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. 

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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.

“A Government Shutdown Looms. Prepare For Democrats to Disappoint.” That’s what I wrote two months ago. And here we are.  

That an opposition party-driven shutdown failed to secure its primary demands is not unusual. In fact, as I’ve repeatedly emphasized, shutdowns have a perfect record of failure. In this case, the asks were a guaranteed extension of expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies and recission-proof agreements on spending levels. 

But I wasn’t expecting a rogue Democratic faction to cave in such a politically illogical fashion when they were on the cusp of proving doubters like me wrong.  

In September, I sketched out the typical progression of events in a shutdown: “Public attention shifts to how shutdowns hurt average Americans and how one political party is willing to harm constituents to play political games. Once public opinion quickly turns, the shutdown agitators invariably realize the shutdown failed to provide negotiating leverage and eventually cave.” 

The current federal government shutdown did not follow the same pattern because of President Donald Trump’s cruel sociopathy. He took a Democratic-provoked shutdown and made it his own, gleefully piling on layoffs of federal workers and needlessly cutting off food assistance to impoverished families, even appealing to the Supreme Court to keep the cutoff of SNAP benefits going when lower courts gave him cause to restore the flow of food to the needy.  

Public opinion turned … against Republicans. Polls showed the public laying most of the blame on the GOP. On Election Day, Democrats slayed up and down the ballot—from the gubernatorial battles in New Jersey and Virginia to the Bucks County, Pennsylvania district attorney race to the Georgia Public Service Commission contests. As of Friday, the Democratic lead in the generic congressional ballot stood at its widest point this year, at 4.1 percentage points. 

In a rare admission of political weakness, Trump acknowledged Wednesday morning after the Republican electoral defeats, “The shutdown was a big factor, negative for the Republicans … We must get the government back open soon. And really, immediately.”  

Still wanting to avoid bartering with Democrats, Trump pushed Senate Republicans to junk the filibuster. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the South Dakota Republican, said, “the votes aren’t there” to do it, reflecting his conference’s rare resistance to a Trump request. North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, who is declining to run for reelection next year after sparring with the president, declared, “With metaphysical certainty, this Congress is not going to nuke the filibuster, period, full stop.” Once again, Trump tacitly acknowledged his hand with Senate Republicans regarding the filibuster in a Wednesday Fox News interview: “Do I want to lose my relationship with those Republicans that have been very good to me for a long period of time … Do you ever have people that are wrong, but you can’t convince them? So do you destroy your whole relationship with them or not?” 

Democrats could not have scripted this any better. They instigated the shutdown, yet Trump took the blame for it. Trump admitted the shutdown had damaged his party at the ballot box. And his one path to ending it without Democrats was cut off by his Senate allies.  

So why would Senator Angus King, the Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats, make this argument to justify surrender? King told reporters on Sunday: 

The question before us, before those of us here who decided to vote yes tonight, the question was, does the shutdown further the goal of achieving some needed support for the extension of the tax credits? Our judgment was that it will not produce that result. And the evidence for that is almost seven weeks of fruitless attempts to make that happen. Would it change in a week or another week, or after Thanksgiving or Christmas? And there’s no evidence that it would. 

Yes, there is evidence that it would: Trump’s admission that the shutdown was hurting Republicans and his inability to secure an end to the shutdown on a party-line vote.  

The only way out of the shutdown was a bipartisan deal, and Democrats had achieved something incredibly rare in a shutdown showdown: opposition party leverage.  

Why did King and the Invertebrate Eight sacrifice that leverage for a deal that forfeited their main Democratic demands?  

The mere hint of losing the filibuster may have caused panic among Senate institutionalists. Karen Tumulty, the veteran Beltway reporter at The Washington Post, said on X, “This was all about the filibuster.” Her former Post colleague Benjy Sarlin added, “D’s seem divided 80-20 between the ‘Go ahead, make my day’ caucus on ditching the filibuster and the 20 who cut a deal as soon as R’s put it on the table.” Republicans had not actually put it on the table, but the surrendering Democrats may have feared the worst anyway. 

Democrats were also susceptible to the plight of federal workers and their families who were experiencing real hardships. When the president of the American Federation of Government Employees union called for “reopen[ing] the government immediately under a clean continuing resolution that allows continued debate on larger issues,” Senator Dick Durbin said the statement “has a lot of impact” and because “they’re our friends, we take them seriously.” 

Of course, it’s honorable for Durbin and other Democrats to care about our cherished civil servants. The deal rescinds the wave of pink slips issued last month. However, nothing in this deal would protect their jobs beyond the current fiscal year.  

Otherwise, all they got was a promise to schedule a vote on renewal of expiring health insurance subsidies—with no assurance of passage. Any funding promises, such as the agreement’s full funding of the General Accountability Office watchdog unit, could still be subject to future recissions. And under the agreement funding for most government agencies will run out again at the end of January, requiring another of negotiations to finish out the fiscal year. 

I tend to disagree with the presumption that “timid” Democrats always bring a spork to a gunfight. But that’s what this looks like. Matthew Yglesias spills that “a lot of the people I’ve spoken to, both in Congress and in the policy community, were genuinely very stressed out about the harm the shutdown was doing to the country, including lost wages and disrupted air travel,” and “lots of them didn’t really believe their own spin. The public blamed Trump, but [Democrats] blamed themselves and felt bad.” They shouldn’t have. Trump was purposefully making the shutdown hurt as many people as possible. And little in this deal is going to prevent him from inflicting further harm.  

I was always deeply skeptical that Democrats could extract significant policy concessions from a shutdown, as it’s never happened before. But my counsel to Democrats was to wash their hands of the appropriations process and tell Republicans—who had already negated past spending agreements with recissions and openly disparaged bipartisan appropriations deals—it’s their problem to solve. Then they could either watch Republicans junk the filibuster or beg for Democratic help on Democratic terms. Walking away from the table would have avoided this debacle, in which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer entered a high-stakes battle without full commitment from his caucus. 

Schumer may not be to blame for Quisling rump, but as former House Speaker John Boehner—who led an infamously unruly band of Republicans and eventually quit before being ousted—liked to say, “A leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk.” Or, in other words, not much of a leader.  

Still, replacing Schumer wouldn’t suddenly make the Senate Democratic Caucus less squishy. And to quote another problematic Republican, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” And the Democratic army—a massive tent spanning from Zohran Mamdani to Abigail Spanberger—had a great Election Day last week. As bad and as unnecessary as this week’s capitulation was, the frustrations among Democrats are likely to be forgotten by the midterms.  

The post The Democratic Shutdown Capitulation: A Perfect and Unnecessary Failure   appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Allowing our political discourse to be swallowed up by the internet and spit back out as chewed-up, attention-grabbing “content” has obviously not been good for the American psyche. Unfortunately, in the wake of the 2024 election, the Democratic Party seems to have decided that there’s no path forward except plunging headfirst into the online cesspool.

The DNC recently poured millions into a project called Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan, billed as an effort to “study the syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality” in male-dominated online spaces. Meanwhile, a startlingly annoying crop of Democratic influencers emerged, teenage boys with resistance-lib politics who mimic online MAGA aesthetics to produce truly terrible videos like “Clueless MAGA Bro Gets SHUT DOWN During Debate.”

