Ruy in Conversation with Welcome’s Liam Kerr

Yesterday, TLV’s Ruy Teixeira went live on Substack with our pal Liam Kerr of Welcome to break down the midterm results. Among the topics they discussed:

• Politics without winners

• Republicans “deciding to lose”1

• What the results mean the Republicans’ coalition

• Democrats and “minimum necessary heterodoxy”

• How Democrats will interpret the results

• Will the Democrats’ “big tent” hold up once they’re in power?

And plenty more. Check out the full conversation above!

Ruy in the Free Press

“There Goes Trump’s Coalition”

The engine of [Democrats’] success was twofold: the cost of living and opposition to Trump. This was a thermostatic reaction against the incumbent with a vengeance. Trump came into office with an impressive new coalition built on his promises to fix the economy, make life affordable, and bring things back to normal. He hasn’t delivered, so there goes his coalition, including especially big swings back toward the Democrats among groups like young voters and Hispanics that swung the hardest toward him in 2024.

What does it all mean? Above all, that we are in an era of very unstable political coalitions. A big victory like this one does not mean voters have realigned toward the winning party. Far from it. It just means that the losing party has been rejected, and restless voters won’t hesitate to go back the other way if things don’t change, and change fast.

Call it “politics without winners.”

Read Ruy’s full thoughts here.

Ruy in the Washington Post

“How a ‘blue wave’ ultimately could cripple the Democratic Party”

Democrats don’t have an easy road ahead. But, paradoxically, the better they do in 2026, the more likely they are to ignore their party’s weaknesses with working-class and rural voters. Those weaknesses led to Trump winning the 2024 election, but they are likely to fade from the party’s memory as Democrats, buoyed by the fool’s gold of midterms success, attempt to placate an energized left.

Celebration is easy; confronting underlying problems is hard. Thus, when Republicans get shellacked on Nov. 3, expect Democrats to see the result as an enthusiastic endorsement of the party rather than a repudiation of the GOP — a far more plausible explanation. […]

Democrats need to turn their good fortune into a lasting political advantage, but the party’s midterms strategy indicates this could be a challenge. Democratic candidates have adopted the “affordability” slogan, seasoned with a generous helping of economic populism. This has been a successful formula for this cycle. Post-election, it could have diminishing returns. […]

Democrats should keep a lesson from the second Trump administration firmly in mind: If you promise to fix the economy, make life affordable and get things back to normal, you’d better do it.

Read the full thing here.

Michael in UnHerd

“Republicans should start planning for a post-Trump future”

No one can predict with certainty what all this portends for the 2028 presidential election, but Republicans face real problems as they look ahead to a post-Trump world. The question before them now may simply be how much longer they’re willing to allow Trump to be an albatross around their necks.

Trump’s power has arguably never been weaker. He is now responsible for one of the worst midterm performances for either party in the modern era. His approval rating is near its lowest point on record — a data point that carries a little more weight in light of the polls’ resounding success this cycle. A healthy party might look at this picture and decide that for the sake of its long-term viability, it may be wise to increasingly crowd him out. Yet Trump still enjoys fairly high support among Republican voters, which could make such a move very risky.

This is perhaps the biggest decision Republicans have to make regarding their future, and — as these elections have shown — that future is approaching much more quickly than they may realize.

Read the full thing here.

Ruy on the Fifth Column podcast

Midterm Madness LIVE with The Fifth Column and Friends

The Latino vote has swung significantly back toward the Democrats, kind of like everybody else, but maybe more so. And particularly in a place like Texas, where it looks like there was a huge shift. … They swung extremely hard toward Trump in 2024—that was one of the big, salient facts about that election—and now, Trump has basically given all those gains back.

Trump assembled a really interesting coalition. Remember, people talked about the multiracial, working-class, populist coalition that Trump had put together. And essentially he’s blown it up in the course of two years. Now again, I don’t think those voters will necessarily stick with the Democrats because I don’t think they love them. I think they just wanted to get out of dodge [with Trump].

There’s some interesting data that suggests that Democrats are going to see this big victory as a license to run even more progressive candidates, which is maybe not the right lesson here. If you want to keep these voters, you should run hard at convincing them that you share their values, you’re aiming toward the center of the country—you just want things to get back to normal.

Watch Ruy’s full conversation with crew here.

Ruy on The After Party with Emily Jashinsky

This was not an electoral environment where it was going to be that effective [for Republicans] to point out socialism, “Piker-ism,” “trans-ism,” whatever the things that Democrats or Democratic candidates were associated with that voters tend not to like—simply harping on that endlessly was not going to do you much good.

I don’t know what would have done them good in this environment, but it would have been better at least to take on the kinds of issues that El-Sayed himself was talking about, rather than just say, “Piker, Piker, Piker.” I mean, at the margin, how much difference was this going to make? I don’t know. But it certainly wasn’t the maximizing strategy.

And I don’t understand how [Republicans] can let Trump off the hook. … What was Trump’s message? He talked all the time about socialism, communism, Hasan Piker… The idea that he is simply the head of the Republican Party and he just wants to talk about kitchen-table issues is wrong.

And it’s interesting: if Republicans choose to respond to this shellacking in that way, I don’t think they’ll get very far. It’s sort of a “circle the wagons” kind of thing. “The problem wasn’t Trump and his administration and how much people detested it. The problem was rather the candidates who didn’t correctly implement the message.” I think that’s just utter nonsense.

Watch Ruy’s full conversation with Emily here.

Finally, a reminder that if you would like to recommend an article or submit a question, please leave a comment on any TLV post published in the seven days leading up to our Friday Five posts (including this one). We’ll collect our favorites and include them in future editions!

In the end, the polls basically got it right: a large share of Americans were angry with the Trump administration and ready to send a message. And the primary beneficiary of that anger was the Democratic Party, the vehicle through which many frustrated voters could express their displeasure. Democrats won big all across the country and at all levels of government. Virtually no Republican who was even moderately vulnerable was safe.

According to projections from the New York Times, Democrats could win as many as 259 House seats once all the votes are counted. They have already flipped seven Senate seats and could win as many as nine, which would tie the largest such gain in any cycle this century (Republicans also gained nine seats in 2014). They have flipped five governorships and could get two more. And the party’s national House popular vote margin could reach as high as 13 points, which would be the biggest win for either party in 50 years.

It was, without question, one of the worst midterms for an incumbent party in modern history. While more detailed data about this election won’t be available for weeks or even months, there are some other important things we do know that are worth exploring further.

The election was a referendum on Trump—not a total endorsement of Democrats

According to early data from the exit poll survey, a plurality of voters (44 percent) said that one reason for their vote was to “express opposition to Donald Trump.” Among these voters, a whopping 97 percent backed Democrats in House races.1 Pre-election polling data told a similar story.

Moreover, fully 63 percent of the electorate said they disapproved of Trump’s job performance, 86 percent of whom voted Democratic. Perhaps more strikingly, an outright majority (54 percent) strongly disapproved, and 94 percent backed Democrats.2

Trump’s war in Iran also appeared to play a major role in the results: three-quarters of voters (74 percent) said the war was either a “crucial or major factor” to their vote choice, and they broke for Democrats by 30 points.

Voters did view Democrats slightly more favorably (47 percent) than they did Republicans (40 percent). But the Democrats’ net favorability was still underwater at -6 points, even with the electorate that delivered them such resounding wins. And among the country more broadly, their numbers are much lower.

Though Democrats are right to be excited by the results, it’s important to understand them for what they are: an indictment of Trump rather than a resounding endorsement of the party and its agenda. More on this in a moment.

Democrats’ majorities will be big, though not quite historic

Friend of The Long View and GWU Professor noted this morning that Democrats’ projected 258 House seats would be the largest majority for either party since 1993. While that’s certainly an impressive feat for the modern political era, it’s still considerably smaller than many majorities in the 20th century.

The Senate tells a similar story: Democrats’ projected 56 seats would represent the largest Senate majority for either party since 2009—but it would still be smaller than many majorities of the 1900s.

Trump’s coalition was more fragile than it appeared

According to Times data, Democrats’ biggest gains came from the groups that swung hard toward Trump in the 2024 election. These included Hispanics (-28), young voters overall (-32), and young minority men in particular (-34).3 Some of this was likely driven by changes in turnout, which we’ll discuss in more detail below.

This tells us a couple of things. When members of these populations shifted to Republicans in 2024, many were apparently just visiting rather than making a new, permanent home there. In essence, Republicans may have taken these gains for granted—as evidenced by the Texas gerrymander—which backfired on them in a big way.

Still, the 2024 election results showed that many of these voters are open to supporting Republicans and are not necessarily as reliable for the Democrats as they thought. So while Democrats can celebrate the swing back in their direction this cycle, they, too, shouldn’t assume these shifts will stick.

Democrats’ advantage was powered heavily by differential partisan turnout

Early indications suggest that a major reason for Democrats’ wins was higher-than-normal midterm turnout among their own voters—and a sharp drop-off among Republicans. According to preliminary analysis from the Democratic firm Blue Rose:

Harris supporters actually turned out at a higher rate in 2018 (59%) than they did this year (56%). The bigger advantage this cycle came from Trump supporters staying home: only 47% voted, down from 56% in 2018 and 51% in 2022.

The Washington Post’s Lenny Bronner detailed how differences in turnout affected states with competitive Senate races, noting that “Democrats showed up as if this were a presidential election... and Republicans didn’t.”

There is also evidence that some voters likely switched their party preference between 2024 and 2026. According to the exits, seven percent of 2024 Trump voters backed a Democrat in House races this year, compared to just two percent of Harris voters who backed a Republican.

We will know more about the relative importance of turnout and persuasion in this election once organizations like Catalist and Pew Research publish their voter-file analyses next spring. But these early results point to differential turnout as a primary factor in the Democrats’ success.

The wave came crashing down on the South

One of the most remarkable developments was the extent of Democrats’ gains in the South.

• In Alabama, Democrats held on in AL-02 (which was gerrymandered to make it more Republican-friendly) and came within six points of flipping AL-05, a district thought to be solidly Republican. The GOP is also on track to win the state’s Senate contest by fewer than ten points, which would be the narrowest victory in a Senate race for them since 1996.

• In Florida, where Republicans passed another gerrymandered map, Democrats not only retained all of their potentially vulnerable seats but may flip one (FL-09). They are also within one point of flipping four other races that remain uncalled. The Democratic candidates for Senate and governor came within three points of winning, just four years after Republicans won those offices by 16 and 20 points, respectively.

• In Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff is set to win re-election by 18 points, the largest margin for a Democratic Senate candidate in the state in 26 years. Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Democrat since 1998 to win the state’s governorship. Democrats also carried this momentum down the ballot, capturing all seven other statewide offices up for election. And Democrats came within three points of flipping GA-01, which was considered solidly Republican.

