As one of President Joe Biden’s top economic advisers, I frequently made my way out to the White House North Lawn to give interviews to the media about the state of the U.S. economy. Especially as the pandemic-induced recession faded in the rearview mirror, I was out there hundreds of times touting how the unemployment rate was at 50-year lows on the back of remarkably strong job growth. Inflation was falling and inflation-adjusted pay was rising.

And yet in every single interview, I got the same question: So why aren’t people feeling it? Why so much good data amid so many bad vibes?

In fact, the question was not hard to answer. It comes down to one word, a word that defines the dominant economic challenge with which American families have been struggling for years: affordability. Whether it’s housing, child care, health care, groceries, utilities, insurance, or other costs, significant numbers of Americans have found that these and other critical goods and services are either out of reach or so pricey that, after they’ve paid for them, they don’t have enough money left to even think about getting ahead.

This duality between the data and how people experience the economy is the subject of The Mismeasurement of America, by Gene Ludwig, a former comptroller of the currency during the Clinton administration. Focusing on unemployment, wages, inflation, and the growing economic distance between Americans at the top and the bottom of the income scale, Ludwig argues that the problem is that the numbers I was touting were, if not quite wrong, then “profoundly misleading.” He then develops his own set of numbers, which he argues better explain why people have long felt a lot worse about the economy than you’d glean from the government’s top-line statistics. While Ludwig is right that top-line numbers, all of which are broad averages, fail to present a full picture of how the different income classes are faring, that’s not a “mismeasurement” problem. It instead reflects the impossibility of encompassing in just a few numbers something as complex and disparate as the U.S. economy. A better title for his book might have been “The Incomplete Measurement of America.”

Ludwig’s critique of inflation statistics is particularly germane to the affordability crisis. The Consumer Price Index is an overall metric that averages out the changes in prices faced by 90 percent of the population. (The CPI does not include prices in extremely rural areas, farm households, and religious communities, among other exceptions.) Ludwig reasonably worries, however, that the average obscures important differences in inflation between income groups.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publishes the CPI, has itself been looking into this and they find that from 2005 to 2024, prices rose 66 percent for those in the bottom fifth of the income scale but just 57 percent for those at the top. This disparity is a double disadvantage: Such households face both lower incomes and higher prices. Ludwig’s adjusted CPI, which he calls the “True Living Cost,” or TLC, captures this dynamic by significantly up-weighting in the index the goods and services that dominate the consumption basket of less-well-off households, including housing, health care, food, and child care.

While this is the right way to drill down on the affordability challenges facing low- and middle-income families today, Ludwig misses one of the more important positive price developments of our time. For technology goods, like computers and smartphones, the TLC registers large price increases while the CPI registers the opposite. The CPI has it right, reflecting a rare cost decline that’s actively making us better off. The BLS statisticians adjust for the fact that computers and cell phones are remarkably more powerful than they used to be. Decades ago, it would have cost millions of dollars for a computer to do what a $700 laptop can do today. Adjusted for quality, the cost of such technology has fallen sharply over the years, and this decline has improved consumer welfare. Yet the TLC appears to ignore these quality improvements and somehow has technology costs soaring over time.

For another example of how Ludwig offers an overreaching solution to a real measurement challenge, consider unemployment. Ludwig argues that instead of the 4.3 percent unemployment rate for August reported by the BLS, what he calls the TRU—the “True Rate of Unemployment”—is 24.7 percent. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of unemployment in America will realize that Ludwig has either made a mistake or is aggressively redefining unemployment. The last time unemployment was that high was during the Great Depression.

Ludwig’s “unemployment” rate, however, includes a lot of people who are, in fact, working, both part-timers and low earners. His terminology is thus off, as is his critique of the current measurement system, which is clearly, transparently, and consistently measuring what it says it’s measuring. If you looked for a job and you didn’t find one, you’re unemployed. That simple and intuitive definition has revealed important information about labor market conditions for many decades.

But as Ludwig’s adjustments reveal, there were a lot more underemployed and underpaid people in the American labor force in August than 4.3 percent. That doesn’t make the official unemployment rate wrong or misleading. Though Donald Trump, who recently fired the commissioner of the BLS, might claim otherwise, our statistical agencies continue to rigorously churn out valid, reliable numbers. (Trump doesn’t like that they show the tariffs raising prices and cracks forming in the job market, but that’s actually a testament to their accuracy.) But Ludwig’s metric helps to bridge the gap between what the official jobless numbers say and the struggle that many working Americans go through every day.

Extracting from these weedy details, and recognizing that the current system is not mismeasuring America, Ludwig’s book provides an important bridge between good data and bad vibes. As he shows, in an economy where inequality has been on the rise for decades, where millions are underemployed, where poor people’s inflation rises faster than that of the rich, averages increasingly fail to tell the full economic story.

Of course, many authors, most notably Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, have made this point before. But by looking at the problem through the lens of jobs, hours worked, wages paid, the costs of housing (and utilities, such as electricity), child care, health care, and so on, Ludwig’s measurements help to shine a light on a policy agenda to address the affordability crisis. His underemployment rate would come down, for example, if we helped involuntary part-timers move to full-time schedules. (Ludwig would correctly note that such a change would not show up in a lower unemployment rate.) An affordability agenda, which Neale Mahoney and I describe in a new brief from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, would help make it easier for economically stretched families to afford housing (by making it easier and cheaper to build), child care (through targeted subsidies), and health care (reversing coverage cuts, Medicare buy-in) in ways that would directly feed into Ludwig’s alternate cost-of-living measure.

