We have no complaints and feel fortunate to have had a place to regularly publish our political and policy ideas since 2020. Hopefully, TLP’s insights and arguments made some difference in the Democratic Party’s strategic discourse and in wider political debates—or at least got people to look at matters in a different light and reconsider some of their positions.

To all our great contributors over the years, thanks so much for the provocative political discussions, nice writing, and interesting policy ideas.

To all our readers, thank you for sticking with us and offering financial support when possible. (We ended paid subscriptions a few weeks ago, and pro-rated refunds were automatically issued to paid subscribers, so we should be all fair and square.)

In the end, TLP’s mix of economic nationalism and cultural moderation—or a blend of social and Christian democracy shorn of identity politics and radicalism—didn’t really have a home in either political party. Although we’re not sure what comes next, we’ll continue to press for TLP’s “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America” agenda across party and ideological lines, whatever we end up doing in the future.

TLP’s archives will remain open and free to all. Who knows, a few posts might be relevant when the 2028 primaries and general election kick into gear. Thanks again for reading over the past five plus years.

Take care — John

Last July, I wrote a piece asking, in the wake of Democrats’ catastrophic defeat in the 2024 election and the obvious need for serious party-wide change, “Is Our Democrats Learning?” At the time, I saw little evidence that Democratic learning was, in fact, taking place.

Posing this question again in early spring 2026, it is my sad duty to inform you that our Democrats continue not to learn. If anything, they are increasingly adamant that such learning is not even necessary. Their mantra now might be, paraphrasing that old joke about the British: “No learning please, we’re Democrats.”

The proximate reasons for this complacency are not hard to discern. Trump and many of his administration’s actions are very unpopular and voters’ views on the economy, their most important issue, are dire. Consistent with these sentiments, Democrats did well in the 2025 elections, continue to clean up in special elections, and appear poised to have a very good election this coming November.

These favorable political winds have made it a great deal easier for Democrats to ignore the need for change. Surely the American people have now woken up, are rejecting Trump and Trumpism once and for all and will never be seduced by right populism again.

But we’ve heard all that before haven’t we? In 2018. In 2022. And now in 2026 with gusto. How quickly they forget.

There was a brief shining moment right after the 2024 election when it did seem like the scale of the debacle would force a real reckoning within the party. But that trend quickly dissipated as #Resistance fever gripped the party, the usual suspects mounted stiff resistance to any revision of party positions and momentum shifted to the energized progressive left within the party.

Currently, the desire for change seems to be hovering around zero, as more and more Democrats have convinced themselves that their problems have essentially been solved. Here at The Liberal Patriot, we know all about that. Funding for our modest enterprise, always precarious, has now completely dried up. Our view that the party has neither solved its problems nor is even very close to doing so has tanked our appeal among partisan Democratic donors, even reform-oriented ones, who now tend to regard us with suspicion. A little heterodoxy is fine but there’s a limit! Hence: no money.

So we are forced to close our doors. The Liberal Patriot, alas, will be no more. “[P]assed on…no more…ceased to be! [E]xpired and gone to meet [its] maker!...Bereft of life…rests in peace!…kicked the bucket…shuffled off [its] mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!” You get the idea: we are now an ex-site.

To wrap things up, let’s review some of those Democratic problems that have not been solved. This is but a selection from a broader rogues’ gallery of problems that continue to bedevil the party.

The culture problem. This is a big one. The yawning gap between the cultural views of the Democratic Party, dominated by liberal professionals, and those of the median working class voter is screamingly obvious. One approach to this problem would be to actually change some of the Democratic Party positions that are so alienating to those voters.

Nah! That would be way too simple plus would create fights within our coalition plus…we’re on the right side of history aren’t we so why the hell would we change our correct, righteous positions? Democrats have instead chosen a different path, aptly summed up by Lauren Egan:

It didn’t take long after the 2024 election—in which their party lost the White House and the Senate—for Democratic leaders to identify the problem: The party had drifted too far to the left on social and cultural issues.

It also didn’t take them long to come up with a solution: simply to shut up about it…

[I]n my conversations over the past few weeks, strategists and campaign staffers I’ve talked to across the country have argued that in order to win back working-class voters, Democrats just need to jiu-jitsu uncomfortable cultural questions about race or gender into criticism of the billionaire class…

The shut-up-and-pivot approach is not without merit. As its proponents see it, people vote largely on economics…But the dismissiveness of cultural issues as not ‘real issues’ that actually matter to voters—and therefore not worthy of formulating an opinion on—has left some party operatives on edge. They worry that by not engaging, Democrats will continue to be perceived as condescending and untrustworthy. They fundamentally don’t believe that the party can win back working-class voters and prevent a lasting GOP majority by pretending these issues simply don’t exist.

Those unnamed party operatives are correct. The shut-up-and-pivot approach won’t solve the underlying problem, even if in the short-term it may be adequate for leveraging thermostatic reaction against the Trump administration. It is trading short-term gain for long-term pain.

The working-class and rural voter problem. This brings us to the Democrats’ working-class and rural voter problem, also screamingly obvious from long-term trends and the results of the 2024 election. Of course, Democrats take comfort from the copious evidence that many of these voters are now having second thoughts about their support for Trump and the GOP. This can be seen both in low Trump approval and future Republican voting intentions relative to those voters’ 2024 levels of Trump support.

But there is little evidence that declining enthusiasm for Trump has been matched by increased enthusiasm for the Democrats among these voters. Indeed, a careful recent study by Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams for the invaluable Center for Working-Class Politics finds that “waverers”—those Trump supporters who now say they are not planning to vote Republican in 2028—are overwhelmingly not supporting the Democrats but rather supporting neither party or generally disengaging from politics.

In short, Democrats have not yet made the sale among these voters even if they do bank some improvements in working-class support in 2026 as seems likely. They are still viewed with suspicion among these voters and not regarded as “their” party. Current Democratic efforts to reverse that perception are limited by the party’s preference for candidates who simulate a populist working-class affect while still having the “correct” positions on cultural issues—in other words, a liberal professional’s idea of what a rural or working-class person should be like.

The candidacy of Graham Platner for the Democratic Senatorial nomination in Maine is a good illustration of this dynamic. As James Billot notes:

Platner likes to present himself as a gruff, no-nonsense prole who, like Cincinnatus abandoning his plow, felt compelled to enter the race by the sheer weight of national misery. After bouncing between several schools in Maine, he enlisted in the Marines in 2004 and served in Iraq and Afghanistan. A brief spell at George Washington University, a stint tending bar, and another War on Terror tour (this time with the private military company formerly known as Blackwater) followed before he returned home to become an oyster farmer. It was only after Democratic consultants “discovered” him—in a video for a local group opposing a Norwegian company’s plan to build a large salmon farm off his hometown of Sullivan—that he entered the political arena.

What tends to be omitted from this narrative is that his upbringing wasn’t quite so hardscrabble. Platner’s grandfather was a renowned architect, known for his work in modernist interior design; his father, Bronson, is an Ivy-educated lawyer and Democratic donor; his mother, Leslie Harlow, is a local activist and entrepreneur runs a restaurant in Bar Harbor, which happens to be the main client for Platner’s oysters. Thanks to the family largess, he enrolled at the elite Hotchkiss School before moving to another private school six months later—a fact he tries to play down.

OK, from an affluent professional family, attended Hotchkiss, sells his oysters to his mom’s upscale restaurant—now that’s a proletarian. Albeit an exemplary proletarian who wants to abolish ICE, supports biological boys in girls sports and generally sees debate about Democrats’ unpopular cultural positions as a “billionaire-funded distraction.” That’s the kind of working-class dude that gives liberal Democrats the warm fuzzies; actually-existing rural and working voters less so as polling data from the primary race indicates.

No wonder that, as Billot summarizes:

For all the campaign’s talk of winning over Trump voters and bringing back the popular classes, his coalition is composed mostly of #Resistance liberals, college students, and crunchy retirees. That may be enough to win the primary, and perhaps even the general. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for a durable re-realignment, or evidence that Democrats have rediscovered a winning formula for 2028.

Even in a rural town that had supported Trump, Billot could not find any Republicans at a rally for Platner.

Everyone I spoke to was a lifelong Democrat, their first rally likely predating Jimmy Carter. They were less worried about finding common cause with the other side than about Trump putting them in concentration camps. Others even asked Platner, hopefully, if the army might consider mutinying.

We’ll likely see more of these faux working-class candidates who strike a populist tone but are otherwise culturally compatible with the priorities of professional class Democrats, whose formidable infrastructure and fundraising clout can make or break them. That will ensure that Democrats remain mostly uncompetitive in the red rural and working-class states Democrats need to carry to have a prayer of taking and keeping the Senate and, increasingly, to prevail in the Electoral College where voting strength is flowing away from high education blue states.

The trans “rights” problem. Every once in a while, some Democratic politician ventures a mild dissent from the trans activist agenda. Without exception, they are met with a brick wall of intense intra-party opposition which typically results in a hasty retreat by said politician. It is truly a litmus test issue.

This is remarkable. Perhaps nothing would surprise a Democratic time traveler from the 20^th century as much as the incorporation of transgender “rights” into the Democrats’ 21^st century project. Going far beyond basic civil rights in housing, employment, and marriage, Democrats have uncritically embraced the ideological agenda of trans activists who believe gender identity trumps biological sex, and that therefore, for example, transwomen—trans-identified males—are literally women and must be able to access all women’s spaces and opportunities: sports, changing rooms, bathrooms, jails, crisis centers, institutions, etc.

The same logic is applied to children who exhibit gender-nonconforming behavior and profess discomfort with their biological bodies. Their revealed “gender identity” is taken to be a determinative indicator that they were “born in the wrong body” and that therefore they should be encouraged to “transition.” This is done first socially and then through medical procedures (puberty blockers, hormones, surgery) to align their bodies with their “true” sex (their gender identity).

Notoriously, the rise of gender ideology and “gender-affirming care” has also led to an explosion of new language and pronoun use to paper over the obvious contradiction between biological sex and the dictates of gender identity. This has been enforced informally and through formal regulations in many institutional settings.

This is a far cry from Democrats’ original conception of women’s rights and sexual equality. The idea was that women and men should have equal rights and that there is no “right” way to be a man or woman—gender non-conforming behavior is just a different way of being a man or woman. Therefore, no one is born in the wrong body whatever their behavior or affect.

This was a realistic approach to the problems of both discrimination against women and the stereotyping of gender roles that limited men’s and women’s life choices. It required no heroic assumptions about human biology, unobservable internal sex, or the need for medical interventions.

But in today’s Democratic Party, it is de rigueur to believe that being born in the wrong body happens all the time and that such individuals should seek to change their body to match their internal gender identity. Biological sex is merely a technicality that can be overridden by self-identification and medical treatment to turn men into women and women into men (and back again!)

In reality, sex is a binary; males cannot become females and females cannot become males. Transwomen are not women. They are males who choose to identify as women and may dress, act, and be medically treated so they resemble their biological sex less. But that does not make them women. It makes them males who choose a different lifestyle.

As noted, the remarkably radical approach of trans activists and gender ideologues has been met with little resistance in the Democratic Party. But as evidence mounts that the medicalization of children is not a benign and life-saving approach, but rather a life-changing treatment with many negative effects, and voters stubbornly refuse to endorse the idea that biological sex is just a technicality and more and more strongly oppose the trans activist agenda, Democrats’ identification with gender ideology has become a massive political liability.

Indeed, for many, many voters the Democrats’ embrace of radical transgender ideology and its associated policy agenda has become the most potent exemplar of Democrats’ lack of connection to the real world of ordinary Americans. For these voters, Democrats have definitely strayed into “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes” territory. And if they’re not realistic about something as fundamental as human biology, why should they be trusted about anything else?

It’s a reasonable question, to which Democrats currently have no effective answer. And, no, calling the question a “billionaire-funded distraction” is not an effective answer.

The immigration problem. The immigration issue has been a total disaster for the Democrats. They encouraged mass immigration through lax border and interior enforcement and porous asylum systems that effectively legalized illegal immigration and made a mockery of controlled, legal immigration. Over time, the intense unpopularity of these policies has contributed hugely to tanking Democrats’ working-class support. But to this day where are the Democratic politicians who are willing to unapologetically proclaim the following fundamentals of a realistic immigration policy?

1. Many more people want to come to a rich country like the United States than an orderly immigration system can allow.

2. Therefore, many people are willing to break the laws of our country to gain entry.

3. If you do not enforce the law, you will get more law-breakers and therefore more illegal immigrants.

4. If you provide procedural loopholes to gain entry into the country (e.g., by claiming asylum), many people will abuse these loopholes.

5. Once these illegal and irregular immigrants gain entry to the country, they will seek to stay indefinitely regardless of their immigration status.

6. If interior immigration enforcement is lax, such that these illegal and irregular immigrants do mostly get to stay forever, that provides a tremendous incentive for others to try to gain entry to the country via the same means.

7. If you provide benefits and dispensations to all immigrants in the country, regardless of their immigration status, this further incentivizes aspiring immigrants to gain entry to the country by any means necessary.

8. Tolerance of flagrant law-breaking on a mass scale contributes to a sense of social disorder and loss of control among a country’s citizens, who believe a nation’s borders are meaningful and that the welfare of a nation’s citizens should come first.

9. There is, in fact, such a thing as too much immigration, particularly low-skill immigration, and negative effects on communities and workers are real, not just in the imaginations of xenophobes. As Josh Barro observes:

Democrats…need to get back in touch with the reasons that both uncontrolled migration and excessive volumes of migration really are problems…[I]llegal and irregular migration reflect a failure of our civic institutions, a misuse of the social safety net, and a breakdown of the rule of law, and…all of that is actually bad…

Illegal immigration, and other forms of irregular migration that happen with the authorization of the executive branch, really do hurt Americans by putting strain on public resources, imposing costs on taxpayers, and undermining social cohesion.

10. If more immigration is desired by parties or policymakers, from whichever countries and at whatever skill levels, that immigration should be regular, legal immigration and approved by the American people through the democratic process. Backdooring mass immigration over the wishes of voters because it is “kind” or “reflects our values” or is deemed “economically necessary” leads inevitably to backlash.

These are the realities of the immigration issue and each and every one of them has been ignored by Democrats during the first quarter of the 21^st century. Going forward, Democrats must show voters they understand these realities and are willing to dramatically change the incentive structure for illegal and irregular immigration. That means strict border enforcement, elimination or radical restriction of immigration loopholes, and a credible interior enforcement regime that recognizes illegal immigrants, even if they stay out of trouble, are still illegal and therefore susceptible to deportation. Otherwise illegal immigrants who manage to enter the country will quite reasonably assume that they can stay here forever which of course is a massive incentive for more illegal immigration.

But so far what has happened? Clearly Democrats are much happier denouncing ICE (including calling for its abolition) and Trump than they are grappling with the immigration issue and making clear, unambiguous commitments to radical reform. Noah Smith rightly sums up the situation:

I have seen zero evidence that progressives have reckoned with their immigration failures of 2021-23. I have not seen any progressive or prominent Democrat articulate a firm set of principles on the issue of who should be allowed into the country and who should be kicked out.

This was not always the case. Bill Clinton had no problem differentiating between legal and illegal immigration in 1995, and declaring that America had a right to kick out people who come illegally.

I have seen no equivalent expression of principle during the second Trump presidency. Every Democrat and progressive thinker can articulate a principled opposition to the brutality and excesses of ICE and to the racism that animates Trump’s immigration policy. But when it comes to the question of whether illegal immigration itself should be punished with deportation, Democrats and progressives alike lapse into an uncomfortable silence.

Every Democratic policy proposal I’ve seen calls to refocus immigration enforcement on those who commit crimes other than crossing the border illegally. But what about those who commit no such crime? If someone who crosses illegally and then lives peacefully and otherwise lawfully in America should be protected from deportation, how is the right-wing charge of “open borders” a false one?

More generally, I have seen no attempt to reckon with why Americans were so mad about immigration under Biden. I have seen no acknowledgement that Americans dislike the violation of the U.S. law that says “You may not cross the border unless explicitly admitted under our immigration system.” I have seen zero recognition of the anger over quasi-legal immigrants’ use of city social services and state and local welfare benefits.

I have not seen any Democrat or progressive even discuss the concern that too rapid of a flood of immigrants could change American culture in ways that the nation’s existing citizenry don’t want. Nor have American progressives looked overseas and wondered why the people of Canada and (to a lesser degree) Europe have forced their own governments to decrease immigration numbers dramatically in recent years…

Sad! But that’s where we are. Given that, why would or should ordinary working-class voters believe the Democrats’ next immigration regime will be any different from their previous one? I think they’d be skeptical and I don’t blame them.

The economic program (or lack thereof) problem. Democrats seem to think that the well-documented discontent with the Trump administration’s economic management now makes the economy “their” issue. In a thermostatic, opposition party sense that may be true, but it remains the case that Democrats do not have an advantage over Republicans on handling the economy.

This makes sense since voters viewed the previous Democratic administration quite negatively on economic management. They may not like what Trump has done, but they have not forgotten what Democrats did.

And let’s face it: the current Democratic economic program is quite thin; voters can reasonably question whether Democratic plans for the economy would be much of an improvement over what the previous Democratic administration delivered. Take energy.

Democrats spent the first quarter of the 21^st century increasingly obsessed with the threat of climate change and the need to rapidly replace fossil fuels with renewables (wind and solar) to stave off the apocalypse. This was despite a thunderous lack of interest from working-class voters. But for Democrats’ burgeoning Brahmin left constituencies, it became a non-negotiable commitment—after all, they were saving the world!

As the 21^st century unfolded, more and more of Democrats’ policy plans centered around combating climate change and promoting a rapid clean energy transition. The claim was that the clean energy transition was not only a virtuous thing to do but would actually drive the economy forward. Hence, the Green New Deal, a version of which was implemented by the Biden administration.

The working class has not been impressed. These voters view climate change as a third-tier issue, vastly prioritize the cost and reliability of energy over its effect on the climate, and, if action on climate change is to be taken, are primarily concerned with the effect of such actions on consumer costs and economic growth. Making fast progress toward net-zero barely registers. Democrats’ assurance that the clean energy transition will deliver prosperity has fallen on deaf ears. The working class just doesn’t believe it will. And it hasn’t.