• In Mississippi, Senate candidate Scott Colom currently leads incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith 1,724 votes. If he were to hold on, he would become the first Democratic senator from Mississippi elected since 1982.

• In North Carolina, Democratic Governor Roy Cooper won the state’s open Senate race by nearly 20 points—this, in a state that narrowly broke for Trump two years ago. And it appears his coattails may have helped his party overcome Republicans’ gerrymandering effort there, too: across the state’s 14 districts, Democrats have already won nine races and are still in the running in the five uncalled races.

• In South Carolina, Annie Andrews scored a surprise victory, making her the first Democrat since 1998 to win a Senate race in South Carolina. Democrats also came within six points of flipping every other statewide office on the ballot. In the House, they are on track to flip SC-01 and are within striking distance of SC-02—another seat handicappers thought was solidly Republican. While the remaining three districts all broke for the GOP, Democrats came within six points of two others as well.

• Tennessee was just red enough to keep most of the big races out of reach for Democrats, but they came surprisingly close in several contests. One of the more shocking results came in the governor’s race, where Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn secured a narrow, 2.5-point win over Democrat Jerri Green. In the House, the GOP’s gerrymander basically worked—Republicans have officially won eight of the state’s nine districts, though Democrats may pull off a massive upset in TN-04 (which handicappers also saw as solidly Republican). And they came within five points of picking off Republicans in five additional districts.

One likely reason why Democrats surged so strongly in this region of the country is that it appears black turnout was way up relative to a typical midterm. Here’s a visualization of this phenomenon, courtesy of analyst Sean Trende:

Briefly: the chart shows that counties with larger black populations in these four states generally saw a smaller decline than other counties in total votes cast in 2026 Senate elections compared to the 2024 presidential election.

These results raise an interesting question: did the Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais, which allowed Republican state legislators in the South to draw maps breaking up majority-black districts historically protected under the Voting Rights Act, contribute to the surge in turnout? Trende noted that “causation is always very difficult to prove, but the intuition that the VRA redistricting supercharged black turnout in the south seems to hold up reasonably well at first blush.” We will know more once the Pew and Catalist analyses come out next year.

Moderates overperformed expectations; progressives not so much

Earlier this week, our friends at Welcome co-published an analysis examining how Senate candidates in several battleground races performed relative to Kamala Harris’s 2024 margin in the state and the statewide House margin this cycle. The results were unequivocal: candidates viewed as center-left all ran ahead of the statewide House vote and ahead of Harris by double-digit margins (and an average of 20.8 points).

By contrast, candidates who campaigned unabashedly as progressives outran Harris by an average of just 4.8 points. None reached double-digit margins, and each trailed the statewide House margin.

Each of the three more left-leaning candidates they analyzed—Jackson in Maine, Flanagan in Minnesota, and El-Sayed in Michigan—also ran behind the gubernatorial candidates with whom they shared the ballot. The biggest underperformer was Jackson, who trailed Democrat Chellie Pingree by 12.2 points in the two-way vote.

Of course, progressives are right to note that their candidates did still win in a handful of swing races. And Jackson, specifically, faced arguably the toughest Republican opponent (Susan Collins) of any Democrat running for Senate. But the data nonetheless suggest these candidates were buoyed by the national shift—and that in a less friendly environment, they may not have been as successful.

Voters (still) really hate inflation, but don’t really trust either party to address it

After the 2024 election, I noted that voters’ frustration with inflation, and the Biden administration’s struggles to tame it, were major culprits behind Democrats’ losses. Two years later, voters are telling their leaders the same thing:

• Eighty-nine percent said the cost of living was a “crucial or major factor” in their vote choice, and they broke for Democrats over Republicans by 20 points (59 to 39).

• Seventy-five percent rated the nation’s economy as “not so good or poor,” and they backed Democrats by an even wider 42-point margin (70 to 28).

• Sixty-six percent of voters said they believe Trump’s tariffs have hurt the national economy, and they voted Democratic by a massive 63-point margin (81 to 18).

• Fifty-nine percent said they are “very concerned” about the cost of healthcare, and they backed Democrats by a more than two-to-one margin (67 to 31).

However, while a plurality of voters (39 percent) highlighted the economy as the top issue facing the country, they broke for Democrats by just six points. And when asked which party they believe is better able to handle the economy, Democrats led Republicans by the same small margin (44 to 37). Nearly 20 percent said they didn’t trust either party.

Indeed, it’s hard to believe voters suddenly trust Democrats on the economy again, just two years after punishing them in an election centered on that issue. The party should keep this in mind as it takes control of Congress and pursues its legislative agenda, especially given the recent rise of “slopulist” ideas that could put even more pressure on already spiraling costs and the national debt. If they go down that road, they risk being blamed for the same problems Trump was.

A real Republican reckoning may not come immediately

After riding a wave of anger at the Biden administration to power, Trump burned through his goodwill with lightning speed, with his net approval rating turning negative after just two months and ticking steadily downward ever since. And all the while, Republicans have stood by him.

However, in the aftermath of an electoral drubbing, it’s reasonable to expect the losing party to take stock of how it veered so off course and away from the median American. Republicans would be wise to reassess their relationship with Trump, who now looks much more like a liability than an asset than two years ago. In fact, one could plausibly argue that he is becoming to Republicans what Biden was to Democrats: someone who succeeded at building a winning coalition but who became an albatross for his party once in office.

But even if some Republicans believe there’s a need for a reckoning over Trump and the party’s current trajectory, it may be a minute before they can begin in earnest. For starters, Trump remains quite popular with Republican voters. Moreover, almost by definition, elected Republicans who survived the wave are more likely to represent deeply red states or districts where support for Trump is even higher. As political scientist David Hopkins noted, “The resulting minority caucus is even more ideologically extreme than the outgoing majority.”

A lot will likely hinge on whom the party’s voters nominate for president in 2028—and whether that person can chart a new path forward that keeps most of Trump’s core coalition in line while also appealing beyond the GOP base.

America remains a center-right country

Polling has shown for years that a large majority of Americans consider themselves either moderate or conservative-leaning, and the midterm results offered further evidence of this. Even in an election where voters voted for Democrats in overwhelming numbers, nearly three-quarters identified as either moderate (41 percent) or conservative (33 percent), compared to just one-quarter who called themselves liberal (26 percent), according to the exit poll survey.

Additionally, this electorate also trusted Republicans slightly more than Democrats to handle immigration issues, 43 percent to 41 percent. And among the 14 percent who identified immigration as the top issue facing the nation, nearly nine in ten broke for the GOP.

Voters in many places also had the chance to express their policy preferences on various ballot measures. In several states—including some deeply Democratic ones—voters backed policies that some might code as conservative or rejected others thought to be progressive. Among some of the more notable results:

• A proposed “billionaire tax” in California is on track to lose by a decent margin.

• In Colorado, voters supported increasing penalties for trafficking or even possessing fentanyl.

• Eight states passed new restrictions on voting, including five that explicitly limited voting rights to U.S. citizens (Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia), two that added a photo ID requirement (Nevada and North Carolina), and one that added new requirements for in-person and mail voting (Ohio).

• A big majority of voters in North Carolina passed measures to cap state income tax rates and limit property tax increases.

• Wisconsin voters supported banning DEI policies in state government—and by nearly the same margin that they elected the state’s first black governor.

• Perhaps the most notable result was a slate of ballot measures that sought to address so-called “trans issues.” Voters in four states passed more restrictive measures, including banning the participation of people who were born male in women’s sports and banning gender-transition surgeries for minors. Surprisingly, some of these measures earned majority support even in deep-blue states like Washington and Colorado. It’s a reminder that many of the views about sex and gender associated with the left wing of the Democratic Party are not broadly shared by much of the country—including even among many Democrats themselves.

These results offer the party a reality check: the same electorate that just delivered them massive gains doesn’t necessarily agree with them on key issues, and it would be prudent to reflect on this. Yet a pre-election Politico survey found that a strong plurality of Democratic midterm voters and a big majority of progressives believed that if the party won big on Tuesday, it should run more left-wing candidates in the next election. With the 2028 presidential primaries expected to ramp up by the beginning of next year, we’ll find out soon which path Democrats choose.

New Electoral College paths may be opening up for both parties

One reason for Democratic optimism moving forward is the possibility that they have expanded the Electoral College map ahead of 2028. They have now demonstrated an ability to win states that haven’t voted Democratic at the statewide level in a very long time. These include Kansas, (likely) Mississippi, South Carolina, and their white whale: Texas. They also dominated in swing states that Trump won two years ago, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.

For Democrats, the biggest question mark is Texas. If they can regularly compete statewide there, it could fundamentally change the Electoral College map. Currently, Texas has 40 electoral votes, four fewer than the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (44 combined). However, post-2030 redistricting projections suggest that Texas could gain two House seats while Michigan and Pennsylvania could each lose one. This would give Texas the same number of electoral votes as the Blue Wall states, which have been trending away from Democrats over the past decade. If states like Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina also become more reliably Democratic, the party would no longer need to rely as heavily on the Upper Midwest.4

But there may be some encouraging news for Republicans heading into 2028, too. Political scientist Matt Grossmann shared a graphic this week comparing several states’ U.S. House vote margins to the national U.S. House margin.

In almost every state where Democrats picked up Senate seats, the statewide House vote was more Republican-leaning than the national vote. This notably included Texas and the three Blue Wall states. It also included Minnesota, which many consider a blue state, but which has also been competitive in presidential years since the turn of the century more often than not.

The main caveat is that the composition of the electorate varies greatly between presidential and midterm years. So while Democrats should certainly be encouraged by their newly demonstrated ability to win states that have long voted Republican, replicating those results in a more competitive presidential election environment could be harder.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this election is that America remains in an era of politics without winners. Frustrated with their leaders and political system, Americans are losing patience with both parties, as evidenced by the record-high share identifying as independents. This has created an increasingly unstable system that produces thermostatic backlash against the party in power every few years and constant change.

Democrats no doubt have much to celebrate after Tuesday’s election—these were real wins that give them real power in the immediate term. But it’s far from certain that these results will translate into long-term success. Many political observers have drawn parallels between this election cycle and 2006, the sixth year of George W. Bush’s increasingly unpopular presidency when Democrats came roaring back to power. They continued their winning streak two years later, electing Barack Obama and growing their majorities in Congress. And then, in 2010, they suffered one of the worst midterm defeats in modern history.

If Democrats hope to remain in power long enough to enact durable change, they’ll have to resist getting bogged down in tribal political squabbles and culture war fights and instead focus on seriously addressing the issues voters continue to say matter most: the cost of living and the economy. So long as Americans believe neither party takes their concerns seriously, the pendulum will continue to swing—and Democrats could find themselves out of power just as quickly as they came into it.