What we should take from this book, then, is not that America is mismeasured. It’s that the gap between what the top-line numbers report and how folks feel about their economic situation is, in part, a function of the increase in economic inequality, of how far they’ve fallen relative to the average. Should we want to better understand how America is really doing, we must dig deeper into the numbers.

The post Measuring the Vibecession 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.

As one of President Joe Biden’s top economic advisers, I frequently made my way out to the White House North Lawn to give interviews to the media about the state of the U.S. economy. Especially as the pandemic-induced recession faded in the rearview mirror, I was out there hundreds of times touting how the unemployment rate was at 50-year lows on the back of remarkably strong job growth. Inflation was falling and inflation-adjusted pay was rising.

And yet in every single interview, I got the same question: So why aren’t people feeling it? Why so much good data amid so many bad vibes?

In fact, the question was not hard to answer. It comes down to one word, a word that defines the dominant economic challenge with which American families have been struggling for years: affordability. Whether it’s housing, child care, health care, groceries, utilities, insurance, or other costs, significant numbers of Americans have found that these and other critical goods and services are either out of reach or so pricey that, after they’ve paid for them, they don’t have enough money left to even think about getting ahead.

This duality between the data and how people experience the economy is the subject of The Mismeasurement of America, by Gene Ludwig, a former comptroller of the currency during the Clinton administration. Focusing on unemployment, wages, inflation, and the growing economic distance between Americans at the top and the bottom of the income scale, Ludwig argues that the problem is that the numbers I was touting were, if not quite wrong, then “profoundly misleading.” He then develops his own set of numbers, which he argues better explain why people have long felt a lot worse about the economy than you’d glean from the government’s top-line statistics. While Ludwig is right that top-line numbers, all of which are broad averages, fail to present a full picture of how the different income classes are faring, that’s not a “mismeasurement” problem. It instead reflects the impossibility of encompassing in just a few numbers something as complex and disparate as the U.S. economy. A better title for his book might have been “The Incomplete Measurement of America.”

Ludwig’s critique of inflation statistics is particularly germane to the affordability crisis. The Consumer Price Index is an overall metric that averages out the changes in prices faced by 90 percent of the population. (The CPI does not include prices in extremely rural areas, farm households, and religious communities, among other exceptions.) Ludwig reasonably worries, however, that the average obscures important differences in inflation between income groups.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publishes the CPI, has itself been looking into this and they find that from 2005 to 2024, prices rose 66 percent for those in the bottom fifth of the income scale but just 57 percent for those at the top. This disparity is a double disadvantage: Such households face both lower incomes and higher prices. Ludwig’s adjusted CPI, which he calls the “True Living Cost,” or TLC, captures this dynamic by significantly up-weighting in the index the goods and services that dominate the consumption basket of less-well-off households, including housing, health care, food, and child care.

While this is the right way to drill down on the affordability challenges facing low- and middle-income families today, Ludwig misses one of the more important positive price developments of our time. For technology goods, like computers and smartphones, the TLC registers large price increases while the CPI registers the opposite. The CPI has it right, reflecting a rare cost decline that’s actively making us better off. The BLS statisticians adjust for the fact that computers and cell phones are remarkably more powerful than they used to be. Decades ago, it would have cost millions of dollars for a computer to do what a $700 laptop can do today. Adjusted for quality, the cost of such technology has fallen sharply over the years, and this decline has improved consumer welfare. Yet the TLC appears to ignore these quality improvements and somehow has technology costs soaring over time.

For another example of how Ludwig offers an overreaching solution to a real measurement challenge, consider unemployment. Ludwig argues that instead of the 4.3 percent unemployment rate for August reported by the BLS, what he calls the TRU—the “True Rate of Unemployment”—is 24.7 percent. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of unemployment in America will realize that Ludwig has either made a mistake or is aggressively redefining unemployment. The last time unemployment was that high was during the Great Depression.

Ludwig’s “unemployment” rate, however, includes a lot of people who are, in fact, working, both part-timers and low earners. His terminology is thus off, as is his critique of the current measurement system, which is clearly, transparently, and consistently measuring what it says it’s measuring. If you looked for a job and you didn’t find one, you’re unemployed. That simple and intuitive definition has revealed important information about labor market conditions for many decades.

But as Ludwig’s adjustments reveal, there were a lot more underemployed and underpaid people in the American labor force in August than 4.3 percent. That doesn’t make the official unemployment rate wrong or misleading. Though Donald Trump, who recently fired the commissioner of the BLS, might claim otherwise, our statistical agencies continue to rigorously churn out valid, reliable numbers. (Trump doesn’t like that they show the tariffs raising prices and cracks forming in the job market, but that’s actually a testament to their accuracy.) But Ludwig’s metric helps to bridge the gap between what the official jobless numbers say and the struggle that many working Americans go through every day.

Extracting from these weedy details, and recognizing that the current system is not mismeasuring America, Ludwig’s book provides an important bridge between good data and bad vibes. As he shows, in an economy where inequality has been on the rise for decades, where millions are underemployed, where poor people’s inflation rises faster than that of the rich, averages increasingly fail to tell the full economic story.

