None of it worked, and Trump returned to the Oval Office in January 2025 with a stronger mandate. Now, if the polls prove correct and Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate, the question is whether they can finally achieve what they couldn’t pull off in those years. The answer is, likely, no: despite the unusually personal nature of his rule, Trump has, in fact, institutionalized his populist revolt.

An ambitious, energetic cadre of MAGA activists who’ve learned the ways of power stand between establishment Democrats and the dream of rolling back the revolution.

The desire for turning the clock back to 2014 is there, to be sure. Witness the recent remarks from Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.). Speaking earlier this month at the University of Chicago, the former CIA and Pentagon bureaucrat offered a revealing glimpse into the Democratic establishment’s plans for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. 

Asked how Democrats should use congressional power if they regain control after the midterms, Slotkin proposed pursuing a handful of high-profile investigations into Trump administration officials. The point, Slotkin explained, was not merely to hold officials accountable for alleged wrongdoing, but to send a stern message to the next generation of Trumpian staffers. She imagined a prospective staffer thinking to himself, as she put it, “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.” She concluded: “I want that deterrence message sent.”

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Following Republican backlash, Slotkin backtracked on her statement, insisting she meant investigations into corruption and illegal conduct. But her national-security background makes her explanation unconvincing. Deterrence has a specific meaning in her world. It involves convincing an adversary that the costs of an action outweigh its benefits. To operationalize this approach requires making painful examples of a handful of targets to influence a broader group. 

Slotkin’s comments ultimately underscored a growing sense of panic within the Democratic establishment, among its career politicians, unelected Washington bureaucrats, and networks of NGOs and corporate interests pushed out of power by the Trump administration. They fear that the MAGA revolution has the potential to become an enduring force in American politics that could outlast Trump himself. And, perhaps most sobering of all, Slotkin’s comments appear to indirectly acknowledge that establishment Democrats have no legitimate political means of stopping it.

And they aren’t wrong.

Trump and the MAGA movement represented a powerful rejection of the overgrowth and abuses associated with the postwar liberal order. The order’s large governing elite had grown increasingly detached from the American people as it consolidated more power across the federal bureaucracy, universities, media, and other major American institutions, using authority for purposes beyond the desires of the ordinary citizen. Undoing this order would require Trump to challenge the very institutions through which the center-Left, especially, had exercised power for decades. The center-Left establishment, in turn, understood the threat from the start of his first presidency.

Early on, Trump’s personality made it easy to cast him as a villain. Over the course of a decade, establishment forces built a powerful movement among Democratic voters, particularly older and college-educated female voters, centered on opposition to Trump’s crass and bombastic style. From this emerged a broader narrative portraying Trump as an authoritarian whose presidency threatened American democracy itself, increasingly conflating the establishment’s loss of political power with an attack on the nation’s democratic norms and institutions. 

To be sure, Trump at times went out of his way to vindicate this picture of him, most notably in his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election. Even so, the narrative failed to stop his movement. More importantly, the playbook is becoming increasingly unsuitable for a political struggle that must continue after he leaves office. 

With two years remaining in Trump’s presidency, establishment Democrats will need a new antagonist and a new pretext to continue clawing back institutional power. But the problem confronting them, as with much of the postwar Western liberal establishment, is twofold: they have lost their grasp on political reality, choosing instead to inhabit a powerful fiction of their own making; and consequently, they have become incapable of formulating a convincing strategy for returning to power through democratic means. The victories for Democrats expected in the upcoming midterms, after all, come not from the party’s establishment, but from insurgent forces in both its populist and radical Left. 

It is this dangerous combination of political desperation and an inability to accept her side’s dispossession by American voters that helps explain Slotkin’s apparent willingness to use the threat of investigations to intimidate and deter the next generation of conservatives from entering government.

Her desire to send a deterrence message may also reflect an understanding among Democrats that, unlike during his first administration, when Trump often found himself surrounded by officials who disagreed with his political goals, his second has brought into Washington a cohort of conservatives committed to translating MAGA’s ideological principles into government policy. Among them are Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, both of whom sharply criticized Trump during his first presidential campaign in 2016 but have since become leading figures in his administration and potential successors to his political movement. Their ambitions extend beyond serving the president. They are seeking to change how the federal government operates, who exercises authority within it, and how much power its agencies should possess. The significance of this development is not merely that Trump has found more loyal officials this time around, but that they are gaining the experience, building the networks, and developing the institutional knowledge necessary to continue the political project after he leaves office.

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Ultimately, what we are witnessing is not the crisis of American democracy feared by establishment Democrats, but the fading of the postwar liberal governing order and the administrative state that expanded under it for the better part of a century. Their unwillingness to recognize the distinction is perhaps understandable given how pervasive their authority became. For decades, the political and professional class operating within Washington’s institutions came to regard its own position as an essential feature of American government, rather than a temporary claim to political authority. The possibility that this arrangement might be challenged, or even permanently altered, is consequently difficult for them to separate from the idea of a constitutional or democratic crisis.

What makes their loss of power particularly painful for members of the establishment is that MAGA isn’t simply seeking to replace their class with another of equal size. Its ideological ambitions include reducing the federal bureaucracy, transferring authority away from administrative agencies back to the states, and concentrating greater federal decision-making power in the executive branch. 

The threat to the old establishment is therefore not simply another four or eight years out of power, but the possibility that many of the institutional mechanisms through which it exercised that power will no longer exist for it to reclaim. The Biden years offered a reminder of just how consequential control of that machinery could be. Having spent four years out of power, Democrats returned to Washington and pursued sweeping policies, from expansive Covid-era mandates and inflationary spending, to opening the southern border, and waging a proxy war against Russia through Ukraine. 

That same pattern appears to be repeating itself, with establishment Democrats showing an even greater urgency to return to power and a willingness to consider increasingly extraordinary measures to regain it. From Slotkin’s proposed “deterrence” campaign to calls to pack the Supreme Court and admit Puerto Rico as the 51st state, the lengths some Democrats are prepared to go to reclaim that authority are becoming increasingly apparent.

There is a final irony in the Democratic establishment’s predicament. It has become so consumed with recovering its former authority that it risks overlooking the socialist insurgency growing within its own party. The longer the old establishment goes on fighting for political order that is slipping further from its grasp, the more room it creates for a young generation of Democrats to remake the party in their own hard-Left image.

Have these red- and purplish-state Democrats found the winning message not just for today, but for 2028? What are they doing right — and what can the party learn from them? The short answer is that, with a few exceptions, these nominees are breaking with the party’s ultra-progressive messaging on cultural issues.

Consider Iowa, a state hard-hit by the bad trade deals of the past, alienated by the cultural Left, and now hurt economically by President Trump’s war in Iran. There, two self-described “prairie populists” are in close races. Barack Obama won Iowa in 2008 and 2012. Since then, it has been solidly red — aside from one candidate who became state auditor in 2022. 

But Iowa isn’t a conservative red state — it is what I call “populist red.” The state has areas that vote red, but aren’t traditional Republican strongholds the way, say, South Carolina is. Populist red states switched to Republican because Trump dropped the GOP’s neoliberal orthodoxies on immigration and trade. This, even as the Democrats began catering aggressively to college-educated professionals at the expense of their historic blue-collar constituencies. 

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That combination — a Republican president who could sound remarkably like the old labor Left and a Democratic Party that didn’t — proved disastrous for the Dems in places like Iowa. Rob Sand, the Democrat running for governor, seems to understand this dynamic.

Sand has broken with his party on several issues. He has advocated against “political agendas” in children’s schools, arguing instead that basic education fundamentals should be the central focus. He supports Iowa’s law barring biological males from competing against women and girls in sports. He is pro-gun. This might make him sound like a “moderate,” but his economic policies mirror those of his populist GOP opponent, who wants to regulate data centers and ban limited liability corporations from buying Iowan land. Sand combines economic-populist ideas with Left-coded ones that are also populist — raising the minimum wage and legalizing cannabis to cover the state’s looming fiscal crisis.

Like Rob Sand, the Democrats’ nominee for US Senate, Josh Turek, has also broken with the national party on the trans sports issue. But on gun rights, Turek toes the party line, and is on record for wanting to ban assault rifles. Other red-state Democrats like Amy Acton, running for governor in Ohio, and Annie Andrews, running for Senate in South Carolina, have broken with the national party on trans ideology. Both women have stated that biological boys can’t compete in girls’ sports and have come out against trans surgeries for minors. Both have also faced substantial backlash. The Ohio Democrats Progressive Caucus, for example, released a statement criticizing Acton’s remarks — even suggesting some may not vote or canvass for her. 

Annie Andrews’s ad, released this month, in which she came out against trans surgeries for minors, was reviled by progressives online. Cory Archibald, a powerful progressive activist, wrote: “Democrats who throw my trans siblings to the wolves will never get a dime out of me or a minute of my time.” Democrats like Acton, Sand, and now Andrews are paving the way for reining in the party’s excesses on issues like gender ideology, which proved consequential for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Progressive activists who criticize red-state Democrats for diverging on these issues often live on the coasts, inside blue bubbles, detached from the realities of working-class and rural areas; much of their success comes from electing progressive candidates in blue districts. 

These activists dismiss issues like biological boys in girls’ sports, insisting that it only affects a small minority of people and that Democrats should stop playing into “Right-wing hysteria.” They contend that Trump’s defining political ad against Kamala Harris was an economic argument and had very little to do with gender ideology. But by taking the wrong side of an 80-20 issue, Democrats undermine their authority on health care and the economy, too. Voters in red states see these views as “lacking common sense” across the board, and espousing them discredits Democrats on all other issues, even when the party may genuinely have better ideas than the other side. Trump’s poll numbers are in the gutter right now, but the Democrats’ brand tracks even lower. Winning the midterm elections on backlash to the affordability crisis and the Iran war alone is not a long-term strategy for Democratic politicians, especially those in red and purple states.

El-Sayed, the progressive firebrand running for the Senate in Michigan, is an exception to this trend. He’s solidly on the Left when it comes to economics. But unlike his counterparts in Iowa and Ohio, El-Sayed has remained unapologetically progressive on most cultural issues. In a Fox News interview, for example, he stuck to the progressive line on gender, and he has made little effort to critique 2020-style peak woke-ism. “Not all of those were bad ideas,” he told one interviewer, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America’s “abolitionist” positions on prisons, borders, and policing.

​For progressives, El-Sayed’s campaign is do-or-die. Winning in a purple state like Michigan will be a powerful sign that the progressive agenda is viable beyond deep-blue districts. Progressives will use this energy to advance their policy goals into the 2028 presidential contest, the same way they did in 2020, when 10 presidential candidates ran on AOC’s Green New Deal. AOC herself recently declared: “If Abdul can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere.” 

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Another (partial) exception is James Talarico, who is running a surprisingly competitive race for the Senate in Texas. Campaigning in far redder territory than El-Sayed’s Michigan, Talarico has been largely unwilling to separate himself from the national Democratic Party brand — saying he was against biological boys competing in girls’ sports if it is “unfair” but quickly reversing his position after receiving backlash from his own party. But even Talarico has come out against gender surgeries for minors.

Given the political climate, candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, Rob Sand, Josh Turek, and James Talarico have a real chance of flipping red states. But if the likes of El-Sayed and Talarico lose while Amy Acton and Rob Sand win in Iowa, it should be a glaring sign to the party that winning in areas they used to win but no longer do requires rethinking progressive culture stances. 

That is the central lesson. In my experience, progressive operatives are unlikely to heed it. In Texas, they will blame Elon Musk for Talarico’s loss. In Michigan, they whine that the establishment media sabotaged El-Sayed by focusing too much on Hasan Piker. They will blame everyone else before confronting their own unpopular ideology. On the other hand, as one Democratic strategist told me: “If Amy Acton, Josh Turek, and Rob Sand win — it proves you can tell LGBTQ activists to go take a hike.”

Yet a rude awakening awaits those who imagine that ending the Iran war or booting the GOP from power will end the inflation crisis. For much of this decade, inflation has been a problem for consumers and firms, and a salient political issue for voters. And although policy choices like the Iran war have no doubt played a role, today’s structural inflation has a much deeper cause: it is the unintended price of voters’ choice to end the model of neoliberal globalization that defined the post-Cold War period.

The process of deglobalization began under Trump I, accelerated during Covid and Biden’s tenure, and has become more destabilizing since Trump’s return to the Oval Office. It is greater and more challenging than any one policy agenda. High costs of living are thus likely to remain impervious to changes in policy or shifts in party power. 

Inflation is baked into deglobalization. Major revisions to global trade — whether stemming from war and sanctions, protectionist concerns, or efforts to combat climate change — entail major changes to production and distribution. These changes are far from seamless, since they involve finding new suppliers, retraining workers, or rebuilding factories. At each step, there is a risk of bottlenecks, shortages, and price spikes. 

Sweeping programs to reduce immigration likewise reverberate throughout the labor market, creating disruptions in critical sectors like home construction, food production, and health care. “Choke points” — a term that became ubiquitous at the height of the pandemic lockdowns — will continue to multiply, self-inflicted or not. Consequently, rising prices show no sign of abating, despite optimistic forecasts by the Federal Reserve that interest-rate hikes will bring inflation close to its 2% target by 2028.

Of course, the main driver of inflation at present is the cost of energy, brought on by US foreign policy — another dark irony, given Trump’s disdain for fuel alternatives and pledge of $2 gas. The high cost of energy affects not just home utilities and the commute to work, but nearly every system that furnishes the basic comforts to which Americans are accustomed. It also exacerbates the nationwide housing shortage: building becomes more expensive, as does borrowing (the latter prompting current owners to hold on to their current homes purchased at lower rates).

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But the Fed’s main method for taming inflation, rate hikes, afflicts workers and small businesses who have weathered messy tariffs and exploding health bills. As household debt continues to reach historic levels, higher interest rates mean heftier borrowing costs. Mortgages, car payments, and credit-card bills — all get more expensive to carry, so more of each paycheck goes to interest. Simply treading water in today’s economy will become more expensive, further diminishing purchasing power.

Yet a Democratic Congress is unlikely to generate a different and workable approach. The simple dynamic of divided government and mutual enmity with the White House is certainly one factor, as is the Fed’s insulated control over monetary policy. But there are deeper political reasons at play that inhibit Democrats from offering more than vague promises to crack down on price gougers, reclaim Congress’s authority over trade policy, and curb immigration raids.

For starters, the “easiest” solutions to inflation are the very policies that gave rise to Trumpian populism in the first place. That naturally has created some hesitation in the Democratic coalition to do more than attack Trump’s overreach and corruption. A return to “free trade,” for instance, would probably ease price pressures. Yet the bipartisan embrace of trade during the 1990s and early 2000s devastated America’s industrial heartlands, creating the working-class grievances that made Trump appear attractive beginning in 2015. While many former Trump supporters now bemoan his tariffs, this frustration doesn’t amount to a wholesale rejection of all protectionism — at least, not in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, where Democrats have suffered the most humbling setbacks.

The same predicament is true of immigration. Labor shortages are real, prompting mainstream economists and business lobbies to urge a more liberal approach. But it would be politically untenable to resume a laissez-faire border policy akin to Biden’s, which not only worsened Democrats’ standing with traditional blue-collar workers, but fueled defections to Trump in normally blue, immigrant-heavy cities and counties in 2024. A majority of voters may now recoil at the inhumane methods employed by Trump’s deportation regime. Yet the preference for a tighter border overall will prevail so long as immigration flows are associated not with lower costs and dynamic growth, but new burdens on housing, public services, the safety net, and social cohesion.

In both cases — trade and the border — Democrats are chary of defending the pre-Trump state of affairs. In an electoral environment that could see the first major upsets in red states in a generation, Democrats don’t want to alienate Right-leaning independents and other swing voters fed up with incumbent Republicans. Surprisingly competitive Farm Belt states, such as Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, are emblematic: their electorates are unhappy with ICE’s unaccountable conduct and the high prices generated by Trump’s tariffs, but they aren’t keen to return to globalization, either.

As if that weren’t complicated enough for Democrats, they also have their “Brahmin Left” base to worry about. Mainstream Democrats, after all, once loudly touted the benefits, cultural and economic, of globalization. They thus can’t afford to be seen by the liberal base as capitulating to any aspect of Trump’s restrictionist agenda. Democrats, accordingly, are reluctant to thread together a set of proposals that may irk “woke” progressives in the short-term, even if such policies would help set the stage for a commanding Democratic victory in 2028.

The Right, meanwhile, seems paralyzed by Trump’s succession of own goals on inflation. Retreating from either protectionism or hard-line immigration policies is a political no-go as long as Trump leads the party. That has forced vulnerable Republicans to defend his record, even though many privately regret shredding the neoliberal order that Reaganite Republicans had pursued before Trump. Republicans are also afraid to break from the White House’s accelerationist position on the AI build-out, the energy demands of which are inflationary and probably unconstrained by high interest rates.

Meanwhile, for all the fanfare over the past decade about the GOP becoming a vehicle for the “multiracial working class,” fealty to corporate profits remains an article of faith across the party. A few individual Republicans may gesture toward collaborating with Democrats to tackle the cost of living, but when push comes to shove, the legislation and congressional votes never actually materialize. Deviating from the conservative donor class on this point is punished severely.

Partisan myopia also forces both parties into positions that prolong inflation. Neither party, for example, is prepared to reform the immigration system in a manner that would promote non-inflationary growth while also prioritizing social stability. That would mean some combination of external and internal enforcement (anathema to many Democrats) and a willingness to grant citizenship to long-standing residents and welcome foreign workers to labor-starved sectors (a nonstarter for Republican hawks).

Nor can the two parties agree on which sectors warrant tailored industrial protection and which would benefit from integration with traditional allies in Europe and middle-income states in Asia and Latin America. Silicon Valley’s unrivaled political influence is another dilemma. Democrats increasingly talk tough about Big Tech but are hardly unanimous about how and to what extent it can and should be reined in.

In short: having largely spearheaded deglobalization, America is saddled with its inflationary consequences due to a party system that failed to anticipate them.

To be sure, the Democrats’ recently revived antitrust tradition is, in part, about lowering prices (on the theory that consolidation allows sellers to set the price). And there have also been more radical proposals for targeted price controls. But such reforms aren’t realistically in the offing for the remainder of Trump’s term. Thus, Democrats’ affordability agenda in 2026 is really a pledge to confront high prices if their party is also returned to the White House — in two years. 

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Yet even assuming Democrats take back the White House and put their backs into it, the affordability effort will still likely fall short of solving persistent, elevated inflation through the 2030s. Unstoppable structural changes in the world economy, even more than dysfunctional domestic politics, present the biggest challenge to an inflation-weary America. Multipolarity — the rise of multiple nodes of global power — all but assures more unpredictable alliances and more exposed supply chains, with corresponding impacts on prices. And although the dollar’s hegemony shows no sign of collapsing in the near term, the prospect of “de-dollarization” is no longer quite so remote. But even if that challenge to the world’s reserve currency is forestalled, the average American consumer may nevertheless lose his place atop a global food chain that assured him a “comfortable lifestyle” even as his wages flatlined.

The peak years of neoliberal globalization — from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the 2008 financial crisis — were predicated on a rosy formula that assumed ever-deepening economic integration between advanced economies and rapidly industrializing ones like China. Price stability could be achieved through anemic wage growth in the Global North and labor repression in the Global South; diversified supply chains with leaps in logistics that enabled “just-in-time” production and shipping; and unprecedented economies of scale that would seemingly keep essentials affordable even as massive conglomerates increased their market share (and thus their power to set prices as they saw fit).

That formula rested on many faulty assumptions, not least the notion that America would do everything possible to perpetuate the liberal international system it had constructed since World War II. Instead, Washington has instigated the system’s rupture. The arrangements that underpinned the unofficial bargain between America’s business elites and the rest of society — above all, the juggernaut trade relationship known as “Chimerica” — have been hammered and fractured by Trump without consideration of America’s underlying socioeconomic problems. Put another way: Trump gleefully broke Chimerica, without giving much thought to problems like infrastructure, workforce training, health costs, corporate power, and regional development.

Rapprochement with Beijing by either political party won’t inherently undo the damage. Worse, America’s image as a declining, volatile hegemon has led other countries to imagine a development path unyoked from the appetites and aspirations of American consumers. On top of more wars, more energy shocks, and more extreme weather events, that dynamic will make Trump’s inaugural boast of a “new golden age” all the more disconnected from the realities of the global economy and America’s fading stature within it.

Democrats are delighting in the possibility that Trump’s hubris may have finally caught up with him. Still, those who are alert to the broader fragmentation of the world economy should beware an empty triumphalism. Inflation is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

To get a sense for this, consider the fates of Taylor Lorenz, Boots Riley, and Zohran Mamdani: three figures with large footprints on the Left who’ve recently come to realize that hell is other Leftists, to adapt the famous line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit.

Lorenz, a journalist-influencer hybrid — a kind of reverse Joe Rogan for people who never took their masks off — championed extreme Covid lockdowns; fangirled after Luigi Mangione, the alleged insurance-boss assassin; and left The Washington Post after the paper investigated her for sharing an Instagram post calling then-President Joe Biden a war criminal. Filmmaker and musician Riley’s latest movie, I Love Boosters, is such a work of agitprop that even an outlet called Communist Revolution described as “communist propaganda” — and “weak sauce” at that. Mamdani, of course, is the self-avowed democratic socialist governing America’s largest city. None of the three, in short, could plausibly be mistaken for a centrist.

Yet all three have been hauled before the People’s Court of Posting: a stateless, leaderless online tribunal whose function is to prosecute everyone — no matter how radical — for insufficient radicalism, invariably ruling that lo, the accused comes up short. It’s more proof that whatever Stephen Miller is currently cooking up to do to “radical-Left terrorism” from inside the Trump administration, it isn’t, right now, the most effective force degrading the American Left. The Left is doing that to itself.

In July, Lorenz claimed that “33,000 people are canceling me” after she criticized Minnesota’s AI nudification law, which prohibits the use of technology for faking sexual images of people. This week, she drew more backlash after discussing how she uses generative AI to work more productively. Reasonable people can debate whether journalists should use such tools, but posters in a Left-leaning subreddit called her “deeply unwell mentally” or claimed, “either she’s in a psychosis, or she’s been bought.” Lorenz then complained that the online Left spends its time “dog-piling everyone who doesn’t comport with their extremely narrow social media-driven worldview,” calling the culture “absolutely deranged” and its practitioners guilty of “no moral consistency on any level” and a willingness to “lie all day about anyone they don’t like.”

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Her realization has impeccable comic timing. It was only last year, when Mamdani rode the subway without a mask during his mayoral campaign, that she accused “a lot of DSA leftists” of hating disabled people, women and LGBTQ people — an extraordinary moral indictment to build out of one politician’s naked face, especially years after universal masking had ceased to be a remotely plausible public policy. Now she has discovered the downside of ruthless purity testing: administer it often enough and, eventually, somebody administers it to you.

Just ask Boots Riley, who has been an outspoken communist since before many of his ultra-Left online trolls were born. He fronted the radical hip-hop group The Coup through the Clinton years and spent a memorable evening on Politically Incorrect a quarter-century ago patiently explaining Marxism to a smirking Bill Maher. When a clip of that appearance resurfaced this week, Riley observed that the old Right-wing gotcha — if you make money under capitalism while opposing capitalism, you are a hypocrite — was now being repeated by “supposed Left online people.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. In one discussion of Riley’s films, a critic argued that he “does not have to make a movie that costs 20 million dollars” — a reference to I Love Boosters — if he really opposes capitalism, dismissed his work as a “million-dollar vanity project funded by the billionaires [Riley] claim[s] to hate,” and concluded that anyone who repeatedly makes choices that perpetuate capitalism is, whatever he calls himself, a capitalist.

This is a wonderfully efficient definition of capitalism, because it makes every person currently alive guilty of it. If Riley proves that longevity confers no immunity from such intramural attacks, Mamdani demonstrates that neither does victory. Conservatives regularly roast the New York City mayor, but some of the heaviest fire still comes from socialists for whom gaining power represents less a triumph than a dangerous ideological compromise.

A recent feature essay in The Drift on New York’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is a nuanced account of a socialist organization’s growing pains in power. But it also doubles as a field guide to how the ultra-Left cannibalizes its own successes.

NYC-DSA boasts 15,000 members and genuine victories: a Big Apple mayor elected from among their own ranks, a rent freeze instituted, and a near-sweep by DSA candidates in the June Democratic primaries. Even so, as French documents, much of the chapter’s energy still gets consumed by warfare waged “in Signal chats, in polemics posted on niche websites, and, inevitably, on X.”

A leadership reshuffle got branded, seriously, a “coup.” A dispute over home-health policy occasioned comparisons to slavery. A national leader of the dominant Groundwork caucus dismissed his internal critics with a line that deserves to be engraved somewhere, describing “an antagonism that attracts the cynical, the burnt-out, the oppositionally defiant, and the unsatisfiable” — arguably the most accurate description of Left Twitter ever.

DSA’s own Liberation Caucus, a — sigh — Marxist-Leninist-Maoist faction operating inside the very organization that helped elect him, published one member’s description of Mamdani as “ZIOhran”; another called him “a traitor and an opportunist” over his perceived moderation on policing and Israel. The Trotskyist paper Workers Vanguard ran a piece headlined, with admirable bluntness, “Want Socialism? Fight Mamdani!,” accusing the mayor of backing “scabherder” Gov. Kathy Hochul during a recent nurses’ strike, and closing with: “Expel Mamdani! Socialists stand with the workers and oppressed, not scabherders and pigs!”

This isn’t an argument against criticizing politicians, artists, or journalists merely because they belong to the same broad political family. A movement that can’t criticize its leaders soon becomes a fan club. The problem is what happens when every honest disagreement over tactics, language, art, or policy becomes a referendum on personal character. The defendant is never merely mistaken but corrupt; never simply compromised but bought; never insufficiently radical but secretly reactionary. The overriding impulse is the avoidance of contamination.

I have experienced the smaller, less glamorous version of this as someone who writes occasionally for Jacobin, a premier Left outlet. Of course, no journalist is above criticism, but nothing matches the venom my own occasional writing generates from my fellow progressives. I’ve been called fascist, racist, Zionist, reactionary, and, most damningly of all in certain corners of the internet, a Jacobin writer. The abuse rarely engages with anything I have actually written, and it rarely tries to persuade anyone; it’s ambient, repetitive and exhausting. It’s a kind of ideological carbon monoxide that doesn’t kill anyone but saps and smothers energy and genuine critical thought.

It’s the kind of noxious atmosphere that helps explain why Bluesky is dying. Conceived as the progressive rescue boat from Elon Musk’s X, it increasingly resembles a lifeboat whose passengers spend their days deciding whom they will cannibalize first. Slate conceded that “the best Bluesky can replicate is a hellish, inescapable, never-ending version of 2016.” By June, the platform’s mobile application commanded 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide, a 27% tumble from its previous year, even as the total number of active participants has withered by over 50% since the high-water mark following the election.

The platform did not invent the Left’s appetite for schism, but it has distilled it into something close to its purest form: a politics conducted almost entirely through denunciation, in which the easiest way to demonstrate your virtue is to expose someone else’s insufficient supply. That may provide a brief dopamine hit, but it cannot build a durable coalition. Any movement large enough to matter will necessarily contain hypocrites, eccentrics, sell-outs, moderates and people who sometimes say stupid things online. It will also contain people who disagree.

Nor is this an exclusively American disease. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana launched Your Party last year amid hundreds of thousands of expressions of interest from voters desperate for an alternative to Labour. A year later, thanks to vicious infighting, Your Party became No One’s Party. The Greens initially appeared to be the beneficiaries, but they, too, have already demonstrated the Left’s remarkable capacity to turn political momentum into an internal disciplinary hearing.