Politicians, too, are getting in on the fun. California Governor Gavin Newsom—apparently convinced that the key to being a successful governor is to fill the “liberal Joe Rogan” void—launched a podcast. His debut episode featured the late Charlie Kirk and was so obsequious that Kirk criticized him for being “overly effusive.” Later, after an amicable debate with Steve Bannon, Newsom switched to mocking Donald Trump in posts that mimic the president’s disjointed, braggadocious style. 

As demeaning and debasing as all this is, maybe it’s also part of a necessary correction. The left’s approach in recent election cycles—engaging in digital shaming pile-ons and strong-arming social media companies into moderating speech on their platforms—mostly backfired by convincing millions of Americans that liberals were censorious scolds. But if that strategy proved counterproductive, this frantic attempt to match the online MAGA world’s tactics in an attentional race to the bottom might be just as doomed to fail. 

I’d like to suggest a different approach, one that is already gathering adherents among liberal strategists, grassroots activists, and legal scholars. Instead of accepting the existing digital political battlefield as inevitable, Democrats should challenge it as the root cause of our dysfunctional politics, and vow to be the party that cleans it up.

The core of the issue is that we have a digital economy built on a business model of trapping people in the virtual world for as long as possible. D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton University, calls it “human fracking,” where instead of oil, companies are extracting our attention. Should we really be surprised, then, that at the same time the internet is subsuming the real world, what’s emerging around the globe is a convulsive, reactionary politics? Addressing this crisis—rather than fueling it—should be central to the Democrats’ strategy in the digital age. 

There are abundant signs that people want something different. For example, a 2020 Pew survey found that about two-thirds of American adults believe social media is negatively affecting the country’s direction; only one in 10 think it’s helping. Perhaps the most compelling evidence of social media users’ simmering discontent comes from a study conducted by economists at the University of Chicago. Participants were asked how much money they would need to be paid to quit social media. The average answer was around $50. But the participants’ attitudes changed dramatically if asked to imagine that everyone else had already quit. In that case, they would not only give up their accounts—they’d be willing to pay to do so. That exodus may slowly be under way—time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has slightly fallen since, with young people representing the largest decrease.

Thankfully, there are more options in the playbook than to surrender to the internet or simply log off. As the political speech scholar Susan Benesch put it to me, the question Democrats need to answer is this: “Do you want to ape the game the other side is already playing in an environment that is bad for people, or do you want to change the game?” Democrats don’t need to abandon the digital sphere to challenge its terms; in fact, a few of its younger rising stars have shown that liberal messages can gain purchase. But to answer that hunger for reform, while also creating a level playing field for sane, fact-based discourse, Democrats must make a serious political commitment to reforming these technologies that govern our lives and yet remain subject to no meaningful democratic oversight. 

The movement to make online life healthier is already well underway. Currently leading the charge is a growing coalition of parents, scholars, and activists focused on protecting children from the most harmful aspects of the digital world. This movement has also launched a state-by-state campaign to claw back some modicum of digital privacy, with state legislators finally taking steps to curb the relentless surveillance and manipulation of individuals by tech platforms. 

Nearly every expert I spoke with agreed that these crusades offer Democrats a clear strategic opportunity: embrace these efforts, raise the profile of their issues, and campaign on federal legislation that embraces these movements. If the goal is a more dramatic restructuring of digital life, though, these measures must be seen as just the opening moves. The harms that have galvanized these reform movements are symptoms of the broader underlying sickness plaguing the online world.

Right now, MAGA channels much of the anger toward modern life by offering a fantasy of a lost, mythic past. But if Democrats were willing to engage with this dissatisfaction honestly, they could expose the central lie of the movement: Despite all its posturing, MAGA wants nothing more than for you to live your life on a screen. 

Unlike the current race toward the most optimized attentional capture possible—which is also disastrous for our politics by favoring the loudest, most outrageous voices—the lane of reform belongs to Democrats alone. With the right’s online dominance, the political conversions of platform owners like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and Republican leaders like Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, pathologically online, the GOP is an unlikely reformer. Rather than join the stampede of human frackers, Democrats could be the one force fighting to protect your mind from being mined.

The most obvious place where the online world has impoverished the real one is childhood. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation documents the teen mental health epidemic that began in the early 2010s, arguing that the “great rewiring of childhood”—the shift from a play-based to a phone-based upbringing—fueled the crisis. Haidt outlines multiple causal pathways linking social media use to mental health harms: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. To safeguard future generations, he proposes four societal norms: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, phone-free schools, and a renewed emphasis on real-world independence and play. 

The book has achieved remarkable success, generating widespread media attention and sparking an eponymous movement attempting to enshrine Haidt’s norms into law. The most effective policy efforts to date have centered on making schools phone-free, with 26 states enacting legislation or executive orders to restrict or ban student cell phone use during the school day. Beyond that, some states have adopted more aggressive measures, banning social media entirely for children under 14 or implementing age verification laws that require parental consent for minors. Other states have taken aim at platform design itself, passing “Kids Codes” that turn on the highest privacy settings as the default for children or prohibiting personalized, algorithmically driven content feeds. Nearly all of these laws have faced legal challenges from NetChoice, the leading tech industry group, which has succeeded in securing injunctions in many cases as the court battles continue. 

Using the judicial system cuts both ways, though. Over the past couple of years, state attorneys general across the country have launched waves of litigation against social media platforms. The immediate outcome of these lawsuits is the exposure of troubling internal communications that reveal how these companies disregard the harms their platforms cause. For example, Kentucky’s lawsuit against TikTok alleges that the company deliberately concealed the app’s addictive design. Internal documents revealed that TikTok identified the habit-forming threshold—260 videos, or about 35 minutes—and linked compulsive use to negative mental health effects. Despite this, it took no meaningful action. A parental control feature, promoted as a safeguard with 60-minute time limits for kids, reduced usage by only 1.5 minutes on average. “Our goal is not to reduce time spent,” one project manager candidly admitted. 

In addition to revealing the true motivations behind platform decisions, these lawsuits could drive real accountability if legislation stalls. Perhaps most significant in this regard is the nearly nationwide lawsuit against Meta for knowingly harming children’s mental health and thus violating consumer protection laws, building on the documents leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. “Nobody thought there could be a 44-state lawsuit against social media,” Haugen told me. “And now we have a lawsuit comparable to the tobacco lawsuit.” (The lawsuit involved 41 states and Washington, D.C.)

The other reform effort that has gained real traction is the fight for digital privacy. In recent years, data privacy advocates have slowly begun to restrict the surveillance and profiling rampant in the online world. Today, social media platforms and other tech giants engage in nearly limitless online surveillance in order to create a vast informational asymmetry between the internet platforms and their users. If corporations know everything about you—your communications, preferences, habits—it is much easier for them to manipulate you into acting in their best interest. Last year, U.S. internet users had their information shared 107 trillion times—an average of 747 exposures per person, per day.

California is headquarters to most of the companies who pioneered this business model, which is why it was the first state to wise up and pass a comprehensive consumer data privacy law in 2018. To this day, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) remains the nation’s strongest privacy regulation. The CCPA was built around the concept of “data minimization,” which means that companies should only collect and use personal information if it is for a purpose that consumers would reasonably expect. For example, a person using a ride-share app would expect the app to use their location to allow the driver to pick them up and drop them off. The user would not reasonably expect that the app continuously tracks their location well after the ride, learns that they visited a pawn shop, and then sells that information to Google, which in turn might start showing that individual ads for predatory loans.