Of course, many authors, most notably Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, have made this point before. But by looking at the problem through the lens of jobs, hours worked, wages paid, the costs of housing (and utilities, such as electricity), child care, health care, and so on, Ludwig’s measurements help to shine a light on a policy agenda to address the affordability crisis. His underemployment rate would come down, for example, if we helped involuntary part-timers move to full-time schedules. (Ludwig would correctly note that such a change would not show up in a lower unemployment rate.) An affordability agenda, which Neale Mahoney and I describe in a new brief from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, would help make it easier for economically stretched families to afford housing (by making it easier and cheaper to build), child care (through targeted subsidies), and health care (reversing coverage cuts, Medicare buy-in) in ways that would directly feed into Ludwig’s alternate cost-of-living measure.

What we should take from this book, then, is not that America is mismeasured. It’s that the gap between what the top-line numbers report and how folks feel about their economic situation is, in part, a function of the increase in economic inequality, of how far they’ve fallen relative to the average. Should we want to better understand how America is really doing, we must dig deeper into the numbers.

The post Measuring the Vibecession appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In what is likely another attempt to distract from his many failings and broken promises, Donald Trump declared on his social media network that he is “going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and that he will do it unilaterally. He continued: 

WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections. Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do. 

In case anyone missed the point, on Monday, at the press conference for his high-stakes summit with Ukraine’s leader, he repeated his anti-mail-in ballot tirade as Volodymyr Zelensky looked on.   

You will not be surprised to hear that the federal government does not manage America’s elections, and state and local elections officials need not do what the President tells them. 

Nevertheless, Trump’s disparagement of vote-by-mail could prompt Republican governors and state legislators to pursue a fresh round of mail voting restrictions, and Republican political operatives to discourage mail voting among their rank and file.  

Following Trump’s advice on mail-in balloting would be bad … for Republicans.  

In the 2024 election, Republicans eased their unjustified opposition to mail balloting—Trump never abandoned it, but he softened his criticisms under pressure from party leaders—and it proved successful. The New York Times reported earlier in January: 

Republicans made almost universal gains in mail voting during the 2024 election, eroding a key Democratic advantage in nearly every state that tracks party registration, according to a data analysis by The New York Times. The Republican rise in the use of mail voting was almost always accompanied by a drop in registered Democrats casting a mail ballot, allowing Republicans to make significant inroads in battleground states like Pennsylvania, red states like Florida and blue states like Connecticut. 

In Pennsylvania, Republicans deployed a “multifaceted campaign of messaging, fund-raising and field operations,” boosting their share of the mail vote from 24 percent in 2020 to 33 percent in 2024. This proved critical. The Times reported: 

Before Election Day, some Democrats speculated that the Republican gains in mail voting simply represented a shift in which high-frequency G.O.P. voters had decided to cast early ballots, “cannibalizing” the party’s Election Day vote. But Republicans’ overall turnout edge proved to be real, and their improved early-voting numbers gave their campaigns an advantage. “When we were looking at daily returns and saw huge gains in the Republican vote-by-mail share compared to previous election cycles, we knew we were on the right pathway to winning this election,” said Matt Gruda, who managed [Dave] McCormick’s [Senate] campaign. “We were seeing these gains not only among the most frequent voters but even more so also among the voters who rarely vote in our elections.” 

And just because Pennsylvania Republicans were still the minority of mail voters doesn’t mean that’s true everywhere. The Times also noted: 

In deep-red Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa, Republicans made up a majority of mail voters in last year’s election, after Democrats dominated in those states in 2020.  

And in Arizona, a swing state where a vast majority of voters cast their ballots by mail, Republicans had an eight-point advantage over Democrats in mail voting. 

That many Republicans out West had no hang-ups probably stems from the fact that mail-in voting got some of its biggest early boosts from Western Republican governors and secretaries of state. 

None of this surprised me because I wrote in 2021 that the conventional wisdom, held by most major party leaders, that easier voting access inherently benefits Democrats, was clearly wrong. Republicans have won in states with high mail voting. Democrats have also won races in states with strict voter ID laws. And there is nothing about mail-in voting that is naturally more appealing to Democrats than Republicans. 

Before 2020, voters regardless of party affiliation “tended to just take advantage of the process, whatever it was in a state,” including vote by mail and early voting, according to John C. Fortier, a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. So the partisan split about traditional and nontraditional voting methods that we saw [in the 2020 presidential election], fueled by Donald Trump’s disparagement of mail voting and polarization around the merits of social distancing, should not color our views about which party would benefit from Democratic proposals to nationalize and encourage such methods. 

But now that Trump is back to full-throttle disparagement of mail voting, the gains Republicans made in 2024 may be reversed.  

Trump’s MAGA movement includes many low-propensity, unreliable voters, often in rural areas. In future elections, Republicans won’t have their greatest motivator of low-propensity voters on the ballot: Trump himself. He will never be on the ballot again, no matter what MAGA leaders see in their fever dreams. In turn, Republicans should recognize it is in their interest to make it easier for people in far-flung rural areas to vote by mail at home, instead of forcing them to travel long distances in uncertain weather to vote in person.  

But what is in the Republican Party’s long-term interest isn’t necessarily what is in Donald Trump’s short-term interest. And as far as I can tell, Trump perceives his short-term interest to be promoting conspiracy theories to justify power grabs. No Republican should feel obliged to indulge Trump’s self-serving paranoia.