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To be fair, the far Right suffers from a nearly identical affliction. MAGA’s online fringe hunts RINOs (“Republicans in Name Only”), fantasizes about Maoist-style purges of liberal institutions, and insists that Nazi jokes remain jokes even as the jokers enter Republican politics and win jobs in the administration. Extremely online politics, Left and Right alike, increasingly resembles two rival cults, each certain the other represents the real existential threat, while both spend the overwhelming majority of their energy excommunicating their own. The American far-Right influencer Laura Loomer is now claiming credit for Friday’s ICE deportation of the British far-Right influencer Milo Yiannopoulos — which is taking intra-party cancel culture to a wild new level.

None of which means Stephen Miller’s threats to progressives are empty theater. The White House consigliere really did vow, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September, to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” a “vast domestic terror movement.” It is worth remembering, too, as that grim anniversary approaches, that eight Prairieland defendants were sentenced to a combined 450 years in federal prison after an anti-ICE protest turned violent. An actual crackdown is afoot, and it deserves to be taken seriously by anyone who cherishes civil liberties.

But if the Trumpians were smart, they would turn their detention centers into a convention of likeminded radicals with free Wi-Fi. What would ensue would be not unlike Sartre in No Exit, in which three sinners are put in a locked room waiting for the instruments of torture, only to realize none was coming; they themselves were each other’s affliction. So it goes for the likes of Lorenz, Riley, and Mamdani.

El-Sayed, a former public-health official, managed it, clinching (as of this writing) 48.5% of ballots, against 47.5% for his centrist opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. The narrow margin might prompt Democratic-establishment crowing about El-Sayed’s chances in the general. But consider that AIPAC and other outside groups poured some $60 million into Stevens’s campaign, with more than half of that amount coming from the political action committee of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby — making this the most expensive Democratic primary ever. Outside groups backing El-Sayed, by contrast, only managed fewer than $5 million. 

Sixty million bucks couldn’t buy a Democratic primary. We have, in every sense, entered a new era.

Stevens was the sort of candidate who, not long ago, breezed to the nomination in a statewide contest. When Mallory McMorrow, the third Democrat in the running, dropped out, it was assumed Stevens could consolidate the anti-El-Sayed vote. This was how centrists almost always beat the Left, after all. In 2020, Bernie Sanders was doomed when Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke dropped out of the primary, endorsing Joe Biden. Even when Leftists were strong, they were factional candidates, doomed to electoral ceilings. Sanders couldn’t get more votes than Biden or Hillary Clinton. The Left had to content itself with small-scale victories, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knocking off Joe Crowley in a single New York House district.

But now we have a Left surge of a kind not seen since the late 1960s and early ’70s. Back then, Left-leaning Democrats won primaries on the strength of their full-throated opposition to the Vietnam War. Just so, today it’s Israel-critical Democrats who are being rewarded for aligning the party with popular sentiment. And popular sentiment is clear: the Jewish state is now viewed unfavorably by nearly all major demographic groups (save for Republicans over age 50).

El-Sayed, like Mamdani, is a fierce critic of Israel. Both shattered taboos around what could be said about the Jewish state. AIPAC knew what was at stake, hence its unprecedented spending. The state’s Democratic establishment, led by outgoing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and outgoing Sen. Gary Peters, likewise lent its backing to Stevens. Before the mid-2020s, that sort of endorsement power alone would have just about ended any statewide primary.

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AOC’s Leftist headache

By ross barkan

Progressives, of course, can’t claim total victory. The margin was uncomfortably tight, and El-Sayed must survive the general election come November. But here, too, the deck is stacked. Moderates get to lose elections all the time, but if the Left blows a race to a Republican, the alarm bells are heard ringing all across the country. It’s the same way with governance: a centrist like Eric Adams, the former Gotham mayor, can depart City Hall in utter disgrace. But Mamdani, the democratic socialist, must run the city without a whiff of scandal; the slightest failure on his part (supposedly) indicts the entire American Left. 

What makes El-Sayed’s victory over Stevens most intriguing, though, is that progressives will finally be able to test a thesis they’ve long entertained: namely, that their brand of politics — populist on economics but still socially liberal — can win in a battleground state. Progressives, typically, haven’t won primaries where a strong Republican is waiting in the wings. If El-Sayed can win Michigan, one of the most pivotal states in the country, he will be a true national star.

For now, at least, the progressive Left has been able to leave its cultural baggage behind. El-Sayed can’t be credibly called anti-woke, but he might be, like Mamdani, post-woke. Mamdani abandoned his earlier calls to defund the police. He does not, like the Democratic Socialists of America and 2010s progressives, support an open border. 

El-Sayed has trod a similar path. With his bulging muscles and willingness to mix it up on the podcast circuit and alternative online channels, he codes as the sort of pol who might be able to solve the Democrats’ problem with woke-weary young men. He possesses a certain machismo that, for Leftists, is a more recent phenomenon. And he speaks forthrightly to the cultural crises of young men, telling UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari that Leftists should address the structural causes behind male malaise — issues like online gambling and porn addiction — rather than write off men as “toxic.” Whether this is enough to convince young men to vote Democratic again nationally remains to be seen.

The bigger story, though, is the pro-Palestine current running through the party, and the generational shift well under way that will eventually tug top Democrats away from Israel. Like all small-d democratic groups, they eventually respond to their voters, and this is clearly what their voters want. Social media were rife with videos mocking Stevens for her over-the-top devotion to the Jewish state — “Israel comes to me in my dreams” — and the AIPAC largesse floating her campaign. 

There was her voice, too, almost a peculiar parody of the Michigander accent — I’ve spent a great amount of time in the state and never heard anyone speak that way — that had many online critics pulling up old clips of Chris Farley. Were these attacks sexist? Maybe. But they came from as many young women as young men. Swaggering El-Sayed was the one they wanted.

The pundit class contends that El-Sayed is a terrible bet in the general election against the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers. Whether they have a point or not, we will find out soon enough. What the Michigan primary proved was that Democratic voters are no longer compelled by that pitch. They once were; the entire premise of Biden’s 2020 campaign was his contention that only he could defeat Trump. Now the electorate is restless. They saw the Democratic failures of 2016 and 2024. They are weary and angry about living, again, under the yoke of Trump. When a Democratic politician or star operative lectures them about electability, they tune out. Wasn’t the failed reality-TV star supposed to be unelectable? Then he won — and won again. Stevens could talk all day and night about how she flipped a Republican seat. Very few people cared.

The harsh reality for the Democratic establishment is that they have, like Republicans in 2016, lost their grip on the party. They have no one but themselves to blame. In 2024, Michigan was the home of the Uncommitted movement: progressives who refused to fall behind Biden and Kamala Harris over the horrors unfolding in Gaza. Why would Stevens, AIPAC’s foot soldier, be the right candidate for 2026 in Michigan of all places, with its sizable Arab and Muslim population? 

Now that it has been proved that AIPAC cannot buy a Democratic primary, the group’s influence on Democratic politics, already waning, will collapse sharply. Even if El-Sayed loses in November, there won’t be a lane for Israel hawks in future Democratic primaries, and they will migrate fully to the GOP (where, it must be noted, a warm embrace isn’t certain to greet them). 

Organic support for Israel is vanishing, and the vast reserves of cash can’t bring it back. Stevens herself once won a House primary bludgeoning a progressive Jewish Democrat, Andy Levin, whom Israel hawks believed was insufficiently supportive of the Jewish state. Now she is finished. At best, she will be a footnote: one of the very last pure AIPAC Democrats. Like the Rockefeller Republicans of old, she and her cause will fade into history.

In the context of the case itself, the fact that black voters comprise roughly a third of Louisiana’s population, the court held, doesn’t automatically require the state to redraw its congressional map to give that group proportional representation in a third of its six congressional seats. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito reasoned that Section 2 remedies require a clear showing of racial animus — “a strong inference that the state intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.”

Mainstream liberal headlines greeted the ruling as another cruel blow to democracy, another attack on racial minorities, another dark day in civil-rights history. NAACP President Derrick Johnson declared it “a major setback for our nation that threatens to erode the hard-won victories we’ve fought, bled, and died for.” Former President Barack Obama warned that the decision frees “state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities — so long as they do it under the guise of ‘partisanship’ rather than explicit ‘racial bias.’” Liberal Justice Elena Kagan stood to read her dissent aloud from the bench, a rare gesture used to underscore her strong disagreement with her colleagues.

These liberal stalwarts aren’t entirely wrong that something significant has ended. But what has ended isn’t the protection of minority voting rights. What has ended is a decades-long political strategy that used the moral language of civil rights to accomplish something the civil-rights movement never actually intended: the expansion of deliberate racial sorting of American voters into engineered electoral districts designed to favor the Democratic Party.

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Anti-Trump judges sparked a legal crisis

By josh hammer

The concept of “using race to fix race” is a pillar of the legal architecture that arose from the 1960s civil-rights era: affirmative action in college admissions and employment being its most explicit and controversial examples. But “using race to fix race” was never understood to be a feature of the Voting Rights Act. Congress designed the VRA to stop state governments from excluding minorities from the ballot box — not to mandate racially engineered outcomes.

But decades after the civil-rights movement, something shifted in how Democratic-aligned rights groups understood the VRA. The law stopped being primarily a shield against racial discrimination and became a sword to expand minority political power by compelling states to draw new districts. Strangely shaped maps that snaked across counties and clustered racial minorities into artificial majorities were no longer per se bad. They could be a useful tool, so long they benefited Democrats. (To justify their gerrymandering, liberal civil-rights litigation recasts residential racial integration — one of the genuine achievements of the post-civil-rights era — as intentional “vote dilution,” requiring the judicial remedy of clustering racial groups into artificially drawn maps.)

That strategy accelerated after the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Section 5 provision of the VRA that had required states with a history of discrimination to get federal preapproval before changing their election rules. Stripped of that powerful administrative lever, liberal groups turned to Section 2, the VRA’s general anti-discrimination provision, to litigate similar outcomes through the courts.

Over the following decade, a web of organizations — the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU Voting Rights Project, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, LatinoJustice, and a constellation of Democratic-aligned law firms led by the Elias Law Group — went into action. They turned to a 1986 Supreme Court precedent to advance the theory that Section 2 requires the creation of majority-minority districts wherever the demographic math could be made to support one. 

With this logic, these groups won federal court orders in dozens of redistricting cases compelling governments to redraw maps at every level, from school boards in Alabama to statehouses in North Dakota and Mississippi. The targets expanded with each cycle: first majority-black districts, then majority-Latino, then Native American, and, most ambitiously, “coalition districts” combining black, Latino, and Asian voters into a single legally protected class.

The deeper problem with this strategy is one mainstream coverage consistently refuses to examine. Racial clustering isn’t an expression of civil rights. Deliberately drawing maps that concentrate people by race is a form of segregation, regardless of the political justification. It was wrong when white Southern legislators used it to dilute Black voting power in the 1960s. It is wrong when liberal lawyers use it to manufacture safe Democratic seats today. 

The principle doesn’t change based on who draws the map.

What the Democratic civil-rights industrial complex built was, at its core, a system that treated black, Latino, and Asian voters not as individual citizens with rights to be protected, but as demographic raw material to be sorted and clustered to the party’s benefit. In 2024, not a single Republican won a majority-minority district anywhere in the country. Instead, these were guaranteed seats for Democrats with no competition, no accountability, and no reason for an elected Democratic representative to do anything other than perform the expected cultural politics of their carefully created constituency. 

The question worth asking, which the Democratic Party has thus far avoided: what did those guaranteed seats deliver for the racial minority communities they were designed to represent? The most Democratic-run cities in America, anchored by these safe majority-minority districts, are also among the most expensive, most unequal, and most poorly managed. Guaranteed seats for Democrats didn’t produce good government. Instead, they set a permanent stage for racial grievance politics that reliably generated fundraising and turnout while delivering remarkably little in the way of material improvement for these captive constituents. 

The new Callais ruling curtails the ambitions of the liberal coastal elites who control the Democratic Party and its various legal and advocacy apparatuses from expanding this captive electoral model through Section 2 of the VRA. There will be short-term costs, to be sure. Republican state legislatures will redraw maps. Some black and Latino Democratic incumbents will face genuinely competitive races for the first time. 

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The civil-rights movement failed

By vincent lloyd

But discomfort for a political party and injustice for a minority racial group aren’t the same thing. Minority voters dispersed into competitive districts produce something the majority-minority district system never could: real pressure on candidates of both parties to earn those votes. In the long-term, the GOP will have to compete for black voters in Georgia, Latino voters in Texas, and working-class minority voters across the South. This is a better arrangement than one that would simply corral those voters into packed Democratic districts. It also allows Republicans the time and opportunity to build persuadable platforms to absorb the coming demographic wave of post-1960s naturalized Americans voters and their offspring, who will play an increasingly important role in future elections.

As for the Democrats, the high court has effectively curtailed the efforts of party operatives to use the VRA to lock in more racial minorities in state redistricting following every US Census. This is a decidedly good thing, because majority-minority districts for decades have left black and Latino voters captured by one party with nowhere else to go. The result was a party that allowed itself to believe that symbolic representation could replace actual representation; and that racial-justice rhetoric could be substituted for material economic results. 

For many observers, it has been obvious for some time that the long-term Democratic strategy was to use Section 2 to create more majority-minority maps, eventually allowing the “coalition district” concept to be held constitutional to cluster two or more racial minority groups to create new districts as the demographics of the United States reflect not just greater number of Hispanic and black voters, but increasing numbers of Asian immigrants.

Long term, Callais is about something larger than redistricting. For more than 60 years, since the passage of the major civil-rights legislation, race became the organizing logic of Democratic electoral strategy because racial sorting was electorally useful. It filled campaign coffers, it guaranteed political seats, and it gave consultants and lawyers and civil-rights organizations a lucrative and powerful position near the center of the party’s operation. The latest court ruling sets the upper limits of the legal architecture the party sought to expand to capture an increasingly diverse electorate. Now if the Democrats want new voters, they will have to earn them.

I thrilled to that haunting, mechanical roar. As a boy, I had been promised a future of technological marvels; here was their fulfillment. I thrilled also to images of missile stockpiles exploding and of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters vanishing in plumes of bilious smoke. I was happy to hear of Ayatollah Khamenei’s demise; and I enjoyed seeing the faces of  mullahs and Iranian military commanders crossed out by red Xs in US and Israeli online propaganda. 

There isn’t a little boy on the planet who doesn’t light up at the idea of killing the bad guys. Nor is there a man in whom something of that little boy — and his moral clarity — doesn’t live on. 

A vocal, politically diverse cohort of Americans, however, have betrayed that healthy impulse. When the ayatollah was killed, The New York Times wistfully played down his reign of terror, while the “globalize the intifada” crowd held vigils to mourn him. Rather than express relief at the regime’s decapitation, most elected Democrats have framed the joint Israeli-US campaign as an illegal, unprovoked act of aggression. Legacy media understated our successes and catastrophized missteps. The Economist, in an article headlined “Advantage Iran,” declares that “a month of bombing has achieved nothing.” Across social media, partisans of what Josh Hammer calls the “Retard Right” — dabblers in low-IQ anti-Semitic conspiracism, such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes — reinforce this narrative. They boost pro-Iran propaganda that wildly overstates the success of Iranian missile attacks on American bases and Israeli cities, while minimizing the extent of the damage the campaign has wrought on Iran’s military.

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The terror of the aged woman

By Justin Lee

The prevailing tone has not been measured, morally serious criticism of our objectives (or lack thereof) or the means chosen to achieve them, but of glee at the prospect of Trump’s — and thus America’s — failure. For Democrats, that glee anticipates a bloodbath for the GOP in the November midterms, and a third round of impeachment theater in 2027. The Retard Right is eager to see the same thing, for a different reason: they want to punish Trump for being, in their fevered telling, Benjamin Netanyahu’s servant.

This trash discourse is stealing oxygen from the conversations that matter. 

I write this as a pacifist and a Christian, who has reluctantly come to adopt the theory of the just war — in a world sometimes so fallen that all of our options are tainted with evil, we must pursue what good we can, knowing that we will ask God’s forgiveness later. In such a situation, intransigent pacifism devolves into sentimental moralism. I believe this is where we find ourselves with Iran; as a consequence, my pacifism must yield to the calculus of just-war theory.

We’ve known for some time that Iran, if it so chooses, could in a few weeks enrich enough weapons-grade uranium for up to 16 compact nuclear warheads. But the stakes have been much higher than the publicly known. Last week, when the IRGC launched two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that houses a joint US-UK military base, the world learned that Iran is capable of striking London. And setting aside the specter of nuclear weapons, as a modern, industrialized country, Iran also possesses enough cesium-137 and cobalt-60 to make any number of dirty bombs, which could be packaged into missiles capable of striking most European capitals. As an erratic regime sworn to destroy the West, this makes it an imminent threat to NATO.

To pass just-war muster, among other criteria, a war must be pursued as a last resort. But as the theologian Oliver O’Donovan explains in The Just War Revisited, “the ‘last’ resort is bounded by the last practicable moment for effective action.” On Feb. 24, Reuters reported that Tehran was in the process of acquiring supersonic anti-ship missiles from China. Had it done so before Israel and the United States attacked, the cost of engagement would have soared astronomically. Although the Trump administration has done a poor job communicating this to the American people, it does appear that we chose to strike just as the window for effective action was set to close. 

Thus far, our actions have been very effective. The war with Iran has been more one-sided than perhaps any large-scale conflict in history, with America and Israel inflicting losses on the enemy in wild disproportion to what we’ve suffered ourselves. Khamenei and more than 40 of Iran’s top-ranking officials have been killed in air strikes, as have most of the Assembly of Experts tasked with selecting his successor. By destroying Iran’s navy and neutralizing up to 90% of its ballistic capabilities, Washington has already ended Tehran’s ability to project power in the Middle East, and we’re on track to scuttle what remains of the country’s nuclear ambitions. 

What’s more, China and Russia had outfitted Iran with their most advanced defense technology, hoping that their Iranian proxy would keep Uncle Sam indefinitely bogged down in the Middle East, and thus ill-equipped to fight on other fronts. But this technology has proved utterly useless against the US military, both in Iran and Venezuela, signaling to Beijing that its ambitions in the South China Sea could be much costlier than anticipated.

These are substantive gains, and perhaps the Trump administration — notwithstanding its inconsistent messaging — will judge them sufficient. But a more decisive victory involving regime change (or at least regime moderation) is conceivable. Were that to occur, America would have direct influence over one-seventh of China’s oil imports and the ability to impede its Belt and Road Initiative, giving us plenty of leverage to dissuade it from invading Taiwan. 

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Iranian strategist: no ceasefire on our agenda

By Sohrab Ahmari

It is conceivable — yet the public discourse fails to conceive of it. We fail to celebrate our military victories; we show no pride for our military capacities; and we barely honor the fighting spirit of the men and women who serve. When the war began, the Twelver Shia death cult that controls Iran had just murdered thousands of its own citizens for protesting the regime’s abuses — yet many among us identify America as the bad guy. 

My feelings are the opposite: while I mourn the loss of innocent lives and remain wary of the war becoming protracted — especially as President Trump weighs the possibility of sending in ground troops to secure Iran’s uranium — I am also optimistic. After nearly five decades of indulging the Iranian regime’s mayhem, we have dealt it a measure of justice, and thwarted its apocalyptic aspirations. And the geopolitical scales are rebalancing in a way that may yet produce justice on an even grander scale.

A nation’s character is judged by whether it is willing to sacrifice for what it deems to be a greater good, and whether it can take pride in its own strength and do the work necessary to maintain it. There is nothing virtuous about a weak man who chooses not to fight. His choice hardly counts as one. But a strong man trained in combat who chooses peace has exercised judgment of real moral weight. These are the qualities that I hope we rediscover, and learn to nurture in the coming months. While it may be hard to see today, amid the hysteria of its opponents, Trump’s Iran war may just bring about such a transformation.

Start with the first trend. Democratic politicians have come to understand that the base of the party is deserting the Jewish state. The atrocities in Gaza during the war that followed the Oct. 7 attacks resulted in a civilian death toll that has been too much to stomach for anyone on the Left — and for an many on the Right, as well, not least Tucker Carlson. 

Now the Israel consensus in the United States, once unified across the two major political parties, has been shattered by Trump’s war in Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relentlessly promoted war; Trump was all too happy to oblige; and as a result, America is mired in a global catastrophe that has been, at least in part, Israel’s making. The poll numbers are disastrous: almost 60% of Democrats and half of independents view Israel negatively, according to an NBC News poll released last week. This is a sharp increase from a few years ago, and it’s highly unlikely that the Jewish state will win back many of these voters, since the young hate the Zionist mission with the greatest intensity. This under-40 cohort will age and carry its views with it, while the more sympathetic middle-aged and elderly will die off. 

For many decades, criticism of Israel was the third rail in American politics, but leading Democrats are now unafraid to break with precedent. California Gov. Gavin Newsom calls Israel an “apartheid” state. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona senator, has sworn off donations from the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest pro-Israel lobby, as has Ro Khanna, a progressive lawmaker from California. Last year, JB Pritzker, the billionaire Illinois governor who once sat on the AIPAC board, voiced support for a Senate resolution that would have blocked American arms sales to Israel. Even Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish and may end up the most prominent hawk of the 2028 race, has been sharply critical of Netanyahu.

The second Leftward surging through the Democratic Party, popular opposition to the Iran war, presents the party with a clear opening: Trump ran on opposition to Mideast regime-change wars, but he has now launched a large operation that may soon entail the deployment of ground troops — of which only 7% of voters approve, according to a Reuters poll last week. But it is yet to be determined if the Democrats will capitalize on this opportunity. Opposition to the war has been clear enough, but certain Democrats, especially the older legislative leaders like New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, run the risk of merely stating their opposition on procedural grounds.

When Trump launched the bombing campaign in Iran, Democrats in Congress fumed that they weren’t consulted first. Israel hawks like Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, weren’t necessarily upset that a war with Iran was happening — it was more that it wasn’t sanctioned, that Congress didn’t get its say, as it did when George W. Bush declared war on Iraq. These leaders suggested that if Congress could have signed off on the bombings, perhaps the chaos would have been more palatable.

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Gavin Newsom is having fun

By Ross Barkan

For Democrats to find a way forward, the party will have to be unequivocally antiwar, in the same way it is moving toward the position, soon to be entirely mainstream, that conditions must be placed on military aid to Israel, if it is to receive any aid at all. The Left will have to move on from lamenting the lack of congressional hearings to a clear and forceful denunciation of the war. Yes, accountability to Congress matters. But as Trump, like the two Republican presidents before him, immolates the Middle East, it’s hardly the main point.

Most crucially, Democrats will have to be the party that is, without question, against all war. MAGA must not outflank the Left on the isolationist front again. The always dubious proposition of a Republican “peace” president has lost credibility, and Democrats must take advantage of it.

The war in Iran is a reminder of just how badly Democrats, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in particular, failed in 2024. Biden, of course, was senile, and never should have run again; Harris was put in the unenviable position of replacing him without having competed for a single primary vote. But then Harris ran one of the worst campaigns in living memory, ducking the media and struggling to articulate any serious domestic policy vision.

When it came to foreign affairs, however, she equivocated less — and the hawkish posture she landed on gave Trump the opening he needed to best her in every swing state. “Make no mistake, as president, I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend American forces and interests from Iran and Iran-backed terrorists, and I will never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” Harris said in October 2024, in a call with Jewish voters. “Diplomacy is my preferred path to that end, but all options are on the table.”

All options are on the table sounds an awful lot like what’s happening now. Granted, Harris is not unstable like Trump, and the odds are far lower that as president, she would have launched such a controversial military operation. Yet it was rhetoric like this that allowed Trump and his followers to hustle to Harris’s Left and promise voters that MAGA, with its vow to put America first and end foreign entanglements, would be the less risky option. When Stephen Miller, in November 2024, posted that “Trump said warmongering neocons love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves,” and that “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace,” plenty of Americans believed him. It was a lie, but one the Democrats allowed to pass unchallenged, especially as Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney, an unreconstructed neoconservative who celebrated her father’s legacy.

The new generation of Democratic politicians is wiser than Harris. Despite an onslaught of scandal related to an alleged Nazi tattoo (since removed), Graham Platner, a proudly Left-wing oyster farmer, has been a fundraising juggernaut who could very well knock out Schumer’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, in a primary race for Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s Maine seat. Platner is an Iraq War veteran who is unapologetically against the war in Iran. He has a fierce, compelling antiwar message that may well launch him to victory. Speaking with a CNN reporter recently, Platner likened Trump’s Iran bombing and troop deployments to Iraq. “We find ourselves here with another war that should not be happening, that is resulting in destruction and horror — all frankly on the taxpayers’ dime,” he said. “That is money that should be spent here in the United States on schools, on hospitals, on infrastructure.”

“Won’t that leave troops in harm’s way, if you vote to defund this operation?” the reporter asked. “No,” Platner said, “because the troops should just not be in harm’s way. End the war. Bring people home. Stop bombing. We can end it.” 

That’s all that needs to be said. Stop bombing, bring home the troops. If Democrats can distill this message plainly — if the party can equivocate less, and avoid the traps Harris laid for it in 2024 — it can quickly outflank a GOP defined by Donald Trump. Few wars in modern American history have been more unpopular at the outset than the bombing of Iran, and voters will only sour further on the conflict as energy prices remain high and the economy stagnates. Unlike in the aughts, today Democrats will take little political risk in being antiwar. During the Iraq War, politicians had to contend with the long shadow of 9/11. They had to beat back accusations of hating America or not sufficiently supporting the troops. They had to, like past generations of liberals, worry about red-baiting, and fend off implications that a belief in civil liberties or pacifism meant they wanted to comfort the enemy within.

Now all they have to do is speak like Platner. Stop killing — and stop wasting money. If Democrats truly want to be the party of peace, their future is plenty bright. 

Deep in rural Maine, more than 100 miles away from the state’s verdant coastline, Graham Platner is holding court. In a state with one of the largest per-capita veteran populations, the Democratic Senate contender’s antiwar message carries a particular potency — and it shows. As of this writing, the 41-year-old Platner has raked in nearly $10 million in campaign money, mostly from small donors; signed up some 15,000 volunteers; and clinched endorsements from Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ruben Gallego, and Martin Heinrich — all progressive stalwarts. Even a steady drip of negative stories in recent months about his spicy Reddit history and a since-covered Nazi tattoo has barely dented him. Polls now show Platner ahead of Democratic primary rival, Gov. Janet Mills, and narrowly edging Susan Collins, the Republican incumbent, in a general election matchup.

It would be tempting, then, to cast Platner as the face of a renewed Democratic Party — a working-class tribune with crossover appeal. But the more revealing question is how deep, and how broad, his support really is. 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.

“A lot of folks I know who voted for Donald Trump wanted an end to overseas wars,” Platner tells me in a husky voice. “But those people are beginning to realize that this was all nonsense, that they were lied to, and they were swindled. We have had tons and tons of Republicans come to these events to say just that.” 

Here in Trump-supporting Greenville, though, I couldn’t find any Republicans in our midst. 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. “The military is not going to save you,” Platner responded. “We are the only ones who are going to save ourselves.” (A strong answer.)

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The trouble with Tucker Carlson

By James Billot

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. 

Still, even some Republican operatives concede that Platner has a good story. “His introduction is quite powerful,” Steve Bannon, the podcast firebrand and ex-Trump consigliere, tells me. “He’s got an opening pitch about being in the Marine Corps. And then he’s got a punch line: ‘what was it worth?’ before getting into his populist takedown of the American ruling class.” But, Bannon adds, Platner “still carries the same cultural baggage as the rest of the Democratic Party.”

The baggage in question includes Platner’s calls for abolishing ICE and support for gender care for kids, and his dismissal of the trans-athlete debate as a “billionaire-funded distraction.” While such positions play well with the base, they remain unpopular with the state at large, which may explain why Platner is struggling to make inroads with Maine’s rural and working classes.

According to a survey of likely voters by Pan-Atlantic Research, Platner leads Janet Mills 56% to 32% among those earning more than $100,000, while the race is essentially even among those below that income threshold. The regional split mirrors that pattern: he is ahead in the more urban and affluent First District, while Mills leads in the rural, working-class Second District, which has backed Trump in the past three presidential elections. 