The effort caught Silicon Valley by surprise and came as a blow to the online platforms who have no interest in scaling back their immense data collection practices. Since then, industry lobbyists and privacy advocates have clashed in state legislatures over how to shape privacy laws. Unlike California’s approach, industry-backed bills typically allow companies to collect personal data without meaningful limits, so long as they disclose it somewhere in a privacy policy. Consumers who want their data must submit individual requests to every entity that holds it (this is in the hundreds or thousands). These laws also deny individuals the right to take companies to court. The tech industry has brought enormous resources to the fight: In 2021 and 2022 alone, 445 lobbyists and firms representing tech giants were active in the 31 states considering privacy legislation. Of the 19 states that have passed privacy laws, the vast majority have adopted industry-backed models. 

But in one of the most high-profile privacy battles to date, the tech industry suffered its first major defeat since California. Maryland state Senator Sara Love, who introduced the privacy bill in 2024 while still in the House of Delegates, said she had never experienced anything like it. “It was exhausting. I have never seen that level of lobbying. Nor had a lot of other legislators,” said Love, who has served in Maryland’s state government since 2019. “The first year lobbyists were telling legislators, ‘You’re not going to get your Starbucks points anymore,’ ” she recalled with a chuckle. “The biggest bunch of malarkey. But they [other state legislators] didn’t understand the technicalities of the bill.” 

This time around Love succeeded in passing the strongest privacy regulation since the CCPA, and now a handful of other states are working on similar laws modeled after California’s or Maryland’s approach. The biggest challenge is in convincing lawmakers that defying Big Tech’s warnings won’t bring the sky crashing down. “Knowing that it can be done helps,” Love reasoned. “The more of us that get these good strong bills, the more that will follow.” 

In The Sirens’ Call, Chris Hayes compares the development of today’s attention economy to the Industrial Revolution. “Attention now exists as a commodity,” he writes, “in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism … a social system had been erected to coercively extract something from people that had previously, in a deep sense, been theirs.” In fact, Hayes thinks the digital revolution may be even more disruptive because, “unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.” 

Much like in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, people today face a collective action problem: Those whose data is being mined have few institutions capable of pushing back against systemic abuse. Just as labor unions and worker protections emerged to confront the excesses of industrial capitalism, we now need digital equivalents to defend users in the age of surveillance capitalism. Rights like the ability to delete your data, to move it between platforms, and to hold companies accountable for their abuse of it should be the starting point. 

One promising step in this direction is the Digital Choices Act (DCA), a law passed in Utah this year. Doug Fiefia, the sponsor of the legislation, was inspired to act after growing disillusioned with the data practices he witnessed during his time at Google Ads. After joining Utah’s state legislature, he proposed a simple idea: Make it possible for users to take their data from one platform to another or delete it from any platform they choose. This kind of data portability could eventually allow users to organize and demand better treatment, backed by the leverage to deprive tech platforms of the data they so desperately need. “What we’re doing is taking back what we never should have given to this industry in the first place: control of our data,” Fiefia explained. “That should always have been ours.” Since Utah passed the DCA, the first legislation of its kind, six other states have reached out to Fiefia to explore introducing similar bills. 

Meanwhile, a group of legal scholars has been pushing for a promising reform called “friction-in-design” regulation. These reformers argue that the tech industry’s obsession with seamless efficiency has stripped users of meaningful choice and enabled what they call the “technosocial engineering of humans.” They propose deliberately designing pauses—like speed bumps in neighborhoods or warning labels on products—to help users reflect, exercise autonomy, and protect their well-being online. Previous attempts to regulate social media have often floundered because they focused on specific types of speech or particular actors, inviting partisan backlash. Friction-in-design offers a politically neutral alternative, one that addresses the underlying dynamics of online harm without censoring content or favoring one viewpoint over another. Just as speed bumps make roads safer without restricting where people can drive, digital friction can reduce harmful online behavior without infringing on free speech. 

There are a vast array of friction-in-design regulations that could curb harmful platform dynamics. Addictive features like infinite scroll (which continuously loads new content so users never reach a natural stopping point) and autoplay (which automatically plays the next video without user input) could be banned outright. Platforms could be forced into imposing automatic time-outs after extended continuous use of the platform. They could also be required to add a short delay after a user posts, likes, or replies to someone else. Content that begins to go viral could be deliberately slowed as it passes certain thresholds. High-reach accounts could be regulated like broadcasters, with posts that reach a certain audience threshold treated as public broadcasts. In the realm of privacy, courts could refuse to enforce automatic contracts and instead require evidence of actual deliberation by consumers. 

When tech platforms have voluntarily adopted some of these measures, they’ve worked. After a wave of gruesome lynchings in India in 2017 and 2018 that were sparked by viral false rumors of child kidnappings, WhatsApp restricted the forwarding of messages that had already been shared five or more times, allowing them to be sent to only one user or group at a time. That minor tweak resulted in the spread of “highly forwarded” messages declining by 70 percent. Of course, platforms are unlikely to adopt these measures on their own, which is why government action is necessary. 

The situation requires many more reforms than the ones that have been outlined here. Aggressive antitrust enforcement to break up the monopolization of the digital economy is crucial. Today’s internet giants have achieved a level of vertical and horizontal integration with few parallels in American history, in large part because previous generations of lawmakers worked hard to prevent it. Even at the height of its power, Ma Bell couldn’t listen to your telephone conversations, learn that you were thinking of buying a house, and then sell that information to banks, which could then cold-call you at dinner with loan offers. Government today could largely eliminate this “surveillance” business model by enforcing existing law—breaking up tech companies’ control of competing social media platforms (like Meta’s ownership of both Facebook and Instagram) and requiring that they follow the same “common carrier” rules that governed previous communications technologies. This would curb a great deal, though not all, of their most exploitative behavior. 

Modifying Section 230, which allows platforms to hide behind total legal immunity even as they algorithmically make editorial decisions, is also important. Beyond that, greater transparency around how algorithms function, and stronger oversight to ensure that they serve the public interest rather than manipulate it, will be key to creating a healthier digital ecosystem. Most major platforms’ algorithms promote the content that gets the most user engagement, which gives undue weight to outrage and misinformation. But those incentives don’t have to be written in stone. Scholars and some smaller platforms are testing out different algorithmic systems, such as “bridging-based ranking,” which sorts internet content using metrics that promote constructive disagreement—such as whether users with opposing views engage with it positively. Documents from Haugen, the Facebook whistle-blower, reveal that the company tested bridging-based ranking in its comments sections, and found that it promoted posts that were “much less likely” to be reported for bullying, hate speech, or violence. But they decided not to implement it widely.

Of course, none of this means Democrats can’t or shouldn’t engage with social media. Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani have shown that it’s possible to use social media platforms effectively in service of progressive causes. But they are the exception. The structure of the current internet ecosystem overwhelmingly favors reactionary, conspiratorial content. Democratic engagement should be grounded not in mimicking that logic, but in naming the alienation the internet produces and offering a more humane alternative. 

