President Donald Trump’s unrelenting assault on the federal workforce has prompted many progressives to leap reflexively to government’s defense.  

Some progressives, however, are acknowledging the need for reform. “The truth is, Trump and Elon Musk alone didn’t break our governing institutions,” write Hannah Garden-Monheit and Tresa Joseph in a new report for the Roosevelt Institute. Rather, government was already failing the American public with its incrementalist approach, disengagement with the public, and the lack of tangible results. “Unfortunately, for most Americans, the federal government is distant, abstract, labyrinthine,” they write. 

Garden-Monheit and Joseph interviewed 45 former officials from President Joe Biden’s administration, many of whom conveyed the frustration of ambitions thwarted by risk aversion, red tape and a cumbersome civil service system.  Their report offers more than 160 fixes to make government more efficient and responsive. 

Most importantly, Garden-Monheit and Joseph argue, government must deliver concrete benefits to Americans’ lives in order to rebuild public trust. For instance, says Garden-Monheit, agencies could pursue tougher, higher-profile enforcement of corporate accountability in areas like consumer protection and antitrust. Agencies could also do a better job of engaging the public in their work. 

Garden-Monheit was the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and chief of staff to former FTC Chair Lina Khan. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

***

Anne Kim: You and your co-author, Tresa Joseph, have written a progressive version of “Project 2029,” except it’s focused on fixing government, not wrecking it. It’s what DOGE was supposed to have accomplished, which is to build an efficient government that regains public trust. What prompted this project, and what frustrations did you experience as an agency official that led to this report?

Hannah Garden-Monheit: The basic impetus was that for a lot of folks like myself and a lot of the officials we talked to, people came into government with really good intentions but found that even with the best of intentions, even working incredibly hard many hours a day around the clock, it was incredibly challenging to get things done. 

When you compare our promises and what we set out to do with what we were able to accomplish within a four-year term—our electoral mandate—we came up short. So folks really wanted to interrogate why that was and what would it take for the government to be effective and nimble and responsive to the needs of working people. 

It is a hopeful project that we can rebuild a government that earns people’s trust and is worthy of the people it’s supposed to serve. 

Anne Kim: The overall takeaway of the report is that government has to be able to act more quickly to deliver tangible wins on the priorities people care about. I’d love to ask why government doesn’t do that now. If I could quote from your report, you say, “the default mode of operating is risk averse, incremental, and wed to process at the expense of outcomes.” What do you mean by that?

Hannah Garden-Monheit: A lot of governmental structures are structured around risk mitigation and compliance. Risks that you might have an embarrassing failure that creates a bad political narrative. Risks that you’re going to get sued, which happens with almost anything an administration that believes in regulation of the economy is going to face.

When you’re optimizing for risk aversion, there’s a tendency to layer on additional processes to try to eliminate those risks. But that comes with the risk of under-delivering. You can spend a lot of time and process trying to come up with the perfect policy, but if you spend all of your time with that, you’re not putting your attention on outcomes and delivery. 

We really need to reorient our mindset. What are the goals that you’re trying to achieve? What is the thing that you want to happen on the ground in working people’s lives to help make their lives better? The process should support getting to that outcome.

Anne Kim:  Your report is pretty exhaustive about the problems with government, including problems with the civil service system. I’m wondering if that means DOGE may have actually had a point in this regard. Can you talk a little bit about the problems you see with the civil service system as it is now?

Hannah Garden-Monheit: There are a couple of buckets of problems, but I want to say at the outset that the way that DOGE went about solving them is not a solution at all. 

Blanket firings without any regard to the important governmental functions people perform or to their individual performance is deeply counterproductive. Likewise, just wiping away people’s collective bargaining rights is not at all the way to go about this. 

[But one problem] I think you would be hard pressed to find somebody who disagrees with is the speed of hiring. 

The civil service process for hiring can take six months to a year. It means that you get applicant attrition because it takes so long to make an offer to somebody that they go and take another job.

That is not at all a match for standing up a government that needs to have the expertise to address modern problems in the economy. Imagine if you decide that AI is an issue we need to tackle, but it’s going to take the better part of a year to hire anybody with expertise. That’s a real problem for your ability to respond. 

Another issue is dealing with non-performance, which I want to say is something that was the exception rather than the rule. But it was notable that when you did have a non-performer, our systems were not oriented around giving them feedback on how to improve. 

Performance management was very often treated as an annual “fill out a form” thing. But anybody who’s been a strong manager of workers knows you need to be engaged in real time giving people feedback about what’s working, what’s not working, and how to improve. 

And then the processes when you had somebody who truly was a non-performer are so time consuming and lengthy that people just don’t have the resources or bandwidth to manage through that process. Workers absolutely should have due process rights. It’s absolutely critical that people can’t be arbitrarily fired based on partisan political machinations. 

But for example, one person we interviewed told us about somebody who literally was not showing up for work anymore, and it was still a nine-month process to dismiss them. That’s a problem that is costly for the people who are doing the work. It’s not good for morale if you are a really strong performer who’s burning the midnight oil to deliver for the American people and you see somebody else on your team who isn’t contributing and yet they get the same recognition.

Anne Kim: You were a senior official at the FTC, and that is one of the agencies whose job is to act as a counterweight to industry. And there are quite a few agencies whose function is to regulate industry or to be a counterweight in some way. But you write about ways in which regulatory capture contributes to inefficiency and perceptions about the poor performance of government. Can you speak to that?

Hannah Garden-Monheit: I was director of the Office of Policy Planning at FTC, and I was also at the White House before that. Our agencies are very accessible to moneyed interests in large part because you have to have money and time and resources in order to know what is going on in the federal government and to engage with it.

For example, the primary public input tool that the federal government uses is the notice and comment process under the Administrative Procedure Act. Right. But that is a framework that’s built around watching the Federal Register and seeing if there’s a 300- page proposed regulation that maybe affects you.

If you’re so lucky as to spot that, then you’re supposed to write up a letter to the agency and submit it through the website. And you’re supposed to talk in pretty formalist, legalistic terms about what your interests are and how you think the regulation should be changed. That’s something that every large corporation can afford to hire a large law firm and a lobbyist to handle for them. 

But working people are busy working. They are not combing the Federal Register to understand the alphabet soup of agencies and regulations that might affect them. So one of our key takeaways from the report is that we really need to restructure our federal capacities and tool set so that we’re proactively engaging working people, finding them where they are to get their input, and learning about the issues they think are important for the government to address. 

This is something that we did a fair bit of at the Federal Trade Commission. But otherwise, the government is a pretty passive recipient of who comes to engage with agencies. And because of how hard it is to do that, it’s much more accessible to moneyed interests than normal people.

Anne Kim: You’ve begun to edge around solutions, so let’s just go all in. A huge takeaway is that you focus on the need to deliver what you call “bold, swift” action and highly visible wins. Why is that important? And what are a couple of concrete examples of the kinds of things that you would like to see in short order?

Hannah Garden-Monheit: The basic connection here is to the functioning of our democratic system. When we have a government that isn’t capable of responding to people’s needs and their frustrations, it really erodes trust in democracy itself. We see people saying, “What’s the point of voting? Nothing ever changes.” Or they say, “I don’t love this candidate, but we’ve got to blow everything up because nothing is working.”

If you live in a country where some people are struggling to put food on the table but Elon Musk is getting a trillion dollar package of compensation, that can be deeply disillusioning for people.

 This is where fascism can creep in—when people lose faith that participating in elections will actually lead to improvements in their lives. 

That’s why it is so pressing to prove to people that government can make their lives better. But to do that, you have to deal with some of the unsexy, wonky, underlying plumbing fixes around why government is so slow and unresponsive. 

Public engagement, for example, isn’t rocket science. At the FTC, we did open commission meetings where anybody who wanted to could show up—virtually, by the way—and say whatever they wanted, completely unfiltered and unscreened. 

Other pieces are harder. We very much need to have a conversation about the courts in this country because a huge portion of what the Biden administration tried to do to deliver economic relief for people was stymied by the courts in the Fifth Circuit. We have a court that is very much stacked with ideological partisans who are very hostile to regulation of the economy. We also have a Supreme Court that has been part of a conservative project for decades from folks who don’t want to see government have the capacity to rein in corporate power and to regulate powerful industries. 

Folks who believe that the government should be capable of shaping markets in the public interest really need to grapple with reforms to the courts. 

Anne Kim:  On the question of corporate power, some of what you call for seems to overlap with the so-called “Abundance” agenda, based on the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book of the same name, which calls for cutting red tape and reforming permitting processes, among other things. The idea is that government being so sclerotic gets in the way of development and progress. But where there’s a departure from so-called “abundance liberalism” is in your call for more enforcement of corporate accountability, which I’m presuming is the result of your time with the FTC.  You would like to see more action on consumer protection, competition policy, and worker protection. How do you see your framework and recommendations fitting into this larger debate within progressives and within the Democratic party at large about corporate power and the right ways to rein it in, while also unleashing the capacity of corporations to do their thing and promote growth?

Hannah Garden-Monheit: I think you’re right that there is a lot of overlap with the abundance movement—there’s very much a shared desire to clear out the procedural sludge and really focus on outcomes. 

There’s a lot of shared ground in terms of rightsizing our processes. Let’s get the best expertise in the private sector brought to bear on the challenges we face. Let’s really speed up execution. 

Abundance has become a little bit of a Rorschach test, and it doesn’t necessarily seem to be a monolith. But there does seem to be this undercurrent that it’s not just about clearing out and rightsizing the procedural sludge, but also saying that government should get out of the way. Just let the private sector do its thing without regulation or oversight. 

If that’s what it’s about, then yes, that is where we part ways because we have tried for 40 years an approach that said, “Let’s be laissez faire, let’s get out of the way, let’s let the private sector do its thing,” and here we are. 

If what they’re saying is that corporations are going to solve all challenges, that hasn’t worked. Our markets are supposed to serve us, not the other way around. Some folks like to caricature what folks on the left are calling for and claim it’s some crazy communist thing. No, it’s enforcement of antitrust law so that giant dominant corporations aren’t able to crush not only consumers and workers, but small businesses and entrepreneurs too. We can have a pro-business, pro-growth economy while also reining in the big guys.

The post Government Is, in Fact, Broken appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Less than a year into his second term, President Donald Trump is already hobbling toward lame duck status. His approval rating has plummeted to 36 percent, according to Gallup’s latest survey, including just a 25 percent thumbs-up among independents. He’s squandered his gains with Latino voters, with nearly 80 percent now telling Pew that his policies are more harmful than helpful. 

Democrats, meanwhile, are enjoying an uptick in their electoral fortunes. Democratic gubernatorial candidates Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill cruised to victory in Virginia and New Jersey, while generic Congressional ballots have begun to show commanding leads for Democrats hopeful of capturing the House. 

But don’t mistake Trump’s unpopularity with newfound affection for Democrats, warns strategist Simon Bazelon, a Research Fellow at the Democratically aligned organization Welcome. Democrats have increasingly shifted leftward in recent years, Bazelon argues, and are perceived as too liberal and out of touch. 

Bazelon is the lead author of Deciding to Win, an exhaustive, data-driven autopsy of the Democratic Party recently published by Welcome. He advocates a new brand of “moderation” among Democratic candidates, defined not by old models of compromise and “triangulation” but by the dictates of popular opinion. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

***

You’ve co-written an incredibly thorough autopsy of the 2024 election and of the Democratic party that’s gotten quite a bit of attention. Before we get into the substance of the report, I have to ask why it’s called “Deciding to Win.” That implies that up to this point, Democrats have been deciding to lose.

Simon Bazelon: The title of the report comes from a quote by Nancy Pelosi, whom I obviously have lot of fondness for. She said an election is a decision. You make a decision to win, and then you make every decision in favor of winning. My own view is that Democrats haven’t been doing everything we can to win elections. We talk a lot about how Donald Trump is a threat to democracy and how it’s really important to beat him. I agree with all of that. I think he’s doing a poor job running the nation, and a big part of deciding to win is figuring out how to beat Trump and other Republicans. But I don’t think the Democrats have necessarily been putting our best foot forward in that effort.

Let’s move on to the substance then. Your report argues that Democrats have huge problems on three fronts: branding, messaging, and tactics. Drilling down on each of these, you conclude that Democrats are perceived by most voters as way too liberal, that they are focused too much on issues that a lot of voters don’t consider to be top priorities, and that they’re focused on turning out the base versus wooing genuinely swing voters. Is that a fair summary? 

Simon Bazelon: I think that’s a fair summary. We break the Democratic Party’s problems into two buckets. One is prioritization—the issues Democrats are focused on versus the issues voters think Democrats should be focused on. And the second is positioning—making sure that Democrats are advocating for policies that make sense to voters and that have broad-based support.

Let’s go back to this first question of voter perceptions of the Democratic Party. Can you walk through a little bit of the evidence that you cite in your report about how voters see the party as too liberal? And why is that a problem given how extreme Republicans have become? Don’t voters also see Republicans as too conservative?

Simon Bazelon: There are a number of things going on here. First, the Democratic Party is a lot more liberal and left-wing than it used to be. For example, the share of congressional Democrats who support Medicare for All or paid family leave or an assault weapons ban or expanded abortion rights has gone way up in the last 12 years. And as that shift to the left has happened, we see in public polling that the share of voters who think Democrats are too liberal has gone up a lot. 

In 2013, roughly 46 percent of voters said that the Democratic Party was too liberal, and now that’s about 55 percent. What’s interesting is that during that time, the share of voters who thought Republicans were too conservative actually declined by about 3 percent.

Now, since Trump has taken office, the share of voters who think Republicans are too extreme has gone way up, but the share of voters who think Democrats are too liberal is still substantially higher than the share of voters who think Republicans are too conservative, even after 10 months of the Trump administration.

Wow. Can you talk a little bit about the ideological makeup of voters? Has there been any shift in one direction or another toward conservative or liberal over the period you’re looking at?