In truth, both here and around the world the net-zero, climate maximalist movement is, if not dead, barely breathing. The recent vogue for “affordability” rather than strenuous climate change rhetoric among Democrats indicates that this reality is at least beginning to penetrate. But name-checking affordability falls far short of fully embracing energy realism and all that would entail.

That means acknowledging that, no, climate change is not an “emergency” and does not justify an impractical rapid transition to wind and solar. And that, yes, fossil fuels, especially natural gas and oil, will be a big part of the energy mix for many, many years to come. Democrats must make it clear that they have a realistic understanding of the complexity and centrality of the energy system and will jettison any and all dogmas that interfere with meeting the country’s energy needs and keeping prices low for consumers and industry. That does not mean solar and wind will not play a role in doing so, but so will other energy sources like natural gas and oil, the revived nuclear industry, which was frozen in amber for decades in no small part due to Democratic opposition, and emerging sources deserving of government support like geothermal. The future mix of energy types and policies should be determined by a zealous commitment to energy realism.

If that means we don’t hit “net zero” by 2050, so be it. Truth be told, that was always a “delusional” goal, as Vaclav Smil has pointed out.

Where are the Democrats willing to say all this out loud? They are very, very thin on the ground, if there are any at all. So why should ordinary working-class voters not be suspicious that Democrats, once back in power, will simply revive their chimerical green transition project, with all the spending that would entail? I think they would be suspicious and, again, I wouldn’t blame them.

Of course, Democrats hope that their new party line about affordability will overwhelm such suspicions and related uneasiness about a return to the Biden-era economy. But affordability is just a slogan, and so far the meager policy bones on the slogan are a grab bag of price caps and controls, subsidies and new regulations that may or may not do much to make everyday life more affordable. Their purpose is mostly, if not solely, to signal that Democrats want to do something about the problem; even the most partisan Democrats likely realize as an economic program it doesn’t amount to much.

It is interesting that affordability, as thin as it is, has mostly drowned out Democratic interest in “abundance,” which had a moment in the Democratic discourse. The concept was always somewhat compromised by its tight linkage to policy projects beloved by liberal professionals like a clean energy transition and urban infill housing, but at least there was a “there” there. However, the intrinsic deregulatory and anti-bureaucratic character of the abundance approach is just not that popular with the many Democratic professionals whose ox would be gored by that approach. So affordability it is to keep peace within the coalition.

Rounding out the hit parade of Democratic economic policy ideas is that old favorite, “tax the rich.” There are now several versions in circulation whose policy defects we will pass over in charitable silence. But if this is what now passes for an innovative Democratic economic policy idea, they are perhaps in more trouble than I thought.

Finally, there is the juggernaut currently reshaping the entire US economy: AI. Here the Democrats seem utterly bereft of ideas other than they should respond to public fears by promising to stop the negative effects of the transformation. How? Not clear in the slightest.

Looking over this list of problems, one thing that stands out to me is that Democrats have never come to terms with how profoundly mistaken many of their priorities have been. These haven’t just been minor errors in implementing an otherwise fine program. Much of the program was simply wrong and, arguably, not even progressive.

It’s time—past time—for Democrats to discard the conceit that they are on the right side of history and that therefore their positions are, and have been, noble and correct. Until they do so, I do not expect them to develop the dominant majority coalition they seek and vanquish right populism. Indeed, it could be the other way around. That’s a sobering thought.

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Conservative populism has now firmly established itself as a significant force in most of the Western world. It remains unclear, however, whether it can build on that to become a dominant power.

The evidence of significance is overwhelming. Populist parties regularly receive twenty or more percent in national elections, at times exceeding thirty percent. Leaders such as Donald Trump, Sanae Takaichi, and Giorgia Meloni have gained power by allying those forces with elements of the old center-right to win majoritarian elections, something that leaders in Eastern Europe such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have long been able to do.

The overall record is nonetheless mixed. France’s National Rally gained significant ground in this month’s local elections, but it nonetheless was rarely able to win in the crucial second round. Left-leaning voters will still rally around even conservative candidates to prevent a populist win, while many conservatives remain unwilling to join the broad coalition of the right urged upon them by Marion Maréchal and Éric Ciotti.

Portugal and Germany are other examples of countries with populist parties that are fast gaining support yet remain off limits to other mainstream parties leading coalitions. Germany’s main center-right group, the Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union, would still rather team up with the center-left Social Democrats or Greens than the populist Alternative for Germany. Portugal’s center-right Democratic Alliance is making the same choice, depending on support from their traditional Socialist Party adversary rather than currying favor with André Ventura’s Chega.

This creates a conundrum for these leaders. Should they emulate Meloni and Trump and cut deals with the old right, even at the expense of significant portions of their agenda? Or should they just persevere in the hope that the tide will soon flow in their direction?

Either course carries risk. Choose moving to the center and a party could go so far that the voters they attract from the old left decide that the new right isn’t different from the old right they reject. Stay the course and you could stay out of power for a long time.

A country’s election and party system will also dictate how conservative populist parties behave. A majoritarian system tends to push a party towards trying to cooperate with or co-opt the old right. But in Great Britain, the splintering of the party system into three national left-leaning or left-wing parties plus two additional regional left-leaning parties means that the conservative populist Reform Party is better off pushing to the right. Forecasts show that it can win an election with only 30 percent of the vote.

Over time, however, these choices will tend to converge towards similar outcomes. A decade from now, conservative populists will gain if the elite consensus fails to solve the problems that are driving the conservative populist surge. Grand coalitions can hold the purported barbarians at the gate for a while, but voters ultimately will give even radical parties their shot at power when the alternatives seem hopeless.

On that score, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz seems to be perhaps the West’s most consequential non-populist leader. With Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer mired in historically low approval numbers and France’s Emmanuel Macron’s centrists fading quickly from the scene, Merz’s grand coalition with the Social Democrats is the last large nation government with a chance to show it can restore economic growth, increase national security, and reduce the social disruption that mass immigration has wrought.

The initial signs are mixed. Merz’s CDU/CSU faction is polling lower than its results in last year’s election, although it has recovered a bit since January. The conservative populist AfD is up, both in polls and in two recent state elections, as is the far-left Left party. Merz will need to deliver by the time the next federal vote occurs in March 2029 if he wants to forestall the shift to the extremes in both directions.

The state of the economy is likely to be the most important question for conservative populists over the next decade. They universally draw from people making less money and with less formal education, but some polls also show a direct correlation between perceived economic situation and openness to populist appeals.

In the U.K., for example, Reform does best among voters who “often struggle to make ends meet” and worst among those who are “very comfortable financially.” Support for the left-wing Green Party shows an identical correlation. In the two most recent German state elections, both held in the former West Germany, support for both the AfD and the Left is much higher among those who say their financial situation is bad than among those who say it is good.

That potentially makes the impact of artificial intelligence incredibly important for populism’s future. Virtually unqualified support for AI is among the core tenets of the cross-partisan elite consensus. As they once said about globalization, the development of AI is supposed to lift all economic boats by increasing productivity. If that happens, then they should be handsomely rewarded at the ballot box.

Globalization’s actual outcome, however, should give one pause. That sea change enriched people with advanced degrees and access to financial capital, while it damaged life prospects for people who work with their hands or on their feet. That is a significant reason why in all nations those with lower incomes and lower levels of education—and especially those classified as manual laborers—have swung so rapidly towards conservative populism.

The AI revolution could have a similar effect on the degree-holding class. British pollster James Kanagasooriam published a fascinating paper last year that looked at what types of jobs are currently at risk of being automated by AI. Jobs with high degrees of verbally specific skills are at high risk of automation. And it turns out that those jobs are found, both in Britain and America, in communities that have done very well economically over the last decades and remain bastions of anti-populist sentiments.

If AI displaces large numbers of jobs via automation, that will leave large numbers of white-collar, degree-holding voters without a means to finance the middle- and upper-middle-class lifestyles they are accustomed to. They will be in exactly the circumstances that blue-collar workers were when their jobs were exposed to globalization, with one exception: they can’t be told to “learn how to code” because entry-level coding will now be performed by AI.

We should then expect the displaced white-collar worker and his/her family to react in the same way their blue-collar fellow citizens reacted in the last decade. They may swing to left-wing populists in greater numbers, but many will swing rightward. Any significant hollowing out of the remaining consensus voters puts the traditional center-right supporter in a massive bind. And we know from history what old center-right voters do when their only viable choices are a populist left and a populist right.

Those who want to resist this analysis should look at how the social democratic left rose from obscurity to dominance within fifty years. It first gained strength among the working class but remained unable to seize power in most nations for years until the twin elite failures of the mid-20th century—the Great Depression and World War II—changed voters’ minds. It took social and economic catastrophe to push democratic polities to embrace the welfare state and Keynesianism, but embrace it they did until the next set of elite failures produced the neoliberal correction of the 1980s that produced our current cross-partisan consensus.

Events do matter, as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s famous dictum reminds us. Those who think the current elite consensus can, with a few tweaks, solve the West’s challenges, still believe that populism can be contained. Those who don’t, and all populist leaders fall into this class, can look forward to a potentially bright conservative populist future. Today may remain in the elite’s hands, but tomorrow might belong to the outsiders.

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Picture a candidate running for elected office who fits this description:

• He believes marriage should be between one man and one woman;

• He criticizes the incumbent president for being too soft on illegal immigration;

• He proudly touts America’s relationship with Israel in a speech to AIPAC, the country’s top pro-Israel lobbying group;

• He supports limits on abortion, calling it a “moral” issue, and inserts language into his party’s platform expressing support for reducing the frequency of abortion;

• He expresses support for the death penalty;

• He believes that black Americans should take more responsibility in their families and their own lives;

• He also appears to favor class-based affirmative action over race-based affirmative action;

• Many of his supporters take a “colorblind” view of race, which he affirms.

Many people likely read that description and concluded the candidate in question was a conservative Republican. However, as the title of this piece likely gave away, every one of these items describes Barack Obama in his first campaign for the presidency.1

In fact, Obama was far from the only Democrat who had such views at the time. Hillary Clinton opposed gay marriage as well and was widely considered a hawk on immigration and foreign policy issues. Democrats also represented several conservative-leaning House districts and Senate seats around this time, and those elected officials often shared the cultural attitudes of their voters.

This may surprise some people in both parties, but it’s a sign of just how much things have changed in American politics since 2008. Over the course of our project, TLP has spent considerable time analyzing Democrats’ evolution, both demographically and ideologically. Since that presidential election, they have lost much of their long-faithful working-class base, which was more culturally moderate-to-conservative, and replaced it with affluent, college-educated, knowledge-economy workers who are far more culturally left-wing. According to Gallup’s latest polling, fully 59 percent of Democrats now call themselves “liberal,”2 a historic high in their data that is up from just 35 percent 20 years ago.

We have also documented how the Democrats’ evolution from a center-left party to a decidedly “left” one has influenced candidates as well. For example, there is evidence that voters have become increasingly less keen on centrist candidates with more “heterodox” views, even sometimes those running in harder-to-win places. Instead, a large majority now says that a candidate must be a “true progressive” for them to get excited.

Some Democrats might object: “The world has evolved, and we expect our politicians to keep up. Even Obama and Clinton are both now pro-gay marriage and more race-conscious than they were in 2008. The party also must adapt to the shifting attitudes of their voters, who have become more diverse and subsequently more liberal.”

This is of course (somewhat) true.3 It’s reasonable to expect that Democratic leaders would move with their base as the world evolves—especially in their direction on issues like gay marriage and abortion—and, perhaps most importantly, as Donald Trump has come into the picture and shattered both parties’ longstanding coalitions. But these demographic and ideological changes have also created real, potentially long-term vulnerabilities for Democrats at the national level.

The reality, as we have long warned, is that the U.S. is a center-right country. As the Democratic base has shifted left and become more reliant on college-educated voters, it has moved further away from the median American on multiple fronts. This, combined with a growing skepticism toward candidates who take more measured approaches or occasionally buck party orthodoxy, risks jeopardizing the Democrats’ ability to build a coalition capable of consistently competing for the Senate and Electoral College, specifically, where they will need some support from voters who may be to their right on contentious issues.

In 2008, Democratic voters were clearly willing to give their candidates breathing room on such issues. This was likely due in part to the fact that a majority of primary voters back then identified either as moderate or conservative. On some hotly debated topics, such as gay marriage, even those voters were not yet on board. Aside from the Iraq War, there were very few litmus tests placed on the party’s candidates. Democrats that year not only won a robust Electoral College victory but huge majorities in Congress, too.

It seems less likely, though, that today’s Democratic primary electorate is prepared to be as ideologically flexible as the one that helped elect Obama two decades ago. And this begs an interesting question: could a candidate like Obama or Clinton, who spurns some party shibboleths on thorny topics or even picks occasional fights with the base, win the Democratic nomination for president today?

One prospective candidate likely to test this question in 2028 is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who has started leaning into his support for Israel. Being pro-Israel has long been a safe bet for candidates of both parties. However, following the country’s war with Hamas and a new one with Iran, its image has cratered among Democrats.

In light of this, many Democratic pols have come to see ties to or support for Israel as a liability, as evidenced by the growing number eschewing campaign contributions from AIPAC. Can Shapiro cross the party’s base on Israel in today’s environment and still have a chance to win its nomination?

One candidate to watch this cycle is Congressman Seth Moulton, who has launched a primary challenge to Senator Ed Markey this year in deep-blue Massachusetts. Shortly after the 2024 election, Moulton argued that his party should rethink its commitment to certain positions that had proven unpopular with the broader public—specifically, allowing individuals who were born male but identify as female to participate in women’s sports. Not only is this an unpopular policy with the broader public (79 percent oppose), but even two-thirds of Democrats (67 percent) oppose it.

Yet, the response to Moulton’s contention among local Democratic and progressive organizations wasn’t curiosity or even debate—it was to immediately threaten a primary challenge. And although he is not seeking re-election to the House, his past expressed position could prove to be a liability in his Senate campaign. This is notable because, this issue notwithstanding, Moulton is mostly a standard Democrat. He is near the ideological center of the House Democratic caucus, and he only votes with Trump 11.3 percent of the time in Congress.4 He has spoken elsewhere very strongly in support of LGBT Americans.

The harsh reality for Moulton is that the Democratic base doesn’t appear willing to let their candidates step out of line in any way on the subject—even when doing so would align them with broader public opinion. This represents a stark contrast to 2008 when Obama received universal support from Democratic base voters, even as the latter overwhelmingly supported gay marriage, the hot-button issue of the day. Of course, Massachusetts voters are not representative of the national electorate, but the animus toward Moulton may be a sign of how much things have changed.

Perhaps the ultimate test of whether centrist heterodoxy is a liability for Democrats will come from another potential 2028 candidate: Gavin Newsom. Last year, he made a point of engaging with high-profile conservatives on his podcast, including figures like Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, and Ben Shapiro, which irked some Democrats. During his conversation with Kirk, he also remarked that he opposed using public funds for gender transition surgeries for inmates (the subject of an infamous 2024 attack ad against Kamala Harris) and called ending sex-segregated sports “deeply unfair.”

Despite adopting positions that some Democrats might find offensive, Newsom is currently running in second place behind only Harris. However, it’s entirely possible that these past positions will come back to bite him in an actual primary campaign.5

It’s worth noting that some Democrats running in more conservative-leaning places are still granted a little latitude to stray from the party. For instance, Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, congressmen representing South Texas House districts, were the only two Democrats to vote for the GOP’s bill to keep school athletic programs segregated by sex. Both won their primary elections earlier this month in districts where voters are overwhelmingly working-class and Hispanic—and thus more likely to be more socially moderate or even conservative themselves.

TLP’s friends at and The Bench have also worked to identify and support candidates running in redder districts who break the mold of a contemporary Democrat. In his campaign launch for Texas’s 15th District, Bobby Pulido endorsed tougher restrictions on illegal immigration. He also proudly touts the fact that he is a gun enthusiast. Pulido hopes his “Blue Dog” positions can help him win a district that Trump carried by 18 points.

These are great opportunities for the party to try to expand its coalition. At the presidential level, though, it’s just not clear that Democratic candidates have this flexibility the way they once did.

Our crew sometimes jokes that candidates who fit the TLP mold would win one percent in a Democratic primary but 51 percent in a general election. I think this short-changes us, but it does offer an important critique of how the party has changed. We consider figures like Obama to be liberal patriots: people who have an optimistic vision for the country and who want to help everyone find their place in it, while also being willing to meet people where they are, embrace ideological pluralism, find room for compromise, and sometimes even call out the excesses of their own side.

Candidates like this are likely to find fans across the political spectrum and command majority support, as Obama did. Whether they can succeed in today’s Democratic Party, however, is less clear.6 Can the base tolerate someone who is with them on 90 to 95 percent of the issues but splits from them on a handful of contentious ones? A more ideologically homogenous coalition may well believe it can demand that candidates toe the line, down the line, which could present unnecessary risks with a national electorate.

It’s our hope that Obama-like candidates can begin rising to the top again and remind Democrats of the wisdom of his approach to politics, especially the necessity of compromise. As the former president once told a group of graduating college students, “Democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want.”

Wise words. Will his party heed his advice?

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A central if underexamined question looming over the 2028 Democratic primary and the future of the American left more broadly is who will claim the mantle of Bernie Sanders’s progressive populism. Many presume Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is Sanders’s heir apparent, based on her star power and the long-established affinity between the two. But Ocasio-Cortez isn’t necessarily Sanders’s protégé, and there isn’t a firm consensus on the left that she is, in fact, best poised to carry the torch, despite her rumored aspirations for higher office. Others speculate that if New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani were constitutionally allowed to run for president, he would possibly overtake his fellow trailblazer of activist-influencer politics and expand Sanders’s movement to the next generation.

