"The BBB is remarkedly unpopular"? Your citation is just another Substack post, which states: "Recent polls have shown between 49% and 55% of Americans opposed to the package — although surveys also show few have heard much about the bill."
Come on. Between 49% and 55% of the population are Democrats, who oppose anything Trump does.
To be fair all of the mega-bills for the last 30 years have been unpopular, at least to those who pay attention. They are the way to get around partisan gridlock and are used by whichever group of partisans is in temporary control. Nancy Pelosi famously said "We have to pass the bill to find out what is in it." This is true of all of these monstrosities.
These bills aren't written by Congresscritters or even their staffs. They are written by a shifting coalition of lobbyists that stuff everything they can into them. Someone noted that the bribes offered to Murkowski to get her vote were remarkedly similar to Obamacare. Remember the Cornhusker kickback.
I live in Nebraska and the senator who negotiated the Cornhusker Kickback, Ben Nelson, never ran for office again. He knew he would get clobbered, people here were very angry with him.
No it's much worse than that. Two-thirds of the country do not affirmatively support it, and the views only dim, even amongst Republicans, when respondents know what it actually does.
" Quinnipiac University’s poll, released last week, showed 55% of voters opposing it, with *just 29% backing it*."
"Six in ten Republicans have a favorable opinion of the bill, but this support is largely driven by supporters of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, while two-thirds of non-MAGA Republicans view the bill unfavorably. Among both Republicans and MAGA supporters, support drops at least 20 percentage points, with less than half of each group viewing the law favorably after hearing it would increase the country’s uninsured rate and decrease funding for local hospitals."
"By a 21-point margin, voters questioned in the most recent Fox News national poll opposed the federal budget legislation (38% favored vs. 59% opposed), which passed by the House of Representatives by just one vote last month."
Again., only a third know what was in it. Does anyone know what is in it even today? These polls are meaningless. I'm definitely not surprised by the numbers, would be interested in how many negative articles there have been vs. positive articles.
If you rephrased questions like "increase the country's uninsured rate" to "free healthcare for undocumented immigrants and healthy, able-bodied men and women who refuse to work, go to school, or volunteer in their communities" -- you might get different responses. Instead you get people in wheelchairs 'protesting' when they're losing nothing.
Lots of things to dislike in the BBB. Which is what gets polled. Especially the Democrat talking points. like closing rural hospitals. Most of them were closed a long time ago and the ones that survived got killed by the Affordable Care Act under Obama. If you're a rural hospital and you need to depend on people illegally claiming Medi-caid benefits, do you need to be open? I don't know, but I can guarantee you that many of those items would be viewed in a different light if the pollsters had linked them to massive tax liabilities coming up next year.
No one even knows what is in it, what a stupid poll. Of course over 80% of Dems oppose. "Trump cures cancer" - 88% of Dems oppose, D.C. judge halts treatments.
Ruy Teixeira saved the best until last. I think Galen Druke writing in The New York Times got it about right.
For all these thoughtful and well-intentioned "how-to" advice columnists, which includes Teixeira, Democrats can only save themselves by halting the party's current absurd trajectory to the radical Left. Their notion that if you harbored misgivings about liberalism veering off course you are going to love our progressive Left socialism is, well, fatally flawed.
It also wouldn't hurt to remove the political blinders, as Texeira suggests, and seek common ground, instead of relentless confrontation, where common ground serves the nation's, and by extension, the party's best longer term interests.
In the current congressional fight over DJT's much GOP hyped and Democratic (and some Republicans') denigrated BBB: A lesson from the Clinton Administration. While President Clinton is correctly credited with having the only balanced budget in most living Americans' lifetimes, he did not achieve it by cutting spending. Instead, a booming economy fueled by the 1990s dot.com and further boosted by Clinton's wisdom in working with a GOP-controlled Congress, saw revenues grow faster than even Congress could spend.
This may be one reason that many Americans and most Republicans are willing to give Trump's BBB a chance where Democrats across the board resort only to sophomoric scare tactics and out-and-out lies.
When I was in Portland recently, I saw the following sign affixed to the digital cash register at a popular food shop: "Please do not assume the gender identity or pronouns of the people behind the counter."
Tell me, how would that assumption be expressed? The pronoun “you” is genderless. The gendered pronouns “he, she, it” are used in talking about a person, not to them —and even I don’t have the cojones to say in a salesclerk’s hearing, “That is, bar none, the ugliest female I’ve ever seen — if it’s really a female.”
It's easy: begin every interaction the way good Portlanders do at the start of meetings and on the first day of every class. Volunteer your preferred pronouns, and the person behind the counter will reflexively respond with theirs the way they've been socialized to do. Then you're off to the races without the risk of committing microaggressions.