Simon Bazelon: The share of voters who identify as liberal has gone up by a little bit since 2012—about 3 or 4 percent. The problem is that the Democratic Party has moved to left more quickly than the electorate has. 

This slight increase in the liberal share of the electorate is not nearly enough to offset big declines among voters who identify as moderate and conservative. Gallup finds that 71 percent of Americans identify as either moderate or conservative. 

As the party becomes more liberal, you argue, it’s spending a lot more time talking about the issues that matter to the base versus the issues that are of concern of the electorate at large. Can you drill down about the particular issues you’re talking about? We’re not hearing that much anymore about defunding the police or reparations, but are there other issues that are coded as “too liberal”?

Simon Bazelon: I think the big issues here are immigration and public safety. Obviously, the mainstream of the Democratic Party does not endorse defunding the police, but that doesn’t mean voters think we’re in the right place on crime. Democrats no longer endorse decriminalizing border crossings, but that doesn’t mean voters think we’re in the right place on immigration. 

It’s not just about being out of step in terms of our positions. It’s also about being out of touch in terms of our priorities. One thing we looked at was comparing the 2012 Democratic Party platform to the 2024 Democratic Party platform. We analyzed the frequency with which a variety of words appeared in those two documents. What we saw was really striking. For example, the phrase “middle class” declined by 79 percent between 2012 and 2024, “economy” was down 49 percent, “economic” was down 51 percent. 

On the flip side, words like “Black,” “white,” and “Latino” were up 1,000 percent, “LGBT” was up 1,000 percent, words like “equity,” “hate,” “justice,” “reproductive,” “democracy,” “criminal justice,” “environmental justice,” “climate,” “guns,”—all of these words increased dramatically in frequency. I think that’s pretty telling of a party that has shifted our priorities away from some of those working class issues that used to define us and towards these more abstract cultural concerns that are higher priorities for Democratic elites.

The share of voters who say that Democrats are “out of touch” has gone from about 50 percent in 2013 to 70 percent in 2025. It’s going to be pretty hard to win any election when 70 percent of voters think that your party is out of touch.

Before we turn to the suite of solutions you offer, I want to talk about one more large problem that you raise: tactics. You argue that because the Democratic Party is overly beholden to its base, its electoral strategy also overly relies on turnout. Your report points out two very important facts about the mathematics of the electorate: (1) that most voters are white, non-college educated and over the age of 50; and (2) a supermajority of voters are moderate, self-identified or conservative. Taking those two facts together means that a turnout strategy isn’t going to work, right?

Simon Bazelon: The idea of the mobilization thesis is that by moving left, Democrats will excite voters who might be skeptical of Democrats because they don’t feel like we’re progressive enough. And those people will come to the polls and deliver a big Democratic victory. This doesn’t line up with what we see in the data at all.

When we look at candidate performance, what we see is really clear. The most progressive Democrats—the folks endorsed by Justice Democrats, Our Revolution—are  running behind the top of the ticket. On the flip side, folks endorsed by the Blue Dogs Coalition or who have more moderate voting records are running ahead of the top of the ticket. In a world in which the mobilization thesis is true, you wouldn’t expect to see that at all. You’d see the opposite.

The kind of voters that Democrats need to turn out and the kind of voters that Democrats need to persuade actually have a lot of structural similarities. They tend to be lower engagement voters, people who don’t follow politics as closely, people for whom politics isn’t as big a part of their identity.

These voters tend to be overwhelmingly concerned with economic issues, and they also tend to be more conservative than Democratic-based voters on a wide range of issues. There’s really no trade-off between this idea of persuading swing voters and mobilizing non-voters. The way to do both is to have an economic-first message that also meets these voters where they are on non-economic cultural issues.

To sum up your bottom line recommendation for winning 2026, 2028 and beyond, Democrats generally need to become more “moderate.” But you define “moderate” in a very specific way—what do you mean?

Simon Bazelon: This is an extremely important distinction to make. Oftentimes, I think people see being “moderate” as defending the establishment or taking the side of corporations or always taking the middle ground between the progressive position and the conservative position. 

That’s not what moderation is. Moderation is taking positions that voters agree with on the issues they care about, particularly when that breaks from unpopular party orthodoxy.

I’ll give a good example of this. Former Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema was opposed to some of the prescription drug reforms that Democrats tried to pass in the Inflation Reduction Act. That was a quite unpopular position. Voters are extremely supportive of prescription drug price negotiation. So that was a more conservative position that she took, but it was also an unpopular position. We don’t think that’s what it means to be moderate. What it means to be moderate is to have views that voters agree with on the issues that they care about. The norm is that the more popular position is going to be closer to the center ideologically for the most part.

Just to play devil’s advocate though, progressives would argue that you’re asking people to abandon their principles. It is not right what ICE is doing. It is not right to give up reproductive freedom, and so on. What is your response to the argument that what you’re asking Democrats to do is to disavow some of the values that they have held dear?

Simon Bazelon: First of all, we live in a democracy, and living in a democracy means taking public opinion really seriously. It means not trying to just impose your own values and worldview on the voters. It means listening to them and respecting them and taking them seriously as people who deserve to have a defining role in our politics and in our policy making. If Democrats aren’t willing to respect public opinion, then we’re going to lose elections to people who don’t respect democracy.

And if we don’t win elections, then we can’t help any of the core constituencies that we want to. I’ll also say a lot of these commitments are relatively new. Every Democrat I know was super excited when Barack Obama won re-election in 2012, but Barack Obama’s 2012 platform looked a lot different from the Democratic agenda of the last four or five years. It was a lot more moderate on a lot of issues, and yet Democrats were still quite excited about him. 

I’m just going to keep pushing back a little bit just because I know people out there are pushing back. You’ve said a few times now that Democrats should talk about what’s popular versus what’s not. But there are at least a couple potential problems with that approach. First, some people might ask how this is leadership if you are led by the polls. And if you are following what’s popular, is there room for new ideas?  Second, what’s popular right now tends to be the MAGA point of view, such as on immigration. Does that mean ceding the field to Republicans and talking about all of these issues from the perspective of Republicans? Isn’t that overly defensive versus offensive?

Simon Bazelon:  There are absolutely huge roles for people to shape public opinion and move public opinion in a more progressive direction. And I fully support that on a lot of issues. With that said, is it an elected official’s role to tell their constituents that their own preferences on these issues aren’t correct and that they should have different preferences? Or is it an elected official’s role to represent the views of the people they’re supposed to be serving? I think I have a representative view of this, which is that in a democracy, an elected official’s job is to serve the will of the voters and to represent their views. And I think where we’ve gone wrong a lot of the time is by assuming that the work of public opinion change should be this top-down model coming from elected officials themselves, rather than from people in their own communities building support every day to change public opinion over the long run. 

What we see in a lot of the data is that when Democratic elites embrace an issue, the hardest-core Democratic partisans become much more supportive of that new position but swing voters are negatively polarized against it because they don’t trust Democratic elites. If you want long lasting public opinion change, it’s going to have to happen from the ground up rather than from the top down.

I’m wondering how hard it’s going be to dislodge some old habits, in part because you have very progressive politicians who’ve become influencers dependent on large social media followings. One of the more fascinating findings I found in your report was that you challenged this idea that social media following translates into electoral advantage. In fact, you decisively show that it does not. Nevertheless, how do candidates and politicians break the grip of having that large social media following and having to cater to what that following wants from day to day, moment to moment?

Simon Bazelon: I think it’s really hard. One of the biggest problems in American politics right now is that on both sides, the incentives of elected officials are to play to constituencies whose policy preferences are more extreme than the average American and whose priorities are different from the average voter.

I do think one thing going for us is that Democratic voters deeply care about winning elections. In the 2020 primary, 65 percent of Democratic voters said they cared more about having a nominee who could win than having a nominee who shared their positions on the issues. 

The problem for Democrats is there’s been a lot of confusion about what electability means. A lot of people have put a lot of time and energy into misleading Democrats about how popular various parts of our agenda are. 

On this question of electability, one of the most interesting charts in your report is an electability index that handicaps the potential 2028 contenders. It was really surprising because you have Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro at the very top of the list, and two of the highest profile governors right now, Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker, down at the bottom. How does that happen, especially given all the excitement around Newsom right now and Pritzker for their resistance to Trump and the meme-friendly stuff that Newsom is doing? 

Simon Bazelon: What we’re seeing right now is that the kinds of candidates that the Democratic base is getting excited about are the kinds of candidates who are engaging in meme warfare against Donald Trump on Twitter. 

But that approach isn’t the kind of thing that is winning over voters who are skeptical of Democrats. What they want to see is that Democrats are focused on the economic issues they care most about, and that Democrats share their values on non-economic issues. That is unfortunately not the kind of thing that’s getting lots of clicks and retweets right now. It’s a real issue for Democrats going forward.

How do you apply the lessons of your report to the results from New Jersey and from Virginia? To what extent do those outcomes validate what you are saying in your report? And to what extent does the outcome in New York City with the election of Zohran Mamdani push against what you are arguing?

Simon Bazelon: Broadly speaking, all the election results are roughly in line with a lot of the things we’re saying. Also, I think it’s really important not to overlearn lessons from off-year special elections. 

Democrats’ problem is not figuring out how to win federal races in New Jersey and Virginia or New York City. It’s figuring out how to win presidential elections in Wisconsin and Michigan. It’s figuring out how to win Senate races in states like Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Texas—places that voted for Donald Trump by double digits in 2024. 

But with that said, I do think that the Democrats who won mostly ran quite disciplined campaigns focused on affordability, which is voters’ top issue.

I hear your point about economy and affordability. But how do candidates not run against corruption and all the things that are just horrific about this presidency?  

Simon Bazelon: Donald Trump provides more lanes of attack than Democrats know what to do with. And I think this is sometimes a little bit of a problem for us. You can only have one top priority. Every time you as a candidate or as a staffer write a tweet, give a speech, post a video on social media, or put a policy item on your website, you are making a signal to voters about what you care about and about what your priorities are. 

It’s important to remember that the issues that voters don’t think we care about enough are lowering costs, securing the border, reducing crime, cutting taxes on the middle class, and making healthcare more affordable. What we need to be focused on is closing that gap between what voters think we should be focused on and what voters think we are currently focused on.

I definitely think there’s room in our message for criticizing Trump’s corruption. Voters are very upset at the status quo. They see elites as out of touch and not serving their interests. Trump has provided a lot of fodder for Democrats on that point.

The post Tough Medicine for Democrats: “Too Liberal” and “Out of Touch” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last month, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill notched blockbuster victories in Virginia and New Jersey. Spanberger trounced her Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by a 15-point margin, while Sherrill defeated businessman Jack Ciattarrelli by 13-points.

The Virginia and New Jersey campaigns relied on similar tactics: A core message on affordability; an emphasis on the national security backgrounds of both candidates; and a willingness to stand up against Trump. One of the chief strategists who devised this approach is pollster Angela Kuefler, a partner at Global Strategy Group who worked with both candidates. Kuefler also brought to both races her perspective as the rare female pollster in a male-dominated field. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

Anne Kim: Congratulations! Most polls did not indicate such large margins in these races. Did these wins outperform your own expectations as well, or did you have an inkling that this was going to happen? 

Angela Kuefler: It was always a possibility. One of the things that is true for off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey is that they become a referendum on the president who’s just been elected. If you look back to the last time Trump was elected, there were healthy wins by Democrats up and down the ticket in both states. So we always knew it was a possibility. I operate from the place of “let’s expect the worst and hope for the best,” but in our various turnout scenarios, we did see the chance of it hitting this high, especially in New Jersey.

Matthew Cooper: I’m from New Jersey, so I’ve seen my share of politicians rise and fall there, going back to the likes of Jim Florio before Chris Christie. Both Spanberger and Sherrill talked about affordability, and it was clearly on the minds of voters. But did voters think that was something governors could do much about? In other words, who are voters blaming for high prices? Or do they see it as an act of God?

Angela Kuefler: They see it as an act of a lot of politicians from the past not doing their jobs right. They see it to some extent as something that is outside any political control. 

But what was different with these two women is the strength of who they are and their past lives and bios as moms, as people with a national security background, and as folks who put mission and service above everything else. Those weren’t just talking points. Those were very important components of their story, of their brand, of their message. 

And the reason it mattered is that it allowed voters to believe that they could do something about costs and the economy because they were not traditional tax-and-spend Democrats. These were Democrats who were not viewed as extreme because of their bios and background. These were Democrats who were different from most politicians, or at least how most people perceive most politicians, and that allowed people to hear them and believe them when they said, “I’m going to do X, I’m going to do Y, to help you and your family control the cost of living.”

Matthew Cooper: There was a time when gun safety was a big issue in states like New Jersey. Of course, after the Dobbs decision, there was reason to think choice would dominate pretty much every state race in years to come. But these issues don’t seem to have really been on the radar of voters that much. Are we now in a place where in some states, choice and guns are settled enough that it doesn’t matter that much, or are they still salient issues? 

Angela Kuefler: Abortion and guns still matter to people, and abortion was a part of both of these campaigns. I think the difference is how we utilized it strategically to draw a contrast with their opponents. 

You could not get two different Republicans than Jack Ciattarrelli and Winsome Earle- Sears. But the work we did to disqualify them was relatively similar, first by disqualifying them on some of the economic brand advantages that Republicans historically have had on cost and affordability by making clear that they have raised people’s costs. And then the other component was to make it clear that they were going to be so aligned with Trump that they would not do what was right to protect the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the state of New Jersey. 

And then finally, there was a layer of extremism, of which abortion was the main proof point. Not only can you not trust either of these Republicans to do what was right because they’re so aligned with MAGA and Trump, they’re so extreme they want to ban abortion. It’s that combination that did a lot of work to disqualify both of these  Republican opponents.

