988: Problems Everywhere

New NYT series vs. old Ruffini argument

Several big pieces out this morning, on what is supposed to be a holy day of obligation to shuffle between soccer tournament fields.

Shane Goldmacher

launched a New York Times series on Democrats, fittingly called Out Of Power. It is chock-full of charts like this one:

And the first installment, Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward, will leave you shaking your head:

For now, Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.

The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.

Duuuuuuude come on.

Also out this morning is a persuasive piece from

Patrick Ruffini

in The Atlantic on American Realignment, combining data with reporting on the ground.

The piece also could have been called “Why buying video game ads isn’t the answer”:

The realignment of the working class, which helped Trump win in 2016, would not stop with white voters. In 2020 and 2024, the realignment came for nonwhite voters. A basic tenet of the Democratic Party—that of being a group-interest-based coalition—was abandoned as the party’s ideologically moderate and conservative nonwhite adherents began to peel off in a mass re-sorting of the electorate. The Democratic analyst David Shor estimates that Democrats went from winning 81 percent of Hispanic moderates in 2016 to just 58 percent in 2024. And these voters were now voting exactly how you would expect them to, given their ideologies: conservatives for the party on the right, moderates split closer to either party.

This explanation for political realignment should concern Democrats deeply, because it can’t be fixed by better messaging or more concerted outreach. The voters moving away from the Democrats are ideologically moderate to conservative.

Ruffini, who

Lauren Harper Pope

had on The Depolarizers last year to discuss the decline of racial polarization, predicted this current situation two years ago in his book Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. He has some fascinating anecdotes, like this one from Starr County, Texas:

Something seemed to break in 2020. That pandemic year, candidates had to improvise new ways to reach voters. Barrera recalls locals’ reactions when a “Trump train”—a caravan of cars and trucks flying Trump flags—one day drove down the main county highway. People emerged quietly from their homes to witness the spectacle. And then, much to Barrera’s surprise, they started applauding.

Democrats have become Jeb Bush’s “please clap” party.

988 days to un-break this before the next presidential primary.