Thanks for the Hernandez link about Abundance. I had much same reaction as her when reading about it. It was Edward Abbey who noted that mankind's oldest war is that between city and country. 36 years after his death, it is still going on. I had to look up when he died and it got me thinking about what place Abbey would have in the modern Democratic Party. He was, and is, an icon of the radical wing of the environmental movement and hated big ass trucks. Yet he was against illegal immigration for environmental reasons (and got accused of racism for that), pro-gun for revolutionary reasons and a champion of flyover country.
I'll know a resurgent Democratic Party is even possible when we start naming exactly which issues we should be more populist on, and which ones more centrist.
My vote is for more populist on anything economic, wages, housing, immigration, tariffs, health care. More centrist on anything social that involves forced vocabulary, sex, divisive grouping. Problem is we will come up with non answers or even worse solutions contrary to the 80% as we've been doing and call it a solution.
The big bugaboo lurking in the shadows is a deficit and debt so large it will force taxes on us and there aren't enough billionaires to keep the lights on.
As a tactical matter, I would prioritize things in your populist category which command support from populists on Left and Right like banking reform and antitrust.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani is Bernie and AOC on steroids: a baneful influence whose rise will only embolden the dominant Democratic factions to double down on the very slogans and policies that alienated working-class voters and drove former Democratic regulars into Trump’s camp. His ascendancy is not a hopeful sign of generational renewal but a symptom of the party’s ideological bubble.
Excellent and insightful analysis, Ruy. The consensus among your readers so far this morning is your last suggestion: a Democratic version of Trump who can overwhelm the party’s current policy incoherence. In my view such a candidate would have to be charismatic, well-spoken and not afraid to speak plainly. Who might that be?
I agree that an anti-establishment Democratic candidate who is an economic populist and culturally moderate would be the party's strongest presidential candidate...especially in non-mega metro regions.
The best advice for the Democrats is in end of the article. Run against the party from both left and right. This is the ticket for populist fusion. Much better advice than trying to create a centrist party out of the remnants of the Establishment.
In 2020, the Democrats promised to repeal Trump's 2017 tax cuts, then left them in place. They promised to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hr and left it at $7.25. They promised to override state right-to-work laws with a federal law but did not. They promised "a 21st Century immigration system", which turned out to mean 12 million more illegal aliens. By 2024, the Democratic Party was reduced to telling the voters that the dog ate their homework.
AI think a simplified explanation of current political situation is this:
1. There is a political spin machine that has developed, and it is 90% Democrat strategy-focused. It relies on the mainstream corporate media and big tech that is 75% Democrat favoring.
2. Modern Democrats as individuals are people that are more emotionally wired (Haidt) and thus more susceptible to having their emotions exploited for political influence. So, Democrats are more prone to being manipulated by #1.
3. Republicans and most independents by personality and other filtering are more independent-minded and less prone to mass emotional manipulation. Due to the long list of so-called conspiracy theories claimed by the right and denied by the Democrats and #1, that have since proven to be true, there is also a massive amount of justified opinion that #1 lacks any credibility. However, Democrats still clutch their reliance on #1 probably because it feeds their emotional diet need.
This explains the problem Democrats are having. They are stuck on an emotional treadmill of their own making and refuse to get off. Meanwhile the rest of the electorate is more than exhausted from all that largely dishonest anger-causing crap spewing from the political spin machine.
The rest of the electorate is looking at a much more pragmatic agenda for solving national problems and moving the country foreword. The Democrats are not even engaged in talking about how they would solve the problems and move the country foreword in a different way - although there is some movement in that direction with respect to the YIMBY trend... although it is likely not real as it will run into the Democrat emotional reaction that backs their change aversion... which is 100% emotional - Democrats are stuck on resistance, ranting, raving, protesting, rioting, calling everyone names, negative branding, character assassination... and all pushed their beloved spin machine that the rest of the electorate rejects.