“I do not really trust polling in Maine, even when it says nice things about me,” says Platner. “We have a ton of just regular working folks showing up to my speeches. But I also think there is an access problem. The only way to actually go talk to working-class folks is to go talk to them in their communities, which is what we’re doing.”

To see how Platner’s message was landing in these communities, I drove an hour west to Jackman, a town 15 miles from the Canadian border. Once a hub of the cross-border timber trade, Jackman’s economy was hollowed out by global competition, accelerated by NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements. A former Democratic stronghold, the town abandoned the party during President Barack Obama’s second term and heavily backed Trump in the past three elections. If Platner wanted to make inroads with the state’s working class, this was a good place to start.

At Jackman’s town hall, Platner came with the same message he delivered in Greenville: the system is rigged, working people are being robbed, and the billionaire class is running roughshod over the social contract. It was the sort of populist messaging Trump himself might have shared 10 years ago. The trouble was that only about 10 people were in attendance. And of those, only a few were from the area (one attendee told me that she’d driven four hours to see him). By contrast, thousands had shown up to listen to Platner and Sanders in Portland, a much bluer (and admittedly more populous) city three hours’ drive to the south.

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I ask Platner to explain this disparity. “Look, it takes time,” he says. “This is a long-term project. We have to connect with these folks directly, or else you’re just this amorphous thing. And I think as the war in Iran gets worse, and as the incompetent authoritarianism of the Trump administration gets worse — because it will — that’s going to continue alienating more folks.”

This may turn out to be true. With 13 American soldiers confirmed dead and the prospect of boots on the ground growing by the day, even the most die-hard MAGA supporters could begin to waver if the conflict spirals. But that day has not arrived. The MAGA base is still standing by its man, and there is very little to suggest that that might be changing.

It might not matter. The political landscape in Maine strongly favors Democrats, making a win likely regardless of who is on the ballot. Susan Collins is the last Republican senator in a blue state that Kamala Harris carried comfortably in 2024, and she is now facing her toughest battle yet to hold on to her seat. After five terms totaling nearly three decades, the appetite for something new is strong among the Democratic grassroots, which may be enough to push the state into the blue column. As a political neophyte, Platner will likely benefit from this enthusiasm; his primary opponent, 78-year-old Mills, challenged reporters to check her “lipid profile.”

It would be easy, then, to read too much into a Platner win. But even if the oysterman looks, sounds, and campaigns like a working-class reset, his coalition suggests otherwise. I saw as much when I visited the Four Seasons diner in Jackman, one block from the town hall, where a Platner ad flickered on the TV. “I know what it feels like to give everything to this country,” one veteran says, “and come home to feel like it’s giving nothing back,” adds another, before the shot cuts to Platner in fatigues. “Graham Platner knows that feeling, too,” the voiceover concludes.

I turn to the man beside me, who works at the logging-mill down the road, and ask what he thought. “Who’s that?” he grunted.

For many commentators, November 2024 was another such moment, with Donald Trump forging a working-class GOP coalition that would similarly “realign” US politics for decades to come. No longer. From Greenland to ICE, Trump’s popularity is shaky, while the Democrats’ robust electoral performance last year vividly illustrates the flimsiness of the President’s 2024 victory. Yet if Democrats are to exploit these sanguine conditions in this year’s midterms, then craft a durable majority, they must unite round an ambitious policy agenda responsive to voters’ discontent. And to do all that, they need realignment — and could do worse than learn from their party’s response to Reagan’s own revolution.

What is the conventional wisdom about Democrats’ reconstruction in the Eighties? Broadly: national and state-level Democrats engineered a Rightward ideological shift, led by the so-called Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Centrists and moderates laud the DLC as a model for present-day reform; the Left castigates it as party elites’ forcing-house for liberalism’s betrayal. But admirers and critics alike seem to agree on the history’s basic narrative: ideologically motivated party reformers reacted to economic turmoil and the Reagan revolution by pulling the Democrats to the right.

Unfortunately, this narrative is a stark simplification of how Democratic leaders pursued renewal through the Eighties and Nineties. The most reform-minded Democrats were a diffuse group who spanned elected officials like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton; business figures like Felix Rohatyn; policy entrepreneurs like Robert Reich (years before his rebrand as a sort of Diet Thomas Piketty); and economists such as Lester Thurow. Never a unitary ideological movement, such figures cycled through voguish labels like “Atari Democrats” or — fatefully — “neoliberals”.

Let’s call them, collectively, “New Liberals”. They existed in a Venn diagram of networks, party factions, and policy institutions that overlapped across a diagnosis of Democrats’ problem: the rise of Reagan’s free-market Right was a symptom, not cause, of a structural crisis of liberalism. This structural crisis was the declining “competitiveness” of America’s regionally dispersed productive economy, especially in relation to Japan’s high-tech “economic miracle.” Though US manufacturing generally rebounded during the Clinton presidency, as Japan sank into its “Lost Decades”, manufacturing employment, and the productive economy’s regional dispersal, never durably recovered from the shock of the Eighties. This is crucial for understanding both the resonance of Trump’s 2016 calls to “restore” American industry, and the oft-frustrated efforts of “Rustbelt” Democrats to supply their own flavor of this potent rhetoric.

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The DLC came into being in 1985, several years after reformers created a new economic agenda. New Liberals’ real animating spirit was a vision of long-term growth centered on high-tech production and channeled into industrial policy. Popular memories of Reagan’s “morning in America” obscure Democrats’ success in 1981-3. After all, Democrats across the country turned industrial decay and the White House’s proposed cuts to Social Security against the GOP, leading to their decisive victory in the 1982 midterms and Reagan’s retreat from the more radical imaginings of free-market revolutionaries. Today’s GOP bears — at least for now — the political costs of DOGE-inflicted job cuts, economic turmoil, and last year’s shutdown. This dynamic echoes that of the Eighties. In the words of the biographer of House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Democrats back then forced Republicans to “take ownership” of the hardships stemming from Reaganite policies.

Two key points stand out. First, though the Eighties Democrats ultimately established a united front, the party was every bit as riven by factional discord as it is today. Just as the Democratic Party of 2026 is a fissiparous political family — spanning from the Ocasio-Cortez Left via moderate “Third Wayers” to the the much-winnowed-down Blue Dogs — Tip O’Neill had to finesse Right-leaning Democratic dissidents in his own day. In fact, O’Neill had far more Right-leaning Democrats to manage than do today’s Congressional leaders. All the same, Democrats back then ultimately coalesced around a response to Reagan. This leads to the second key point. Democrats had to establish a sense of what they were for as well as what they were against. Here, New Liberals, to whom O’Neill granted considerable autonomy to devise a new economic program, came to the fore. Congressional New Liberals spearheaded the creation of an ambitious industrial policy agenda that brought together disparate party factions, business backers in high-tech and “traditional” industries, and organized labor.

This approach was profoundly different from a Rightward ideological shift. New Liberals recognized their party needed to change: not by mimicking its ascendant opposition, but instead by crafting a distinctly Democratic response to the economic malaise and changing demographic dynamics of which GOP wins were themselves symptomatic. Understood this way, Reagan’s landslide 1984 reelection — which would be analogous to a new GOP leader consolidating the MAGA coalition in 2028 — was not inevitable. It happened, rather, because of Democrats’ failure to sustain momentum. Walter Mondale, the Democrats’ 1984 nominee, navigated a middle path between party factions rather than determining a policy agenda that could unify them all. And Mondale’s astringent campaign rhetoric prioritized deficit reduction over a long-term vision for broad-based growth.

Party reformers learned from the 1984 fiasco — to an extent. Over the course of Democrats’ subsequent sojourn in the Reagan-era wilderness, New Liberals developed a political strategy that combined their policy vision for growth with soft economic populism and cultural moderation. These three terms equated to electoral renewal. In 1992, Clinton won the White House by campaigning on the latter two themes. But advocates of the New Liberal growth agenda furnished the intellectual undergirding of Clinton’s campaign.

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Democrats’ return to power in the Nineties proved a lost opportunity. For a variety of reasons spanning internal policy debates, the global economic sea-change brought about by the Cold War’s end, and political missteps, the Clinton administration failed to realize New Liberals’ formative growth vision. But this does not change the fact that contemporary Democrats can learn from the intellectual and political renewal of the Reagan era.

After all the populist Right’s triumphalism in the winter of 2024-5, the reality of Trump 2.0 gives Democrats an opening. Some on the New Right, like American Compass’s Oren Cass, claim the GOP can pursue reindustrialization and consolidate a working-class MAGA majority.

Yet if reindustrialization is the goal, then why take a chainsaw to long-term investments in productive tech and green energy? This is economic policy as vibes and cultural resentment. The outlook becomes bleaker still when one considers Trump’s marquee domestic-spending legislation in his first year: the One Big Beautiful Bill. This served up a witches’ brew of vicious spending cuts (often targeting the president’s own base) and plutocrat-friendly fiscal policy, leavened with a kind of ersatz populism like the “no tax on tips” provision.

Many Democratic leaders seem to sense the broad contours of an effective response: turn Trump 2.0’s false promises against him and embrace an agenda of affordability and growth, flavored with moderately populist rhetoric. Compelling figures spanning the Democratic spectrum — from Zohran Mamdani to Washington congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — speak eloquently about bread-and-butter concerns. This is essential. But it must be paired with a longer-term vision for growth. To repurpose political scientist Steven Teles’s formulation, think of the former as election strategy and the latter as reelection strategy.

Why did New Liberals stumble in the Nineties over delivering their bold economic ideas? More recently, why did Joe Biden’s “market-crafting” fall short, both politically and substantively? Partly, the answer involves communication and messaging. In both instances, the growth vision itself remained an elite preoccupation rather than a mass political project. Industrial policy-style initiatives underpinned midcentury Democratic hegemony because they were so “visible”. Think, for instance, of rural electrification. All the same, communications missteps are not the whole story. Key to more successful Democratic renewal will be implementation. It is here that some version of the emerging “abundance agenda” offers genuine cause for hope.

At its heart, abundance is about delivery: make government effective again, move fast and build stuff. A “procedure fetish”, arising from dispensations like public-interest law and environmental preservation, ensnared local arenas of liberalism from the Seventies onwards. More seriously, after the New Liberals’ lost opportunity, Democrats emphasized meliorative social policies over the fostering of broad-based, regionally dispersed growth. The result, since the turn of the 21st century, was a liberalism of “compensating the losers”; 2016 showed where that led.

These political pathologies need to change. Today’s Democrats should be laser-focused on building: economic development projects, housing, public infrastructure. Ironically, and given the history sketched out above, such an approach would fulfill what New Liberals in the Reagan era originally envisioned.

False prophets on the populist Right proclaim a new working-class majority. But 18 months into Trump 2.0, MAGA has stifled growth, eviscerated the social safety net, undermined American innovation, and sped-up the transition to a “Chinese Century.” In 2026, beleaguered Democrats can’t afford to miss the opening this provides. The party will be revived when it convinces voters that it has a vision of, and a blueprint for delivering, long-term growth. Yet the Democrats’ greatest challenge here is not even the formidable task of unifying around a message. Rather, it’s thinking through a long-term growth model in the context of a still-uncertain AI revolution. The specter of machine learning means that, even if Democrats successfully focus on rebuilding America’s productive economy, policymakers can’t simply upgrade the postwar political economy as the original New Liberals once hoped.

Additionally, pure techno-optimism will do little but reheat the political failure of “compensating the losers”. A hands-off approach would likely exacerbate the decoupling between productivity and workers’ wages that Americans have suffered since the Seventies. Since Democrats still need to unify politically around growth, the contours of the practical model are far from clear. At minimum, though, it must pair sensible regulation of AI with the targeted procedural deregulation for building suggested above. This is only the first step towards recoupling technological and productivity gains with wages, and remains a daunting task. Yet such a comprehensive realignment could be Democrats’ only hope.

The episode instantly became a shorthand for his governing philosophy, one he repeats often and with pride: get shit done. It’s that reputation, along with his electoral record in the swingiest of swing states, that landed him on Kamala Harris’s short list of veep candidates in 2024. It’s also why he’s in the mix as a plausible presidential nominee in 2028. But if you want to see the limits of Shapiro-ism, visit the seat of his power — Harrisburg, Pa.

The Keystone State’s small capital city, on the banks of the Susquehanna River, is trapped in a post-pandemic doom loop, a place many Pennsylvanians avoid because of high crime, boarded-up storefronts, and chronic homelessness that range just beyond the glittering green-domed capitol building. Local politics are shackled by a corrupt mayor and a dysfunctional city council. The economy, once anchored by state workers who have remained stubbornly remote, keeps sinking. “Ghost city” is an often-encountered label for Harrisburg.

In 2023, the same year Shapiro rode to the rescue of I-95, an electrical fire consumed the Broad Street Market, the oldest continuously operating stone market house in the country, which first opened during the Civil War. A day later, Shapiro stood amid the charred remains and again promised lightning-strike efficiency. “You’re going to see government at all levels now work together,” he pledged. “We are all now going to come together and do what’s necessary.”

That didn’t happen. Nearly three years later, Broad Street Market is in worse shape than ever before. This winter, one of the market’s historic exterior walls, weakened by two years of exposure and the sheer weight of local ineptitude, crumbled to the ground. The collapse is forcing new delays and reopening questions that stretch into the indefinite future.

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The same day the Market wall tumbled to the ground, Dec. 15, Shapiro was busy schmoozing in Midtown Manhattan. There, the governor attended a ritzy $1,000-per-plate Pennsylvania Society dinner with the state’s political elite, bragging about how good a job he was doing as the state’s chief executive. When a reporter asked Shapiro about the state of the Broad Street Market, he blamed Harrisburg leaders and said they need to “get their act together.” Meanwhile, the market’s site sits fenced off and inert, a civic wound slowly scabbing over, yet to heal.

To be fair, many of Harrisburg’s problems are indeed out of his jurisdiction, are self-inflicted, or predate his reign by decades. In the aughts, former Mayor Steve Reed went on a wild and reckless spending and debt spree that ended with the city seeking bankruptcy protection to manage its $315 million debt, and the state appointed a receiver. Yet it quietly crawled out of that hole, and by the 2010s, central Harrisburg enjoyed a mini-Renaissance, with a series of restaurant and bar openings that solidified into a Restaurant Row on 2nd Street.

Not anymore. Since the pandemic, Harrisburg’s downtown core has hollowed out, and the now-vacant storefronts of Restaurant Row make the city look like a set for a low-budget zombie movie. Why? For one, the state of Pennsylvania, the city’s biggest employer by far, doesn’t pay property taxes. Second, state workers, the lifeblood of Harrisburg’s core, aren’t fully back in the office, and they may never be.

Shapiro’s press team boasted to UnHerd of a 56% increase in state workers returning to the office last year. But walk down State Street at noon on a Monday, and you’ll see the reality: on a typical weekday, homeless people staggering about on the sidewalks outnumber state workers and tourists. To make matters worse, the Shapiro administration is in the process of severely shrinking the state’s office-space footprint, which hits Harrisburg the hardest. As part of his Space Optimization and Utilization project, the state didn’t renew a lease at a 22-story downtown building that had housed state offices for more than two decades.

The decay from disinvestment is visceral. Every week, it seems, a different local business fails, and there are few takers on vacant properties. In December, Zeroday Brewing Co. — whose taproom, a block away from the state capitol building, once buzzed with legislators and state workers (and where I once worked) — announced it was shuttering. The owners cited a workforce that never returned and an environment that has become hostile to small businesses. On Wednesday, a beloved Mexican restaurant, El Sol, announced it was also closing its doors a stone’s throw away from the state capitol. This, even as El Sol is keeping open its suburban branches.

Crime is a massive problem. While violent crime declined around the country in 2024, Harrisburg had 23 homicides, its most in nearly 40 years and the highest among central Pennsylvania’s largest cities. I live in Midtown, half a dozen blocks from where the governor sleeps. In one week in the summer of 2025, my e-bike and my car were stolen in two separate incidents. When I called the police about the bike — having actually located a stash of stolen goods where mine was likely sitting — they wouldn’t even take the call.

A few months later, a woman who talks to herself stole my cat. I had to beg a police officer to accompany me to her apartment just to get my pet back. This is the daily reality in Shapiro’s backyard, a place where package theft is so rampant that my neighbors have resorted to a sort of biochemical warfare, placing dog poop inside fake Amazon boxes to spite the porch pirates.

The elephant in the room — the one Shapiro refuses to truly tackle — is Harrisburg Mayor Wanda Williams, who was just sworn in to her second term. Williams is Harrisburg’s tiny version of Donald Trump: pugnacious, defensive, corrupt, and perpetually embroiled in a civil war with her own city council. Her tenure has been a masterclass in petty dysfunction. Williams reportedly placed as many as five relatives on the city payroll in full-time positions. A federal lawsuit filed by former Public Works Director Nathaniel Spriggs alleges that Williams pressured him to alter job descriptions so her relatives could be hired or promoted. The city is now spending taxpayer dollars on legal fees to defend those actions in court, while the mayor is busy trying to raise her own salary by 20%.

The Broad Street Market rebuild has been the city’s biggest fiasco. The market’s manager was convicted of stealing money to fund his doggie-spa habit and then tried raising vendors’ rents by 25%. In 2024, the city council voted against approving a construction contractor due to insufficient DEI promotion. A ramshackle tent structure meant to serve as a temporary holding space for the market’s vendors got the embarrassing moniker Tenty McTentface.

But if there’s one moment that defines Harrisburg in the mid-2020s, it’s July 4, 2024. That’s when the annual fireworks show on City Island was disrupted by an armed teenager fleeing police. The 18-year-old threw his pistol into the Susquehanna River and bumped into Williams during his escape from the cops, injuring her leg in a fall. Instead of boosting police presence or cracking down on crime, however, Williams simply canceled all future city-run fireworks on Independence Day. The best solution, she figured, was to tuck and run.

Shapiro’s response has been muted. His spokesperson didn’t respond to my query about the governor’s relationship to the mayor, which her press office characterized as “positive.” The spokesperson cited $850,000 in additional state funding to support the Broad Street Market’s $20-million-plus rebuild and said Shapiro is “working closely with the City of Harrisburg, the Harrisburg delegation, and other local leaders to help Harrisburg reach its full potential.”

The governor’s press team also noted a recent $15,000 grant to a group of local leaders trying to revitalize downtown. But that’s peanuts compared to the comprehensive revitalization plan Gov. Kathy Hochul is pursuing for Albany, New York’s also-struggling capital city. In mid-2025, she announced that the Empire State would be funneling $400 million of investments into revitalizing Albany’s downtown core.

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There are plenty of other examples of blue-state governors boosting their capital cities. In the aughts, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick launched a 10-year, $1 billion program that helped establish Boston as a national magnet for the life-sciences industry. St. Paul, Minn., was one of the biggest beneficiaries of Mark Dayton’s two terms as the state’s governor, with a $100 million capitol renovation, part of nearly $1 billion in investments made in 2014.

I’d be surprised if Shapiro suddenly steps in to save Harrisburg in 2026. He’s gearing up for a national book tour to promote Where We Keep the Light: Stories from a Life of Service, the kind of softly lit, hagiographic autobiography that usually indicates a warm-up to a White House bid. As 2028 whispers grow into a roar, the Shapiro narrative will be polished to a mirror shine. You will hear about the bridge constructions and the get-shit-done attitude.

Shapiro may indeed be getting shit done in Pennsylvania, but there’s little evidence of it in the city where he works and lives part-time. In Harrisburg, the only thing that seems to be getting shit done is gravity. Just ask the Broad Street Market.

There is, however, one construction project in Harrisburg that appears to be moving along with I-95 speed: The Wall. Last April, a troubled Harrisburg man named Cody Balmer, invoking the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, broke into the governor’s mansion and threw Molotov cocktails in a frightening assassination attempt. The state immediately went into action and spent $32 million to rebuild the governor’s fire-damaged dining room and erect a new permanent security wall. Plus, a controversial $1 million was spent on Shapiro’s private home in the Philadelphia suburbs, including $311,000 for a new security system and $290,000 for landscaping and groundskeeping. Shapiro’s office has argued that the security upgrades were recommended by law enforcement for the governor’s personal safety, but the optics are terrible. Shapiro is literally walling himself off from the city decaying around him.

What does that imply about his readiness to lead in a national environment also defined by slow, grinding institutional failure? We may find out in the next two years.

Back in 2024, the President’s gains in neighborhoods like Corona were widely taken as evidence of a new Republican coalition: multi-racial, working-class and culturally conservative. But with Mamdani’s victory, that coalition appears to be under threat. For not only did these voters abandon the Republicans, they spurned the moderate choice, Andrew Cuomo, too. In fact, Mamdani made significant inroads with the very electorate that propelled Trump to victory just 12 months ago. 

There were an estimated 60,000 New Yorkers who voted for Trump and Mamdani. In a city of eight million, that may not seem like much, but they exemplify a broader trend across the country. As this month’s special elections showed, America’s non-white population is becoming ideologically promiscuous, flitting between both major parties, and shedding long-standing partisan loyalties in the process. When I visited some of the neighborhoods where the Trump-Mamdani swing was most pronounced, the overall message was clear: the status quo was not working. With next year’s midterms looming, this restless, unpredictable bloc could prove decisive in shaping the balance of power in Washington.

Here in New York, sandwiched between La Guardia airport and the Mets’ baseball ground, Citi Field, is Corona, one of the most Hispanic corners of the city. Next to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the streets are lined with vendors selling roasted corn, fresh tamales, mangoes, and empanadas. The residents, mostly first- or second-generation immigrants from Latin America, are blue-collar, Catholic and entrepreneurial, with many working two jobs, or sometimes three. 

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In 2024, Trump won six election districts here (up from zero), and made double-digit percentage point gains in dozens of others nearby. It was the best performance of any Republican nominee in Gotham since 1988, fueled by anger over rising grocery prices, the cost of living, and declining public safety. But within a year, voters turned away from the 79-year-old, two-term president and voted for the 34-year-old newcomer Mamdani instead.

“Trump brought too much chaos, man,” says Ramon*, whom I met outside the Guatemalteca Deli on Roosevelt Avenue. “My bills are still high and my wife can’t afford no groceries.” A part-time car mechanic by day and cleaner at the new JP Morgan office by night, Ramon says that he voted for Trump in 2024 because he thought he’d bring down the price of gas and groceries, but “that ain’t happened”. “I don’t know if Mamdani’s going to make things better or worse,” he said, “but we need something different from this.”

The despair felt by Ramon wasn’t confined to Roosevelt Avenue. Ten minutes north of Corona lies East Elmhurst, another Queens neighborhood that saw a similar Trump-to-Mamdani swing. Unlike Corona, there is no subway line here, and the Manhattan skyline barely pokes out in the distance. At the local park, I spoke with Carlos de Cruz, who told me that he didn’t vote this month, but said that many of his friends followed Ramon’s lead. “They wanted something different with Trump,” he said. “Now they’re angry with him because the prices are still high. The ICE stuff is scary. Now they think Mamdani will bring something different.”

Mamdani certainly is bringing something different. He has promised free buses, free universal childcare, public grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, and a rent freeze for roughly one million rent-stabilized units in the city. It’s a platform that jives well with New York’s “commie corridor”, which stretches from northwest Queens down through Brooklyn, but it took longer for the city’s outer boroughs to warm up to it. When Mamdani won the Democratic primary in June, he did so without much support from the city’s immigrant and working-class communities. But by the mayoral election this month, he built a rainbow coalition of Muslim, black, and Hispanic voters as well as renters and progressives. 

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Bronx local Yahay Obeid is a new member of this rainbow coalition. A two-time Trump voter, the air traffic controller was so “disgusted” by the racism he saw on the Right that he ended up voting for him. “There are a lot of people like me who are not socialists,” he said. “They are moderates who found the racial slurs and racist bigotry so disgusting and disturbing that they decided to vote for Mamdani.” Then why, I ask, not vote for Cuomo? “Cuomo shut down houses of worship during Covid and I’ll never forgive him for that.”

Obeid, the director of the Bronx Muslim Center, is a practicing Muslim. He admitted that many in his community had reservations about Mamdani, particularly over his liberal positions on prostitution and public safety. Previous statements including “defund the police” and describing the NYPD as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” had unnerved his members. That was, until, Mamdani met with them on several occasions to assuage their concerns. “We were getting backlash that he wanted to legalize prostitution,” Obeid said. “But he told us that was DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) policy, not his. We also asked him about defunding the police, but he said that he’s not looking to cut down on police and that he’s keeping the same police commissioner, so that changed the mood in the room.”

In 2024, Trump claimed roughly 30% of the Muslim vote nationally. But in this month’s election, Mamdani secured around nine out of every 10 of New York’s Muslim votes. He did this by leaning into his Islamic identity, producing campaign videos in Urdu and Bangla, and fusing it with an economically populist message. In one of his earliest (and most popular) campaign videos, for example, he railed against “Halalflation”, a nod to rising street‑food prices, which quickly spread through WhatsApp groups and local mosque networks. 

“Mamdani understands the difference between ethnic politics and identity politics,” said Renu Mukherjee, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “There was no grievance — he just immersed himself in various local cultures, which Cuomo completely failed to do.” That was evident when Mamdani took the unusual step, for a non-Latino candidate, of releasing a full Spanish-language ad. And it was evident when I visited Jamaica Hill, central Queens, where stray Mamdani flyers in Bangla fluttered past bridal shops selling affordable saris and sherwanis.

Last year, Jamaica Hill swung nearly 25 points toward the GOP last year, only to flip to Mamdani by an even larger margin. In several districts, he captured more than 70% of the vote, highlighting the success of his outreach campaign. But there was also something simpler at work: many voters saw him as one of their own, a sense that only deepened as Right-wing attacks intensified. In one notorious case, Mamdani was attacked online for eating rice with his hands, with one GOP Congressman telling him to “go back to the Third World”. Except when I stopped for lunch at Khalil Biriyani House, at least half of the customers were doing the same. 

Clearly, he was more in step with the neighborhood than his critics were. New York has long had a large foreign-born population, but unlike other multicultural cities such as London, it is far less assimilationist. Here, many immigrant communities remain distinct, as evidenced by the 40+ ethnic enclaves across the city. Harlem has “Le Petit Senegal”; Queens has “Little Manila”; and in the Bronx, where Obeid lives, there is a little Yemen. In recent years, however, assimilation has slowed further, driven in part by the arrival of new immigrant groups, such as Bangladeshis. In the Jamaica district, where the South Asian population has exploded, new arrivals have brought cultural habits from their countries of origin — such as eating rice with hands — which Mamdani himself mirrored.

The interesting question this all poses is whether Mamdani’s brand of ethnic politics can lay a template for Democrats elsewhere. Despite his campaign’s strengths, it was also clear that a strong anti-incumbent feeling drove many New Yorkers to “vote blue no matter who”. Fear and fury over high grocery prices, a needlessly showy deportations campaign, and cuts to Medicaid and SNAP have turned voters against Trump. “There was definitely an anti-Trump backlash in some of these neighborhoods,” said Michael Lange, author of the Narrative Wars Substack. “If Kamala Harris and Trump reran this year, Trump isn’t winning neighborhoods like North Corona or others in Queens.”

But Democrats have also found limited success running as the perma-scandalized anti-Trump party, a strategy that minority communities, as 2024 demonstrated, do not respond well to. As a result, these voters — who are more pragmatic than ideological — remain up for grabs, which helps explain why some of the biggest shifts in these special elections occurred among the country’s non-white population. For example, New Jersey’s two counties with the biggest moves towards Democrats had the largest concentrations of Hispanics. Meanwhile in Virginia, Hispanic and Asian voters swung 20 and 42 points, respectively, towards the Democratic governor’s candidate compared with the 2024 presidential election. Taken together, these results show that non-white voters are far from a captive electorate.

This presents a problem — and opportunity — for both parties. Over the past decade, Democrats have become whiter, wealthier, and more college-educated, increasingly oriented toward suburban and professional constituencies. That shift has alienated the non-white, working-class voters who once formed the backbone of the party’s coalition. But as shown by the election successes of Mamdani, Mikie Sherill (New Jersey’s governor-elect) and Abigail Spanberger (Virginia’s governor-elect), a renewed focus on affordability can at least work some way towards restoring some of that lost trust.