Anne Kim: I want to ask specifically about Virginia. Abigail Spanberger outperformed both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in Virginia, and even though some of those corners of southwest Virginia stayed red, the losses were definitely not as severe as they had been in the past. And in Chesapeake, she did extremely well in her home territory. Do we know at this point who is making the shift back into the blue column and how durable those shifts are going to be?

Angela Kuefler: We don’t really know until the voter files are updated who actually showed up to this election. There’s always some estimation based on precincts, but the reality is we don’t know how much of it was different people showing up and how much of it was persuasion. 

I tend to think it was a combination of both those things, given that turnout—while it will never match a presidential year—was still higher. Both Abigail and Mikie have also had multiple races where they have done really great work in winning over more traditional right-leaning swing voters in many different communities. 

And that’s part of their superpower. Having a national security background just vibes to folks as not being extreme on one end or the other. It feels moderate. It feels like somebody that they think can trust.

There are certainly lessons that we should all be taking from these victories in candidate recruitment, messaging, and all of that. But I don’t think all Democratic problems are solved by one really good night with electorates that don’t look like the midterm or the presidential.

Matthew Cooper: Going back to New Jersey, all eyes were on Passaic County with its big Hispanic, Arab-American and Muslim populations after its dramatic swing to Trump in 2024. It moved back in a Democratic direction this time. Can you offer some insight about what happened there and among those communities?

Angela Kuefler: It’s probably a combination of a few things. One, we played for them hard. We were on Spanish TV. We did Latino-focused mail. We very much targeted that group. But they’re not a monolith, obviously. There are different factors that they’re persuaded by or not. 

In terms of messaging, some of it built on the overreach of what Trump is doing—the mass deportations. That certainly played a role. The bigger role though, again, was the message on cost and affordability. This is a population that is particularly attuned to cost.

Anne Kim: What do you think were the biggest mistakes that the GOP opponents made in both races? I live in Virginia and was inundated by ads from Winsome Earle-Sears that struck me as a little bit tone deaf, but what are the other ways you think in which both candidates may have misfired in their message to voters and in their whole approach?

Angela Kuefler: My job is to do the research to help inform campaign strategy. It’s a much bigger team, obviously, but the way it works is that you do the research, and you come up with the ideal message narrative. You always plan for shifts your opponent might make, and I like to assume my opponent is smarter than us and is going to do the smart thing. 

So as part of that planning, I and I think others on both these campaigns were quite sure each of these candidates would try to distance themselves from the president, try to make themselves seem more moderate, try to push back.

The vast majority of swing voters have never wanted a politician who was just going to be a party line vote. That is a longstanding belief. So regardless of who the president is, they still should have been trying to promote some separation. 

But they never even tried, and I frankly couldn’t believe it. It was a gift. I don’t know how they weren’t advising their candidate to push back against a president who is completely underwater in each of these states. The logic didn’t make sense. The best I could figure out is that maybe they recognized that turnout was the one of the key levers here and they could galvanize the Trump base and create a different electorate. But that is risky, and that has historically not happened when Trump isn’t on the ticket himself.

Part of it could be they didn’t want to upset daddy. Maybe they both knew they were going to lose and wanted to preserve that relationship. 

Anne Kim:  I want to ask a question about the business of polling before we bring it back to your advice for candidates in 2026. As I understand it, your client roster is pretty exclusively female. You have led independent expenditure polling for Kansas Governor Laura Kelly, for instance, and you’ve worked for Georgia politicians Stacey Abrams and Lucy McBath. 

Polling is also very much a male-dominated profession. What do you bring as a female pollster to the candidates you work with? And given that polling as a profession has been beaten up over the last few cycles, how does your perspective improve polling as a profession or represents perspectives that have not been represented as fully in the past?

Angela Kuefler: I don’t think I’m providing anything different or better from the literal steps of polling methodology. I do think where it makes a difference is in the team environment. It’s not just polling that is male-dominated, it’s the entire political consultant industry. 

So it helps to sometimes have a different voice. I think that how I and other women think about branding a candidate, or the narrative of a candidate, is a little bit different. It’s robust. It’s deeper. And I hadn’t even clocked that as a way that women see the world slightly differently until somebody flagged it for me relatively recently. 

For example, when I’m thinking about how to build up a candidate brand, I have a framework about how one connects to someone emotionally, how one bonds with them based on lived experience, and how one connects their motivation to run with what people believe is pure—stuff that in my experience builds a deeper candidate brand. And that’s not how a lot of folks think about it. They’re like, “We test whatever polls really well on policy, and let’s call it a day.” There’s no shame in that. That has worked for many years. But it doesn’t always work, and it certainly doesn’t work in really hard races where you need to develop deeper connections with voters, especially if you’re a Democrat running in a redder place.  

I think it’s important to have women’s perspectives on these campaign teams, which are predominantly men. And I get even more joy when I’m not the only woman on the team, which does happen sometimes.

Anne Kim: I think it’s just so important because women candidates at the presidential level just have not fared well. And it does seem that there needs to be something different that happens in order to break that final glass ceiling. 

Angela Kuefler: I think women, people of color, and people who have been historically marginalized in any way see where power lies more acutely. And so I think we tend to see our own vulnerabilities a little bit more too, which is sometimes the role I play in campaigns. 

For example, there are a lot of academic studies out there that say women candidates who go on TV and are perceived to be attacking first get more blowback. If you don’t know that, and you’re just operating with the playbook for how to win a campaign that was written for men by men, then you’re pushing your candidate and not taking that nuance into account. 

It’s the same thing when you’re balancing when you should talk about being a mom versus when you should talk about being a Navy helicopter pilot or a CIA agent. Both of those things says different things to different voters—both good things—but it’s a balance.

Anne Kim: And at the risk of going off on a tangent here, I do think that this consideration of what it means to be a woman candidate becomes even more fraught because of what’s happening on the other side of the aisle with traditional gender roles becoming so much a part of the conversation. Being that CIA analyst or being a veteran pushes against this paradigm that they’re constructing on the other side. It’s going to be really interesting to see what happens over the next few cycles with female candidates and how they brand themselves.

Angela Kuefler: Yep. It pushes against it in a way that is helpful, but because they are both moms, it also doesn’t bust those traditional rules too much to backfire. That combination has proven to be really powerful, and I think will continue.

Matthew Cooper: If you’re meeting with someone who is thinking about running in 2026, what are you going to tell them about the personal travails of running and also the landscape coming up?

Angela Kuefler: The first thing is to make sure candidates are aware how much work it’s going to be. I think a lot of them intellectually get it, but when they’re locked in call time for multiple hours a day, when they’re on the road constantly, it wears. 

Next, I’m feeling pretty bullish about 2026 at this point—all of the redistricting conversations aside, because that obviously throws a wrench into a lot of different things.

But if we think about 2026 as a replay of 2018, much like 2025 proved to be a relatively similar replay to 2017, we won big, and we won districts that were considered R+10 or up to R+13. That means compared to the national average in the last two elections, they voted Republican 10 points more than the national average or up to 13 points more than the national average.

Last time, we moved some of those really, really hard districts, and keep in mind that in 2018, Abigail Spanberger herself beat Dave Brat in an R+7 district. And he was not a hated guy. 

So I feel pretty bullish that we’ll be able to swing some of these harder places. And then it becomes: Are you a candidate who has an appealing profile and are you willing to do the work? If you are both those things, then you can catch that wave and potentially, much like Mikie and Abigail both did, in less than a decade be governor.

The post How Democrats Won Virginia and New Jersey appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A month after President Donald Trump abruptly ended trade talks with Canada over an anti-tariff ad featuring former President Ronald Reagan, the two countries have yet to resume negotiations. 

Earlier this week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said he’ll restart talks “when it’s appropriate,” telling Reuters that “he did not have a pressing issue to address with President Donald Trump.” Instead, Carney has been courting US rivals China and India to lessen Canada’s dependence on the United States, and the country has set a goal of doubling its non-US exports by 2035, according to the Washington Post.

The rift between America and its ally to the north is “the worst in modern history,” says former US Ambassador to Canada James Blanchard. And it’s no wonder. Trump has threatened to annex Canada as the “51^st state,” and mocked former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as its “governor.” He’s blamed the country for flooding America with fentanyl and illegal immigrants, though neither charge bears resemblance to reality. And he’s levied punitive tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, among other exports, all the while accusing Canada of “cheating” on trade. 

Canadians, meanwhile, have rallied to the cry of “Elbows Up” and boycotted American products. Canada-US travel is down by nearly a third compared to a year ago, resulting in billions of dollars for US companies. They also elected Carney this spring, in part for his anti-Trump views, and rejected Trump-lite conservative candidate Pierre Poilievre, who also lost his seat in Parliament. 

Even after Trump’s eventual departure from office, these wounds will be hard to heal, says Blanchard, who served as Ambassador to Canada under President Bill Clinton. Blanchard also served two terms as governor of Michigan and four terms in Congress. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

***

Anne Kim: You were the U.S. Ambassador to Canada during the Clinton administration—in fact, during the ratification of NAFTA, which was incredibly crucial time in the relationship between our countries. And before then, you served two terms as governor of Michigan, a state that also has deep ties to Canada. How would you characterize the current state of US-Canada relations, especially as compared to what you experienced as ambassador?

Amb. Blanchard:  US relations with Canada are the worst in modern history, and there’s no one who has studied it that would disagree with what I’ve said, especially the Canadians. It’s tragic. It’s not just trade disputes, it’s the rhetoric of the president—whether he wants to refer to them as the “51st state” or to say they’re nasty or, you know, Vice President Vance saying the Canadians have treated us very badly these last few decades. He hasn’t even lived long enough to know that. Or Howard Lutnick’s foolish statements. It’s the tone and the attitude which has Canadians losing total faith in us and wondering what’s going on in the United States.

I do a lot of Canadian interviews, and I mentioned to Canadians that most Americans consider Canada our best friend and ally and partner, and they should disregard the rhetoric from the top. 

Garrett Epps: I think a lot of people in this country got a kick out of the elections in Canada and the idea that the slogan was “Elbows Up”—which of course Americans didn’t know what it meant until then. But the question is whether “Elbows Up” is going to work for Canada in the long term, and whether they really can withstand what’s coming at them. We have a situation where a president, if he doesn’t like a commercial on TV, tries to slap a 10 percent tariff on all your goods. The United States is obviously economically much more powerful than Canada. How is this going to play out?

Amb. Blanchard:  Well, it’s hard to know. Let me backtrack just one moment, though, to say relations were very good during the Clinton years. The Canadians didn’t know him when he got elected, and they were a little worried he was a Southerner. And they really liked Bush and Reagan. But their natural inclination is to be liberal, and once they got to know Clinton, they loved him. So it was great being his ambassador there. We dealt with NAFTA, we dealt with Open Skies, we dealt with the Quebec referendum. It was a critical time, and Clinton was fabulous. It was probably the golden era now that we look back. 

By the way, I love the Reagan commercial. And I think if they don’t get a deal, they ought to start playing it again in some key markets because that obviously was getting the Republicans in Congress rattled. 

We have an integrated economy with Canada. It’s not just autos. It’s energy, it’s agriculture, it’s steel and aluminum, it’s everything. And we actually have a surplus on trade with Canada on almost everything really except energy. And we need that energy. We’re the largest producer of crude oil on the planet now, but our refineries can’t use our new light crude, so we export it.

Our refineries are set up for Canadian heavy crude, so we’re dependent on Canada for energy. Canada could cause power outages in New England if they pulled Hydro-Quebec back. So they have cards to play, but they don’t want to do that. I mean, they’re 10 percent of our population. We simply have a lot more leverage than they do, and that makes it hard.

Anne Kim: What has been the impact of the tariffs on the Canadian economy? My understanding is that the Canadian economy is actually suffering fairly badly and that U.S. automakers are beginning to move production out of Canada back into the United States. What is the impact you’re seeing and is that going to affect the strategy long term for Canadians?

Amb. Blanchard: Well, I think it’s causing inflation in Canada and here, despite what the president says. There may be some movement from Canada to the U.S. There’s always shuffling back and forth. But when you have a totally integrated economy in terms of parts and suppliers, as well as assembly, a lot is still going to happen in Canada.

I don’t think you’re going to see any auto company wanting to build a new plant in the United States at the expense of Canada, because it takes several years, and the president, Mr. Trump, is not going to be there. It’s hard to believe any future president would be so foolish to deal with our number one customer that way. It’s just unrealistic. We’re too integrated.

And that’s not going to change. Geography is not going to change. Manufacturing is changing, but the major reason for the reduction in auto workers has been automation and to some degree bad management. It wasn’t nearly as much trade.

Garrett Epps: For all of the negative effects, Trump has really benefited some people. For example, Jimmy Kimmel, I think, is extremely grateful to the president. And another one might be Mark Carney, who was considered not to be a very strong candidate until Trump decided to involved himself in Canadian affairs. How do you rate his performance as prime minister in dealing with what is obviously a very serious crisis for that country?

Amb. Blanchard: It’s hard to find fault. “Steady as you go” is probably his motto, and I think that’s what Canada needs to do—not overreact to every little thing that comes up. It’s true he would not be prime minister but for Trump’s attacks on Canada. The Liberal Party last December was slated for a major defeat, and whoever was going to succeed Trudeau in the Liberal Party was going to lose by 20 points. 

But then Mr. Trump started attacking Canada and making jokes, saying they’re a national security threat—which of course is baloney—and all these other stupid remarks. Then Mark Carney gets the nomination at the Liberal Convention and his numbers just skyrocket. 

I don’t think there would have been a Liberal prime minister in Canada, but for Trump’s craziness. How’s he doing? He’s got a weak hand actually, just because we’re 10 times bigger, but I think he’s doing okay. I’m not sure I would have apologized, however privately, about the Reagan commercial because [Ontario Premier] Doug Ford has been his ally.

On the other hand, if they don’t get an agreement, they could start running that ad in New York and Florida and Texas and all over. It’s devastating, and they know it. I almost wish they would, but I think wiser minds say to let things cool off. 

