baker saying, “Always remember: the other fellow might be right.” Is there a time you can look back and say, “I didn’t get this quite right. In hindsight, I’ve changed my opinion. I didn’t nail it the first time”?

Teixeira: Oh, man, too many to count! Actually, I think back to a very common one that occurs to me. When we wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, John Judis and I, I think we got a lot of things right about some of the demographic and geographic changes that were taking place. And we talked in the book about the rise of the professionals, and how they would be a boon to the Democrats. They clearly realigned toward the Democrats, they have a ton of influence, they vote at high rates.

But I was just wrong about a relatively benevolent conception of that. We did not anticipate how powerfully professionals would not only have hegemony over the party but actually move to the left in very significant ways that would divorce the party and its brand from working-class voters. So we just really got that one wrong. And I’m sorry—they just kinda snuck up on us!

When the history of the Trump era of American politics is written, historians should pay particular attention to the voters who live in the counties the American Communities Project calls the Middle Suburbs.

This collection of blue-collar counties heavily concentrated in the Industrial Midwest has been a linchpin to President Donald Trump’s political success, giving him the margins needed to win crucial states—including the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Now, as we near the final big Trump-era election, the Middle Suburbs bear close watch not just for what they tell us about 2026—in tight races in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and even Iowa—but for what they may tell us about the nation’s future, politically and otherwise.

These “swingy” voting communities may be ripe for more change as American politics prepares to enter a new era.

Swinging in the Suburbs

Most of the community types in the ACP rubric are easy to understand politically. Their voting habits have only deepened in the last 26 years. The Urban Suburbs voted for Al Gore for president by about eight percentage points in 2000 and for Kamala Harris by about 13 in 2024. Rural Middle America voted for George W. Bush by about 15 percentage points in 2000 and for Donald Trump by 37 points in 2024.

The Middle Suburbs defy that trend. They voted for Al Gore by one point in 2000 and for Donald Trump by 13 points. In between, they voted for George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama, twice.

Only two other types have swung at all since 2000: the Hispanic Centers and the Native American Lands. The rest have consistently voted for the same party’s presidential candidate in that time, albeit by shifting margins.

But the Middle Suburbs stand out because of their geography and potential political impact. They are based in states where the vote is often close, particularly in presidential election years.

Middle Suburbs

In 2024, Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by fewer than two percentage points each. They were his closest wins—and they may be ready to swing again.

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Reasons for Unhappiness

Why do the Middle Suburbs have a history of swing voting, and why did they swing so hard to Trump? Because these counties are full of voters who are perpetually displeased with their representation—and the data help show that they have good reason to be unhappy.

Manufacturing, a key component of what built a lot of these communities, has been shrinking all over, but to a greater extent in the Middle Suburbs than nationally.

The numbers are down in other communities as well, but the dip arguably matters more in the Middle Suburbs because these manufacturing jobs tended to pay well. Many were union jobs with good salaries and benefits that allowed families to live comfortable lives. These were the jobs that built these communities.

These job losses also help explain another challenge in the Middle Suburbs: real losses in economic standing. Consider the average median household income of the Middle Suburb counties in 2000 and 2024, adjusted for inflation.

Overall, the number has declined by almost $7,000 since 2000, the biggest drop of any community type in the ACP rubric. This came as the overall average adjusted median household income rose slightly in that time.

To double-check the numbers and ensure they weren’t being driven by one or two outlier counties, we looked at the Middle Suburb counties individually. Of these 57 counties, 50 had seen their real median household incomes decline in that period.

To be clear, these numbers are complicated. The 2000 figures come from the decennial census and are based on 1999 incomes, while the 2024 figures come from the 2024 five-year American Community Survey data. The 2024 numbers may actually understate the impact of post-Covid inflation. But this measure is the best possible with the data available—even if the figures are not perfect matches, the general direction and size of the drop are both noteworthy.

The numbers help explain why the voters in these places have been routinely unhappy and swung from party to party in presidential elections. The jobs that built these communities are going away and incomes are suffering. People are falling behind relative to where they once were. They want someone to fix an economy that is not working for them—and has not been for quite some time.

This also helps explain why Donald Trump has been popular here. Note that big jump in the GOP presidential vote in the chart above. Trump didn’t just offer a new approach; his entire rise to the presidency has been something of a nostalgia play. The key word in “Make America Great Again” is again. It’s a promise to return to an earlier time—a time that was much better for the Middle Suburbs.

Now What?

But promising a return to a better time and delivering it are two different things.

There have been ups and down in manufacturing, of course, but the overall trend in manufacturing jobs has been downward since their peak in 1979. And though manufacturing jobs are up slightly in the last few months, they are still down by about 20,000 from when Trump took office.

Additionally, inflation has hit people across the country, but it has hit less affluent communities harder. And remember that median household incomes in the Middle Suburbs have struggled to keep up with inflation for decades.

Taken together, these factors could play a big role this fall in the close races everyone is watching.

What happens in the Middle Suburbs on November 3 in Michigan, where there are seven of these counties and a close U.S. Senate race? Or in Ohio, where there are ten such counties, and both the U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races look tight? Or even Iowa, where there are only two Middle Suburb counties, but the Senate race looks to be neck-and-neck?

Whether the Middle Suburbs swing back or stay true to their Trumpier form could have huge impacts in all those races. Shifts in these communities are potentially about much more than November. They are about 2028—and beyond.

The big swing in votes in these places took place when Trump entered the political scene. He will soon be exiting it through term limits, and his presidency has not brought back what these communities were promised—at least not yet.

The Middle Suburbs have been swinging for a quarter century. The question now is whether they are swinging back toward the Democrats, staying with Trump’s Republicans, or looking for something else entirely. Whatever they decide, their choice could tell us a great deal about where American politics goes after Trump.

Editor’s note: this piece first appeared in the American Communities Project Substack.

Dante Chinni is a political and data journalist and director of the American Communities Project at Michigan State University.

• Methodological questions about the midterm polls

• Differences between key election models and forecasts

• Possible outcomes for the midterm elections

• Whether a good midterm for Democrats complicates the “realignment” thesis

• The rise of the DSA in the Democratic Party

• In what direction the Democrats and Republicans might go in 2028

And much more. We greatly enjoyed the conversation with Patrick. Be sure to check out his work with his polling firm, Echelon Insights, as well as other original analysis on his Substack, .

What will the Blue Wave leave behind after the election? Midterm history and the newly re-gerrymandered reality show us just how much a few points - and overperforming candidates - can impact House results.

After the last midterm in 2022, I wrote in The Bulwark about the funky wave that hit the incumbent party:

The odd truth about these midterms is that there actually was a red wave, both in who showed up (there were more Republican voters than Democrats) and in how people voted overall (Republicans will probably win the House popular vote by about 4 3 points).

But not all waves break the same. There’s a type of wave called—seriously—a dumper. You get dumpers when waves go from deep to shallow water, and so curl and crash down without running up on shore. The 2022 red wave was bigger than expected—but it took a big dump when it hit moderate Democrats focused on persuasion …

The best way to picture this dumper wave was circling the moderate Democratic outliers on this scatterplot chart from Patrick Ruffini, which showed an overwhelming number of districts voted more Republican for House in 2022 than they had in the previous presidential election in 2020. EXCEPT for a half-dozen outliers bunched right around the closest districts, contested by aggressive moderates like Jared Golden in ME-02 and Adam Frisch in CO-03 and Elissa Slotkin in MI-07.

For this midterm, the wave faces a different structure. GOP gerrymandering has reduced the share of seats that are narrowly contested and built a bulge of 62 districts favoring Republicans by 10 to 20 points. You can see it in this bar chart, again from Patrick Ruffini, which shows how many districts are at each level of partisanship from left (favoring Democrats by 80 points) to the right (favoring Republicans by 60 points).

This has the visual bonus of literally looking like a medium-sized blue wave on the left coming up against a large red wall. The star on PA-10 (which was WelcomePAC’s top new target to put on the map last cycle) indicates the tipping point seat, at which Democrats would have a majority. Having a district that Trump won by 5.2% as the tipping point shows how advantageous the House map is for Republicans.

But the downside of the gerrymandering - stacking 62 usually-safe districts between R+10 and R+20 - is that if the waterline reaches that high, previously safe areas could get totally flooded.