Mamdani’s focus on economic, rather than cultural, grievances was a vindication of this strategy. In the early 2020s, the then Queens assemblyman’s views were a grab-bag of BLM politics: Covid maximalism, defunding the police, ending capitalism, and promoting racial identitarianism. By contrast, his campaign focused on New York’s cost of living crisis and extending an olive branch to Trump voters. Similarly in Virginia, more than half of all the GOP’s political ads were about trans issues, which did not strike a chord with voters struggling to pay their electricity bills.

For Trump and the Republicans, the warning is just as stark. The same results show that they do not have as strong a grip on these voters as once thought. With the midterms less than a year away, any overreliance on Trump’s prior popularity risks undoing the gains Republicans made with Latino and Asian communities. In states such as Texas, where Republican gerrymandering relied heavily on Trump-era support among Latino voters, at least two seats may now be in jeopardy. Given that Latino voters are more likely than any other ethnic group to cite the economy as their top concern, improving the health of the economy has to become a central focus of the Trump administration.

Next year’s elections, then, could shape up to be the most unpredictable yet. With a strong anti-incumbent sentiment spreading across the country, Democrats are well placed to capitalize on this voter disaffection. But if there’s one thing this party excels at, it’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Should Mamdani fail to deliver on any of his ambitious promises, it could tarnish the Democratic brand for years. If public safety deteriorates or cost-of-living pressures rise, New York’s new mayor will become the embodiment of Democratic urban failure, a cautionary symbol for voters nationwide.

More broadly, the Trump-Mamdani overlap illustrates a wider trend: that American politics is becoming increasingly volatile, localized, and issue-driven, rather than strictly tribal. This shift is especially evident among immigrant populations, who lack the same kind of tribal loyalty to parties often found among white voters. The constant cycling between Democrats and Republicans suggests that there is now a widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, creating a fertile political terrain for insurgent candidates like Mamdani. 

Crucially, Mamdani represents the beginning, not the end, of this insurgency. In other blue cities, progressives and socialists are gaining ground, with New York’s mayor-elect serving as a blueprint for their campaigns. But the lessons of the early 2020s should not be forgotten: veer too far into cultural politics and you risk alienating the very voters who put you in office. It was, after all, the former cop and moderate Eric Adams who replaced the progressive mayor Bill de Blasio in New York’s last mayoral election.

At a state and federal level, voters have shown they are willing to buck party allegiances if there is something new on the table. Paradoxically, they are voting for change in the hope of returning to some semblance of normality. As Ramon succinctly put it: “The world is crazy right now… I just want to get on with my life.”

*Ramon’s name was changed 

For months after Kamala Harris’s loss, you could practically hear the wind whistling through the think tanks. Lately, however, the factions have begun to re-emerge from the woods, each clutching its own plan for reinvention. The result is a flurry of competing visions for the party’s future: the “Welcome” moderates, the “Persuasion” progressives, the “Abundance” techno-optimists, the Kamala Harris loyalists (whose approach seems to be waiting for the GOP to self-destruct), and now a new entry — an institutionalist wing led by the Roosevelt Institute and former Biden officials, who insist that the party should ditch the incrementalism of old for a leaner, meaner government.

It’s proof of a party wrestling with itself — or, considering the dreadful state of the party, trying to fuse pieces of dead flesh for the sake of a Frankenstein-like revival. But there’s a problem: talk is cheap and almost none of it answers the harder question. How do you change a party whose 21st-century structure and ecosystem — donors, NGOs, media, universities, consultants — thrive on staying exactly the same? That’s something none of the Democrats’ blueprints sufficiently addresses.

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First, the good news. There are some clever ideas here, especially in a new report titled “Deciding to Win.” It was produced by the center-Left organization Welcome, which began as a political action committee in 2022 and has since developed a broader research arm. The report argues bluntly that since 2012, Democrats have become the party of donors, activist groups, and media pundits — “the affluent and highly educated” — while losing contact with voters without college degrees and working-class communities of all races, which isn’t exactly new information.

But what is novel is that its cure is — for lack of a better term — populist moderates: candidates who are both economically populist and moderate on culture-war issues, and ideally have a legitimate working-class background. These Democrats will tax Wall Street but still own a pair of work boots that have actually touched dirt. Historically, moderate has become shorthand for a kind of weak, mealy-mouthed neoliberal or technocrat. But Welcome says it means a bold leader who takes popular but often heterodox positions and who doesn’t reflexively defend the establishment or corporate interests. A dream populist moderate candidate, for instance, might look like Dan Osborn, the independent union leader in Nebraska who talked like Bernie Sanders about economic issues but more like MAGA on other matters: “If Trump needs help building the Wall, well, I’m pretty handy,” Osborn says in an October campaign ad.

This approach is surfacing elsewhere. Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego is a progressive who has doubled his overall favorability with Republican voters after talking like a border hawk. In an interview with Ezra Klein last week, Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, also cited Nathan Sage in Iowa, Graham Platner in Maine, and Wisconsin’s Rebecca Cooke as economic populists “taking pragmatic positions” on some cultural issues.

For all of its wisdom, the Deciding to Win report still has blind spots, however. Welcome blasts the “timid and risk-averse culture” that pervades much of the institutional Democratic Party, but then treats Medicare for All as a boutique issue. America’s health-care system is decaying fast — costs soaring, hospitals closing, insurers consolidating — and pretending otherwise won’t make Democrats seem “moderate.” Likewise, the report suggests that Amy Klobuchar, Josh Shapiro, and Andy Beshear should be top candidates in 2028, which to me sounds like the world’s most polite LinkedIn webinar.

Not everyone in the party agrees that Democrats need to sound more like gruff Midwestern union bros. A rival vision, calling itself Persuasion 2025, insists the party’s problem hasn’t been progressive ideology at all but a lack of guts and poor narrative discipline. Backed by donors in the Way to Win network, Persuasion types argue that Democrats have tried to coast on polite incrementalism when they should have been shaping public opinion with moral clarity and relentless message repetition. In their telling, the last decade didn’t prove progressivism is out of touch — it proved Democrats never really tried it. Unlike Welcome, Persuasion is doubling down on wokeness, vowing to find “disability justice, racial justice, economic justice, water justice and air justice,” and warned against throwing any progressive constituency “under the bus.”

Their solution is more activist energy, more movement politics, and a renewed attempt to win back young people, MAGA voters, and disaffected minorities — especially in the Sun Belt. They don’t promise persuasion in the old retail, diner-booth sense, but in the broadcast-to-the-algorithm sense: flood the zone with justice-oriented messaging and let the vibes do the work. It is, effectively, the 2020 movement’s greatest-hits album, remastered for TikTok — what if the Democrats had a woke Joe Rogan?

If Persuasion imagines victory through moral passion and mobilized constituencies, Abundance imagines it through capacity and confidence: bulldozers, not bullhorns. Popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book-length manifesto, your typical Abundance Bros are Silicon Valley-adjacent urbanists who imagine that supporting zoning reform is a personality. They argue that voters do not crave another lecture about norms; they crave more houses, more trains, more power plants, more child-care centers — proof that the state can build again.  It’s an appeal to the future-oriented optimism Democrats lost in their drift toward becoming the party of the status quo.

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Meanwhile, the new Roosevelt Institute manifesto insists on talking about power. Authored by former senior Biden officials, it is perhaps the most explicit repudiation of the party’s post-Obama instinct to act like a think-tank fellowship rather than a governing coalition. Their program reads like a liberal answer to the Right’s “administrative state” crusade — a Democratic (and milder) answer to Project 2025 with 161 “practical ideas” such as rewriting the creaky “notice-and-comment” regime of the Administrative Procedure Act so it can’t be weaponized by bad-faith judges, and building new institutional guardrails — up to and including a specialized court for administrative cases and, yes, expanding the Supreme Court itself.

At one level, all of this intellectual ferment is healthy and necessary. At another, it resembles 1989 again. That year, the Democrats talked themselves into a necessary reinvention after losing their third consecutive presidential election. That included a loser of a candidate in Michael Dukakis, whom one pundit described as “slightly less animation and personality than the Shroud of Turin.” In response to Dukakis’s drubbing, a group of political consultants wrote “The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency.” It’s a document that makes the Democratic Party of the Bush I years sound strikingly similar to the 2025 version. (Indeed, “The Politics of Evasion” is even cited as an intellectual inspiration for Deciding to Win). “Too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defense of their national security,” they wrote.

The problem is that the man who took their advice and won — Bill Clinton — decided that in order to beat the Republicans, you had to govern like a free-trading Wall Street-loving one.

And that is the danger now. Democrats are again cataloging their failures with admirable honesty, again workshopping manifestos full of bold verbs, again flirting with the idea of governing with purpose rather than vibes. But even as they welcome talk about reform and renewal, you can already feel the gravitational pull of the consultant class and big money donors.

If history is a guide, the most likely outcome of all this renewal talk is not a populist-moderate revival, a progressive crusade, or an abundance revolution. I’d wager that the Democrats go into 2026 with an approach that might be called Kamala Harris-ism in the wake of the finger-pointing and empty posturing of Harris and former Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during their recent book tours. It means to do very little — or, as James Carville bluntly put it in an essay for The New York Times, the “play-dead” strategy.

The idea is that Republicans are mired in chaos, so the smartest move is to let them collapse under the weight of their own contradictions and self-inflicted absurdities. That instead of fighting tooth-and-nail, Democrats should project calm and responsible governance while MAGA self-immolates. It is the least imaginative vision, but also the one that fits the institutional muscle memory of today’s Democratic Party: avoid fights, avoid risk, avoid offending donors, let the chaos on the other side do the persuading. Call it the Path of Least Resistance school of politics.

So yes, maybe their time in the woods did Democrats some good. They return with maps and theories for building a new path. But paths aren’t plans, and maps don’t matter if you refuse to leave camp. It is one thing to emerge from the forest enlightened. It is another thing to actually walk out.

A Gallup poll last week found that only 54% of American adults drank alcohol in 2025. Drinking among Republicans is in a rapid collapse, with only 46% of Republicans reporting that they drank in 2025, down from 65% two years ago. (Democrats, by contrast, are drinking only slightly less than before, 61% this year, down from 64% in 2023.) The phenomenon seems to be, at least in part, mimetic: President Trump doesn’t drink. RFK Jr. abstains. Charlie Kirk preaches sobriety. Tucker Carlson is sober.

This might seem like a winning issue for the Right — and one that unites the Trump coalition, since the tech libertarians who now finance the party don’t drink, either — but anyone who cares about human conviviality should be skeptical. 

Republican teetotaling is part of a general decline in having fun; partying — drinking, sex, going out — has slumped since the pandemic (during which public authorities told Americans that physical alienation from each other is a responsible social pattern). It turns out that when you lock up members of an already atomized, lonely society, people don’t easily recover the sociality that Aristotle taught is one of the fundamental characteristics of the human animal. Restless un-leisure — doom-scroolling, scrambled attention spans, ordering in — has gradually become more normal than being together. 

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Across the board, alcohol consumption is declining — men, women, white, nonwhite, rich, poor. Biohackers like Bryan Johnson or self-optimizing influencers like Andrew Huberman believe no level of alcohol is safe. Sobriety or “California sober” — no alcohol, but plenty of cannabis — is another emerging trend and is increasingly normal among Gen Z and millennials, who prefer stimulants, nootropics and nicotine. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic are also reducing consumption in general, drinking included.

Against the backdrop of a broad decline in social trust and socializing, the general decline in alcohol consumption becomes relevant — and the more specific decline in drinking among Republicans is especially ominous. 

To some extent, the embrace of sobriety on the Right is a reversal, since lately it’s been progressives who are anti-pleasure. But in the longer historical perspective, it’s a return to form. Over the last 150 years, temperance has been a consistently Republican virtue. The reputation for drinking and “fun” belonged to Democrats. 

It was the Republicans who were the “drys” during Prohibition, casting themselves as the party of sobriety, order, and Protestant reform, while Democrats were associated with saloons, ethnic political machines, and speakeasies. The old Republican rallying cry “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” — caricaturing Democrats as the party of booze, Catholic immigrants, and Confederate nostalgia — was first uttered by a Protestant minister during the 1884 presidential campaign. 

Excess drinking and alcoholism are deadly, to be sure, and some people should never drink. For many others, not drinking is super fucking lame; moderate drinking is fundamental feature of a good life. Certainly, that’s been the position of Western civilization both before and after the advent of Christianity. “Mix stronger wine,” Achilles commands in Homer’s Iliad, “a cup for the hands of each guest — / Here beneath my roof are the men I love the most.” Wine is used for cooking, at meals and during religious rituals in the poem. The guests in the Platonic dialog The Symposium negotiate how much they’ll drink at the beginning of the evening — and then go on to imbibe more than planned, joking about their drunkenness and referring to each other as “o my companions in drink.” 

Christianity, of course, incorporates wine in the central mystery of the Eucharist, though sometimes some of the more dour denominations have substituted grape juice. Medieval paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder portray village life as scenes of rowdy and joyous drunken revelry, and the still life tradition in the 1800s showed tables laden with glasses, bottles and carafes. Private drinking parties made life tolerable, for me personally, during the pandemic; good dive bars are part of what justify the price of rent in New York City — or any other big city.

Anything that unites — even accidentally — the neuroticism of tech optimizers, progressive scolds, and rightoid incels is probably bad. Americans need convivial practices like drinking with friends. The decline of drinking is a decline in spending time with other people, learning about them, and knowing them. Temperance promotes isolation and alienation.

Politically, the neo-temperance movement also threatens the plurality and energy of the Trump coalition. Part of Trump’s appeal was his basically liberal attitude toward the good life (he doesn’t drink, but doesn’t proselytize about it, either). The better aspects of Trump-era populism implied solidarity, community, revelry, and a good time, and stood against the dominant qualities of the Left: moral superiority, hyper-rationalism, fear of the body, fear of spontaneous community, fear of mixing it up, fear of confession, fear of the local, the street, the bar, the friend. Drinking promotes a neighborliness and bonding essential to a conservative view of the polis.

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Republican neo-temperance, moreover, not only smacks of a 19th-century purity and social stiffness, but a 20th-century clubbiness and suburban rejection of blue-collar values of the union hall or the bar — and even of the emotions that emerge from working class people in the tempo of drinking. Temperance culture is repressive.

Similarly, a Calvinist-in-spirit shunning of imbibing and inebriation — the spurning of the social and even moral uses of alcohol — is suggestive of a larger rejection of courtship, reproduction, and communal behaviors. There’s something about energy drinks and Zyn that seems suited for staring at a screen, for locking in to a kind of isolated work practice, but not conducive to talking, flirting, boasting, taking pleasure in free-spirited afterwork hours.

The Trump coalition will endure if it stays chill. An abstemious, Puritan attitude threatens the gains of the post-pandemic counterrevolution against progressivism and Bidenism, against the antisocial, judgmental, unpragmatic, and anti-communal behaviors of late progressive culture. Neurotic liberals have already driven less-neurotic liberals out of the Democratic Party; Republicans should remember that those voters can move the other way.

Moreover, temperance is, whenever enacted, unpopular and a losing position. Sermonizing conservative Protestant neuroticism about drinking resembles sermonizing liberal post-Protestant neuroticism about everything else. If conservatives embrace and accelerate accidental temperance, they risk creating a mirror image of the progressive Left: afraid of doing things, afraid of the world, afraid of irrationality.

In the 2020s, a good rule of politics, policy, and culture might be: normal is good. Most of what people were doing 40 or 50 years ago was better than the antisocial mores of today. Social drinking is a traditional good that conservatives ought to be conserve.

“I got a good friend where our entire relationship has been comprised of talking about athletes of the past,” El-Sayed tells me in a wide-ranging phone interview. “You just spitball: name an athlete from the past and their best moment, or whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan is the GOAT” (greatest of all time). He adds parenthetically: “It’s Jordan, by the way.”

ESPN used to be at the center of the friendship. But more recently, El-Sayed and his buddy can’t watch it, because the network “has become one gigantic billboard for sports betting, and he has problematic gambling. It’s was such an important of his identity, and it’s gone from him. We don’t talk about that.”

The $100 billion sports-betting “industry” raises bankruptcy rates by a third within four years of a state legalizing the practice, according to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles. That’s about 30,000 additional bankruptcies per year nationally. Yet for El-Sayed, the deeper crisis is how gambling firms, and other corporate peddlers of vice, “monetize men’s dopamine circuits.”

A gym rat and former star athlete, El-Sayed says he doesn’t know “any young man between the ages of 14 and 40 who doesn’t have some kind of problematic relationship with one of the following: sports betting, gaming, porn, cannabis.” Each “leaves people feeling small and kind of broken.” Meanwhile, elite discourse blames men “for this sort of ‘toxic masculinity,’ ” while the likes of Andrew Tate promote a misogynistic caricature of what it means to be a man. “All of these working together have led to this massive MAGA-pilling of young men.”

In response, El-Sayed thinks, Democrats should return to what their party was founded to do: empowering ordinary people relative to the market forces profiting off their misery. In this case, El-Sayed argues, that means regulating vice advertising that attempts to ensnare Americans at ever younger ages. His own daughter Emmalee (age 7), he says, has started to notice a marijuana dispensary called Cookies on the way to hockey practice in Ann Arbor, where the El-Sayeds live.

El-Sayed recalls, “I had to explain to her that they don’t sell cookies. How do I explain to [her] that they’re trying to market a product that isn’t meant for children, but [is] explicitly marketed to children?”

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Post-puberty young men are even worse off, in thrall to those who would addict them (Pornhub), and to those who farm online engagement by shifting the blame (Tate). As El-Sayed puts it, “When you’ve been sapped of all your energy because you’ve just looked at porn for the third time today, because it’s literally everywhere, and then somebody comes and tells you that ‘the reason you feel so bad is because of women,’ you’re talking about people in a very vulnerable place.”

The progressive alternative, El-Sayed contends, should be a combination of self-help and collective action: “You can tell young men, ‘OK, put on your pants, go to class, show up better in your life, hit the gym, all of it.’ But also: ‘Let’s talk about why you feel this way. It’s not about the women in your life. It’s about these huge corporations that have tried to separate you from your dollar in ways that make you feel bad.’ ”

It’s this relentless economic populism — combined with a blunt, here-I-am rhetorical style, especially on Gaza — that has made El-Sayed one of the most talked-about candidates amid the progressive ferment roiling the Democratic Party. Indeed, he comes closest to being the true heir to the aging Bernie Sanders progressives have spent years looking for.

The only question is whether El-Sayed is more like the 2016 Sanders (a heterodox rebel) or the 2020 Sanders (more conventional, more willing to play ball with the party mainstream). The shorter answer is: El-Sayed has elements of both. But on the whole, he’s more Bernie 2016 than Bernie 2020.

Abdul El-Sayed was born in 1984 in Rochester Hills, Mich., to Egyptian parents who’d moved to the area so his father could study engineering at Wayne State University. His parents later separated, and he grew up, as he told a radio interviewer in 2021, with a “Daughter of the American Revolution” stepmother and his immigrant father — the kind of only-in-America blended family that belies fantasies of racial purification animating the online Right.

He finished his undergraduate degree and the first two years of medical school at the University of Michigan before being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he earned a public-health doctorate. Back Stateside, he completed his medical degree at Columbia but skipped residency to pursue a career in public-health research. In 2015, at age 30, he returned to Detroit to serve as the city’s health director before running for governor three years later.

His gubernatorial bid failed, but along the way, he garnered endorsements from the likes of Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Meanwhile, he co-authored a book making the case for Medicare for All that doubled as a decent history of American health care and insurance.

Then came 2024. Michigan proved to be an especially challenging battleground for Democrats — in ways that touched on El-Sayed’s biography. Not only did the Biden-Harris campaign fail to motivate the state’s Muslim-American community, the country’s largest, but Donald Trump even won major endorsements from a number of imams and mayors. When the dust settled, Trump had clinched a majority of ballots in Dearborn, Mich., the country’s most heavily Muslim city.

How does El-Sayed explain the loss? In a word, Gaza. “Unfortunately,” he tells me, “President Biden was on the wrong side of that. His ‘hug-Bibi’ strategy put us in a situation where our values and our aims were not consistently applied as Democrats. . . . Folks got sick and tired of their tax dollars being spent to watch children being murdered who looked like their own children.”

While noting that he endorsed Kamala Harris, El-Sayed isn’t shy about where he thinks principle and politics should lead Democrats when it comes to the Middle East. For starters, he wants more Dems to get comfortable with the G-word: “I call this a ‘genocide’ in large part because that’s a technical term for a horror that’s being inflicted on people. I don’t know another word for killing 60,000-plus people, at least 18,500 of them children. Rendering their homes unlivable. Trying to push them into other countries because they happen to speak the same language.”

El-Sayed’s immediate solution to the Gaza crisis is to cut off all funding to the Israeli military (and, he quickly adds, to all foreign militaries): “I think we would do well to spend our money here to feed our children who are going without food, to build our kids’ schools, to empower our people to have health care, to build our infrastructure, rather than decimating and devastating people abroad.”

Unfavorable views of Israel are now overwhelming among Democrats, a majority of Independents, and a growing share of younger Republicans (though, as a whole, the GOP remains stalwartly pro-Israel). Yet the mainstream leadership of the Democratic Party isn’t ready to follow its base, notwithstanding a recent vote in the Senate that saw an astonishing half of the Democratic caucus call for withholding offensive weapons from the Jewish state.

Case in point: Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary and a likely 2028 presidential aspirant, faced broad ridicule for a podcast appearance in which he pontificated at length on Gaza without taking any clear stances. (When I ask El-Sayed to comment on this —Buttigieg is from neighboring Indiana, after all — he demurs: “I’m not a pundit.”)

But besides cutting off arms to the IDF, what’s his long-term plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Does he envision a two-state solution? “Every president before Donald Trump, since the founding of the State of Israel, has agreed that we want a two-state solution. That has been their stated aim. There is an Israel — there is not a Palestine. And yet our taxpayer dollars continue to be spent to aid, arm, and abet the very people who want to foreclose on the possibility of Palestine.”

Squint hard enough, and you might detect a grudging acknowledgment of official US policy there — two states for two peoples. Then again, El-Sayed’s cynicism is well-founded, in that leaders in Jerusalem increasingly reject Palestinian self-determination, most recently with an overwhelming vote in the Knesset in favor of annexing the West Bank.

Given the widening gap between Israel’s leaders and political culture, on one hand, and younger Americans of all political persuasions, on the other, even centrist Democrats are likely to shift in El-Sayed’s direction, even if not all the way. What makes him a potentially transformative leader for the party, however, isn’t his vociferousness on Israel per se, but his hospitals-here-not-bombs-there attitude. It echoes Sanders’s 2016 campaign — and could win back moderate or marginal GOP voters: not MAGA die-hards, but working- and lower-middle-class Americans who pulled twice for Obama before switching to Trump over the past decade.

El-Sayed is open about trying to reach disaffected Trumpians. “The fundamental divide,” he says, “is between people who have felt locked out of our system for a very long time and people who’ve been trying to lock them out. I want to work for the people who’ve been locked out. . . . How they’ve voted in the past, where they stand on social issues — I’ve got my opinions about those things, but I think we’re better as a society when people who’ve been locked out get a fair shake.”

If El-Sayed is indeed the closest thing progressives have to Bernie 2.0, his success will turn on his ability to navigate the tension between class-based economic populism and the identity-and-grievance jockeying that has shaped the party since the mid-2010s.

In 2015-16, Sanders denounced “open borders” and ran an unabashedly class-first message. In response, the party’s neoliberal center derided his followers as “bros” and often accused them (preposterously) of racism and sexism. Hillary Clinton asked: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow … would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” Four years later, amid “peak woke,” Sanders fell in line on immigration and lost his edge.

Where is El-Sayed on all this in 2025? At first, he bristles at the question and its left-right, class-versus-identity framing: “I’m a little bit too much of a scientist to take on premise a lot of the implied lenses that you’re using to make sense out of our political moment.” Yeah, OK. Obama, too, had wearied of red and blue, right and left by the time he gave his career-defining speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

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On immigration — an issue that massively contributed to Trump’s re-election last year, and which has dramatically altered politics across the developed world — El-Sayed sounds more conventionally progressive notes. While disavowing “open borders,” he mostly fumes against the cruelty of the newly supercharged Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Masked, anonymous ICE agents, he says, “are literally tearing mothers from babies and babies away from mothers. Tell me how this is something that benefits all of us. I just don’t see it, I’m sorry.”

Fair enough. But this doesn’t overcome the deeper economic argument against the free movement of labor: that it allows capital to engage in wage arbitrage, especially at the lower rungs of the labor market. It was just this that impelled the labor movement, and many trade-union and civil-rights icons, to back restrictionism until relatively recently. And it’s why the Bernie of old denounced porous national frontiers as a “Koch Brothers policy.”

El-Sayed disagrees: “The answer to going after the DoorDash economy, is to go after fucking DoorDash.” Meaning: pro-worker and pro-consumer legislation and regulation. So would that include national E-Verify, holding employers responsible for the immigration status of employees? Not quite. His bottom line is that border enforcement can’t and mustn’t be thought of as a means for boosting labor’s market power.

Immigration aside, El-Sayed’s vision resembles Bernie 2016 to a great extent. Class and economic power are at the heart of it: “I’m interested in trying to achieve an America where everyone has their best shot at a dignified life,” he says, “and I understand that the central challenge to doing that has been the power of extremely wealthy people to corrupt our politics, to shape an economy that funnels more and more money to the very top, against and despite everybody else who does all the work.”

He goes on to call for Medicare for All, higher union density in the private economy, robust antitrust enforcement, and the removal of corporate influence from politics. Add his communitarian concern about widespread male addiction and alienation, and his agenda could prove extremely popular in years to come. Doubly so if the Trumpians continue to deliver a George W. Bush program — Medicaid cuts, Mideast war — under the banner of America First.

This is the state of the Democrats in 2025. Bereft of ideas and riven by internal division, the party is no longer in control of itself. That has left it open to challenges from the ideological fringes, with a new wave of socialists and progressives emerging in America’s cities, from New York to Minneapolis to Albuquerque. Led by a new generation of young primary challengers, a broader realignment may be taking shape in the party — one that is more progressive, economically populist, and unapologetically pro-Palestine.

The forceful return of the Left has exposed the fecklessness of centrist Democrats, whose efforts to reclaim the party after President Trump’s victory last year have utterly failed. Back in November, moderates promised a sober reset: a return to pragmatism, competence, and electability. But they have since been out-organized, out-communicated, and increasingly out of step with a base that no longer sees triangulation as a virtue. With the midterms looming, it’s clear that the center isn’t holding, and the Left is on the march.

Over the last two months, a pair of Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates, Zohran Mamdani and Omar Fateh, have surfaced as contenders for mayor in two blue cities. In June, Mamdani — a democratic socialist who campaigned on city-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and free buses — won the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City. His victory was followed by that of Fateh, who received a major boost when the Minneapolis Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (the state’s version of the Democrats) endorsed him over incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey. It was the Minneapolis DFL’s first endorsement in 16 years.

Like Mamdani, Fateh’s pitch to voters focused almost exclusively on cost-of-living issues. He promised to implement widespread rent control, raise the city minimum wage to $20, and implement free transit. He is now well-positioned to win the general election later this year — even if Gov. Tim Walz has endorsed his rival Frey.

Progressives elsewhere are taking note. In Seattle, Katie Wilson looks set to defeat Mayor Bruce Harrell in a Democratic primary by promising affordable housing and better public transit. In a written statement, Wilson sounded almost like a MAGA Republican with her promise to take on “career politicians backed by corporate interests,” who have “presided for years over skyrocketing costs of living and out-of-control homelessness.” Similarly, in Albuquerque, NM, Alex Uballez is challenging Democratic Mayor Tim Keller on a progressive platform to combat income and housing inequality.

