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Wolfy Jack's avatar

A recent article by Ezra Klein in the NYTimes entitled Democrats Need to Face Why Trump won, an interview with Daniel Shor, spelled out clearly what party was favored on issues and how important those issues were for voters. Transcript at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-david-shor.html

Actually, the environment was one of the strongest issue where voters favored the Democrats, by a 10% margin, which was higher than the other main D advantages in healthcare and abortion. True it was not rated as important as the economic issues, but on those the Rs had the advantage.

Matt Yglesias also posted an article this week to the effect of going easy on the environment.

So, true the environment is not that important to voters, but it also is an advantage issue for the Dems if they avoid going full Al Gore on it, it would work.

And the Dems did not campaign on the environment particularly, but on abortion and greedy companies and Trump's threat to Democracy. And the survey showed that voters favored the Dems more on the environment than abortion and thought it was a more important issue. Healthcare was more important but their margin was slimmer.

So I would actually bump up the environment in the ways the author mentioned, but if Dems want to capture the uber important economic issues, as indeed the three most important issues to voters were Cost of Living, the Economy and Taxes, all which they favored the Rs on, with healthcare then emerging in 4th, then they need to come up with new policies as those issues work for the Rs.

Now Trump may give us a bonanza by worsening inflation, but I think the Dems have always been weakest on taxes. If there is one truth it is that people dont like to pay taxes and they link taxes to the Democrats.

True the majority of GOP tax cuts go to the wealthiest, but they do give some to the middle, where the Dems might tax the wealthy more but they spend the money. Voters saw Trump cut their taxes, and ignore the fact that more went to the wealthy and he increased the debt. My suggestion would be to run on giving a big middle class tax cut offset by higher taxes on the wealthy, rather than the usual Dem playbook of coming up with more social programs like forgiving student loans.

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