The post Trump Demands: Ditch Vote-By-Mail. Republicans Shouldn’t appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Elon Musk’s still-hypothetical third party could become reality because, as I discussed yesterday, combining historically high debt levels with an economic downturn could stoke public frustration with both parties. We saw this in 1992 when independent billionaire Ross Perot exploited rising debt to garner nearly 20 percent of the presidential popular vote.  

But it’s not a given that a large faction of voters will blame both parties for today’s rising debt. With nearly every Republican in federal office having voted for the red-ink-laden budget reconciliation bill, Democrats have a political opportunity to exploit.  

Besides, the winning political party in the 1992 election was the Democratic Party. 

Bill Clinton didn’t position himself as an austerity-minded candidate in that year’s primaries. On the contrary, he savaged the fiscal scold in the race, former Senator Paul Tsongas, for his “cold-blooded” economics. And he touted a “middle-class tax cut,” breaking from past Democratic nominees Walter Mondale (who pledged to raise taxes to balance the budget) and Michael Dukakis (who said tax increases to balance the budget would be a “last resort.”) 

But in the general election campaign, feeling some heat from Perotistas and needing to woo Tsongas voters, Clinton nodded more toward deficit reduction. In his nomination acceptance address, delivered soon after Perot (temporarily) suspended his campaign, Clinton said: 

[President George H. W. Bush] has raised taxes on the people driving pickup trucks and lowered taxes on the people riding in limousines. We can do better. He promised to balance the budget, but he hasn’t even tried. In fact, the budgets he has submitted to Congress nearly doubled the debt. Even worse, he wasted billions and reduced our investments in education and jobs. We can do better. So if you are sick and tired of a government that doesn’t work to create jobs, if you’re sick and tired of a tax system that’s stacked against you, if you’re sick and tired of exploding debt and reduced investments in our future, or if, like the great civil rights pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer, you’re just plain old sick and tired of being sick and tired, then join us. 

Clinton’s rhetorical framework glossed over the tension between pursuing deficit reduction, lower middle-class taxes, and future-oriented investments. But once in office, Clinton prioritized deficit reduction with higher taxes on the wealthy (when Democrats ran Congress) and spending restraint (when Republicans ran Congress) while jettisoning the middle-class tax cut. While Clinton took initial political heat for the broken promise, a growing economy fueled by low Federal Reserve interest rates helped him get re-elected. He had a rare string of annual budget surpluses in his second term.  

In a 2008 debate with his Republican opponent John McCain, Obama weaponized the higher debt accumulated by the incumbent George W. Bush: 

When President Bush came into office, we had a budget surplus and the national debt was a little over $5 trillion. It has doubled over the last eight years. And we are now looking at a deficit of well over half a trillion dollars … And, frankly, Senator McCain voted for four out of five of President Bush’s budgets. 

Obama promised to run a tighter ship but steered clear of specifics, and also stressed the need to immediately pump money into the economy to deal with the “economic crisis,” while also arguing “we’re not going to be able to go back to our profligate ways” after the crisis is over. 

As president, Obama enacted an enormous economic stimulus package. But his signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is a deficit reducer thanks to tax increases and cost efficiencies. Also, like Clinton, once Republicans claimed control of the House and the Great Recession subsided, Obama accepted more spending restraints. The annual deficit as a percent of GDP plummeted during his presidency from 9.8 percent in 2009 to 3.1 percent in 2016. 

While both Clinton and Obama narrowed or eliminated annual budget deficits throughout their presidencies, neither was succeeded by a Democrat, raising the question of whether budget balancing had any political benefit.  

During his one presidential term, Joe Biden was far more concerned about spending than saving. He enacted massive pandemic relief, vastly expanded the child tax credit (though the stingy Senator Joe Manchin blocked an effort to extend the costly expansion beyond one year), secured significant infrastructure investment, and implemented student loan forgiveness by executive order (though losses in court limited the total amount). Whether or not it’s fair to blame Biden’s spending for the period of high inflation on his watch, the high inflation was the main driver of Trump’s election victory and has given big spending a bad name.  

And now it’s Trump piling on the debt with massive tax cuts skewed to the wealthy, paired with, but not offset by, huge cuts to health care, food aid, and clean energy. And any relief for working stiffs from tax cuts may be undercut by Trump’s tariffs. The issue will be challenging to ignore with debt at historically high levels relative to the economy. Democrats will be sorely tempted to whack Republicans as fiscally irresponsible, and rightfully so.  

The electoral successes of Clinton and Obama remind us that it’s easier to level attacks on high debt in the campaign than produce a deficit reduction plan that squares with other party priorities and yields electoral victories. For example, Democrats will have no problem arguing for higher taxes on the wealthy. But how much will they want to commit additional tax revenue to deficit reduction when there is health coverage, food aid, and clean energy tax incentives to restore? What other big-ticket ideas will they fund, such as baby bonds or vocational and higher education support? Is it better to launch programs that deliver direct benefits, or indirectly improve the cost of living by reducing deficits and making it easier for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates? 

As the successful Clinton and Obama campaigns show, such tensions don’t need to be resolved until after Democrats regain power. But until then, the tension will percolate. 

The post Democrats Should Prepare for the Return of Debt Politics  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For all the post-mortems on the left, for all the gloating on the right, few have asked one question about the 2024 election: Why did Americans elect a convicted felon over a prosecutor?