The way we live online is not good for us. The average American now checks their phone 205 times a day, or once every five waking minutes. The average young person today spends 5.5 hours staring at screens, putting them on pace to spend 25 years of their life online. Rates of depression, anxiety, and behavioral addictions have soared; rates of friendship and romantic relationships have plummeted. 

Meanwhile, those in the tech industry want to double down on all of it. Marc Andreessen, cofounder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is often called Silicon Valley’s “philosopher-king.” He argues that the goal of improving material conditions on Earth is misguided, the folly of those who cannot see past their own “reality privilege”:

A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substances, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date … Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world … Reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

It’s hard to imagine a more noxious ideology—or less likable messengers—to run against. To think that the answers to our most existential problems could be found by building ever more seductive online worlds to disappear into is essentially a surrender of faith in the human project. No wonder figures like Peter Thiel hesitate when asked if humanity should even survive. Let MAGA have this bleak vision. And let them own the horror that is our online world. 

Democrats, meanwhile, should start listening to other voices. Zadie Smith, more than a decade ago, wrote that the technology shaping our lives is unworthy of us. We are more interesting than it. We deserve better. It’s time to build something different.

The post Draining the Online Swamp appeared first on Washington Monthly.

“SNAP recipients shouldn’t go without food. People should be getting paid in this country. And we’ve tried to do that thirteen times! You voted no thirteen times! This isn’t a political game. These are real people’s lives that we’re talking about!”

That was Senate Majority Leader John Thune ranting on the Senate floor this week, trying to blame Democrats for the cutoff of Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on Saturday.

Look, it’s fair to tag Democrats for being the instigators of the government shutdown, but not for President Donald Trump’s decisions that maximize the shutdown’s pain and hurt people who do not need to be hurt.

Before the shutdown began almost a month ago, the Department of Agriculture, led by Secretary Brooke Rollins, made clear that the delivery of SNAP, still often referred to by its former moniker, Food Stamps, need not be impacted. The 55-page USDA “Lapse of Funding Plan” includes the following section:

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): OMB’s General Counsel provided a letter to USDA on May 23, 2025, stating that there is a bona fide need to obligate benefits for October –…thereby guaranteeing that benefit funds are available for program operations even in the event of a government shutdown at the beginning of a fiscal year. In addition, Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown…

That plan was available here at this URL until at least October 10, according to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. But Trump’s USDA has memory-holed it. When you go to that URL now, you get an attack on Democrats that almost surely violates the Hatch Act: “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”

The website change tracked a USDA memo issued last week claiming “contingency funds are not legally available to cover regular benefits … Instead, the contingency fund is a source of funds for contingencies, such as the Disaster SNAP program,” an assertion that contradicts the earlier USDA plan, and many legal experts reject. The New York Times reported:

David A. Super, a law professor at Georgetown University and a federal budget expert, called the memo’s rationale “absurd,” and said “nothing in the law imposes that limit” of using contingency funding only for natural disasters. “Both the first Trump administration and this administration, as recently as the end of September, said these funds were available in the case of lapses in appropriations,” he said. “This is blatantly lawless.”

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes that SNAP has never been disrupted during past shutdowns. “During both Republican and Democratic administrations, SNAP benefits have always been provided using available funding sources to prevent a break in benefits.”

Republicans can fairly blame Democrats for other shutdown-related disruptions, such as the lack of routine food inspections, unstaffed national parks, and cessation of paychecks for most federal workers. (Democrats can retort by noting Republicans can reopen the government on their own by suspending the filibuster.)

But Democrats shoulder no responsibility for Trump and Rollins cutting off SNAP benefits from those who need them to survive. You can’t even argue Democrats should have expected SNAP to be affected because USDA declared ahead of the shutdown that it wouldn’t. The number of recipients tops 40 million, more than a tenth of the U.S. population. Aside from the human suffering, the economic blow to grocers, distributors, and farmers will be sizeable, too. This is why these programs, at least until recently, enjoyed bipartisan support.

Thune can save his performative rage for the people playing political games with people’s lives: Donald Trump and Agriculture Secretary Rollins.

The post SNAP Cuts: The Trump Administration Weaponizes Food appeared first on Washington Monthly.

On Monday, the American Federation of Government Employees union’s national president called for Congress to “reopen the government immediately under a clean continuing resolution that allows continued debate on larger issues.” As noted in mainstream media coverage, the statement was a shift away from the Democratic position linking reopening with renewal of expiring health insurance subsidies, and an effective embrace of the Republican position. Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin told Politico the statement “has a lot of impact. They’ve been our friends.” 

But that is not reason enough for Democrats to surrender. They stand on firmer political ground than President Donald Trump and the Republicans. Climbing down with nothing to show for it would shatter the Democratic base far more than this one statement.  

How do we know Democrats have the upper hand? As I wrote earlier this month, the poll metric to track is the congressional generic ballot test. And the Democratic edge has held through October. Two outlets, Morning Consult and The Economist/YouGov, sample the question weekly, including this week. Democrats have held a consistent 3-point lead in Morning Consult and have toggled between 3 and 5 points in The Economist. Plus, Quinnipiac University chimed in last week with a whopping 9-point Democratic margin. Even if you deem that an outlier, we have no evidence of Democratic erosion, which we saw with Republican instigators during the 2013 shutdown before they threw in the towel. 

Should we assume Democrats can sustain their position? Yes, because their main argument—expiring Affordable Care Act [ACA] health insurance subsidies are too urgent to separate from reopening the government—is being validated daily. Open enrollment at Healthcare.gov starts on Saturday. And The Washington Post reported last week that “premiums for the most popular types of plans sold on the federal health insurance marketplace Healthcare.gov will spike on average by 30 percent next year,” and those spikes are “mirroring the rising cost of private-employer-sponsored plans.”  

ABC News reports that “more than 24 million people were enrolled in the [ACA] marketplace plans in 2025” and “the political pressure” to address the sharply higher costs “has been evident in Republican town halls.”  

In theory, Republicans could address the twin problems of reopening the government and tackling health care costs without Democratic help. But that would require a Republican health care plan and mustering the GOP votes to suspend the filibuster. 

The Wall Street Journal checked in with Senate Republicans about their appetite for junking the filibuster and found it was limited. Senators Tommy Tuberville and Josh Hawley were open to it. But the Senate Majority Leader John Thune said it was a “bad idea,” and retiring Senator Thom Tillis declared, “The filibuster is not going away this Congress,” even if Trump demanded it. 

But if Republicans suspended the filibuster, they are not positioned to tackle health insurance policy. It’s been eight years since Trump tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a comprehensive replacement. There still is no Republican plan, and there likely never will be. The Trump-era GOP is deeply conflicted between the party’s legacy of small government and its newfound embrace of government largesse as spoils for favored constituencies. Bridging that divide while crafting policies to regulate a complex industry is politically and substantively impossible. 

That leaves Republicans two choices: own a massive spike in health care costs heading into the 2026 midterms or cut a bipartisan deal.  

At the onset of open enrollment, Democrats have every reason to press their advantage. They can even sell it as a favor to Republicans: We know your most at-risk members don’t want to face voters suffering massive increases in health insurance premiums, and we recognize you can’t achieve partisan consensus on health care. We Democrats are your only hope.  