The problem is that we have people around Trump who feed him so much misinformation. It’s crackpot economics. Trump is still out there trying to tell people that other countries pay the tariffs when of course we pay the tariffs as consumers.

He’s also still trying to act like Canada is a national security threat, which nobody believes. Or that the European Union was formed to take advantage of the U.S., which of course is not true. So, we have a problem.

Garrett Epps: Well, imagine what the trade situation would be today if the Blue Jays had won the series. 

Amb. Blanchard: Trump would have gone crazy. He would have called up the commissioner and asked him to remove the Blue Jays from the MLB. He would have gone nuts.

Garrett Epps: Exactly. He’d also ask for a recount. He’d say, you know, they counted the runs wrong.

Amb. Blanchard: It’s sad. It’s humorous. It’s tragic. I tell Canadians, you feel bad? What do you think we feel here in the United States? We have a guy who is not well. And even when he was well, he was acting crazy all the time. He doesn’t speak for us.

Anne Kim: How do you see the end game for the trade relationship, at least with the US and Canada? During his first term in office, Trump renegotiated NAFTA into what’s now USMCA, the US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement. That agreement expires in 2036 unless the three countries agree to extend it next year for an additional 16 year period. Given everything that’s happening, what’s your expectation about the fate of those negotiations next year and the USMCA in general?

Amb. Blanchard: Well, no one really knows. The responsible officials, including our trade rep, know better. But it’s the whims of the people who prod Mr. Trump that are the problem. I think they’ll settle down and get what is a similar agreement to what they currently have. I think they will cite some U.S. auto companies who say they’re expanding in the U.S. And they’ll announce several billions of dollars of investment that he will hold up as a major victory, even though they probably were going to make those investments anyway. And we’ll get back to what I hope will be the normal trading relationship, which is very positive and very productive.

The big thing would be for them to drop the tariffs on steel and aluminum currently because all that’s doing is adding costs to the auto companies and car prices. It’s totally unnecessary. 

Garrett Epps: Are these tariffs helping anybody in the United States? Let’s leave Canada for one side because supposedly, we’re America first. The tariffs, from what you said, are not helping the auto industry. Is anybody benefiting?

Amb. Blanchard: No, they’re not helping consumers or the auto companies at all. And they’re probably going to end up hurting the auto workers because sales will drop and then layoffs will occur. I have heard from respected sources that steel workers, perhaps in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, will gain some thousands of jobs. But that will be offset by hundreds of thousands of layoffs and increased costs elsewhere. It’s bad. 

But I think Trump has convinced himself these foreign countries actually pay the tariffs, not us. 

Anne Kim: What will it take to rebuild the US-Canada relationship? Will the departure of Trump be enough to flip a switch so we’re back to the way things were? And what would your advice be to the next president, assuming it’s not JD Vance and that the restoration of US-Canada relationship is one of their goals?

Amb. Blanchard: The next president is going to have to get on a plane right away and fly to Ottawa, and say, “We’re back.” Now, Biden tried to do that with Europe right after he won, but people were worried that he would be the aberration, not Trump. 

And unfortunately, Canadians and Europeans and all of our friends everywhere are saying they’re worried about the American voter. We can have the best president on the planet go up there in three years, and they’re going to say, “We believe you, we love you, we’re glad you’re back, but we’re still going to worry about your voters until we see some continuity here of policy.” They loved Biden, but it’s the voters they worry about. 

The post US-Canada Relations Have Hit Rock Bottom appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Monthly jobs numbers and the Census Bureau might be the first—and only—things that come to mind for many Americans when they think about federal data. But government data undergirds many of the everyday essentials Americans rely on, like weather forecasts and tornado warnings. Federal data keep track of crime and public safety, provide early warning of epidemics, and help farmers plan their crops. 

But all of that is under threat. 

To President Donald Trump, data are both a weapon and an enemy. 

On the one hand, Trump cites spurious—and often outlandish—numbers to justify his policies. He’s claimed, for instance, that as many as 20 million unauthorized immigrants are living in America—or about double the real number—to rationalize the intensity of his detentions and deportations. 

He’s also boasted of securing  “over $17 trillion” in new U.S. investments—presumably to validate his tariffs as a strategy for domestic economic growth. (The White House, however, claims $8.8 trillion in new investments, and even that figure is fiction).

At the same time, Trump is suppressing, disappearing and even altering data to fit his agenda or to hide inconvenient truths about the impact of his actions. Earlier this fall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture ended its annual survey of hunger in America, just weeks before the recent government shutdown that paused food stamp benefits for millions of Americans. This summer, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a weak jobs report he didn’t like. And as part of Trump’s campaign against “DEI,” government agencies have quietly altered at least 200 federal datasets to remove references to “gender” in favor of references to “sex,” according to an analysis by the Lancet.

These active assaults on federal data have also been accompanied by neglect. Drastic cuts to the federal workforce, including by Elon Musk’s DOGE, have hollowed out capacity at many agencies to collect and maintain data, including data vital to US industries, agriculture and ordinary citizens. 

Denice W. Ross, former Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer and U.S. Chief Data Scientist under President Joe Biden, is sounding the alarm on the degradation of America’s federal data infrastructure and the myriad risks that presents. She’s also spearheading an effort, EssentialData.us, to track and preserve disappearing data. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes. 

Anne Kim: When most people think about federal data, there are probably only a handful of numbers that come to mind: Jobs and employment numbers from Bureau of Labor Statistics, for instance, the Census Bureau, maybe the weather. But there’s a whole lot more to federal data than that. I came across your post for the Federation of American Scientists, where you said there are more than 300,000 federal data sets, which is just an astonishing number.

Denice Ross: The federal data ecosystem is vast, and it’s so much larger than what we typically think of with jobs and weather data. One of my favorite data sets that’s really surprising is the US Geological Survey’s North American Bat Monitoring database.  What’s important about bats and why we need to monitor them is that they provide billions of dollars of free services to America’s farmers every year. 

If you want to continue that free service, you need to protect the bats. And if you want to protect the bats, you need to know where they are. So what this geospatial data set does is to identify the location and numbers of bats around America. 

That also makes it easier when development is happening. For example, if you’re building a highway bridge, or a mine, or a wind farm, you want to make sure that development is mitigating any harm against these bats. The developers need to know where the bats are. So rather than counting the bats themselves, they can go to this federal data set.

And then lastly, there’s some research that suggests that in places where bats do disappear—rural areas, farming areas—infant mortality goes up because farmers have to use more pesticides. That’s the working theory. So that just really ups the stakes for why these data are so essential.

That’s just one of hundreds of thousands of data sets across the federal ecosystem that at first glance might seem not important, but actually have really substantial consequences for American lives and livelihoods.

Anne Kim: How do these data sets come about? And is it immediately apparent that a data set will benefit industry and ordinary Americans, or is that something that evolves as the data set evolves and people find new applications for it?

Denice Ross: That’s a great question. Sometimes data sets are mandated by Congress. For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the NAEP, or the “Nation’s Report Card,” is specified in law. It contains the details about what variables need to be collected, including race, ethnicity, gender,  and income levels. 

Most of the time, though, it’s just data that are collected because they are necessary to run government. Sometimes it’s surveys that are collected to inform policies and program design, and other times it’s administrative records. For example, people who are seeking disaster relief fill out a form that says where they live and what happened, and then that starts the process of getting benefits from FEMA. That creates administrative data behind the scenes.

Anne Kim: Step back to the big picture and talk about the big goals that all of this data collection does for Americans. With the bat monitoring program, there are clearly implications for industry and public health. But are there large policy pillars that define the function of all of these datasets and make the case to the public about why all this data is so important to collect and to maintain? 

Denice Ross: I’m so glad you asked that because data, and especially federal data, are a type of infrastructure that we really take for granted. Data help keep us healthy. They help keep us employed and safe. And data also support innovation and the economy at large. 

I can give you a few examples that are policy relevant. At the beginning of November, we were talking a lot about hunger in America, and there were already policy changes to the SNAP food stamps program that were likely to cause millions of Americans to lose their food benefits. 

How might we know the impact of that policy change? Well, there’s the food security supplement that is a collaboration between the USDA and the Census Bureau, and that’s been shining a light on hunger in America for the last 30 years. It’s the only data set that gives us a full picture of what’s happening at the state level, and what’s happening with children versus adult hunger. That was recently terminated by the USDA. 

There’s also another way of understanding what’s happening with food assistance. States are required submit to USDA their application processing timelines, with the goal being that it should take no longer than 30 days for a state to process a SNAP application, and seven days if it’s an emergency. You can imagine that if you’re a grandparent and you recently took custody of a grandchild, and now you need help putting food on the table, it would be really bad if it takes more than 30 days or even more than a week to get that assistance. 

This is a dataset that holds states accountable for processing those applications in a timely manner. Just the mere fact that it’s transparent and available to the public and the media helps increase the states’ ambition to meet those deadlines. 

Anne Kim: I want to talk more broadly about the current administration’s approach to data, and data preservation and collection. They’re certainly well aware of the power of data, which is why they are systematically suppressing it. You mentioned the survey of household food insecurity that’s no longer happening, just as there are going to be major cuts to the SNAP program as a result of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” The administration has also challenged the accuracy of data. Most recently, they fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over numbers they just didn’t like. How would you characterize how the administration handles data, and what do you find most problematic about their approach?

Denice Ross: There are three main buckets of damage that we’re seeing to the federal data ecosystem. The first was very high profile, at the beginning of the administration, when many data sets were taken down at the end of January in order to be scrubbed of elements that did not align with administration priorities. This was gender, DEI, and climate. 

For the most part, those data sets went back up. There were a few data elements that did not. For example, the Bureau of Prisons had a data set on inmate statistics, and they removed the transgender category from the gender of inmates. Another example is the National Crime Victimization Survey. There were three questions there that were removed on gender.

Similarly, the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, has a really important data set called FedScope, which gives us a sense of the characteristics of the federal workforce, which are very policy relevant given the major shifts that we’ve seen in the federal workforce over the last few months. They deleted all of the race and ethnicity data going back years from that FedScope data.

And then what we’ve seen, which is more damaging and more like a death by 1,000 cuts, is the diminishment of the capacity of federal agencies to collect, protect, and publish data. That’s due to the cuts in staffing, the cancellations of contracts, and the terminations of the federal advisory committees that are so essential for helping data collections keep up with changes in modern society.

We’re also seeing that it’s just harder to get things done in government. For example, if the Secretary of the Department of Commerce has to personally approve every contract above $100,000, it’s just going to be so much harder to get work done, and there’s fewer people to do the work. That will manifest across so many different types of collections. 

For example, take the ground-based radar that protects rural America from tornadoes. Somebody’s got to fix that equipment if it starts malfunctioning, and if the staff or the contractors who do that work are no longer around, those sensors will start to decay over time. So the quality of the tornado forecasting will go down. It’s hard to even fathom the small bits of damage that are happening that will have such a large collective impact on the quality of the information that we need to just run a modern society. 

The third trend that we’re seeing, which started this summer in earnest, are the attacks on data that might reveal that administration policies are not working as promised. The first data set that I noticed was the Social Security Administration’s call center wait times data set, which was terminated right around the time when thousands of Social Security Administration employees were let go, field offices were closing, and increased fraud protection measures were going in place. So it would be likely that more Social Security recipients would be needing to call the call center to resolve any issues. But that data set disappeared right around that time.

And then, as you noted already, that when the jobs numbers came out this summer that did not align with the administration’s message, the BLS commissioner was fired. And then more recently, of course, that food security supplement was terminated right as millions of Americans were about to lose their food stamp benefits. So I expect to see more of those types of losses moving forward when the data are just sort of politically inconvenient.

Anne Kim: What about data integrity and accuracy, particularly in light of political pressure? We already know about the political pressure on BLS, but there’s going to be pressure on other agencies as well. I’m sure it’s happening all the time. Are Americans going to be able to trust the data they get from their government for the next few years?

Denice Ross: So far, we have not seen any direct manipulation of numbers. There’s one Lancet article that does an excellent job of cataloging changes to column headers in some datasets—health datasets in particular—where a survey might have collected the gender of a person, and that column header was changed to sex. And then that change was not included in the documentation about that dataset. That’s the closest thing to manipulation that we’ve seen so far. 

However, it’s worth thinking about the life cycle of data. You have primary datasets that only the federal government can produce, and then there are derivative works—the way that agencies might be interpreting that primary data that they’ve produced.

With the Department of Energy’s recent report on the impact of greenhouse gas emissions or the new recommendations for children and vaccines, for example, we’ve seen some interpretations of the data that are not as scientific as we would normally expect from the federal government.

Anne Kim: What about academic reliance on data too? There are many professors around the country and research institutes and think tanks that rely on federal data and interpret it. As the quality and quantity of data diminishes, what’s the downstream impact going to be on the quality of scholarship around all this data?

Denice Ross: The quality of scholarship will certainly be challenging. 

There are some stopgap measures in place. For example, there are partnerships already between federal agencies and universities to collect data like the Framingham Heart Study out of NIH. NOAA’s also got this fantastic fleet of floating buoys in the ocean that gives us ocean temperature conditions. 

These academic partnerships helps keep these datasets a little more secure because they might have multiple stakeholders and they aren’t necessarily in the .gov space. But over time, I think what we’ll start to see is a slow disintegration of the quality of the data coming in and the ability to keep hosting it. 

But even more critical are the downstream consequences—the impacts on the American people—when our nation’s research enterprise is so hobbled by these losses to data flows. What I’m telling my colleagues who are users of data right now is that if you are using data to do your work, now is the time to advocate for why those data matter. We, and I include myself in that, have not done a great job of talking about how federal data are absolutely essential for benefiting American lives and livelihoods. 

Anne Kim: That brings us to your website, essentialdata.us, which is something that you’ve created to catalog the data sets that are disappearing and to make the case to the public about the importance of data. I was looking at the site recently—this was around Halloween—and I noticed that one of the pages on the site is titled Dearly Departed Datasets.