Still, the bigger problem facing AOC and others hoping to follow in Sanders’s footsteps—and perhaps achieve what he couldn’t in his two runs for president—is that nearly all are urban progressives taken to represent the worldview of the Brahmin left. They constitute the new “conscience” of the Democratic Party, the voices who have increased the salience of class and economic power in a coalition that had for too long sidestepped the issues that once gave liberal Democrats their raison d’être. They have ensured social justice means more than making America’s educated and business elites look a little more like the rest of the country. In contrast to Sanders, however, they are much less familiar with the plight of rural and small-town Americans and the distinct challenges they face. Sanders, one of the most popular politicians in America, is, at heart, a very New England type of socialist, at ease with the idiosyncratic communitarian and libertarian tendencies that America’s core political traditions have passed down through the ages. And it is doubtful that even his most talented acolytes share this essential quality to the same degree.

That is no minor weakness for a left largely deprived of the institutions—unions, farmers’ associations, and public interest civic groups—that made New Deal liberalism the vehicle of working-class advance for the better part of the 20th century. The left, already handicapped in this regard, is glaringly limited to a handful of highly educated coastal metros, disengaged, if not entirely by choice, from vast sections of the country. Alongside the Democratic establishment’s own aloofness, that has political costs few besides Sanders have warned of. Indeed, if the perspective gained by place and custom still matters in American politics, the left has a blind spot that will only become more conspicuous once Sanders retires from office.

To be sure, there are other rising leaders from the Democrats’ left flank who are trying to capture the grassroots enthusiasm of Sanders’s first campaign for president. Although he represents one of the wealthiest districts in the country, Representative Ro Khanna of California has increasingly fashioned himself as a maverick antiwar Democrat willing to take on the “Epstein class” and powerful lobbies. He co-chaired Sanders’s 2020 campaign, recently announced with Sanders a new wealth tax proposal, and remains a lead sponsor in the House of Medicare for All and other progressive legislation waiting for an elusive filibuster-proof majority. That lends him a certain amount of “parliamentary” authority, though there are doubts he could ever equal Sanders’s gravitas and impassioned following. But again, the main barrier Khanna must overcome is effectively the same as AOC’s, notwithstanding her more working-class district. Unavoidably, he is a world apart from the dairy farms, machine tool plants, and quaint, semi-vacant downtowns that dot Sanders’s “blue” Vermont as well as other states that are much less friendly to Democrats.

Then there are Graham Platner of Maine and Dan Osborn of Nebraska, two former service members running for Senate in their respective states as political outsiders appalled by the crony capitalism that brazenly pervades Washington. Both bear similar anti-establishment messages in heavily rural, white working-class states that bring to mind Sanders’s folk hero stature in Vermont. The resonance inspires a bit of optimism, not least because it is often assumed the American left has been reduced to a coastal urban phenomenon more committed to elite-mediated identity politics than rebuilding a New Deal-style coalition that unites working people across regions.

There are limits in both cases, however, to the comparison that can be drawn with Sanders. Platner, who is vying for the Democratic nomination against Governor Janet Mills, the party establishment favorite, to topple Republican Senator Susan Collins, is an outspoken progressive on nearly every issue, foreign and domestic (the importance of the 2nd amendment excepted). On top of being a fellow New Englander, that consistent left-wing orientation superficially makes him more like Sanders, whereas Dan Osborn, a self-described lifelong independent who avoids overt criticism of Trump and the MAGA base, has pitched a far more tailored anti-monopoly platform in his bid to crack the GOP’s lock on Nebraska.

Yet Sanders, who grew up in a working-class Jewish family in 1940s Brooklyn, spent years on the political margins before converting traditionally Republican Vermont to his brand of politics; as mayor of Burlington and then as an independent member of Congress, he methodically carved out a left-populist yet “heterodox” reputation that won respect and votes from residents who didn’t necessarily identify with the activist left. Platner, whose campaign has not escaped (and arguably embraces) the “nationalization” of political offices and party stances, is shaping up to be a formidable insurgent, but it is unclear he will earn the same reputation in his quest to upend Maine’s staid politics. Osborn, meanwhile, remains a dark horse enigma waging a lonely battle against polarization itself. Even if he defies the odds in his second race, Osborn may prove to be an anomaly rather than a harbinger of a heartland rebellion. Nowhere on the horizon is there a figure who seems capable of inspiring a grassroots movement that reaches an armistice in the culture wars in order to fight corruption and build worker power on a national scale.

Part of the reason it is difficult to conceive of who might fill Sanders’s shoes is that Sanders, a somewhat unshowy legislator in his early days, evolved from a curiosity into one of the most singular influences on contemporary American politics. His insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton and the DNC “machine” made him an icon, but he also was (and to some extent still is) an iconoclastic voice within American liberalism. Sanders, for both practical and sincere reasons, hearkens back to FDR to assuage potential converts that “democratic socialism” means the enlightened welfare states of Scandinavia and the unfinished work of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, not the suffocating bureaucratic authoritarianism of the old Eastern bloc. But aside from this carefully drawn parallel with Sanders’s professed hero, he does not fit neatly within the typology of America’s radical and reform traditions.

Conventionally speaking, he emerged far to the left of Kennedy-style liberalism, the direction in which New England and the Northeast in general moved in the latter third of the 20th century. The Kennedy tradition, like its Wilsonian antecedent, was largely in favor of free-trade agreements and confident in America’s soft and hard power to nurture liberal democracy abroad, eventually meshing with Bill Clinton’s Third Way approach. Sanders, by contrast, was a left-wing critic of globalization and fairly protectionist at that, putting him in league with Jesse Jackson, Minnesota’s Paul Wellstone, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, South Carolina’s Fritz Hollings, and Indiana’s Vance Hartke, who all espoused, in different registers, a left-populism focused on preserving good-paying American jobs and rebuilding at home. That partly explains why Sanders attracted independents in 2015 and 2016, some of whom ended up voting for Trump in the general election; Sanders never underestimated the havoc wrought by NAFTA and the China shock and knew it was vital that the left didn’t further hemorrhage or spurn workers in manufacturing and traditional trades.

By the same token, that principled opposition reflected an ambivalence toward globalization that today’s activist left generally hasn’t shared. As many noted in 2016 and then again in the aftermath of the migration surge under Joe Biden, Sanders also viewed open borders not as the progressive position on immigration but as a policy that the right-wing Koch network lobbied for. While he worked tenaciously in his 2020 campaign to deepen support among Latino workers and advocacy groups, Sanders never quite abandoned his earlier position, believing unchecked migration leads to exploitation and thus lower workplace safety standards and wages.

Sanders was also never an eager practitioner of identity politics and the associated theories that became in vogue on so many campuses. He was an early champion of gay rights, supported a woman’s right to an abortion, abhorred racism, and denounced covert US operations supporting rightwing regimes in Latin America. But unlike the “woke” sectarians who scaled the heights of media and academia last decade and their adherents, Sanders was averse to “progressive” race reductionism and similar modes of politics that emphasized difference over common material concerns. Moreover, he never trafficked in attitudes that judged every moral failing or blunder of the US government as an indictment of the people itself; he didn’t ridicule the country’s noblest values as a sham, dismiss its vastly undercelebrated cultural contributions, or regard ordinary workers as oafs and rubes. Americans had a heritage to be proud of, precisely because it was working people who were the agents of both creative change and worthy traditions.

Sanders, in other words, was and is a social republican and a radical “small d” democrat, confident in America’s potential and the ability of all to bring meaning to their communities.

Who, then, are Sanders’s predecessors? Is there something in his intellectual imprinting that distinguishes the 84-year-old from his would-be successors? Long before he leaned into his idealization of FDR, Sanders was an admirer of Eugene Debs, the five-time Socialist candidate for president in the early 20th century. But Debs has never really been Sanders’s model, considering Sanders’s dogged effort to realign the Democratic Party rather than forge an entirely independent movement. In some respects, Sanders shares more in common with Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette or Nebraska’s George Norris—“independent” Republicans of the Progressive Era with vocal rural constituencies who held a communitarian ethos and believed public power and tough regulations would make the economy deliver for the many. Another touchstone is Fiorello La Guardia, the reform-minded mayor of New York who did so much to reify the spirit of the New Deal during Sanders’s boyhood. While Sanders exhorts his listeners to be part of a “revolution,” his message has always been imbued with a strong sense of civic nationalism, as if it had been extracted from a WPA mural. That quality has had an underappreciated effect on his appeal that only Mamdani has come close to matching. Contrary to the caricature of him as an unsentimental and dour figure, Sanders has long sought to replicate the energy and idealism of reformed ward politics in the least likely places, from his start in Burlington to his rural and Rust Belt delegate strategy in the 2016 primary.

Sanders’s unflappable determination—and the aura it has created—is what makes his inevitable departure from the scene so hard to fathom on the left. Whatever the exact alchemy of his influences, it has helped him become an elder statesman in a party bereft of them. Sanders may not be the most poetic orator or exhibit much of a Rooseveltian flair for public philosophy. But a mere gadfly he is not. He has synthesized—perhaps consciously—various elements from America’s past egalitarians, allowing him, a once marginal figure of the Sixties New Left, to embody the “Old Left” in a way no other post-Reagan politician has.

It is an overlooked talent that won’t be easy to duplicate. But as the pro-freedom, pluralist left ponders who might carry the torch forward, its thinkers and cadres must remember it is vital to make the past relevant to the future—and remind Americans it is within their collective power to flourish anew. Sanders did not persevere by believing anything less.

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🇮🇷 "7 facts about Iranians in the U.S.," by Pew Research Center. As the conflict in Iran continues, millions of Iranians around the globe will try to take a break this weekend by celebrating Nowruz, the Persian New Year. This includes approximately 750,000 who live in the U.S., such as TLP's Michael Baharaeen and his family. Since the 1980s, Iranian immigrants and their children have become an integral part of America's population. Among their many contributions to the country is their cuisine, which centers on rice, meat kebabs, and flavors like saffron and rosewater. (Michael’s favorite dishes are the stews: ghormeh sabzi, gheymeh, and fesenjoon. The chicken or beef barg kebabs are also excellent.) Pew Research recently published an overview of the Iranian-American population that paints a clearer picture of who they are, where they live, and how they've made their home in America.

📚 “Understanding Iran: seven books that help explain the unrest,” from the Financial Times. Speaking of Iran, the FT put together an excellent list of books on the politics and history of the country’s Islamic regime since the revolution and fall of the Shah in 1979. We haven’t read all of these yet but strongly second their recommendation of Black Wave by Kim Ghattas.

Seamlessly weaving history, geopolitics, and intimate storytelling, Kim Ghattas tells the gripping and largely unexplored story of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a conflict born from the sparks of the 1979 Iranian revolution, fueled by American policy, and that, Ghattas argues, represents the true heart of the Middle East’s bloody turmoil.

With vivid story-telling, extensive historical research, and on-the-ground reporting, Ghattas dispels accepted truths about a region she calls home. Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, now mortal enemies, were once allies and twin pillars of US strategy in the Middle East. But all of that changed after 1979. Distorting and deploying religion in a competition that went well beyond geopolitics, each side proceeded to strategically feed intolerance, suppress cultural expression, and encourage sectarian violence from Egypt to Pakistan. This ongoing war for cultural supremacy has led to Iran’s fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, the assassination of countless intellectuals, the birth of groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and the rise of ISIS.

Ghattas introduces us to a riveting cast of characters whose lives were upended by decades of geopolitical drama: from the Pakistani television anchor who defied her country’s dictator, to the Egyptian novelist thrown in jail for indecent writings, to journalist Jamal Khashoggi who was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

🎶 Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves, by Chris Dalla Riva. If you love music and you love numbers—and who among us does not?—this is the book for you. Absolutely fascinating analysis that is bound to chime with many of your musical memories.

Popular music history collides with data analytics, charts, and numbers in this insightful and surprising look at the greatest hits and musicians, fads, forgotten artists, and much more. Data analyst and musician Chris Dalla Riva reframes everything you thought you knew about music. Did you know that hit songs in the late 1950s were regularly about gruesome death? That a US vice president wrote a number one hit? That while TikTok has spawned countless hits, it’s made artists more anonymous than ever before? That pop songs have shaped race relations in the United States? That the key change died around 2003? And that’s just the beginning. Coupling hard data with engaging anecdotes, Uncharted Territory is both a takedown and celebration of popular music and provides new ways to think about your favorite songs, genres, and artists from the last 6 decades using unexpected statistics and playful visualizations. This entertaining history is filled with the most popular musicians of all time from The Beatles and The Bee Gees to Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, and beyond. Whether you danced the twist or the dougie at your senior prom, you’re sure to never listen to music again in the same way.

We still miss the key change!

🏀 March Madness, Second Round. The opening two rounds of the annual college hoops supremacy tournament offer some of the most enjoyable sports viewing of the entire year. Wall-to-wall games, upsets galore, and passionate fans all over the country. We have no particular rooting interest, so we’ll go with the underdogs, including High Point, VCU, TCU, Utah State, and Saint Louis, in their big second-round matchups.

All games are on CBS and its various affiliates.

🎼 Vila, by Fabiano do Nascimento & Vittor Santos Orchestra. This record is just a lovely way to usher in springtime, full of gentle guitar melodies and soaring string arrangements:

Hidden away amidst the bustle of Rio de Janeiro’s Catete neighbourhood is a small alleyway behind a cast iron gate. At its end is Bairro Saavedra, the courtyard surrounded by Neo-colonial houses where Brazilian guitar virtuoso Fabiano do Nascimento spent much of his childhood. Built in 1928, this secluded neighbourhood with its wooden shutters, tiled floors and tranquil benches, provides the inspiration for the title of Do Nascimento’s new album Vila, a collaborative project with a sixteen piece orchestra led by trombonist and arranger Vittor Santos.

Recorded between Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles, Vila is grand, tender, warm, playful and nostalgic. On this stunningly ambitious work, the delicate compositions led by Nascimento's guitar, which sits central in the mix, are surrounded by Santos’ breathtaking orchestral arrangements which swirl in all directions: complimenting, questioning, responding; in constant conversation.

Enjoy this appropriately titled track, “Spring Theme.”

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Democratic elites breathed another sigh of relief after Tuesday’s Illinois primaries as the most radical progressive candidates for Congress all lost. The fact that many of the winners so far in Texas, North Carolina, and Illinois are still well to the left of the median voter, often coupled with a recent shift leftward, should give them pause. What works to win a Democratic primary may not be sellable to a national presidential electorate.

Centrist Democratic groups frequently stress that the road to the White House runs through the moderate, unaligned voter. Those voters, they say, tend to want to hear about traditional kitchen table concerns like jobs, inflation, and crime. The centrists advise focusing on these concerns and downplaying—or better yet, distinguishing their views from—the cultural issues where Democrats’ base voters are out of step.

These people make little secret of their desire that someone like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear will lead the 2028 ticket. Former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel is aggressively putting himself forward as another possible candidate in this lane. All seem to want to lean heavily to the center as they work to become this generation’s New Democrat, Clintonesque reformer.

That strategy is sound as far as it goes. The problem is that such a person needs to survive a Democratic primary where the majority of convention delegates will be chosen in safely Democratic states and congressional districts. To get to the center, then, the potential centrist savior first has to defeat or mollify the left.

That’s much easier said than done, and this year’s primaries so far show little proof that this is possible.

Texas is a case in point. State representative James Talarico beat progressive firebrand Representative Jasmine Crockett by winning most suburbs and running up a large margin among Hispanics. But old tweets and videos released since the primary show that Talarico embraced, and apparently still embraces, many of the progressive left’s most controversial shibboleths. Centrists worried that Kamala Harris’s support for transgender rights might have cost her the election should be terrified that Talarico’s statement that there are six genders will drive swing voters far away.

North Carolina provides another cautionary tale. Representative Valerie Foushee barely survived a primary challenge from progressive Nida Allam, winning by less than one point. The congresswoman had once received financial support from AIPAC and was part of an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel in 2024. But that group and its views on Israeli actions in Gaza and the Middle East have become toxic in Democratic politics. Foushee disclaimed AIPAC backing in this race and now loudly criticizes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Her switch in time may have saved her. It is nonetheless a telling indication that she survived only by moving leftward to be closer to the progressive position.

The battle for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District is a clear indication of where the Democratic center is. Yes, 26-year-old progressive internet journalist and influencer Kat Abughazaleh lost, but she handily won in Chicago and easily bested the most moderate serious candidate, state senator Laura Fine, to finish second. The winner, Evanston mayor Daniel Biss, is an open critic of AIPAC (although he labels himself a “progressive Zionist” in the J Street mold) and is nearly as leftist as the fiery Abughazaleh.

The party avoided nominating a future member of the Squad only to elevate someone likely to become Illinois’ Ro Khanna. That’s not what Third Way and other establishment Democrats who favor “combative centrism” want to see happen in 2028.

If anything, the primary results so far are fantastic news for California Governor Gavin Newsom. He has spent the last year triangulating Democratic progressives and centrists, showing the former he fights Trump at every opportunity while positioning himself for the latter as the sophisticated grown-up in the party room. That’s why he now either leads or is a close second to former vice president Harris in national presidential primary polls.

Centrists are also hamstrung by the fact that the most sizable moderate faction within the party electorate, black voters, tends to prefer serious black candidates even when they are more liberal than might be ideal. Harris, for example, was chosen by 59 percent of black voters in a recent Harvard/Harris poll, compared to only 15 percent for Newsom. If Harris does run, she would likely prevent a moderate white candidate from obtaining the early polling numbers they need to raise funds and remain viable into the early contests.

Candidates who want to track to the center also have to look at the fates of Democratic senators who have tried to favor the middle at the expense of the party base. Senators Kyrsten Sinema’s and Joe Manchin’s support of maintaining the filibuster rather than reforming it to pass signature party initiatives led to a collapse in support among Democrats. Neither person ran again, as it was painfully clear they had no path to re-election.

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman is experiencing the same thing today. He has largely voted the party line but has been vocally supportive of Trump’s actions against Iran and occasionally voted for Trump nominees. A recent poll found he’s popular with Pennsylvania independents, garnering a 48 percent job approval rating. But his ratings with Democrats have cratered: only 22 percent of Democrats approved of his performance.

Rational Democrats will see this and act accordingly. They will ensure they don’t infuriate the progressive base and hope that stylistic moderation and some carefully modulated distinctions will satisfy moderates. Anyone old enough to recall Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis’s attempt to play the same game in 1988 remembers how that turned out.