The legal system that valorizes prosecutors and demonizes criminals has so delegitimized itself that “prosecutor” and “felon” no longer resonate as “good guy” and “bad guy.” While there are reasons to oppose President Donald Trump, his status as a felon may not be one.

Minorities, particularly Black men, have notoriously been the unjust targets of police, prosecutors, and judges. After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, less than a mile from my home in Minneapolis, we heard the slogan “Defund the Police.” That cry was widely ridiculed (on the right and left).

But when Republicans nominated and the country elected Trump, who demanded that “Republicans in Congress should defund the DOJ and FBI,” the tide turned. When the 47^th president nominated an attorney general who promised that “the prosecutors will be prosecuted,” MAGA and Black Lives Matter had something in common.

Progressives and conservatives alike have become fatigued by law enforcement exercising powers arbitrarily and seem to be impervious to sanction. Both sides have called for defunding police that they believe are terrorizing Americans who have done nothing but stand up for their freedoms, even if they disagree about who qualifies. The right identifies the J6 “hostages,” Trump himself, or Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio as police victims. At the same time, the left stands up for Black men or those President Joe Biden granted clemency to on his last day in office—some preemptively, in anticipation of unjustified persecution from the incoming administration.

Distrust of police, prosecutors, and judges, even the system itself, once an accepted fact of life among Black families who gave their children “The Talk,” has become mainstream. When half the country identifies myriad “felons” as heroes (let’s not forget Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy) and the other half can’t accept that others walked free (Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman), the system seems arbitrary, not just.

Things change. “Reefer madness” and myths of Black men on marijuana with dangerous urges led to the classification of pot as a Schedule I controlled substance. Now, marijuana possession is legal in half the country, and people can be imprisoned for it in the other half.

Even the definition of self-defense has become ambiguous as political agendas have transformed “the castle doctrine” into “stand your ground” and now, “make my day” laws.

Prosecutors use laws mandating lengthy prison sentences to burnish their bona fides. They often tout 95 percent conviction rates or higher to prove they keep families safe. But they achieve these fantastic results only because, as one federal prosecutor bragged, the prosecution holds “51 cards in a deck when they go to trial.” The judge standing next to him chimed in: “…and the jokers.” The government has access to virtually bottomless resources, with entire police and sheriff’s departments acting as investigators and forensic experts with the title ‘The State’ behind them.

As a result, almost all those indicted end up convicted of something due to a system that can only result in convictions.

Jed Rakoff, a well-respected federal judge, writes, “Our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight. The outcome is very largely determined by the prosecutor alone.” He explains that sentencing “guidelines, like the mandatory minimums, provide prosecutors with weapons to bludgeon defendants into effectively coerced plea bargains” in an article, later a book, Why the Innocent Plead Guilty.

As a result, the U.S. incarcerates 655 people out of every 100,000. By comparison, the United Kingdom imprisons 140 per 100,000, France and Germany 100 and 75 people per 100,000, respectively.

While 4.4 percent of the world’s population lives in the U. S., 22 percent of the world’s prisoners do.

The American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.

For comparison, the countries with the most incarcerated people per capita are:

Enforcement is Unequal

Who is incarcerated (and who is not) is, in part, a reflection of cultural biases, racism, and classism. “Criminal” and “law-abiding citizen” have much to do with class and race, not just whether one obeys the law.

Look at drug law enforcement. Forty percent of college students admit to using marijuana when and where it was illegal, and nearly one in five use other drugs. But when college students are caught with drugs, they are much more likely to be administratively disciplined than to face legal consequences. The unprivileged committing the same crime (drug possession) accrue criminal records. At any given time, there are approximately a quarter of a million people in jails and prisons for drug possession or sales, the same crime for which those college students are given the collegiate version of a time-out.

One study conducted after four Wesleyan University students were arrested for drug sales found that, in the two most recent years for which data were available, “521 Wesleyan students were referred to campus officials for disciplinary action involving drug use on campus. Only four students were arrested.” Broadening the research to include other elite colleges, the article continues,

At Colgate University, 245 students in [the same two-year period] were referred for disciplinary action for drug abuse violations, and six were arrested. Oberlin College referred 198 students in that same time span, while five were arrested. It’s a similar story at Kenyon College, Reed College, and Occidental College: student arrests were in the single digits; disciplinary referrals were in the hundreds.

A study of hundreds of thousands of cases in Gainesville, home of the University of Florida, found that “college-aged blacks off campus are nine times more likely to be arrested for drugs than their white peers at the university in the same city. “For hard drugs like cocaine, whites and blacks arrested by campus police don’t spend any time behind bars, while college-age blacks busted by city police average 236 days and whites average 76 days.” Both race and status as a college student affect whose lives are knocked off track and who can move on.

Too Many Common Behaviors Are Criminal

Furthermore, it is relatively easy to run afoul of the criminal system without knowing it. Paul Rosenzweig of the Heritage Foundation points out:

[e]stimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. The American Bar Association reported in 1998 that there were more than 3,300 separate criminal offenses. More than 40 percent of these laws have been enacted in just the past 30 years, scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate by reference the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are ‘[n]early 10,000.’

These estimates are based on the federal criminal code. Immensely more law is codified in those regulations of federal agencies. That federal code, the Code of Federal Regulations, contains ten times as many provisions that can result in imprisonment. Georgetown University Law Professor Rosa Brooks writes, “At the federal level, there are now some three hundred thousand laws whose violation can lead to prison time. . . .”