It’s literally a graveyard for datasets, and you’ve got these little tombstones for the data that’s disappearing. This graveyard also seems to be growing. How are you keeping track, and what else is disappearing?

Denice Ross: The reason we decided to do this campaign to crowdsource the “dearly departed datasets” right before Halloween is that a lot of people, especially journalists, were asking which data sets have actually disappeared. 

It turns out that the number that are actually gone right now is relatively small. It probably numbers in the dozens rather than the hundreds or thousands. But that really understates the risk to the entire data enterprise. 

In addition to the examples already mentioned, another dataset that’s [gone] is the “drug awareness network”—DAWN. That was a health surveillance network that monitors drug-related visits to emergency rooms, and it serves as an early warning system when new forms of dangerous illicit drugs start to pop up in a community. Where it’s going to show up is in emergency rooms, and it really makes sense for the federal government to consolidate that information. 

Another example of a dataset that’s disappeared is EPA’s greenhouse gas reporting program. It was imperfect, certainly, but it was the only way we had to get information on emissions from some of the nation’s largest emitters.

Anne Kim: Is this data gone forever? there anybody that’s been archiving the data? Is that even possible? Is there a plan for restoring the data someday?

Denice Ross: When we say a dataset “disappears,” the historical data so far are mostly still available in the federal web space. But the collection is terminated moving forward. Civil society has been really fantastic, especially with the leadership of groups like the Data Rescue Project, at archiving some of these key data. And I definitely sleep better at night knowing that there are archives, and in some cases, multiple versions of data sets, that preserve the snapshot in time. 

But the best outcome is that we keep these data flowing because the value of the data is in its continual update. That’s why it’s so important that people who are depending on the data make the case to federal data stewards and policymakers and elected officials about why these data matter.

Anne Kim: Even if you do have an opportunity to begin collecting the data again in a couple years, though, there’s probably been enough damage done to the infrastructure that it probably is a longer term project to rebuild it, right?

Denice Ross: We’re going to have to retool and figure out what the future of a more resilient national data infrastructure looks like. But for now, we have to protect the core, and the many data sets that only the federal government can produce. 

If we lose that continuity, we are going to be flying blind as a nation during a time when we are having so many really dramatic shifts in public policy. We’ve got the steady cadence of climate fuel disasters, we’ve got civil unrest, and we’ve got the transformation happening because of AI and new technologies. If we ever needed to be operating with all of our instrumentation, it’s now.

Anne Kim: Not to mention public health, crime…

Denice Ross: Absolutely. Public health, all the things that might keep one awake at night. Data usually has some foundational role in policies and our ability to prepare as a nation.

Anne Kim: Is there anything that ordinary citizens who are concerned about this problem can do?

Denice Ross: I would encourage you to check out EssentialData.us and talk to your friends and colleagues about how important these data are that we’re taking for granted. 

For example, one dataset that we take for granted is the heat index that comes from the National Weather Service. Football coaches use the heat index to know when to move football practice inside so their players don’t die of heat stroke.

When I take my kids camping, that wooden sign that tells me what the fire risk level is and whether or not we can light a fire comes from federal data also. Just be more aware about the role that federal data plays in your everyday life. 

The post Federal Data Are Disappearing appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As if the gerrymandering arms race weren’t already approaching DEFCON 1, a pending Supreme Court ruling this year could tempt more states to join the fray.

Last month, the Court heard oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais—a case that could spell the end of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the bedrock federal law that bars racial discrimination in voting. At issue is the constitutionality of Louisiana’s Congressional map and its two majority-Black districts (the result of a legal challenge to the original map, which had just one majority-Black district for a state that is one-third Black). 

White voters who brought suit claimed the new districts to be unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. The Court, however, has decided to look at an even broader question: whether Section 2 might be unconstitutional as well. 

As voting rights expert Joshua Douglas explains, the Court is unlikely to strike down Section 2 outright. That’s a headline this Court doesn’t want. But the Court could still gut Section 2—by allowing the disenfranchisement of minority voters as partisan gerrymandering, not racial discrimination. 

The result could be a fresh wave of redistricting efforts aimed at eliminating majority-minority districts like the one in question in Louisiana. While 34 percent of House districts were majority-minority in 2024, states like Tennessee, South Carolina, and Indiana have just one majority-minority seat. The loss of these districts would mean the loss of minority representation—and the loss of 60 years of progress toward racial equality. 

Joshua A. Douglas is a law professor at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law. He is the author of The Court v. The Voters: The Troubling Story of How the Supreme Court Has Undermined Voting Rights and is working on a new project on voter turnout and nonvoters. He is the host of the award-winning Democracy Optimist podcast and writes the Democracy Optimist Substack. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

***

Garrett Epps: Josh, as our readers know, you are our go-to guy on volatile voting questions, and we also love talking to you because you’re the “Democracy Optimist,” as you’ve described yourself. But I’m not sure you’re optimistic about a current case called Louisiana v. Callais. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Josh Douglas: First, I’d like to point out that being a “democracy optimist” doesn’t mean I think everything’s great. It means I think there’s hope for the future. 

I’m not particularly optimistic about this case we’re going to discuss, but I think of democracy in the long term and what can we do to help sustain democracy, even given the troubled and turbulent times that we’re living through right now.

But let’s talk about Louisiana v. Callais, because I do think this could be the potential for a not great outcome at the US Supreme Court for the future of minority voting rights. 

Louisiana has six Congressional districts, and it’s got a population that’s about 33 percent Black individuals—so about one third minority. When Louisiana redrew its Congressional lines, it drew the lines such that only one of the six districts would be majority Black. So in the language of the lawsuits and the law, only one district out of the six would give minority individuals an opportunity “to elect a candidate of their choice.” 

A lower court said this dilutes minority voting strength and was a violation of the Voting Rights Act. So Louisiana drew a new map with two of the six districts being majority Black. It also did some funny line drawing to protect some of the incumbents—Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, in particular. 

They passed a new map that was fairer in terms of minority representation, but then some white plaintiffs sued and said, “Hold up, Louisiana, when you drew this new map that has two of six majority Black districts, you thought about race too much.”

Separate from cases involving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, there’s another line of cases under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment that basically says race can’t be the predominant overriding concern in redistricting. If Louisiana comes back and says, “We had to think about race to ensure that we were complying with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” the plaintiffs can argue that this makes the Voting Rights Act itself unconstitutional. 

So this is a long windup to say that this case could stand for a very important proposition about the constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. If the Court finds that the reason the state drew the map the way it did with two Black districts was to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and that that is in and of itself thinking about race too much, then the Court could say that the Voting Rights Act itself is unconstitutional.

Garrett Epps: Just so our listeners catch up, the “effects” test under Section 2 means that it doesn’t have to be intentional discrimination to be violation of the Voting Rights Act. Is that a fair statement?

Josh Douglas: Right. There are two ways to think about discrimination. First, there’s intentional discrimination—when someone decides to draw the lines purposefully in a way that will make it harder for Black individuals to elect a candidate of their choice. That would be smoking gun intent. 

The second is “effect.” In 1982, Congress updated the Voting Rights Act in response to a previous Supreme Court decision, City of Mobile v. Bolden. The Court in that case construed the prior version of Section 2 to only reach intentional discrimination. And Congress immediately responded, “No, what we want is Section 2 to reach effects.”  

One way to think about this in a more concrete manner outside of redistricting is a voter ID law. When states pass a photo identification requirement for voting, they’re usually at least  not trying to intentionally discriminate against minority individuals. But we know just based on living conditions, structural inequalities, the economy, that Black individuals are less likely to have an ID that qualifies. In some states, depending on the nature of the photo ID law, a photo ID requirement might have the effect of discrimination on the basis of race, even if the state legislature was not trying or even thinking about race in doing so. 

The lawsuit over the initial Louisiana map argued that even if you weren’t trying to make it harder for Black people to elect a candidate of their choice with only one majority Black district, the effect of the map violated Section 2.

Garrett Epps: And “candidate of their choice” is important because people sometimes hear these discussions and believe that you’re entitled to majority Black districts or majority Latino districts. That’s not exactly right. It’s something called “opportunity districts,” if I recall correctly. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Josh Douglas: We say “candidate of choice” because we don’t mean that Black people get to vote for Black candidates or that we measure a map as to whether it has the effect of discrimination by looking at the population of the area and then comparing it to the percentage of Black individuals who are elected. 

One good way to think about this is who was the “candidate of choice” for many Southern black Democrats in 2020? It was Joe Biden—a  white individual, right? It so happened that Joe Biden had policies and a message that really called to a majority of Black individuals, particularly in places like South Carolina. That is a good example of a white candidate who was the “candidate of choice” for Black individuals in those places.

We  don’t care how many minority individuals are in the legislature. We care whether those individuals were elected by minority people. Did they have the opportunity to choose someone that collectively they supported? It’s often going to be someone of the same race, but that’s not the test. 

Garrett Epps: You listened to the oral argument for Callais. I did too. I have a feeling a lot of it went over my head that didn’t go over yours. What was your feeling about the oral argument in that case?

Josh Douglas: I think it seems pretty clear that there are going to be five votes to cut back on the Voting Rights Act, Section 2, in some way. 

Now, the Court is probably going to want to avoid the headline of “US Supreme Court Strikes Down Voting Rights Act.” Chief Justice Roberts might want to do something that looks more mild, even though he has a long history of advocating against the Voting Rights Act. 

What the Solicitor General argued was that if the state can say that it’s trying to achieve a political end and not just a racial end, the map is valid. That is to say, under a Section 2 lawsuit, a valid defense would be politics, not race. The Court already adopted this basic standard in a case out of South Carolina from just a year or two ago, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, where the Court basically said that if Black people challenge a map because the state thought about race too much in drawing the lines, the state can justify it by pointing to politics. 

The U.S. Solicitor General suggested incorporating the same idea into the Voting Rights Act, Section 2, as a valid defense, and my suspicion is that’s where we’ll end up on this question.

Garrett Epps: That leads us into this whole issue of partisan gerrymandering. And to me, the weird turn that the Court has taken on that, in a case called Rucho v. Common Cause, is that they basically said that if all you’re trying to do is rig the system so that your candidates win, that’s okay. That’s partisan gerrymandering. If you’re trying to rig it so race is not dominant, well, that’s a different thing. We’ve now got this novel idea that if you’re trying to set up the system so that one party always wins, that’s okay. Where did this idea come from and how has it developed?

Josh Douglas: In that Rucho case in 2019 out of North Carolina, the Court referred to “constitutional partisan gerrymandering,” and I have always thought that phrase is very strange. How can partisan gerrymandering be constitutional under an understanding of the Constitution that protects equality, that protects democracy, and that preserves the idea of democracy being derived from the consent of the governed? 

Partisan gerrymandering had been challenged for years, and when the US Supreme Court had faced the issue, the Court has said, “Well, partisan gerrymandering or least some level of partisan gerrymandering, is unconstitutional, but we haven’t figured out how we tell the difference between something that’s perfectly fine and legal and something that goes too far.”  Anytime a legislature does anything, that’s inherently partisan, right? We kind of expect that. We expect when the legislature passes tax laws that it’s going to be partisan in nature. And if you don’t like the laws that the legislature passed, well, the solution is to vote the bums out.

So the Court has struggled with this idea that if everything a legislature does is partisan, and that the US Constitution gives state legislatures the authority to dictate the times, place and manner of federal elections, including the authority to draw the maps, how do we tell when that action is normal politics or politics gone too far?

The North Carolina map was clearly a far, far outlier. The map drawers didn’t hide what they were doing. They had 14 congressional districts, and they drew a map that was 10 strong Republican districts and four Democratic districts. And when the key Republican lawmaker who drew the map was asked why did you draw a map that was 10-4, he said, “Well, I couldn’t figure out a way to make it 11-3 and still comply with the “one person, one vote” standard. So it was implicitly partisan in terms of what they were doing, and the US Supreme Court basically said that’s fine. 

There are many problems with this—the first being that this is letting the politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around. 

You wish the number one goal of state legislators is to serve the people well, but their number one goal is to win reelection and keep their job. And what better way to do that than to draw the lines in such a way that it basically makes it impossible for the other side to win?

So that’s problematic in and of itself. But I think the problem has become supercharged in these cases involving race. Not only did the US Supreme Court say, “We’re not going to police partisan gerrymandering,” we’re now seeing states use politics as their defense to every other potential claim against their maps. And we’re seeing the Supreme Court essentially still defer to the legislature when using politics as the defense. 

In the Alexander case, the argument was that the state drew the map to pack as many Black voters in as few districts as possible, so that white people could control the rest of the state. That was the claim. The state was able to say, “Well, there’s a political reason for why we did this.” And the US Supreme Court said, “Okay, that defeats the plaintiff’s claim.” I fear a similar standard is going to be set out in Louisiana v. Callais.

The headline would be that the Court “guts” Section 2 or cuts back on it but doesn’t strike it down. But the practical effect would be that it would be extremely difficult to bring a Section 2 claim against a map if the state could justify it based on its partisanship and partisan arguments.

Garrett Epps: As you look at what Louisiana did or South Carolina did, how far have we come from that period when the Voting Rights Act was needed to hold back legislators who were going to explicitly discriminate? 

Josh Douglas: This is where my democracy optimist viewpoint will come in a little bit, which is to say that we’re definitely way better off in terms of equality in voting in representation since the early 1960s. That’s kind of undeniable, right? We don’t have explicit literacy tests anymore. Registration rates between minority individuals and white individuals have come a lot closer. It’s not exactly on par, but the registration gap is not as big. The turnout gap is not as big. It still exists, but it’s not as big. So I think we can say that we have come a long way, but that doesn’t mean we’re done. And just saying there’s been progress doesn’t mean that progress is finished. 