Even the rare victories of genuinely centrist Democrats like that of former Representative Melissa Bean in Illinois’ 8th Congressional District prove the point. Bean’s six-point win over progressive businessman Junaid Ahmed was enough to give her the nomination, but presidential contests award delegates proportionally by congressional district. A centrist who did as well as Bean did against Ahmed would garner only one more delegate than a progressive.

That could also easily be offset by progressive victories in seats based in more liberal and urban areas, areas that also tend to award more delegates than the ones where centrists are stronger. Indeed, Bean’s 8th district sent five delegates to the 2024 convention, while the 9th sent seven. A progressive like Abughazaleh would likely have won as many delegates for finishing second in the 9th as a centrist like Bean would win by winning the 8th.

The good news for Democrats so far is that the progressive surge evident in last year’s New York and Seattle mayoral races may have peaked. The bad news is that it often takes a “progressive lite” to hold the line. Whether that will be enough to beat a Trump Republican—particularly in more competitive states and districts—is anyone’s guess.

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Democrats once understood the importance of economic growth. That’s because growth, particularly productivity growth, is what drives rising living standards over time. Democrats sought to harness the benefits of growth for the working class, not to interfere with the economic engine of progress. They believed in the future and the possibilities for dramatic improvement in human welfare.

Democrats’ 21^st century project has, at its core, been dedicated to other goals. They now prize goals like fighting climate change, reducing inequality, pursuing procedural justice, and advocating for immigrants and identity groups above promoting growth. For example, the “Deciding to Win” report analyzed word frequency in Democratic Party platforms since 2012 and found a 32 percent decline in the appearance of the word “growth” compared to 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 rising living standards for the working class—once the Democrats’ prized 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 priorities like infrastructure projects, and, as Benjamin Friedman has argued, has positive “moral consequences” by orienting citizens toward generosity, tolerance, and collective advance. Slow growth has the opposite effects.

It is therefore completely unrealistic for Democrats to think they can accomplish their goals 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.)

With that in mind, it is instructive to examine the Democrats’ latest economic proposals and see where they fall short—and frequently massively so.

Start with “affordability”—the Democrats’ mantra of the moment. One does not have to be a cynic to see that affordability is not a program but a slogan, designed to take advantage of voters’ strong dissatisfaction with the Trump administration’s economic management. They feel the prices they pay for key commodities are no better aligned with their incomes than they were under Biden (perhaps worse)—and they weren’t happy about it then.

Hence the slogan “affordability.” If voters don’t feel things are affordable, well, we’ll promise to make things affordable. Of course, that’s not much of an economic program and, by definition, has nothing to do with growth. The result has been a grab bag of price caps and controls, subsidies and new regulations that may or may not do much to make everyday life more affordable but at least signal that Democrats want to do something about the problem. Long-term beneficial effects on the economy are neither claimed nor likely.

Nearly as popular as affordability—and frequently twinned with the affordability pitch—is a populist denunciation of the rich and big companies who are alleged to be responsible for high prices and nearly everything else that’s wrong with the economy. As James Talarico, Democratic candidate for the Senate in Texas put it:

What I would say is that the only minority destroying this country is the billionaires…We are all focused on the wrong 1 percent...Trans people aren’t taking away our healthcare. Undocumented people aren’t defunding our schools…It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians.

Countless Democratic politicians have made variations of this claim. But such claims have no logical connection to a coherent economic program and certainly have nothing to do with economic growth. What they do connect to is, well, taxing the rich. In particular, there is now a vogue for wealth taxes in Democratic circles including the notorious “billionaires tax” in California, a ballot initiative that would levy a 5 percent tax on net worth over $1 billion using estimates inflated by voting control rather than economic interest.

Going further, Democrats on the national level have twinned taxing the rich with free money and that old Republican favorite, tax cuts. The Bernie Sanders-Ro Khanna proposal would go California one better and makes the 5 percent wealth tax annual rather than a one-time levy, directing the revenue toward, among many other things, “a $3,000 direct payment to every man, woman and child in a household making $150,000 or less — $12,000 for a family of four”. Free money—now that’s an economic program!

The Van Hollen proposal taxes income rather than wealth and imposes escalating surtaxes on incomes over $1 million, starting at 5 percent and topping out at 12 percent on incomes over $5 million. In this proposal, the revenue raised will be used to eliminate federal income taxes for about half of working Americans ($46,000 individual income; $92,000 if married and filing jointly). Take that, Republicans. We may have no idea how to promote economic growth but we can beat you on tax cuts!

A more promising Democratic idea, with more serious economic content, is the idea of “abundance.” A Washington Post article described the abundance approach as “cutting back on the environmental reviews, strict zoning, labor rules and other obstacles that prevent government from efficiently building, fixing and fostering the things people want, from housing to energy.” An Axios article summarized the new approach as “respond[ing to governing failures in blue cities and states] by cutting excess regulations to build more housing, energy projects and more.”

There has been some movement, at least on the state front, in implementing this approach. But resistance has been fierce from key sectors of the Democratic Party. After all, those most directly connected to the regulations, procedures and bureaucracies that the abundance approach wants to attack, not to mention the countless NGOs that defend them, are by and large Democrats. They’ve got a lot of power within the party and are exerting it to the maximum to protect their self-interest.

A bigger problem is the ultimate goal of this approach. There is a distinct whiff of professional class coastal liberal preferences in the Democratic vision of abundance. That vision is heavy on infill urban housing, urban infrastructure, and building out clean energy to stave off climate catastrophe. Indeed, in the seminal text of the Democratic abundance movement, Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the book’s introduction waxes rhapsodic on their vision of a 2050 socially liberal ecotopia, where, to paraphrase President Trump (“everything’s computer!”), everything’s electric! Fossil fuels are but a distant memory; it’s all clean energy that is dirt cheap with towering skyscraper farms for food and drones that seamlessly deliver everything your heart desires.

This is catnip for the book’s target audience of liberal Democratic-leaning professionals but for the rest of the population—not so much. Democrats have not yet grappled with the fact that the goals of their abundance approach are linked to a concept of abundance that does not line up well with the preferences of actually-existing working-class voters. These voters, quite simply, want to be richer and have more stuff. Abundance Democrats, on the other hand, seem to have in mind a socially liberal ecotopia that is highly appealing to educated, upper middle class liberals but much less so to the working class. As Josh Barro has noted Democratic abundance advocates tend to support “policies that would make energy, and the aspirational suburban lifestyle, more expensive.” And that lifestyle, he points out, is what “abundance” means for most ordinary Americans. Arizona Democratic senator Ruben Gallego underscored the issue: “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck.”

That connects to an even more profound limitation of the Democrats’ abundance approach. As an economic program, it is not really a growth program but rather one that promises to deliver more of what Democratic liberals want. But what the country really needs—and what most voters want—is to become richer faster. And that can only be delivered through economic growth that outstrips population growth (rising GDP per capita).

Of course, promoting economic growth at this level is challenging. 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 AI 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 judgement on AI back in December. Democrats’ views on AI have not improved since then. The current favorite trope is to bash data centers linked to AI and call for regulatory measures ranging from a mortarium on new ones to insisting that data centers provide and pay for their own power. Other proposed regulations aim at AI companies directly around issues of online safety, especially for minors.

Leaving aside the likely policy efficacy (or lack thereof) of these measures they have nothing to do with maximizing productivity growth from AI and channeling the benefits as widely as possible. They are, instead, measures to take advantage of public fears about AI, which are considerable. Blue Rose Research recently 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 could be politically effective in the short-run, especially as we approach the 2026 election. But is is woefully inadequate as an approach to AI as a new GPT that could make the country and its workers richer. For that, you’d need a growth program and Democrats don’t have one.

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We’ve documented numerous times the collapse of voter trust in government and public officials, a problem that has only intensified as national politics turns ever more polarized and dysfunctional. New data from YouGov shows that in early 2026, there are only two agencies in the entire federal government that most Americans say are trustworthy—the National Park Service (NPS) at 57 percent and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at 52 percent. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) are viewed as trustworthy by more than four in ten Americans, and the rest of the agencies on the list receive paltry trustworthiness marks.

Parks and rockets are the only two government functions that Americans reliably trust, along with some minor love for weather reports and support for the elderly and disabled. That’s it.

This is a truly pathetic situation that goes well beyond partisans yelling, “It’s Biden’s fault!” or “It’s Trump’s fault!” Years of neglect and incompetent management by both parties have left Americans across the divides deeply distrustful or uncertain about the trustworthiness of the public sector in areas ranging from health and education to justice and national security.

Partisans, of course, have their favorites and least favorites: e.g., Democrats are much less trusting of ICE, DHS, CBP, the Pentagon, and the Justice Department than Republicans, while Republicans are much less trusting of USAID, the EPA, and the CDC than Democrats.

But beyond the expected dislike of certain government functions that don’t fit each party’s respective ideological biases, it’s much more concerning that Americans overall don’t seem to trust much of anything carried out or released by the government, even basic information. Other data highlighted by YouGov shows that only 23 percent of U.S. adults believe that all or most of the statistics reported by the government are “reliable and accurate”—down from 36 percent just a year ago. Similarly, if you look at the chart below, you’ll see at most only around one third of adults deem a range of specific government statistics from population counts to crimes to the number of COVID-19 deaths to be trustworthy information.

Although there are expected partisan divides on many of these measures given who is in power at any given point, the much bigger question is whether government in the public interest is even possible anymore—at least in terms of whether Americans themselves will ever again view its work as reliable, trustworthy, and valuable independent of who is in charge.

My guess is that most Americans respect and value the hard work and dedication of those civil servants who help keep our country safe, clean, healthy, secure, prosperous, well-educated, and orderly. Sure, there are constant hits on layabout bureaucrats and “government fraud,” with many of these complaints being legitimate grievances, but the work of the public sector and government agencies is often grueling, underpaid, and subject to constant whiplash by wealthy members of Congress and presidents trying to score political points.

Federal workers do the business of the American people mostly well and mostly without complaint. We need genuine leadership from the legislative and executive branches to back up these workers and ensure that the activities and services of the federal government are unmatched in their excellence. The government should never settle for mediocre services or throw up its hands and say the system is what it is and can’t be fixed. The government should aim higher to achieve the levels of public backing and support that many private sector companies receive from Americans based on the quality of the services and products they supply—and their responsiveness to consumers. This will require far more transparency from government agencies plus constant internal reviews and upgrading of techniques and methods used to carry out the people’s work.

Likewise, Congress should pay its bills and stop using shutdowns of agencies and threatened defaults to make meaningless ideological points. We’ve had two federal government shutdowns in a mere six months, basically for no reason and no discernible outcome other than partisan spite. Programs and agency budgets that are superfluous or out-of-date should be eliminated through the legislative process, and money saved should be used to reduce deficits or shifted into other proven projects that people need to live a good life or get ahead.

Finally, vital information released to the public on the state of the economy or our overseas commitments or public health or national emergencies must always be viewed as truly neutral facts and advice, entirely free of partisan interference by outside political actors trying to defend their positions and from internal managers trying to achieve some ideological goal. If public officials can’t or won’t adhere to these standards, they should be promptly removed and replaced by others who will.

America is a fantastic nation that faces an array of manageable economic and security challenges that can be overcome if we put our minds to the task more cooperatively and end the ridiculous partisan degrading of the public sector. We need a federal government and workforce better managed and operated and ready to work in partnership with private businesses and civil society to keep improving the lives of all Americans and maintain a robust national economy.

If politicians in the two parties would rather preen on social media than work in concert to help build a high-functioning governmental system, then they should retire from public life or expect to be voted out by citizens and replaced with officials genuinely interested in making government work better for the people.

When it comes to the federal government, trust is a one-way street. The government must earn the trust of Americans, not expect them to go along with shoddy services, poorly designed programs, and surly or entitled attitudes from politicians.

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When Kamala Harris announced that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz would be her running mate in 2024, my first reaction was curious optimism for the Democratic ticket. I hadn’t followed Walz’s career especially closely, but I was familiar enough with him to know that he hailed from a rural area of a Midwestern state and that he had been a Blue Dog Democrat during his time in the House of Representatives. This seemed like exactly the kind of candidate the party could use to engage with the more conservative-leaning rural and working-class voters whom they had lost to Trump over the previous eight years.

But then I began to see the reactions from my peers, many of whom are highly educated, urban-dwelling, professional class voters whose cultural politics are often quite left-wing—more or less the median Democratic base voter. Most were elated by the Walz pick, and I was suddenly less sure about my initial reaction.

When I dug into Walz’s background some more, and I found that his political profile had changed pretty dramatically since his days as a Blue Dog. In his two campaigns for governor in Minnesota, he had adopted more progressive positions on a number of issues. His base of support had also shifted away from red-leaning rural counties, where he had lost immense ground, to blue-dominated and highly educated metro areas—especially the Twin Cities. Even so, Democrats believed he could open doors for them in the former. As one pollster said at the time:

Selecting Walz is a signal that [Harris] and the campaign think she can be competitive enough in rural, small-town areas, and her path to 270 still does cut through the Rust Belt. It also sends an important message about Harris, how she wants to round out her ticket…She picked a white guy governor from the Midwest who can go into small towns in the Midwest and help her with those voters.

Many Democrats seemed jazzed that they had found a candidate who looked like the voters whose support they needed to win but who also didn’t seem to hold any of the culturally conservative views shared by those voters. And ideally, he had the credibility to convince some of them to leave their “outdated” views behind and to nudge them toward Harris’s forward-thinking agenda. It was a win-win-win.

As I observed at the time, however, the argument in favor of Walz’s appeal was

predicated on little more than identity politics: the idea that white working-class voters will be reassured by having someone who “looks like them” on the Democratic ticket and thus be likelier to vote for Harris…Offering Walz to white working-class voters as a means of “representation” may actually come off as quite patronizing. Rather, many voters are looking for someone who shares their values or supports their favored policies… It also strikes at the heart of an assumption that the party continues to wrongly make in the year 2024: that most voters need to identify with a candidate’s race or gender to consider voting for them.

Ultimately, there was not only no evidence that Walz had helped Harris improve her standing in these places or with these voters, but in fact she lost further ground. In fairness to Walz, running mates rarely have a major impact on presidential tickets, and it was probably unreasonable to expect him to turn Harris’s fortunes around with voters who had an issue with the party brand, not just one or two specific politicians.

Still, he clearly did not add much to the ticket, either, and there was evidence even at the time that rural voters, specifically, were not keen on him. There may be a useful lesson in this for Democrats: in today’s highly polarized America, where cultural issues increasingly inform political divisions, candidates who appeal to culturally liberal college grads are probably less likely to find support among culturally conservative working-class voters.1

It’s not evident, though, that Democrats have accepted this. They certainly seem to comprehend the importance of improving their standing with working-class voters and in red-leaning places. Yet, some of their candidates running in key midterm states have quite Walz-ian profiles.

Two notable examples are James Talarico and Graham Platner, who are running for the U.S. Senate in states that will help determine which party controls the chamber in 2027 (Texas and Maine, respectively). Both men appear to embody a “new way” for Democrats hoping to win difficult races.

Talarico has garnered national attention for his well-spoken manner as well as his eager willingness to engage with conservatives and talk about his faith—rarities among Democratic politicians today. Polling ahead of Democratic primary election showed these attributes had helped convince likely voters that he was more moderate than his opponent, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. This, coupled with the Christian roots of his campaign messaging, has excited Democrats who hope Talarico can make inroads with conservatives in highly religious Texas.

Platner, meanwhile, looks on the surface like he was designed in a lab to win over working-class voters. He is a burly, blue-collar figure from a small Maine town whose resume includes military service and a career as an oyster farmer. He has touted his support for gun rights and, like Talarico, leaned into economically populist messaging. Early primary polls have shown him trouncing increasingly unpopular incumbent Governor Janet Mills. Democrats seem to hope Platner will break the archetype of affluent, lawyerly candidates the party is known for fielding.

Talarico and Platner have clearly captured the imaginations of liberal Democrats around the country who are desperate to win back the Senate and check Trump’s power. According to 2025 fourth-quarter fundraising estimates, both of them finished in the top five among all Senate candidates, and much of their support has come from small-dollar donors. All this has surely convinced some Democrats that they are close to cracking the code to winning conservative-leaning rural and working-class voters.

There are a couple of problems with this thinking, however. The first is that both candidates engage in what my colleague Ruy Teixeira has called “cultural denialism”: a tendency that some Democrats have of dismissing cultural issues—and thus voters’ concerns about them—for not being “real issues.” This usually manifests as deflecting from conversations about thorny topics like race or gender toward others like economic populism, where candidates feel they are on more sound footing.

Talarico, for example, has attempted to side-step past controversial statements regarding transgender issues by suggesting they don’t really matter and voters aren’t concerned with them. Speaking on a panel at the SXSW conference this week, he asked, “What do the American people care more about? Culture wars or actual wars? Pronouns or prices?” Elsewhere, he has stated, “Trans people aren’t taking away our health care. Muslims aren’t defunding our schools. Immigrants aren’t cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians. The culture wars are a smokescreen.”

Many Democrats likely agree with him, but others may find these deflections off-putting. As Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnuru put it, “A lot of voters…find the issues he dismisses important in themselves and signs of whether a candidate shares their worldview.”2 All this, plus a growing digital trail of other, highly left-wing statements from his past, isn’t likely to do Talarico any favors in a state that voted for Trump by 14 points, where conservatives are a large plurality of the electorate, and where voters overall see themselves more ideologically aligned with the two prospective Republican candidates than with Talarico.

Platner has taken a similar approach to dismissing cultural issues, saying, “Every single breath we take discussing culture war stuff is a breath we are not talking about universal healthcare. It’s a breath we are not talking about going after wealth where it’s been hoarded. Not talking about breaking up corporate monopoly power. That’s what we need to be focusing on.” Though he may not want to talk about these issues, Maine voters have thoughts on them. Statements like this risk signaling that he doesn’t care about those thoughts, and few voters appreciate hearing that their concerns don’t matter to politicians.