The Founders anticipated this problem. In the Federalist Papers, “Publius” (probably James Madison) wrote, “[i]t will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be tomorrow.”

In 1987, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote, “In our society, liberty is the norm, and detention before or without trial is the carefully limited exception.” Yet more than three-quarters of a million people languish in jail in the U.S. because a judge has either ordered them held without bail until trial or set bail so high that they can’t afford it. They are deprived of freedom because they have been accused. We punish them first and try them later. As a defense lawyer for over 20 years, I can assure you that preparing to try a criminal case when your client is incarcerated is like running a marathon in a potato sack and blindfolded. Meanwhile, the elite, who can afford a $1 million bail, get released to prepare. The rest accept a plea in exchange for time served.

This dynamic was brilliantly described by an indigent client I represented as a public defender. After explaining her options—take a plea deal or exercise your constitutional right to a trial—I asked if she understood the choices. She said, “Yeah, if I plead guilty, I get to go home.” She succinctly explained what the system has become.

The Prosecutors

Prosecutors could—and should—provide a backstop to the errors that police make. It is the prosecutors who decide whether to charge or not. Prosecutors take the raw material—police reports—and determine whether there is enough evidence to charge a case. They have two considerations. 1) whether there is probable cause, the minimum basis for charging, and 2) whether, maybe with further investigation such as forensic analysis of evidence, there is likely to be enough evidence to prove guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

But prosecutors are often elected. They face political pressure. Populations swing between “tough on crime” and “progressive” prosecutors, between “broken windows” enforcement and “evidence-based” theories of policing. And when prosecutors push too hard, succumb to political pressure, and commit misconduct to ensure a victory, they are virtually never punished.

The journalist Radley Balko found that,

Study after study, from New York to California, has found that only a tiny number of bad prosecutors ever face discipline. It’s typically less than 1 percent, not of all prosecutors, but less than 1 percent of prosecutors already found by a court to have committed misconduct.

Take the Cutis Flowers cases. American Public Media (APM) produced an 11-part podcast investigating a quadruple murder in Winona, Mississippi, the arrest of Curtis Flowers for the crime, and the six trials that followed. Four of the six trials resulted in guilty verdicts, but the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned three for prosecutorial misconduct (the other two resulted in hung juries). The last trial resulted in a guilty verdict that was appealed and reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Two different Supreme Courts (the State of Mississippi and the United States) found that the prosecutor, Doug Evans, not only engaged in prosecutorial misconduct, specifically racial bias in jury selection but that the misconduct was so egregious as to require reversals of convictions for a quadruple murder.

Yet, despite the state supreme court and the U.S. Supreme Court finding four separate times that he engaged in egregious misconduct, for which Curtis Flowers has been in prison for over two decades, Mr. Evans has never spent a day in jail for his behavior. Until he recently retired, he continued to be re-elected even after courts found him to have consistently violated the Constitution.

Don’t trust prosecutors? Don’t believe that “felon” is a definitive assessment of one’s character? There might be a good reason. As a result of this mess of a legal system, the United States has 19 million convicted felons. They all have families. About 100 million Americans are or have family members who are felons. Many justifiably feel that a record is an arbitrary combination of status and circumstances rather than an assessment of character. The pronouncement—There goes a felon—understandably leads to a nationwide shrug.

The post Why Did Americans Elect a Felon Instead of a Prosecutor? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Last month, the organization where we work, Third Way, urged Democrats to reject the policy and political pledges myriad progressive groups demand of the Party’s officeholders and candidates. We argued that if we let candidates fall prey to the siren song of far-left groups who claim to speak for our coalition, “we might as well save ourselves billions and countless hours of blood, sweat, and tears and just sit out the next election.” Here is one simple and determinative step Democrats can take to declare independence from progressive orthodoxy: Tear up all candidate questionnaires and surveys that box us into complicated and often indefensible positions. 

Let’s be clear: The purpose of candidate questionnaires is not to broaden policy considerations but to narrow them. They are litmus tests to pressure candidates into positions they otherwise wouldn’t take, filled with jargon no ordinary person would use, and championing legislation that will never pass. Few flesh-and-blood candidates fill out these questionnaires because they tend to be long, turgid, and voluminous. The answers almost always represent the best guesses of campaign staff, who fill them out to win a coveted endorsement that could raise money and gain attention.

But questionnaires come with a general election price that is too high. In anything resembling a swing state or district, they fail the test of independent judgment and authenticity. Instead, they come across as interest group appeasement. In many candidate questionnaires, there are traps where candidates check “yes” on a position they hope no one will notice. Once upon a time, that was a reasonable gambit. In the information age, that is now whistling past the graveyard. 

Exhibit A of a victim of the questionnaire trap is former Vice President Kamala Harris. For 106 days as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024, Harris ran a campaign targeted to appeal to swing voters and the moderates essential to a winning Democratic presidential coalition. But her candidacy was blindsided by surveys she filled out in 2019, during her short-lived presidential bid, including one that Republicans easily weaponized. Ironically, the offending question (about taxpayer funding for healthcare for transgender people in federal prisons) was not asked by a transgender advocacy organization but by the ACLU. 