“Cost of living has for several years in a row now been top of mind for voters at all levels of elections,” says Michael Baharaeen, chief political analyst at the Liberal Patriot newsletter. “For better or worse, this new contingent of socialist and progressive candidates has a message on this stuff. They are speaking about things — whether they’re workable ideas or not — that people really care about.”

Many remain skeptical. Citing Mamdani’s plan to tax “whiter” neighborhoods harder or Fateh’s pledge to expand city funding for progressive causes (including a “Trans Equity Summit”), they claim that these figures merely represent a “new phase” of wokeness — not a rejection of it. To them, the populist gloss is just that. “When I hear a politician being described as economically populist, I want to see if the working class is actually voting for them or not,” says the political economist and UnHerd contributor Michael Lind. “The public grocery store idea does not come from the working class — it comes from the nonprofit sector. It’s a classic case of ‘pity charity liberalism.’”

Given that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo beat Mamdani by a wide margin among lower-income and black voters — the only two groups he won — it is difficult to cast Mamdani as a tribune of the working class. Still, there are signs he is trying to address that weakness. After the Midtown Manhattan shooting, for example, the Democratic nominee went directly from the airport after his wedding trip to Uganda to visit the family of a slain police officer. Later that day, he walked back past posts calling to defund the police, which he admitted were “out of step.” This may not sound entirely convincing, but it is a significant, if cautious, course correction.

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Cuomo, for his part, tried to run a conventional campaign focused on public safety in the primary. But Mamdani, despite starting with almost no name recognition, succeeded in shifting the conversation. He reframed the race around housing, affordability, and the cost of living, which proved so effective that Cuomo, in his campaign relaunch, mimicked both Mamdani’s visual style and his economic focus. What was meant to be a law-and-order referendum has since become a debate on rent, wages, and whom the city is for.

The fact that Mamdani remains a viable candidate speaks to a deeper shift in the Democratic Party. Ten or even five years ago, it is doubtful that figures like him or Fateh would have emerged as serious contenders for office. In any other Democratic leadership contest, a candidate who refused to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” or who declined to support then-President Joe Biden in the 2024 primary — over his stance on Israel — would have been dead on arrival.

But these are different times. Democratic voters have undergone a dramatic shift on Israel — so much so that even former senior Barack Obama advisers are now calling for a re-evaluation of the party’s position. Chris Van Hollen, a US senator from Maryland, declared it was a “big lie” that Hamas has systematically stolen UN aid, while 24 Democratic senators supported blocking the sale of more than $675 million in arms sales to Israel. Meanwhile, in the House, 13 progressive lawmakers have signed onto a letter urging the Trump administration to recognize a Palestinian state, and at least one plans to introduce a pro-statehood resolution.

It would be a stretch to credit Mamdani and his fellow progressives for this shift, but their refusal to tone down criticism of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war has forced once-taboo positions into the mainstream. This dynamic was in full display during a mayoral debate, at which the candidates were asked to name the first foreign country they’d visit upon being elected mayor. Nearly all the other candidates named Israel, offering effusive praise for the Jewish state. Mamdani, however, indicated that he would stay put in the Big Apple, visiting local synagogues to connect with Jewish New Yorkers. The stance won him applause from the Left — and even many on the MAGA Right.

In fact, Israel’s blocking of aid to Gaza has twisted centrist Democrats into knots, with fears spreading that the war in the Middle East could become a litmus test for next year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential primaries. In the face of mass starvation and an IDF push to take over the entire Gaza strip, the only consensus the party’s moderate wing has managed to reach is this: criticize the Netanyahu government, but not the Jewish state.

This stance has produced some painfully tin-eared moments online. Challenged on a popular YouTube show on why she wasn’t taking a stronger position on Gaza, Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan deflected, insisting, “I would offer that Democrats own nothing in Washington,” before shifting the conversation to the difference between sending offensive and defensive weapons to Israel. Even on that point, she struggled. Asked whether she would support a ban on offensive arms to Israel, she meekly responded: “That, to me, would certainly be a place to look.” In the end, she skipped the vote on the offensive-weapons resolution for an appearance on the Stephen Colbert talkshow.

The center, then, is no longer setting the terms of the debate; it’s struggling to keep up.

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The upheaval is playing out at the ballot box, too. In safe blue districts across the country, a new generation of candidates — almost all under 40 — is mounting primary challenges against long-serving Democratic incumbents. In New York, a 26-year-old Jewish democratic socialist is taking on Rep. Dan Goldman, drawing inspiration from Mamdani’s high-profile run. In California, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is facing a challenge from a onetime aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In Illinois, a progressive content creator is running to unseat a 14-term congressman. And in a pair of open Senate races, Gen X and Millennial Democrats have launched bids to fill seats vacated by retiring Boomers in New Hampshire and Michigan. As Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive physician endorsed by Bernie Sanders who is running in Michigan, told Politico, his position on Gaza is a “symbol for something greater. Gaza, unfortunately, has become a Rorschach test for values. Do your morals apply anywhere and everywhere?”

What these races show is that the anti-establishment feeling that fueled Trump’s return is moving in both directions. As polling analysis by the election-data site Split Ticket illustrates, Democrats now view their party about as negatively as Republicans viewed theirs from 2009 to 2015, when Bush-Romney neoliberal dogma ruled the GOP. That insurgency reshaped the GOP from the ground up, dragging the party toward populism. A similar dynamic may now be unfolding on the Left. Polling in June found that roughly half of Democrats are “unsatisfied with current leadership,” with 62% calling for the “party leaders to be replaced” — a level of disaffection that suggests something bigger is stirring inside the party.

The Democrats have yet to find their own answer to Trump. But the most obvious contender is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has successfully straddled both wings of the party, serving as a bridge between the establishment and progressives. She has the highest net approval out of any Democrat not running for president, and she is still young enough to position herself as an outsider candidate.

Unlike most of her colleagues, AOC has also cultivated a political identity that operates largely independent of the Democratic Party’s institutional machinery. But the real test will be whether she can break through beyond the progressive base and win over moderates and independents — the very voters needed to beat Trump’s successor.

She is also exactly who, like Mamdani, Republicans want front and center in the Democratic Party. Just as Trump painted her and The Squad as the face of the party during his first term, the president is now targeting Mamdani in a similar fashion. This could have a deleterious effect on Democratic efforts to win back independents and moderates ahead of next year’s midterms. As Karl Rove aptly put it on Fox News last weekend, “the more that we get people like this representing the face of the Democratic Party, the harder it is [for them] to win back voters in the middle of American politics.”

For that to happen — to win back a national majority — these progressive challengers actually need to win their races first. Beyond that, a lot will also depend on the progressives’ ability to stay singularly focused on issues like the cost of living and Republicans’ attacks on hugely popular entitlements, while eschewing “peak woke” slogans like police abolition and “queer liberation.”

Still, their success so far signals a deeper shift underway in the party. What once looked like fringe discontent is beginning to coalesce into a coherent, organized revolt. Far from being isolated local phenomena, their victories would legitimize a new template for Left-wing politics: one rooted in economic populism with a deep skepticism of the party establishment. In a few years’ time, it may not be Mamdani, Fateh, and others who seem like outliers — but the party leadership, scrambling to catch up.

Maybe a Republican has a chance to become governor for the first time since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reelection in 2006. But probably not. Of the two Republicans battling for their party’s nomination, one is an unimpressive county sheriff who speaks in the dullest of Republican slogans, and the other is Steve Hilton, whose campaign tract Califailure is badly written, poorly argued, lazily researched, barely edited, and entirely uninspiring.

Hilton’s inability to write an inspiring political tract was an odd discovery, because his most prominent role in British politics was doing strategy and communications for David Cameron. Since then, he has remade himself as a Fox News commentator, and now has designs on the governorship. Califailure, then, has taken on new importance since its publication in March.

Not only is it totally unserious as an analysis of the Democrats’ bad policies, it also fails as political messaging. It’s a book written to exercise the emotions of Hilton’s Fox News audience, but a message designed for the geriatric ideologues and fantasists who watch Fox News is not going to break the Democratic Party’s death-grip on California politics. It will do little to help people truly understand the policy disasters that have befallen California, and it will persuade few California voters who aren’t already Republicans to vote against Democratic rule. What Califailure will mainly do is convince faithful Fox viewers in Tennessee and Colorado and Michigan that the cartoon portrait of California they get on Fox News is the truth. Don’t get me wrong. It’s closer to the truth than a cartoon portrait should be, but it’s still a cartoon portrait.

You can see Hilton’s role as a talking head taking over his duties as an author in the table of contents of Califailure. After a short chapter titled “One Party Rule,” Hilton goes on a run of nine chapters whose titles are words that will resonate as incendiary insults with Fox News viewers: “Elitism”, “Narcissism”, “Maoism”, “Climatism”, “Socialism”, “Bureaucratism”, “Compassionism”, “Cronyism”, and “Incompetism”. For those words that aren’t already recognized “-isms” (unlike Maoism and Socialism), Hilton affixes “-ism” to them to indicate that these aren’t just governing tendencies or pathologies but full-blown “ideologies” of their own. For example, the Democrats who run California aren’t just incompetent. They have turned incompetence into a belief system. Thus “Incompetism”. Translating the stubborn pathologies of California’s Democratic governance into discrete and conscious systems of belief serves Hilton’s interest as a Fox News commentator, but it doesn’t help anyone understand the underlying forces of political idiocy that afflict the state.

Take “Elitism”. If you remember what happened in California during Covid, and you have a feel for Hilton’s way with a political message, you can guess where his “Elitism” chapter is heading: it’s heading out for an expensive dinner at the French Laundry. The French Laundry is the famous Wine Country restaurant (three Michelin stars) where, in November 2020, Gavin Newsom and his wife were joined by rich friends and powerful colleagues to celebrate Newsom’s 50th birthday. Even as he was demanding that California residents wear masks when they were inside stores and other public buildings, and limiting California restaurants to outdoor dining, Newsom and his party dined maskless and indoors.

I suppose this is an example of elitism, and the fancy-restaurant destination, as well as Newsom’s status as a pretty-boy scion of a rich and politically connected family, make it a satisfying reason to reach for your pitchfork. But the fact that powerful people think the rules they apply to others don’t apply to them is a fairly generic lesson of politics. Power corrupts, even when it’s attained by popular vote, even in places that aren’t California. Hilton is just rabble-rousing here, eliciting familiar tones from his bell, cueing readers to froth in the clinically predicted ways.

A more telling example — also dating from the lockdown era — appears near the end of the “Elitism” chapter. Hilton points out that expensive private schools, such as those attended by Newsom’s own children, were holding regular in-person instruction while “public”, government-run schools were still doing online instruction, holding classes via Zoom session. “So why didn’t he insist that public schools educating the majority of California’s students open for in-person instruction, and not just the schools attended by his children and the other children of the elite?” He doesn’t answer this question. He takes it to answer itself. And the answer is the title of the chapter in which it appears: “Elitism”. People in the elite like Gavin Newsom just take themselves to be better than the rest of us, and so they get to follow different rules. It’s an ideology.

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But a much better, much more concrete and parsimonious, explanation for why public schools persisted with phony video schooling, in which kids didn’t learn anything, is the strength of teachers’ unions. Teachers at public schools are unionized. Teachers at private schools generally aren’t unionized. Unions took a maximalist view of the Covid risk their members faced. This was not reasonable, from either an educational or a public health standpoint, but from the standpoint of the institutional game that teachers’ unions are always playing, it was totally comprehensible. It’s what you’d expect.

The challenge for a book about the many failures of California governance is not to find the best insult for teachers’ unions. It’s to understand why teachers’ unions have so much power that they can force a disastrous pandemic policy onto students and their families with no resistance, indeed with the full complicity of the other major powers in state politics. The answer is not mysterious. Local teachers’ unions are members of the California Education Association (CEA), and the CEA is one of the most powerful forces in California politics. Since the CEA basically sets its own agenda within the state Democratic party, and since that party has a monopoly of power in the state, the CEA can pursue its favored policies enviably free of electoral or institutional constraints. In other words, the so-called elitism in Hilton’s private school example is entirely downstream of the power of unionized public school teachers, which is entirely downstream of the fact that Democrats have total control of state government.

This line of causality — from the Democrats’ unopposed power to the state’s pathological governance — is pretty obvious and direct in the case of the CEA. In other areas Hilton covers, the connections are a touch more subtle, but they’re far from obscure. For instance, in his “Compassionism” chapter he describes some of the now-familiar examples of progressive officials in California seeming to favor chaos and crime over mundane public order maintained by police officers. Hilton uses “Compassionism” to describe a vague mental condition — an ideology, yes, but also a sort of mental illness, in his treatment — from which California progressives supposedly suffer that leads them to tolerate chaos and oppose measures to control it.

But the destructive and weirdly selective compassion expressed in the state’s Democratic policies — summoned for the criminal targets of police power but withheld from the victims of these criminals — reflects internal political dynamics predictable in one-party rule, in which the strongest pressures are applied from the ideological fringe. I’ve described this phenomenon as it affects my own city of Oakland — progressive politicians facing no electoral constraints from their Right, only the threat of shaming from activists to their Left for their lack of ideological purity. Both social status and political survival in this sort of one-party governance depend on submitting to puritanical ideologues. At some point in the moral bidding wars that drive progressive politics, it becomes socially and politically treacherous for even sensible officials to concede, for example, that the police should enforce the law.

The strange thing about Califailure is that, though it begins with a chapter titled “One Party Rule,” Hilton doesn’t use this basic electoral fact to frame his treatment of California’s bad governance. For the sake of his TV audience, he treats his various pathologies — “Elitism”, “Compassionism”, and so on — as independent variables, freestanding causes that explain the bad governance. But he can’t decide how they explain it. He mostly seems to think that progressives just inherently have these “diseases”, as if one is drawn to Leftist politics as symptomatic expression of clinical Cronyism or whatever, but sometimes he suggests that they take on these mental illnesses willingly. “The pathology of Narcissism,” he writes, “is tailor-made for an elite class that believes its own utopian fantasies can replace… mundane reality….” Tailor-made? On one hand, this is terrible writing, another instance of the crude, sloganeering prose that makes up Califailure. On the other hand, it reveals the trick Hilton is trying and failing to pull off, using the polemical language of sickness but also wanting the sick people he’s talking about to be fully deserving of his scorn because they’ve somehow, consciously chosen their diseases, as a man chooses the cut of his suit. Narcissism is a mental illness and an ideology. Compassionism is an ideology and a mental illness.

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In either case, Hilton treats the excesses of progressivism — his nine silly “-isms” — as independent causes of California’s problems, which allows him to yell about them as he yells about things on TV. But, again, these excesses are better understood as effects of one-party rule. In this context, a party’s extremists hold a potent advantage in negotiation and persuasion precisely because of their extremism. When there’s serious inter-party competition, though, those extremists lose this structural advantage. Faced with electoral competition, party leaders are more likely to resist the influence of purists and ideologues whose favored policies alienate moderate voters.

We Californians don’t get to see this happen in state politics these days, but we have gotten recent glimpses of it as our Governor, who seems to be readying a 2028 run for President, reacts to the demands of national politics, where elections are competitive and moderate voters matter. Indeed, my city has enjoyed direct benefits from this altered political logic. Gavin Newsom doesn’t want national voters imagining rampant crime and homelessness when they hear his name, and so he’s made several high-profile moves in recent years that have angered the Left-wing of his party. Among these moves was dispatching a large contingent from state law enforcement to aid the Oakland Police Department — shrunken and “defunded” by extreme progressives on our city council – as it struggled to fight a devastating crime wave. This worked, and, in working, it showed electoral competition to be a healthy antidote to fanatic-driven policymaking in our one-party city.

But why is there no electoral competition? Why do Republican candidates no longer have a chance in statewide elections? If California’s absurd governance is an effect of Democratic control, shouldn’t a book about that absurdity direct a little curiosity at the other party’s performance through these years of dysfunction? Maybe it should, but it doesn’t. Hilton assigns no blame to the Republicans for their own weakness. Instead, he blames the Democrats. His “One Party Rule” chapter briefly examines the effects of Democratic dominance on Republicans, and he makes a pretty good case that the Democrats have gamed the supposedly non-partisan system for drawing districts for the State Assembly, in the classic manner of partisan gerrymandering. If districts were drawn in a truly non-partisan manner, he points out, the Assembly should be around 40% Republican, reflecting the usual Republican vote in statewide elections. Instead, Republicans hold only 22% of Assembly seats.

This is a fair point. But why should the Republican share of the state electorate be capped at 40%, especially when Democratic rule has made the state into a national laughing stock? Why can’t the Republicans grab enough voters disgusted with the crime and the dysfunction and the overall idiocy to make statewide elections competitive again?

Hilton directs no criticism or even advice or encouragement towards his fellow Republicans on this matter. And these voters exist. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the state’s Republican Party is more ideologically uniform than its Democratic Party. In other words, conservative Democrats are much more numerous than liberal Republicans. But there’s nothing in Califailure about winning over those ambivalent Democrats from their malfunctioning party.

He could have made his book a true provocation to Democratic voters frustrated with their party by focusing on the self-satirizing details of progressive governance and messaging, which are generally hidden from everyday people precisely because there’s no viable opposition party to broadcast these things. That is, instead of the few brief passages he devotes to the specifics of progressive policymaking (especially in his worthwhile “Bureaucratism” chapter), he could have filled his entire book with such things in their infuriating and irrational specifics — the petty, hostile, relentless regulation and taxation of small businesses; the rich payouts to Left-wing NGOs that work to perpetuate rather than to mitigate their pet disasters; the proud non-enforcement of basic criminal law; the unimaginable waste of environmentalist dreams like our bullet-train-to-nowhere, and progressives’ crippling efforts to make us the greenest country in the world when we’re not even a country.

Hilton touches on these things, but his research is lazy and haphazard. He’s easily distracted. He’s more interested in issues that agitate his national audience of Fox watchers than with the concrete troubles of us beleaguered Californians. He can’t help dredging up worked-over culture-war tropes, so that you can forget sometimes he’s even writing about California. His “Narcissism” chapter includes a long rant about the activist neologism “LatinX”, in which he rebuts the need for such a term with a hilariously earnest and misplaced digression on Spanish grammar. It’s as if he’s seeking relief from the shallowness of his own book through a fantasy of being a linguistics professor. His “Maoism” chapter is consumed with Stanford University and the authoritarian Leftism of its administrators. Stanford is technically located in California, but the maddening things happening there are happening at every elite university in the US. These campus issues are national issues. They illustrate nothing about California’s failed governance.

Indeed the focus on rarefied Stanford hints at a sort of elitism in Steve Hilton’s worldview, and in the ways of the state Republican Party he hopes to lead. This elitism, ironically, mirrors that of the state’s ruling Democrats. Just as the Democrats’ insulation from electoral competition allows them to indulge the elitist, utopian fantasies of their activist base, the Republicans’ impotence in this competition enables a similar dynamic, in which ideological purity and fidelity to elites in the national Republican party displace hard thinking and compromise about bread-and-butter issues that affect everyday Californians. Once you decide that statewide victory is off the table, you can let go of difficult, impure politicking and settle into the easier business of placating activists who vote in primaries, parroting the themes of Republican celebrities in Washington, and playing up abstract culture-war fights.

As Mike Madrid, former political director for the state Republican party, said in 2023, “The Republican Party is really not trying to be a viable political party anymore in California. It’s kind of content being this small, regional, marginalized social movement, and for the moment that’s what it is, and that’s probably what it’ll be for a very long time.” You can see how this arrangement would suit individuals at the core of the Republican party, as it suits those on Democratic side. Those people are already where they want to be, enjoying the quantum of reliable influence they’ve been given in our unhealthy equilibrium.

And, in the composition of his dashed-off book, you can see Steve Hilton bidding to secure his own place in this arrangement. Nothing in his book suggests he’s serious about actually winning the statewide election he’s made himself a side-character in. Despite the book’s title, Califailure doesn’t read like something addressed to California voters at all, who will find its fixations only occasionally and vaguely connected to the concrete problems of their state. He’s talking to nationwide consumers of partisan media, who relish their Schadenfreude about liberal California and like to have it reinforced periodically from their TV sets. He’ll still be talking to them after the next election, and still as someone who doesn’t hold political office, and, if his ridiculous book is any indication, he’s perfectly content with that.

Both the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, could end up victims. Or at least, they may have to sweat very hard through their re-election campaigns. Some of this might be because both men are based in New York City, ground zero for Left-wing activism. But the threat is baked into their jobs at a time when Democratic voters, nationally, are taking a dim view of their party overlords.

This great suspicion of the Democratic Party is what distinguishes the first Primary Spring from the second. In 2017, President Trump had just been elected for the first time, and liberal activism was reaching its apogee. This was the #Resistance era, when every conceivable cause — immigration, policing, loathing Russia — was amplified to a stunning degree, and public protest was seemingly inexhaustible. Though anti-Trump marches still take place today, they are nothing like they were in 2017 and 2018, when resistance to Trump was culturally dominant and “woke” politics were just beginning to peak. Put it this way: the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad campaign could not have appeared during the first spring.

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In addition to being more woke, Democrats liked their party back then. There was genuine excitement for their upstart candidate, and party elders like Schumer and Nancy Pelosi were not yet considered too old, too disconnected. They were cheered as heroes of the anti-Trump war. In 2017, these two ideas — liking the national party leaders enough, while also demanding change — could exist in harmony. Pelosi resented Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, and followers of the young upstart could be fiercely critical of the party mainstream. But once the fireworks died down, there was some sense of unity: everyone agreed that beating Trump was critical, and there were plenty of ordinary Democrats who could have warm feelings about both Pelosi and AOC. Unlike now, the Democratic Party itself largely polled well.

The true beginning of the first Primary Spring was AOC’s shock victory over Joe Crowley in a district straddling The Bronx and Queens. Crowley was one of the highest-ranking Democrats in the House, but he wasn’t a well-known national figure. Rather, he was a political boss in Gotham, where he was regarded as a power broker poised to one day ascend to the speakership. Beyond a few local Leftists, no one saw AOC’s triumph coming. Overnight, she was transformed into a national star feted on talk shows, and she embodied a new Millennial generation that was, with great fanfare, asserting itself politically. Moderate Democrats may have been rankled by AOC, but her star power was undeniable.

In the first Primary Spring, progressive challenges to sitting members of Congress and state legislators were prized most. Bernie Sanders’s second presidential campaign, in 2020, was seen as the expected culmination of several years of intense activism. If very few believed Ocasio-Cortez could defeat Crowley, Sanders, following his aggressive challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016, was far less of a dark horse. Leftists, around the fall and winter of 2019, truly believed that the Vermont socialist could seize the nomination and bring his “old Left” vision to the White House.

Sanders’s obvious defeat in 2020 — the Democratic National Committee or scheming Clintonites couldn’t be blamed this time around — sapped much of the energy out of the first Primary Spring. But there were more progressive victories that came that year, after Sanders conceded to Biden. One of them was Jamaal Bowman, the Squad congressman who unseated a long-serving pro-Israel hawk, Eliot Engel, in a Democratic primary as the pandemic raged. On the same day Bowman won his primary, a young socialist organiser from Queens named Zohran Mamdani triumphed, as well, beating a local assemblyman to enter the Albany legislature.

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When Biden became president, progressives had more power, but the sizzle was gone, and Democratic incumbents were much better-positioned. AOC’s Squad plateaued. The Democratic Socialists of America began to see a net decrease in membership. And the wind-down of the pandemic meant certain causes that were once dominant, like Black Lives Matter, were going to matter less. Corporations, which enthusiastically backed Black Lives Matter and other progressive causes during the pandemic, would return to business as usual by the time the next presidential election rolled around.

And here we are now, facing a second spring. In one sense, there is nothing surprising about a Trump presidential victory triggering a new Primary Spring. Squint hard enough, and you’ll spot the parallels between 2017 and 2025. Special elections are breaking the Democratic Party’s way, and GOP town halls — if congressional Republicans even bother to hold them — are filling up with constituents alienated by Trump’s Medicaid cuts. What’s different now is the internal sourness: Democrats hate Trump but aren’t feeling much better about their own leaders, Schumer in particular. The remarkably durable leader — he’s been in politics for half a century, and the leader of the Senate Democrats for a decade — seems in danger of losing.

The good news for Schumer is that he has time to recover his standing: he won’t face voters again until 2028. The bad news is that the primary date could fall on the same day as the presidential primary, leading to a turnout boom that sinks him. In the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June, Mamdani benefited from a turnout surge, especially from 20-something voters who don’t typically participate in local elections. Like Trump, Mamdani performed very well with the casual voter. These kinds of Democrats — anti-establishment, less reverent of party leadership — would not be friendly to Schumer, who will turn 78 in the fall 2028. Mamdani proved, too, that pro-Palestine politics are a winner in a primary, and Schumer’s tireless defense of Israel won’t be viewed fondly.

The challenge for Schumer isn’t just age. Sanders, at 83, is still popular with the youth and revered by the Left. It’s that Schumer’s political strengths no longer play well in the current environment, especially as Democrats hunger for compelling national figures to lead them out of the wilderness. They want another Barack Obama, or at least someone who possesses that sort of verve — a natural storyteller, above anything else.

Democrats lack a narrative. Schumer has always been a small-bore legislator, relishing constituent work and passing somewhat notable but inoffensive bills. He is not a Harry Reid or Lyndon Johnson; he has never had much of a vision for where Democrats or the nation should go. Rather, he’s always been stronger at wrangling votes and cajoling colleagues. Under Biden, this was beneficial, as Democrats passed sweeping infrastructure and green energy legislation with the narrowest of majorities.

Under Trump, however, Schumer has little to offer.

Who primaries Schumer remains to be seen, but AOC already looks like a strong contender. She has played more of the inside game since coming to Congress, and she still retains a strong fan base among the young. She’d raise gobs of money. If she doesn’t run for president, a campaign against Schumer seems inevitable. And if, for whatever reason, she decides against it, New York has no shortage of younger legislators and high-profile politicians who could knock out Schumer; Letitia James, the state attorney general known for tussling with Trump, would be formidable.

Less vulnerable, but no longer completely safe, is Jeffries, the House minority leader. Jeffries, like Schumer, is based in Brooklyn. He’s much younger, still in his 50s, and he’s a stronger public speaker. He has deep roots in the black community, which has traditionally been important for primaries. Unlike Crowley, he won’t be a sleepy campaigner. His district also has enough moderate and conservative chunks to save him from a Left-wing challenger.

But Jeffries must look over his shoulder now because Mamdani was a serious contender in his district. In the northern sections, younger, Left-leaning voters are eager for change. It doesn’t matter to them that Jeffries, in 2027, appears likely to become speaker of the House, with Democrats favored to flip the chamber. They aren’t moved by the power that’s potentially in reach.

Jeffries will, at the minimum, be motivated to offer a message for the Democrats that transcends reviling Trump. Eight years ago, Trump hate went a long way. Now, voters are demanding more. They are, if anything else, less naïve than they once were. If Schumer is challenged in 2028 — or if the rumblings of internal dissent get louder — Senate Democrats will have to rethink how they organize themselves, especially as they struggle to get out of the minority. Is Schumer really the man to lead them back? Or do they hunt for another leader, someone with a sharper vision and more of a fighting spirit? These questions, for the Democrats, will only become more urgent as the Trump era drags on.

One might be tempted to conclude from this data that voters simply agree with Republicans more on the issues. The real story is more complicated. What Democrats are lacking isn’t so much the right policy package, but a demonstrated willingness to stand up to Donald Trump and his agenda in the second term. The issue, moreover, is less one of increasing Democratic unpopularity, than Republicans weathering a general decline in trust in institutions due to the unique connection Trump has with a significant minority of the country. Democrats cannot break this bond; they can only hope to mobilize the forces against it.

Consider polling about specific bills. Last month, Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill, the signature legislation of his second term thus far. On average, it had a net approval rating of -23, making it the second most unpopular major piece of legislation under consideration since 1990, only beating out the 2017 GOP health-care bill. In contrast, Biden’s infrastructure bill was at +39 when it was polled.