And as always, a reminder: if you would like to recommend an article or submit a question for our mailbag, please leave a comment on any TLV post published in the seven days leading up to our Friday Five posts (including this one). We’ll collect our favorites and include them in future editions!

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Paul Gigot: With eight days to go before Election Day 2026, collars are tightening around campaigns across the country and especially in the White House. Democrats are anticipating a big win, but beyond the electoral math are deeper questions about what the results will tell us about the shifting coalition of Republicans and Democrats. How have those coalitions changed since 2024 when Donald Trump rallied a new coalition of working-class white voters, Hispanics, and independents, and other minorities to win nearly 50 percent of the vote?

I’m Paul Gigot, editor of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. And my guest today is Ruy Teixeira, a longtime student of politics, political scientist, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and founder of the Substack newsletter, The Long View. Welcome, sir. Thanks for coming in.

Ruy Teixeira: Thanks for having me, Paul. This should be interesting.

Let’s talk about this issue, the fundamental issue that seems to be approaching us next week is that the Republican Party, considering where it was in 2024, has shed voters. The Trump coalition isn’t what it was two years ago. What’s driving this political dissatisfaction with the president and his party?

Well, I think it’s pretty simple. I mean, this is a thermostatic reaction against a party in power, which has not delivered what it said it would. People’s views of the economy are extremely negative. People’s views of a lot of Trump administration actions are extremely negative.

Look, Trump came in with this new coalition you alluded to, and in a sense, he was promising to fix the economy, make life affordable, and bring things back to normal after a certain amount of Democratic craziness. I think on all of those scores, he hasn’t really delivered, though you could argue he’s pushed back on some of the Democratic craziness. Unfortunately, he substituted his own craziness for it.

So I think people are really very unhappy with how things are going, and that’s why the Republicans are hemorrhaging a lot of the votes that they picked up in 2024 from non-white working-class voters, even some working-class white voters, young voters, Latinos. I mean, it’s pretty much across the board. Those voters that swung exceptionally heavily in his direction in 2024 are all swinging back.

Now, we can’t really control for who are those voters who are swinging back. Maybe those are the voters who were always more likely to swing back to begin with. In other words, there’s some peripheral voters who moved in Trump’s direction in 2024 who just aren’t going to show up this time, even though on balance, they probably still prefer the Republicans to the Democrats. But that said, I think it’s undeniable that this shift will be big, and it will be precisely in the opposite direction of what happened in 2024.

So if you talk to the White House, they’ll say, “Well, look, we’re just not getting the credit. We closed the border, and that was a big driver of votes in 2024. Prices, hey, I mean, wasn’t our fault. It’s the residual carryover from Biden.” They have a harder time denying the tariffs played a role in this, and they have a harder time denying that the war in Iran has played a role here. And in fact, Trump has all but acknowledged the latter by saying it’s just temporary. It’ll come back after we end the war, however that does end.

Particularly on immigration, you don’t get credit for the things you promised that you do that are no longer issues. People say the border’s closed, so let’s move on to the next thing. And then there’s this: do you think that the way that the administration has enforced internal immigration control with its deportations, is that factoring in here at all?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think it’s really true that he did something that he said he was going to do that people basically supported and still support, which is closing the border. That’s been very effective. He doesn’t really talk about it enough, I think, or in the right kind of way, but it has been twinned with, at least initially, these pretty draconian enforcement actions of ICE, which obviously would get pumped up endlessly in most of the media whenever something untoward happened.

There were the huge demonstrations and tragic deaths in Minneapolis, and it just struck most people as being excessive, even people who supported a much more restrictionist approach to immigration and supported Trump partly for that reason. So I think that’s still a big hangover on views of the Trump administration.

And Democrats now, they’re not that far off Republicans in terms of who’s preferred in immigration, depends on the poll you look at. But Trump’s approval rating in particular is dreadful on immigration, even though it’s slightly less dreadful than on the economy or inflation. That’s really a lot driven by the sense that, yeah, okay, I wanted the immigration situation under control, but this isn’t exactly the way I had in mind.

If they were doing then what they are doing now, which is a much quieter approach to deportations, I think they could have avoided a lot of these problems. Unfortunately, they didn’t, and that’s still first and foremost in the public mind about their interior enforcement regime, as they associate it with that early days of ICE raids and the heavy demonstrations and masked people in the streets. I mean, you don’t have to have the resistance liberal view of it to nevertheless be somewhat disturbed by it. And I think that’s really hurt them quite a bit.

It’s one of the more striking things when you look at the issue mix and [ask] voters, who do you favor more on issues, Democrats or Republicans? Immigration has been the strongest Republican, one of the strongest issues for a very long time, and now it’s turned. As you say, it’s only slightly more negative for the Republicans than the Democrats, but it’s still striking that that is the case. You would think that the White House and Trump would get more credit for [it]. But this enforcement where they went to set a quota of 3,000 deportation arrests a day—

Bad idea.

—I mean, just a terrible idea, because it’s going to lead to excesses as people try to meet a quota as opposed to actually just trying to arrest people who are here illegally, particularly criminal aliens. So it’s an own goal.

Democrats have been able to skate on the whole issue of interior enforcement. Now, they can just say, “We’ll be nicer and less crazy than Trump and the Republicans. And we, too, believe axe murderers should be deported!” And it really elides the whole question of, well, what about people who are here just illegally per se, right? I mean, they aren’t axe murderers. Maybe they have a job, maybe they’ve been here for a year or two, maybe they came here six months ago. What do you do about those people? Are you going to have any enforcement regime against them whatsoever?

And I think Democrats would prefer very much not to talk about it and, in fact, basically quasi-legalize the people here and do a vast immigration reform package, which of course will never get through Congress. So I think the Democrats have been able to skate on this, and I think that’s a real liability for Trump because it takes one of his biggest issues out of the Republican quiver.

Let me ask you about Republicans and their motivation to vote here. The president is spending a month here—and to his credit, very vigorously—he’s out every day doing an event, a rally in some state or another where there’s a key Senate race in particular, and mostly in the red states, Republican states where there are competitive seats.

I mean, Kansas, I didn’t expect to see Trump and Vance rally the troops, but he’s in a lot of these states, in Mississippi. He’s trying to rally the core Trump vote. He’s saying, “I’m on the ballot. Pretend I’m on the ballot. I’m not, but pretend I am.” So he gets those people out.

My reading of the polls though is that those people are likely to vote anyway. They were going to come out. Maybe I’m wrong, but the people that have been telling pollsters they may not come out are some of the traditional Republicans, the Romney voters, the McCain voters, people who voted for Donald Trump probably twice because the alternative was worse in their eyes. They’re curbing their enthusiasm here for the Republicans now. And I’m not sure… How important is it for Trump to get those people out here, and can he do it?

Well, I agree with you. I mean, I think a real problem that these candidates face is not the hardcore MAGA Trump voters. It’s rather the people who voted for Trump, but weren’t necessarily super enthusiastic and had questions about it to begin with. I mean, these are the people who are more likely to stay home. These are people more likely to vote for the other side.

And you don’t necessarily rally them to the Republican side, to candidates like Paxton or whatever, by holding a bunch of rallies, Trump rallies, which attract the Trump faithful and get that kind of coverage. And it’s a desperate attempt to cover up on the fact that a lot of these are, as you say, own goals where the administration has done things. It’s essentially pushed voters away exactly those kinds of voters whose support for Trump, at least the Trump administration, was somewhat provisional.

I mean, one single factor could explain a lot of what’s going to happen as much as anything else, which is the Iran war and the rise in gas prices, because it’s a bit catastrophic. I mean, they’re already doing poorly, and this has just undercut the whole claim of the Trump administration and the GOP to having solved people’s economic problems. “Hey, look, these guys are making it worse. This is crazy.” You can’t make up for an error like that by going out and holding a bunch of rallies.

Really, the hope for Republicans here is just the polls are a bit wrong, and they could be, and especially in red states. I mean, there’s a record. There’s some good analyses by Patrick Ruffini and Sean Trende and others that show that polling error is much more common in these red states, these solidly red states, not swing states. And if that’s true, there might be enough error that we might wind up seeing a Senator Paxton, certainly might wind up seeing a Senator Hinson, I think. I mean, I think that’s some ways more likely than not.

But basically, as is well known, the Democrats need to take a lot of these red states. And if the polls are inaccurate on this, they’re in better shape—the Republicans are in better shape than they thought.

It’s Ken Paxton, the Republican attorney general from Texas, running neck and neck with James Talarico, even a little bit behind in Texas, and Ashley Hinson, congresswoman…running in Iowa as a senator, and that’s neck and neck. She’s a little ahead in the polling, but these are margin of error. Yeah, these are margin of error issues.

So I mean, what’s your personal view on the polling accuracy? I mean, I’ve seen the Patrick Ruffini data. Pretty compelling. Also, we’ve seen years when the Democratic turnout has been underestimated. What’s your view about whether or not this year they are going to be underestimated one way or another?

Yeah, I hesitate to make a point prediction on that. I mean, Nate Silver’s traditional reply to this is, “Well, I mean, this is kind of a random walk, the polling errors. I mean, it could be pro-Democratic, it could be pro-Republican. It’s very hard to make a prediction, particularly about congressional elections where the pattern is less clear.”

So on the other hand, you take a look at the Ruffini, Trende, etc. data, and you do see that pretty well-defined trend of being over-optimistic for the Democrats in red states. So I would not be surprised if that means that some of these polls are bit off and that would help the Republicans, [the polls being] too much in favor of the Democrats.

I mean, again, is it enough to actually prevent a Democratic Senate? I guess I would tend to doubt that. I don’t really want to go through the races race by race and say, “Well, this one might work for the Republican one.” The leads are solid enough and big enough in a lot of these red states that even an error might not be enough to push them back toward the Republicans.

So my overall take, I guess, is yes, there’ll probably be some polling error. I would not be surprised if it was more on the pro-Democratic side than the pro-Republican side in these red states, but I also would kind of expect that not to be enough to push the Senate back into Republican hands or keep it in Republican hands. But I could be wrong.

I mean…this is actually going to be a good test of how good the polls still are. If in fact there is a really, a pretty big polling error to the extent that, for example, Republicans hold the Senate, I think, man, what’s going on here? I mean, everything you saw for the last four or five months, everything shifted toward the Democrats. Every modeler says the Democrats are more likely than not to take the Senate. If that doesn’t turn out, well, they’ll say, “Okay, well, we never said it was for sure. We just said what the probabilities were.”

But still, it’s disturbing. It’s just hard to poll these days. It’s hard to get an actual random sample of the voters who are actually going to show up on election day, particularly in red areas, and [there’s] this ongoing problem with peripheral Republican or populist-oriented voters of relatively low education levels who don’t want to talk to pollsters, and it’s really hard to adjust for that. So I think this will be a fascinating test case of whether pollsters are even close to figuring this one out.