This is a comforting narrative, but it is dependent on the Trump mode of rhetoric, which is fundamentally A.) Don't bother with grounding anything you say in data, B.) assert what you would prefer to be true, and C.) claim anyone who criticizes it as a purveyor of "fake news". It is a powerful method of argumentation, but it is not sustainable in the long run, as you should have learned from Biden. At some point reality punctures the cocoon. "Our trade policies are making the nation great again" begins to ring hollow as the job market and the economy slides, "We're the party of fiscal responsibility and the champions of the working class" loses its currency when your party is authorizing massive tax giveaways to the wealthiest stratum of society and running up massive fiscal deficits while insisting rural hospitals and medicaid recipients take it in the neck. Likewise, "I am not a crook" isn't terribly convincing when people catch on that you're using presidential power to enrich yourself by selling memecoins, telephones, and golf courses in Qatar and Vietnam in return for 'the president's ear'.*
The constraints of reality are already beginning to reassert themselves--you'll see it first in the labor market before it bleeds into public sentiment. There will be no blaming the Dems this time for the travesties of the BBB, and no one's going to buy the whole "the Dems are the party of Big Tech" thing when you picked Elon Musk to help you 'reform' government spending, and you're literally making army colonels out of tech oligarchs. (https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/06/27/tech-executives-commissioned-senior-army-officers-wont-recuse-themselves-dod-business-dealings.html)
* - for all these, anyone perusing this comments section can see the cold terms of reality here:
The principal problem with your argument is that none of those evil things have come to pass. Despite expert opinion, the economy continues to grow. Despite gloomy prediction, unemployment is still trending downward. Despite the worrisome nature of the BBB, most people don’t seem to be worried.
Sure, there’s plenty of time for things to go pear-shaped before the end of Trump’s term, but before the midterms? Maybe, maybe not. If the stimulative effects of the BBB run ahead of the inflationary effects, Trump will keep his majorities in both houses of Congress — and Democrats may win the White House just as it becomes necessary to snatch the punch bowl away. Will they have the courage?
The blatant corruption has already come to pass—check the links above if you don’t believe it. If you mean the economy (which seems to be what you are referring to), there’s no doubt the burn is and will be slower than the stagflation of the 1970s. (Barrons had a good write-up about it: https://www.barrons.com/articles/inflation-and-unemployment-means-stagflation-lite-is-coming-69f16ead?st=hTWMsL). But the signs are already there. Private sector growth in the last quarter was negative according to the BLS, (all the growth recorded was essentially from rehiring government workers illegally released by DOGE) traffic at the ports has slowed to a trickle, and department stores are already reporting renewed price increases. Meanwhile the BBB and the drop in labor supply in tandem with the ongoing tariffs have stalled the Fed’s dovish turn. The slowdown likely won’t happen overnight, but the ball is already rolling, and there’s a reason every economist not named Stephen Miller has been telling Trump his trade policies are counterproductive. It’s kind of baked into the populist cake, honestly: populists always boast that they are above fiscal constraints, and most of them ultimately winds up being done in by said constraints.
No one seems to care about the corruption. As for the jobs rate, the BLS Current Employment Survey (hereinafter CES) says private sector employment went up by 344,000 over the last quarter, while government employment rose 105,000. Not too shabby.
Inflation over the past year was 2.4%, according to the CPI-U, May 2025, and was -0.1%,0.2%,and 0.1% for February thru May.
As for port activity, the Department of Transportation’s TEU report on container traffic (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit, so a twenty-foot container is one TEU, a forty-foot two TEUs, and so forth) shows a slight falloff since the first of the year, but I wouldn’t call four million TEUs a month “a trickle.”
Seeing what works and then replicating it in a form that can fit one's view of what one's party should be, is definitely a way forward. It is amazing to me, to see that the Progressives have moved so far, that they are like the aristocrats of the Old Regime or maybe the final supporters of the Romanov's. They are so sure of their positions and their righteousness, that anything that would change their view may not be worth achieving, even if it meant winning some races.
I didn't see it mention, although I could have easily missed it, that defendants voted for Trump becasue he was the Anti Democrat. Especially when it came to policies. Disenfranchised Dem identity voters voted for Trump because they couldn't stand where the Dems were going to, or already at.
So if the cure for Dems is to just say no to Trump's policies, they have already lost that argument as of last Nov. Trump is being given credit for fulfilling his sated goals to get elected plus policies and stances. So what is being said is that Dems, need to have policies anti Trump but that s why they got defeated kn the first place.
Medicaid is part of Trump's promise to root out fraud waste and abuse.
He has a favorable rating by Republicans of 63%. which beats any current day past Republican president.
The $6000 deduction for SS recipients will help. (I wonder what the AARP thinks about that deduction?)
"It may seem like an audacious gambit, but a successful candidate has provided them a blueprint: Donald Trump…"
Trump performed a hostile takeover of the GOP. Who on the left would be bold/popular enough to run against their own party? Would this person also need household name recognition and fabulous wealth?
A key wrinkle not addressed: the Democrats are rudderless, but the GOP's only rudder is Trump. Those who have tried to ape his schtick have shown it can't be replicated--see: Joni Ernst in Iowa and "we all die anyway". They aren't thinking beyond him any more than the DNC. No one can articulate what a post-Trump GOP looks like. It is the same issue the Democrats faced with Obama.
At any rate, every fascist takeover has been marked, in its early stages, by an ineffectual opposition as much as by a mendacious, charismatic leader. This one is no different.