Put another way: When asked about specific pieces of legislation, voters prefer the Democratic approach of higher spending on infrastructure and social services to Republicans’ spending cuts that only partially offset tax cuts disproportionately favoring the wealthiest Americans.

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By Richard Hanania

Nate Silver’s tracking of polls finds Trump’s approval rating to be underwater by double digits on inflation, trade, and the economy. Immigration is Trump’s strongest issue, but even here, net approval is currently at -3. To be sure, the Journal poll shows Republicans to be more trusted on issues like immigration and the economy. Meanwhile, YouGov in May found nine issues where Democrats had an advantage, and 10 where Republicans did. It’s difficult to know what to make of polls showing that voters agree more with Democratic tax-and-spending bills than those favored by Republicans, while at the same time Republicans are more trusted on the economy as an abstract issue. Another contradiction: while Americans dislike Trump’s tariffs, and one would think that Democrats represent a return to the status quo, they still trust Republicans equally as much as Democrats or more on the issue. This shouldn’t be logically possible, and probably again reflects voters not thinking too carefully about their political attitudes.

Issue polling is, in short, a mess. Although we can draw broad lessons about which party owns specific policy areas, I would be hesitant to use it in order to make inferences regarding recent changes in how Americans view Democrats and Republicans.

So if not policy, what does explain the sorry state of the Democrats? It would be one thing if they were cratering with Independents. That would suggest that they are simply out of step with the majority of Americans. In fact, the party leadership is reaching new lows because it faces discontent among its base. In the CNN poll cited above, only 58% of Democratic-aligned adults have a favorable view of their party, compared to 76% of Republicans. Morris and Radcliffe point to a Strength in Numbers/Verasite poll showing that Left-wing Democratic voters are disproportionately unhappy: about 20% of self-identified “very liberal” Democrats now have an unfavorable view of their own party, far higher than the equivalent disaffection among “very conservative” Republicans, who are at 8%. If you factor out this Left-flank discontent, Democratic approval would rise by a net of eight points. In the Strength in Numbers poll, Democrats actually do better with Independents.

The Republican advantage, then, seems mostly or completely driven by very liberal voters not liking the current Democratic Party. Does that mean that, in order to match Republicans in popularity, all Democrats would have to do is move Left? Unfortunately for them, surveys indicate that their voters would like them to do precisely the opposite.

According to a February poll from Gallup, as of early 2025, only 22% of Democrats were content with the party’s current ideological approach — everyone else wanted change. Crucially, 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents said the party should become more moderate, while 29% wanted it to be more liberal or progressive. Among Republicans, in contrast, a healthy plurality of 43% was satisfied with the party and wanted it to stay the course.

What this means is that Democrats might need to think twice before simply trying to satisfy the most extreme voices among their base. Otherwise, they may lose moderate voters in the process, as more of their supporters want them to take a centrist path.

There is nothing all that mysterious about any of this. No matter where the Democrats are ideologically, voters could disapprove of the party from either side. A very liberal Democratic voter and a moderate one might both have gripes, which you would expect in a large, diverse country with only two major parties representing the entire political spectrum.

Perhaps it is a mistake, then, to focus on Democratic unpopularity. Maybe the question we should ask is why Republican approval remains so high among its base, in an era where trust in institutions is collapsing. The Trump-era GOP has taken radically unpopular positions on taxing and spending policy. Yet the Republican base seems to shrug everything off and remains malleable, seemingly due to Trump’s unique charisma. A KFF tracking poll shows that while only 61% of Republicans approved of the Big Beautiful Bill in June, that figure had risen to 78% in July.

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Republican politicians now regularly justify their actions based on the idea that they follow the will of Trump. Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma was more explicit than most when he said that he fought against releasing Epstein documents in order to give Trump “cover,” arguing that Democrats would use any information that came out to target the president. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, when praising the recent trade deal with South Korea, urged his followers to “Trust in Trump”. A recent New York Times headline reads: “Texas Republicans Unveil Gerrymandered House Map, Trying to Please Trump,” showing that the president’s influence reaches down to what have traditionally been state and local issues.

The behavior of the current Congress has been downright cult-like. As the Associated Press reports, a raft of GOP proposals would allow Americans to “take the day off work for Donald Trump’s birthday,” receive “a $100 bill with Trump’s portrait on it,” and land at “Donald J. Trump International Airport near the nation’s capital,” among other similar measures.

It’s easy to feel contempt for politicians here. But we can assume that they are simply following their voters, who really love this man. Trump’s approval remains sky high in a party that was famous for turning on its leaders in Congress throughout the Obama era. Since 2023, researchers at Vanderbilt University have been asking Republicans if they consider themselves more supporters of MAGA or the traditional GOP. The first time they posed the question, 37% of respondents reported that they feel MAGA first. Today, the MAGA-first group is at 52%.

This is particularly interesting because MAGA is notoriously flexible when it comes to ideology. Those who consider themselves more intellectual Trumpists have no shortage of complaints about the president, from his bombing of Iran to his Medicaid cuts. A popular meme shows Trump implementing tariffs and being praised for it by a cartoon supporter in a red hat, who then turns around and declares “art of the deal” every time he removes the levies.

The story of falling Democratic popularity relative to Republicans is therefore only partly a story about Democrats. We are in an era of declining trust, which afflicts nearly all institutions, from the media to Congress to the medical system. Of course, the two major political parties are likely to take a hit under those conditions. Yet Republicans are buoyed by a cult of personality that is largely impervious to the effects of bad news or unpopular policy positions.

According to the Wall Street Journal poll, Republicans are currently about where they were in 2010 in terms of net favorability. Meanwhile, Democrats have seen an almost continuous decline. Thus, the notion that Trump is a drag on the GOP likely gets things exactly backwards. While his overall popularity might be underwater, what distinguishes Trump from other politicians is his ability to hold a base of support among a substantial and unshakable minority of the American people. This rubs off on the rest of the GOP, as long as lesser Republicans are seen to be doing the bidding of their leader.

That doesn’t mean all hope is lost for Democrats. While the party is indeed divided on whether it should become more moderate or liberal, there is greater unity on standing up to Trump. In a March poll that asked Democrats how they would grade their party’s response to Trump, 70% gave them a C or lower, with 21% giving an F. Only 17% said that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was doing enough to fight Trump; 61% felt he wasn’t doing enough. Democratic voters overwhelmingly support efforts like trying to block Trump’s actions through the courts and engaging in mass protests.

It follows that Democratic elected officials can likely shore up their own base of support by standing together against Trump’s political priorities. Would that possibly hurt them with Independents? One can’t say for sure, but given that Trump’s overall approval rating is underwater, it isn’t as if they would be going against the tide of public opinion. And Republicans are already extremely polarized against Democrats, and likely to stay that way, given their increasingly propagandistic media-consumption habits.

Trump’s role in the national psyche is so overwhelming that nearly every major political story is, at heart, a story about Trump. Republicans believe what they believe largely based on what Trump says and does. The Democrats are now a party that is ideologically divided, but united in opposition to Trump.

Given the fact that Trump’s base can’t be moved, Democrats might as well show life and pull out all the stops to oppose his agenda. On policy and messaging, it probably makes sense to moderate, rather than move to the Left. On anti-Trump opposition, however, the party must be resolute. In other words, Democrats need a centrism that fights. As the Republican Party becomes more and more enthralled to one man and his personal agenda, there is little to be gained by hoping to appease the other side.

Oppositional centrism would shore up the Democrats’ own base, and likely has the best chance of winning over the small number of Americans who are still persuadable. MAGAs will find a reason to be angry regardless. In order to thrive in the face of an increasingly unified opposition, Democrats cannot keep living in fear of the backlash that might result from standing up to Trump.

What America needs today is a Democratic Party with a prosocial vision advanced through prosocial means: to defend human beings as fundamentally social, cooperative, and mutually dependent, both in the way they campaign and in the policies they promote. 

Unfortunately, too many Democrats look at Trump and conclude they can use his tools to advance their ends. Envious of Trump’s success, they have also become envious of his political style. Unable, or maybe unwilling, to reckon with their electoral failing, Democrats are frantically searching for someone to match Trump’s crassness and cruelty in a feckless bid to mirror his political success. But what they fail to recognize is that Trump’s style is consistent with his political outlook. The cultivation of anger, vulgarity, antagonism, derision — these tools are antithetical to any legitimate effort to build up the common good and unite Americans. 

Democrats began the Trump era running ads about how our children were watching, and warning that Trump’s language and character were unfit for the highest office in the land. They had a point, and it’s a big reason why they won in 2020. In 2024, however, Democrats sought to maintain their claim of moral superiority all while increasingly employing their own brand of frivolous, crude, and ultimately ineffective politics (you cannot beat Trump at his own game). During the last presidential campaign, if my kids were within earshot, I would preemptively change the station whenever a Harris-Walz ad came on the air, as they so often resorted to using vulgarity as a shortcut to conveying conviction. We have never had such an openly vulgar, profane presidential campaign in the modern era — and Trump wasn’t the only vulgar nominee.  

Trump has pitted family members and communities against one another, and it’s been heartbreaking and destructive. Rather than strike a contrast with Trump, Democrats routinely suggest that voting against them equates to a personal betrayal of one’s family, gender, and race. Kamala Harris supporters closed the campaign encouraging spouses to lie to one another, in effect promoting familial conflict. 

It is ludicrous and self-defeating that a leading slogan for the 2024 Democratic ticket was “mind your own damn business.” For some reason, Tim Walz referred to it as “the Golden Rule,” though, of course, that is emphatically not the Golden Rule in Minnesota or anywhere else. Did he get a thrill out of gesturing to the sacred before turning to the profane? The distance between the winning Obama coalition and the campaign-by-meme Democrats we have now might well be the distance between Obama’s “I am my brother’s keeper” and Walz’s “mind your own damn business” (full disclosure: I served the 44th president as his director of faith outreach). 

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Progressives who dismiss critiques of Democrats as “false equivalencies” miss the point. It is no coincidence that Trump employs vulgarity, derision, anger, and fear; these are the social and emotional conditions that justify his antisocial politics. The nature of these tools does not change just because Democrats use them. Democrats help Trump when they appropriate his style — even when they ostensibly aim to oppose him.

Democrats should understand that just because a particular style or set of references have cachet in pop culture and on social media, it doesn’t mean Americans want it in their politics. Obscure references, sarcastic putdowns, memes, and celebrity culture can undermine Democrats’ message, and make voters feel like politics and politicians are distant from their lives. Similarly, many Americans may accept and be drawn to entertainment that is full of anger and vulgarity. But for politicians and activists to deploy the crude vernacular of the entertainment industry and online culture can only undermine confidence that the government can act on behalf of all of the people. Instead, Democrats can renew a vision of politics as a forum for service and identify acts of neighborliness as integral to this vision.

It will be tempting for the Democratic Party to find its purpose in opposing Trump for the next four years, while avoiding its own internal contradictions and aimlessness. There are some who seem to think that if Democrats would just fight, they would regain Americans’ trust. Newspaper columns and cable-news punditry are filled with calls for Democrats to fight, though specifics about whom or what they’re fighting for are more difficult to find.

This advice gets it exactly backwards. You don’t figure out what you believe by fighting. You figure out what’s worth fighting for when you know what you believe. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) has argued, Democrats need “not just an opposition vision … but a proposition vision.” If Democrats want to effectively fight the Trump administration, they need to regain Americans’ trust by gaining clarity on what they believe, what they are willing to defend, and what they want to do with the power to govern again.

In order to regain Americans’ trust and deserve to govern, Democrats must become a prosocial party that filters all policies, tactics, and communications through a prosocial filter. Put simply, a prosocial filter means that what Democrats support and oppose must meet the test of improving our common life together, rather than just representing a hodgepodge of policies that please certain advocacy groups and the interests they claim to represent.

Democrats have allowed themselves to be tied to antisocial behavior, which undermines their vision of governance and America’s potential. In The Atlantic last year, Marc Fisher described the growing acceptance and prevalence of shoplifting, and how it is transforming retail operations. Likewise, in many cities, anyone who takes public transportation regularly encounters flagrant fare evasion. It is demoralizing to be unable to walk into a store and choose the items we need off the shelf, without a clerk having to unlock a shoplifting-proof cabinet. It assails our sense of dignity to be forced to painstakingly monitor our personal budget for what are apparently optional ticket fares. 

Democrats generally don’t actively support shoplifting or fare evasion, to be sure. But why is it that when you read criticisms of these behaviors, they are coded as conservative concerns? Rather than offer isolated, defensive pleas that they, too, oppose crime, and a reactionary plan to combat price-gouging as a talking point on inflation, Democrats ought to oppose crime and corruption because injustice makes life miserable, communities distrustful, and robust economic and community well-being unattainable. 

Likewise, instead of accepting the unfettered advance of technological and business encroachments that promote antisocial behavior, Democrats ought to be the party that puts social well-being at the center of decision making. They should take New York Rep. Paul Tonko’s lead in seeking to rein in online sports gambling, a societal catastrophe everyone sees coming but acts helpless to prevent. Democrats should revisit their support for the legalization and public proliferation of marijuana in light of new scientific evidence of its harms; even if they do not go so far, their support for the legalization of marijuana must include a social analysis and policy attentiveness to the consequences of legalization. Does anyone really believe that the ubiquitous, public presence of marijuana or online sports gambling (as just two examples) have made our communities better, healthier or even more enjoyable? 

Similarly, it should not be assumed that the policy task at hand is to simply help Americans adjust to artificial intelligence. Instead, the development and utilization of AI should proceed in negotiation with the demands of a prosocial vision for our communities and nation. How do the American people want AI to affect their lives? Shouldn’t that question at least be on the table? Politics should pose and help answer that question, not just go along with the profit motive and technological prowess for their own sake. Some Democrats are taking steps to address AI’s effect on Americans’ jobs. But many more should be taking seriously the consequences AI might have for our humanity: for the way we relate to one another as social creatures.  

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Then, too, Democrats need to take responsibility for the antisocial effects of their politics in recent years. As 2024 wound down, reports emerged of a Federal Emergency Management Agency official instructing government canvassers to avoid the homes of Trump supporters while offering hurricane relief in Florida. Democrats must ask themselves: have we conducted ourselves in a way that could give someone the impression that this is OK? Have we provided permission for this kind of behavior toward fellow Americans? 

Democrats must stop being so concerned about whether there is a double standard for judging appropriate political behavior, and become much more concerned about their own standards, and whether they live up to them. The American people have less tolerance for feigned sincerity than for Donald Trump’s transparent insincerity. 

The party doesn’t have to start from scratch in building a prosocial politics; there are leaders already showing the way. They can look to Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s service agenda; Senator Chris Murphy’s incisive work to address our nation’s loneliness epidemic and rebuild social capital; Senator Andy Kim’s focus on humble service, rather than self-aggrandizing condemnation or antipathy, following Jan. 6. It’s also worth revisiting Pete Buttigieg’s values-based “Rules for the Road” for his 2020 presidential campaign.

Donald Trump borrowed “Make America Great Again” from Ronald Reagan. Democrats would do well to take up the promise of Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, to pursue a “kinder, gentler society.” We have become meaner, lonelier, and less considerate as a nation, often in the name of politics. Political ideology is increasingly used to justify and excuse interpersonal cruelty. It doesn’t take a prophet to foresee that in a few years, voters will have had their fill of conflict and cruelty. They will want community again, and they deserve a party that will help them build, nurture, and protect it.

Mamdani was a rising organizer whom I wanted to hire for my bid for the state Senate. In the New York City neighborhoods where I was campaigning, Mamdani had been the canvassing director on the City Council bid of a Palestinian pastor who nearly pulled off a stunning upset. The pastor, known as Father K, had thrilled the local youth, and canvassers constantly swarmed my apartment building. Many belonged to the Democratic Socialists of America. The concept of an openly socialist campaign winning office had always seemed far-fetched. But here was Father K, storming the ramparts. I wanted to know immediately who was working for him.

When I met Mamdani, he was intrigued by my campaign. I was a progressive Democrat unafraid of calling myself a socialist or criticizing Israel, even though I was Jewish. We immediately bonded over a shared political vision, as well as a wicked sense of humor. But hiring Mamdani couldn’t happen automatically — not because I was waffling, but because he wanted to know whether I was serious.

He needed to know if I was going to raise a decent amount of money and make my run viable. He wasn’t interested in vanity campaigns or lost causes. I respected that. I was motivated to go out and raise money, proving my mettle to my supporters and to Mamdani. In early 2018, he signed on as my field director, and he rapidly rose to become my full-fledged campaign manager.

These days, Mamdani faces a far tougher challenge than helming a state legislative campaign. He’s got to win a general election against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (again), incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, and the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa. Then he has to decide how to govern Gotham’s vast bureaucracies. Winning in November, by contrast, will be relatively easy. Some of his campaign promises, like freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments, are quite doable. Others, like raising corporate taxes or funding a $5 billion childcare expansion, will need the cooperation of a state government that may not be hospitable to a young socialist mayor. Business leaders are threatening to leave the city.

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Mamdani will also have to decide how he would govern America’s largest police force — as a Leftist who once backed defunding the police but no longer advocates for this goal. Will he retain the current NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a well-regarded, Harvard-educated technocrat who is also critical of many of the criminal-justice reforms that he backs? And what would he do if President Trump keeps flooding New York streets with ICE agents?

There is a cliché, which is mostly true, that being mayor of New York is America’s toughest job after the presidency. City Hall has a way of wearing down the titans who swagger inside. Every local ill is laid at the mayor’s feet. A DC lawmaker doesn’t have to rush to the site of a gas explosion or a train derailment, but a mayor is expected to — immediately. If a police officer is killed, he must comfort the family.

Is Mamdani up for all of this? If he beats back Adams and Cuomo, as expected — neither man is very popular — we are going to find out. He would have less experience than any incoming mayor in modern times. There’s great promise there. And peril, too.

I can think back to my own campaign, when I saw how Mamdani moved through rooms and thrilled our volunteers. He was supremely good with people, in the way you still hear folk tales told about a young Bill Clinton. His charm and gravitas, for someone of his age, was striking even then. Though Mamdani worked for me — my campaign funds paid his salary — I very much worked for Mamdani and felt driven to give every ounce of myself to the cause. This was his superpower. I would stand at a subway station in the middle of summer to pass out campaign materials at six in the morning. I would knock on doors to talk to voters seven days a week, often until nine at night. The volunteers and paid canvassers were no less driven. Everyone wanted to give themselves — to him.

A surreal moment for me came just a short while ago when Mamdani appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on the eve of the Democratic primary. Colbert pressed Mamdani on Israel and concerns about antisemitism. Mamdani is an unabashed critic of the Jewish state, a backer of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and someone who, until not very long ago, could be called an anti-Zionist. I’m sympathetic to much of what Mamdani believes and, as an American Jew, I am weary of a nation many thousands of miles away defining how I should worship or how I am viewed by the world. When Colbert asked Mamdani how he could bring together Jews and Muslims, Mamdani, who is Muslim, replied, “Many years ago, I was the campaign manager of a Jewish candidate for state Senate, and I took him to a mosque in Bay Ridge, and after he gave his speech at Friday prayers, an older Palestinian man came over to him, and he looked at him, and he said, ‘cousins’.”

That candidate, of course, was me. Indeed, Mamdani and I went to many mosques — too many to count. I was, in many instances, one of the very first candidates for office who had ever spoken with these Muslim men. (Since the prayers were segregated by gender, I also spoke with Muslim women’s groups.) At one Eid prayer, I took the microphone and spoke to thousands of Muslims arrayed on a vast field. I went to churches and synagogues, too, of course, because the district, in all its New York diversity, demanded it. Mamdani believed, urgently, that a candidate should go everywhere possible. Unlike many other Leftists, he relished the art of persuasion: knocking on the door, finding a Donald Trump sympathizer, and convincing him to take another look at a Left-wing candidate like me.

I didn’t win. We ran competitively — an uphill, underdog campaign — and came up short. I was momentarily crushed but glad, in the end, to return to my writing career, which I valued more. I knew Mamdani would get his own chance to run soon. It was merely a question of where and when. He had learned several vital lessons from our defeat. One was that building a large field operation was incredibly important. We had an army of volunteers and paid canvassers, many of them in their twenties. But other traditional tactics, like sending campaign mail, mattered, too. Since we were running out of money by the end of the race, we didn’t have the budget to dispatch those glossy mailers, which are never terribly creative but do alert voters to your presence.

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I invoked Clinton before, but there are uncanny parallels between Mamdani and Barack Obama: two young men with foreign-sounding names and African roots who upended the political establishment and won in such a fashion that few actually believed was possible. America had never had a black president, or even one who had spent less than one term in the US Senate before successfully vaulting to the White House. Obama was assailed relentlessly for his relative youth and inexperience in 2007 and 2008, especially in his bitter primary against Hillary Clinton.

Ironically, Mamdani embodies much of what Obama’s feverish Right-wing critics accused him, falsely, of being: a Muslim socialist born in Africa. Mamdani, born to a Ugandan-Indian father in Kampala, can never legally serve as president. In some form, this inoculates him from attacks from the Right, since he is hiding nothing and is rarely on the defensive. The same is true of his parentage: his mother a renowned filmmaker, his father a celebrated scholar of the Middle East. Other Leftists might run from such a background, but Mamdani never fails to acknowledge his own privilege. He is always quite direct.

One political strength and saving grace for Mamdani, ultimately, may be his fan base. No local politician has captured so many imaginations. Mayoral races don’t normally attract tens of thousands of volunteers; in the case of Mamdani, the internet became real life, with his Instagram and TikTok virality morphing into a flesh-and-blood campaign apparatus that blew away the competition. As with Trump, Mamdani’s fans are bound to stick with him, and they’ll battle for him as he slogs onward as mayor. If he does win in November, it will herald a new political era for New York and perhaps the United States. All of it, at the very least, will be fascinating to watch.

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If the Democrats want to vanquish MAGA, then they need to win back the 11%. Even garnering the support of half of them could deliver the party from the political wilderness. Doing so isn’t that complicated. It requires crafting a program that speaks to workers’ economic interests and social attitudes. Of course, that might be easier said than done.

The CWCP analyzed 128 public-opinion questions from three comprehensive surveys: the American National Election Studies survey, the General Social Survey, and the Cooperative Election Study. We looked at questions concerning immigration, civil rights, social norms, environmental policy, and two types of economic policy: predistribution (altering the division of the social income through bargaining power and higher wages) and redistribution (doing the same through taxes and welfare).

We sorted the responses by social class, so that we could compare the attitudes of working-class Americans — those with less than a college education and who fall in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution — with those of people above those education and income thresholds. We also looked at responses dating back to 1960 and through 2022, allowing us to compare attitudes across the decades. Then we isolated working-class Trump voters to compare their attitudes with those of the rest.

The resulting report confirms that working-class voters, even blue-collar Trump voters, aren’t a “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton once described them. They aren’t in thrall to a demagogue or hopelessly lost in the fog of MAGA conspiracies. Rather, working-class voters largely support a range of progressive economic policies and hold more progressive views than middle- and upper-class voters on a number of bread-and-butter questions (especially those concerning jobs).

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For instance, a majority of working-class voters support raising the minimum wage, boosting spending on Social Security and Medicare, limiting imports to protect domestic jobs, cutting the cost of prescription drugs, increasing federal investments in infrastructure and public schools, making it easier to join a union, putting workers on company boards, implementing a millionaires’ tax, and even the notion of a job guarantee.

Even more remarkable: working-class views on civil and LGBT rights and immigration have shifted to the Left over the past two decades — a fact easily missed by those in the liberal media who assume that anyone who works with his hands is a frothing reactionary. For instance, a whopping 61% of working-class respondents favor a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and 74% oppose family-separating deportations. Similarly, more than 80% of working-class respondents support legal protections against discrimination for gays and lesbians and favor background checks for gun owners.

Put another way: working-class voters are largely economic egalitarians, worried about inequality and in favor of the government leveling the playing field between capital and labor, the asset-rich and the asset-less. These voters have also steadily drifted to the Left on a range of cultural issues. So what accounts for the fact that these voters have abandoned the Democratic Party? Our research provides some clues.

First, while working-class voters are populists and egalitarians, they aren’t liberal welfarists. That is, while they favor a policy mix aimed at improving wages and bargaining power and protecting them against the effects of globalization, they are quite skeptical of new government regulations, welfare spending, and expensive social proposals. They prefer combating inequality at the level of wages and workplace power over cash transfers.

Democrats have long assumed that all progressive economic policy is roughly the same, thus straying from the kind of economic populism that appeals to blue-collar voters. Today, the Democratic brand is much more closely associated with redistributive cash transfers and social services than with a program focused squarely on work, wages, jobs, pensions, and trade. The reputation is well earned, given that only 18% of Democratic congressional candidates in 2022 prioritized jobs-focused rhetoric, as previous research by the CWCP found.

Second, although working-class voters have indeed shifted to the Left on many cultural issues, they’ve been far outpaced in that direction by the educated, professional-class voters who now form the party’s base. The latter, it’s fair to say, have become ultra-liberal in recent years. As a result, a wide attitude gap has opened up between the two camps. This has generated a significant amount of class tension. And overcoming it won’t be easy. But the challenge is surmountable.

In broad strokes, what’s needed is a fairly simple formula. If Democrats want to win back workers, they can start by loudly advocating for a worker-focused program — more moderate on cultural issues but decidedly populist on economic ones. They ought to promise to raise the minimum wage, protect industrial jobs from free trade, increase infrastructure spending, better fund public schooling, expand Social Security, strengthen Medicare, and guarantee full employment.

Partly, this will require some redistributive taxation of the richest Americans, and Democrats shouldn’t be shy about saying so; the working class would be with them. But the predistributive element must remain at the forefront.

On social and cultural questions, meanwhile, Democrats have no need to chase the Trumpian Right. But they ought to pull back from social commitments that put them starkly at odds with working-class voters. For example, progressives don’t need to ape Trump’s cruel deportation policies, nor should they drop their commitment to finding a genuine path to citizenship. But they do need to recognize the need for greater border security and a more restrictive immigration regime.

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By Justin H. Vassallo

Which brings us back to the 11%. We found that in 2020, that percentage of working-class Trump supporters fit in this populist sweet spot: economically egalitarian and culturally tolerant but moderate. With the right approach and candidate, they are persuadable. But are the Democrats amenable? That’s the big question.

As the party’s core support has climbed a few rungs up the class ladder, the interests, values, and attitudes of Democratic Party mouthpieces increasingly reflect this group. Not only do many top Democrats have no clue what working-class voters actually want, but they have fewer of them in their districts, and almost none in their offices, whom they might ask. Worse, even when the occasional liberal turns to the working class, there are strong headwinds preventing the message from becoming dominant in the party. Consider that so much of the Democratic Party’s image is not shaped by party communiqués, but through the institutions where liberals reign supreme: the media, the arts, the academy, think tanks, nonprofits, and philanthropic foundations. In these places, cultural liberalism is the currency of the realm, and liberal elites aren’t prepared to cashier their power.

What incentive do culturally progressive but economically inegalitarian liberals have to give up their seats in favor of working-class representatives? Not many. But if party elites have any desire of regaining a majority and pursuing a progressive policy agenda, they had better start listening to blue-collar voters. The quickest path back to power for the Democrats is to embrace a genuine social populism, against their donors wishes, and against the inclinations of many of their professionals. Indeed, doing so is the only shot they have of winning a working-class majority.

Nor is Rolling Fork, with its 1,800 residents, really alone: when it comes to national dysfunction, Mississippi is America’s champion. “First in everything bad, and last in everything good,” says Danyelle Holmes, an organizer for the Poor People’s Campaign. If you’re familiar with the numbers, it’s hard to disagree, with the Magnolia State beating its 49 peers in infant mortality and mass incarceration — and coming dead last in healthcare.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Raised in a shack on the edge of Rolling Fork, Ty Pinkins is convinced he can remake politics in his native state. A Georgetown Law grad, and a war hero who won a Bronze Star in Iraq, he’s already performed admirably in two statewide races for the Democrats. Especially with an unpopular GOP incumbent in the Senate, Pinkins feels the time is ripe to turn red Mississippi blue. “Voters are on the edge of their seats,” he tells me, arguing that all he’d need to win is a paltry $500,000 from Democratic bosses in Washington.