How rare is that situation? Political hobbyists have been conditioned to view modern American politics as completely and utterly polarized. But the truth is that, as Nate Silver shows in this chart, this is not a hundred-year flood. Midterms have averaged 7.4 point swings, and at least 5 points every single midterm for the last two decades:

2026 may be a bigger blue wave than expected, but we’ve been calling out the potential for gerrymandering to backfire - a “dummymander” - for more than a year. And Republicans have already spent more than $70 million in their newly drawn districts.

As Marc Novicoff writes in The Atlantic, the same cliff that could flood Republicans means that a relatively normal systematic polling error could still turn back Democrats. Forecasters and markets have Democrats at roughly a 90% chance. But that’s where the 10% chance comes from. And why Democrats have to play through the tape.

Get involved! Join Ethan at the Promise to America celebration on November 10th, from 5-7 pm at the National Union Building. You can RSVP here.

In other news, eight new signers announced on Wednesday that they have signed the Promise to America:

• Taylor Rehmet, State Senator, Fort Worth, Texas

• Thomas Chittenden, State Senator, South Burlington, Vermont

• Naquetta Ricks, State Representative, Aurora, Colorado

• Alex Burton, State Representative, Evansville, Indiana

• Anne Graham, State Representative, North Yarmouth, Maine

• Paul Berch, State Representative, Westmoreland, New Hampshire

• Nelson Esparza President, Fresno City Council, Candidate for California Board of Equalization

• Aidee Hernandez, Candidate for Nueces County Judge, Nueces County, Texas

Check them out! These are the leaders the Democratic Party and the country need to win and govern responsibly.

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As we head into the final weeks of the 2026 midterm cycle, analysts, voters, and candidates are all keeping a close eye on public polls to make sense of how things might play out. At the national level, polling shows Democrats are poised for a very good, potentially even great, election. According to Nate Silver’s generic congressional ballot aggregator, they have gained two full points on Republicans over just the past month and now lead them by 8.6 points—the same margin by which they won the national popular vote in the 2018 midterms.

Of course, there are important caveats to this data. First, national polls cannot tell us what will happen in individual races at the state and district levels. Consider 2022. Republicans entered the midterm election with a 2.5-point lead on the generic ballot and ultimately won the national House vote by 2.8 points, narrowly flipping the House. Yet Democrats held key seats in both chambers and even grew their Senate majority, largely thanks to race-specific dynamics.

Second, there are serious questions about the state of the polls right now—chiefly, whether they are fully capturing Republicans’ vote preferences and likelihood of turning out. If the problems that have plagued polling in recent presidential elections persist this cycle, Democrats’ dreams of flipping states that broke for Trump by double digits less than two years ago may remain just that: dreams.

However, there’s a very real possibility that these polls are largely accurate, which would be consistent with polling performance in recent midterms. If that is the case, then we may already have a good idea of how things will shake out come Election Day, such as how how various populations might vote—and how their voting patterns could differ from 2024.

But this type of data is often presented without important context. For example, a news report about how Hispanic voters have swung back toward the Democrats would likely have readers concluding that Trump’s Hispanic gains in 2024 were more of a facade than a sign of an actual demographic realignment.

What such reports often fail to do, however, is compare a population’s shift from 2024 to the national shift. This matters because if much of the country is swinging against the incumbent president, this will necessarily be true for most demographic groups as well. The more revealing question is how much a given group is moving toward Democrats compared to all voters.

Put another way: it isn’t enough to merely say that, in 2024, Democrats lost white voters by 14 points but are now only losing them by five points. Such results must be adjusted to account for the national swing (of ten points) toward the Democrats since then. Below is a chart of what this looks like:

As the second-to-last column shows, Democrats have improved their margins over Republicans with virtually every key group since 2024. The final (or rightmost) column, however, adjusts for a national leftward swing of 10.1 points from two years ago, revealing a more complicated picture. Democrats have certainly gained ground with some of the groups they underperformed with in 2024—namely, independents, young voters, and Hispanics. These would represent crucial improvements for the party.

However, their gains have been more muted with other important groups relative to the national swing, including older voters, black voters, and non-college voters (especially non-college whites). This could pose challenges in places like Michigan or Ohio, where each of these populations makes up a significant share of the electorate.

But let’s take a slightly longer view and compare Democrats’ performance with another midterm cycle. We have a nearly perfect candidate for this: 2018, a midterm election also held during Trump’s presidency and in which Democrats won the national House vote by 8.6 points—the same margin of this week’s generic ballot polling. That gives us about as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as we can find. Here’s what that looks like:

This comparison confirms many of the shifts that we have seen in the two parties’ coalitions during the Trump era. Democrats, for instance, have improved their standing among older, college-educated, and white voters. Meanwhile, Republicans have improved with non-college voters of all races, and while Democrats still enjoy huge levels of support with black voters, Republicans have made real gains with them, too.

So, what are the implications of this? Again, assuming the polls are generally accurate, Democrats are poised to claw back some of the gains Trump made in 2024 with core demographic groups. This would lend some credence to the argument that 2024 was not a “realignment” but rather a “dealignment” election—that we were not witnessing the start of an inexorable rightward drift among working-class minorities. Instead, more of them may just be less wedded to either party, meaning gains from one cycle can be wiped away as soon as the next.

For now, that change is coming largely Republicans’ expense. If, for example, the Democrats’ relative bounce-back with Hispanics is real, it could help make sense of why James Talarico appears to be faring so well in Texas. Many of the gains that Trump made in places like the Rio Grande Valley may simply not be sticking. Similarly, Democrats’ apparently strong gains with college-educated voters—a highly engaged group—relative to 2024 could be a big reason for their strength right now.

But the data also shows that Democrats have not fully returned to their pre-2024 standing, either. While they have made meaningful gains since 2024 with independents, young voters, and Hispanics, their gains with older voters, black voters, and non-college voters have lagged the national leftward shift.

Moreover, the comparison to 2018 suggests that some of the changes in the parties’ coalitions during the Trump era have endured, at least to some degree. This may not prevent Democrats from having a strong midterm, but it’s something they’ll have to contend with looking beyond November—perhaps as soon as 2028.

Today, Rep. Ricks is a successful small business owner, founder and CEO of the African Chamber of Commerce Colorado, and chairs the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee. Listen to her and Promise to America founder Felix Frisch discuss why she signed the Promise and how she works to reflect its values in her work.

In pre-election news, check out this insane graph...

While the generic ballot has moved from an R+ 2-3 point advantage in 2024 to a D+ 8-9 advantage in polling today, these effects haven’t been felt equally in every district. Yes, the President is deeply unpopular, with an approval rating in the low to mid 30s. But at the same time, the Democratic Party is also historically unpopular. So as always in our modern era of politics, the voters who will decide the midterms are distrustful of both Trump and the Democratic Party. Candidates must embrace mainstream values to win over these voters and secure victory in the midterms. And the Promise to America is exactly that - a set of six principles popular with Democrats and Republicans alike that can differentiate Democratic candidates who want to be seen as mainstream. Promise candidates are pushing beyond the national environment to put Republican districts in play.

More proof beyond the polling?

There are only two Districts rated by the Cook Political Report that started in their “Safe Republican” category but have been moved to “Tossup”. Jamie Ager in NC-11 and Bobby Pulido in TX-15 are those two candidates, and both proudly signed the Promise to America.

In other news...

• Check out this Reuters story from last week.

• Join the Promise to America November 10th in DC in our post-election Celebration

• Stay tuned early next week for a big announcement

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We know that in today’s oversaturated media environment, good journalism is often hard to find. So each Friday, our team highlights five pieces—analysis, interviews, editorials, and more—that caught our attention from both the past week and weeks prior. We may not always agree with every writer’s arguments, but we nonetheless think they are worth sharing.

We also want to thank you for being a reader of The Long View. And if you like what we’re doing here and are willing to do a little more than simply read, we’d greatly appreciate your becoming a paid subscriber today.

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2 things from this week

• Mike Solana: Doom Analysis [paywalled]

If we keep building artificial intelligence, are you, and everyone you know and love, going to die?

Artificial intelligence poses several real and obvious risks, from the integrity of our internet, and by extension really almost everything that upholds our modern way of life, to the future of war. But I think our risk of accidentally building something roughly as powerful as God, which is, without exaggeration, how most major safetyists conceive of this threat, and of that God killing every human alive as it rearranges all matter in the galaxy in such a way as it finds pleasing, is negligible.