If the Voting Rights Act gets cut in these ways, that’s going to set us back. But my democracy optimist mind sees that longer history and sees that, okay, we need to find different tactics or new ways to tackle the problem of what Justice Ginsburg referred to as “second generation barriers” to voting. I think we’ve cleared and fixed many of the first generation barriers—the explicit attempts to defeat minority voter opportunity and representation. But that doesn’t mean we’re done.

The post How the Supreme Court Could Turbocharge Gerrymandering appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Dear Reader, 

When Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps and I launched the Washington Monthly podcast last year, it was a shoestring affair—and still is. If you listen to our earliest episodes—please don’t, actually—you’ll hear uneven audio and cringe at my efforts to channel the honeyed smoothness of my audio hero, Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. (Garrett, however, sounds great.)  

Our first guest and guinea pig was Washington Monthly contributor Peter Shane. The legal scholar warned listeners of President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to use “recess appointments” to install a cabinet—an act that seems only mildly transgressive in retrospect—and that the 47^th president has used aggressively.  

Join the conversation at the Washington Monthly.  

Since then, Garrett and I have spoken with the sharpest legal, political, and economic minds about Trump’s wrecking-ball presidency such as the popular YouTuber Natalie Wynn, who has dissected the allure of conspiracism; journalist Michael Grunwald, whose new book chronicles the environmental destruction caused by agriculture; and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson, who offered lessons Americans can learn from China’s dissidents.  

We know that videos and podcasts are how many Americans get their news. We want the Monthly to be among the voices you turn to for fresh thoughts, new ideas about defeating MAGA and promoting a common-sense vision for America, or thoughtful analysis that puts our chaotic world into context. We’re building a community. And that goes for our newsletters, too. 

But we need your help. This is only possible with your support. Your contributions allow us to expand the Monthly’s presence online, on your feeds, and in your headphones. We hope you’ll take a moment to support us with a tax-deductible contribution. Please do it now. For only $50, you get a complimentary year of our print edition. Next year promises to be one of the most consequential in the history of our democracy. Join us. 

All the best, 

Anne Kim 

Senior Editor 

The post A Podcast With Purpose appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The government spends the equivalent of about $90,000 per U.S. household per year—yet many Americans don’t see the benefits. Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security and tax subsidies (primarily for wealthy households) swallow up the lion’s share of the federal budget every year, along with interest on the national debt. 

All of this automatic spending means no room in the federal budget for investments in America’s future, argues budget expert Eugene Steuerle, while many Americans are losing out. In 2023, for instance, just nine percent of the federal budget went toward programs for children—while 11 percent was spent on interest on the debt. In 2024, the federal government spent $880 billion for interest on the debt, compared to $80 billion for the Department of Education.  

In his new book, Abandoned: How Republicans and Democrats Deserted the Working Class, the Young and the American Dream, Steuerle blames a broken budget process that rewards short-term fixes and a Congress too polarized to tackle entitlement reform. He also argues that Republicans’ fixation on tax cuts has vastly contributed to inequality, while Democrats’ focus on consumption over investment has meant insufficient attention to helping working class Americans build wealth. The net result, Steuerle says, is a collapse in “fiscal democracy.”  Increasingly, Americans are losing their stake in the federal spending as entitlements and debt consume the entirety—and then some—of the nation’s future budget. 

Steuerle is the Richard B. Fisher chair at the Urban Institute, codirector of the Brookings-Urban Tax Policy Center, and the author of the Substack newsletter The Government We Deserve, in addition to 18 books. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

***

Anne Kim: In your book, you argue that both parties are responsible for destroying opportunity in America. What sins have they committed together and what are the unique sins of each party?

Eugene Steuerle: Essentially, there have been two major dominant policy thrusts for almost a half a century, one by the Democrats and one by the Republicans. For Republicans, it’s largely been centered upon tax cuts. For the Democrats, it’s largely been putting money into retirement and Social Security and healthcare. And as a result of those two thrusts, almost everything else is getting shoved aside. Almost anything that promotes upward mobility really has gotten the short shrift for some time. 

I’m not arguing that either one of those thrusts in and of itself is bad. It’s just that they’ve been so dominant they’ve squeezed out other important options we should be pursuing.

Anne Kim: If I understand your argument,  you’re saying that as a result of Republicans’ prioritization of tax cuts, what’s happened is a widening of inequality, and that has limited mobility. And then on the Democratic side, the emphasis has been largely on consumption versus investment, and that has further squeezed mobility for the groups you lay out in your book, including young people and the working class. Is that roughly correct? 

Eugene Steuerle: That’s exactly right. 

Education is an easy example. We’ve failed on a lot of fronts on education. Quite honestly, to get quality teachers, you have to pay for them. To get quality teachers in early childhood education, you have to pay for them. We pay very little for that. We’ve also neglected for a long time young people who don’t go on to college. We don’t have much of an apprenticeship program in this country. We have to figure out ways to put money into those of efforts. 

I also suggest very strongly that we should be doing a lot more in the way of wage subsidies. All these efforts at picking particular industries we’re going to favor or tariff do very little for the working class. So I argue that we ought to be beefing up a lot the work subsidies we have in this system. I even suggest perhaps something like a universal basic wage—not basic income, because I think that’s a mistake. 

The current earned income credit mainly goes to single mothers with children, whom we want to help, but it’s left out a lot of the people you’ve written about yourself, like young males, young people in general, who feel left out of the system because in fact they’re not eligible for those types of subsidies. And married couples who have two earners, they get phased out of a lot of systems. There’s a huge marriage penalty throughout our subsidies. 

And on the financial side, our pension subsidies mainly go to people who have good incomes because it’s proportional to the amount of money you can put in the system. And housing subsidies like the home mortgage interest deduction have done really nothing to expand home ownership for some time. We could do much more to help first time home buyers and not people like me who already own a home and don’t need the extra subsidies. 

All these things are the items that would promote upward mobility, and they’re the things that are getting squeezed and put aside.

Anne Kim: You’ve begun to answer this question about how current policies are betraying the people who most need the help. But could we talk a little bit more about the ways in which current budget policy and current domestic policy betray the young? You’ve begun to talk about that in terms of what we’re failing in far as education, but what are some other things you point out in your book about how we’re really betraying what we owe future generations because of the way the budget has been set up?

Eugene Steuerle: The young are among those groups who are being squeezed out by these programs. About 20 years ago, almost now, I started a series at the Urban Institute that you’re aware of called KidsShare that tries to track the budget for children. The budget for children is very, very small.

I want to be clear I’m making a relative argument. We spend huge amounts on people my age. A typical elderly couple retiring today gets about $1.3 million in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Millennials are scheduled to get about $2.5 million dollars because ofall the built-in growth in those programs. Well, that’s being done instead of putting money into education for children, or work subsidies for workers, or anything else along those lines. 

It’s this squeezing out of these programs more than an outright rejection of them that’s been happening. The programs for children and workers for the most part don’t really grow over time, whereas programs like healthcare and retirement have all this automatic growth built into them. 

Both political parties in the last election said they really care about the working class. And I’m saying, “Hey, guys and gals, get around to proving it.”

I’m not arguing we shouldn’t have social security. Social Security is probably the most successful program we’ve had in this country. I’m not arguing we shouldn’t have health care, in fact, we need more universal health care. I am arguing we shouldn’t automatically be spending ever larger portions of our economy on health care and on extra years of retirement in preference to other efforts.

Anne Kim: On the solution side, you talk about something you call “fiscal democracy.” What does that mean and how do you suggest going about achieving that?

Eugene Steuerle: One of the measures I’ve developed over time with Tim Roper is an index of “fiscal democracy.” We measure the share of revenues that are left after you take into account what’s called mandated spending—entitlement spending, or the spending that’s automatic.

Social security grows automatically through a variety of factors. Healthcare grows automatically because prices are often set by producers, such as drug companies.

The revenues that are left after you take into account that spending is actually to zero. All revenues are already committed to those items. So if you could think about it this way, everything else in the aggregate is paid for out of deficits, and the mandated spending is still growing faster than our revenues.

So that number, that index of fiscal democracy, is scheduled to go well below zero. Now mind you, in the ’60s, 60 percent or 70 percent of our spending was discretionary. It wasn’t mandated. Congress would go in and decide each year what to do. Even in the Clinton years, the number was closer to maybe 30 percent. 

This lack of fiscal democracy explains to a great extent why Congress over the last couple of decades has been unable to get a hold of the budget. If mandated spending is scheduled to grow faster than revenues, and that’s not sustainable, then the job of Congress is not to decide what to do with the new revenues but to renege on past promises. And reneging on past promises is a clear way to lose the next election. Both parties have been scared to death to lead or even unite to deal with these issues. 

The whole culture war, in my view, has been a replacement for the budget policy that is the main job of government. And by budget policy, I don’t mean just the dollars, I’m talking about administering programs and running programs. That’s the main job of government. We’re fighting over which kids can go to which bathrooms. That’s not a legitimate issue. 

We’re fighting over things where government has limited control as opposed to things they do have control over. We lack fiscal democracy, and I think it’s a threat not just to the economy, it’s a threat to democracy itself because it’s now very hard for each new generation of voters to feel they’ve got control over what happens. 

The Democrats don’t want the Republicans to come in and have another tax cut, but the Republicans don’t want the Democrats to come in and be able to spend more. So they go through this constant battle about trying to stop the other party from doing what it wants, but they are not willing to cut back on what they have done to excess.

Anne Kim: How do you suggest breaking through this short-term thinking? For better for worse, as long as our constitutional system is the way it is, we are trapped with two year cycles in the House and the six year cycles and the four year cycles for the presidency. But you’re talking about changes that require a Congress to think 20, 30, 40 years in the future. How do you reconcile the political realities with the fiscal realities that have to be grappled with at some point?

Eugene Steuerle: This is very difficult right now. I love Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s statement about “defining deviancy down.” I think we’ve actually become more deviant in our policy and our policy discussions, so I don’t see any immediate end to that. I think at some point things crash.

Hopefully, they don’t crash economically. Hopefully, they crash because the public finally decides it really is tired of all this and demands something. So we voters are not totally innocent from what’s going on. We vote for people who often try to mislead us.

I think it’s going to take some real efforts at bipartisanship in Congress and maybe us voters voting for people who can work across the aisle. But I do not have an easy political answer. 

I do think that the way budget people like myself present the data to the public is often misleading. I’ll give you one example. When we do a tax cut, typically, we do a distributional table about the winners: Here’s who got a tax cut. Well, that’s misleading because somebody’s paying for it. 

The people who have to pay the bill down the road—we don’t know how to identify them. So we don’t show them. But the result of that presentation is that it makes it appear that a tax cut or a spending increase does good, and a tax increase and a spending cut does bad.

Anne Kim: We recently reached $38 trillion on the national debt, which is the highest it’s ever been. Both parties have been guilty of arguing that deficits don’t matter. For a brief, Modern Monetary Theory was taking center stage on the left, and the GOP has actually never considered deficits to be that big of a problem starting with Ronald Reagan. What’s your argument that deficits actually do matter and that we’re going to start seeing the impacts of this kind of debt fairly soon?

Eugene Steuerle: In fact, we are starting to see one impact in just the last two or three years, which is that interest costs have been rising as a share of GDP and rising fairly rapidly. 

From 1980 to about 2020, the debt to GDP ratio quadrupled from about 25 percent of GDP to 100 percent of GDP. The Social Security and Medicare Trust Fund imbalances that we’ve long predicted are now within a 10-year cycle. 

I think members of Congress are well aware of these things happening. They just don’t have the wherewithal, in some cases the courage and the processes in place to actually try to deal with it. And we’re having this cultural war that totally sidetracks us. 

Anne Kim: So do you have advice in the short term for politicians who are looking at all of this about anything small that they could do? Assuming that the House comes back into session at some point and Congress is functional—or let’s just say it’s 2026, and there is some balance of power restored to Congress. What’s the first thing that Congress should think about doing to restore the fiscal democracy index to a level that is more sustainable for the nation?

Eugene Steuerle: Well, they could certainly enact budgets that try to start tackling the problem. I fear that the issue is so widespread that the good or the right ways to do it can’t happen in the short run. 

But nonetheless, they could start doing something. Anything that moves a little bit in the right direction is better than something that moves in the wrong direction, like the recent budget bill. 

David Walker, Former Comptroller General and head of the Peterson Foundation always said, “When you’re in a hole, don’t dig deeper.” So that’s a one little thing. 

Something I think that Congress could do that I’ve been arguing for 40 years is to address a lot of the weaknesses of a lot of programs by simply making what I’ll call deficit neutral tradeoffs.

I’ll give you one little example. Congress recently adopted a new charitable deduction that for reasons I won’t fully get into is really fairly badly designed to promote charitable giving.

Well, let’s create a better charitable deduction. If we don’t want to have to fight over the size or the revenue or whether government’s bigger or smaller, let’s just make it more efficient. 

And then finally, if you really want to do something much bigger, you could do things like decide that in Social Security, you’re going to stop wage indexing of benefits as long as the system is out of balance. I would probably stop it only for higher income people, but it’s a part of every Social Security plan that’s out there. There’s no way that Social Security is going to continue to promise higher-income Millennials the benefit it now suggests. 

You could also put much better caps on healthcare spending. There’s almost no part of our federal subsidies for healthcare, which cover about two thirds of all healthcare spending, that’s adequately capped or limited.

Congress is always going to want to do more and more. But if you get the long run in control, it’s a lot easier to deal with the short run. If the long run is out of control, then you just make short-term fixes and you’re still always in the soup.

The post Congress Has Bankrupted America’s Future appeared first on Washington Monthly.

QAnon. Pizzagate. Chemtrails.

Conspiracy theories dominate much of the internet and form the rabid core of MAGA canon: That the January 6 insurrection was a “false flag” operation; that vaccines cause autism; and that the 2020 election was “rigged.” 