Good luck with that. Both national and state Democrats have aligned against Pinkins in favor of a 43-year-old district attorney named Scott Colom. Unlike his rival, Colom lacks name recognition, or indeed ties to the Mississippi Delta, a bulwark of Democratic support in this, America’s poorest state. What Scott Colom does have, however, is the right surname. Scott, after all, is the son of Will Colom, a major Democratic Party donor.

Now, finally, Pinkins has had enough, forsaking the Democrats and announcing plans to run for the Senate as an independent. Yet if he’s abandoned the party his family has backed since black Mississippians gained the right to vote, back in 1965, his tale is anything but done.

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A Halloween ghost story

By Jeff Bloodworth

Whoever you ask in Mississippi, they’ll tell you that the Republicans are vulnerable. In 2020, Cindy Hyde-Smith earned the GOP’s narrowest Senate victory in Mississippi in almost four decades. And, five years later, she isn’t doing much better, saddled with dreary poll ratings after a somnolent tenure. Yes, Republicans hold all eight statewide offices, and huge majorities in the statehouse and senate. But Democrats have a path forward in a state that is 39% African American: strong black turnout, alongside just 22% of the white vote, could make a liberal competitive.

In 2023, Brandon Presley used that very formula to come within 26,600 votes of defeating his Republican opponent for governor — with Pinkins hot on his heels. Certainly, his Delta roots are an electoral boon. A vast alluvial floodplain, home to 13 of Mississippi’s 82 counties, the region’s swamps and cotton fields host a third of Mississippi’s black residents. And if that’s significant from an electoral perspective, Pinkins can also use his upbringing to understand voter fears.

“Ty came from the bottom of the bottom,” says Lenora Wynn, his cousin. We met at “Pinkinville”, the plot of land outside Rolling Rock where the extended family once lived. “There’s only so much you can see from the cottonfield,” Wynn adds. “We had a simple beginning.” In this, Pinkins shared much with his neighbors: around 40% of all Deltans are poor.

But if that shared background helps Pinkins secure his black base, his horizon spans far beyond the Delta. An 21-year army veteran, he left Mississippi for tours in Germany, Okinawa, Iraq, as well as a stint in the White House as a military aide. Unlike many southern politicians, that makes him equally comfortable in black and white spaces. At a rally in Jackson, the state capital, Pinkins thrilled his white audience with bits of his grandmother’s wisdom. “‘Baby,’” he cried, “‘when the storm comes don’t cuss the wind, gather the neighbors and sing louder than the thunder.’” Afterwards, a white lesbian in a rainbow t-shirt wrapped him in a bear hug. As one relative puts it, “Ty can code switch.”

All the same, politics in Mississippi is about more than bear hugs. In his 2024 Senate campaign, Pinkins recruited team leaders across every Mississippi county — what Matt Barron, a political strategist, calls “cutting turf”. But when the general election came around, Pinkins lost by 25%. Why? Because by leaping into the race, Pinkins upset what many insiders here call the “gatekeepers” of the Democratic Party. A case in point here in Bennie Thompson. He may have made a name for himself nationally, chairing a Capitol Hill committee into the January 6 violence, but Mississippi’s lone Democratic congressman apparently continues to pull strings back home. According to Pinkins, Thompson withheld vital campaign funds and endorsements after he dared run without official backing, allegedly refusing to even acknowledge the upstart former soldier at campaign events. Neither Thompson nor his media representatives replied to a request for comment.

Yet despite going bankrupt bankrolling his 2024 Senate run without party help, Pinkins promptly announced his candidacy for the 2026 race, before breaking with the Democrats altogether. Leon Brown, another cousin, isn’t surprised. “He’s one that don’t quit.” And, truth be told, gatekeepers have defined Pinkins’ whole life. Back in 1986, it was a racist seventh-grade math teacher, who failed him out of spite. At the time, it seemed like Pinkins was destined to a lifetime chopping cotton — just like his parents, and his grandparents before them. When he read his grade that humid afternoon, Pinkins fell to his knees and cried. Even 39 years later, the incident still stings. “I was ready to give up,” he says.

But racism wasn’t Pinkins’ only obstacle — and here we arguably get closer to understanding the seeming elevation of people like Scott Colom. “There is a class structure in Rolling Fork,” says Shawonder Harris, yet another Pinkins’ cousin. “And our parents chopped cotton.” In the Delta, the region’s tiny black professional class connives with whites to keep poor blacks at the bottom of the socioeconomic pile. That’s hardly new: W.E.B. DuBois was infamous for making his peace with the racist white establishment, accepting that a “talented tenth” of African Americans might eventually achieve racial uplift.

Desperate to escape places like Pinkinville, these attitudes die hard, with DuBois’s teachers and grocers replaced by elected politicians. With hard-won sinecures vanishingly rare, self-service in Mississippi too often trumps the public good. “You have to navigate agendas to amass power and influence,” says Eva Posner, a liberal political tactician. “Over time, you do that enough, the person in the mirror changes. That line in the sand moves. In an industry powered by power, it is very easy to be corrupted.”

Taken together, it’s little wonder that the Pinkins clan characterizes these gatekeepers as the “Black Boulé”. Officially, the Boulé is an invitation-only organization of prominent African Americans. In practice, says Harris, it symbolizes the “intersection of classism and racism” that so exemplifies Mississippi’s Democratic gatekeepers. Never mind that Thompson and Will Colom, a lawyer and car dealer, sharpened their political teeth under civil rights icons like John Lewis. By the Nineties, they’d morphed into complacent members of the Black Boulé, more than happy to cut thrusting newcomers down to size. As Posner vividly puts it, it all speaks to a political class willing to “get dementia on national television” rather than simply retire.

In this, of course, Mississippi is far from unusual. How else to explain Joe Biden’s doddering attempts at re-election last year? But, as so often in the Deep South, the price of gatekeeping feels especially stark. “Mississippi is a crime scene,” says Holmes, “and the gatekeepers are the accomplices” — even suggesting that the state’s African American establishment is built on the exploitation of poor blacks. In Holmes’ telling, that goes far beyond dolling out campaign contributions. Rather, she claims, as does Delta whistleblower Fred Chambliss, that Thompson heads up a thoroughgoing political machine, one greased by thick wedges of cash.

“For the gatekeepers to let you in,” Pinkins agrees, “you better be like Santa Claus, with a sack of money to give to the national party and Bennie Thompson’s friends.” Will Colom, to be sure, has plenty of sacks. Since 2016, he has given many thousands to both state and national Democrats. There’s no evidence of any illegality here, but Colom’s generosity appears well-timed: around the same time that he made a substantial donation to the DNC, President Biden nominated his son for a Mississippi federal judgeship, a bid ultimately blocked by none other than Cindy Hyde-Smith. Three years on, it’s hard not to get the sense that other sacks of money are boosting Scott’s Senate bid.

Colom rejects any such links. “I am not one of the largest contributors to the Mississippi Democratic Party,” he tells me. “I stepped down as member Democratic National Committee representing Mississippi,” adding that he’s not yet sure if his son is even running for the Senate.

Thompson himself is at the center of other allegations. According to staffers, he once used his chairmanship of Congress’s Homeland Security Committee to threaten credit card companies with regulation in return for campaign donations. Current and former Thompson staffers have also operated a party-planning side hustle, in which they earned $20,000 from lobbyists for events they staged in their boss’s honour. As for the man himself, Thompson is one of the richest DC politicians in Mississippi, with an estimated net worth of $3.25 million. “This is a normal pattern and practice,” says Holmes, suggesting that if Thompson, or his close associates, can’t gain from a municipality, he simply has no interest. John Walker exemplifies these cozy arrangements. Thompson’s personal attorney and campaign advisor — as well as godfather to his daughter — Walker headed the firm that has represented both the state’s biggest airports and Thompson’s hometown.

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America's destiny lies in the New South

By Joel Kotkin

Whatever the truth, and as so often in Mississippi, this is a persistent problem. Local Republicans are hardly free of scandal themselves, with the local GOP implicated in a $77 million welfare scandal, one allegedly promoted by football hall-of-famer Brett Favre. Little wonder experts say it’s a coin toss between the Magnolia State and neighboring Louisiana for the most corrupt in the union. Either way, this explains why the arrival of a clean-slate candidate like Pinkins is such a threat to the Democratic establishment — especially when he can woo blacks and whites both, thereby breaking the Thompson machine’s hold over the Delta and the state’s Democratic Party.

That still leaves one more question: why would the Democratic establishment in DC indulge such behavior? The answer comes with a strange kind of logic. Long used to being short of funds, compared to plutocrat-friendly Republicans anyway, establishment Democrats still believe every candidate failing can be fixed by campaign cash. “It is donor relations, not a campaign strategy,” says Posner, arguing that though party poohbahs know Scott Colom is bound to lose his Senate race in Mississippi, that doesn’t matter as long as his father stumps up the funds for more winnable races in other states.

Not that Mississippi is necessarily destined to remain in hoc to dubious candidates forever. As insurgents like Donald Trump so vividly prove, peppering voters with pricey TV ads is no longer a guarantee of success, while the walking disaster that was Kamala Harris shows that funding isn’t everything. To be sure, money remains a vital ingredient in the American political stew: but cash without the grassroots won’t win campaigns. Besides, Democrats these days generally have enough funds to be competitive. The problem, Posner says, is that they never invest in the necessary political infrastructure, instead relying on the tried-and-tested Boulé.

For the moment, then, money and power remain the language of Mississippi’s political class. In mid-June, Will Colom is meant to have phoned Pinkins with a promise of future campaign funds — apparently wrapped in a warning. “Ty,” Colom allegedly said, “you know I have accumulated a lot of resources over the years. They are available to you. If you and Scott go against each other, I don’t want it to get dirty.” As far as Pinkins himself is concerned, the threatening subtext is clear: “‘If you don’t drop-out, it will get dirty.’” Colom denies making any threat, implied or otherwise. “I never said anything to Pinkins about running against Scott Colom for Senate,” he tells me. “Not a word.”

Either way, such allegations don’t surprise Holmes. “Nothing,” she says, “will go to the Mississippi Delta if you aren’t part of the in-crowd.” As for Ty Pinkins himself, he doesn’t seem willing to sell his integrity cheap. The night before he announced his independent bid, I spoke to him from his Vicksburg home. On that muggy Mississippi night, he sounded buoyant for tomorrow — even as he offers a warning to his former party’s gatekeepers. “If Tyrone from the Mississippi Delta says, ‘I’m no longer a Democrat,’ there’s a problem.” That’s surely true from a moral perspective. But depending on how the next few months go, it could soon pose vast electoral issues for the likes of Bennie Thompson too.

So asked Ben Meiselas of the MeidasTouch podcast of Joe Biden in December in a rare one-on-one sit-down, conducted during Biden’s lame-duck period, as he and the nation awaited President Trump’s return to the White House. By then, Biden resembled a shambling zombie from the film 28 Years Later, and he squinted and slurred his way through an incoherent answer that boiled down to: Nope, no regrets.

His rant sounded quite Trumpian in its detachment from reality, including a claim that his term would end with an Israel-Gaza peace deal. Yet the hangdog-faced podcaster didn’t challenge it or follow up. He simply nodded and moved on to the next scripted question he had written down in a notebook. Meiselas looked like a man who had won the lottery to interview a sitting president and didn’t want to blow it. You could almost see affirmation in Meiselas’s eyes: You’re doing great, Mr. President. Keep going.

Welcome to MeidasTouch, the popular “news-influencer” show where every hour feels like amateur hour. It’s essentially a booster club for Democrats disguised as just-the-facts-ma’am independent journalism. Since Hollywood and establishment media failed miserably to help elect Biden and Kamala Harris in 2024, the Democrats have been desperately searching for their own Joe Rogan — a charismatic and outsider everyman who resonates with young men and can gently steer them toward Team Blue. What they’ve got instead with MeidasTouch is nearly the polar opposite: it’s anti-Trump infotainment starring three earnest Millennial brothers — Ben, Brett, and Jordan Meiselas — with little charisma and no chill, peddling content that appeals to news-addicted liberals.

The MeidasTouch bros claim that their brand is “pro-democracy,” but somehow that only aligns perfectly with one side. It’s no coincidence that years before they interviewed Biden on their podcast as journalists, the Meiselases were raising money for him. Launched in the spring of 2020, MeidasTouch almost immediately became a DIY SuperPAC helmed by the three Long Island brothers: Colin Kaepernick’s lawyer (Ben), a video editor for the Ellen show (Brett), and a marketing executive (Jordan).

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We’re still distracting ourselves to death

By Ryan Zickgraf

Their early batch of anti-Trump digital ads spoke the language of outrage fluently, and the brothers positioned themselves not just as commentators, but combatants in an existential bloodsport. The prize: America’s soul. Within months, they’d raised $5 million for the 2020 election cycle. A Rolling Stone investigation concluded that MeidasTouch’s anti-Trump ad campaign “was a huge waste of donor money, and its tweets weren’t persuading swing voters.” MeidasTouch responded by threatening to sue Rolling Stone and demanded that the magazine apologize and pay its legal costs. (The MeidasTouch brothers didn’t respond to UnHerd’s request for comment.)

Their digital network grew steadily over the four years that followed — but exploded once Trump took office for a second term. In the first quarter of 2025, MeidasTouch was the fastest-growing YouTube channel in terms of net new subscribers. It made splashy headlines in February, notching 57.5 million downloads and surpassing Rogan’s 51.5 million for the No. 1 podcast. The bros got there by posting multiple times daily, all rapid response 10-minute segments featuring the search-engine-friendly word “Trump” in the title.

Their success is proof that a media empire can be built almost solely on white-hot Trump hate. To listen to it is to enter a world where the president is a mindless buffoon, an Inspector Clouseau type who destroys democracy like it’s a vase accidentally knocked off a pedestal, but also even more than that: a moral aberration, a threat to civilization itself that must be denounced at every turn lest it be “normalized.”

Every YouTube thumbnail is a scream declaring Donald’s impending downfall — “Trump gets publicly HUMILIATED in the WORST TV appearance of all time” or “Trump LOSES IT as MAGA Burns IT ALL DOWN” — repackaging every political development into content gold. The hyperbolic headlines rarely match reality, but the dopamine loop is deliberate and constant. Play the video. Share the tweet. Feel the rage. Repeat. They’re like the #Resistance’s unholy marriage of the dystopian online-game-show host MrBeast and MSNBC — equal parts law school, cable news, and YouTube reaction video.

MeidasTouch is part of a sprawling digital-media #Resistance ecosystem, in which every news cycle presents a fresh reason to panic and post. The historian Heather Cox Richardson writes Substack essays that feel like bedtime stories for liberals about how history’s lessons all point to Trump trying to wrench America back to the pre-Civil War era. The Bulwark dresses up neocon-friendly centrism in moral urgency against MAGA. Well-dressed progressive commentator Brian Tyler Cohen condenses news stories into slick TikToks.

These are the town criers for the terminally online, warning us that Trump is coming (again), and only your retweet and subscription can stop him. There’s no room for dissent, no appetite for introspection, no curiosity about voters who drifted from the Democratic Party and why they might have done so. The hate machine needs both conflict and clarity. In a recent video, Brett Meideles said that Trump makes problems worse 99.9% of the time, but then quickly corrected himself. Oh, actually, it was 100% of the time.

Their growing audience has often been dubbed “BlueAnon,” because they’re also prone to conspiratorial thinking — similar to the Right-wing variety, QAnon — when it suits them. An Economist/YouGov poll found that 41% of Democrats still believe Trump didn’t legitimately win in 2024. About a third think the assassination attempt against him in Butler, Pa., might have been staged. They’re also the fastest-growing demographic of gun owners, doomsday preppers more likely to holster their weapons in farmer’s-market tote bags than camo. This isn’t just fringe paranoia; it’s become the dour mood of a base that now sees even The New York Times or NPR as suspiciously neutral. In their eyes, objectivity itself has become complicity. They want media that picks a side, and MeidasTouch is happy to oblige.

The irony, of course, is that the same people who decry disinformation and cultishness on the Right have created a mirrored pathology: an all-consuming fixation on Trump, his every utterance, tweet, and indictment. If Trump is indeed the Boomer ego in human form — a gaudy, narcissistic amalgam of generational hubris — to his critics he remains the gravitational force around which their media diets, anxieties, and identities orbit.

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Democrats are wasting a populist moment

By Justin H. Vassallo

For many Millennial children of aging liberals, it’s become a running joke; there hasn’t been a family dinner or phone call in years without Trump somehow being invoked. “We’re providing a comforting place where we’re channeling people’s feelings during a real difficult time,” Meiselas told the Times. Still, MeidasTouch is hardly providing comfort — it’s churning out addictive ragebait and telling viewers to “Join the Meidas Mighty,” the podcast’s version of Swifties for Trump haters.

Flattening all Left-of-center commentary into anti-MAGA rants is a copout. Instead of grappling with the real and urgent reasons why Democrats are so unpopular in 2025 — housing costs, health-care failures, stagnant wages — their content is the podcast equivalent of jamming fingers in their ears and yelling “Trump!” at the top of their lungs. It’s red meat for the haters, but it doesn’t build coalitions or expand the base. If anything, it drowns out the figures and institutions that are trying to do the slow, difficult work of organizing around positive policy change. Their brand of algorithmic outrage might rally clicks, but it does not build up alternatives to Trump World.

Once this kind of hyperventilating partisan media was the sole dominion of the Right with the likes of Fox News and Breitbart. Now, sadly, it looks like the future for centrist liberals. America has plenty of legitimate beef with the old, fussy mainstream media. But we’ll miss it when it’s scrapped for parts and replaced by the new algorithmically optimized online media machines.

Where art thou, Brian Williams?

The Big Beautiful Bill — or the Big Bullshit Bill, or Beautiful Billionaire Bailout, depending on who you ask — qualifies as the fullest articulation of Trumpism yet, revealing the President’s disregard for debt and love of profligate spending, his worship of the plutocrats and his contempt for those who might need a hand. It’s a bill in which rape and pillage and a dozen more private planes and real estate deals for Eric and Jared could be ensconced somewhere among the 940 pages that took nearly 16 hours to read aloud on the Senate floor, and no one would know. Here is a bill that will add a 10-digit number to the debt limit, inspiring the arch-budget conservative from Texas, Chip Roy, to comment, “I don’t think the math is correct yet” — as if Trump’s thirst to achieve for himself the moment that would ever after define him as the most consequential figure in United States history had anything to do with maths.

That said, a few sums are worth mentioning: billions for border and national security, while billions are subtracted from wind and solar investments in green energy. The biggest cut in the history of Medicaid, totaling around $1 trillion, stripping coverage from almost 12 million lower-income Americans. An extra shot of $150 billion to the Pentagon for bombs and missiles — to be allocated by chat-group addicted, ex-Fox anchor Pete Hegseth, the one with the Crusader tattoos. Billions deducted from food assistance, most notably school lunches for hungry kids, and more than $100 billion in tax cuts for the top one-percent.

The BBB will see $3.3 trillion added to the national debt over the next decade, enough to make even the most ardent acolyte of modern monetary theory blanch, and more than enough to make Elon Musk descend into a rant and against, in the Republicans, the “Porky Pig Party”, whose representatives should “hang their head[s] in shame”.

Musk threatened any member of Congress who voted for “the biggest debt increase in history” with an ominous promise: “They will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this earth.” Not a single “No” vote came of it, although the GOP may rue the day.

Infuriated by yet another betrayal from his erstwhile bestie, the President vowed to launch a DOGE investigation into the world’s über tech-bro, threatening that the MAGA minions over at ICE might send Musk “back home to South Africa”. (That said, the end of Americans’ $7,500 credit for buying Teslas will likely be punishment enough.) On the White House lawn, Trump went so far as to muse metaphorically: “DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon.”

During 27 hours of voting and debate, the drama of the Big Beautiful Bill ascended to the heights of tragedy. “It is inescapable that this bill will betray the promise Donald Trump made,” the Republican senator Thom Tillis said on the Senate floor. Knowing full well the fate that awaited him and his party, Tillis prophesied that the Republicans would get trounced in the 2026 midterms. Then he announced that he would not run for re-election. Such roadkill not only satisfied Trump (“Great News!” he wrote), but delighted the Democrats, who view the Tillis retirement as a chance to fill the North Carolina seat with one of their own.

The retirement of Nebraska’s conservative centrist, Don Bacon, similarly made headlines. There were also episodes of comic buffoonery, typified by Joni Ernst, Senator from Iowa, who dismissed fears that the bill would mean that upwards of 80,000 Iowans would lose health insurance. “We’re all going to die,” she flippantly told her critics.

Hours of strong-arming, horse-trading, side-dealing, intimidating, coercing, and internecine negotiations between the true believers, the last of the fiscal hawks, and what was left of the wonk coalition — those who might actually care about the alternative minimum tax and foreign-derived intangible income — lasted until the dawn’s early light.

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By Malcom Kyeyune

By that point in the debate, weary members of the media had been whipped into a strung-out frenzy of cliché. There was a “needle to thread”. It was “make-or-break” time. The vote would be “a real nail-biter”. While the press called play-by-play, exhausted interns munched pizza and played cards, and Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama lit a cigar.

But as everyone knew from the get-go, the BBB — now the somewhat less sonorous “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — would squeak through the Senate with a somber Vice President JD Vance casting the deciding vote. The pandemonium has now transferred to the House of Representatives, where the one-trillion dollar addition to the deficit has brought frustrations to a climax. As one moderate Republican asked incredulously: “How did it get so much fucking worse?”

It’s “very complicated stuff”, Trump acknowledged, then got on a plane to Florida, leaving the drone of roll-call votes behind him.

“It’s a shitshow,” said Georgia Congresswoman and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

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The futility of fact checkers

By Frederick Kaufman

Whether or not the ceremonial signing will occur on the evening of the Fourth of July, as Trump has demanded, remains a matter of speculation, but despite the rhetoric of suspense there is no doubt that the bill will eventually wend its way to the Oval Office, where it will at long last be graced by the touch of Trump’s omnipotent Sharpie.  

So much for the views of the American people. Harry Enten, CNN’s data guru, described the public opinion ratings gathered by Pew, Quinnipiac, and Fox as “terrible, terrible, terrible”. “The American public, at this particular point, hates, hates, HATES the Big Beautiful Bill,” he said. No matter, so long as the President can deliver $10 billion more for his ready-for-primetime immigration raids.

“It’s bad legislation,” concluded Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. “This is a political gift for Democrats.” Everyone on both sides of the aisle knows Kelly is right — that is, everyone but the fanatics blinded by their loyalty to the king — but everyone also knows that for the time being, Trump’s agenda will in some redacted and compromised form prevail, the dollar will sink to new lows, and the rich will prosper like pigs at the trough.Which is all according to MAGA plan.

But politics are not foolproof. Trump’s opus may backfire, as the Democrats now have an arsenal of images and rhetoric, and are already planning to inform every American that Republicans cut school lunches and Medicaid and sent their hairdresser and housekeeper to a dungeon in the Sudan.

As if to prove the point, just as I was finishing this piece, I received a text from none other than Nancy Pelosi: “Democrats will respond to Republicans’ attack on the most vulnerable Americans,” it began. “I’m calling on a historic 5,000 donations in the next 24 hours to have a HUGE fundraising day for Democrats…”

Will the Republicans finally self-destruct into the long-anticipated splintering, as Elon Musk joins the Freedom Caucus to forge a new, post-Trump juggernaut? Will the Democrats attract the neo-liberal leftovers of the GOP, benefit from a backlash to the behemoth bill, take the House, and impeach what will be a weakened and aged post-2026 lame-duck President? Have the last twenty years of American populism finally hit a tipping point? As lawmakers rush to return to their latest nightmare, as the only certainty that awaits American politics is heavy weather.

He hasn’t tweeted the word “queer” since 2023, nor “defund the police” since 2020. (Except for a 12 June post that read: “Don’t believe the MAGA billionaires funding Andrew Cuomo’s fear-driven campaign: I will not defund the police.”) But back in 2020 Mamdani insisted that “Queer liberation means defund the police.” This would have been toxic to a citywide campaign in pandemic-era NYC, but Mamdani isn’t running on it now. He’s running on one thing and one thing only: affordability. And it has captured the disenfranchised Millennials that Democrats have ignored.

Back in November when we chatted, as Democrats were reeling from Donald Trump’s culture-war comeback, Mamdani’s populist streak actually positioned him well to meet the moment. When I asked what his message was to Trump-supporting New Yorkers, Mamdani said he’d just spent the weekend in Queens and the Bronx chatting with voters about why they backed Trump or stayed home from the polls.

Trump, they told him, spoke to their “desire for a more affordable life and bringing peace back to the world.” So Mamdani said his path to victory was clear: talk about “tangible, deliverable policies” for the working class, not about “values or ideas.”

“There are far more New Yorkers who feel left out by the economic policies of Mayor Eric Adams and the Democratic leadership,” he told me, “Than identify with any one political persuasion.”

This turned out to be the key to Mamdani’s primary win. For most voters, in New York City or anywhere else, elections are always a matter of choosing between two imperfect choices. To read Andrew Cuomo’s loss as the Democratic electorate’s embrace of defund-the-police socialism is to underestimate the toxicity of the party establishment and how much voters have turned against it.

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How woke doomed Dems on the border

By Emily Jashinsky

People are viscerally angry at Cuomo. And they are right to be, they project understandable grief onto him for Covid-era nursing home deaths. They see him as a figurehead for the party that led the city ever deeper into an affordability crisis, and the party that went to comical lengths covering-up the president’s mental decline. That’s enough to motivate many voters to actually go to the polls, and enough for them to take a chance on the guy who only ever seems to talk about one thing: the cost of living.

Mamdani was the perfect foil to a terrible candidate. It’s really that simple. If Democrats are mad about voters electing a socialist, they should consider that consolidating behind Cuomo left a whole lot of New Yorkers determined to vote in a way to take the disgraced governor down at all costs. For some, it was more about affirmatively embracing Mamdani’s platform and for others it was more about rejecting Cuomo. You don’t have to be a democratic socialist to vote for one when the alternative is more Andrew Cuomo.

Consider how the conservative writer Rod Dreher likened Mamdani’s win to Trump’s, writing that New York’s Left-wing voters “lashed out against what they regard as a failed liberal establishment, electing a charismatic populist who promised a clear break with the past.” Just as voters did for Trump nine years ago. “We on the Right can shake our heads and laugh at how dumb New York liberals and progressives were to choose a candidate as politically inexperienced and radical as Mamdani,” he argued “but don’t miss that this was also a referendum on the Democratic Party itself.”

The question, then, is why voters are animated and desperate to reject the Democratic Party, so much so that some were willing to vote for the erstwhile host of Celebrity Apprentice or a millennial socialist. I think Peter Thiel might have the best answer.

Cuomo is, of course, repulsive in many ways that have nothing to do with his economic policies. His fall from gubernatorial grace was particularly humiliating and shameful. But Thiel, the techno-libertarian billionaire, articulated socialism’s pull with millennials in a 2020 email to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, among other tech heavyweights. “I would be the last person to advocate for socialism,” he wrote. “But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”

“And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact,” he added, “there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.”

In Thiel’s framework, it is no surprise then that Mamdani outperformed Cuomo in boroughs with the highest concentration of young voters, who are facing extreme rising costs and unaffordable housing in New York City. Andrew Cuomo’s own campaign website observed the cost of living has “risen faster than the growth in incomes.” New York’s state comptroller reported that food costs rose by 56.2% over the last ten years, which is 10% more than the national increase. And rents in the city “grew more than seven times faster than wages last year, the largest gap in the country.”

But this is not all Cuomo’s fault. It’s the result of structures that transcend the city’s borders. Places like New York City struggle, in part, because they’re such desirable places to live, with abundant economic and cultural opportunities. It will always be a hardscrabble city for the ambitious and artists. But it needs a healthy middle class and it can have a middle class — at least if politicians hope to neutralize the appeal of populism.