Particularly in the red states where Democrats really do have to pick up some, North Carolina, Roy Cooper’s going to win that, put that—

Done.

—in the Democratic column, that’s done… Susan Collins in Maine, I think there’s a really good chance she pulls it out.

Agree.

That’s tied, and I think her personal standing in the state could pull it out. And then you’ve got the Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, Texas. These are states where Democrats are going to have to win some of these. But I want to ask you about two races in particular which deal with the Democratic quality of the candidate, and that is Maine with Troy Jackson, who’s a man of the left, no question about it, and has not performed well in the debates. Clearly doesn’t understand the difference between Medicare and Medicaid. I don’t know how many voters care about that, but I noticed it.

That’s asking a lot, Paul.

And then you’ve got Abdul El-Sayed, also a really distinctive man of the left, deeply anti-Israel, portrayed by Mike Rogers, the Republican, as a radical. Yet he’s led in the polls by a couple of points pretty solidly throughout. He’s very smooth on his feet… But could those candidacies really upend the Democratic attempt to get a majority?

Oh, I think I’d be very concerned. I mean, basically, you’re talking about one state that they were counting to flip, Maine, and if they don’t flip Maine, that just makes everything more difficult because then they got to pick up five other seats, not four. And then the Michigan thing is a hold, so if they lose that, the whole arithmetic goes into a cocked hat.

I mean, I think Troy Jackson, he’s left, but he’s not... Basically most Democratic candidates are pretty left these days, and he is a left-populist type of guy, but he’s not Platner and not as charismatic as Platner, but he has the overhang from the Platner failed candidacy, which I think really, really hurts him. So would they have been better off with a sort of generic Democratic nominee in Maine? Probably, I think.

And where I think it really would’ve favored a generic Democratic nominee would be in Michigan. I think Abdul El-Sayed will probably win, but I think he will underperform the overall swing, he’ll underperform the Democratic gubernatorial candidate—and he may lose! And this year, you shouldn’t lose in a state like Michigan with the national tide running so heavily in favor of the Democrats. But there’s huge question marks about this guy. They would’ve been much better off.

That’s not the mood of the Democratic primary electorate. [That] may be the worst aspect of Abdul El-Sayed running: even if he wins, and again, I think he probably will win, I just think this is a massive green light—the semaphore is down green—for the DSA progressive left to say, “Okay, we did it. I mean, Abdul El-Sayed won. I mean, why can’t we...” As AOC so memorably put it, “We can win anywhere.”

And I think that one can contest this interpretation, but I think it will have a lot of purchase within the Democratic Party. And I think it will turbocharge the progressive/DSA left and the Democrats, which I think will make it more difficult for them post-2026 moving into the ’28 cycle. Because I mean, some people believe Democrats have solved their problems, but as we’ve discussed earlier, this is primarily a thermostatic reaction against Trump. They don’t love you, they hate your opponent, I think is what I keep on telling the Democrats.

The victory of Abdul El-Sayed will be an important factor pushing them away from that sensible interpretation. “Change anything? Why do we need to change anything? Look, Abdul won! We kicked the Republican’s ass! This is great. Let’s press the accelerator!” So I think that’s going to be a real problem for them. We’ll see how bad a problem after the election.

I focused on Michigan and Maine because I think those are two critical races in the result. What signals will it send to the party about the lessons of this election? If Collins goes down, for example, it was likely to be because of Trump. I mean, an astute observer of Maine politics said it would almost be better for Collins if Trump were at the top of the ticket now, because then Democrats split their ticket, vote against Trump, but then say, “Okay, I’ll vote for her.”

Instead, now, voting against her is the only way they can register their unhappiness with Trump. But with her moderate voting record, her history, sometimes voting against Trump, if she loses and Jackson wins, it will not only turbocharge the left, some Republicans will say, “See? You can’t win anywhere with a moderate Republican now.”

And for the Democrats, I mean, it’s interesting, right? Who went to campaign for Collins? Joe Manchin, former West Virginia senator. Who went to campaign for Troy Jackson in Maine? It’s Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And who came for El-Sayed? Those three and of course Barack Obama on the weekend. The left wing of the Democratic Party really thinks these are the two most important races they’ve got. Do you agree with That?

Yeah, I agree with that. As a political observer, I think people who really count noses in politics would question the interpretation of the progressive left if in fact those victories take place. But I do think it’s going to have, again, huge purchase, huge momentum. Yeah, as you say, look who shows up to campaign for those people.

And I think they will count it: “That’s in our column. We won. Come on. We’ve got the Big Mo,” as they used to say. It’s undeniable. I mean, look, these people even showed up for Angie Nixon in Florida, who is absolutely bonkers, but they were happy to go out there and say, “Oh, Angie Nixon, great. This is what we need.” Of course, she’ll lose, but if she loses by any less than people are expecting, they’ll probably say that’s a victory, too. “Florida’s coming back, baby!”

Yeah. Well, that is Angie Nixon, the Democratic Senate candidate. She’s going to lose, there’s no question about it, but it’s interesting that they nonetheless went down there to fly the flag, and even Obama showed up for her, which is interesting.

So let’s say that, I mean, Democrats take the House comfortably. Senate, we’ll see how those close races go, but likely 48 or 49 Republicans in the Senate in the end, so 51 or 52 Democrats. So that’s sort of where you think that’s going to come out. That’s a reasonable bet, I think. There’s still a chance Republicans hold it with 50. I wouldn’t bet my 401(k) on it. Let’s say they get that outcome, big swing to the Democrats. What lessons does the party learn?

Well, that’s the big question, right? I mean, I think that in some ways, it’s less interesting than what the outcome is at this point. It’s like how the party’s going to interpret it going forward. And I follow these debates pretty closely. I mean, we’ve already touched on the idea that I think you can put it in the bank that the progressive left, and I don’t just mean the DSA, I mean the progressives—well, Progressive Caucus—is huge. It’s over a hundred members.

It is.

Greg Casar is already talking about, “I’m looking forward to passing a bill every week.” He doesn’t mean a bill that would actually become law. He means a bill that would reflect progressive priorities. So that’s going to be their strategy. “Let’s fly the progressive flag. Let’s fly it high. Enough of this...” Sort of, “No more Mr. Nice Guy. We’re going to really show people what we’re for. And when we show people what we’re for, that will make everybody like us because everybody really agrees with us whether they know it or not.”

And I think the moderates, such as they are in the party, or more establishment figures, they will not be so enthusiastic about this. But they really haven’t put up much of a fight as the progressive strength has grown in the party and as the DSA in particular has become stronger. It’s like a big tent.

One way I think about this, Paul, is: is it really a big tent if a democratic-socialist Democrat feels more comfortable in the party than a conservative Democrat? I don’t think so, but I think that’s a situation we have. So I think it seems likely post-2026 is just a tsunami of messaging bills—a lot of grandstanding in Congress.

I mean, remember, they got elected on essentially, the big campaign theme is affordability. What are they going to do for affordability? In their defense, there’s not much they can do, but they will certainly pass a lot of bills. But I think people may get tired of that rather fast, and then looming ahead of that are sort of the delights we can look forward to with all the messaging bills is like the big contest for the presidential nomination over the Democrats that is going to kick off the day after the election’s over.

So how are these results going to feed into that? I think the optimistic interpretation that my more moderate friends in the Democratic Party say, “Well, look, James Talarico won in Texas,” etc. “He was willing to say some slightly heterodox things, and it just shows we’re making progress in red states. What we really need to do is keep on doing that, and the DSA people or whatever, they’ll do their thing, but really moderation is winning, and that’s the kind of candidate we should have.” But I think the progressive left will disagree with that strenuously.

And where is the energy going to be within the primary electorate and within the general democratic discourse? I’m not sure it’s going to be along the lines of, “Well, we should be at least a little bit heterodox and we shouldn’t scare people. We shouldn’t be too far to the left.” I think they’re more like, “Hey, let’s press the accelerator.”

I mean, in 2020, you had the candidates being herded to the left, the primary candidates, one-upping each other. How do we know that doesn’t happen again? I mean, especially given the likely pattern of the election results, especially given the mood in the party. Why would it not be the case that even a candidate who started out thinking they wanted to be moderate realizes they have to position themselves to take advantage of that resistance, progressive energy within the party?

So to me, that’s the real interesting question: how that argument will play out and how it’ll affect the potential presidential candidates. My guess is that progressives will probably have the upper hand, because I mean, look, so far, the so-called moderates haven’t been willing to have much of an argument with them, so why would they do it now?

If I was a Democrat—well, I am a Democrat—that’s what I worry about. I worry that reasonable calls for moderation will be stoutly ignored, and I think the moderates will be reduced to saying, “Well, can we be a little bit less to the left than you would like? Wouldn’t that be nice?” And I think that’s not a good position to put yourself in going into 2028.

They hate JD Vance. I mean, they’ll beat him easily, but I wouldn’t be so sure. I think that it’s two years from now, a lot of things could change. And I think they underestimate—and I think this is something that’s really going to hurt them from interpreting the election results—they’ve underestimated or forgotten about what happened in 2024, about the populist mood in the country, about how working-class voters really don’t like them, how so many Latino voters bailed out in 2024 and could do it again. Right?

Right.

I mean, the voters who come back in 2026 are just going to be visiting, looking around, “Now that I’m back in, this doesn’t look so great. I’ll go somewhere else.” So I think that is going to be really difficult for them. It’s going to make them even more out of touch. The mood of the voters that they lost in ’24—some of them come back in ’26. I just think it’s going to be a real challenge for them. I mean, the America they want is not the America they have, and I think they’re going to have to realize that.

Very much agree with that, but I want to make a distinction between what I see in its drive to use economic populism as an alternative to Trump’s cultural MAGA populism, and cultural leftism.

I see among the Democrats, you saw it in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races a year ago, but you’ve seen it a little bit among Democratic leaders, that they want to moderate themselves on immigration, for example. They’ve ducked it as you suggested, but nobody’s going to go out and say, “Open borders again,” in a presidential debate. You’re seeing some moderation even on DEI. Trans issues, not as much as I think they ought to if they want to regain the center, but a little bit.

But where they’re really moving is economic populism, big tax increases. Everybody in the party is now supporting a big tax increase. Now, they say it’s on the wealthy. There’s a lot of bills that wouldn’t just affect the wealthy. For example, fixing Social Security: they want to raise the cap on Social Security, which is a big increase on suburban voters, for example, who make more than $180,000 a year.

They’re moving hard to the left on economics, and that’s where the billionaire wealth tax in California, I think, is a bellwether and will be really significant here. If that referendum passes—Prop 40—that will give further fuel to the Democratic economic populism.