This may seem to you an odd thing to argue. It may even seem unfair. Surely, I must be cherry-picking the most extreme safetyist views to make them seem insane. But while I disagree with them to some extent, I don’t think AI safetyists are insane. And this is not a fringe idea.

The motivating safetyist fear, which has now made its way to your evening news, is the runaway artificial superintelligence (ASI) taking over a company, or companies, then infrastructure throughout the material world, where it will rapidly conquer our planet and kill everyone. Yes, they will talk about a terrorist or whatever learning how to build a bioweapon. Yes, they will contribute to the latest “chatbots made me do it” crime or suicide hysteria. And yes, they will fret, as do I, about the future of the internet. But their central concern is we are accidentally building a malevolent God.

• Francis Fukuyama: The AfD Emerged From a Respect Deficit

The AfD’s political base is in the states of the former East Germany, what used to be the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR). After unification in the early 1990s, the former West Germany made impressive efforts to incorporate the GDR into its own thriving economy, transferring wealth and welfare state benefits to the East, as well as a rule of law that granted equal rights to the former Communist society.

This formal equality was not matched, however, on a social level. […]

Many Easterners felt that they were being looked down upon by their Western compatriots. They bore a subtle social stigma that showed up in phenomena like regional accents and the Easterners’ inability to speak English well. While the latter were receiving social benefits from the West, politics remained dominated by that region’s mainstream parties.

Prior to 1989, there had been virtually no non-European immigration into the GDR, and therefore no experience of living in a culturally diverse society. West Germans did a lot after 1945 to educate their young people about the Holocaust and the militarism of the Hitler era, something that did not happen in the East. This omission fed the AfD narrative that Germans needed to stop feeling guilty for the Nazi era and to be proud of their history. Younger, less educated men in particular saw their social status decline in the liberal culture brought on after unification.

2 things from the archive

• Jesse McKinley: America Is Atomizing

It’s an article of faith that America is polarized. Its people are bifurcated and bunkered, engaged in a never-ending Spy vs. Spy with each camp finding it nearly impossible to relate to the other side of the divide. That certainly describes our ruptured two-party political system: The very concept of a United States, it seems, is now misleading.

But what if that idea doesn’t quite sum it up?

Some social scientists and cultural observers are increasingly considering a more extreme concept: atomization, or the scattering of people — not into two opposing factions but into countless smaller tribes.

Like groups of atoms, those subsets can form — and dissolve — at quicksilver pace, leaving people in ever-tinier bubbles, devoid of connection with one another and the larger social fabric. Even subgroups have subgroups, dividing amoeba-like into combative factions, creating a nation of us vs. them and them and them.

• John B. Judis: The Myth of a Professional-Managerial Class

In the wake of Kamala Harris’s defeat in 2024, one heard often that Democrats needed to focus on class rather than identity. But what exactly does it mean to focus on class? And what class is it that Democrats need to focus on? The party’s surging left wing has a clear answer—the working class—and usually offers an expansive conception of who is included in that category. “I think if you have to work to pay your bills,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said, “I think that is one definition of being a part of the working class.”

However, some have taken exception to this characterization and questioned whether Democrats like Mamdani are really speaking to the working class. Citing the high levels of education and relative affluence of voters supporting progressive candidates, they claim that Mamdani and his allies’ true base is the “professional-managerial class,” or PMC.

As the centrist blogger Noah Smith put it, “The ‘PMC,’ as it has become known, was beginning to dominate the political left even in 1977; today, it arguably forms the Democratic Party’s most important voter base.” “Fifty years ago, the professional-managerial class swung right. Today, in America’s biggest cities, they’re voting for leftists like Zohran Mamdani,” wrote River Page in The Free Press.

The idea of the PMC was popularized by the left-wing social critics John and Barbara Ehrenreich in a 1976 essay in Radical America. Over the past decade, writers from various points on the political spectrum have revived versions of this concept in discussions of resurgent progressive politics, from Julius Krein and Michael Lind to Gabriel Winant and Catherine Liu, whose 2021 book was entitled Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional-Managerial Class.

Is the distinction between the working class and the professional-managerial class, common to all these accounts, useful? Returning to the origins of the PMC concept makes clear how it seemed plausible at the time, but also why it has now outlived its usefulness except as a polemical term against left-wing politicians.

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• Jay Van Bavel: Liberals and conservatives behave differently in everyday life

Liberals and conservatives behave differently in everyday life--conservatives seem to be out with others at lot more while liberals stay home and doom-scroll.

This study analyzed activity using smartphones to track college students and found that conservatives were more likely to be at parties, noisy places, fraternities and religious facilities. Liberals were at home, resting, doing chores, and browsing social media.

This helps explain why conservatives are, on average, happier than liberals.

The behavioral differences were small but robust, not accounted for by other plausible factors (e.g., demographics), and most pronounced in the leisure domain.

The House battleground map is increasingly filled with alluring possibilities for Democrats as President Trump’s support has cratered. But with their financial resources limited, one question keeps coming up as Democratic strategists puzzle over where to invest during the crucial final four weeks of the campaign.

Do they seek to rent — or own?

National political correspondent Shane Goldmacher goes on to break down those options for the party committees and PACs working to maximize Democratic gains:

Democrats are trying to figure out where their money goes furthest. Are they better off seeking to run up their numbers by competing in less expensive races or for open seats in Republican areas? If they do, they might struggle to hold onto many of those seats in a couple of years, when there is less likelihood of a blue wave.

Or is it a better bet to spend more and go all-in to try to oust a handful of entrenched Republican incumbents who represent more Democratic areas, a difficult path that, if successful, could put those seats in the Democratic column for a longer time.

We offer a third option: back the most valuable candidate - the next Mary Peltola.

The Empty Bench

Do Democrats have a strong bench? We often hear that optimism.

But for the most important candidates - candidates with a proven track record of winning swing voters states with GOP Senators - the pipeline is practically empty.

Republicans hold Senate seats in 27 states, and there are 214 Democrats in the House.

But zero of those 214 Democrats meet the following criteria: under 55 and running for reelection, and represent a Trump district in a state with a Republican Senator.

Zero!

It should not be a surprise that a new organization literally called The Bench is backing two senate candidates in red states who come from state legislatures and one from the pulpit. And then Mary Peltola.

Donate Directly to the Candidates

Peltola’s Value

By now, you are likely familiar with the concept of WAR. Borrowed from baseball analytics, Wins Above Replacement seeks to capture the value of a player in terms of the number of wins he delivers beyond the baseline replacement player. WelcomePAC-backed candidates have had the highest WAR of any group over our first two cycles.

But to capture the value of Mary Peltola, who in 2022 at the age of 49, captured the statewide House seat between 10 and 13 point victories by Trump, we cannot look at a single cycle. It is not enough to know that Peltola put up WAR scores of 22 points and 9 points in her House races. Because, as The New York Times articulated, the choice is also about the future.

We have to think like a baseball team allocating resources between different players at different stages. We have to determine the Future Value (FV).

Candidate Quality is Still Underrated

Recent senate polling shows that Democrats are closer in Alaska and Texas - states that Trump won by more than 13 points - than in Maine, which Harris won by 7 points. Candidate quality is clearly very important.

But given the billions of dollars flowing into the late stages of elections, it is still wildly undervalued.

In the Senate, Nate Silver gives Democrats a 63% chance to flip Alaska but just a 14% chance to flip Florida. There is a 50% gap despite both states both voting for Trump by 13 points in 2024.

That 50% - effectively half a Senate seat - is worth many hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 1918, the Red Sox had two corner outfielders who ended the season with similar WAR scores. Harry Hooper, a 31 year old star right fielder, finished with 4.8 WAR. The team’s 23 year old left fielder, who also pitched, finished with 4.7 WAR.

Some winners this cycle will be like Harry Hooper. Others will be like Babe Ruth - and Mary Peltola.

Rent or Buy … or Flip?

There are 50 Senate seats in states that Trump won three times. Democrats currently hold 0 of those 60 seats. The majority of Democrats who won have competitive Senate seats previously held federal or statewide office, building a brand distinct from the national party.

All nine challengers backed by WelcomePAC this cycle are in Trump-won districts in states with a Republican Senator. These are candidates whose value may be in the billions in future cycles, raising the odds of Democratic flips in Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Iowa.