Mamdani’s biggest vulnerabilities in the general election in November are the two issues that fall in the middle of the Venn diagram between culture and economics: immigration and crime. They’ll either be his salvation or his downfall. The #defundthepolice record will be hard to run from in a general election, but Mamdani has backed away from it and the city is recovering from the pandemic-era crime spike, meaning it’s not as sensitive for voters right now as it was several years ago.

Immigration could be even tougher. Like many Democrats, Mamdani is leaning into the culture war angle by aggressively opposing the Trump administration’s crackdown as a fight against “fascism.”

“We are going to protect our immigrant communities and not collaborate with ICE,” he pledged this month. The campaign will have to convince wary New Yorkers, who also connect immigration with jobs and housing, that his opposition to Trump’s crackdown won’t be a package deal with the policies that flooded hotels and shelters earlier in Eric Adams’s term.

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The likeliest case is that any time Mamdani is asked to defend his cultural record, he’ll pivot to affordability as fast as Adams jumps on business class flights to Turkey. When Mamdani says people in New York are “struggling to afford even a shred of dignity in their lives,” it resonates, and makes people more willing to take a chance on something new. His bet is that they care more about decreasing the cost of living than whatever he may or may not do in the cultural arena. If he can signal that queer liberation is a lower priority than affordable housing or universal childcare — and his opponent is a scandal-stained centrist — he can keep overperforming expectations, and win.

For Mamdani, the key to achieving that in the primary was a “relentless focus on an economic agenda,” as his communications director Andrew Epstein told me on Election Night. When I asked Epstein what the campaign’s message is now that Mamdani is running in the general election, he replied, “One thing Zohran has said throughout this whole campaign is there is not an ideological majority in New York City but there is a majority of people who feel disillusioned with the political system and alienated from the economic system and feel the strain of the cost of living prices.” The alienated and disillusioned — Thiel’s millennials — showed up full throttle for Zohran.

“I don’t think the message really changes,” said Epstein. “I think it continues to be this relentless economic agenda.”

Democratic voters are clearly not the only New Yorkers ready for change. Mamdani’s opponents, be they Bill Ackman, Curtis Sliwa, or Eric Adams, will need to make Mamdani look like a riskier bet than the painful and precarious status quo if they have any hope of preventing his win in November. Like the broader Democratic Party, Mamdani is now winning voters’ trust by focusing on kitchen table issues without fully disavowing the progressive cultural policies he prioritized before Peak Woke started receding. If he’s successful, then the party might have found its path out of the wilderness.

Freedom of movement, multiculturalism, global economic openness, and affirmation of the historically marginalized: these are the core principles that have become synonymous with the Brahmin Left’s vision of progressive capitalism, and which California’s particular fusion of elite and activist driven politics has done so much to shape.

The problem for Democrats pining for a Golden State hero to slay Trumpism is that the strength of these convictions is indelibly tied up with a record of aloof misrule and beguiling hypocrisy.  While some state Democrats have been in an uproar this week over Newsom’s proposed budget cuts, the state’s deep-seated economic challenges extend far beyond decisions over any single social program. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger left the Governor’s office in 2011, Democrats have overwhelmingly dominated California’s state politics, enjoying a “supermajority” in the state legislature free of Republican influence for over twelve years. With 43 of California’s 52 congressional districts in their hands, they have also shifted the poles of Democratic politics from the Northeast and Midwest to the West Coast.

Some progressives might assume this performance is a tribute to uncompromising values and smart party-building. Yet in this period, California’s image as a beacon for those seeking reinvention and the American Dream has been gradually but unmistakably sullied, a challenge Newsom’s second term in office is unlikely to reverse despite his sudden interest in slashing red tape around development.

For the world’s fourth largest economy, the state’s major indicators of development don’t inspire much confidence. Nearly a third of Californians live in or near the threshold of poverty, and nearly a quarter of the U.S. homeless population lives in California. The future isn’t bright for the state’s youth, either. One 2023 report on educational attainment placed California in the bottom half, far below most other states dominated by Democrats.

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And the “California Exodus,” first identified in the early 1990s, shows few signs of abating. The UnHerd contributor Joel Kotkin, a former Bill Clinton supporter, has blamed California’s woes on a green, liberal “gentry” motivated by a suspicion of development and expensive energy policies. Thronged, purportedly, by self-serving public sector unions, NIMBY lobbies, and zealous climate activists, California’s Democratic Party has succumbed to its worst instincts around managing its existing coalition. With a monopoly on state power, it has rewarded inertia while amplifying a caricature-prone conception of social justice divorced from the very real material hardships of the working-class.

Kotkin’s unsparing portrait is undoubtedly meant to provoke progressives who sincerely believe California is a policy leader and agenda-setter for the Democratic party. Many would proudly contend that, with an assist from the party’s delegation in the Pacific Northwest, California Democrats have the set bar for regulating carbon emissions and extending protections to minorities, and that they are focused on improving wages in California’s all important hospitality sector. If the state’s affordable housing crisis is less than excusable, they would add, at least Newsom and his allies are waking up to the issue.

This apologia fails to appreciate that when national voters think of the merits of one-party rule under Democrats, they now turn to California’s underwhelming performance. And the disenchantment cuts across the ideological spectrum. Cultural moderates and blue-collar conservatives believe the party’s priorities are elitist and dogmatic, while Left-wing populists see the state as ground zero for government capture by Big Tech.

The air of elitism cannot be overstated. Too often, support for California’s progressivism, both within the state and from afar, betrays the exact dynamic Kotkin and like-minded critics take issue with: the entitled sense of “stewardship” that drives the modern Democratic Party’s approach to governance. Rather than focus on broadening the pathways to middle-class prosperity and setting bold targets for poverty reduction, California Democrats appear to be in the business of merely managing economic insecurity through means-tested programs like food assistance. Judging by the numbers, they haven’t succeeded, despite plenty of legislation attesting to their support for active government.

It wasn’t always this way. Between the original Progressive Era and the early postwar boom, California had a competitive two party-system inflected by agrarian populism, anti-monopoly politics, and a growing trade union movement. The Second World War and federal New Deal policies rapidly industrialized the state, consolidating California’s status as a cultural, economic, and political counterweight to the East Coast and a place with expanding potential. Despite some hotbeds of hardline conservatism, California overall seemed to testify to the efficacy and popularity of strong government and public investment. Indeed, its extraordinary growth and the population’s sense of upward mobility seemed largely driven by the New Deal order.

But the former governor Jerry Brown transformed West Coast progressivism. Big developmentalist projects and courtship of the working-class gave way to a watered-down version of “New Left” autonomy, wellness culture, and (often superficial) ecological consciousness. While the Golden State’s notorious smog eventually improved as a result of stronger environmental standards, prospects for the working-class were less encouraging.

Since then, California’s stark economic inequality has, for all intents and purposes, become a Democratic problem. Economic progressives point with good reason to anti-government, budget-slashing Republicans in Congress as a major reason for America’s pockmarked welfare state and wealth inequality. But the fact is that in deep-blue California there is no obstructionist opposition party to blame for its limited horizons. Indeed, although Trump noticeably improved his margins there in the 2024 election, the state GOP is essentially a rump party (ostracized for its aggressive stance on restricting immigrants, yes, but also a victim of its own chosen irrelevance).

This inconvenient fact of one-party rule is beginning to bear down on other California Democrats hoping to lead their party out of the wilderness. While Newsom still enjoys the highest name recognition at the national level, the evolving situation might be best described as the Ro Khanna dilemma, in which aspiring party insurgents are tethered to the very upscale, Brahmin Left constituencies they must distance themselves from. Since winning his first House term in 2016, Khanna has built a profile as both an “economic patriot” who advocates for industrial policy and a sometime-adversary of monopoly power, particularly in regard to the tech industry. He co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, and has become a prominent interlocutor between the party establishment and progressive activists. His near ubiquitous media presence during Trump’s first six months back in office suggests he is either planning to run for president or play progressive kingmaker in the hopes of catapulting himself to the VP slot.

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Yet Khanna also represents the richest congressional district in the United States — a symbol of just how comfortable the once-Republican dominated upper-class are with Democrats, and how much the once-populist Democratic Party has ingratiated itself among America’s 21st century oligarchs and cultural elites.

That image of following the preferences of society’s richest will be hard to shake. Many progressive Democrats still like to think of themselves as New Deal-style social democrats focused on workers’ interests. Yet as Trump’s “triple-trending counties” prove, many parts of the country don’t see them that way. Fair or not, overcoming that perception is the main task for the Democrats. The question is whether the party’s would-be leaders have the stamina and authenticity to do so.

As Khanna illustrates, however, it will take Trumpian levels of chutzpah for elite progressives to convincingly run against their ossified establishment. Whatever his true convictions, Khanna seems unlikely to transform into a veritable tribune of the left behind, whether they reside in California or Western Pennsylvania. Needless to say, the odds of the same happening to Newsom are even more remote.

That’s not to say a healthy intraparty rebellion couldn’t ignite further in California. But given the state’s reputation for dysfunction and drift, Democrats desperate for new blood and new ideas might reconsider the faith they once put in their California delegation. Jejune fantasies of a “Left coast” paradise can no longer distract from the hard truth: In the age of Trump, Progressive California has been a drag on building real working-class power.

That might sound far-fetched now, but the writing is already on the wall. Emanuel’s tried-and-true mantra — “Never let a good crisis go to waste” — is back in fashion in liberal circles. The crisis, of course, is Trump: a singular, exhausting force whose re-election has caused moderate Democrats to yearn for the days of “Build Back Never” and the blunt instrument of a potential nominee who both sharp-elbowed and sharp-tongued.

Since November, Democrats have started talking like they’ve been binge-watching Veep on HBO rather than their old favorite: The West Wing. Party operatives and candidates are swearing like sailors in interviews, swaggering on social media (The Democratic National Committee itself even promoted Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s labeling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as “a fucking liar”), and senators are testing out their best “tough-guy” impressions. Likewise, mainstream outlets abound with op-eds insisting that liberals must elect a bully and “learn to punch back.” The stage-managed belligerence is new; the emptiness behind it is not.

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Enter Emanuel, who smells opportunity and is eager to cast himself in that role — grizzled, pragmatic, and so combative that he was once nicknamed “Rahmbo.” As a bonus, no one else has a resume of salty language in politics like Rahm; he’s been wielding F-bombs in Washington longer than congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh has been alive. (The unfunny fictional Twitter thread turned coffee table book The F—ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel even made cursing his entire personality.)

But the big fucking problem with Rahm trying to become president isn’t his attack dog style, it’s who and what he’s barking at. The pithy catchphrase he’s market-testing on the talk-show circuit these days is that the current batch of Democrats “is weak and woke,” which is a fine diagnosis, but Rahm himself is bad medicine. He’s the Machiavelli of moderation, a veteran of nearly every Democratic Party capitulation of the last few decades, from NAFTA to the Wall Street bailout to a health-care law designed not to offend the insurance industry. “He gets things done,” was the line from Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, in 1996, but what Rahm was building was the ideological cul-de-sac that Democrats have been stuck in ever since: socially liberal, fiscally neoliberal, and emotionally constipated.

When Rahm admitted recently that he was “a product of Bill Clinton,” it was an unintentional self-own. I’m sympathetic to the view, espoused by author Thomas Frank in Listen, Liberal, that Clinton was secretly the biggest villain of the neoliberal era of US politics because he spearheaded the Democratic Party’s heel turn from Party of the People to the Party of Technocrats, bought and paid for by Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. While Republicans were busy tut-tutting “Slick Willie” for his scandals and affairs, Clinton was busy enacting their agenda. He accomplished things that neither Ronald Reagan nor George Bush (H. or W. — take your pick) could only dream of: welfare reform, the crime bill, NAFTA, and the deregulation of the financial and communication industries — legislation that hurt his coalition but boosted the party coffers.

Rahm didn’t just ride that wave — he helped engineer it. As the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the mid-2000s, he built the model that defined the party’s soul-sickness for decades. The so-called blue wave of the 2006 midterms was mythologized in the book The Thumpin’: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Finally Ended the Republican Revolution. His formula was simple: stoke fear about Republican extremism, then run safe, centrist technocrats (preferably veterans) in swing districts to peel off liberal-leaning GOP voters. Then legislate like you’re trying to please Lindsay Graham and Barney Frank. If you couldn’t beat the neocons, his logic seemed to go, you might as well become them, but with better manners, more bike lanes, and cooler gay bars. As Thomas Frank once put it, “(Rahm) loves one class of citizens and strongly disapproves of another.” Entrepreneurs, good. Labor, bad.

During his tenure as Obama’s chief of staff, Emanuel played the role of enforcer not for bold ideas, but for trimming them down to a size acceptable to Joe Lieberman and the pharmaceutical lobby. He opposed including a public option in the Affordable Care Act from the start, dismissing those demanding comprehensive health care reform as “fucking retarded” and instead backed a deal that locked Americans into private insurance. He urged Obama to abandon ambitious climate legislation, slow-walked financial reform, and urged caution at every major turn — an odd posture for someone known for yelling and sending a dead fish in a box to a pollster. Under Emanuel’s watch, “Hope and Change” got converted into “No Fucking Way.”

When he wasn’t magically shrinking Obama’s agenda, Emanuel was making bank on Wall Street — more than $16 million as an investment banker in a few short years. He also served on the board of directors at Freddie Mac at a time when it misstated its annual revenue, and later, the mortgage giant was blamed for playing a key role in the 2008 financial crisis. Oops.

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Then came Chicago. After he was elected mayor in 2011, Emanuel ran the city like a SimCity expansion pack for the financial elite. He closed public schools by the dozen, declared war on teachers’ unions, outsourced public services, and shoveled tax incentives toward developers and corporations. Then came scandals, like the cover-up of a dashcam video of a black 17-year-old named Laquan McDonald, killed by Chicago police. Chicago journalist Ben Joravsky once described Emanuel as Mayor One Percent, who possessed “as much determination, will, and chutzpah as anyone alive,” but that he wastes it all on “wimpy policies that largely preserve the status quo.”

And yet, everyone’s collective memory seems stuck in a Covid brain fog, as if history started sometime in 2016. To desperate Democrats who have an exceedingly thin bench, Emanuel looks like a grownup. To everyone else, he seems like the reason they stopped voting. His brother Ezekiel (no, not the Hollywood agent, the other one, the doctor) once wrote an essay in The Atlantic headlined Why I Hope to Die at 75, arguing that ambition curdles and creativity fades with age and that it’s better to flame out than fade away. By that logic, Rahm’s political career should’ve been dead and buried long ago.

Instead, it’s threatening to return like a nostalgic aughts-era sequel no one asked for; one about as welcome as wearing low-rise jeans with a visible thong to a Senate confirmation hearing.

In a normal race, the prospect of a Muslim-American socialist (not to mention anti-Zionist) candidate running America’s largest city would be seen as fanciful. But these are not normal times. The incumbent, Eric Adams, has been forced to run as an independent amid corruption allegations. Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, is the unloved frontrunner. And the city, which has experienced sweeping demographic changes over the last 10 years, has become Trumpier. This has fuelled an anti-establishment feeling that could, paradoxically, benefit outsider candidates like Mamdani.

As voting starts on 14 June in the Democratic primary, the result of this race will ripple far beyond the city’s five boroughs. Should Mamdani pull off an upset, progressives elsewhere in the country may challenge incumbents in their own states, using the victory as a chance to reshape the national party and pull Democrats to the Left. Meanwhile, if Cuomo wins, it will be seen as proof that voters don’t want radicals — just a “return to normalcy,” to borrow Warren G. Harding’s 1920 campaign slogan.

As things stand, the odds remain stacked in Cuomo’s favor. Despite the sexual-harassment allegations that led to his resignation as governor in 2021 and a federal investigation into his handling of nursing-home deaths during the pandemic, the 67-year-old maintains a prohibitive lead over his opponents. The latest polls put him around 10 percentage points ahead of second-placed Mamdani, and in a projected run-off, he would win with 56% of the vote to Mamdani’s 44%.

The gap, however, has been narrowing. In March, Cuomo enjoyed a nearly 30-point lead over Mamdani, but as that advantage has shrunk, fears are growing that he may be getting complacent. Instead of hitting the campaign trail, the former governor has adopted a Bidenesque basement strategy, eschewing the media in favor of a few limited public appearances across the city.

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Mamdani, meanwhile, has run a sophisticated grassroots campaign that bears an uncanny resemblance to AOC’s original bid for the House of Representatives. Through a combination of intensive door-to-door canvassing and buzzy policy proposals like Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a Green New Deal, the then-28-year-old bartender pulled off a huge upset by unseating 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary back in 2018.

Taking a leaf from her book, Mamdani touts free buses, city-run grocery stores, and universal childcare. He promises to fund these initiatives with higher taxes on the extremely wealthy and corporations, even though there is little sign that the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul, is receptive to such plans. Yet even so, Hochul is up for re-election next year. If Mamdani does win, she may feel obliged — or even pressured — to offer something up.

Cuomo, by contrast, has made public safety the centrepiece of his campaign. In his announcement video, he gravely indicted the city’s leadership for its anti-anti-crime stances: “We know that today our New York City is in trouble. You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person, or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway.”

It is a strong message — but one that might have landed more effectively during the 2021 election than today’s. For while those concerns persist, they aren’t felt as acute as they once were: the migrant crisis is subsiding, violent crime is down, and tourism has rebounded. “Cuomo is running a crisis campaign when people don’t feel that way,” says Dan Turrentine, a Democratic strategist. “New Yorkers want a more positive message.”

The relative improvement in the city’s mood has created space for Mamdani’s more expansive (or panglossian) economic proposals. Ironically, his Left-populist message may have been bolstered by Trump’s win last year. “Trump has actually made things easier for a democratic socialist,” says Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “When the president says Walmart can eat the cost of tariffs, it makes Mamdani’s idea of government-run grocery stores seem less crazy. Trump says things no one from either party has dared to, which gives the extremes on both sides license to go further.”

That a city as blue as New York increased its support for Trump consistently over three election cycles shouldn’t be mistaken for a broader conservative shift. Rather, it is a sign of growing frustration with the establishment, which has hurt Cuomo’s campaign more than the others. Even though he has never been mayor, progressives have framed Cuomo as the incumbent and tied the city’s failures to him. During last week’s debate, the 67-year-old faced relentless attacks from his opponents about his decade as governor. At times, he was left on the backfoot.

“Cuomo has been battered — the Left is determined to break him down,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran strategist who worked on the campaigns of Bill Clinton and Michael Bloomberg. “It’s a bad time to be an establishment centrist Democrat because everything is changing. And when everything changes, that hurts those in the middle the most.”

Recognising Cuomo’s weakness, progressive candidates have been doing something they almost never do: cooperating. Learning from their mistakes in the last mayoral election, progressives have launched a concerted ABC (Anyone But Cuomo) campaign, which could negatively impact the former governor under the primary’s ranked-choice voting system. The push was epitomised by AOC, who told voters in her Mamdani endorsement: “do not rank Andrew Cuomo on your ballot at all. Leave the bubble next to his name blank.”

Mamdani’s late surge means that it’ll be more likely for progressive voters to coalesce around his candidacy. But his shortcomings are hard to ignore. His legislative record is thin — he has passed a grand total of three bills during his time in the New York state Assembly — and his free-bus pilot scheme was not renewed. Then there is his ferociously anti-Israel stance, which risks alienating many of the city’s 1.3 million Jewish residents. Asked about whether he supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in last week’s debate, Mamdani could only offer a mealy-mouthed response. “I believe Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights,” he said.

There is also another inescapable truth that becomes all too evident at Mamdani’s rallies. Ironically for an Indian-American born in Uganda, his supporters are almost exclusively white, largely concentrated in the gentrifying neighbourhoods of Queens and Brooklyn. This was confirmed by the recent Emerson poll, in which Mamdani leads white voters with 57% support, compared to Cuomo at 43%. Among black voters, however, he pulls less than 26%, and Hispanics are even colder on him.

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For a candidate who claims to represent the city’s (largely nonwhite) working class, this is a glaring disconnect. It’s a testament to the tension between whom progressives like Mamdani claim to speak for versus who actually shows up to support them. After all, it was the city’s voters of color — long a moderating force on the Democratic Party — who handed former NYPD captain Eric Adams the mayoralty and who, by wide margins, tell pollsters they want the same or more policing in their neighbourhoods, not less. Mamdani, by contrast, supports community-led alternatives to public safety — a stance that very few working-class New Yorkers would likely support.

Cuomo’s base is far broader. He’s backed by Jews in Manhattan, black churchgoers in Brooklyn, Latino families in southeast Queens, and older homeowners across the boroughs — the coalition that forms the bedrock of the city’s electorate. He has also promised to add 5,000 additional NYPD officers, which would likely be well received by these communities.

Taken together, these factors give Cuomo a clearer path to victory than Mamdani, but the implications of this race stretch far beyond New York. For the rest of America, it could offer a revealing lesson about the Democratic Party’s unresolved identity crisis. Whichever faction prevails will claim a mandate: a Mamdani victory might embolden progressives like AOC to pressure establishment figures — including Sen. Chuck Schumer, who faces re-election next year — to shift further Left or risk a primary. A Cuomo win, meanwhile, would strengthen the hand of moderates arguing that the party must reclaim the centre to stay competitive. With party figures across the country jockeying for consideration in the 2028 presidential race, all eyes will be on how this one turns out.

In fewer than two weeks, voters will find out who will lead the Democrats into the general election at the end of this year. But as Hank Sheinkopf, who has worked on some 700 campaigns around the world, said, all bets on this race are off. “One given in New York politics,” he says, “is that nothing is predictable.”

The chances are that Trump will win this latest legal battle, just as he won the previous ones. The Supreme Court, where this legal battle may ultimately end up, has a majority of conservative justices. Six have been appointed by Republican presidents, three of them by Trump himself. The court’s most recent rulings have tilted heavily in favor of Trump. It ruled before last year’s election that Trump enjoyed immunity for actions he committed as president. It ruled in favor of the Trump administration in a case involving his decision to remove two members of an independent federal agency; on a case involving the protected status of Venezuelan migrants; and on a case that limited the scope of environmental reviews. The Supreme Court went against him in a decision to deport a Venezuelan accused of gang affiliations. This history of the court’s ruling would suggest the odds are 80:20 in favor of Trump.

But the deeper reason why I think Trump will win is that the New York court’s legal argument would set a very dangerous precedent if confirmed. It would be dangerous for Democrats too. Trump invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act from 1977 to justify his “Liberation Day” tariffs. That act was signed into law by Jimmy Carter. It was meant to enable a president to take emergency measures after the oil shocks of that decade.

Trump’s lawyers argued that the persistent US trade deficits constituted a national emergency that would justify the triggering of the Act. The New York court rejected this line of argument because the US has been running trade deficits since 1976. How can something be an emergency if it has been going on for that long?

The argument is sheer sophistry. In finance and economics, most crises occur due to things that have been going on for a long time. Remember subprime mortgages? They started in 1988. It took another 20 years until they triggered the global financial crisis. Or think about diseases in medicine. Life is full of emergencies whose causes started to build over long periods.

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But let’s suppose I am wrong. Trump loses the court case. Then what?

He still wins. This is because he has so many other ways of imposing tariffs. And on top of that, many more ways of achieving similar outcomes.

It already started on the weekend, when he said he would double the steel and aluminum tariffs to 50%. These tariffs come under a different heading: Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. I have counted five Acts that allow a president to impose tariffs — and there are probably more. Section 232 deals with national security. Joe Biden used it to impose a 100% tariff on electric cars from China. Trump’s car tariff also falls into this category.

Could the courts challenge him over Section 232? I doubt it. Historically, courts have not gone against the President over national security. Trump invoked Section 232 with the argument that the US has become dependent on imports for certain critical goods and materials, like vehicles, steel and also drugs. This is factually correct. You cannot use Section 232 to put an import on champagne and argue that you need to block its flow for national security reasons. But Trump can still do what the Europeans do: establish some food and wine standards that only domestic suppliers can fulfill.

The jargon of US trade and finance politics includes a lot of numbers, which all happen to be in the hundreds. There is also Section 301 of the 1974 US Trade Act. This is about unfair trading practices. Section 301 is triggered by an official investigation by the US Trade Representative. It is a powerful act, but slow. It follows strict procedural rules. They have to launch an investigation, hold hearings, and allow people to raise objections. But when all this is over, the President decides.

And then there is the nuclear device: Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Act from 1930. That is the Act that triggered the Great Depression. Smoot-Hawley allows the President to impose tariffs of up to 50% for the most quotidian of reasons: to shield American industry from foreign competition. Smoot-Hawley is surprisingly still on the statute books.

You want more numbers? There is also Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which gives Trump the power to impose tariffs of 15% for up to 150 days, no questions asked. If you deep-dive into the current bill, which passed the House of Representatives by a single vote last week, you might come across Section 899. This introduces a tax on foreign investors whose countries are deemed to run tax regimes the US considers detrimental to the interests of US business.

I am going to stop here with the numbers. But the bottom line is that Trump will find a way. Only a fool would bet on Trump being stopped by the courts. It did not happen in the past. It won’t happen now.

Behind these serial misjudgments lies a deeper problem. One of the reasons why centrist, liberal democracy is in retreat is its tendency towards lawfare. The German military historian Carl von Clausewitz described war as the continuation of policy with other means. Lawfare is the continuation of policies through the courts. If you don’t win elections, you still have the courts. This is an abuse of the legal system. Democracy is not meant to work that way.

Lawfare also has a tendency to backfire. There are many examples other than Trump’s criminal trials. The UK Supreme Court’s decision to stop Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament in 2019 represented another campaign whose efforts did not have the intended effect. The ruling was celebrated by the Remain campaign, but it also triggered new elections that Johnson won with an unexpectedly large majority. The European Commission also commits lawfare through a procedure they call “rule of law”. It is where politicians vote to withhold payments to recalcitrant EU members. Courts in France and Romania have banned the lead candidates in presidential elections. In Germany, centrist politicians are actively discussing whether to seek a ban of the Alternative for Germany. If you can’t beat them, ban them. That’s lawfare.

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By Wolfgang Münchau

Lawfare fails for two reasons. It rallies the broader support base of those who are subjected to it — which is what happened with Trump, and with the Leave campaign during the Brexit years. But, perhaps more importantly, it has a terrible effect on those who pursue it. The lawfarers relied on the courts to do the dirty work for them. They were not sufficiently focused on defeating Trump in the elections, because the courts lurked in the background.

I see centrist-liberal complacency everywhere. Here in Europe liberals wrap themselves in the Ukrainian flag and promise that they will support Ukraine for however long it takes to defeat Russia. But for that promise to mean anything, it would have required some real sacrifice, like higher taxes, a gas and oil embargo, or comprehensively cutting off Russian banks from the Western financial system. I feel sorry for Ukraine that it has such spineless allies. The problem with liberal centrists is that they fight battles that are legal rather than political. They like something done. But they don’t like to do it themselves. They don’t fight wars themselves but prefer somebody else to fight it for them. The European centrists hate Trump in part because he ended that toxic game.

The reality is that Trump has won two elections, and he has got almost four years left to govern. The intelligent question for his opponents to ask is not how to defeat him in the courts, but how to move forward when they take over from him, and what parts of the agenda they should focus on if they were to win the mid-term elections next year. What should the US-China relationship be? Or US trade policy after 2029? Do you really want manufacturing to come back? What kind of manufacturing?

The reason why electorates are disaffected with incumbents is that many voters are not partaking in the fast lane of the 21st-century economy. It would be a massive job trying to fix this. It would mean reconnecting the average voter with the 21st-century economy. Trump managed to connect with the average voter better than his Democratic opponent, but in the end I don’t think he will deliver for them. The Trump presidency is more likely than not to end in disappointment. The sole purpose of the tariffs is to pay for the tax cuts that will benefit mostly the rich. If you want to defeat Trump, forget the courts. Start solving the actual problem.