In the runup to his second campaign, Trump egged on the believers of QAnon, reposting Q-related content and playing QAnon songs (yes, there is such a thing) in his campaign rallies and videos. (As of 2022, as many as 1 in 5 Americans—and 1 in 4 Republicans—were QAnon believers.) MAGA’s conspiracist roots run so deep that they even ultimately precipitated a crack in Trump’s base. Adherents perceived the administration’s failure to release the “Epstein files” as a betrayal of QAnon’s key tenets: that a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophilic elites secretly run the world, that Epstein was “proof” of this scheme, and that it was Trump’s destiny to “save the children.” 

While social scientists and politicians have struggled with strategies to beat back the tide of conspiracies, YouTuber and cultural critic Natalie Wynn—known as ContraPoints—is reaching vast audiences with her videos. Wynn, an ex-philosophy PhD student, has built an award-winning commentary channel dedicated to countering the rising tide of right-wing extremism on YouTube. She produces extensively researched, expertly set-designed, and meticulously costumed feature-length video essays for an audience of 1.9 million subscribers. “One of the hallmarks of Wynn’s rhetorical style is her ability to get her viewers to see things from another person’s point of view,” Nancy Jo Sales wrote in a 2021 Guardian profile. 

Her latest video, “CONSPIRACY,” has racked up more than 4 million views with a deep dive into the history and dynamics of conspiracist thinking in America, and how conspiracism undermines democracy. The success of her approach could hold important lessons for how to loosen conspiracists’ grip on American politics. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at YouTube, Spotify and iTunes. 

***

Anne Kim: To set the table for our audience, you host a YouTube channel under your alter ego, ContraPoints, which has nearly two million subscribers. You’ve won awards for your commentary and you’ve been fearless in your dissections of right-wing ideology. You’ve critiqued incel culture, transphobia, and racism, and done video essays that have covered a wide range of topics, ethics, politics, gender, philosophy. I think you were once a PhD student in philosophy. Your latest video, “CONSPIRACY,” is a two hour 40 minute tour de force. There’s really no other way to describe it. It’s about conspiracist thinking in America, and I found every minute to be riveting. We want to talk about your approach in creating this video, but what prompted you to tackle this topic in the first place?

Natalie Wynn: Thank you. My channel has often covered fringe aspects of digital culture. Back in 2017, I did a lot of stuff on what was at the time called the “alt-right,” but which has now increasingly become the Republican Party. So I guess this is kind of my beat in a way. I remember spending a lot of time online as a teenager, during the Bush administration. At that time, conspiracy theories were everywhere online—mostly about 9/11. But there has been a kind of acceleration of it, and a mainstreaming of it, that happened during the first Trump administration. Most fascinating to me was QAnon, because of just how exotic that particular conspiracy theory got. And also the fact that it played a major role in motivating thousands of people to attempt to overturn an election. I actually regretted not doing a video about QAnon back in 2020. But I thought that by the time 2024 came around, it was still relevant.

Gillen Tener Martin: This video has gained four million views, reaching beyond even your subscriber base. Whom are you hoping to reach with this video? 

Natalie Wynn: I thought about this question a lot while I was working on it. Am I going to try to convince people who are deep in the conspiracy world? Am I trying to convince them to stop it? I decided ‘no, I’m not going to do that.’ I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that you can just reason people out of. 

Who I wanted the video to emotionally resonate most with are friends and family of people who have gone down the rabbit hole. I think there is an element of catharsis in hearing someone analyze this thing that has caused a lot of distress in your life. I think millions of Americans and people around the world are in that situation.

Anne Kim: You talk about the patterns that conspiracies have in common. What are the commonalities that you’ve observed in the various conspiracies that have taken hold of our modern politics over the last 20 years?

Natalie Wynn: There are really two types of patterns that I analyze. One is the method of argument, and one is the content of the beliefs. Part of my research for this video was watching a lot of viral conspiracy “documentaries,” I guess you could call them, that have been influential over the last couple of decades. For the 9/11 “truther” movement, there was this video called “Loose Change,” which was viral on YouTube in the late 2000s. I compare it to “Fall of the Cabal,” which was a Facebook-viral documentary that onboarded a lot of people to QAnon beliefs in 2019 and 2020. What I describe as a common style of argument is basically a ‘catalog of “anomalies.”

An anomaly is something that subjectively feels inconsistent or implausible about an official narrative. So for example, a 9/11 “anomaly” would be that a passport of one of the hijackers was found after 9/11 at Ground Zero. How could a passport survive this fire that burned the building down? 

The 9/11 conspiracy theories at least approximate something like amassing evidence for a specific conclusion. Whereas with a lot of the QAnon stuff, it’s hard to even suggest what the logic might be. It’s like, “look at these reptile symbols in the architecture of the Vatican.” You mentioned I used to be a philosophy PhD. I dropped out, but I still got as far as logic class. And in logic, there are premises that lead to a conclusion. I would not say that “Fall of the Cabal” is anything close to that. 

Instead, I think what they’re doing is creating room for doubt that maybe all the world’s institutions are captured by some kind of radical evil. That I think is emotionally powerful because it makes people feel like they have nowhere to go for good information. They can’t trust the press. They can’t trust doctors. Obviously, the government is corrupt. Obviously, you can’t trust any official historian because they’re all in on it. So that’s uncomfortable, right? Because it’s uncomfortable not to know what kind of world you’re living in. It creates this thirst for knowledge, which the conspiracy documentary that you’re watching then fills in with a bunch of stuff that they haven’t demonstrated with anything resembling evidence. But it fills in the gap that you’ve just created by causing them to question everything else. 

For the content, I break it down into three major tendencies that I call dualism, symbolism, and intentionalism. Dualism is black and white moral thinking. People are good or people are evil. And all of the world’s institutions, governments, universities—those have all been captured by radical evil. Whereas, we, the conspiracy researchers and the common people, obviously we’re good. 

Intentionalism would be the idea that things happen because someone consciously wills them to happen. So If there is an economic recession, well, that’s not the product of widely dispersed, reckless decision-making. It’s not the product of ordinary human greed compounding at the level of millions of little decisions. It’s instead like, “Someone decided there’s going to be a recession now and they made that happen.” And every single detail unfolds according to plan. So that’s intentionalism. 

Symbolism I compare to divination, like reading tea leaves or astrology, where you are using associations with symbols that you attempt to interpret. You can look for the symbols basically anywhere. Government buildings are a good place to start. [So take] again, the Vatican: it has reptile symbols, a snake is associated with Satan, so that means the Vatican is probably satanic. A lot of the activity in the QAnon community online was “decoding.” There are these cryptic messages, and then people go around looking for clues. I think this is closer to divination than it is to the kind of thing that a journalist or historian would do, which I think is also fun for people because journalism and history are kind of tedious, right? It requires you to collect information and to proportion your belief to evidence. Whereas divination is kind of fun because you can follow whatever feels emotionally satisfying to you in the moment. It’s almost like free association. 

Gillen Tener Martin: I think it’s common to think about conspiracist thinking as a mainstream phenomenon in the U.S. today, but you trace a big historical arc to the beginnings of the Republic. Can you talk a bit about that long arc of conspiracist thinking?

Natalie Wynn: People talk about this like the internet started it. I do think the internet made it worse, but I don’t think the internet started it. I think the printing press probably was the first thing to make it worse. There was this book by John Robison. He’s a [Scottish] writer on conspiracy theories, and he was the popularizer of the Illuminati conspiracy theory in the 18th century. They thought the Illuminati was a branch of the Freemasons: atheists and anarchists that would cause revolutions and overthrow all the world’s governments and all the world’s religions. 

Someone sent a copy of his book to George Washington, and there’s a correspondence where George Washington acknowledges having read the book and he sort of says, “Well, I’ve heard a lot about this. I don’t think the Freemasons of America are involved, but I’ll keep an eye on it.” It’s funny to me considering how “online” Illuminati conspiracy theories feel—the 2010s was a peak of people looking for triangles and eyes everywhere, like in Katy Perry music videos. “My God, it’s the Illuminati!” It’s kind of funny that George Washington was having this conversation with someone.

Anne Kim: Let’s bring things back to the modern day and to Trump. What is it about Trump and conspiracist thinking that has enabled such a close partnership? You could argue that Trump exploits all the tendencies that you’ve talked about in order to leverage and use that thinking to his benefit. There are aspects of Trump that fit into what you’re talking about. He does see the world in very dualistic terms: black and white, us against them. But how did Donald Trump become the totem for conspiracy theorists and conspiracist thinking, to the extent that he has?

Natalie Wynn: I think Trump has always recognized conspiracy thinking as useful, as this underground strain of American politics that is available at any time to be tapped by someone unscrupulous enough to tap it. In 2015, he went on the Alex Jones show “Infowars,” which I don’t think any other presidential candidate, certainly not one running for one of the main two parties, has ever gone on. Because, you know, it’s crackpot. But Trump saw that there were millions of people listening to that, and no politician saw that as a useful voting demographic. He did. 

I think that he found it useful especially in 2020. The best way to plot a real conspiracy is to theorize a fictional conspiracy, because the existence of a conspiracy justifies a counter-conspiracy. So if you say that the election has been rigged, and if your followers believe that, then it’s justified to conspire to overturn the election, right? It’s not like this is the first election where people have said that it’s rigged or that it’s a conspiracy. People say it basically every time. But traditionally, American politicians who lose the election concede and they tell their followers, “yes, we accept the results of the election.” And that quells this impulse. But Trump did the opposite. He fanned the flames up until the point of January 6th. 

So I think in a very pragmatic way, he finds conspiracy thinking useful. Although things have gotten a little awkward lately as a result of the Epstein situation because the Epstein stuff is a load-bearing pillar of conspiracy thinking in the modern age. I think that a lot of people, and certainly most conspiracy theorists, believe that there is a vast pedophile conspiracy that involves a huge proportion of Hollywood and politicians and so on. I get the sense that Trump has gotten used to the idea that he can just tell his followers, “Yeah, we’re not thinking about that anymore,” and they’ll stop. But this one seems to be a little more difficult. As a big part of QAnon, people are very attached to this, and so it’s a little harder to put a memory hold on this particular thing.

Gillen Tener Martin: It says a lot to me that this has formed one of the most notable cracks in his base so far. And going back to January 6th, I think it can be easy for us now to forget the relationship of conspiracies to that event, but in the video you give a really good overview of how conspiracy both led to and excused an insurrection. Can you talk a bit about the role of QAnon and conspiracism in January 6th?

Natalie Wynn: So QAnon always had this element of apocalyptic thinking. The idea was that there was going to be this event called “the Storm”’ where Donald Trump—who they viewed as a messiah figure—was going to purge the deep state of the cabal (cannibals, pedophiles, whatever evil people that had taken hold of it). And there was a growing frustration that this hadn’t happened. What happened is a morphing of the idea “Trump is going to abolish the deep state” to “we are the digital soldiers, we’ve been here all along, the point of this movement was that it was training us to be ready for this moment, and now it’s up to us to join the president in bringing about the Storm.”

Obviously, there were a lot of different groups at January 6th. There [were] also Proud Boys and other people bringing their own agenda to it. But a lot of those who I guess would be considered “ordinary people”—people who were not previously involved in white nationalist gangs, for example, like accountants and grandmothers—who showed up on January 6th were there because of QAnon conspiracy theorizing.

Anne Kim: Your reference to the accountants and the grandmothers alludes to a point that you make in your video about how almost anyone can be vulnerable to conspiracist thinking. Could you talk a little bit about what makes someone more vulnerable to this kind of thinking in the first place? 

Natalie Wynn: Some of it is pretty universal. Systematic thinking is hard: it’s unintuitive to humans, whereas intentionalist thinking—the idea that things happen as a result of plans manifesting—is more intuitive. But there are things that I think cause specific people to really tend to dive into this. One of the big ones is some sense of humiliation or having this longing to feel important that has been frustrated in other areas of life. This is something I noticed with the most high-profile celebrity conspiracy theorists. 

For example, David Icke is most notorious for the reptilian theorizing that he did beginning in the 1990s. But he used to be a sports broadcaster. He announced on a talk show in the early ‘90s that he was the son of God, and he prophesied a coming era of hurricanes and earthquakes and this sort of revolution. And he was mocked, he was laughed at, and was kind of a pariah in the British media. I mean, we can understand why. But I think from his perspective, that was painful and humiliating. And so there’s this desire to be like, “Who did this to me?” And in his case, the answer to that question was reptilians. But I think that it’s something you also see with more recent conspiracy theorists. 

Candace Owens, who has really been on a conspiracy tear recently, wasn’t always like this. Back in 2017 or so, she was involved in Black Lives Matter activism. But there was this incident where she created a website called Social Autopsy, which was essentially a revenge doxing website for people who had been harassed. She got very negative feedback for this, and I think the sense of being canceled. She’s talked about this in interviews. She felt like “the media is against me,” and then she heard Trump talking about how the media is lying, and that really resonated because she was under attack by the media. So I think that there’s a sense of humiliation in both those cases. 

But it’s also common in the average person who gets into conspiracy theories. A sense of career unfulfillment or estrangement from your kids or just any kind of miscellaneous personal frustration that you have can create a scapegoating impulse. When bad things happen, people want a sort of satanic mastermind that they can blame. And conspiracism offers that. 

Gillen Tener Martin: You make a really strong case throughout the video for how conspiracist thinking is not compatible with democracy. Can you lay out why?

Natalie Wynn: So the idea of how democracy ideally is supposed to function is that there is public deliberation about issues and it’s possible for us to negotiate and to reason about things and to make compromises. Conspiracism throws a wrench in the works of all of that because it’s so irrational. I almost want to say a-rational. It’s not really engaging with reason at all. So when you find that you cannot reason with your neighbors—you can’t even have a coherent conversation because you don’t know how to have a coherent conversation with someone who thinks that the pandemic was caused by the Rothschilds—I think it’s a problem for a political system where people need to reach at least some baseline of consensus about what reality is. 

There’s a wide spectrum of opinion, much of it I would disagree with, but which I would still consider to be within the realm of things that can be argued about. Whereas the idea that the Judeo-Bolshevik-Vatican-Freemasons are controlling the White House through reptilian moon radars or whatever … I don’t know how to talk about that because it’s so not grounded in reality that discourse itself fails. And that scares me.