Your most effective dollars are to these candidates - directly to their campaigns, which you can do here.

Many Democrats are giddy about the likely thumping of Trump and the GOP. The 2024 debacle is fast fading from memory. Between the adoption of the “affordability” campaign trope, a ratcheting up of populist rhetoric, and a carefully curated dose of “heterodoxy” in key races, they are convinced they have found the winning formula to take down the unpopular Trump and his party. The necessary reforms and repositioning have taken place; a “wave” election awaits. Problem solved!

I beg to differ. Here are three reasons they’re deluding themselves.

1. The election aftermath problem. Right now, all wings of the party seem pretty happy to, as it were, cash in their winnings in November and stare into a future so bright they gotta wear shades. On the progressive left, whether socialist-identified or not, they feel they have all the momentum and, with their projected victories in the 2026 election, will be the rising force in the party. Their politics have been legitimated; it is the party’s establishment that has had to accommodate them rather than the other way round. The party’s future is secure, they will assure us, provided it follows the progressive path.

On the moderate wing of the party, they are happy that many candidates have seen the dangers of going all-in with the progressive left and appear poised for success this November. If candidates like Josh Turek and James Talarico help capture the Senate, they will feel vindicated. Democrats’ problems are solved, they will argue, provided they follow the moderate (or, at least, non-left) formula.

Of course, the reality is that Trump and his administration are extraordinarily unpopular, especially on cost-of-living issues. And without that factor, the party, regardless of candidate strategy, would not be succeeding as it is. That means it will be hard in the election’s aftermath to sort out who can legitimately claim to have solved the Democrats’ problems. But claim they will.

It is predictable that the current kumbaya moment, with all happily ensconced in the “big tent,” will dissolve very quickly in the election’s aftermath. While the fighting ramps up, it will serve to obscure the depth of the Democrats’ real problem: they are not well-liked as a party, and their national brand is still terrible. The party just has not changed that much since its drubbing in 2024. Consider these recent ratings from an NBC poll:

The Democratic Party’s image is highly negative and actually worse than that of the Republican Party (and even ICE!). The Democrats’ rating is about on a par with that of the MAGA movement and only significantly better than that of the DSA and of socialism—both of which, of course, are becoming more and more associated with the Democrats. Manifestly, the unpopularity of Trump is failing to generate warm feelings for the Democrats.

2. The “minimum necessary heterodoxy” problem. Assuming the Democrats do as well as the polls suggest, some credit will be apportioned to a willingness of candidates in key races to slightly dissent from party orthodoxy to achieve sufficient marketability with swing voters—what I have dubbed the “minimum necessary heterodoxy” (MNH). MNH positions are clearly not the primary sell these candidates are making to voters; they are more about convincing voters who might otherwise vote against them if they cleaved to party orthodoxy.

Inspection of the actual “heterodox” positions of these candidates makes clear their MNH nature. Consider James Talarico, perhaps the most stunning example of a Democrat running way ahead of a state’s partisan lean (Trump carried Texas by 14 points). He has been blessed with an opponent who is an unbelievably terrible (and lazy!) candidate. But he has wisely realized that, despite his low-quality opponent and the highly unfavorable national environment for the GOP, he needs to compensate for his extremely liberal background and statements with countersignals to reassure more conservative voters—it’s still Texas, after all!

But the substantive limitations of these countersignals are not hard to detect. Take energy/climate. In 2022, Talarico was saying, “Fossil fuels are destroying the planet,” and, “It’s time to transition.” The previous year, he had introduced the Texas Climate Action bill in the Texas legislature (HB2206), which included extremely aggressive emissions reduction targets (50 percent of 1990 levels by 2030; 90 percent by 2050).

Now, Talarico says that “too many people in our party talk about eliminating oil and gas,” and, “I support our oil and gas industry.” Yet his commitment to aggressive climate action remains, including to his Texas Climate Action bill, and he offers no real dissent from his party’s high prioritization of renewables development and emissions reductions.

So, he somewhat incoherently (and ostentatiously) backs the Texas oil and gas industry while simultaneously supporting policies that would undercut that industry’s long-term prospects. The latter is presumably reflective of his underlying (and certainly his party’s) views on climate/energy while the former provides some reassurance to the many Texans who don’t share his party’s animus toward the fossil fuel industry. And, importantly, the former is guaranteed to get the media coverage he needs to craft his image, even if his underlying philosophy has changed very little. Call it “headline heterodoxy.”

This can also be seen in his positioning on transgender issues. Talarico has opposed a simple prohibition on trans-identified boys/men participating in girls/women’s sports—the overwhelmingly preferred position of voters. Instead, he has said that he favors dealing with this issue locally on an athlete-by-athlete, case-by-case basis where issues of safety or fairness may arise. This could result in some trans athletes being unable to play on teams that match their gender identity. This is a very squishy position, but it reliably yields headlines about how Talarico breaks with his party on trans sports.

Similarly, on “gender-affirming care,” Talarico does not appear to question the Democratic Party’s embrace of the importance—sometimes overriding importance—of gender identity. He supports medicalizing minors where necessary (e.g., puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones) to align their bodies with their gender identity and opposes bans on these treatments.

However, he has stated his opposition to gender-affirming surgical treatment for minors, even to the point of suggesting he would support a national ban on such procedures. Interestingly, though, when he had the opportunity in the Texas legislature to support a bill (SB 14) that would have prohibited these procedures, he voted against it because it also prohibited use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, etc. But, as noted, he still gets the headline.

Talarico has also taken great pains to portray himself as a “border security Democrat.” He pairs this rhetorical positioning with criticism of the Biden administration for letting the border situation get out of hand. He has also declared his support for the “framework” of the bipartisan Dignity Act, currently languishing in Congress, which includes support for physical barriers along the border, faster processing of asylum claims, and even some form of E-Verify.

In terms of interior enforcement, however, Talarico is only comfortable talking about deportation for “criminals, gang members and human traffickers,” not those who are here illegally but are “our neighbors.” And, despite his criticism of the Biden administration’s record, he has little to say about alternatives like “Remain in Mexico,” reforming the criteria for asylum, and ending the abuse of irregular immigration pathways that contributed to the Biden-era wave, such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and parole. But the headline “border security Democrat” still garners attention.

These mildly heterodox positions are not the positive sell, though; rather, they are aimed at preventing more conservative voters from automatically opposing him. The positive sell builds on widespread voter discontent with the economic record of the Trump administration. Talarico advocates a decidedly non-heterodox progressive economic approach embedded in the affordability/anti-corruption/economic populism template adopted by many Democrats this cycle. He supports higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, a higher minimum wage, universal child care and pre-K, and a public option for Medicare (“Medicare for y’all”), among many other progressive economic ideas.

These ideas are typically linked to a strenuous economic populism. He frequently asserts that “the only minority destroying America is the billionaires”, says that “trickle-down economics isn’t a theory, it’s theft,” claims that “while we’re here serving our neighbors, billionaire mega donors and their puppet politicians are clinking their champagne glasses,” and, taking off the gloves, promises to “tax trillionaires out of existence.”

Talarico’s basic playbook of mild heterodoxy on some issues combined with progressive economics and populist messaging is quite similar to that adopted by Josh Turek in Iowa, another red state where Democrats have a good shot of flipping a Republican Senate seat. Mary Peltola in Alaska is also similar, but she concentrates on issues particular to her state, especially on energy. Sherrod Brown in Ohio is overall less heterodox but even more focused on economic populism.

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Given that these candidates could all win their races, is MNH plus economic populism the Democrats’ “problem solved” formula? No, but it may be adequate to leverage thermostatic reaction against Trump and his administration in a terrible year for the GOP. The longer-term problems, though, will remain.

Consider the continuing and very wide class gap in Democratic support. No doubt Democrats are hoping that their economic populism, affordability rhetoric, and carefully calibrated heterodoxy will bring working-class voters flooding back into their camp and remedy their ongoing problems with this historic Democratic constituency. And they are, indeed, enjoying a significant increase in working-class support this cycle. But the same is true among the college-educated. The end result is that the class gap has remained roughly the same.