But such takeovers inevitably implode, and likewise this one will be no different. Unfortunately, history also suggests things can get pretty darn bad before an effective opposition emerges. Now that the strongman's policies are beginning to bear their rotten fruit--see: the latest jobs report--you can expect him to turn the repression up a notch. He's already got the ball rolling--attacks on the universities, marines in the streets of the cities, attempts to bring the media under his control, etc.--but the worst may be yet to come. And he and the GOP are clearly in "Lol nothing matters" mode, judging by the BBB. They believe they'll remain the "heroes of the working class" even as they kick the working class off Medicaid in order to give away more money to the oligarchs. We'll see if they're right.
Trump’s legacy will be prosperous, well run red states. Florida, Texas, and all the others will still be drawing from the blue states’ population. That trend has a very long way to go, with red states gaining Congressional representatives.
Probably somewhere down the road the democrat party will be bailed out by a dynamic politician with flexible policy positions. For the party to turn around sooner select, plan and turn around a blue state. The party has no credibility to put forth an abundance agenda. It’s all theory.
Implement the abundance agenda somewhere NOW. I recommend a small state, with great natural beauty, still enjoying a slight in-migration of new residents, and perhaps with some forward thinking local talent. In ten years the party will have a success story to tell; safe streets, declining drug overdoses, improving student academic performance, minimal regulatory burden, declining homeless population, and a declining tax burden. You might select Maine.
Does ten years seem like a long time? Last time around it took 16 years, from 1976 to 1992, before the nation again elected a democrat president. A big, scary, impossible goal may pull the disparate factions of the party together.
I think his legacy will be far worse than that--similar to the legacies of other corrupt, authoritarian leaders on the social front, (the books to be written on his unprecedented memecoin/trump-phone/Qatari bribery/etc. grifting will be thick and fascinating) and then an object-lesson in what happens when you implement protectionism poorly on the economic front. The flow of people to red states was well underway before him, I don't think he'll be credited with it.
Agreed that the abundance route is the best path for Democrats to follow. I don't think it needs to be limited to one state--make it a general philosophy that Democratic governors, senators, etc. apply everywhere, and build a portfolio of success stories that spans small and large, highly urbanized and less urbanized states.
All I’m saying is start NOW somewhere, all the blue states if you like. But it is hard work and requires a goal oriented strategy. No rocket science, just find someplace that has reached the desired goal and do what they did. Miami has fewer homeless this year than it had 11 years ago. There’s a great place to start. Feel good is out, results are in. Time to put the abundance agenda into action.
Also, a minor irony: there *is* a charismatic Democratic leader with digital savvy and a centrist policy platform, who is willing to appear in right-tilted and MAGA-adjacent media spaces and hold his own, has a record of good governance in Middle America, and is a decorated military veteran. (the latter two being things Trump never had)
His name is Pete Buttigieg and unfortunately he will likely never gain enough support among key factions of the Democratic base to ever make a serious run for president.
First a small-city mayor, then Secretary of Transportation, where his only notable achievement was not going to East Palestine, Ohio after the catastrophic derailment. Trump did, Pete didn’t. Which played better in Peoria?
Ruy ís correct that no politician of political consequence is listening to the political messaging Ruy has been suggesting for the past couple of years. I discount Elon Musk's importance since forming a third political party is beyond his attention span.
"The BBB is remarkedly unpopular"? Your citation is just another Substack post, which states: "Recent polls have shown between 49% and 55% of Americans opposed to the package — although surveys also show few have heard much about the bill."
Come on. Between 49% and 55% of the population are Democrats, who oppose anything Trump does.
To be fair all of the mega-bills for the last 30 years have been unpopular, at least to those who pay attention. They are the way to get around partisan gridlock and are used by whichever group of partisans is in temporary control. Nancy Pelosi famously said "We have to pass the bill to find out what is in it." This is true of all of these monstrosities.
Why does it have to be this way? Why mega-bills?
Filibuster.
At least we would have a voting record, and it would be harder to stuff random items into it. Maybe I've just answered my own question...
These bills aren't written by Congresscritters or even their staffs. They are written by a shifting coalition of lobbyists that stuff everything they can into them. Someone noted that the bribes offered to Murkowski to get her vote were remarkedly similar to Obamacare. Remember the Cornhusker kickback.
I live in Nebraska and the senator who negotiated the Cornhusker Kickback, Ben Nelson, never ran for office again. He knew he would get clobbered, people here were very angry with him.
I liked the payments to whaling captains. I had to think hard about who in Alaska actually hunts whales.
I do not trust the polling at all.