That leads to another reason candidates should junk questionnaires: most careen wildly beyond each group’s lane of expertise and merge into other progressive lanes. The desire may be to show solidarity with other progressive causes; the reality is a bloody crash. As a result of this ACLU questionnaire, there were two casualties: the Kamala Harris campaign and transgender people who have been unfairly scapegoated in the “why we lost” blame game through actions not of their choosing and now suffer under a president who is kicking them out of the armed forces, banishing their identities from passports and other government forms, and otherwise canceling them in the truest sense of the word.

A sampling of candidate questionnaires reveals a litany of loaded questions that demand candidates take positions that lean into identity politics, deploy opaque faculty lounge language, and divert attention to niche issues far from the top concerns of most voters. 

This questionnaire asked candidates to “affirm a pregnant person’s (emphasis added) right to obtain abortion care.” 

This one demanded “clemency … to release 25,000 people from the federal prison system [plus] direct federal incentives to the states aimed at releasing 250,000 more.” 

Many reduced complicated policy questions to landmines: ending cash bail, canceling student loans, voting for the Green New Deal, demanding no new fossil fuel infrastructure, reducing ICE and CBP funding, supporting Medicare for All, and offering a guaranteed wage. 

Some questionnaires obfuscate because clarity would be awkward, like the League of Conservation Voters’ opposition to permitting reform, which is hidden behind a green smokescreen: “Do you oppose all legislative efforts to undermine environmental laws which would make the regulatory process work against, rather than for, strong and effective public protections?” It sounds reasonable until you realize that this policy would make rebuilding the electricity grid impossible in anything resembling a timely manner.

Still others require Talmudic scholars to interpret their meaning, like this mouthful from the Sierra Club. “Will you support the development of a new, climate-friendly trade model—including the establishment of a carbon dumping fee on polluting imports—and the revision of trade agreements to add binding climate, environmental, labor, and human rights standards so that countries and corporations are incentivized to invest in a rapid transition that serves workers, frontline communities, and the planet?” Sounds just like a swing voter in a focus group! 

And if that’s not enough, some questionnaires demand “above and beyond maintaining a 100% voting record while in office”—in other words, fealty or exile. 

Many excellent and worthy public interest organizations are out there. Some of those groups are progressive and do the Lord’s work. We should be thankful for their dedication and passion. They play a vital role in the Washington ecosphere, both in the political and policy space. Not every questionnaire is filled with booby traps or difficult-to-defend positions. 

But we’ve lost the right to have nice things because too many fail the test of mainstream views, and the sheer volume of these surveys has ballooned. And let’s not forget that Democrats routinely score 100 percent on these surveys but often receive less than 50 percent of the actual vote of the membership many of these groups represent. Something has to change. 

At a meeting we held with about 80 campaign operatives, former officeholders, think tankers, pollsters, and opinion-makers, the topic of questionnaires elicited an audible groan. Simply put, interest group candidate surveys don’t broaden the policy debates; they narrow them. They don’t encourage candidate independence and authenticity; they stifle it. They don’t increase a candidate’s chances of winning a general election; they shrink them. 

Let’s shred the candidate surveys. 

The post Democratic Candidates Should Shred Interest-Group Questionnaires appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The 2024 elections ensured an authoritarian, coup-plotting convicted felon will spend the coming years in the Oval Office. It will be the work of a generation to rebuild American democracy from the damage. 

Given the stakes, it’s disorienting that the election results were so pedestrian. No historic realignment of our political geography, sweeping mandate, or surge of authoritarian enthusiasm was recorded in the exit polls. Democracy was on the ballot, but many voters made the election about the price of eggs.  

From a regional point of view—and that’s a big part of what I study—2024, in many ways, doesn’t look much different from the 2000 election. A quarter century of drama and upheaval—hanging chads, falling towers, forever wars, failing banks, deadly variants—and most of the country’s regional cultures have barely budged their partisan leanings. In most regions, this was Donald Trump’s best election yet, but his ethnonationalist agenda still underperformed George W. Bush’s corporate neo-conservatism, albeit during wartime.  

As I laid out in my 2011 book  American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, our sectional differences and their boundaries can be traced to the rival colonizing projects that took hold on the eastern and southwestern rims of what is now the U.S. in the 17th and 18th centuries. These rival projects settled mutually exclusive strips of much of the continent, laying down cultural norms and attitudes toward authority, honor, diversity, government, individual liberty, communitarianism, identity, and belonging. These have shaped our history, our constitutional structure, and, of course, electoral politics—past and present. (I have frequently written about its political implications in the Monthly over the past 14 years, but there’s a detailed summary here.) The regions do not respect state or even international boundaries, as you can see from the map at the top of this post of what they look like today. They profoundly affect our politics, as I’ve previously demonstrated regarding the 2020, 2016, and 2012 presidential contests, the 2022, 2018, and 2014 midterms, and even key off-year contests discussed in the Monthly in 2013 and 2011.  

At Nationhood Lab—the project I founded at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy—we crunched the 2024 presidential election results before the holidays. From my perspective, the topline result echoed the same regional patterning we’ve seen in virtually all competitive contests in our history, including the elections of the past quarter century. In recent decades, what have been “blue” regions voted for Harris. The “red” regions went for Donald Trump, and the great swing region, the Midlands, was, once again, the only regional culture that was truly competitive, with Trump eking out a 0.5 percent victory this time around. In the other regions, the winning candidate’s margin of victory was between six and 34 percent, from Harris’s comfortable victory in Yankeedom to her blowout in the Left Coast. 