For example, the class gap in 2024, based on an average of the four key election data sources (Catalist, Pew, exits, and AP VoteCast), was 26 points—that is, the Democratic margin among college-educated voters was 26 points better than among working-class (non-college) voters. By comparison, in the latest national New York Times/Siena poll, the Democratic margin in the generic congressional ballot was 30 points better among the college-educated than among the working class.

This fits the idea of a sharp thermostatic swing across demographics against the incumbent GOP rather than a break in the overall trend of class voting. And why should there be such a break? As longtime election analyst Charlie Cook notes:

While many have long predicted that Democrats will enjoy a “blue wave” election, I think of it more as a “red undertow,” which will pull many Republicans under and significantly trim the margins for many others.

A blue wave implies an endorsement or affirmation of Democrats and their policies. But Democrats’ brand is still in tatters from 2021–2025, particularly 2021 and 2022, when they not only had President Biden in the White House but also majorities in the Senate and House. Fortunately for Democrats, this election will in most cases not be about them.

On a deeper level, Dustin Guastella, a political commentator who is also a Teamsters Union official, clarifies that, despite the Democrats’ current emphasis on how their party is a “big tent,” it is still very clear who is running the tent:

It’s no secret that the Democratic Party increasingly represents high-earning voters. Democrats control 9 of the 10 richest congressional districts in the country and hold governorships in 9 of the 10 richest states by median household income. A majority of upper-income voters now identify as Democrats.

This influx of affluent voters into the Democratic Party has significant implications for the party’s agenda. Consider recent research by Jared Abbott and Joan Williams that asked working-class and liberal professional-class respondents to rank their top political priorities. For working-class respondents, 11 of their top 12 concerns were economic, and the only extra-economic concern listed, the desire to lower the crime rate, would hardly be considered immaterial. For progressive professionals, however, the story was very different. Of their top 12 concerns, only half were economic priorities. Worse, abstract cultural and symbolic issues trumped concrete material ones: “Resisting authoritarianism” was rated above “Protecting Social Security,” and “Ending racism” ranked higher than “Protecting Medicaid.” Whatever else one might read into these results, it’s clear that it isn’t the working class that is clamoring for the culture war.

The MNH exhibited by some Democrats on some issues in some races cannot change these realities and the party image they evoke. It will take far more than this to get working class voters to embrace the Democrats as their party once again. It’s hard to see how anyone with a clear-eyed view of today’s actually existing Democratic Party—not some mythical tribune of the working class—could possibly disagree.

Of course, many Democrats will argue that, heterodoxy aside, it is their great economic ideas that are not only bringing back the working class but will keep them in the party. That brings us to the third problem.

3. The economic populism problem. Democrats have not stinted on the economic populism this cycle. One can scarcely hear oneself think over the incessant denunciations of “billionaires” and “the Epstein class.”

But that’s not an economic program; it’s just rhetoric. Presumably, if Democrats were serious about remedying the ills implied by their populist messaging, they would have a program in hand to improve economic outcomes for the working class. They do not.

Instead, they have a confusing smorgasbord of measures intended to address “affordability,” their mantra of the 2026 campaign. (A Democratic candidate would no doubt be rung up on charges if they didn’t refer to it constantly.) These include a grab bag of price caps and controls, subsidies, and new regulations that may or may not make everyday life more affordable. Then there is a wide array of ideas for new social welfare programs and expansions of old ones—expensive and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to implement in today’s fiscal climate. And, of course, there are traditional favorites like taxing the rich and raising the minimum wage.

There is nothing particularly new about this affordability program, supposedly the substantive content of economic populism. Indeed, it seems suspiciously similar to the laundry list of progressive economic priorities that defined the Biden administration. But that didn’t work so well, so perhaps proposing a do-over is neither wise nor likely to convince working-class voters that Democrats have things figured out.

The fact of the matter is that essentially none of Democrats’ economic ideas have a clear connection to achieving higher economic growth. Redistribution, yes, but not growth. This is remarkably short-sighted. The key to substantially raising living standards for the working class—which should be the goal—is precisely more economic growth, especially higher productivity growth. You cannot make up for that by redistribution, nor by simply spending more money on government programs. A fast-growth economy provides more opportunities for upward mobility, generates better-paying jobs, creates fiscal space for non-inflationary government spending, and, as Benjamin Friedman has argued, has positive “moral consequences” by orienting citizens toward generosity, tolerance, and collective advance. Slow growth, by contrast, has the opposite effects.

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

No doubt promoting economic growth is challenging and does not lend itself to economic populism. It depends above all on promoting sustainable, strong productivity growth. This in turn depends centrally on technological change and its incorporation into the economy, typically linked to the rise of new general-purpose technologies (GPTs). Think electricity, the internal combustion engine, semiconductors/computing, and so on.

Might such a GPT be on tap today? Of course there is: AI. AI boosters are not wrong to claim that it is, in fact, a new GPT. If so, the effects on productivity growth could be game-changing and era-defining.

Democrats, however, who have long had a streak of techno-pessimism, are not reacting terribly positively to this development and its enormous growth potential. Indeed, the evolving reaction seems to be downright negative. Senator Chris Murphy, a reliable barometer of party trends, had this to say:

The cultural and economic impact of AI is going to be the biggest issue in politics over the next decade…There is going to be a growing appetite from voters to support candidates that are going to help them manage the potential coming disaster as AI poisons our kids and destroys all of our jobs.

Murphy made this judgment on AI back in December. Democrats’ views on the topic have not improved since then. Indeed, they’ve become even more negative to take advantage of increasingly negative sentiment among voters. AI, data centers, tech companies, and the like have been eagerly and seamlessly integrated into the Democrats’ economic populism pitch.

The general approach is to bash data centers and call for regulatory measures ranging from a moratorium on new ones to insisting that data centers provide and pay for their own power to a slowdown in the development of AI frontier models. Other proposed regulations take aim at AI companies directly around issues of online safety, especially for minors.

The concerns behind these ideas are legitimate, and some of the proposed regulations may indeed be necessary. But, pretty much by definition, they have nothing to do with maximizing productivity growth from AI and channeling the benefits as widely as possible. They are, instead, measures designed to take advantage of public fears about AI, which are now considerable. Blue Rose Research found that a fire-breathing AI-specific populism maximizes political benefits for Democrats. An example from their research of such an approach:

Within 5 years, AI is projected to eliminate 75 percent of our jobs. The biggest change in human history is here. Your job, my job...they’re on the line. What happens next is a choice. Their choice? Let mega-corporations fire everyone, keep all the profits, and leave you with nothing. A future of mass unemployment, foreclosures, and chaos.

I don’t doubt that such an approach will be politically effective in the short run, especially as we approach the 2026 election. But it is woefully inadequate as an approach to AI as a new GPT that could make the country and its workers richer.

Steven Rattner put it well in a recent op-ed in the New York Times:

The walls are closing in on artificial intelligence: moratoriums on new data center construction, job-loss concerns and rising alarm over safety.

All valid worries. But none are sufficient to turn away from one of the greatest technological innovations in history, one with the potential to reinvigorate our slow-growth economy and make it easier to address the country’s increasingly challenging problems. For all the concern about the technology, we need A.I. to deliver….

Growth — and the increases in incomes and living standards that come with it — is a function of just two things, a larger labor force and how much each worker produces. More workers increase the overall size of the pie. But individuals don’t get a larger share unless each worker produces more.

Greater national income, particularly if it comes from higher productivity, gives the nation more legroom to redistribute wealth fairly among citizens and reduce inequality. It also provides resources to hold down the national debt and fund public services such as health care and education….

In the early 1970s, productivity growth slowed and has remained depressed for most of the past half-century, with notable exceptions such as the internet boom. Ending the productivity sluggishness should be a top national priority, and using A.I. is the most promising way.

Of course, many Democrats may believe that AI cannot or will not deliver a big productivity growth dividend, or that it is too dangerous to try. OK, but then what’s the alternative growth program? The Green New Deal/Inflation Reduction Act 2.0? Please. They just don’t have a plausible or compelling alternative right now. Once this campaign’s over, they will have to take AI seriously rather than using it as a punching bag.

Perry Bacon Jr. and Patrick Ruffini both recently noted in a piece in The New York Times that the political environment is worse for Republicans than in the 2018 midterms, and current data suggests that current trends signal a “2018-ish blowout in the House.” I’ve recently written about the comparisons of this midterm cycle to 2018 and argued Democrats should be doing better given the national environment is worse than it was for Republicans eight years ago.