Polling firms are in the confirmation bias business, working to buck up democrats and demoralize republicans.
100%. Remember the Iowa poll where Trump was losing by 3% to Kamala released shortly before the election? He ended up winning by 13 points.
No it's much worse than that. Two-thirds of the country do not affirmatively support it, and the views only dim, even amongst Republicans, when respondents know what it actually does.
" Quinnipiac University’s poll, released last week, showed 55% of voters opposing it, with *just 29% backing it*."
https://time.com/7299256/big-beautiful-bill-polling-takeaways/
"Six in ten Republicans have a favorable opinion of the bill, but this support is largely driven by supporters of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, while two-thirds of non-MAGA Republicans view the bill unfavorably. Among both Republicans and MAGA supporters, support drops at least 20 percentage points, with less than half of each group viewing the law favorably after hearing it would increase the country’s uninsured rate and decrease funding for local hospitals."
https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/kff-health-tracking-poll-views-of-the-one-big-beautiful-bill/
"By a 21-point margin, voters questioned in the most recent Fox News national poll opposed the federal budget legislation (38% favored vs. 59% opposed), which passed by the House of Representatives by just one vote last month."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-economic-pessimism-abates-slightly
Again., only a third know what was in it. Does anyone know what is in it even today? These polls are meaningless. I'm definitely not surprised by the numbers, would be interested in how many negative articles there have been vs. positive articles.
If you rephrased questions like "increase the country's uninsured rate" to "free healthcare for undocumented immigrants and healthy, able-bodied men and women who refuse to work, go to school, or volunteer in their communities" -- you might get different responses. Instead you get people in wheelchairs 'protesting' when they're losing nothing.
Lots of things to dislike in the BBB. Which is what gets polled. Especially the Democrat talking points. like closing rural hospitals. Most of them were closed a long time ago and the ones that survived got killed by the Affordable Care Act under Obama. If you're a rural hospital and you need to depend on people illegally claiming Medi-caid benefits, do you need to be open? I don't know, but I can guarantee you that many of those items would be viewed in a different light if the pollsters had linked them to massive tax liabilities coming up next year.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/polls-show-americans-largely-oppose-trumps-big-beautiful/story?id=123343071
No one even knows what is in it, what a stupid poll. Of course over 80% of Dems oppose. "Trump cures cancer" - 88% of Dems oppose, D.C. judge halts treatments.
of course we all knew what was in it, mostly: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/03/opinion/domestic-policy-bill-in-charts.html?searchResultPosition=1
or this:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/upshot/senate-republican-megabill.html
Of course, this means you would have to be willing to actually be looking for the facts of the matter
I don't have NYT sub, of course.
And why are lefties so snotty?
You could have found the stuff elsewhere if had really wanted to
Ruy Teixeira saved the best until last. I think Galen Druke writing in The New York Times got it about right.
For all these thoughtful and well-intentioned "how-to" advice columnists, which includes Teixeira, Democrats can only save themselves by halting the party's current absurd trajectory to the radical Left. Their notion that if you harbored misgivings about liberalism veering off course you are going to love our progressive Left socialism is, well, fatally flawed.
It also wouldn't hurt to remove the political blinders, as Texeira suggests, and seek common ground, instead of relentless confrontation, where common ground serves the nation's, and by extension, the party's best longer term interests.
In the current congressional fight over DJT's much GOP hyped and Democratic (and some Republicans') denigrated BBB: A lesson from the Clinton Administration. While President Clinton is correctly credited with having the only balanced budget in most living Americans' lifetimes, he did not achieve it by cutting spending. Instead, a booming economy fueled by the 1990s dot.com and further boosted by Clinton's wisdom in working with a GOP-controlled Congress, saw revenues grow faster than even Congress could spend.
This may be one reason that many Americans and most Republicans are willing to give Trump's BBB a chance where Democrats across the board resort only to sophomoric scare tactics and out-and-out lies.
When I was in Portland recently, I saw the following sign affixed to the digital cash register at a popular food shop: "Please do not assume the gender identity or pronouns of the people behind the counter."
Our Dems continue digging their hole.
Tell me, how would that assumption be expressed? The pronoun “you” is genderless. The gendered pronouns “he, she, it” are used in talking about a person, not to them —and even I don’t have the cojones to say in a salesclerk’s hearing, “That is, bar none, the ugliest female I’ve ever seen — if it’s really a female.”
It's easy: begin every interaction the way good Portlanders do at the start of meetings and on the first day of every class. Volunteer your preferred pronouns, and the person behind the counter will reflexively respond with theirs the way they've been socialized to do. Then you're off to the races without the risk of committing microaggressions.
Not in a millyun years.