Should Democrats worry about being blamed for the elongated shutdown? Not if they remind everyone that Republicans, who have no nostalgia for norms, can reopen the government by suspending the filibuster. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer may be extremely reluctant to say that. After all, the filibuster gives minority leaders a lot of power. But Schumer was willing to suspend it when he was majority leader, so we know he’s not all that attached to it. In fact, that gives him more credibility to argue that Republicans have the power to open the government, and if they can’t cobble the votes among themselves to do it, then they have no choice but to do it in a bipartisan way. This requires a bipartisan solution to spiking health insurance premiums and guaranteeing that any agreement isn’t subject to partisan clawbacks like the last deal.  

Democrats have something the opposition party in a shutdown showdown has never had: the upper hand. Why give it up now?  

The post Democrats Have Every Reason to Dig in Their Heels  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Almost twelve months after their drubbing in the 2024 election, Democrats are still having a tired argument about the party’s future. Should it move left, reclaim the center, or lurch right to win back the working class?  

The New York Times editorial board offered its answer in October, with an article titled “The Partisans Are Wrong: Moving to the Center Is the Way to Win.” The story profiled a group of mostly Democratic elected officials characterized as moderates: Marcy Kaptur in Ohio, Pat Ryan in New York, Jared Golden in Maine, Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Jacky Rosen in Nevada, and Vicente Gonzalez in Texas. Citing a post-election analysis, it found that these “moderate” Democrats outperformed Kamala Harris by 2.8 points. At the same time, progressives—including Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—lagged behind her. Of the 17 Democrats (13 House, four Senate) who won in places Trump carried in 2024, “moderation dominated their campaign messages,” the Times found. 

Buried in the essay, though, is one line that really crystallizes what is going on:  

The moderation that has worked best in recent years is not a sober, 20th-century centrism that promises to protect the status quo. It is more combative and populist. [Emphasis added]  

You don’t say.  

The Democrats who succeeded best in 2024—especially in purple and red territory—weren’t economically moderate in any recognizable Beltway sense. They were populists who focused relentlessly on prices, jobs, and manufacturing. On economic policy, these politicians are well to the left of the “moderate” consensus that has long dominated Washington think tanks and the columns of liberal-centrist luminaries like Jonathan Chait, Matthew Yglesias, Derek Thompson, and Ezra Klein. These writers generally support industrial policy in principle but shy away from its populist edge—from talk of greedflation, strategic tariffs, corporate power, or monopolies—even as they celebrate the candidates whose victories were built on those themes.  

In January, Chait, for example, argued in The Atlantic that the party’s Biden-era turn against free-trade orthodoxy—toward labor, antitrust, and industrial policy—was a bust. “The theory that populist economic policies can win back the working class for Democrats has been tried, and it has failed,” he wrote. Chait endorsed Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s “abundance agenda,” also co-signed by Yglesias, which promises faster growth in housing and energy through deregulation and preemption of local control. The “abundance” advocates mainly treat populist economics as a left-wing indulgence rather than the beating heart of today’s political center. “[Former Pennsylvania Senator] Bob Casey did more than any other frontline Democrat to make opposition to greedflation and price gouging the core of his campaign message,” Yglesias wrote in June, “It didn’t work.”  

But that misreads what voters rewarded, and what they punished. The problem in 2024 wasn’t Biden’s focus on jobs and manufacturing or antitrust. It was essentially inflation plus his border policy, and Bob Casey never tried to distance himself from the latter. Democrats who survived in swing and red-leaning districts separated themselves from the administration’s immigration approach even as they embraced its populist economic policies. They championed the factories and infrastructure Biden helped deliver, not the chaos at the border that dominated national headlines. For example, Marcy Kaptur won her 22nd term in a Toledo, Ohio-based district that Trump carried by seven points. The 79-year-old, often a GOP target, ran on reviving American manufacturing and “what America makes and grows,” backing tariffs on Chinese steel and steering federal dollars toward Midwest battery plants. She argued in a campaign ad last year, “America has gotten off course,” citing “the far left ignoring millions illegally crossing the border and trying to defund the police” and “the far right taking away women’s rights and protecting greedy corporations at every turn.”  

Recent polling shows just how potent that kind of populism remains. Voters overwhelmingly support policies that take on corporate pricing power—preferring crackdowns on price gouging to the “abundance” liberal prescriptions of cutting red tape by a two-to-one margin. According to a Third Way post-mortem, voters in battleground states trusted Trump over Harris on border security by a staggering 21-point margin, far larger than the gap on economic issues. In short, border chaos and inflation, not populist economic policies, were 2024’s albatross for Democrats.  

The very winners the Times lists as evidence of the broad appeal of “centrism” ran on anti-monopoly populism and place-based industrial policy. Culturally, they’re not movement activists but coalition builders—Democrats who speak to their districts, not just their base. They reject the punitive cruelty of the right and the moral absolutism that the left sometimes exudes, projecting a kind of moral seriousness without moral superiority. It’s a nuance that the centrist pundits recognize, and that many progressives dismiss as irrelevant. This, plus the working-class roots many of them have, gives them a better connection with voters. “If they went to a P.T.A. meeting at their school, they wouldn’t be viewed as a snooty middle-class parent,” observed Jared Abbott, director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, on Ezra Klein’s podcast. “Then you have somebody like an Elizabeth Warren, who has all this great stuff but doesn’t have that kind of effect.” 

Consider the roster the Times celebrates: Jared Golden, a Marine veteran from Maine’s 2nd District, who is facing a stiff primary challenge, rejects the left-right dichotomy altogether. “The political spectrum does not exist in nature,” he says. His shorthand: “progressive economics, cultural conservatism”: “Tax the rich to cut the deficit: pro-business and pro-antitrust. Corporate welfare is bad; direct payments to families are good. Financialization of the economy is sometimes bad, protective tariffs are sometimes good.” Golden frustrates many Democrats because of his penchant to break ranks, as he did recently when he supported a Republican bill to keep the government open that lacked the Democratic Party’s demands. But such rogue moments are probably necessary for Golden to survive in a district Trump won handily. More importantly, on economic philosophy, it sounds to me like Golden has been reading the Washington Monthly or The American Prospect, not the well-funded new “abundance”-coded magazine, The Argument. 

Meanwhile, Pat Ryan outperformed Kamala Harris by double digits in New York’s Hudson Valley and flipped a swing seat by hammering corporate price-gouging and monopolies. Ryan, an Iraq War veteran and the son of a small business owner and public school teacher, co-founded the Monopoly Busters Caucus, which is pushing the Federal Trade Commission to revive the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act to fight against predatory pricing for small businesses. (Yglesias has criticized the enforcement of the law and defends various forms of price discrimination. ) Ryan’s “patriotic populism,” he told New York magazine, targets “greedy and corrupt elites”—oil executives and tax-dodging tech moguls—while casting “scrappy, hungry innovators” as the heroes. At the anti-monopoly conference sponsored by the American Economic Liberties Project in Washington, D.C., last month, Ryan and Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego gave rousing speeches about their fights against concentrated economic power, and for reshoring supply chains and manufacturing.  

“Anything that empowers the consumer, the everyday person, is going to be a very popular message,” Gallego declared at the conference. “It can be an antitrust, anti-monopoly, anti-big-business message, but it has to be centered on the person and making their life better and easier … Anything that we can do to make that person have a little more at the end of the month will make a huge difference,” he said. “If we do that, that’s a winning message. It can win in any cycle, in almost any state, or environment.”  