Both comparisons seem apt: as Amy Walter notes, the landscape now is remarkably similar to 2006; the 2018 midterms are as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as you can get, given that it was the other midterm held in the middle of a Trump term.

In one very specific way, however, 2026 is unlike any midterm since (and including) 2006: the current generic ballot polling for Democrats is overperforming their relative brand advantage versus Republicans, while in the 2018 and 2006 midterms, which saw significant Democratic victories, their performance underperformed their brand advantage. What does that mean, you ask? Well…

An Analysis of the Generic Ballot and Political Party Brands This Close to the Midterms from 2006–2026

For the purpose of this analysis1, I pulled together publicly-available surveys from the Q3 period of each midterm from 2006 to 2026 that asked all three questions: favorability of the Democratic Party, favorability of the Republican Party, and the generic ballot.2 Some brief notes of explanation for the chart below:

• The x-axis is “relative brand advantage” (RBA), which calculates how much higher or lower favorability for the Democratic Party is compared to the Republican Party. For example, in 2006, the average net favorability of the Democratic Party was net +13 and the average net favorability of the Republican Party was net -9; thus, the RBA for Democrats was +22. In 2018, the average net favorability of the Democratic Party was net +1 and the average net favorability of the Republican Party was net -16; thus, the RBA for Democrats was +17. In Q3 of 2026, the average net favorability of the Democratic Party is net -13 and the average net favorability of the Republican Party is net -17; thus, the relative brand advantage for Democrats is just +4. This post does not dwell on the deterioration of the Democratic Party brand, of which I’ve also written about extensively and expressed many concerns about, but I will say this: despite having a narrow RBA, favorability of the Democratic Party dropping by a net 26 points over the last two decades is deeply problematic and should not be overlooked.

• The y-axis is far simpler: it is just the net share on the generic ballot, where a number above zero indicates greater Democratic vote preference and a number below zero signals greater Republican vote preference.

When charted this way, Democrats have tended to underperform or equal their RBA in the generic ballot—and, ultimately, in the actual election results.

• The Democratic “blue waves” of 2018 and 2006 were very similar to one another: the RBA was greater than +15 favoring Democrats, but voters in surveys of Q3 that year were pointing toward a seven-to-11-point national margin for Democrats in those respective midterms.

• In 2014 and 2022—elections where Republicans prevailed but picked up fewer net seats in the House than we would normally expect in a wave election3—the Democratic RBA was still positive, but their generic ballot performance was slightly worse.

• In 2010, the only midterm of the last six where Republicans had a narrow RBA, preference for Republicans in the generic ballot mirrored their RBA.

What makes 2026 polling different is that Democrats are currently overperforming their relative brand advantage on the generic ballot by a narrow four points, yet they lead on the generic ballot by seven points.4

Two High-Level Thoughts on What This Means

First, this may suggest the Democratic Party brand problems could be holding back their performance in generic ballot polling from being even stronger. After a recent New York Times/Siena national survey showed Democrats with an eight-point national lead, I wrote about how they should be doing better than at this point in 2018. In a survey from CNN/SSRS last week, more voters said Trump’s policies are worsening economic conditions in the country than said the same about Biden’s policies heading into the 2022 midterms. Independents and traditionally Democratic-aligned voting blocs such as younger voters, women, college graduates, and people of color, expressed the greatest levels of dissatisfaction.

This added to my belief that Democrats should be performing several points better than 2018. And, to be fair, there have also been several recent surveys showing double-digit Democratic leads nationally in the month of September, including from Emerson (D+11), Marist (D+12), Marquette (D+13), and YouGov (D+14). If the election ultimately produces results like these, that would better align with expectations relative to 2018 (though polling aggregators are currently much closer to the eight-point lead in the NYT/Siena survey).

If the national environment does end up being closer to D+8 (or weaker), my biggest question will be whether the lack of Democratic RBA and low net-favorability rating of the Democratic Party offset the higher antipathy felt toward Trump and Republicans.

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Second, it’s possible the generic ballot may have a wider range of error than normal. If you had asked me a few days ago about my opinion regarding potential polling error in one direction or another this cycle, I probably would have said something to the effect of (and in the following order):

1. Midterm polling in 2018 and 2022 has been fairly reliable in an era where polling has been susceptible to underrepresenting Trump/Republican support in presidential election cycles.

2. Something akin to Perry Bacon’s argument that, compared to 2018, we are headed for a blowout at that level (and to be clear, it is really, really hard to get beyond an eight-point national lead!).⁵

3. Given those dynamics, there are real challenges to doing this kind of polling accurately, so we should be prepared for a scenario where polling does not match our expectations. Ben Jacobs had a great read where he talked to Zac McCrary, who had exactly the right take: “The issue is that it has never been cheaper or easier to poll the wrong way and more expensive or complicated to poll the right way.”

4. Moreover, national surveys are hard to make sense of because of political dynamics like redistricting and the reality that very few seats actually determine House control (if it isn’t a total blowout, that is). And state and district surveys are really expensive, have smaller sample sizes, and are often publicly released by pollsters with incentives beyond simply measuring the state of the race accurately.

5. Even if there were systematic polling error underestimating support for Republicans, the current generic ballot lead is probably large enough that Democrats would still likely win the House (if the error was 2020-sized or less).

All of these thoughts are in relation to the potential for systematic polling error, which is always possible. It is increasingly hard to ignore that possibility when there is almost only good news for Democrats, or when respondents enter a survey and don’t complete it, but may have wildly different attitudes on the questions they do answer. As a pollster who has lived through the last three presidential elections, the prospect of non-response bias looms large and will for the rest of my days.

The Democratic RBA versus generic ballot trend introduces a potential for bias within the composition of samples of completed interviews this year—not one between supporting Democratic candidates and Republican candidates, but one between turning out for Democrats and not turning out at all.

Democrats led Republicans in the generic ballot in the September Marquette poll by eight points, which increased to 13 points among likely voters. Similarly, the Economist/YouGov survey showing D+14 among likely voters found a smaller eight-point Democratic lead among registered voters. Turnout assumptions are always a necessary part of developing likely voter models; the question sticking with me based on this analysis is whether those assumptions are too rosy for Democrats when many people supporting them don’t have a positive view of the Democratic Party either.

At the moment, my gut tells me that the toxicity of the political environment and anger toward Trump and Republicans are more meaningful, motivating forces than discontent with the Democratic Party and its leadership in depressing turnout. Maybe all this doesn’t mean anything in the end.

That said, I am mentally anticipating a larger band of potential outcomes in my head just in case the results in November look different from the generic ballot polling we’re seeing now.

Editor’s note: this piece first appeared on the author’s Substack

Bryan Bennett is the Principal of Loft Beck Strategies, a public opinion research consultancy based in Austin, Texas. Prior to starting LBS, Bryan previously founded and ran Navigator Research from 2018–2025.

We know that in today’s oversaturated media environment, good journalism is often hard to find. So each Friday, our team highlights five pieces—analysis, interviews, editorials, and more—that caught our attention from both the past week and weeks prior. We may not always agree with every writer’s arguments, but we nonetheless think they are worth sharing.

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2 things from this week

• Eboo Patel: DEI Demeans Minorities

But the great tragedy of DEI is that it opened up so much space for talk about racism that it crowded out any room for the kinds of activities that help people excel. Indeed, it did just the opposite. By building programs on concepts like white supremacy culture (which explicitly states that good writing, punctuality, and following protocols of excellence are “white supremacist” values) it created the impression that lowering standards for minorities (rather than raising expectations and supporting people to succeed) was morally superior and intellectually sophisticated. In fact, the DEI regime’s singular focus on racism and other forms of discrimination created perverse incentives: the more minorities failed, the more evidence there was for the ideology that the system was set up for minorities to fail.

• Dino Guastella: The Earners, the Owners, and the Donors [paywalled]

As midterms elections inch closer, the Left seems to have some wind in its sails. Big victories in New York City, and a primary win in Michigan suggest, to some, that socialists and progressives have learned real lessons about how to campaign on their popular economic critique while downplaying those social positions that put them at odds with the majority of voters. Across the board, there seems to be a consensus: if the Left ditches the culture war and courts the working class by focusing only on the ways progressive policy can improve the lives of the have-nots, then the Left can win. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now claims that the era of “woke” was a kind of mania and that Democrats would be better off focusing on health care and grocery prices.