Thanks for the Hernandez link about Abundance. I had much same reaction as her when reading about it. It was Edward Abbey who noted that mankind's oldest war is that between city and country. 36 years after his death, it is still going on. I had to look up when he died and it got me thinking about what place Abbey would have in the modern Democratic Party. He was, and is, an icon of the radical wing of the environmental movement and hated big ass trucks. Yet he was against illegal immigration for environmental reasons (and got accused of racism for that), pro-gun for revolutionary reasons and a champion of flyover country.
I'll know a resurgent Democratic Party is even possible when we start naming exactly which issues we should be more populist on, and which ones more centrist.
My vote is for more populist on anything economic, wages, housing, immigration, tariffs, health care. More centrist on anything social that involves forced vocabulary, sex, divisive grouping. Problem is we will come up with non answers or even worse solutions contrary to the 80% as we've been doing and call it a solution.
The big bugaboo lurking in the shadows is a deficit and debt so large it will force taxes on us and there aren't enough billionaires to keep the lights on.
As a tactical matter, I would prioritize things in your populist category which command support from populists on Left and Right like banking reform and antitrust.
Min wages and health care usually poll at 80%, not to the min I'd like but much more than now. Also not universal care but some sort of minimum care.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani is Bernie and AOC on steroids: a baneful influence whose rise will only embolden the dominant Democratic factions to double down on the very slogans and policies that alienated working-class voters and drove former Democratic regulars into Trump’s camp. His ascendancy is not a hopeful sign of generational renewal but a symptom of the party’s ideological bubble.
Excellent and insightful analysis, Ruy. The consensus among your readers so far this morning is your last suggestion: a Democratic version of Trump who can overwhelm the party’s current policy incoherence. In my view such a candidate would have to be charismatic, well-spoken and not afraid to speak plainly. Who might that be?
I agree that an anti-establishment Democratic candidate who is an economic populist and culturally moderate would be the party's strongest presidential candidate...especially in non-mega metro regions.
The best advice for the Democrats is in end of the article. Run against the party from both left and right. This is the ticket for populist fusion. Much better advice than trying to create a centrist party out of the remnants of the Establishment.
In 2020, the Democrats promised to repeal Trump's 2017 tax cuts, then left them in place. They promised to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hr and left it at $7.25. They promised to override state right-to-work laws with a federal law but did not. They promised "a 21st Century immigration system", which turned out to mean 12 million more illegal aliens. By 2024, the Democratic Party was reduced to telling the voters that the dog ate their homework.
AI think a simplified explanation of current political situation is this:
1. There is a political spin machine that has developed, and it is 90% Democrat strategy-focused. It relies on the mainstream corporate media and big tech that is 75% Democrat favoring.
2. Modern Democrats as individuals are people that are more emotionally wired (Haidt) and thus more susceptible to having their emotions exploited for political influence. So, Democrats are more prone to being manipulated by #1.
3. Republicans and most independents by personality and other filtering are more independent-minded and less prone to mass emotional manipulation. Due to the long list of so-called conspiracy theories claimed by the right and denied by the Democrats and #1, that have since proven to be true, there is also a massive amount of justified opinion that #1 lacks any credibility. However, Democrats still clutch their reliance on #1 probably because it feeds their emotional diet need.
This explains the problem Democrats are having. They are stuck on an emotional treadmill of their own making and refuse to get off. Meanwhile the rest of the electorate is more than exhausted from all that largely dishonest anger-causing crap spewing from the political spin machine.
The rest of the electorate is looking at a much more pragmatic agenda for solving national problems and moving the country foreword. The Democrats are not even engaged in talking about how they would solve the problems and move the country foreword in a different way - although there is some movement in that direction with respect to the YIMBY trend... although it is likely not real as it will run into the Democrat emotional reaction that backs their change aversion... which is 100% emotional - Democrats are stuck on resistance, ranting, raving, protesting, rioting, calling everyone names, negative branding, character assassination... and all pushed their beloved spin machine that the rest of the electorate rejects.