When Gallego, an Iraq War vet who worked at a meatpacking plant as a teenager, talks about industry consolidation, he makes it very concrete. “It’s not a theoretical antitrust situation,” he said. “This is about how people are living now.” He pointed to grocery mergers, independent pharmacy closures, and algorithmic price-fixing that have made everyday life more expensive. And he skewered Silicon Valley’s sanitized self-image: “The old robber barons wore top hats and twirled their mustaches,” he said. “Today it’s the guy drinking matcha tea in a gray sweatshirt, going to yoga class. Those people are just as bad for consumers.”  

Gallego certainly isn’t allergic to all the so-called “abundance” agenda. Like most pragmatic Democrats, he supports faster housing and energy infrastructure construction to bring down costs—areas where populists and “abundance” liberals overlap. But neither permitting reform nor growth is the core of his message. 

Moving north to Wisconsin, Senator Tammy Baldwin fought for Buy America rules in the 2024 defense bill while her colleague, Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin, campaigned on reshoring semiconductors and EV supply chains through the CHIPS Act. In Texas, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, and in Nevada, Senator Jacky Rosen, both took tough stances on illegal immigration in their campaigns—criticizing their own party’s tolerance of a broken border—even as they also spoke against corporate greed. Both slammed oil companies for price gouging, and Rosen urged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and crack down on Big Oil mergers that “greatly reduce competition and drive up gas prices at the pump.” And in Washington state, freshman Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez crafted a rural Democrat brand by focusing on issues like right-to-repair for farm equipment, antitrust enforcement on Big Ag and Big Tech, and other pro-small-business populist ideas. Even Rep. Seth Moulton, whom Matt Yglesias has championed as a challenger to the 79-year-old Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, is a cofounder of the Congressional Antitrust Caucus and has been a leader in the House on combating algorithmic rent hikes.  

These are not “centrist Democrats” in the Kyrsten Sinema mold. They don’t sell moderation as a virtue in itself. Their populism defends production over speculation, competition over consolidation, and work over finance. None of them trumpet the supposed advantages of monopolies in ushering in new technological wonders—the way Yglesias, Thompson, Klein, and other “abundance” pundits do. The politicians who actually win in hard districts aren’t making paeans to the efficiency of big businesses; they’re fighting to keep power diffuse and local. In fact, it’s hard to think of a worse message than: “We’ll build data centers and solar farms in your rural community without your input.” That’s not moderation. Voters, especially rural ones with whom Democrats desperately need to become competitive again, call that insane.  

Stanford Political Scientist Adam Bonica, who has challenged the statistical basis of the Times story, nevertheless agrees that winning moderate candidates are those “who can channel voter fury at a broken system into a concrete agenda for change.” The successful Democratic politicians don’t sound moderate because they’ve sanded off their edges. They sound moderate because they’ve rebuilt a moral vocabulary around work and place. At a moment when every argument is nationalized, they talk about the price of milk, the closing factory, and the bridge that finally got fixed. They are impatient with faculty lounge language, suspicious of elites, and generally allergic to bullshit. Call it whatever you want—populism, moderation, common sense. The country seems ready to reward it.  

The post The Rise of the Populist Moderates  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Before government shutdowns end, political blame games begin. And as politicians from both parties try to blame each other, party operatives and pundits scour the poll data to see who wins the game. Often, they look at poll questions that directly ask which party deserves blame or gauge party favorability.  

But to my eye, only one poll number really matters in determining whether a government shutdown is having any political impact: the generic congressional ballot test. 

The generic congressional ballot test involves some form of the question: if the congressional election were today, which party’s candidate would you vote for in your House district? 

In this polarized era, party favorability is low, with blame for most things falling along party lines and a healthy chunk of the electorate quick to cast a pox on both sides. But the generic congressional ballot test forces poll respondents to choose one party over the other. 

Take the 17-day shutdown of October 2013, when Republicans, prodded by Senator Ted Cruz, refused to fund the government unless President Barack Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, was defunded. Over the summer of 2013, the Democratic lead in the Real Clear Politics generic congressional ballot average had disappeared, from 6.3 percentage points in April to zero in August. As the threat of a shutdown grew in September, the Democratic lead increased by 2.4 points. By the end of the shutdown on October 17, the Democratic lead was up to 5.5 points and peaked at 6.6 by early November. The public opinion cratering was impossible to deny, so Republicans caved without nicking Obamacare. 

Today marks the 17th day of the 2025 shutdown, with Democrats demanding renewals of expiring Affordable Care Act enhanced subsidies. Yet the Democrats’ electoral standing is essentially unchanged. The average Democratic lead in all generic congressional ballot test polls sampled in September was 3.1 points, and for those taken in October, 2.7 points.  

Does this mean the shutdown will help Democrats in November 2026? An argument made after the fact by Republican proponents of the 2013 shutdown (and Democratic advocates for adopting similar smashmouth tactics) was that Republicans had a great 2014 midterm, holding the House and taking the Senate. But Republican improvement in the generic congressional ballot test only improved after they abandoned the shutdown without any policy concessions to show for it. Republicans didn’t win in 2014 because of the 2013 shutdown; they won because they gave up on it and gave the public plenty of time to forget that it happened. 

Unless the current shutdown continues for months (which it could!), voters a year from now probably won’t factor it into their Election Day decision-making. But Democratic leaders today must constantly assess whether their highwire tactics are putting their swing district and swing state candidates at risk. So far, the answer is clearly: nope. 

Should Democrats be sanguine about a 3-point generic congressional ballot lead in the polling average? Not quite. The aggregate Republican House popular vote margin has beaten the RCP generic congressional ballot average eight out of 12 times, including the last three elections (albeit only by 0.3 points in 2022). But Democrats have beaten the spread before, most recently in 2018—the previous midterm when Donald Trump was president, when Democrats flipped the House. They were already cruising with a poll average lead of 7.3, then outperformed in the popular vote by 1.1 points. 

Would a three-point lead in the popular vote be sufficient for Democrats to win, after considering gerrymandering? We don’t know yet what the final lines for 2026 will be, or whether aggressive Republican gerrymandering will help them add seats or backfire by spreading their votes out thinly and failing to account for swing voters, particularly Latinos. But despite past gerrymandering concerns, the winning party’s share of the House popular vote in the last four House elections closely tracked its share of the House seats. Three points may be enough, but Democrats won’t feel comfortable without more of a cushion in the polls. 

So congressional Democrats can’t presume the shutdown will seal the Election Day deal, though I doubt they ever held such an assumption. But considering that the existing Democratic lead in the generic congressional ballot test has held up after more than two weeks of a shutdown, with other polls asking about blame showing Republicans are shouldering the most, Democrats appear to keep their base energized without sacrificing swing votes. Without weakening their midterm prospects, Democrats have zero incentive to surrender. 

The post Democrats Are Winning the Survey Question That Matters appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The longest federal government shutdown in American history is 35 days, spanning December 2018 and January 2019. Technically, it was a partial shutdown because appropriations for some agencies were approved before the beginning of Fiscal Year 2019. It is also the only government shutdown directly instigated by a President of the United States, one Donald J. Trump, who wanted to hold the government hostage until Congress agreed to give him billions for building a border wall.  