Yet there is good reason to doubt that this sort of disciplined, anti-manic approach will be widely adopted. “Woke 1 was crazy,” but Woke 2 feels almost inevitable. After all, this isn’t the first time such a conclusion has been reached. We’ve been here before.

In his 2004 bestselling book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, author Thomas Frank castigated liberals for choosing “to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues.” And decades before that, works like Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Irving Howe’s Beyond the New Left, and Bayard Rustin’s many writings and speeches all offered compelling arguments that that the Left ought to build a political program based on the shared economic interests of the popular classes, and not upon those moral-cultural issues that deeply divide us. Yet, repeatedly, we have proven incapable of heeding this advice. Instead, every decade or so we find some new moral-cultural crusade that only succeeds in undermining the Left’s social and economic agenda. No amount of reasoned critique or political experience has generated the capacity for the Left to act in the way we all periodically agree we ought to act. Why?

In large part it’s a story about interests. And in this case, the interests of three distinct, sometimes overlapping, social groups: professional-class high-earners whose occupations and income predispose them toward cultural issues, corporate-class owners chasing the tremendous spending power of the prior group, and uber-rich liberal donors, who—perhaps lacking anything more interesting to do with their money—seem to enjoy sponsoring endless cultural skirmishes.

Against that trifecta, what chance does common sense stand?

2 things from the archive

• Matthew Vines: I’m Gay, Not Queer. It Matters.

Since then, the broad support that made marriage equality possible has grown more vulnerable. This is in part because a key message behind it — that being gay is not a choice — is being undermined by those who argue that same-sex orientation is better thought of as a part of a wider rebellion against social norms.

This worldview is best expressed in one word: “queer,” which is often used interchangeably with “gay” these days. The two words don’t mean the same thing. And in that difference lies a danger for our hard-fought equality. […]

…the capaciousness that makes “queer” appealing to some also makes the term remarkably easy for anybody — regardless of orientation — to adopt as a kind of radical chic identity label. Because the word “queer” can describe any departure from social norms, it becomes an open door through which almost anyone can walk. Polyamorous? Queer. Vaguely uncomfortable with gender expectations? Possibly queer, too.

That elasticity has helped fuel a sharp rise in young people identifying as something other than straight, even if they are unlikely to ever pursue a same-sex relationship. Some of this increase represents people who were previously closeted but are now free to be honest about their sexual orientation, which is a welcome development. But the broader trend of casting the queer net ever wider has muddled a once-clear public message about who gay people are. Being gay begins to look less like an inborn trait and more like a chosen ideology or aesthetic.

• Maarten Boudry: How to Hijack a University

Long story short: our research group gradually thinned out, attracting fewer and fewer students, and entered something of a death spiral. Somewhat disillusioned, my supervisor opted for early retirement and now devotes the rest of his career to public outreach. Almost immediately, you could feel the department’s ideological center of gravity shifting. Braeckman was not right-wing by any stretch, but he cherished academic freedom and viewpoint diversity and loathed all forms of dogmatism. A few other liberal professors retired, and the new generation tended to be more ideologically homogeneous. There were still plenty of reasonable and moderate people, but they preferred to keep their heads down.

Some students felt emboldened to complain about the remaining biological approaches in our courses, deriding them with the standard slur of “scientism.” The few remaining courses in anthropology and biology disappeared from the curriculum. Some colleagues even expressed satisfaction that right-leaning students dropped out of the program after a year or two, having realized they didn’t really belong there. […]

The ideological slant became even more noticeable at the level of the Faculty of Arts and Letters as a whole. In 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, our dean signed a letter on “decolonization,” along with dozens of professors. It was a nakedly ideological document calling for decolonization to become a compulsory goal across all faculties, rehashing all the familiar activist slogans about “Eurocentric” and “Western” frameworks and “racialized minorities” who supposedly don’t feel represented by academic staff with a different skin color. […]

At the time, as I wrote in Quillette, I didn’t take the whole decolonization issue seriously. When the proposal was discussed during a department meeting, I was even inclined to lean back in mild amusement. As a naturalist, I’m primarily concerned with real-world problems of today, not with poring over the great works of Kant, Hegel, and Aristotle. But how, I thought, would my progressive colleagues square the circle of dedicating their lives to all those Dead White Males while still staying in the good graces of the activists? You can’t exactly rewrite the history of philosophy. It struck me as somebody else’s problem. (I was dead wrong.)

1 data visualization

• Dominic Packer & Jay Van Bavel: Partisans are highly segregated by workplace

Museums and environmental organizations have the fewest Republicans, gas pipelines and mines have the most Republicans.

Historians are most likely to be Democrats, drill operators are the most likely to be Republicans.

Political Segregation is largest among the politically active and those with more market power (senior executives).

Republicans experience higher exposure to Democrats at work: the average Republican’s coworkers are 50% Democratic versus 32% Republican for the average Democrat.

We believe there’s value in revisiting old ideas and arguments as circumstances change, so we are starting a new, semi-regular segment: TLP, Revisited. From time to time, we will reprint some of our favorite pieces from The Liberal Patriot and add a little commentary reflecting on them from the perspective of today.

As we note in this piece, a recurring theme of the 21st century has been instability: the dot-com crash, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and subsequent fallout in the Middle East), the Great Recession, mass migration, rapid technological change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of populist movements on the left and right (to name just a few).

And over the past few years, artificial intelligence has emerged as a new and increasingly omnipresent force in daily life—one that many people are wary of and feel they have little control over. Consider:

• 63 percent of Americans say AI is advancing “too quickly,” while just 19 percent say it’s moving at about the right pace (and a mere two percent say it’s going too slowly);

• 59 percent expect AI to reduce the need for humans to perform important or creative tasks;

• 57 percent say they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefits (compared with 34 percent who say the opposite);

• Half (50 percent) of Americans are more concerned than excited about the growing use of AI in daily life, versus just ten percent who are more excited than concerned; and,

• Three in five (59 percent) of Americans say they have little or no control over how AI is used in their lives.

In the face of all this, it’s not hard to understand why so many Americans feel that the world around them has become so unsettling. And any party that hopes to win and exercise political power would be wise to speak to this growing sense of instability.

Right now, the party that appears to be on the cusp of winning power is the Democrats. Their standing has dramatically improved since this piece was first published. But with any newly acquired power will come a great responsibility: they must rise to the occasion by showing strong, steady leadership and offering a path for navigating this new world that eases people’s fears as much as possible, rather than feeding on them.

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Originally published on June 17, 2025.

As Donald Trump ran for a second term in 2024, a attack line he frequently leveled at Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was that they were both “weak.” He focused specifically on the porous southern border and conflicts abroad, problems he said never would have happened under his leadership. Enough voters ultimately bought this argument. In a post-election study from Third Way, among the top words they associated with Trump were “strong” and “leader.” The AP VoteCast survey similarly found voters were likelier to view Trump (56 to 43) than Harris (46 to 53) as a “strong leader.”

The efficacy of the “strong” versus “weak” framing likely stemmed from a deeper issue in American life: many people feel like the country is going through an uncertain and unstable time and are looking for strong leadership to navigate it. In a poll last month, YouGov asked respondents which periods in U.S. history they believed were the most and least politically stable. There were several contenders for most stable, but the top choice was the Reagan Era, which many seem to fondly recall as a time when the country succeeded under the leadership of a strong and confident president—especially coming out of the Vietnam War and economic stagnation of the 1970s.

But respondents were less divided when it came to identifying the least stable era: a decisive plurality (31 percent) picked the present, which appears to include everything that has happened since 2020. Tack on the decade or so just before that, including the Great Recession and tumult of the 2010s, and that figure rises to 36 percent. The next-closest era? The Civil War, which just 17 percent identified as the most unstable period in American history.