Yeah, I think that’s very true. I wrote a piece a while ago on my old Substack, The Liberal Patriot, No Populism Without Cultural Populism. But as you point out, the way they’re dealing with those issues is carefully titrated moderation in some of these things without really changing their fundamental position much, and they feel that’s enough. Now, why do they feel that’s enough? Because they’ve got economic populism, the magical pixie dust of an economic populism that can sprinkle over their program and it’ll make everybody love them.

But what is the content of that economic populism? What is it actually going to accomplish? I mean, what even is it in programmatic—they don’t know. “Down with the billionaire class.” In a way, it’s like Bernie Sanders’s old thing—“Down with the billionaire class”—has become hegemonic within the Democratic Party, as if that’s some sort of substantive position. And the more we tax them, the better.

But look, again, back to something I mentioned earlier, they ran on, “We’re going to make life affordable. We’re going to fix the economy.” What is their program for fixing the economy and making things more affordable? Is it simply to tax the rich? If you look at the things they are going to put into play in the Congress after 2026 and the things that are likely to be prominent as Democrats run for the nomination, it’s basically like redistribution and spending money.

Yeah. That’s what I see too.

Is that going to produce the economic growth the country needs? I mean, whatever happened to economic growth? I mean, Democrats never talk about it anymore. And I think that is a real problem because almost everything they want to do is dependent on having pretty solid economic growth—very solid economic growth. And if simply the program devolves down to spending money and redistribution, I don’t think it’s going to produce the results that they want and it’s actually not going to uplift the working class.

And so I mean, populism is a rhetorical stance. Its content as policy and actual governance I think is highly questionable, kind of like fool’s gold. It kind of works as political rhetoric, but I think what it would actually deliver in reality is questionable. As I think the Biden administration found out, you can promise a lot of things and then get into power and even do some of those things. And if they’re not the right things, it doesn’t work out very well.

This is a long-winded way of saying, yeah, I think economic populism is somewhat bankrupt as an approach, unless you actually have some ideas of what you’re going to do that would actually work. Fundamental to working is an approach that would actually produce a high level of growth in the United States, but then would allow you to do other things if you want to expand social programs and what have you. But expanding social programs, spending more money, and redistributing in the absence of that is probably not a particularly great idea. And taxing the rich isn’t going to be nearly enough to bring in the money you say you need to do all these things.

So I mean, I probably don’t have to convince you of this, Paul, but they need to do some work here in terms of fleshing that out. What are they going to do about AI? I mean, AI is a huge deal. What is the Democratic program on AI? It’s kind of like, “Well, we should slow down the data centers and maybe it’ll kill us all and that would be bad.” But if AI, in fact, is a general-purpose technology which could produce a high-productivity growth regime in the United States, which would lift people’s living standards, I mean, my view is you need to have more to say about it than that.

And economic populism is a very poor substitute for dealing with those very difficult problems, but the payoff from dealing with those difficult problems could be pretty big. I mean, right now, voters don’t have a lot of faith in either party to produce the kind of economic regime that they want. So maybe you should start thinking about that instead of thinking about how to bash your opponents. End of rant.

Yeah, real food for thought for Democrats. And I would just say that the counterpart there on the Republican side, the fool’s gold on the populist side, has been tariffs.

Yeah.

Donald Trump ran and Republicans said, “Okay, tariffs really work because it identifies us with unions and the working class.” But you put them in power, you put them in place, and turns out they have all of these damaging effects on voters in Michigan and Maine, for example.

Ruy Teixeira, thank you so much for coming in. American Enterprise Institute senior fellow, his own Substack, The Long View. Thanks for coming in, and we’ll have you back in here sometime as the primaries unfold, which will be sooner than I think most Americans would hope.

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The Democratic Party is poised for a very strong showing in tomorrow’s midterm election. President Trump’s approval rating as of this week is just 36.9 percent, matching George W. Bush’s rating heading into the 2006 midterms, when Democrats flipped both the House and Senate. Voters have soured on the war in Iran and the state of the economy, and are frustrated with high gas prices. Many feel that the administration has not done enough to tackle their number one issue: the cost of living.

Barring a massive polling error—which is possible, but far from a given—Democrats should win back the House and have a strong shot at the Senate, too. If that comes to pass, the party will face an important question: what lessons should it draw from its victory?

One path forward likely looks something like the period following the 2018 midterms, the first of Trump’s tenure, when Democrats won back the House with a sizable majority. Over the next two years, they devoted substantial time and energy to partisan battles with the White House. These included building on the Mueller investigation into potential Russian interference in the 2016 election and, of course, pursuing two impeachment efforts.1

They also pursued an ambitious policy agenda. While some of it focused on the issues Americans said they prioritized—healthcare and the economy—their progressive flank also pushed hard on more contentious topics, such as support for single-payer healthcare, the Green New Deal, and reparations for slavery. At the same time, the Democratic presidential primary field was taking shape, with several candidates racing to the left early on.2

Ultimately, primary voters in 2020 chose the candidate who had run the most moderate campaign, Joe Biden, and he went on to win the general election. However, Democrats actually lost seats in the House that year. And though Biden won, his victory was much narrower than people often remember: he carried three swing states by a combined margin of just 43,000 votes.3 The result was hardly an endorsement of the Democrats or their agenda. It was also a sign that the party may have misinterpreted the results of the 2018 election.4

This leads us to an alternative path for Democrats if they win big again this year, one that requires humility and acknowledges that the party still has a lot of work to do. It starts with remembering that midterms are almost always a referendum on the incumbent president and his party. This has been true for most of American history. A big Democratic victory is much more likely to reflect voter dissatisfaction with Trump and the Republicans than to be an endorsement of all the party’s priorities or a mandate for sweeping change.

Consider the results of a recent CBS News/YouGov survey. Nearly three in five likely voters (58 percent) who support Democrats in this election said their support was mainly to “stop Trump and Republican policies.” Meanwhile, only 42 percent of these respondents said they wanted to “help Democrats get their policies.”

Additionally, half of voters believed that if Republicans win control of Congress again, their policies would cause gas prices to go up and make Americans financially worse off. But voters were less certain about what would happen if Democrats won, with only about 36 percent saying they expected prices to fall or their financial circumstances to improve.

Viewed over the longer term, Americans’ views of the Democratic Party are much less warm today than they were in previous midterm cycles. This reinforces the idea that the party’s expected success this cycle is driven heavily by voter antipathy toward Trump.

The New York Times recently reported that if Democrats do win back the House, their early priorities would include stabilizing premiums on the ACA exchanges, reversing Trump’s Medicaid cuts, ending his tariffs, restoring congressional authority over trade, and ending the war in Iran. These are all broadly popular moves that address the issues voters say matter most to them, particularly the high cost of living and healthcare.

Exercising oversight of the Trump administration is also something many voters appear to support. Seeking accountability for the actions of the executive branch is a primary function of the legislative branch, and so far in Trump’s second term his party has shown little interest in doing it. Assigning this responsibility to the appropriate committees would allow the rest of the House to focus on other matters.

But some Democrats are also itching for another impeachment fight, whether against Trump himself or Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. A lengthy Senate trial could grind much of Congress’s other business to a halt and lead voters to conclude Demcrats had betrayed their trust.5 Some members of the party’s ascendant DSA faction who are set to join the next Congress have also signaled they will press House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries to take up a slate of contentious social issues. It’s therefore not hard to see how a Democratic majority could lose focus quickly.

Democrats would be wise to remember, even in victory, that Americans don’t much care for either party right now. Voters aren’t looking for sweeping, ideologically driven change so much as pragmatic, competent, and ethical governance that can help stabilize America’s democracy and address the economic struggles many people face. Whether tomorrow brings a wave or a ripple, Democrats should remain humble in victory, recognize that they still have work to do to restore the public’s confidence in them, and stay focused on what’s important to the vast majority of Americans when they take power.

Editor’s note: a version of this piece first appeared in UnHerd.

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?

The context of this question is that Jim is 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.

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• 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.

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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 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, .

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.

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.

1 data visualization

• 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.

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.

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

• 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.

At the end of our workshops, someone often raises their hand to say that while we may have made a worthwhile point or two, they weren’t eager to “be nice” to Trump voters. But being “nice” wasn’t exactly our prescription. Rather, we tried to drive home the importance of understanding their grievances and working together to rebuild trust, cultivate mutual respect, and find common ground. Most of our participants are willing to try, but for a few, respecting the humanity of Trump supporters remains too bitter a pill to swallow. Trump voters infuriate them, scare them, even disgust them, and they’re not about to let their defenses down.

Stubborn animosity toward Trump voters is the default attitude among the “resistance” rank-and-file in liberal politics today. This stance raises important strategic as well as ethical considerations—and, in my view, fails on both fronts. From an electoral strategy perspective, it repels potential defectors. And as a moral posture, it contradicts bedrock democratic principles and values that most on the left hold sacred.

Most liberals likely do not hold Obama voters responsible for the killing of hundreds of civilians by the drone strikes he ordered. Nor, presumably, do they blame Bill Clinton voters for the loss of blue-collar jobs when factories were offshored in the wake of NAFTA. But because of the contempt Trump’s obnoxious persona inspires, his voters are not extended the same grace.

Holding individual voters accountable for the egregious things Trump has done might feel like an act of justice, but it’s a strategic pitfall. Whether the goal is to vanquish MAGA or “save democracy” (an oft-heard resistance refrain), shunning, shaming, or ridiculing Trump voters is counterproductive.

Expressing contempt or hostility toward Trump voters ratifies their perception of liberals as self-righteous hypocrites. Rather from shaming them into withdrawing support for Trump, they are more likely to look to him for safety: he will bully the bullies. Round and round it goes, contempt volleyed and returned in an endless cycle that helped send Trump back to the White House. Beth Macy, a Democrat trying to flip a rural Virginia congressional district this year, cautioned against her party meeting Trump voters who have recently become jaded with the president with scorn and ridicule. “We should be welcoming them into the tent and making the tent larger.”

Ostracizing or lashing out at those whose opinions make us uncomfortable or angry offers fleeting gratification. But when venting personal feelings takes precedence over strategic exigencies, the result is an impotent coalition of one.

Rich Logis, a disillusioned MAGA operative who founded the group Leaving MAGA, says that epithets like “neo-Nazi” or “deplorable” don’t accurately describe most MAGA adherents and warns that insults push them deeper into that world. Logis encourages Trump opponents to give his fans a reason to leave by welcoming them into a big tent and providing a sense of belonging and camaraderie like they experienced inside the MAGA movement.

Logis’s advice is reinforced by the Columbia World Project, a consortium of one hundred thought leaders and organizers who identify the dearth of left-leaning community-building organizations as one of the principal causes of the crisis of democratic participation: “On the right: evangelical networks, conservative media, and organizations such as Turning Point USA that often meet people where they are, offer genuine community, and make members feel like they matter. On the left: not much.” The project calls for fostering civic participation that makes people feel “connected, valued, and part of something larger than themselves.” That’s not just being “nice”—it’s creating institutions that respect and engage local wisdom and values.