The second issue facing both men relates to their coalitions. Let’s start with Talarico. To win Texas, which no Democrat has done at the statewide level since 1994, he would need to at minimum replicate Beto O’Rourke’s coalition from 2018. That cycle, when O’Rourke came the closest of any recent Democrat—falling short by just 2.5 points—Republicans and Republican-leaning independents accounted for nearly half (49 percent) of the Texas electorate, according to the AP VoteCast survey. A fascinating analysis of post-COVID migration trends from the New York Times found that newcomers have made Texas even more Republican in recent years.

Moreover, generic ballot projections from Nate Silver show that under the current national environment, which leans five points toward Democrats, the partisan baseline in Texas would be +5.6 points Republican. This means Talarico would need a national shift of another five points just to be on an even playing field.

As regular TLP contributor Justin Vassallo has pointed out, there were some promising signs for Talarico in the primary election results earlier this month, including his strong performance with affluent liberals and ability to turn out Hispanics at a high rate. However, he still has a steep hill to climb, and early general election polling shows him trailing O’Rourke’s 2018 margins with key groups, including Hispanics and non-college voters—both of whom are typically more conservative than the median Democrat. It remains to be seen how these groups will trend as they get to know him better in the campaign, but there is a real possibility that they struggle to connect with his cultural attitudes.

In Maine, Platner may be facing similar coalitional issues. Nicholas Jacobs, a longtime rural politics scholar who himself lives in rural Maine, has documented how Platner’s biography isn’t quite as “everyman” as it may seem:

But his story cuts both ways. He’s the grandson of a celebrated Manhattan architect, his father is a lawyer and his mother is a restaurateur whose business caters to summer tourists. He attended the elite Hotchkiss School. It’s a life of silver spoons and salt air.

Jacobs added:

That tension mirrors the Democratic Party itself, led and funded by urban professionals who are increasingly aware of just how far they strayed from their working-class roots. If Platner is to prevail, he must assemble a coalition that expands beyond what the party has become—concentrated in urban and coastal enclaves, financed nationally and culturally distant from much of rural America. Yet Platner’s immediate hurdle isn’t rural Maine at all. It is the Democratic primary, and those voters do not live where his campaign imagery is set.

Maine remains far more Democratic-friendly than Texas—Harris carried it by seven points, so Platner would not be starting a general election as far behind as Talarico in Texas. And some analysts believe that longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins could be vulnerable in this midterm environment. Still, the state has a long history of electing moderate, independent-minded senators, and Collins would have plenty of material to work with against Platner to paint him as anything but. This makes it more imperative that he break through with the types of voters Democrats have lost ground with over the past decade.

The real issue facing Democrats is this: they are still struggling to understand how to connect with conservative-leaning Americans largely because many of them don’t know any. They therefore often end up rallying behind candidates whose biographies, presentations, and views they like, and then they convince themselves that these candidates will appeal to conservatives, too.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that candidates running in red places who lean left on culture, such as Talarico, can win, especially in a midterm cycle when the incumbent president has grown increasingly unpopular. Some right-leaning voters may even be willing to overlook these Democrats’ more liberal cultural views for an economic message that resonates with them. But that disconnect does make these candidates’ jobs harder. Texas and even Maine are not as blue as Virginia, New Jersey, or New York City, where Democrats running for governor and mayor last November more or less successfully sidestepped hot-button culture war fights in favor of “affordability” messaging. This approach is less likely to work in the states that Democrats need to win for a Senate majority like Texas, Ohio, Florida, Iowa, or even Maine.

An alternate path for the party is to try identifying candidates who have at least some genuinely right-leaning cultural attitudes that are more in line with the voters whose support they need. As Matt Yglesias wrote in the New York Times yesterday:

Iowa was won twice in a row by the Black guy with a professorial demeanor from Chicago and then three times sequentially by the silver-spoon real estate tycoon from New York. Neither fit the part perfectly, but both catered to the views of voters who like the existing social safety net but worry Democrats will sacrifice their well-being to serve narrow special interests or small minorities.

Yglesias noted how Trump successfully pushed Republicans away from many of their unpopular positions on issues like Medicare, Social Security, the Iraq war, abortion, and gay marriage. Meanwhile, eight years earlier, Obama

questioned whether his daughters deserved a boost in college admissions and affirmed that marriage should be between a man and a woman; as president, he took on teachers’ unions over questions of pay and seniority and espoused an all-of-the-above energy strategy that environmental groups didn’t love.

In a recent interview with TLP, the Searchlight Institute’s Adam Jentleson recalled how not long ago the Democrats controlled Senate seats in deeply red states like Arkansas, Louisiana, and West Virginia, all of which helped deliver them a super-majority during Obama’s first term. He added that to earn power like that again, Democrats would need to expand their tent to include people who hold more culturally conservative positions, noting that the party has fielded some of these candidates in House races this cycle.

Indeed, so long as Democrats are uncomfortable allowing these kinds of candidates into their tent, they will struggle to consistently compete in the Senate and Electoral College—institutions that have longstanding biases toward states with smaller and more rural populations—among other offices. The path forward will require an embrace of ideological pluralism in their ranks and a heterodox coalition, including identifying and welcoming truly centrist candidates who can compete in places that lean to the right of the nation. This may not thrill the party’s base, but it may be just what Democrats need.

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Until the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran took center stage, Trump’s unyielding faith in tariffs had become his party’s chief liability heading into the midterms. In some ways this was unsurprising, given their broad scope and negative impact on grocery prices and other household goods. Yet the discontent also reveals the growing chasm between the allure of economic nationalism in the abstract and support for its practice à la Trump. Trump, it must be remembered, owed his rise to the liberal establishment’s conflicted response to the twin forces of deindustrialization and globalization. On top of his pledge to radically curb immigration, he successfully campaigned on overturning the global trade order in 2016 and did so even more emphatically in 2024.

Many economists warned that his agenda threatened to reignite inflation, scramble supply chains, and raise input costs for domestic manufacturers. But it was to no avail. Despite the Biden administration’s attempts to piece together its own “post-neoliberal” trade and industrial strategy, millions of Americans—not least younger men who had no memory of the debates over NAFTA and China joining the WTO—appeared willing to try Trump’s brasher approach, regardless of the turbulence and complications likely to transpire.

Trends since Trump’s return to office suggest the appetite for such experimentation has waned precipitously. Sixty percent of Americans “strongly or somewhat approve” of the Supreme Court’s ruling against Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, according to a recent YouGov survey; a new survey commissioned by The Guardian shows seven in ten Americans believe they are paying higher prices because of tariffs. Other polls similarly indicate around two thirds of Americans oppose Trump’s handling of trade policy, with strong pluralities reporting they don’t think it will revive manufacturing at all. Trump’s base has become restive, too. In recent weeks, Trump has received some of his lowest approval ratings among working-class whites since he first galvanized their swing to the GOP.

Trump remains defiant, boasting his administration will find ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s decision and impose levies as it sees fit. But as the sharp decline in consumer confidence underscores, his main economic policy besides corporate tax cuts has exasperated many of the same voters who gave him the benefit of the doubt. Combined with the calamitous energy and fertilizer price shocks inflicted by the new war, angst over Trump’s tariff gamble is very likely to fuel Democratic gains in November.

It may also have a more lasting effect on US politics and the direction of the Democratic Party as it attempts to shift the political terrain. The deepening unpopularity of tariffs, the main weapon of protectionism, amid a spiraling war of choice suggests industrial policy may no longer be so salient—that after years of shaping party competition, support for economic nationalism is actually fading among American voters. While it is perhaps too soon to say definitively, the votes that propelled Trump to victory in key industrial states seem in hindsight to have been the “last wave” of a losing, fifty-year battle against a fundamental, irreversible reorganization of the American economy. If that is the case, policymakers hoping to formulate a social democratic alternative to Trump’s erratic and increasingly empty vision of industrial renewal must think anew about how to build economic agency in an age where all of life’s anchors are under threat.

The notion that sympathy for economic nationalism is plummeting may seem counterintuitive at first. Trump didn’t conjure an “America First” movement out of the blue but tapped into something that had been brewing for many years (and had largely sprung from the Old Left at that). Since the early 1970s, in fact, each decade has seen a period of intense activity, usually led by labor unions, in favor of import quotas, targeted tariffs, tougher labor and environmental standards in trade agreements, buy-American requirements in federal contracts, and complementary ideas to preserve domestic manufacturing jobs and induce fixed reinvestment. Although many of the subsectors that made these demands have virtually disappeared from domestic production, the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, and Teamsters continue to support some combination of protectionist measures and exert political influence in this policy area.

Generational change had not dampened the backlash to globalization either, as politicians from both parties had blithely expected at the turn of the century. Instead, the severe contraction in manufacturing jobs and union membership, which the China shock and Great Recession hastened, intensified the hunger among blue-collar households for the “old” Fordist system and the relative stability it provided. Towns and small cities convulsed by the shattering of their economic anchor intuited correctly that advanced tech and tourist-driven hospitality jobs wouldn’t miraculously follow. Their link to the national economy was broken, and they yearned for a political champion who would read the riot act to multinationals, the shareholder class, and “trade cheats.”

In the event, Trump has not by any stretch of the imagination jawboned his way to better prospects for manufacturing workers. His actions have narrowly aided steel producers in some cases, and he insists he’s secured several big “concessions” from trade partners and foreign corporations pledging to build in America. But the latest estimates suggest 100,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since Trump returned to office. His tariffs, at once haphazard and sweeping, pushed up input, wholesale, and retail costs, much as experts warned, while his vindictive rollback of Biden-era incentives for renewable energy has stalled or eliminated projects that would have advanced the same workforce objectives “heterodox” conservatives profess to care about.

Still, dashed expectations aside, concerns about America’s industrial base have been eclipsed by the intractable crisis of affordability. While increasing the range of good-paying jobs matters to blue-collar voters, their impatience with tariffs—which can be experienced as both an explicit tax and as an opaque passed-on cost—shows they don’t think Trump’s economic nationalism is working out. They’re right. The anemic job creation of the last fourteen months makes clear that the vote of confidence many Rust Belt communities placed in Trump has not been rewarded through policies that restore their economic foundations. They have contended with more of the same, except with even fewer opportunities to stretch their paychecks and provide their dependents any semblance of middle-class comfort.

All these setbacks, combined with nationwide dread over the labor market effects of AI, have drained Trump’s strategy of support. Stagflationary conditions weren’t inevitable, however. Although Trump critics hardly expected otherwise, Trump could have considered a different combination of policies, in which carefully targeted tariffs played a more auxiliary role, to stoke manufacturing jobs. A new effort led by his US Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, to deter trade in goods made with forced labor hints at what a more disciplined, genuinely pro-worker strategy might look like. Still, as on other fronts, the raw stubbornness that has thus far defined Trump’s course of action and seemingly undergirded his political fortunes may ultimately be his Achilles’ heel. A decade on from Trump’s first campaign, industrial decline appears insurmountable because Trump has shown no interest in addressing the larger problems perpetuating it: financialization, monopoly power, the boardroom obsession with quarterly profits, the multi-decade campaign to sabotage collective bargaining, and the worsening skills gap.

Trump’s obstacles, however, are not merely self-inflicted—they reflect the structural constraints of the current party system as well. The same dynamic that allowed Trump to exploit rage over industrial decline—regional polarization—has also impeded his ability to impose a “collective” national endeavor, just as Joe Biden and his progressive allies could not rally the electorate to a scaled-down Green New Deal. Indeed, polarization has fed mistrust of government (or, more precisely, an ultra-partisan bureaucracy and regulatory capture) even as many voters across the political spectrum desire a level of state intervention in the economy not seen since World War Two. As a result, neither party has been able to convince a decisive majority that their respective plans to “rebalance” the economy genuinely put the country first.

This highlights one of the primary contradictions of our extended populist moment. Economic nationalism is typically understood as the key ingredient to achieving a political realignment due to its presumed resonance with left-behind counties and voters without a college degree. It elicits powerful emotions by channeling popular grievances and aspirations for a society in which Main Street’s interests override Wall Street’s. In theory, that could unite working-class voters across the country, from coastal service hubs to rural factory towns.

Yet when acted upon, it arouses fresh concerns about who stands to benefit most and whether it will devolve into a new form of crony capitalism. The average voter might agree in principle on the need for an industrial base that can withstand global shocks and the developmental benefits of value-added manufacturing and world-class infrastructure. Support wavers, however, once the main types of policies thought to achieve these objectives are introduced.

On the left and right, voters are suspicious of special tax credits, trade restrictions, and other de facto subsidies as well as “mandates” that spur sectoral change, especially if they reflect a strong ideological orientation. This skepticism, however, doesn’t solely reflect negative partisanship—that is, a fear that industrial policy in the hands of the other party will only reward its allies and powerful lobbies. Disagreements over how to kickstart a new era of development are also a constant source of intraparty conflict. Within progressive circles, there are endless debates over what mix of new regulations and regulatory reforms might simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions, create high-wage jobs, build housing, relieve consumers of escalating energy costs, and help poorer countries attain sustainable development. Trumpian conservatives, meanwhile, oscillate wildly between statism and libertarianism—a function, undoubtedly, of their inconsistent view of when and how markets should serve the “national interest.” Put another way, even Americans of the same tribe can’t reach any consensus over what a proper industrial strategy should entail.

The very process of globalization has further attenuated faith in collective action and common solutions. Americans don’t like to think of themselves as ungenerous and hyper-individualistic, but as their economic agency feels increasingly tenuous and superficial, and upward mobility becomes harder to attain, many have grown doubtful of sacrifices in the name of the whole. They are wary of “top-down” tools that in any way alter consumer behavior and threaten their purchasing power. And because of this mistrust, it is very difficult to make the case for either a “traditional” program of industrial renewal or a rapid energy transition.

This would very likely be true even if someone less divisive and impulsive than Trump occupied the Oval Office. After a quarter century of falling life chances, ordinary workers understandably resent the idea they might have to make do with less—whether through taxes, lifestyle changes, or a devalued dollar—to serve hard-to-measure ends like reclaiming economic sovereignty or preventing ecological tipping points. Overburdened by debt and inequality, many are simply disinclined to make new sacrifices for uncertain gains.

The cynicism is so ingrained that America’s warring political tribes can barely reach an accord over existing priorities like the federal budget. Each side accuses the other of picking winners and losers—as well as misguided prescriptions and misdeeds that have led to stagnation. Red state legislators caterwaul about blue states and their advocacy networks using regulation to strangle “free enterprise” and industrial expansion; blue state leaders increasingly inveigh against the red state “socialism” that is made possible through higher blue state tax contributions to federal programs, which red state residents disproportionately benefit from. Under the circumstances, it is hard to conceive of a New Deal-scale vision of national redevelopment earning broad acclaim, despite many Americans longing for a nation on the march once more.

The lack of good-faith dialogue over what would put the country on a sounder economic footing bodes poorly for our future. But there is also the troubling question of what can be created that is “competitive” in a globalized economy that has also become more multipolar and less dependent on the American market. The Biden administration hoped it could nurture a comprehensive EV sector and other “clean tech” industries through strategic protectionism. Yet between Trump’s disdain for climate policy and China’s stunning technological advances and exploding market share, the window for America to produce EVs, solar panels, and related goods that American consumers will buy and that other countries want is quickly passing.

Unfortunately, as the disruptions from AI begin to accelerate, neither political party has an answer for what comes next. Even if there were a sudden transformation in US governance that emulated China’s state capacity and fueled a renaissance in American innovation, it is highly improbable the changes would support the mass production jobs that accompanied the age of America’s industrial primacy. Almost invariably, the new sectors would be highly specialized and thus unsuited to resolving the socioeconomic difficulties faced by millions of Americans.

Do all these constraints mean industrial policy is destined to fail? Is it a perpetual boondoggle, rather than the antidote to decades of rising inequality and disinvestment? Chastened by the failure of “Bidenomics” to lift Americans’ hopes, Democrats have refrained from unveiling new plans to tackle America’s developmental challenges, preferring instead to lambaste Trump’s tariff folly. It would be better, though, if Democrats tried a new tack, one that cleverly dispenses with both Fordist nostalgia and the unpersuasive “Green New Deal” framing while still articulating a vision of economic empowerment that finally beats “nationalist populism.”

Indeed, as the ominous fourth decade of the 21st century nears, perhaps the best “industrial policy” is downstream from a people-first agenda. Democrats don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But it is imperative that they finally raise the federal minimum wage, aggressively eliminate monopoly choke points, build abundant family housing, invest in vocational training, provide targeted wage subsidies and regulatory relief for new small businesses, use progressive taxation to fix our aging infrastructure, and actually secure our energy independence. While these actions won’t solve all of America’s economic imbalances and strategic vulnerabilities, they will go some way to restoring faith in the country’s potential.

In the face of multiplying crises, Democrats must do everything possible to get their chance—and not fumble it again. The cost of failure has already been too high.

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🇺🇸 “Freedom Plane National Tour: Documents That Forged a Nation.” If you have never seen America’s seminal founding documents, now may be your best chance. In celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday, the National Archives is bringing nine of these documents to eight cities across the country. They will travel aboard a Boeing 737 in a commemorative “Freedom Plane.” The documents include:

• William Stone’s engraving of the Declaration of Independence (1823)

• Articles of Association (1774)

• George Washington’s, Alexander Hamilton’s, and Aaron Burr’s Oaths of Allegiance (1778)

• The Treaty of Paris (1783)

• David Brearley’s Secret Printing of the Constitution (1787)

• State delegate votes approving the Constitution (1787)

• The Senate markup of the Bill of Rights (1789)

The tour began last week, making its first stop in Kansas City, Missouri, at the National World War I Museum. It will then proceed to seven more cities: Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Miami, Dearborn, and Seattle.

📚 The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, by Jason Burke. You think we’ve got left-wing crazy today? Burke’s book takes us back to an era when many left-wing revolutionaries thought it was completely right on to hijack airplanes as part of the “international anti-imperialist struggle.” And eerily a great deal of it was bound up with supporting the Palestinian cause, which has once again become a cause célèbre for today’s left. Let’s hope they don’t emulate their predecessors from the 1970s.