The post A One-Woman Stand Against Conspiracists appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In Falls Church, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., 76 percent of residents have a bachelors’ degree or more, and the poverty rate is just 3 percent.

But in Galax, Virginia, at the other end of the state, the picture is starkly different: Poverty there is at 22 percent—nearly double the national rate. Median incomes are half the median statewide, and a quarter of adults don’t work. One in six has no high school diploma.  

Nationwide, according to the bipartisan Economic Innovation Group (EIG), about 83 million Americans live in prosperous places like Falls Church, while 51 million live in “distressed” communities like Galax. 

As the architect of EIG’s Distressed Communities Index, Senior Fellow Kenan Fikri has spent the better part of the last decade discovering who is prospering in America—and where. The maldistribution of American opportunity, he warns, has led to stark divides, economically, socially and politically. On the other hand, he argues, understanding the geography of opportunity could help to heal these rifts. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Watch or listen to the full discussion on Spotify, YouTube or iTunes.  

***

Anne Kim: Kenan, for almost the past decade, you have been the mastermind of a really remarkable data set, the Distressed Communities Index (DCI). And the headline number from this year’s report is that 51 million Americans live in a “distressed community.” That’s 15 percent of the US population. Can you define what that means? 

Kenan Fikri: We define “distressed” in the DCI based on seven different complementary social and economic metrics. We look at the poverty rate, we look at income levels, we look at housing vacancy rates, educational attainment, job growth, the opening or closing of new business establishments, and business growth too. We put all that together to provide a summary statistic of economic well-being at the zip code level all across the United States. And then communities that rank in the bottom one-fifth of all zip codes nationally, we consider “distressed.”

Even though it’s a relative measure—20 percent of all zip codes will always be “distressed” by our definition—the gaps that it captures are absolute. Poverty rates in distressed communities are more than twice as high as they are nationwide. That means that

in a period of strong national economic growth, distressed communities are generally going to be losing jobs and suffering from net business closures. The condition of being economically distressed is one of being disconnected from the broader national story.

Anne Kim: One of the remarkable things about your work is how it shows just how unevenly opportunity is distributed in America. You have maps online that show where the distressed communities are, as well as maps that show where the communities that are prospering are located. Can you talk a little bit about the geographic distribution of the distressed communities?

Kenan Fikri: Economic opportunity is unevenly distributed across the country and it varies on all sorts of scales. It varies broadly regionally between the Northeast corridor or the West Coast and the Deep South or Appalachia. It varies within states, within counties, and then really neighborhood by neighborhood. That’s why we start at the zip code level to really see the scale at which most Americans live, work, go to school, consume.

And you do see the so-called “other side of the tracks” phenomenon where on really small geographic scales, you have wide divergences in economic well-being. Often these may follow municipal boundaries. We can look at cities in the Midwest and often sometimes all the zip codes that are part of the city will be economically distressed, but as soon as you leave that core municipality and enter more suburban jurisdictions, you’re at a totally different plane of national economic well-being. But that’s at the very local level. 

If you’re looking at the U.S. map, looking state by state, we see a concentration of distressed zip codes in the deep south, first and foremost, in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, but then kind of stretching all the way up across the so-called “Eastern Heartland” into Ohio and Michigan where you’re still seeing above national percentages of state populations living in distressed communities. But really these pockets exist in really almost every major metropolitan area and then across numerous rural areas as well. 

Anne Kim: You talked a little bit about the disparity in the poverty rate between the bottom quintile and the top quintile. But can you give more of a sense of how stark these disparities are?

Kenan Fikri: Take Harris County, Texas, for example. It’s one of the most populous in the country, but 1.4 million residents live in a distressed zip code in the same county, while 1.1 million residents are living in a prosperous zip code. And here we’re talking about poverty rates that may be 30 percent or higher in the distressed portion of the community, compared to below 5 percent in some more outlying jurisdictions. You’re going to see huge gaps in educational attainment too. And even in something like vacancy rates where you have a lot of disinvested properties, you may have one in six, one in seven, one in five homes vacant in a distressed corner, even in a growth market such as Houston.

Anne Kim: One of the things that was really intriguing to me was the extent to which you found that in distressed communities, men are earning a lot less than women. And of course there’s stark racial inequality as well. Can you talk a little bit about the demographics?

Kenan Fikri: Place is really a vector in a frame to talk about people, zip codes and communities. I’m a geographer, and zip codes and counties are, you know, interesting units for a geographer because they it’s an organizing unit for social analysis as well as economic analysis. 

Starting first with race and ethnicity before turning to gender, we see that generally in the United States, minorities are overrepresented in distressed communities and underrepresented in prosperous communities. That differs a little bit by subtype of race and ethnicity. Asian Americans are relatively better represented in prosperous communities. Hispanic Americans are generally clustered  in the middle to lower tiers of communities on the DCI. And then African Americans and Native Americans are disproportionately concentrated in the distressed tier. 

African Americans are about twice the share of the population in distressed communities as they are nationally.  Place is a way to understand or reveal long running social conditions and afflictions in the United States today. And you can’t, when you’re looking at something like the DCI separate people from place from history. The economic conditions people experience are living history.

Anne Kim: On the gender piece, the disparity in men’s earning power versus women in some of these communities is really striking, especially when we have so many discussions politically about men and masculinity and Stolen Pride, to borrow the title of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book.

Kenan Fikri: Absolutely. This was the first year we actually looked at gender through the lens of the DCI. We assumed, I guess naively, that there wouldn’t necessarily be that much variation across gender in the DCI, but we were really surprised to find that the earnings gap is wider in distressed communities.

In general, men’s economic conditions deteriorate much faster than women’s do as you go down the spectrum of community distress. Male educational attainment really lags behind, and there’s a sharp, sharp decline in college attainment rates as you move from the prosperous to the comfortable to mid-tier at risk and then to distressed quintiles.

Whereas women’s educational attainment is much more stable, regardless of community. There are still fewer women with college degrees in distressed communities than in prosperous ones, but it’s a much smoother gradient than it is for men. So I think it’s really an under-studied corner of social science right now—the vulnerability that men face with

limited economic conditions, and how that makes stabilizing a community harder as it filters through to family structures and things like that. It underscores the fact that this is a corner of discourse and understanding that we need to turn to as a country because whatever currents are underway in society today are running really deep, and they also run through space and communities.

Anne Kim: Does your research show any indication of why these gaps are happening? I’m assuming that in parts of the Rust Belt, for instance, it’s a story about the loss of manufacturing. But did you pick up any clues as to what was going on?

Kenan Fikri: It’s a great question and I wish we picked up greater clues. I think it does come down to economic opportunity in particular sectors. Men are likelier to find employment in traded sectors such as manufacturing and potentially white-collar work, versus traditionally non-traded or less traded sectors such as education, healthcare, social assistance and other professional services jobs that don’t vary as much by location and that women tend to be overrepresented in. So it’s either the elimination or loss of those traded sector jobs, or in some cases, like in rural areas, the fact that there never were that many strong jobs to begin with. 

Anne Kim: And just to clarify, by “traded” sector, you mean a sector that’s susceptible to outsourcing?

Kenan Fikri: That’s economic geographer-speak, a traded sector is something that you sell beyond the region. So manufacturing would be traded. Consulting services could be a traded sector activity, or information services too. It’s really anything  you’re selling to a wider market, be it nationally or globally, versus just the local community where people’s incomes circulate among things like doctors and grocery stores. 

Anne Kim: What is the connection between levels of education and levels of distress? Do low levels of education cause a community to become distressed or is it the other way around? Which way does the causal connection run?

Kenan Fikri: It is really difficult to find a good job today without a more than a high school education. A lot of people who have found a good job with limited education may now be nearing the end of their careers, in industries where credentials didn’t matter as much as they do today. 

It’s one of the first things that I point to to explain the geography of well-being today. Where college-educated Americans live is the well-off geography, whereas Americans with high school or less live in predominantly distressed geography. And then there are more mixed communities where folks with associates degrees or some college are interspersed with folks from both the high and low ends of the educational attainment spectrum living together. That’s where you’ll get mid-tier communities. 

I don’t want to run to the conclusion that more education for everyone is automatically better because there are a lot of problems with the higher education system today, but the fact remains that that college degree is still the ticket to opportunity in the United States today. 

Anne Kim: But the problem is, of course, that a lot of times when someone in a rural community, for instance, gets a college degree, they don’t necessarily stay in the community. That means they take their opportunities with them, or they chase the opportunity that exists elsewhere. 

Kenan Fikri: True. Folks who are most likely to leave a community are the ones who are most likely to get higher education and find opportunity elsewhere. Mobility is lowest for the people who most need to get out to find new opportunity, but they’re often the ones who are most reluctant to move.

Anne Kim: I appreciate how the DCI defines well-being beyond simply financial security. One of the things that you found is that living in a distressed community has real costs for individuals. You find that on average people living in distressed communities can actually expect to die five years sooner than the counterparts in prosperous areas, which was yet another stunning and depressing finding. What accounts for that difference?

Kenan Fikri: It’s a great question. And even that five-year statistic is summarizing across all counties in the top and bottom quintiles. If you zoom in on specific locations like Virginia, you’ll see almost a 20-year gap in life expectancy between Arlington, Virginia, and Petersburg, a predominantly African-American city in southern Virginia.

These are absolutely shocking statistics that show why place matters to understand life outcomes.  The DCI has become a way for researchers to study the social determinants of health because place corrals a whole bunch of unobservable factors into one unit. What do I mean by that? There are things like social connections, access to quality foods, access to quality healthcare, access to people and social groups and amenities and all sorts of wraparound services and culture that support good health that might be missing in a community. 

It speaks to the toll—psychological and physical—that living in such an unequal country where inequalities are experienced so viscerally and so starkly can take on individual lives and livelihoods. When you fall through the pretty porous floor that the US economy puts underneath people and places, things can start to get pretty grim.

Anne Kim: I have to ask a little bit more of a fraught question now. When you look at the map of distressed communities versus prosperous ones, there is a huge similarity to the maps that show you red versus blue. The deep South, as you mentioned, is more distressed and it’s more red, and the coasts are a little bit more blue and they tend to be a little more prosperous. What can you say about distress and prosperity and the state of political polarization that we’re all experiencing?

Kenan Fikri: I wish I had the key to solve that and dispel all the political polarization for us. Alas, I don’t. But one insight that’s helped my understanding of the polarization today is that if you look at the population in distressed communities, it’s about evenly divided between rural and urban are. 

So distress is one thing that unites some different American factions geographically. When you look at the national map, the larger physical units of rural zip codes make those pop more than the smaller physical units of urban zip codes, but when you zoom in, distress is an experience and a problem that affects both parties and both coalitions.

The optimist in me would hope that there may be common ground, with all of our elected representatives caring about the places they call home. They can disagree about a lot else, but I think we can agree that the economy is failing particular Americans extremely. And then we can start to see where there may be common ground for solutions. 

That sounds a little naively Pollyanna-ish, perhaps, but I think if we have to start somewhere, that’s a pretty decent place to start.

I’ll also say that  if you look at the states of the Midwest that might not be outright distressed yet, they’ve really fallen out of the prosperous tier, maybe into more middling conditions, and that also gets to some of the feelings of being left behind or just not really participating in the best the U.S. economy has to offer.

I think that that may help explain why some of the coalitions are fracturing so much. Places and communities might not have fallen into outright distress, but they do feel their relative standard of living declining. 

And interestingly, we’re seeing now that in a lot of corners of the Northeast, states like New York, Rhode Island are really starting to fall relative to when we first did the DCI in 2010, when the superstar cities and the really college-educated places were doing best. They had large swaths of their population in prosperous zip codes. Now that’s ebbing, such that New York and Alabama have equivalent shares of their populations living in prosperous zip codes. 

I don’t think New York is going to go necessarily red, but the DCI is an interesting lens to understand these relative flows and then conjecture how it plays into politics.

Anne Kim: Wow, that is fascinating. Well, that leads to my final question for you, which is how do we fix these extremes in regional inequality? We’re never going to eliminate distress altogether—let’s posit that—but how do we ensure that there’s better shared prosperity? You talked about common ground. Are there specific ideas you have about what we can do to bring some communities up and also to stop the slide of other communities that are facing distress?

Kenan Fikri: That’s the big question, the important question. I wish I had a better answer. But to me, I am a firm believer in the power of the American economy as history’s greatest engine of wealth and prosperity and opportunity for the vast majority of people. 

So I think part of the solution has to run through what I like to call a “reconnection agenda,” recognizing that folks need to have connections—be it physical, social, or economic—to the broader national economy in order to participate in it and seize opportunity in it. That means making sure that financial markets better serve low-income Americans and low-income communities. 

We have some tools in that toolkit from the [Community Reinvestment Act], but that’s ripe for reform. I do think that Opportunity Zones are a good step in the right direction to nudge financial markets to look at places that have systematically been deprived of capital by private markets left on their own. And I think there’s a lot more that can be done to advance social inclusion. 

We have to recognize how much opportunity is transmitted or not through the K-12 school system. School districts and where people tend to move isolate different groups. So that’s an area to look at and an area for innovation and reform.

And then there’s physical connectivity too. We have to be careful here because, say, in the urban renewal era of the mid-1900s, physical connectivity done wrong actually disconnected and severed places. But if you think of rural areas—rural Appalachia or southern West Virginia—these are extremely isolated locales, and it’s very hard to site labor intensive manufacturing in a place like that  where it’s difficult to get to market. 

The internet age allows us to think of connectivity in a digital sense too and how that may open up opportunity for people to access jobs outside their region or even for others to move in to more mixing in American communities that can foster mobility in the United States.

Anne Kim: Well, I hope some of this agenda comes to pass in coming years. Looks like we really need it. Kenan, thank you so much for sharing your research.

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