This is a comforting narrative, but it is dependent on the Trump mode of rhetoric, which is fundamentally A.) Don't bother with grounding anything you say in data, B.) assert what you would prefer to be true, and C.) claim anyone who criticizes it as a purveyor of "fake news". It is a powerful method of argumentation, but it is not sustainable in the long run, as you should have learned from Biden. At some point reality punctures the cocoon. "Our trade policies are making the nation great again" begins to ring hollow as the job market and the economy slides, "We're the party of fiscal responsibility and the champions of the working class" loses its currency when your party is authorizing massive tax giveaways to the wealthiest stratum of society and running up massive fiscal deficits while insisting rural hospitals and medicaid recipients take it in the neck. Likewise, "I am not a crook" isn't terribly convincing when people catch on that you're using presidential power to enrich yourself by selling memecoins, telephones, and golf courses in Qatar and Vietnam in return for 'the president's ear'.*
The constraints of reality are already beginning to reassert themselves--you'll see it first in the labor market before it bleeds into public sentiment. There will be no blaming the Dems this time for the travesties of the BBB, and no one's going to buy the whole "the Dems are the party of Big Tech" thing when you picked Elon Musk to help you 'reform' government spending, and you're literally making army colonels out of tech oligarchs. (https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/06/27/tech-executives-commissioned-senior-army-officers-wont-recuse-themselves-dod-business-dealings.html)
* - for all these, anyone perusing this comments section can see the cold terms of reality here:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-draws-global-crypto-investors-with-148-million-meme-coin-dinner-2025-05-22/
https://apnews.com/article/trump-cell-phone-mobile-made-america-3e03af70b6a9b161b522cc8055f1b25b
https://apnews.com/article/trump-qatar-deal-conflicts-saudi-arabia-emoluments-7379bee2e307d39bd43b534a05ae3207
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/vietnam-approves-1-5-billion-183500461.html?guccounter=2&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmVkZGl0LmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAHwqfkwn4FrNPqNyd6aH4lZAjMIBjSMmFXkDVNcDuo9ie3YBOm_Qx9mwP-iTh-04seLPo-otAGI7zF-ExiSWl1rY0zzzZB85BVXgoPAw6wMmSGzSe98U2Ac02uv4SHeJ9wTEN6z-0VzFtYkmlDLk5Gd7M8ie4IHXn5WsXvwcIuuU
The principal problem with your argument is that none of those evil things have come to pass. Despite expert opinion, the economy continues to grow. Despite gloomy prediction, unemployment is still trending downward. Despite the worrisome nature of the BBB, most people don’t seem to be worried.
Sure, there’s plenty of time for things to go pear-shaped before the end of Trump’s term, but before the midterms? Maybe, maybe not. If the stimulative effects of the BBB run ahead of the inflationary effects, Trump will keep his majorities in both houses of Congress — and Democrats may win the White House just as it becomes necessary to snatch the punch bowl away. Will they have the courage?
The blatant corruption has already come to pass—check the links above if you don’t believe it. If you mean the economy (which seems to be what you are referring to), there’s no doubt the burn is and will be slower than the stagflation of the 1970s. (Barrons had a good write-up about it: https://www.barrons.com/articles/inflation-and-unemployment-means-stagflation-lite-is-coming-69f16ead?st=hTWMsL). But the signs are already there. Private sector growth in the last quarter was negative according to the BLS, (all the growth recorded was essentially from rehiring government workers illegally released by DOGE) traffic at the ports has slowed to a trickle, and department stores are already reporting renewed price increases. Meanwhile the BBB and the drop in labor supply in tandem with the ongoing tariffs have stalled the Fed’s dovish turn. The slowdown likely won’t happen overnight, but the ball is already rolling, and there’s a reason every economist not named Stephen Miller has been telling Trump his trade policies are counterproductive. It’s kind of baked into the populist cake, honestly: populists always boast that they are above fiscal constraints, and most of them ultimately winds up being done in by said constraints.
No one seems to care about the corruption. As for the jobs rate, the BLS Current Employment Survey (hereinafter CES) says private sector employment went up by 344,000 over the last quarter, while government employment rose 105,000. Not too shabby.
Inflation over the past year was 2.4%, according to the CPI-U, May 2025, and was -0.1%,0.2%,and 0.1% for February thru May.
As for port activity, the Department of Transportation’s TEU report on container traffic (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit, so a twenty-foot container is one TEU, a forty-foot two TEUs, and so forth) shows a slight falloff since the first of the year, but I wouldn’t call four million TEUs a month “a trickle.”
Seeing what works and then replicating it in a form that can fit one's view of what one's party should be, is definitely a way forward. It is amazing to me, to see that the Progressives have moved so far, that they are like the aristocrats of the Old Regime or maybe the final supporters of the Romanov's. They are so sure of their positions and their righteousness, that anything that would change their view may not be worth achieving, even if it meant winning some races.
Like the Pieta for your standard.
I didn't see it mention, although I could have easily missed it, that defendants voted for Trump becasue he was the Anti Democrat. Especially when it came to policies. Disenfranchised Dem identity voters voted for Trump because they couldn't stand where the Dems were going to, or already at.
So if the cure for Dems is to just say no to Trump's policies, they have already lost that argument as of last Nov. Trump is being given credit for fulfilling his sated goals to get elected plus policies and stances. So what is being said is that Dems, need to have policies anti Trump but that s why they got defeated kn the first place.