In the 1970s, an unprecedented wave of international terrorism broke out around the world. More ambitious, networked and far-reaching than ever before, new armed groups terrorized the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage missions, leaving governments scrambling to cope. Their motives were as diverse as their methods. Some sought to champion Palestinian liberation, others to topple Western imperialism or battle capitalism; a few simply sought adventure or power. Among them were the unflappable young Leila Khaled, sporting jewelry made from AK-47 ammunition; the maverick Carlos the Jackal with his taste for cigars, fine dining, and designer suits; and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Japanese Red Army. Their attacks forged a lawless new battlefield thirty thousand feet in the air, evading the reach of security agencies, policymakers, and spies alike. Their operations rallied activist and networks in places where few had suspected their existence, leaving a trail of chaos from Bangkok to Paris to London to Washington, D.C.

Veteran foreign correspondent Jason Burke provides a thrilling account of this era of spectacular violence. Drawing on decades of research, recently declassified government files, still secret documents, and original interviews with hijackers, double agents, and victims still grieving their loved ones, The Revolutionists provides an unprecedented account of a period which definitively shaped today’s world and probes the complex relationship between violence, terrorism, and revolution. From the deserts of Jordan and the Munich Olympics to the Iranian Embassy Siege in London and the Beirut bombings of the early 1980s, Burke invites us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of these attacks, as well as the government agents and top officials who sought to foil them. Charting, too, such shattering events as the Iranian Revolution and the Lebanese civil war, he shows how, by the early 1980s, a campaign for radical change led by secular, leftist revolutionaries had given way to a far more lethal movement of conservative religious fanaticism that would dominate the decades to come.

It’s an incredible tale and we’re still living with the fallout today.

Bonus: Watch Olivier Assayas’ epic five-and-a-half hour movie, Carlos, for a stunning dramatization of that era and the scarcely-believable life of Carlos the Jackal.

🏉 Ireland vs. Scotland, Six Nations Rugby, Aviva Stadium, Dublin. We have three Irish picks for you in honor of the St. Patrick’s Day festivities, starting off with a massive rugby match on the final day of the 2026 Six Nations tournament. France, Scotland, and Ireland all have chances to win on “Super Saturday,” with this matchup between the Irish and Scots happening just prior to the France and England match later that evening.

All matches will stream on Peacock in the USA.

🇮🇪 Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray. Next up is one of our favorite recent-ish Irish novels, Skippy Dies. Murray’s charming and hilarious coming-of-age book takes place over four months at a Dublin school. As the NYT review describes:

The extravagantly entertaining Skippy Dies chronicles a single catastrophic autumn at Seabrook from a good 20 different perspectives: students, teachers, administrators, priests, girlfriends, doughnut shop managers. At the center of it all is Daniel Juster, known as Skippy, whose death—on the floor of Ed’s Doughnut House, just after writing his beloved’s name on the floor in raspberry filling—opens the novel. Skippy Dies then flashes back to the months preceding, months in which the gloomy, doomed 14-year-old falls in love, wins a fight, keeps a secret and attracts the attention of members of the faculty who do not have his best interests at heart.

Along the way we get to know Skippy’s friends and tormentors, each drawn with great affection: Ruprecht, Skippy’s doughy genius roommate, who pursues experiments in string theory despite spending much of his time head-down in the toilet; Dennis, “an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic”; Carl, Skippy’s romantic rival and a budding psychopath; Lori, the possibly unworthy object of Skippy’s affections, who’s obsessed with a ­Britney-like pop tart and who keeps her diet pills hidden in her teddy bear’s tummy.

And Mario, sweet, stupid Mario, son of an Italian diplomat, whose obsession with sex would become tiresome if it weren’t a source of so many richly comic dorm-room conversations:

“He flips open his wallet. ‘Read it and weep, boys. It is my lucky condom, which never fails.’

“A silence, as Mario smugly returns his wallet to his pocket, and then, clearing his throat, Dennis says, ‘Uh, Mario, in what way exactly is there anything lucky about that condom?’

“ ‘Never fails,’ Mario repeats, a little defensively.

“ ‘But — ’ Dennis pinches his fingers to his nose, brow furrowed ‘ — I mean, if it was really a lucky condom, wouldn’t you have used it by now?’

“ ‘How long have you had it in there, Mario?’ Geoff says.

“ ‘Three years,’ Mario says.”

🎧 Loveless, by My Bloody Valentine. Finally, kick your weekend celebrations into high gear with a spin of the greatest Irish indie record of all time. My Bloody Valentine formed in Dublin in 1983, and their second studio record, Loveless, released in 1991, basically defined the entire “shoegaze” era. The album offers MBV’s signature blend of guitar dissonance, pounding rhythm, and melodic vocals exemplified in the opening track, “Only Shallow.”

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• Why do the progressive groups shaping Democratic policy seem to only represent the views and priorities of their own college-educated staffers? How do they keep getting away with it?

• Why did prioritizing climate change become shorthand for “liberal elite”—and should Democrats stop talking about it entirely if they actually want to fix it?

• Is there any potential 2028 candidate who would be willing to embrace “80-20” issues and break away from activist orthodoxy the way Donald Trump broke away from his party in 2015?

In addition to his role at Searchlight, Jentleson is the author of an excellent book on the complicated history of the U.S. Senate and the filibuster, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.

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A transcript of this podcast is available at the top of the post page on our website.

It’s easy to underestimate how much the Democratic Party has changed in this century. In particular, you can miss how white liberals have changed from being a voice in the choir to the choir director. Cast your mind back to the beginning of the century. At that point, a mere 28 percent of Democrats described themselves as liberal and two thirds were either moderate or conservative.

Fast forward to today and the liberal share has more than doubled to 59 percent while the moderate/conservative share has declined drastically. It’s the liberals’ party now. And especially, it’s the white liberals’ party now.

White Democrats even at the beginning of this century were already disproportionately liberal—that is, more likely to be liberal than nonwhite Democrats. That disproportion has grown sharply over the course of the century. A Gallup analysis from 2023 found that over several decades, the liberal share among white Democrats had gone up 37 points, compared to 17 points among black Democrats and 18 points among Hispanic Democrats.

These trends have combined to radically change the ideological composition of white Democrats. In 2000, white Democrats who were moderate or conservative outnumbered white liberal Democrats by about 2:1. Today that relationship has been reversed. White liberal Democrats now outnumber moderate/conservative white Democrats by about 2:1.

That matters. From being merely a voice, albeit an important one, in the Democratic choir, white liberals are now directing the choir and imposing their culture, preferences, and priorities on the party as a whole. For example, in the recent Third Way survey of likely 2028 Democratic primary voters, white liberals (43 percent) outnumber all nonwhites (35 percent) who anyway are ideologically split in a way white Democrats tend not to be (66 percent of that group say they’re liberal). Indeed, black voters in the survey are split down the middle between liberal and moderate/conservative, with the latter group actually being slightly larger.

That gives white liberals enormous leverage within the party. Any Democrat seeking to build their support in the party has to reckon with this enormous bloc of Democrats, whose influence is enhanced beyond their considerable numbers by their dominance of the party’s infrastructure, allied NGOs and advocacy groups, and left-leaning media, foundations, and academia. Not to mention the money—ambitious Democrats need money and white liberals are a reliable source of cash for politicians who press the right buttons.

This clarifies why it is so difficult for Democratic politicians to carve out a truly moderate path. Back in the day, such a politician could balance the demands of white liberals with the considerable and countervailing tug from white moderates and conservatives. No more. White liberals are in the driver’s seat and Democratic politicians have calibrated their appeals accordingly.

The pull in that direction is enhanced by the fact that white conservative Democrats have practically disappeared and even white moderate Democrats are not particularly moderate by the standards of the country as a whole. In the Third Way survey, moderate white Democrats, while not as enthusiastically as white liberals, still give strong support to Medicare for All that would eliminate private health insurance, a Green New Deal that would rapidly eliminate fossil fuels, canceling student debt and free college, and an annual nationwide wealth tax on billionaires. Not so moderate!

So it is not irrational for ambitious Democratic politicians to put a finger on the scales for an agenda that puts white liberals in their happy place. Quite the contrary.

And no wonder one still searches in vain for the Democratic politician willing to venture a true “Sister Souljah moment.” Recall the original Sister Souljah moment that occurred in June 1992, when Bill Clinton, speaking at a gathering for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, commented on a statement rapper/activist Sister Souljah had made in an interview with The Washington Post. In the interview, she replied to a question about whether black-on-white violence in the 1992 LA riots was a “wise, reasoned action” as follows:

Yeah, it was wise. I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?...White people, this government and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?

Clinton’s comment on this to the Rainbow Coalition was:

You had a rap singer here last night [on a panel] named Sister Souljah…Her comments before and after Los Angeles were filled with a kind of hatred that you do not honor today and tonight. Just listen to this, what she said: She told The Washington Post about a month ago, and I quote, ‘If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?…So if you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?

If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke [founder of a Louisiana-based KKK organization] was giving that speech.

At the time, Democrats were suffering from a highly negative image of being soft on crime and public disorder and practicing a racial double standard (sound familiar?). Given what Clinton said and where he said it (to the Rainbow Coalition), his message was crystal clear: Democrats should not tolerate violence and inflammatory rhetoric, including any that comes from members of their own coalition. There should be no double standards.

Clinton was relentlessly attacked by Jackson and other figures on the party’s left for his apostasy. But normie voters got the message. Here was a different kind of Democrat who was willing to throw obvious Democratic lunacy over the side. Clinton withstood the blowback and he—and his party—reaped the reward.

It’s hard to imagine a contemporary Democratic politician being willing to risk such a confrontational attack on party orthodoxy. Today’s massive contingent of white liberals, herded along by their opinion leaders and institutions, are likely to rise up in unison to punish such apostasy. That key change makes the intra-party cost-benefit calculus of such a move far different—far more negative—than in Clinton’s day. So we don’t see them.

Instead, we get the occasional anodyne attempts at heterodoxy, quickly swept under the rug when they are (inevitably) attacked by the usual suspects. Democratic politicians chasing a moderate image typically do not attack liberal shibboleths but rather emphasize their practical bent and distaste for being “divisive.” But their underlying positions rarely deviate much from those preferred by white liberals.

That will only take you so far, even in era where the political terrain is tilting against Trump and his party. As Damon Linker pointed out in an essay last summer:

[W]hat liberals need to do to defeat right-wing populism…[is] to moderate on culture. That means on policies and moral stances wrapped up with the old culture war (like trans and other gender-related issues) as well as in other areas of policy that have a strong cultural valance—like crime, immigration, and DEI. This isn’t just necessary because Democratic positions on these issues are unpopular at the moment. It’s also crucial because culture is more fundamental than politics: It sends a signal to voters about where a politician or party stands on base-level moral questions. When voters become convinced that a specific politician or party has bad (or just sufficiently different) moral judgment, they lose trust in that politician or party. And then other, more superficial policy commitments don’t matter…

White liberals who are inclined to blame everyone but themselves for why their cause hasn’t gotten farther should consider the wise words of Pogo:

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

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One of the biggest buzzwords in politics over the past few years is “heterodoxy.” It’s a dead-on (if jargony) term precisely because of its religious origins—to be heterodox means you hold beliefs or opinions that go against official, or orthodox, positions.

“No, the Eucharist is not actually the body and blood of Christ.” “Blasphemer!” That sort of thing.

Every major religion, sect, and denomination in world history has experienced intricate and abstract theological disputes about what counts as the “real” position of their respective faith traditions and what should be labeled as heresy with its adherents punished, excommunicated, or otherwise ostracized by the community. In addition to dense doctrinal debates, orthodoxy versus heterodoxy in religious and historical terms frequently involves schisms over who or what is the “true” leader of a particular church or movement—and who is a heretic. For example, communist politics in the 20th century was chock full of arcane and violent debates about Marxist-Leninist theory and praxis and who exactly embodied its true meaning and purpose and who was deviant. Economists later picked up the term to label academics and practitioners who held divergent views from mainstream or “neoclassical” economics. Today, there are entire think tanks and academic centers dedicated solely to heterodox economic ideas that seek to challenge neoliberalism and free market orthodoxy.

In American politics, “heterodoxy” typically signifies individuals, leaders, or movements within Democratic and Republican circles that hold economic or cultural views significantly at odds with either (1) party leadership, elected officials, and donors or (2) other voters and activists in the party, along with ideological enforcers in the media, who sustain orthodoxy through personal network effects and routine denunciations of apostates.

For modern-day Democrats, an example of heterodoxy on the cultural front would be someone saying, “Men can’t become women and boys shouldn’t be allowed to play in girls’ sports,” or “We should restrict all forms of immigration.” Why is this heterodox? Well, because nearly every Democratic elected official, donor, and activist group in the country holds the exact opposite view on both these matters, thereby embodying and enforcing orthodoxy on trans and immigration issues. Alternatively, economic heterodoxy among Democrats could come from the more social democratic and labor side of the party in the form of someone arguing, “We should have a fully nationalized health care system paid for by a VAT,” or “Strategic tariffs and oil production are good for America”—policy ideas that deviate significantly from the accepted and allowable views of mainstream party officials, donors, consultants, and policy institutions.

Perhaps more pertinent to recent party debates, ideological enforcers on both sides of the Israel divide in the Democratic Party are desperately seeking to create a new orthodoxy and set of policy “litmus tests” to patrol the issue—either Israel should be cut off, morally shamed, and labeled as an “apartheid state” that committed genocide in Gaza, or Israel should be unequivocally supported financially and militarily no matter what its national leaders choose to say or do. Of course, rather than admit that they are seeking to create and enforce these new orthodoxies in electoral and policy-making terms, both the anti- and pro-Israel sides proclaim to be the true heterodox voices facing persecution by the other side, which is full of establishment stooges or extremists who don’t allow for differences of opinion and conflicted views about the U.S.-Israel relationship. Meanwhile, the average Democratic voter, who basically doesn’t care about these fights over Israel, is constantly poked and prodded to pick one side or the other and signal the correct choice with the appropriate language and social media postings—or else face partisan opprobrium, anonymous denunciations, and community snubbing.

For modern-day Republicans, heterodoxy mostly indicates someone who says, “I disagree with Donald Trump.” At one point, Trump himself represented the heterodox. Then he gained power, and like an ancient priest or holy emperor, Trump emerged as both the definer and enforcer of Republican orthodoxy: “President Trump is MAGA, and MAGA is President Trump,” his spokesperson announced. Behavioral shifts toward the new orthodoxy are exemplified by once stalwart free traders and free enterprise Republicans arguing in favor of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and his direct interference in various American businesses. Why? Because Trump acted on them and told everyone to support him without question, at least until the Supreme Court invalidated most of them. A more acute potential orthodoxy-heterodoxy schism among Republicans is emerging on the Iran war. Where Trump and the entire MAGA movement once decried foreign interventionism by their opponents and said America should instead focus on the home front, now the president and nearly all his followers have morphed into ardent war proponents and supporters of Trump’s interventions in Venezuela and Iran and his attempts to strong-arm Denmark into giving him Greenland. Old-school MAGA media personalities don’t like this shift, but they are dismissed as “not smart enough” to understand what he’s up to on foreign policy.

The treatment of existing heterodox politicians by both parties highlights these recent ideological developments—DINOs and RINOs are seen everywhere in their respective parties, waiting to be tagged and shipped off for re-education by orthodox officials and their enforcement units. Anyone who deviates from the party line will be punished, demoted, “primaried,” and attacked nonstop on social media.

As Michael Baharaeen outlined nicely in a post last week, look at the Democrats’ apoplectic reactions to Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman on any number of issues, including immigration, crime, and primarily Israel. Democrats absolutely hate Fetterman for his heterodoxy while independents and many Republicans in his home state kind of like him. Similarly, notice the activist and media savaging of the handful of congressional Democrats who voted against the Iran war powers resolution, or perhaps those like Jared Golden who may have supported some aspect of Trump’s economic plans or those in the Senate who voted to end the government shutdown back in the fall. All pilloried by the Democrats’ orthodox militia. On the Republican side, you’ll see Trump’s and MAGA’s denigration of heterodox right-populists like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie—people who took stands against the president and then were cast out and labeled as heretics for daring to disagree with Trump’s foreign policy agenda and his administration’s handling of the Epstein files.

Heterodoxy among voters is a slightly different issue where voters themselves either hold ideologically inconsistent or contradictory positions (e.g., we should reduce deficits but not cut spending or raise taxes; America shouldn’t be the world’s policeman, yet we should still attack Iran) or they hold a mix of views that are not represented at all by traditional party institutions arranged along the left-right axis (e.g., pro-gun and against religion in politics; anti-illegal immigration and pro-immigrants’ rights; “Medicare for All” but no welfare fraud; support deregulation of business plus a strong safety net for the poor.)

Increasing numbers of Americans are heterodox in either one of these two ways, and many also would support a heterodox legislator from the same or opposite party in their local voting district and state. Unfortunately, these voters and candidates don’t get a lot of backing from the two parties. Perhaps if America had a more democratic party system—e.g., proportional representation and a multi-party Congress—independent Americans would feel better recognized and more inclined to participate in politics and policy deliberations.

But since these politically abandoned and heterodox Americans lack serious representation nationally from either Democrats or Republicans, they mostly keep their heads down, stay out of politics, and avoid partisan battles over orthodoxy as the priests and clergy of the two parties bless the true believers and denounce the dissenters.

Maybe the heterodox really are the smartest sect around. “Splitter!”

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It’s no secret that the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has shifted left over the past decade or two. Whereas the base of the party not long ago was older, working-class, moderate black voters, it increasingly comprises college-educated white liberals. This, along with greater levels of partisan polarization and geographic sorting, has over time helped erode the party’s moderate faction in Congress and given rise to new progressive power bases in big urban cities like New York, Chicago, and Seattle.

And while these transformations have made the party more capable of dominating in off-year elections, it has also become harder for Democrats to compete in some parts of the country and with certain voting blocs that were a core part of their coalition not long ago—and that made them capable of winning big at the federal level. Post-election analysis after 2024 found that more Americans today believe Democrats are too liberal than when Barack Obama sought re-election in 2012.