Electoral coalition-building and democratic participation aside, what about the ethical dimensions of the question, “Should we be nice to Trump voters?”

The skeptic is likely thinking one or both of the following:

• I’m better than them and, to preserve my superiority, I must maintain a firewall between myself and the bad people. If I stoop to their level to extend kindness, I’m compromising my own righteousness and scruples; and/or

• They deserve to be punished for the moral transgression of voting for Trump. If they are now suffering, they have only themselves to blame.

Someone who answers “yes” is thinking very differently:

• Who I voted for doesn’t make me a better person. Adjudicating who is “better” would require knowing everything each of us has ever done, an impossible and futile exercise with no referee;

• Voters are not personally responsible for everything their leaders do. More generally, most people who do bad things still deserve human kindness. Maybe a rapist or murderer or Nazi forfeits this right, but vote choice doesn’t come anywhere close to those things; and/or

• My moral code favors reconciliation over retribution. If I can stay in community with people whose views I abhor, we can make common cause on the things we do agree on. And there’s always an outside chance they’ll change their minds about the other things, not because I enlightened them, but because they realize something for themselves once the obstacle of seeing me as the enemy is removed.

The desire for retribution is, in other contexts, anathema to liberals. Opposition to harsh prison sentences and a willingness to consider a convicted criminal’s life circumstances are what separates liberal from conservative criminal justice frameworks. So, why extend mercy and second chances to even violent offenders but reserve severe condemnation for the crime of voting for Trump?

For those of us who live in small towns and are surrounded by conservative family, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances, this more antagonistic mindset is something of a head-scratcher. In these places, it’s easier to see how demonstrating contempt for ideological opponents would disrupt the ties that hold our communities together. The guy who gravels our driveway has a Trump sign on his truck and no shortage of customers. Picking a fight with him would leave me and my driveway in a bad spot. The same goes for the farmers who feed me, the line workers who keep the lights on, and the drivers who deliver my packages, most of whom I assume voted for Trump.

My local Rotary club is politically mixed, but there we are, side by side, picking up trash and filling backpacks of food for hungry students. RUBI runs a Community Works program that operates on the same principle: bringing people together to solve problems, instead of arguing about politics, builds trust across lines of difference. Working together for the betterment of their communities opens people’s eyes to each other’s fundamental decency. Trust and respect operate in a reciprocal cycle, with each small act inspiring more of the same until, eventually, distrust and loathing fade away and “being nice” comes naturally.

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With the help of Colby College political scientist Nicholas Jacobs, we’ve actually been able to document the depolarizing impact of our strictly apolitical program. Republicans who live in counties with Community Works chapters did not grow colder toward Democrats the way Republicans in neighboring counties did. Anecdotally, Democrats who volunteer for Community Works projects tell us that working shoulder to shoulder with local Republicans changes the way they view their communities for the better. Being “nice,” it seems, makes it easier to see that we’re all in the same boat, our destinies intertwined.

That shared-fate ethos is beautifully exemplified by Daryl Davis. A black musician in Maryland, Davis took it upon himself to initiate conversations with members of the Ku Klux Klan. After years of effort, his closet is now filled with the robes of dozens of Klan members, including top leaders, who found it impossible to sustain their hatred in the face of Davis’s signature question: “How can you hate me if you don’t even know me?”

Hailed by many as a civil rights hero, Davis came under fire from three Baltimore Black Lives Matter activists who were so outraged by his efforts to befriend white racists that they all but threatened (Klan-like) to run him out of town. They chastised him for wasting his time, insisting, contra the evidence right in front of them, that white supremacists are incapable of changing their minds. (One of the men later reconciled with Davis.)

At a screening of a documentary film about him, Davis said, “I consider everyone in this room my people, the Klan, neo-Nazis, whatever, they’re all my people. And granted, some of our people are deplorable, as Hillary Clinton might put it…and some of them will never change. But we have an obligation to make this a better society.” He has also emphasized that finding common ground with even our worst enemies is the key to defusing fear and hate.

Davis’s commitment to finding the thread of humanity that connects us all stands in stark contrast to the ethos of shunning and canceling that is so prevalent online and in many progressive spaces, and that gives rise to the “deplore the deplorables” reflex. The deplorables mindset manifests in ugly and hypocritical ways: it rationalizes dancing on the graves of Lindsey Graham and Charlie Kirk while denouncing Trump for spitting on Rob Reiner’s. It blinds partisans to how their own side contributes to the erosion of democratic norms and principles. They embrace conditional principles like “free speech for me but not for thee.” They endorse academic freedom, except for “wrong” opinions on topics like Israel, and decry gerrymandering as a threat to democracy, except when their party does it.

In a contest of good against evil, many partisans come to see principles such as free speech, due process, viewpoint diversity, and basic fairness and respect as instruments of harm. Extending these values to the bad guys is considered too risky. The dehumanization of our enemies is justified as the means to a noble end (destroying or disempowering them).

But this reductive view misses a messier reality in which we Americans live together on a chunk of land. Some of us do terrible things, to be sure, but such people are not Star Wars stormtroopers who can simply be eliminated by “resistance” fighters. They are complex human beings, many of whom are raising children and have strong ties to their communities. Trump and his supporters don’t inhabit a Death Star that can be blown up; they’re right here, living alongside us. And unless Trump’s opponents plan to launch a civil war that would carve the country up into hostile red and blue territories, we are stuck here together for the long haul. Like it or not, we are interconnected, our fates intertwined.

A nation that hangs together must rest on a bedrock of shared principles. Democratic virtues like free speech and due process are crucial, but the most important of all is, I believe, kindness.

I see kindness as an antidote to the poison that has seeped into our culture, from the social media cesspool to the manosphere to the hate-filled sludge seeping out of the Oval Office. Even as keyboard warriors and narcissists wreak havoc, our society holds together thanks to a stable core of decent-hearted people who quietly help and support each other, extending everyday kindnesses, large and small, without asking the beneficiary to fill out an ideological questionnaire.

While some relish the misfortune of Trump voters reaping what they sowed, they are but a small number of misanthropes, far outnumbered by ordinary Americans who treat everyone with courtesy and respect without a second thought. Still, the vindictive minority is pumping poison into the country’s veins.

In response to a story about Arkansas farmers on the brink of bankruptcy and suicide, for example, reactions like these were typical:

It’s not just social media warriors, either. Even professional journalists have been vindictive.

“Humiliation,” writes social psychologist Evelin Lindner, “is the nuclear bomb of the emotions.” Anyone on the receiving end of headlines and tweets like those above is bound to have a negative reaction. Some will turn the other cheek, but many will respond in kind. Still others will feel bitterly alienated, impotent to do anything other than vote for the guy who promises to put the jerks in their place. There is no upside to shaming and humiliating.

Are compassion, fairness, inclusivity, leniency, and open-mindedness core liberal values? I used to think so. It’s not for nothing we’re often disparaged as “bleeding-heart liberals,” a label most of us wear with pride.

But this litany of values is now cluttered with enough asterisks to make them sound like slogans from Orwell’s Ministry of Truth: tolerance, except toward perceived intolerance; fairness, but not toward those who play dirty; concern for people’s health, unless they refuse to get vaccinated, in which case their deaths are worthy of mockery.

Other behaviors most liberals would normally consider objectionable become okay in the midst of partisan conflict. Prejudice and “othering” are wrong, except when aimed at people with the wrong opinions or values. Stereotypes are verboten, unless they’re stereotypes of rednecks and hillbillies, which are fine—even hilarious.

In carving out so many exceptions to these values, liberals become doppelgängers of the people we claim to oppose, our (supposed) superiority entitling us to mimic what we detest. I reckon many conservatives are no more principled and are similarly willing to discard core tenets of conservatism when politically expedient. (I leave it to conservatives to examine their own contradictions). But withholding empathy from political foes is an asymmetrically liberal vice.

My husband is part of our county’s volunteer search-and-rescue team that goes out looking for hikers gone missing in the woods and elders and children who have wandered off. The team includes quite a few former military members and police officers, most of whom we assume voted for Trump. But it would be absurd to suggest that my husband is morally compromised by working alongside men and women who give up their free time to trudge for miles in heat and rain looking for people of every race and creed. It would be destructive for him to be anything other than collegial toward them—and they would not dream of conditioning their services on Republican Party allegiance.

If being “nice” to Trump supporters is a bridge too far for some liberals, another option is to simply refrain from being mean. Deriding, ridiculing, or turning our backs on them is an act of self-sabotage. It violates values liberals hold dear, costs us elections, and contributes to the fraying of our social fabric. Most of all, it turns us into versions of ourselves we probably never consciously chose. It chains us to an anvil of negativity we drag around to the point of exhaustion. By contrast, being nice can feel amazingly liberating.

Political movements and figureheads come and go, but society endures. What that society looks like largely depends on how we treat each other. Trump shouldn’t be allowed to take that power away from us.

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

Erica Etelson is president of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative and author of Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide.

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

• Conor McGlynn: How Effective Altruism Took Over the World [paywalled]

The resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who warns that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” has prompted a new wave of attention to existential risk from AI, while drawing scrutiny to what the people working at frontier AI companies really believe about the technology they are developing. Many of those who continue to work at Anthropic and OpenAI share Coxon’s fears. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, declared in a post following Coxon’s departure: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei likewise reiterated once again his belief that the technology his company is creating could pose grave risks to humanity.

How is it that those seeking to build superintelligent AI can also believe that doing so might end life on earth? The weakest explanation is that these statements are attempts to generate hype for marketing purposes. It is obvious when one talks to these people or reads their writing, often dating to long before the current AI boom, that these are genuinely held beliefs. Another influential attempt to make sense of this paradox comes from Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist and former AI ethicist at Google, and philosopher Émile Torres, who in a 2024 paper described what they call “the TESCREAL bundle,” standing for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism.

TESCREAL refers to a set of ideas developed over the past forty years that Gebru and Torres take to be the key intellectual influences on current thinking about AI. Understanding this ideological cluster, the authors claim, explains the close connection between AI development and AI doomerism, and allows us to see these as “two sides of the same coin.” To make their case, they trace current thinking about AI back to an explicit ideology, namely transhumanism. In doing so, however, the TESCREAL authors mistake the origins of these ideas for how they are wielded today. Only by understanding how these ideas escaped the small transhumanist circles in which they emerged can we reckon with the influence this thinking exerts today.

• Jennifer Weber: What Nikole Hannah-Jones Wouldn’t Let Herself See

Ten years ago, New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones explained her decision to enroll her daughter, Najya, in a segregated, high-poverty Brooklyn public school, P.S. 307, despite having the resources and knowledge to send her elsewhere. Now, a decade later, in a follow-up essay, she concludes that her choice failed her daughter—and that segregation was to blame.