Since then, America has had 2,440 days of fully operating federal governance. (Joe Biden pitched a perfect game.) Trump is back, and the streak has ended. With zero Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations bills passed by Congress, this shutdown is total, save for essential employees. 

My bet is that this shutdown will break the 35-day record, with no partial shutdown asterisks. 

Why? Because Trump doesn’t care if the government shuts down. He has no interest in what most of the federal government does, beyond what it can do for him. Through the Office of Management and Budget, he has the power to deem certain government workers essential, which fulfills his desire to exert unilateral power. 

Democrats, all things being equal, do care about what the federal government does. But Trump is already stripping the civil service down to the studs while asserting unlimited executive powers. Democrats, for the most part, do not want to abet Trump’s agenda with passive votes for Republican spending bills, nor are they afraid of taking blame for any of the consequences of a shutdown.  

Perhaps they should be. I have already expressed my disagreements with the tactical choices by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. But Trump begins this standoff with much of the public aghast at his chaotic authoritarianism; a new New York Times poll shows majorities believe Trump has “gone too far” by pressuring media outlets, sending the National Guard into cities, and with immigration enforcement generally. Trump has been such a colossal chaos agent and has been so dismissive of bipartisan negotiations that Democrats have reason to believe he won’t escape blame for one more act of chaos, even though Democrats have complicated their preferred narrative by making their own demands regarding renewal of expiring health coverage subsidies. 

Moreover, Democratic Party favorability is already pretty low, just 33 percent in the Real Clear Politics average. A shutdown probably can’t make it go much lower and could give it a slight boost if frustrated rank-and-file Democrats are energized. Having said that, the poll number Democrats will want to keep a closer eye on is the generic congressional ballot, where they now hold a slight edge. Slippage there in reaction to a shutdown may prompt calls for surrender. Short of that, Democrats should have no problem allowing the federal government to stay closed and pinning the resulting chaos on the person tagged as the “Chaos President” before he even held the office.  

Might Schumer wobble? Some Democrats were frustrated when he shied away from the shutdown standoff in March. And Punchbowl News’s Andrew Desiderio reported on Monday that “Schumer has approached a small group of Senate Dems to see if they’re OK with short-term [spending bill] (10 days, for example), but with a caveat—assuming Trump agrees to a negotiation on [Affordable Care Act] subsidies.” Punchbowl subsequently reported that the small olive branch “drew the ire of House Democrats.” Schumer didn’t propose it when he met with Trump.  

Just as rank-and-file Democrats are pressuring Schumer to walk away from the negotiating table, Trump is doing everything possible to push him away. Following that meeting, Trump posted on his social media page a deepfake video of Schumer telling a sombrero-clad Jeffries, over a track of mariachi music, “we have no voters anymore because of our woke trans bullshit” so “if we give all these illegal aliens free health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.” Republicans had some ground to stand on in arguing Democrats were instigating the shutdown by insisting on renewing expiring health coverage subsidies. Still, they sacrificed that ground by lying about what Democrats were demanding. Beyond the substantive dishonesty, attempting to humiliate Schumer only gives him a political incentive to stand his ground.  

And so does Trump, spending precious time, as the shutdown clock ticks, telling military leaders to expect deployment to American cities to fight a “war from within” in apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.  

Furthermore, Democrats have an available response to Republican attempts to shift all the blame onto them: Republicans don’t need us to open the government. They can change Senate rules and suspend or eliminate the filibuster on a party-line vote. And Republicans can’t argue that they think changing the rules on a party-line vote—the so-called “nuclear option”—is a terrible violation of Senate norms because Republicans literally changed the rules on a party-line vote three weeks ago to speed confirmation of judicial nominees. If they don’t go nuclear and kill the filibuster to keep the government open, that shows how little they care about keeping it open, and how much they care about creating excuses for vilifying Democrats.

(Longtime readers of my work know I like the filibuster, so I have no ulterior motive in goading Republicans into abolishing it. But let’s get real: Senators in both parties have gone “nuclear” enough that the filibuster rule is already hanging by a thread.) 

All this is to say that we shouldn’t expect a shutdown to end anytime soon, primarily because Trump is a reckless authoritarian with no obvious interest in negotiations or in maintaining the bulk of what the federal government does, and far more interested in scurrilous political combat. 

The post Republicans Can End the Government Shutdown Today appeared first on Washington Monthly.

With little chance of passage for legislation to keep the federal government open before the new fiscal year begins on October 1, President Donald Trump instructed federal agencies to prepare for mass layoffs—not temporary layoffs during a typical government shutdown, but permanent layoffs that would leave thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of American workers unemployed.  

The Washington Post asserted that “the directive increases pressure on congressional Democrats.” This is incorrect. The directive is intended to pressure congressional Democrats because they don’t want to see the civil service decimated, but it does the opposite. By eagerly compounding the negative consequences of a shutdown, Trump is complicating any attempt to pin a shutdown solely on Democrats.  

Meanwhile, Democrats are flying close to the political sun by making policy demands in exchange for keeping the government open, focusing on the looming expiration of enhanced levels of Affordable Care Act subsidies. Last week, Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor, “We want to keep the government open by engaging in bipartisan negotiations, where we can address some of the grave harms Donald Trump has caused to our healthcare system and help Americans with the cost of living.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also centered on health care, telling reporters on Wednesday, “Any agreement related to protecting the health care of the American people has to be ironclad and in legislation.” 

As I wrote earlier this month, every past attempt to use government shutdowns to extract policy concessions has failed, even when the policy demands are politically popular, because “shutdowns make people forget what you have to say. Public attention shifts to how shutdowns hurt average Americans and how one political party is willing to harm constituents to play political games. Once public opinion quickly turns, the shutdown agitators invariably realize the shutdown failed to provide negotiating leverage and eventually cave.” 

Democrats might take solace that Trump is blundering towards at least partial ownership of a shutdown, but they are still at high risk of owning a piece for themselves. 

My counsel to Democrats was and is to walk away from the negotiating table completely, because Republicans have already broken faith by clawing back money from the last bipartisan spending deal. With Trump and his budget director explicitly trashing the idea of a bipartisan appropriations process, Democrats have additional ground to say: Republicans want to keep the government open by themselves, so any shutdown is their problem to solve, not ours. If that means Republicans need to suspend or end the filibuster to do it, that’s also on them. Last week, Trump even said of the opposition party, “Don’t even bother dealing with them.” 

In a New York Times column, Nate Silver argued Democrats should swap tariffs for health care as the issue to link to keeping the government open, since Trump’s tariffs are demonstrably unpopular and could “drive a greater wedge between Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans.” I believe this still violates the cardinal rule about shutdown demands: No matter how popular the demand is in a vacuum, that popularity will be overwhelmed by the unpopularity of the shutdown.  

Silver expressed sympathy for my proposal but fretted, “The message—actually, we’re not negotiating, we’re refusing to negotiate; you have your majorities and all of this is your problem—would require a lot of discipline in practice, and Democrats aren’t very good at that.” I disagree! It’s a simple message succinctly articulated by Nate Silver!  

It doesn’t need detailed policy explanations. Reporters can’t probe for weaknesses by suggesting hypothetical compromises. Once Democrats say they’ve walked away from a table that Republicans never invited them to join, there’s essentially nothing left for them to discuss or do. Media attention will quickly shift away from the Democrats, as the focus turns to: So, what will Republicans do to address this crisis? 