Yet, even in the midst of this transition, a significant share of Democratic voters actually remain ideologically moderate, possess complex views and attitudes on the issues, and aren’t necessarily cheering the party’s leftward shift. Shortly after the 2024 election, for example, a Gallup survey found that a large plurality (45 percent) wanted to see the party become more moderate against only 29 percent that wanted it to become more liberal.

Last week, two prominent think tanks released surveys showing moderate Democrats remain a major part of the party’s coalition. The first came from the center-left Third Way, which found that roughly 40 percent of Democratic primary voters self-identity either as moderate (34 percent) or conservative (five percent).1 Moreover, Democrats overall appeared to hold pragmatic views of politics. For instance:

• 89 percent agreed that “just because a candidate is moderate does not mean they are boring.”

• 88 percent said they are “willing to vote for someone I don’t agree with on every issue as long as they are strong and will fight for the working people of this country.”

• 75 percent said they prefer “a candidate who works across the aisle to get things done, even if it means compromising sometimes” rather than one who “sticks to their progressive beliefs, even if it means getting less done.”

• 72 percent are “willing to vote for someone I don’t agree with on every issue as long as they are authentic and true to what they believe in.”

• And fully two-thirds believe “nominating a Democrat for president who is too far left risks losing the general election to a MAGA candidate, because America is not liberal and someone far to the left will turn off swing voters.”

Most Democrats hold pretty normie views on key issues as well. Two-thirds support overhauling ICE and holding it accountable rather than abolishing it entirely (34 percent). A large majority (62 percent) also continues to support capitalism over socialism (38 percent). According to the report’s authors, these findings demonstrate that “primary voters are pragmatic, and they don’t want their nominee to go so far left in a primary that they can’t win against MAGA in the general.”

The second survey came from a more unexpected source: the Manhattan Institute (MI), a conservative think tank.2 MI set out to determine whether “the median Democratic voter [is] actually moving left—or…the party [is] being pulled left by a smaller activist faction that dominates elite discourse and low-turnout politics.” They found that the party’s coalition is “often more moderate, more internally divided, and more pragmatic than what is found across left-leaning social media, cable news, and donor-funded groups,” and that “more voters favor moving the party toward the ideological center than further left.”3

In fact, compared to Third Way, MI’s data found that moderates make up an even greater share of the party’s coalition at 47 percent. Meanwhile, “Progressive Liberals” (PLs) are 37 percent while the “Woke Fringe” (WF) is just 11 percent.4 MI dug deeper into Democratic voters’ views on hot-button issues and found that they are much more complex than people may realize.

• Immigration. Democrats of all stripes continue to see America as a nation of immigrants, but pluralities of moderates (50 percent) and PLs (44 percent) believed that the number of legal immigrants allowed to enter the U.S. each year should “stay about the same” rather than be increased from current levels (16 percent and 27 percent, respectively).

• Trans issues. Democratic voters often take more cautious positions here than people may expect—even as the party doesn’t always do the same. A plurality of voters overall (including a majority of moderates and plurality of PLs) believe that sporting events should be separated on the basis of sex rather than “gender identity.” Huge majorities across all demographic and ideological cohorts except for the WF (which was split) also believe that medicine for gender transitions should not be administered to people until they are at least 18 years old.

• Crime. Only 18 percent of Democrats believe that the U.S. criminal justice system is “too tough” in its handling of crime. A plurality (34 percent) think it’s “about right,” while a similar share (31 percent) say it is “not tough enough. A large majority (55 percent) also agrees that “police are essential—they should remain the primary way communities address crime and public safety,” while just one-third believe that “police do more harm than good, [and] funding should be shifted toward non-police alternatives.”

• Israel. Nearly half (49 percent) of Democrats say that while they believe Israel has a right to exist, they are worried about how Israel has conducted its war against Hamas. By contrast, only 13 percent agree that “Israel is a colonial apartheid state”—a position that some leading 2028 contenders have espoused—and that it, alone, bears responsibility for “any and all violence that has followed its establishment.”

• Billionaires. The overwhelming majority of Democrats (73 percent) believe that billionaires can exist, even though they want to see them contribute more in taxes. By contrast, just 14 percent say billionaires are “bad for society and shouldn’t exist,” a belief most pronounced among the WF.

These two surveys illustrate that the Democratic electorate is a mixed group and, like most Americans, holds a diverse set of views, especially among its most moderate members. The MI results are especially interesting: a right-leaning organization might have an incentive to show that Democratic voters are uniformly left-wing, which could provide ammunition for the GOP in its pursuit of swing voters and independents. And yet, this is not the story their data told.

Still, these surveys also showed concerning signs for center-left reformers about moderates’ influence—or, perhaps, lack of it—in the party today. For starters, both found that a majority of the Democratic coalition is not ideologically moderate. In the Third Way study, fully 60 percent self-identified as either liberal, progressive, or socialist. And anyone who did the math above will know the MI study found that a plurality (48 percent) either belonged to the PL or WF camps.5

This data mirrors other surveys from nonpartisan groups that have shown the share of moderates and conservatives in the Democratic Party on an inexorable, decades-long decline while the share of liberals is at its highest point on record, as is the share who identify as “very liberal.”

Third Way’s data also showed that even as large shares of Democrats purport to want more moderation from the party, many would still support candidates who espouse support for things like “Medicare for all” (83 percent), the “Green New Deal” (74 percent), and canceling student debt and making college free (72 percent)—all policies that have gotten the party’s candidates into trouble in the past. Two-thirds of voters also say that a candidate needs to be a “true progressive” for them to get excited about voting.

This presents another problem. Many Democrats purportedly want an “electable” candidate—recall that 66 percent said “nominating a Democrat for president who is too far left risks losing the general election to a MAGA candidate.” But MI’s polling shows that several of the top 2028 contenders they support are either way to the left of the median American or serial electoral underperformers.

So, even as most Democrats tell themselves that they want their party to moderate to win over the voters they need, there is clearly a leftward gravitational pull internally. The energy and vibes in a primary election today are likelier to be with candidates like Zohran Mamdani and AOC—whose brand of politics animates the party’s base but will very likely struggle to win over swing voters in key states in a general election—than with moderate reformers like Rahm Emanuel or center-left candidates with strong electoral track records like Josh Shapiro.

Here’s how MI put it:

Activist politics often speaks for the most ideologically intense voters, but on many issues, the majority view within the coalition is that of the Moderates—often alongside black and Hispanic voters—rather than the party’s most activist faction. The Woke Fringe, however, may still exert outsized influence in low-turnout primaries and online discourse. Because this group is younger, it represents a plausible source of future ideological change inside the party, even if it is not the median position today.

This doesn’t mean that moderates are out of luck or that the party is fated to an AOC nomination in 2028. But the winds right now are at the back of the progressive base. If moderates want to chart a different way forward for the Democrats, they’ll need to identify and rally behind a consensus candidate who offers to chart a different path—and they’ll need to do it sooner than later.

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In Texas’s open Senate primary last Tuesday, Democratic hopes of “flipping” the Lone Star State soared to their highest level since former Representative Beto O’Rourke polled within the margin of error in his unsuccessful bid to topple Republican Senator Ted Cruz in 2018. Turnout for the Democratic winner, state representative James Talarico, and the runner-up, Representative Jasmine Crockett, surged above ballots for the leading Republican candidates, despite widespread reports of voters being turned away at polling stations in Dallas and Williamson counties due to recent changes to voting rules by local Republicans.

The enthusiasm gap between the parties startled political observers, as did Talarico’s six-point margin over Crockett. Though Talarico entered the race months before Crockett, the self-styled MAGA antagonist was perceived to have some strong advantages. Crockett was (and remains) a rising star capable of energizing Democrats who have demanded much more combative leadership since Trump’s return to office. She had already built a strong social media following due to her flair for “clapback” interactions with Marjorie Taylor Greene and other hard-right figures, while her blunt primetime speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention had catapulted her into the limelight as one of the Democrats’ most prominent younger black voices.

Talarico, meanwhile, came across as comparatively restrained—and perhaps a bit over-rehearsed, at least in the beginning. A Presbyterian seminarian, Talarico foregrounded his Christian faith and spoke solemnly about a “politics of love” that might transcend America’s existential tribalism. That seemingly “unpopulist” posture made the press susceptible to halfhearted attempts to draw an ideological distinction between him and Crockett. Talarico’s outreach to independents and disaffected Republicans was associated with “moderation,” whereas Crockett, presumed to grasp what the base wanted, was depicted as the progressive “firebrand.”

That distinction always felt artificial. On the surface, the contest between Talarico and Crockett was mainly a contrast in style rather than policy positions or ideology. It was not a Lone Star reprise of Mamdani vs. Cuomo or Bernie vs. Hillary. Upon closer inspection, however, the contest did reflect two different theories of how to strengthen the Democratic coalition. In a state that has perennially frustrated the party’s ambitions but which remains the key to Democrats ever achieving an FDR-style majority, Democrats have had to learn the hard way that possessing “star power,” which motivates the base, is only part of the battle. As in the Midwest and the purple states of Georgia and North Carolina, the more essential piece of the puzzle is figuring out how to expand the coalition’s geographic range and finally attenuate the Republican grip on smaller cities and towns.

The results laid bare Talarico’s keener understanding of the challenge before Democrats. Crockett’s strategy leaned heavily on appeals based on identity and her persona; it essentially boiled down to a belief that a candidate with enough charisma could still mobilize the “rising American electorate” of younger minorities by fanning outrage over Trump’s record. Talarico approached the electorate differently even as he aimed to exploit his own “authentic” viral moments. Bereft of a bulwark equal to Crockett’s support among black voters in East Texas, Talarico instead treated the primary as a test run for the general election. By necessity, he waged a less hyper-partisan campaign that focused on voters alienated by contemporary politics and upset over spiraling costs.

The strategy paid off impressively while disproving the confused narrative that Talarico was the conciliatory moderate of the two. As the primary entered its final stretch and the strength of his ground game in Latino enclaves became apparent, Talarico had the air of an insurgent with the rhetoric to match. “We already have class warfare in this country,” he rejoined to a skeptical attendee of one of his town halls, underscoring, “it’s the billionaires waging war against the rest of us.” Within a matter of months, the boyish 36-year-old—tougher and shrewder than his neighborly demeanor conveyed—had added his own touch to a message embraced by Democratic insurgents from Maine to Montana.

Last Tuesday’s results suggest that Democrats in tough environments don’t have to make a false choice between a positive and patriotic “big tent” pitch and economic populism. They likewise indicate that in a state that has undergone as many rapid changes as Texas, Talarico’s message of compassion and renewal holds promise against a bilious and caricature-laden GOP that has come to resent the very demographic and cultural transformations induced through its obsessive pursuit of economic growth. Nevertheless, exuberant Talarico supporters wishing to savor this moment know the sense of unstoppable momentum will be short-lived. Although the Republican nominee has yet to be determined—a runoff election between incumbent Senator John Cornyn and state attorney general Ken Paxton, his far-right challenger, is scheduled for May—Talarico faces the same array of challenges that has vexed Democratic candidates the past three decades.

As a young white progressive, he must decisively mobilize culturally moderate and religious Latinos who theoretically lean left on economics but have repeatedly failed to leverage their demographic weight at the polls; maximize turnout among all segments of the black community, from the urban machine and new black entrepreneurial class to struggling service workers; harness the growing electoral power of Asian and South Asian Texans; and—no less crucial—cut down Republicans’ lopsided margins among rural, blue-collar whites. In short, Talarico has seven months to fulfill his wager that he can realign the Texas electorate—and do so by transforming working-class expectations of what Texas politics can deliver.

Doing all this simultaneously will be an extraordinary lift. Talarico can be fairly certain to run up the score with affluent liberals and the more economically insecure parts of the Brahmin left, as his resounding margin in Austin illustrates. And his striking ability to turn out Latinos has cast aside the initial impression he was the Sun Belt’s answer to Pete Buttigieg—quick-witted and skilled at countering right-wing talking points, but with limited traction beyond the ranks of college-educated whites. Yet even in the event that the scandal-tarred Paxton ends up being his opponent—thus boosting his chances with moderates—Talarico faces an uphill battle when it comes to flipping precincts in Republican-leaning Tarrant and Williamson counties and deepening the faint blue hue of Fort Bend, key urban areas in which Democrats must dramatically overperform and best Joe Biden’s short-lived gains from 2020.

The path is all the more daunting given Talarico’s uncertain-at-best standing with black voters, whose sense of urgency in this election will be especially critical to Democratic tallies in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and Jefferson County. At over four million residents, Texas has the largest share of black Americans in the country, fueled in part by migration after the Great Recession and, later, Covid. Although this influx has arguably made black Texans more heterogeneous in their cultural outlook and economic interests, they form, as in Georgia, the bedrock of the Democrats’ urban base and establishment, making a strong alliance with Crockett and other local black leaders vital to Talarico’s chances.

How much ground Talarico needs to make up is anyone’s guess. Crockett readily endorsed him after the results came in, but the primary had taken a sour turn in early February when former U.S. Representative Colin Allred, following the claims of a content creator, accused Talarico of calling him a “mediocre black man.” Talarico strongly denied the charge, insisting he had only characterized Allred’s failed bid to unseat Cruz in 2024 as underwhelming. But a wave of online sniping among influencers and other informal campaign surrogates ensued, briefly creating the impression Talarico was mistrusted by black activists. While the fallout seems limited, the black electorate has become less predictable in recent years, with turnout surging when Barack Obama and Joe Biden headed the Democratic ticket and declining when Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were the standard-bearers. At the end of the day, Talarico's team must find a way to obtain more than 89 percent of the black vote—the share O'Rourke was estimated to have won—even if they are banking on unprecedented turnout among Latinos and young people.

Different aspects of Talarico’s biography and political identity could make it all come together. His religiosity could attract older black and Latino voters, who tend to be churchgoers, while his steadfast cultural liberalism is bound to generate a strong get-out-the-vote effort among other core Democratic constituencies. And his story of his mother’s determination to provide him a good life after leaving an abusive relationship with his birth father may well stir voters otherwise weary of liberal platitudes about resilience and hope.

Then again, Talarico’s basic fidelity to identity politics—at bottom, not meaningfully different from Crockett’s—could undermine his overtures to working-class independents and wavering Trump voters. He has pointedly cast MAGA’s cultural priorities as focused on the “wrong one percent” and enjoined his audiences to train their ire on the monied interests distorting American democracy. But Texas is still Texas: it skews to the right, despite its overflowing sociocultural and political contradictions. In what has been the epicenter of America’s culture wars over immigration, gender, guns, and abortion, Talarico may soon come up against harsh limits in his attempts to defy polarization and extend a hand to those who don’t agree with progressives on every issue.

Yet, as daunting as the odds are, Talarico’s campaign has concrete reasons to be optimistic. The blowback from ICE’s abuses and rapidly declining consumer sentiment, likely to worsen as the escalating war with Iran spikes energy, food, and shipping prices, may well spark the rebellion against the state’s MAGAfied establishment that eluded past Democratic challengers. Latinos who fueled Trump’s four-point improvement in 2024 over his 2020 victory in the state are now swinging toward Democrats because of the administration’s draconian and increasingly unpopular deportation regime, including in the Rio Grande Valley, where anxiety about border crossings, crime, and inflation had contributed to Trump’s stunning gains with traditional Democrats. The mounting cost-of-living crisis, meanwhile, has diminished Texas’s allure as a high-growth state with a middle-class-friendly housing market. Rents and utilities are up sharply in several metros while construction has slowed due to the chill sweeping through the immigrant-dependent sector. The explosion in data centers, moreover, has raised alarm over the demand placed on local water supplies and the state’s notoriously vulnerable energy grid, spreading grassroots opposition that transcends partisan loyalties. Together, these conditions may allow Talarico to close the deal and burnish, in turn, the new Sun Belt populism that has strengthened his voice.

Talarico, of course, knows he cannot depend on a perfect storm to yield an upset. Republicans are determined to consign Democrats to permanent minority status across Texas and the South, and the national Democratic Party, through endless fumbles and sins of omission, has done vanishingly little to stop them. Talarico will thus have to fight for every last persuadable vote—and not shrink from the onslaught his adversaries are preparing. The question, then, that should animate Talarico’s team as he forges ahead is whether they can continue to build something bigger than a proxy referendum on Trump’s record—and leave behind a movement primed for the battles to come. His fellow insurgents, near and far, are counting on it.

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📖 “Why Rustin? Why Now?” by Damage Magazine and Dustin Guastella. On their excellent Substack, Damage Magazine and Dustin Guastella offer some remarks to introduce their new book, Rustin’s Challenge, collecting key writings of the great civil rights leader Bayard Rustin along with some political commentary.

It’s easy to flatten Bayard Rustin into a kind of stock character: the 1960s activist, the outsider, the agitator, the dreamy idealist. This is wrong.

Rustin was hard-nosed and iron-willed. He was suspicious of the young New Left—and they were suspicious of him. He didn’t like sentimental liberalism. He didn’t like fads. He was, throughout his life, obsessively concerned with one problem: the problem of social class, or the problem of who gets what, and who does what, in a rich, industrial society.

Even his commitment to civil rights (for which he was immortalized most recently in a 2023 Netflix movie produced by the Obamas) wasn’t an end in itself, but rather, was a means to building what he really wanted: a movement for economic equality and social solidarity…

That brings us to the second part of the question: Why now?

Coming of age in the 1930s Rustin’s political sensibilities were shaped by the organizations and philosophy of what we now call the Old Left. That Left was characterized by a singular focus on the plight of the working masses, the failures of the economic system, and the determination to forge a new social compact. He swam among the reformers and radicals of the 1940s and the civil rights change-makers of the 1950s. He was, therefore, exceptionally well-positioned to see both the virtues of the New Deal, which he fought to advance, and the emerging vices of the New Left.

The new progressives of the ‘60s, he observed, were increasingly quick to “substitute self-expression for politics.” They embraced personal autonomy as the highest good and endorsed a permanent revolution in cultural norms. They were obsessed with the psychological problems of racism and sexism but less excited by questions of how an economy should be run, the way a national budget should be organized, what to do about jobs, and who would pay for which programs and why. We still live in the long shadow of that Left; the shadow of 1968. And this shadow is now so long it’s sometimes hard to see the edges of it, or the light beyond it.