Some of this result is likely due to recency bias. Still, it’s telling, if understandable, that so many Americans view the present with such unease. Consider everything the U.S. (and several other countries, for that matter) has experienced over just the past couple of decades:

• A monumental recession that created a prolonged period of hardship and an uneven recovery;

• Post-war fatigue following Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of ISIS and other terror groups that later wreaked havoc on western countries, and the start of two new foreign wars in which the U.S. has had a tremendous stake;

• The advent of camera phones, which among other things became a vehicle for broadcasting police shootings, leading to subsequent unrest across the country;

• Social movements on the left aimed at upending longstanding conventions and understandings surrounding everything from race to gender to relations between the sexes;

• A populist uprising on the right that has fervently worked to dismantle (or at least seriously rethink the wisdom of) many post-World War II institutions and disrupt the longstanding global neoliberal order;

• A pandemic that led to the deaths of over one million Americans, greater levels of isolation, and more antisocial behavior in public;

• Mass migration that has rapidly changed the demographics of many western societies and engendered backlash, especially following a surge of border crossings during Biden’s presidency;

• A declining devotion to organized religion, an institution some people may feel has long helped root American society in a shared ethos;

• The exacerbation of political and cultural polarization coupled with growing levels of distrust among Americans of different political persuasions; and

• The rapid development of new technologies and their subsequent disruption of daily life (such as social media and, most recently, AI).

In moments of vulnerability and precarity, people often turn to leaders who project strength—or whom they believe can at least deliver some sense of stability. In 2020, facing a global pandemic, that leader was Joe Biden, who pitched his steady hand and decades of experience as the antidote to four chaotic and unpredictable years of Trump and pledged a “return to normalcy.”

However, Biden’s term was marred by much of the post-Covid fallout detailed above, including growing inflation and a spike in border crossings that sharply reversed a previous uptick in favorability toward higher levels of immigration. According to the 2024 VoteCast survey, a large majority (60 percent) identified either inflation or immigration as the top issue facing the country—both issues dealing with matters of security and stability—and these voters broke heavily for Trump.

Since assuming office for the second time, though, Trump has overseen even more instability. His haphazard tariffs have left allies, consumers, and markets spinning. Many of his executive orders pertaining to federal departments and agencies have been ill-conceived, leaving states, municipalities, and ordinary Americans unsure of whether federal funds and jobs will continue flowing to their communities. On the immigration front, far from any kind of organized and methodical deportation program focused primarily on criminal offenders, Trump’s approach has been more akin to shock-and-awe, engendering backlash from many Americans.

Just this past week, the country was rocked by a series of destabilizing events: marines arrived on the streets of Los Angeles to put down protests, a U.S. senator was handcuffed and dragged out of a public event, a new war commenced in the Middle East, and a Minnesota state legislator was assassinated (and one of her colleagues nearly was, too).

And yet: despite all this, voters aren’t yearning for a return to Democratic rule. In fact, Trump has retained a higher level of support up to this point in his second term than he did in his first.

Democrats thus cannot assume the pendulum will naturally swing back to them four years from now, even if Trump remains unpopular or the current tumult persists. Research has found that during periods of rapid and unsettling changes, voters don’t often look left. In the face of economic uncertainty, for example, support tends to increase for right-wing populists rather than progressive parties promising to expand the safety net and increase income redistribution—moves some Democrats might believe could address voters’ feelings of insecurity. Or consider how following the violent riots of the 1960s, support grew for the law-and-order candidacy of Richard Nixon.

Viewed in this context, one could reasonably argue that Biden’s 2020 win—a victory for the left party at a time of great uncertainty—was more of an aberration than a sign of typical voter behavior.

This isn’t to say Democrats can’t win back the presidency in 2028. However, they would be wise to reckon with the disquieting feelings many people possess right now, including speaking directly to the issues that inform those feelings. Though it may be a while before the public trusts them again to handle immigration, Democrats could at least offer their own alternative to Trump for how they plan to control the flow of migration over the southern border—a primary driver of the recent rise in anti-immigration sentiments—and plug other holes in the system while still pledging to defend the country’s rich tradition of welcoming and assimilating new immigrants.

Additionally, there’s another issue on which Democrats continue to hold an edge over Republicans and which they may be able to credibly press with voters: healthcare. Post-election evidence suggested that even at one of the Democrats’ lowest points in recent memory, voters still continued to trust them more on this issue.

People who don’t have health insurance often fear they are one medical issue away from bankruptcy. And for those who do have it, the threat of taking it away might be strong enough to move their votes. Given the overwhelming public opposition to the current Republican plan to cut Medicaid—and possibly curb Medicare benefits, too—there may be an opening here for Democrats.

Another way Democrats might address voters’ concerns is through the type of candidates they nominate, in particular for president. Maybe it’s someone with a national security or military background who can market themselves as a leader with a steady hand. Or, perhaps it’s an experienced governor who successfully helped guide their state through the Covid pandemic, a difficult and fearful time for many Americans. Whoever they choose should have the ability to calm a weary nation.

This period of precarity is unlikely to end soon, especially in the face of uncertain technological changes around artificial intelligence, growing partisan polarization, continued mass migration globally, and the persistence of foreign conflicts. Whichever party is able to compellingly speak to voters’ anxieties during this time and offer a reassuring vision for helping guide the nation through it may stand to enjoy sustained success in this decade and beyond.

The lesson for parties should be straightforward: contest a big map early, because you never know what will happen between the beginning of the cycle and Election Day.

How It Looked When The Map Was Set

The fact that Democrats are poised for big House gains seems likely today, and in retrospect, many signs were there earlier on in the cycle. But it’s important to remember how different the environment was when candidates were deciding whether to run or not.

The Iran War started on February 28th, just days before the March 3rd Texas primary. By then, candidate filing deadlines had already passed in 15 states, with another 15 states set to close their filing periods within four weeks. At that point, the generic ballot was D+4, a favorable environment, but not one that suggested a decisive shift in the House. Control of the chamber still looked likely to come down to a relatively small number of seats.

But even that understates how early the map was really set. Candidates typically do not decide to run when the filing deadline arrives. To build a credible campaign, candidates would have needed to begin organizing, fundraising and announcing in early to mid 2025, when the generic ballot was D+2. Even before that, candidates were likely considering a run in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 elections, when Republicans briefly held the advantage.

That is why the CCI argues that parties should build credible campaigns well beyond the handful of districts initially identified as toss-ups or lean.

The Race Raters

Race ratings are useful snapshots of the political environment at any given moment. However elections are fluid, and as this cycle has shown, environments can change in a short amount of time.

Of the 15 Republican-held seats that Cook rates as Toss Ups (that were not significantly altered by redistricting1), only six were Toss Ups at the start of the cycle. Another six began as Lean Republican, one began as Likely Republican (Texas 15) and two made their way all across the board from Solid Republican (North Carolina 11 and Ohio 7).

That means a majority of today’s Republican-held Toss Ups were not considered Toss Ups when campaigns were taking shape. And three of them were initially rated Likely or Solid Republican, exactly the kind of seats that could easily have been overlooked by a party focused only on the conventional battlefield.

Two of those three are Welcome races: NC-11 and TX-15. Both illustrate the value of having credible candidates like Jamie Ager in North Carolina and Bobby Pulido in Texas, who are running as locally focused, aggressively centrist campaigns in districts that Trump won by double digits less than two years ago.

The point is not that the earlier ratings were wrong. Things can change that impact races over time: the national environment moves, strong candidates emerge, incumbents face scandals, etc. The lesson here is that initial ratings should help describe the battlefield, not define its outer limits. Competing in a broader set of districts creates the infrastructure to capitalize when a race that once looked unlikely suddenly becomes competitive.

What It Means

American politics has been incredibly volatile for the last decade. Consider House control. After nearly a half-century of Democratic control of the House, Republicans took the chamber in 1994 in a wave election, and held it until 2006. Democrats then controlled the chamber in a wave election for four years, before losing it in yet another wave election in 2010. Republicans then held the chamber for four terms, before losing it in, you guessed it, the 2018 wave election. Democrats then held the House for two terms before losing it again in 2022. Republicans retained their narrow majority in 2024, and the chamber is once again highly competitive in 2026.

House control went from changing every half century to changing every decade to changing nearly every election!

In this environment, parties must contest a broad map, because it’s difficult to ascertain two years out what might be competitive. Voters are poised to “throw the bums out,” and incumbents may end up emerging weaker than expected. When Jamie Ager ran for a North Carolina seat that was seen as “safe Republican,” no one predicted the incumbent, Chuck Edwards, would be forced to retire due to sexual misconduct allegations.

That uncertainty is precisely the point. Parties cannot predict which supposedly safe seats will become competitive. They can, however, make sure they have candidates in place when they do.