How does a child with two educated, affluent, involved parents, in the highest-spending school system in the country, reach ninth grade without knowing fractions? Hannah-Jones’s own reporting shows how: through failed pedagogy. The failures that Hannah-Jones recorded demonstrate how schools trained teachers in ill-conceived but fashionable instructional methods—at the expense of proven approaches—while also incorporating equity policies that eroded standards and made no one truly responsible for student learning.

2 things from the archive

• Michael Powell: The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs

Seattle is one of the wealthiest and best-educated cities in the world. It can afford to try various strategies to address its drug epidemic and high rate of fatal overdoses. Yet many of the city’s leaders, apparently supported by voters, view enforcing bans on the open sale and use of narcotics, and forcing addicts off the streets and into treatment, as akin to an act of state repression.

Seattle, like a striking number of other liberal American cities, has embraced a radical form of “harm reduction,” which is more a philosophy about treating addiction than a scientific approach to it. Harm reduction’s adherents hold that police and outreach workers should “meet the addicted where they are,” which is to say without judgment. The New York State Department of Health, a bastion of harm reduction, describes it as a “social movement” committed to “building leadership” among drug users. In these places, de facto and sometimes legal restrictions on narcotics use have been greatly loosened; cities fund teams of workers to hand out drug paraphernalia, and in some rare cases they’ve created dedicated spaces for addicts to shoot up. Meanwhile, police departments struggling with staffing shortages and budget cuts have stopped devoting resources to sweeping users and dealers off the streets or out of parks and playgrounds. […]

Harm reduction isn’t just a problem for addicts. In many cities, the autonomy of drug users has taken precedence over nearly everything and everyone else, not least working-class families like Monsegur’s who must live alongside addicts and accept dystopian decay. Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry and behavioral-sciences professor and a former adviser to President Obama, supports needle exchanges and opposes the widespread jailing of users. But when he argues that drug policy must take into account the impact on communities, he told me, some critics dismiss him as a reactionary. Their arguments, he said, “sound a lot more like gun rights and vaccine refusal. It’s no longer about the whole population; it’s about the subset who use drugs.”

In recent years, officials in cities such as San Francisco and Philadelphia have moved to rein in the excesses of harm-reduction policies. Nevertheless, these policies retain a powerful hold on public-health and political leaders in blue parts of the country. I witnessed this in visits to Seattle and Burlington, Vermont—two of America’s more progressive cities. Both are afflicted by high overdose rates, overwhelmed police forces, parks and public squares often captive to drug use, and the theft and disorder that accompany all of that. Yet many of their elected officials continue to insist, despite everything, that harm reduction is the most effective and moral solution to addiction.

• Brink Lindsey: Liberalism hasn’t failed, but many liberals sure have

In my most recent podcast, Jonathan Rauch and I discussed the internal division among liberals regarding how to respond to the stern challenges now being mounted from the extremes of right and left. Some liberals (including me) argue that the rise of political extremism reflects a misguided reaction to genuine, serious problems afflicting contemporary liberal society, and thus that acknowledging and working to remedy those problems are essential to any well-formulated liberal response. Others (including Jonathan) argue that excessive self-criticism within the liberal camp only serves to add fuel to the extremists’ fire.

Much of our conversation focused on whether and to what extent liberalism was “responsible” or “to blame” for the resentments and grievances that have spurred forward the populist right along with the “woke” and socialist left. From my perspective, the problems underlying our political crises are problems of mass affluence, which itself is a world-historical triumph of the first order made possible by liberal values and institutions. Liberalism is thus responsible for our current problems in the sense that it gave us mass affluence and mass affluence has given us new problems. Our contemporary ills, however, do not represent some deep-seated failure in the basic principles of liberalism that has now finally manifested itself. Rather, liberalism has been an engine of amazing social progress — but it is the fate of social progress, as it takes us deeper into the terra incognita of unexplored historical novelty, for every solution to preexisting problems to present us with new problems to solve.

Accordingly, I don’t think it makes sense to blame liberalism for the discontents roiling society today and the political crisis that has resulted. First of all, the problems of mass affluence and unprecedented freedom of choice are far preferable to humanity’s traditional problems of poverty, ignorance, and oppression; furthermore, liberal values and institutions represent our best chance for rising to contemporary challenges, just as they guided us to triumph over those traditional ills.

Here I want to change the focus — from the basic principles of liberalism to actual, flesh-and-blood liberals, and from creating the problems that sparked the political crisis to actually responding to that crisis since it has flared up. In other words, the question I want to raise here is: does the disturbing strength of political extremism at present reflect failures by liberals in responding to the extremist challenge? My answer to this question is an emphatic yes: there is no way things could have gotten to the current pass without massive failures and blunders by liberals on both sides of the ideological spectrum.

This was not the question that occupied Jonathan and me, but I think it gets much closer to the raw nerve of current internal disputes within Team Liberal. And that’s because, under the present circumstances, it focuses attention on heated controversies within the Democratic Party and the ideological left over how to win against right-wing populism and where to lead the country.

1 data visualization

• YouGov: Will “probable” voters show up in November?

Since Labor Day, many major pollsters have begun switching from polling registered voters only to applying “likely voter models,” which attempt to identify the voters most likely to turn out in the November midterm election. Some pollsters release results for both registered and likely voters. But few separate out registered voters who do not qualify as likely voters and examine how they think, which is what made a recent survey from YouGov so interesting—and insightful.

Like many other pollsters, YouGov broke out likely voters—those who said they will “definitely vote”—from its sample. Among these voters, Democrats had a whopping 11-point lead over Republicans on the generic ballot. This was the finding that generated the most headlines. But YouGov then broke out voters who said they would “probably” vote as well, and among these voters, Republicans had the lead—and by an even larger margin of 21 points (though the number of undecideds were much higher at 23 percent).

“Probably” does not carry the same certainty as “definitely,” and with good reason. But it’s also fair to suspect that most people interpret it as meaning “more likely than not.”

It is, of course, possible that likely-voter models are accurately capturing who will show up to vote in November; several signs suggest that a blue wave is a highly probable outcome. Friend of TLV Patrick Ruffini recently analyzed past pre-election polling trends from the Trump era and found that Senate polls, specifically, tended to become considerably more accurate by Election Day in midterm years than in presidential years. If that pattern holds this year, the Democrats stand a good chance of flipping the Senate—and flipping the House would likely be a foregone conclusion.

However, YouGov’s data may hint at a more complicated—and more competitive—landscape than many of us have expected up to now.

However, this changed in a big way during the Trump era. After breaking for Barack Obama in 2012 by four points, non-college voters supported Donald Trump by six points in 2016—a swing that, importantly, occurred across both white and non-white voters.2 Since then, these voters have shifted even further right. In 2024, Trump carried them by 13 points, the largest margin for a Republican presidential candidate in at least the last 30 years.

Today, the Democratic Party is defined less by its support for the working class and more by its affiliation with the Brahmin left. As a result, it has become harder for the party to build an electoral coalition capable of consistently winning all over the country. For example, states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were a core part of the party’s “Blue Wall” from 1992 to 2012. However, Trump won all three in both of his victories, buoyed by working-class voters who are overrepresented in these states.

So, how can Democrats win back at least a meaningful share of these voters—and keep them? It’s a topic we regularly covered at The Liberal Patriot and plan to dig into more at The Long View. Helpfully, there are several new survey studies that offer additional insights into this question.

Understanding what really divides the social classes

Back in July, Jared Abbott, director of the Center for Working Class Politics (and friend of TLV), and Joan C. Williams, professor emerita at the University of California Law San Francisco, published a report called “The Left’s Coalition Crisis.” Though they did not explicitly say this, their intended audience appeared to be a group they referred to several times: liberal college graduates.

Designed to help the political left “develop the cultural competence to bridge the diploma divide between college grads and voters without degrees,” the report offered some tough love to middle- and upper-class liberals. For starters, the authors note that many liberal college grads live in a class bubble where most everyone around them shares their views on culture and climate issues—views that are often not held by working-class Americans.

Each cohort has different priorities as well. Among the 12 issues that working-class respondents prioritized, ten are economic in nature (the other two are corruption and crime). By contrast, college-educated liberals are much more likely to prioritize cultural and social issues. In contrast to the working class, they care far more about resisting authoritarianism, protecting LGBT rights, addressing climate change, and protecting abortion access.

In particular, “defending democracy” is a top priority for liberal college grads, but for working-class Americans it ranks 19th out of 30 possible priorities. In fact, resisting authoritarianism is a far higher priority for college liberals than for working-class respondents across every racial sub-group.

As the authors write, “This helps explain why Kamala Harris lost noncollege voters by 14 points. She centered two issues—defense of democracy and abortion rights—that liberal college grads prioritize but most working-class Americans don’t.”

Even when there appear to be agreements on the surface, there remain meaningful differences. This includes economic priorities: whereas working-class people typically focus on raising wages and creating more jobs and economic growth, liberal college grads, perhaps feeling more secure in their jobs, tend to care more about prices (though many in the working class also care about this). Another key contrast relates to whom each population directs its anti-elitist anger toward. College liberals often focus on the top 1% and business elites but rarely political elites, who receive much of the working class’s ire.

These disconnects can make it hard for liberal college grads to understand that their views reflect a particular class bias, and that people from other walks of life may approach those topics from a very different place. It can also be difficult to understand why others sometimes hold very different values from them. The authors also note:

Upper-middle-class language and priorities that make perfect sense among liberal college graduates often lack the cultural resonance to win working-class votes. Working-class voters’ principal concerns are paychecks, prices, and personal security. And their values tend to run in the opposite direction from those of the college-educated left: loyalty to community and country over globalism, family and self-discipline over self-actualization, tradition over sophistication, physical safety, and a distrust of credentialed experts. These are values the Right has learned to channel effectively; the Left, less so.

Finally, they note that liberal college grads’ class bubble can engender scorn toward people who disagree with them—and fuel the political right. While most liberal candidates steer clear of rhetoric like “deplorables” to describe more conservative-leaning working-class people, many ordinary liberals still view them as deplorable. This reality is reflected in the lawn signs pervading many liberal neighborhoods, which Abbott and Williams say signal that “if your priorities aren’t race, gender, and immigration, you’re so beyond the pale that you don’t even understand the importance of love or kindness.”

The authors offer several pieces of advice to the left for how to break this toxic cycle and build bridges with working-class Americans, including:

• Respect working-class priorities, especially economic and personal security;

• Replace a politics of scorn with genuine cross-class respect, which requires leaving one’s bubble and approaching those outside of it with curiosity; and

• Better understand how working-class values reflect working-class lives, including deep loyalty to community and country, the high value of self-discipline, the prioritization of personal security, resentment of experts, and the role of traditional institutions in their lives such as the military, religion, and the traditional family.