To quibble with Silver’s summation of the message, “we’re refusing to negotiate” should be replaced with “Trump is refusing to negotiate.” Combined with Trump’s mass layoff plan, this gives Schumer and Jeffries an off-ramp from their current doomed-to-fail strategy. Democratic policies that poll well cannot bring Trump to heel because the president is a budding authoritarian who ignores polls. If you propose an idea that helps people, he will counter with one that harms them and dare you to escalate further.  

If it wasn’t clear that Trump and his Republican allies were not good-faith negotiating partners before, it should be now. Forgive the glib sports analogy, but you can’t win a game with someone playing an entirely different game. So, stop playing.  

Instead, the Democratic leaders can now say:  

We asked President Trump to work with us to prevent a spike in health care costs for working-class Americans. He responded by refusing to meet with us, telling other Republicans they shouldn’t bother with us, and threatening to add thousands of hard-working civil servants to the unemployment rolls. This is not a person with whom we can negotiate in good faith. While Democrats do not want a government shutdown, Republicans must find a way to use their majorities to keep the government open. We wish them good luck.  

Silver also said of my strategy, expressing skepticism, “The crisis atmosphere that Democrats are treating as a desirable feature of the shutdown might be exactly what Mr. Trump wants.” But I wouldn’t argue that Democrats should walk away to provoke a crisis. We are already drowning in crises—constitutional, legal, ethical, and economic—shutdown or no shutdown, whether we like it or not. They are crises of Trump’s making, and Democrats can do little about them save for winning control of Congress in 2026 and the presidency in 2028. For now, Democrats have no obligation to provide a tiny bucket of water to the MAGA gang of political arsonists.  

The post The Democrats’ Shutdown Strategy Is Bad. Trump’s Is Worse  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In late summer of a typical year, both parties in Congress are drafting bipartisan appropriations legislation that won’t get filibustered in the Senate and will keep the federal government open when the next fiscal year starts on October 1.  

This year is not typical.  

Congressional Republicans, at President Donald Trump’s behest, have unapologetically broken faith in the appropriations process by undermining a bipartisan agreement struck just four months ago. That deal kept the government open through the current fiscal year. Since Democrats can no longer trust Republicans to keep their word, they should abandon negotiations over Fiscal Year 2026 spending and let the Republican majority figure out how to keep the government open.  

Let’s review what just happened. 

During Fiscal Year 2025, Congress passed three bills to fund the federal government, the last signed by Trump in March. These bills set specific spending amounts for government programs. 

Last week, Republicans exploited a quirk in the law that allows the Senate to vote on a presidential request for “recissions”—cuts to previously agreed-upon spending amounts—without the possibility of a filibuster. Without any Democratic votes in favor, Republicans clawed back $8 billion in foreign aid and $1 billion in support for public broadcasting. An agreement on funding levels, approved of by a bipartisan Senate supermajority, was rolled back by a narrow partisan simple majority. 

If you are charitable, you might say: Nine billion dollars is a rounding error on nearly $7 trillion of federal spending. The lion’s share of the agreement held. And this only happened once. There’s no need to overreact, end negotiations, and stumble into a government shutdown.  

However, Trump’s budget director Russ Vought said afterwards that the recissions package was not intended to be a one-off, but the beginning of a new appropriations process. “Who ran and won on an agenda of a bipartisan appropriations process? Literally, no one,” Vought told reporters at the July 17 Christian Science Monitor Breakfast, “No Democrat, no Republican. There is no voter in the country [who] went to the polls and said, ‘I’m voting for a bipartisan appropriations process.’ The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan.” He also said another recissions package is “likely to come soon.” 

So there will be a next time, and the next recissions may be even bigger. Any bipartisan agreement is worthless. Trump and the Republican majority will determine the final budget. Why should Democrats provide a wisp of bipartisan cover?  

Beyond passing recissions through legal, if dishonorable, methods, the White House has also spent the last six months sandbagging Congress’s power of the purse by decimating federal agencies with mass layoffs of government workers. 

The Democratic response to Vought should be: You want a partisan appropriations process? You got it.  

The ranking member of the House Budget Committee, Brendan Boyle, in an article for The Bulwark, encouraged “my fellow Democrats to be wary this September before lending their votes for deals that President Trump is inevitably going to disregard through illegal impoundments, or that Republicans are just going to rip up anyway. Doing so will chip away at public trust, undermine our ability to govern effectively, and weaken the checks and balances meant to protect democracy.” 

I would take it a step farther. 

Democrats should immediately announce that all talks about Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations are over. Democrats, even in the congressional minority, are willing to share the responsibility of governing for the common good. But they cannot exercise joint responsibility if Republicans not only won’t keep bipartisan agreements but are openly dismissive of them. 

Where would that leave the appropriations process?  

Under the current rules, in limbo. Trump just signed what he calls the One Big Beautiful Bill, which cleared Congress through the budget reconciliation process, which forbids a Senate filibuster. But as the current rules stand, the type of spending determined through the annual appropriations process is not eligible for budget reconciliation. To pass the Senate, 60 votes will be needed, which means securing at least seven Democratic votes.  

Does that guarantee a government shutdown for which Democrats will get blamed?  

No. Republicans would have two options. 

One, Republicans could change the rules. After all, these are not folks who are especially enamored with norms and precedents. For example, in the budget reconciliation process, Republicans wriggled out of rules meant to limit deficit spending by asserting that expiring tax cuts—initially made temporary to survive budget reconciliation rules—could be extended as “current policy” without adding to the deficit. Republicans then prevented Democrats from having the Senate parliamentarian review the maneuver.  

Skirting the parliamentarian was a hair short of overruling the parliamentarian by majority vote. Senate rule changes are supposed to require a two-thirds vote. Still, everyone knows that rule changes can be, and have been, steamrolled by overruling the parliamentarian by simple majority. (This is the so-called “nuclear option” maneuver.) But nothing is stopping Republicans from crossing that line too, except the recognizing Democrats could do the same the next time they have a Senate majority. If you want a partisan appropriations process, that’s how to get it.  

Two, Republicans could capitulate. The Fiscal Year 2026 appropriation bills could include provisions that protect spending from the threat of recission. Separate legislation could be enacted that broadly subjects future rescission requests to filibusters.  

The former, of course, is more likely than the latter. But both are ways the Republican majority is empowered to avoid a government shutdown. They are the party in control. They have already indicated they do not believe the minority party should share governing responsibilities. So it’s entirely on Republicans to keep the government open; they own the consequences of failing to do so. It’s not the Democrats’ job to keep the government open and have no say in how the federal government functions. 

Why wait to make that clear? Democrats shouldn’t want to have a government shutdown. Publicly ending negotiations now gives Republicans the maximum time to determine their next steps. Trump is already pressuring the Senate Majority Leader to cancel the August recess to get more of his nominees confirmed, including highly controversial ones such as Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to a federal appeals court despite being accused by a whistleblower of encouraging defiance of judicial orders. If Republicans are going to cut short their break, they might as well work on keeping the government open. 

Sometimes the minority party is caught between what’s politically smart and what’s necessary for the public interest. This is not one of those times. Walk away. 

The post Democrats Should Get Tough and Quit Negotiating Spending Bills  appeared first on Washington Monthly.