Medicaid is part of Trump's promise to root out fraud waste and abuse.
He has a favorable rating by Republicans of 63%. which beats any current day past Republican president.
The $6000 deduction for SS recipients will help. (I wonder what the AARP thinks about that deduction?)
"It may seem like an audacious gambit, but a successful candidate has provided them a blueprint: Donald Trump…"
Trump performed a hostile takeover of the GOP. Who on the left would be bold/popular enough to run against their own party? Would this person also need household name recognition and fabulous wealth?
A key wrinkle not addressed: the Democrats are rudderless, but the GOP's only rudder is Trump. Those who have tried to ape his schtick have shown it can't be replicated--see: Joni Ernst in Iowa and "we all die anyway". They aren't thinking beyond him any more than the DNC. No one can articulate what a post-Trump GOP looks like. It is the same issue the Democrats faced with Obama.
At any rate, every fascist takeover has been marked, in its early stages, by an ineffectual opposition as much as by a mendacious, charismatic leader. This one is no different.
But such takeovers inevitably implode, and likewise this one will be no different. Unfortunately, history also suggests things can get pretty darn bad before an effective opposition emerges. Now that the strongman's policies are beginning to bear their rotten fruit--see: the latest jobs report--you can expect him to turn the repression up a notch. He's already got the ball rolling--attacks on the universities, marines in the streets of the cities, attempts to bring the media under his control, etc.--but the worst may be yet to come. And he and the GOP are clearly in "Lol nothing matters" mode, judging by the BBB. They believe they'll remain the "heroes of the working class" even as they kick the working class off Medicaid in order to give away more money to the oligarchs. We'll see if they're right.
Trump’s legacy will be prosperous, well run red states. Florida, Texas, and all the others will still be drawing from the blue states’ population. That trend has a very long way to go, with red states gaining Congressional representatives.
Probably somewhere down the road the democrat party will be bailed out by a dynamic politician with flexible policy positions. For the party to turn around sooner select, plan and turn around a blue state. The party has no credibility to put forth an abundance agenda. It’s all theory.
Implement the abundance agenda somewhere NOW. I recommend a small state, with great natural beauty, still enjoying a slight in-migration of new residents, and perhaps with some forward thinking local talent. In ten years the party will have a success story to tell; safe streets, declining drug overdoses, improving student academic performance, minimal regulatory burden, declining homeless population, and a declining tax burden. You might select Maine.
Does ten years seem like a long time? Last time around it took 16 years, from 1976 to 1992, before the nation again elected a democrat president. A big, scary, impossible goal may pull the disparate factions of the party together.
I think his legacy will be far worse than that--similar to the legacies of other corrupt, authoritarian leaders on the social front, (the books to be written on his unprecedented memecoin/trump-phone/Qatari bribery/etc. grifting will be thick and fascinating) and then an object-lesson in what happens when you implement protectionism poorly on the economic front. The flow of people to red states was well underway before him, I don't think he'll be credited with it.
Agreed that the abundance route is the best path for Democrats to follow. I don't think it needs to be limited to one state--make it a general philosophy that Democratic governors, senators, etc. apply everywhere, and build a portfolio of success stories that spans small and large, highly urbanized and less urbanized states.
All I’m saying is start NOW somewhere, all the blue states if you like. But it is hard work and requires a goal oriented strategy. No rocket science, just find someplace that has reached the desired goal and do what they did. Miami has fewer homeless this year than it had 11 years ago. There’s a great place to start. Feel good is out, results are in. Time to put the abundance agenda into action.
Also, a minor irony: there *is* a charismatic Democratic leader with digital savvy and a centrist policy platform, who is willing to appear in right-tilted and MAGA-adjacent media spaces and hold his own, has a record of good governance in Middle America, and is a decorated military veteran. (the latter two being things Trump never had)
His name is Pete Buttigieg and unfortunately he will likely never gain enough support among key factions of the Democratic base to ever make a serious run for president.
He is personally impressive and would make a good ambassador, but his stint at Transportation suggests he’s not a very effective executive.
First a small-city mayor, then Secretary of Transportation, where his only notable achievement was not going to East Palestine, Ohio after the catastrophic derailment. Trump did, Pete didn’t. Which played better in Peoria?
Exactly. It’s hard to imagine him as presidential material. There’s no “there” there.
Pollis will wipe him out in the gay lane. He has a 50 point IQ advantage
Correct. Ambassador yes, but nothing in the Executive branch where he actually has to run something.
Ruy ís correct that no politician of political consequence is listening to the political messaging Ruy has been suggesting for the past couple of years. I discount Elon Musk's importance since forming a third political party is beyond his attention span.