Without these steps, it will likely be very difficult for the left to break through to many working-class people and convince them to hear its perspective.

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Understanding the value of moderation

Democrats who are interested in reaching working-class voters would also do well to acknowledge that many such voters do not support seismic changes to America’s institutions. Though they aren’t uniformly against left-leaning ideas or reforms, many working-class people are less ideological and simply want a stable and effective government.

Two reports out this month buttress this idea. The first, also from Abbott and Williams, is called “The Working-Class Win-O-Meter.” This study, which surveyed more than 40,000 respondents, examines strategies to help Democrats win back working-class voters (more on those strategies in a minute). The authors find that “moving to the most progressive position significantly costs working-class votes” on four specific issues:

• Defunding the police. This carried the biggest penalty across all positions they tested. Candidates who support it ran 5.7 points behind those who advocate for less severe reforms like body cameras and de-escalation training.

• Women’s sports. The lowest-scoring proposition in the survey was male participation in women’s sports, which received just 38% working-class support. Candidates who supported this position ran 5.6 points behind those who took a more moderate stance.

• Assault rifle bans. Candidates who support this position ran four points behind those who support universal background checks.

• Abolishing ICE. Candidates who support this position ran two points behind those who support reforming the agency.

The authors also note that candidates who hold “working-class resonant or moderate” positions on cultural issues, specifically, run ahead of those who stay silent. By contrast, candidates who run on progressive or “non-resonant” positions tend to do worse than those who say nothing at all about culture. The penalty for this is, perhaps unsurprisingly, even steeper in red or purple districts.

Welcome Democracy Institute—an arm of our friends at Welcome—echoed many of these findings in a new report out this week titled, “The Industrial Heartland Swing.” WDI conducted focus groups with working-class swing voters in Obama-Trump communities across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Iowa. They found that many of these voters feel cross-pressured by the two parties, which they believe are captured by their respective extremes.

Many focus group participants identified themselves as moderate or “middle of the road” and made explicit—often unprompted—appeals for more moderation and bipartisanship. Said one Pennsylvania woman, “They’re not working together. They’re working against each other, which is making all of us suffer.” Democratic politicians like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Iowa governor candidate Rob Sand, and Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez received high marks from several participants.

Meanwhile, candidates like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and California Governor Gavin Newsom were viewed less favorably:

Voters often agreed with their words about inequality but perceived Newsom as a polished multimillionaire from another culture and Ocasio-Cortez as demagogic, performative, and short on solutions. Her line that “what they call radical, I call common sense” backfired: several participants heard it as confirmation that her “normal” is not theirs.

Members of the focus groups also rejected extremism on a policy level. Several fringe positions on the left tested negatively across every group, including abolishing ICE, banning fracking and natural gas, and abolishing the police. If a candidate took positions like this, many participants believed it signaled that he or she was “pandering to the loudest crowd.” They similarly looked unfavorably upon the “socialist” label.

The report’s authors take care to note that this doesn’t mean these voters do not support institutional reform. But they prefer to fix what’s broken—not do away with it entirely.

What does—and does not—resonate with the working class

For Democrats to repair their relationship with working-class Americans, they must first become reacquainted with their values and priorities, especially where those things substantially differ from those of the party’s college-educated, liberal base. So what, exactly, might a pro-working-class message and agenda look like?

Abbott’s and Williams’ Working-Class Win-O-Meter used survey data to identify six “dials” candidates can turn to boost their support among working-class voters and outperform a “Kamala Harris-style 2024 Democrat.” Here’s what they found moved the needle:

• Lead with working-class economics (+2.8 points). Prioritizing economic issues—especially over non-resonant culture, climate, or democracy issues—is a more effective way of increasing working-class support. The most appealing ideas overall are defending existing popular programs (e.g., Social Security), finding ways to reduce costs, and “taking bold action” on skills-building and unions. By contrast, failing to prioritize any economic issues is especially costly, particularly when replaced by social issues. Candidates who do this underperform with working-class voters overall (-4) and especially working-class independents (-5.3) and Trump 2024 voters (-5.1).

• Adopt culture and climate policies resonant with the working class (+2.9 points). Taking positions on hot-button cultural issues that please the Democrats’ progressive base is a surefire way to turn off many working-class voters, which can make the difference in swing districts and states. This does not mean candidates can’t embrace liberal goals, such as a more humane immigration system or actions to forestall climate change, but working-class voters want to see policies that account for their interests and values. For example, advocating for “clean energy that protects workers’ jobs” is far preferable to “100% clean energy by 2050.”

• Explicitly prioritize working-class people (+1.9 points). Candidates who say that they will listen to working-class Americans boost their support by nearly two points, more than appeals to any other group, including the middle class, business leaders, policy experts, or specific demographic groups. This held true across several different populations, especially women and racial minorities.

• Combine working-class policies with an explicit statement of working-class values (+1.6 points). Appeals rooted in working-class values—self-discipline, self-reliance, prioritizing family and community—are unsurprisingly more effective than those couched in middle- or upper-class sentiments like “life is about finding your own path and personal fulfillment” or “our institutions need to be updated to keep up with social change.” Notably, messaging around “defending democracy” and holding Trump accountable plays with the party’s base but not many working-class voters—in fact, it backfires with the Trump-curious right and does nothing to increase support with independents.

• Lean into populist rhetoric, but pick the right enemy (+1.7 points). There are three types of populist language that perform better than “establishment” messages: people-centric, anti-political elite, and anti-economic elite. Establishment messages aren’t all viewed unfavorably. For example, candidates who say they want to “work with both parties to get things done” barely see any penalty at all. However, saying they will “listen to more experts and evidence” actually has a negative effect (-3.1). Moreover, left-populist messaging against the establishment often omits political elites, but including them resonates with independent and right-leaning respondents.

• Run candidates with non-elite backgrounds (+1.0 points). The study also finds that while having a working-class job doesn’t necessarily move the needle for candidates, those who have elite backgrounds are likely to pay a penalty. In other words, it is more important for working-class voters that a candidate not come from an elite sphere than that they come from a working-class one. Interestingly, many respondents view small business owners as working class, not because they make a working-class salary but because “they occupy a distinctive place in working-class life. The owner of the local garage, salon, or diner is someone working-class voters meet as a neighbor and a self-made worker, not as a distant professional or executive. […] It appears working-class voters appraise small-business owners as peers who build things—a livelihood earned through one’s own work rather than through credentials…”

The authors find that when a candidate turns all six dials, it increases their support with working-class voters by 10.9 points, and that boost is even greater among the core groups Democrats need to win in competitive states and districts.

One other recent report, “Kitchen Table Messaging for the Populist Era,” came from CWCP and the Rural Urban Bridge Institute (or RUBI). The authors tested several common, economically populist messages to see how they actually landed with Americans. Though they found that some economically populist rhetoric does have resonance, they also caution that not all such rhetoric is created equally and that it must be employed thoughtfully.3

The report’s main takeaway is that addressing the pocketbook issues that affect voters’ daily lives is virtually always a winning proposition. The seven messages they tested that did this included three key components: they addressed people’s cost-of-living woes, pointed to a culprit, and offered a solution.

Their best-testing message, dubbed “The American Way,” focused on broadly shared values like hard work and fairness:

Most people just want to work hard, get ahead, and give their kids a better shot—and they should be able to. But the cost of rent, groceries, and health care keeps going up faster than working families can keep up, and paychecks just aren’t stretching the way they used to. I’m going to bring those costs down for working people, make sure the biggest corporations pay their fair share, and crack down on corruption and the people who game the system for themselves. Hard work should pay off again – that’s the American way.

They also tested a more confrontational variation of this message, which took a harder line against the wealthy and corporations. Though there wasn’t much drop-off among working-class voters (-3 points versus the original message), it fared far worse with many other core groups whose support Democrats need if they want to consistently compete in difficult terrain, such as independents (-11), rural voters (-16), Trump waverers (-13), and undecided 2026 voters (-20 points).

Meanwhile, “divide-and-conquer” messaging—often employed by progressives—was among the least effective ways to break through on these issues, including rhetoric about “fighting the oligarchy.” Interestingly, messaging taken from James Talarico’s Senate campaign website, which argues that billionaires are pushing divisive cultural issues to distract from the fact that they are “defunding our schools, gutting our healthcare, and cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends,” underperformed all seven economic-focused messages.

Among the worst-performing messages were those centered on the “race-class narrative,” for which the authors pulled language straight from ASO Communications, a progressive firm known for recommending Democrats tack left to win elections (and for often engaging in histrionics). By far, the least popular of these three was the one that leaned heavily into racial rhetoric:

Every family, of every color and background, deserves to have what we need. But today, Republicans spread lies to keep us divided while they abduct our neighbors, start wars abroad and jack up prices. If you want to know who took your money, it’s the people with all the money. And if billionaires and Republicans can talk you into thinking Black people and new immigrants are to blame for your hard times, they will keep getting away with it. The many—white, Black, and brown—can take on the money by voting for leaders who will fund our futures and respect our freedoms.

The report’s authors conclude that these “divide-and-conquer” strategies are far less resonant with many voters—especially working-class voters—than simply acknowledging their economic pain and pledging to do something about it. They also add that attacking Trump or MAGA accomplishes little at this juncture. Messaging that included this similarly performed poorly, and “bringing Trump into the picture muddies the story and triggers defensiveness on the part of anyone who has ever supported him.”

What should Democrats make of all this? The overarching lessons from these reports echo many of the things we at The Long View have said for some time. First, Democrats must become more aware of the fact that a big reason for their struggles with working-class voters is the growing influence of their professional-class base. Middle- and upper-class liberals with college degrees have far different priorities and sometimes very different values from working-class voters, and the party’s growing reliance on the former has made it more difficult to connect with the latter. Though it’s hardly advisable for the party to actively antagonize its current voters, it needs to be more open to running candidates who have credibility with working-class voters, including those who are more conservative-leaning.

Second (and relatedly), most voters are not down-the-line partisans, and many are desperate for candidates who are either moderate or who espouse a desire to be problem-solvers and embrace bipartisanship. This is especially true for the kinds of voters who will help Democrats win difficult races and be competitive over the long run in the Electoral College and Senate.

Finally, working-class appeals rooted in addressing Americans’ day-to-day economic struggles are more effective than anything else. Most people aren’t left-activists looking for a populist revolution, nor are they moved by antagonism toward “the oligarchy” or warnings about “threats to democracy.”

The formula for making inroads with America’s working class isn’t difficult to comprehend, and there are a handful of Democrats who have heeded the above advice. But if the party hopes to rebound to its supermajority glory days—to grow its appeal in parts of the country that have fled it since the start of the Trump era—it will take a concerted effort from more than a few of its members to change course.