Today progressives still focus the lion’s share of their energy on cultural priorities, demands for tolerance, and radical-sounding slogans—to defund this or abolish that—which have no hope of attracting the kind of durable majorities needed to achieve reform.

Rustin witnessed the emergence of these progressive pathologies firsthand. Just as one can identify the exact moment when a bell is struck but can never quite pinpoint when the ringing stops, the counterproductive tendencies that would shape the Left for the next several decades were perfectly clear to him then. They were new and sharp, representing a break from what had come before. And, he feared, this approach to politics was a step backward that would only contribute to the slowing, or even reversal, of American political progress.

His diagnoses were prescient. In the 1970s, Rustin castigated comfortable professional-class liberals who, armed with a sense of moral superiority, attacked working-class whites as “privileged.” He predicted the rise of the urban riots that bubbled up across the United States in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, noting that those at the bottom of society were trapped in a “cycle of frustration.” He feared that demands to overturn everything, injunctions to violence, and slogans meant to scandalize, no matter how emotionally appealing, would succeed in changing nothing. Today—when protests bloom overnight on social media, demand the world, then recede just as quickly as they materialized—his criticisms are just as apt.

A man ahead—way ahead—of his time.

🎙️ “Can C-SPAN Pull Off ‘Crossfire,’ but With Civility?,” by Michael M. Grynbaum. Folks may remember the show “Crossfire,” which aired on CNN for 23 years from 1982 to 2005 (and again, briefly, from 2013 to 2014). During its run, Crossfire produced high-profile, often testy clashes between politicians and pundits from both sides of the aisle. It shut down in 2005, not long after a memorable appearance by Jon Stewart, who excoriated its then-hosts, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, for “hurting America” with the program. Fast-forward another 20 years, and one of the original Crossfire producers, Sam Feist, has now taken his talents to C-SPAN, where he pitched a similar—but in some ways polar opposite—idea: “Ceasefire.”

Feist said he envisioned the new venture as respectful dialogues between lawmakers from each side of the political spectrum. “No shouting, no fighting, no acrimony. Just two American political leaders with a willingness to find common ground.” In the early running, the show has featured a slate of notable names, including Governors Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) and Matt Meyer (D-DE), former Congressmen Charlie Dent (R-PA) and Steve Israel (D-NY), and Mayors Todd Glorida (D-San Diego) and David Holt (R-Oklahoma City). Check out the full archive of interviews from the show here.

🇮🇷 “The third Gulf war: one week on,” by The Economist. If you’re looking for a non-political and more strategic examination of the war in Iran, The Intelligence experts nicely explain the early goals of the conflict, battlefield developments, and missile stockpiles, along with an obituary examining the life of the late Ayatollah Khamenei.

The podcast is available on their site and other platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

🏏 India vs. New Zealand, Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup Final, from the Narendra Modi Stadium, Ahmedabad, India. Test cricket purists may pinch their noses at the shorter version of the game, but India and New Zealand put on a cracking display of this great sport in the semis, especially the Kiwis’ “nine-wicket demolition of previously unbeaten South Africa that left fans and pundits rubbing their eyes ​in disbelief.”

The final should be thrilling viewing, as “India’s bid to become the first team to retain the T20 World Cup will collide ​with New Zealand’s quest for a maiden global white-ball crown when the finalists step on to the field at ‌the world’s largest cricket stadium on Sunday. The 20-team tournament will end in an Ahmedabad amphitheater where more than 100,000 fans will expect a gladiatorial slugfest, and most will hope for a home triumph.”

The game starts at 9:30AM EST and can be viewed on Willow TV in the USA.

🎹 What Day Is It, by Fonville x Fribush featuring Alan Good Parker. If you’re looking for a little musical relaxation over the weekend, this organ trio from Richmond, Virginia, has you covered.

Fonville x Fribush is the brand new musical collaboration from acclaimed drummer Corey Fonville (Butcher Brown) and organ player Sam Fribush. Charlie Hunter introduced the two young producers, allowing their collective ear, musical talents and friendship to bring out the best in one another. Together with undiscovered guitarist Alan Parker, the debut album is a tasty mixture that just may reignite a newfound appreciation for the organ trio sound. Meant to inspire a generation that’s ready for something more than reimagined blues, funk and boogaloo, this record pushes the limits of organ trio music into something more youthful and fresh.

Enjoy a little sample of the record, “Dinner Bell.”

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Democrats are cautiously optimistic about November’s midterms as President Trump’s poor job approval numbers and continued success in flipping GOP seats in special elections suggest victory is forthcoming. They ought not to take too much comfort in that, as these points do not show that conservative populism’s appeal is waning. In fact, the evidence from overseas suggests it is still growing.

Japan

Japan’s most recent national election is a case in point. Just last July, the long-dominant, conventionally conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost its majority in the nation’s upper house, the House of Counsellors. The big winners were not the traditional centrist opposition, but instead two conservative populist parties, Sanseitō and the Conservative Party, which skyrocketed to take nearly 18 percent of the vote together. Prime Minister Shigero Ishiba resigned to take responsibility for the fall from grace.

He was replaced by Japan’s first female prime minister, Sagae Takaichi. She cites Britain’s Margaret Thatcher as an inspiration for her career, but as PM, she is more like a Japanese Trump than anything else. Sharply conservative on social issues like same-sex marriage (she’s opposed), she has embraced a rapid rebuilding of Japan’s military and angered China with statements that that country’s use of its navy to blockade Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” that would trigger laws allowing the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) to intervene.

Takaichi also takes a hard line on immigration, pledging to tighten immigration procedures and perhaps even establish a numerical target for the amount of foreign-born people allowed to live in Japan. Combined, these policies moved the LDP sharply to the nationalist right, the better to compete with Sanseitō and the Conservatives.

Last month’s snap election for the lower house, the House of Representatives, was a smashing success for her conservative populism. The LDP won a record 315 seats in the 465-seat chamber. The conservative populists, nonetheless, won 10 percent combined, a record showing for populist hard-right parties in a lower house election. It’s clear Japan now stands firmly in the conservative populist camp.

Costa Rica

Costa Rica is another example of record high support for conservative populism. The longtime democracy has historically tilted toward the center-left, as the National Liberation Party (PLN) won nearly two-thirds of the nation’s elections between 1953 and 2010. Even the PLN’s defeats in 2014 and 2018 came as a result of another party of the center-left, the Citizen’s Action Party (PAC), taking over first place.

This started to change in 2022, as an entirely new party, the Social Democratic Progress Party (PPSD), elected a president on the strength of concern about unemployment and immigration. That man, Rodrigo Chaves Robles, was extremely controversial during his tenure and avoided criminal prosecution only because the opposition could not muster the two-thirds needed to lift his immunity.

Unable to run again because of constitutional bars on consecutive terms in office, it remained for one of Chaves’ ministers, Laura Fernandes Delgado, to carry on his legacy. She argued in the campaign to build a prison like the one constructed by El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to control the country’s soaring crime and to crack down on drug trafficking. Fernandes is also socially conservative, pledging to increase penalties for having an abortion and reaching out to the nation’s large and growing evangelical voters.

Costa Ricans gave her and her party, a split from the PPSD known as the Sovereign People’s Party (PPSO), a historic landslide. She won in the first round with nearly a majority of the votes. Moreover, the PPSO won 31 of the unicameral legislature’s 57 seats, the first time a single party had won a majority since 1990. The nation’s traditional center-right and classical liberal parties mustered only one seat combined.

France

A recent legislative by-election in France further shows how the traditional right is crumbling in the face of populist fervor. The 3d district of Haute-Savoie had always been won by a candidate from the traditional center-right parties since the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958. The center-right won handily even in 2024’s snap vote, which saw the populist right National Rally (RN) surge in support. The center-right candidate, Christelle Petex, beat the RN-supported candidate, Antoine Valentin, comfortably by a 56-44 margin as voters to her left swung to her side in the all-important second-round runoff.

Petex’s resignation set off the by-election, which was held on January 25th and February 1st. RN backed Valentin again, but this time two even farther-right parties, Reconquête and Les Patriotes, put up their own nominees. Valentin nonetheless finished on top in the first round with 45 percent, about 5.5 percent higher than he received in 2024. The two ultra-rightists combined for an additional 4 percent, putting Valentin on the cusp of victory simply by combining the record high far-right vote.

Valentin did even better than that, swamping the center-right candidate, Christophe Fournier, by a landslide 59-41 margin. That was a 30-point swing from 2024, on par with the 32-point swing in the recent Texas state Senate election that has Democrats salivating. France’s conservatives, like Japan’s and Costa Rica’s, are swinging hard right, and the nation’s centrists and leftists seem powerless to stop them.

Australia

Populism’s rapid rise has even spread Down Under to Australia. That country has long had a center-right coalition of the Liberal and National parties that essentially occupied all of the space on the right side of the spectrum. That has begun to fray over the last decade, but the Coalition still dominated the right even in 2025’s historic landslide defeat. It received about 32 percent of the primary vote (the nation has mandatory ranked-choice voting), while the largest populist right party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, got only 6.4 percent.

That is now ancient history. The Coalition now polls at record lows on the primary vote, ranging between 19 and 26 percent in the most recent polls. One Nation has surged and now polls higher than the Coalition, receiving between 22 and 28 percent. It got so bad that the Liberals, the long-dominant party in the Coalition, recently dumped its leader, Sussan Ley, even though she had only held the job for nine months.

One Nation’s rise is easy to explain. Hanson is a longtime political figure known for her nationalist and anti-immigrant views who is credible as a principled outsider. That appeals to disaffected conservatives tired of the Coalition’s losing and temporizing on hot-button issues. Her fiscal nonconformity and plain-speaking approach also appeal to working-class voters disappointed in the governing center-left Labor Party. That ability to attract both left and right is a staple of successful conservative populists worldwide.

The most recent Sky News Pulse/YouGov poll shows this clearly. It found that 12 percent of Labor Party voters now back One Nation, along with 29 percent of the Coalition’s support and 21 percent who had backed independents. It leads Labor with working-class voters, once the very reason for Labor’s existence, and is competitive with both traditional major parties among the middle class. Only the well-off reject populism—another feature of modern global politics—but they are largely concentrated in a few urban and suburban enclaves. If the election were held today, One Nation would easily supplant the Coalition in Parliament as the largest party on the right and would likely win a few surprising working-class Labor seats too.

United Kingdom

Even the populist right’s recent defeat in the avidly watched Gorton and Denton by-election in Great Britain is a sign of strength rather than weakness. The seat has one of Britain’s largest Muslim populations, a constituency that is clearly antagonistic to the anti-immigration, pro-Western culture populist party. It was also historically one of the most left-wing seats in the nation, regularly returning Labour Party MPs since 1935 with huge majorities.

Reform’s second-place finish with 29 percent of the vote is, in this context, a huge success. Nowcast UK’s model estimated it would receive 26.5 percent, with the Conservatives winning 4.5 percent. In the event, the combined Reform plus Tory vote share of 30.6 percent is nearly identical to the model’s. And that model projects that Reform would win 315 seats in the next election, easily enough to form a coalition government with the much smaller rump of Conservatives.

When the best election result for the left in recent days still points to a conservative populist government, one must sit up and face the facts. Trump may be in decline at the moment, but demand for conservative populism is strong and growing. If he ever hits his stride, perhaps by focusing on domestic politics rather than endlessly pursuing the Nobel Peace Prize, Democrats may find their current advantage is as durable as a snowpack come springtime.

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The Democrats are set for a good—perhaps very good—2026 election. They seem almost certain to take back the House and the Senate, while still improbable, is within reach. But once they stop congratulating themselves for taking advantage of thermostatic reaction against a floundering Trump presidency, they’ll face a fresh and more daunting challenge: who to nominate for their 2028 presidential candidate?

That nominee is crucial for two reasons. Most obviously, Democrats should want a candidate who will maximize their chances of taking back the presidency. Successfully sorting through the potential nominees to find that candidate is not a given. On a deeper level, parties typically rebrand themselves after a period of coalitional attrition through a presidential nominee who newly defines their image (think Clinton, Obama). The 2028 nominee should ideally provide that new template for the national party.

That’s the assignment. The Democratic presidential primary electorate will be the ones carrying it out (or not). At this point, what can we say about those voters and what they might be inclined to do? Clearly it’s early and any poll that attempts to survey that electorate cannot precisely predict what it will look like in 2028. That said, Third Way has just released a treasure trove of data (topline, memo, presentation, crosstabs) on these voters that illuminates the playing field aspiring Democratic candidates will have to negotiate. Here are some of the most interesting findings.

(1) The Democratic presidential primary electorate is dominated by women (61 percent), whites (65 percent), and non-college voters (60 percent). In addition, a clear majority (55 percent) are over the age of 55; just 12 percent are under 30.

(2) In terms of ideology, the Democratic primary electorate skews liberal to left as one would expect. The survey asks about ideology in two different ways:

• socialist/progressive/liberal/moderate/conservative

• very liberal/somewhat liberal/moderate/somewhat conservative/very conservative.

In the first categorization, socialist (6 percent) + progressive (11 percent) + liberal (43 percent) are 60 percent of the sample; in the second categorization very liberal and somewhat liberal are both around 31 percent making liberals 62 percent of primary voters when categorized in that way. Moderates in both categorizations are 34 percent of the sample while conservatives are a trace presence.

Naturally, liberals are to the left of moderates on most questions on the survey but this difference is attenuated if you use the first categorization, which subtracts out the socialists and progressives, who are very left, from the liberal category. Moderates are also relatively close to those who are somewhat liberal in the second categorization while those who say they are very liberal (which includes nearly all the socialists and progressives) are quite far to the left of both. Of course, one should remember that, in turn, moderates who vote in Democratic presidential primaries are quite far to the left of moderates in the overall electorate.

(3) Some common-sense ideas that candidates could include in their platforms generate almost unanimous support for candidates who back them. These include: “Building on the Affordable Care Act to cap health care costs for everyone, making it easier to choose your own doctor, stopping hospital price gouging, and streamlining medical bills” (96 percent overall support); “Providing more low-cost vocational training and apprenticeship opportunities, so people can get good-paying jobs in growing fields without a four-year college degree” (95 percent); “Investing in a range of energy sources, including clean energy, to meet our rising energy demand and bring down our bills” (95 percent)”; and “Overhaul ICE to focus only on dangerous criminals, not families who have lived in the U.S. for years and are contributing to their communities” (93 percent). Such proposals not only have overwhelming support within the Democratic primary electorate, they should also be salable to independents, swing voters, and some disaffected Republicans.

(4) On the other hand, some classically left-identified proposals that would be hard to sell outside the ranks of partisans also have strong support within the Democratic primary electorate. These include: “Creating an annual nationwide wealth tax on billionaires” (91 percent overall support); “Passing Medicare for All, meaning that the government provides everyone’s insurance and private insurance is eliminated” (83 percent); “Passing a national plan like the Green New Deal that would move rapidly to eliminate fossil fuels” (74 percent); “Cancelling all student debt and making college free” (72 percent); and “Abolish ICE and halt all immigration enforcement inside the country” (59 percent).

Here though there is meaningful variation across ideological categories within the primary electorate. For example, on Medicare for All, those who are very liberal provide 88 percent support while moderates are significantly lower at 75 percent. On free college and no student debt, the very liberal are at 83 percent, socialists are at 95 percent and progressives are at 90 percent compared to moderates who are down at 63 percent. A Green New Deal and eliminating fossil fuels is supported by 84 percent of those who are very liberal but just 62 percent of moderates. Finally, abolishing ICE and ending interior immigration enforcement has 79 percent support among the very liberal, 80 percent among socialists, 79 percent among progressives but is actually net negative among moderates (47 percent support vs. 53 percent opposition).

Still, there is no gainsaying the fact that, despite the near-unanimous support for moderate reform proposals, there is very significant support for more left proposals—proposals which cold well prove more exciting to voters in the context of heated primary contests. The possibility is real that the Democratic primary electorate could wind up supporting a candidate who not only wouldn’t be the probability-maximizing choice against the GOP opposition but also would do nothing to fix the Democrats’ brand problem—indeed would just make it worse.

(5) Underscoring this potential problem, Democratic primary voters express support for the party becoming more liberal to beat Republicans and say that only a “true progressive” could excite them as a candidate. In the survey, 55 percent say the party should become more liberal. However, while support for this proposition is overwhelming among the very liberal, socialists and progressives, it drops to 42 percent among moderates.

And 62 percent call for a “true progressive” to excite them. Similar to the pattern above though, 97 percent of socialists, 88 percent of progressives and 83 percent of the very liberal demand a true progressive while moderates are split down the middle on the question.

This is more than a bit disconcerting given that the overall electorate has increasingly seen the Democrats as too liberal over time. Quite a few Democratic primary voters are apparently willing to press the accelerator on this.

(6) But when put in the context of electability, Democratic primary voters show more flexibility and pragmatism. Over three-fifths (62 percent) declare they would vote “for someone who can win the general election against a Republican” rather than “for someone who stands by their progressive values, even if it could make them less electable.” This includes 57 percent among those who say they are very liberal. Only the socialists dissent strongly from this preference.

Conversely, 55 percent disagree that nominating a moderate Democrat would just be repeating the mistakes of the past because it wouldn’t excite people to vote. However, here the progressives and very liberal join the socialists in dissenting from the overall judgement.

The problem with this welcome pragmatism—at least among the majority of Democratic primary voters—is that it hinges on a good understanding of who, in fact, is electable. Right now, Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom—two liberal California Democrats—sit atop Democratic presidential nomination polling, garnering nearly half of overall support. They are, respectively, the fourth worst and flat-out worst in performance relative to underlying partisan lean of 21 potential candidates tested by the “Deciding to Win” report. Moreover, another top contender is AOC who is also an underperformer relative to her district.

Of course, there’s plenty of time for overperformers like Josh Shapiro and Andy Beshear to make a case for their electability and potentially an audience for that case. But it will take some work and hard politicking. Nothing can be taken for granted given how seductive the siren song of the left may be in the upcoming presidential cycle as the Third Way data make clear.

It’s all to play for. Gentlemen and women, place your bets.

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