Beneath the surface were some significant developments. Most striking is that Trump improved on his 2020 performance in every region, both the nine major ones that are located primarily within the current borders of the United States and three of the smaller “enclaves” that are the U.S. portions of regional cultures that are mainly located in Canada, the Caribbean, Greenland or Oceania. (Because Alaska doesn’t report results on a county level, it’s been excluded from this analysis, which means we don’t have data here for the fourth “enclave” region, First Nation.) In all but one of those regions, 2024 was his best performance to date, improving even on his 2016 numbers, and his most considerable improvements were in three ethnographically diverse, communitarian-minded regions: New Netherland, El Norte, and Spanish Caribbean. Each moved over ten points in his direction since 2016. 

But if you step back, Trump’s surge looks less impressive. We crunched the numbers for presidential elections from George W Bush’s hair’s breadth victory over Al Gore in 2000 to Biden’s narrow win four years ago—to better understand how the three “Trump elections” fit into regional partisan trend lines. Is Trumpism—an ethnonational authoritarian movement—more popular than the conventional “less taxes, less regulation” conservatism of George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney? Does Harris represent a less popular vision of liberal politics than conventional Democratic politicians like Al Gore, John Kerry, or Hillary Clinton? Using a regional culture lens, the answer to both questions looks to be mostly “No,” as shown in this graphic. 

Trump’s 2024 margins are worse in many regional cultures than Bush’s in 2004. The Texan did better than Trump in the Deep South, Far West, El Norte, Tidewater, Left Coast, and Greater Polynesia. Romney bested him in the Far West in 2012, and both Romney and John McCain outperformed him in Tidewater, although that region has been rapidly trending blue over the past decade. Harris’s margins in El Norte, Left Coast, and Greater Polynesia were substantially better than Al Gore’s were in 2000 or John Kerry’s in 2004, and her numbers in Left Coast were almost the same as Barack Obama’s, though a few points less than Biden’s and Clinton’s. 

True to history, The Midlands  has behaved as a swing region throughout this period. Trump won it by half a point this year, falling just short of Hillary Clinton’s 0.6-point margin in 2016 but better than Bush’s 0.1-point margin of victory in 2004. Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 (+3.1) was about the same as Gore’s two decades earlier (+2.8.) Obama did better than anyone here. Still, his margin in 2008 (+10.5) is the only time a candidate has had a solid victory win here since the Reagan era. 

But Trump has a strong track record in other parts of the federation. Last month, he flipped  Spanish Caribbean—that’s South Florida, where Mar-a-Lago is located—for the first time this millennium, realizing a nearly 22-point swing compared to 2016. This takes Florida—where the other 62 percent of the population lives in the Deep South—off the board for Democrats in much the same way as the conservative shift of the Cajun-Bourbon enclave of New France made Louisiana a red state. Trump’s margin of victory this year in Spanish Caribbean (+7.7) was greater than his margin in the Deep South (as a whole) four years ago (+7). The conservative, pro-business, anti-communist culture of this enclave’s Cuban community, now augmented by Venezuelan exiles, appears to have restored its dominance over the area for the first time since the 1980s when Reagan and George H.W. Bush handily won every county in the enclave. Trump has also made consistent inroads in another region with a large Latino population and cultural legacy, El Norte, where he reduced the Democratic candidate’s lead from 21.8 points in 2016 to 20.8 in 2020 to 11.6 this year.  

There’s more analysis—including a discussion of rural-urban trends and the Trumpian strength in New Netherland (also touched on by Nate Weisberg here)—in our piece at Nationhood Lab. 

The post The 2024 Presidential Election and U.S. Regional Cultures appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Today for the Washington Monthly I argued that Joe Biden should abandon his opposition to Japanese-owned Nippon Steel taking over U.S. Steel.

As I explain in the article, in recent weeks the higher-minded arguments against the deal have largely been rendered moot. All that remains is short-sighted nationalism that would deprive America, and American workers, of billions in foreign investment.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump is continuing his arguments from the campaign in favor of protectionist, regressive tariffs.

On New Year’s Day, Trump shared on his social media site a post from the tech billionaire Marc Andreessen who marveled at a chart showing tariff revenue as a share of total federal revenue, which was very high before 1913 when the constitutional amendment empowering Congress to enact income taxes was ratified.

Andreessen said the “Second Industrial Revolution, perhaps the most fertile area for technology development and deployment in human history, was 1870-1914,” implying that tariffs deserved the credit.

Trump chimed in, “The Tariffs, and Tariffs alone, created this vast wealth for our Country. Then we switched over to Income Tax. We were never so wealthy as during this period. Tariffs will pay off our debt and, MAKE AMERICA WEALTHY AGAIN!”

While it’s not the primary reason for Biden to approve the steel deal, Biden should take the opportunity to explain the foolishness of Trump’s crude economic nationalism, and warped view of history.

But first, here’s what’s leading the Washington Monthly website:

***

The Democratic Panic in New York: Associate Editor Nate Weisberg assesses why Democrats struggled in the normally deep blue Empire State last November. Click here for the full story.

We’re Losing the War Against Drunk Driving. Here’s How to Fight Back: Candace Lightner, founder and president of We Save Lives, urges a cultural shift regarding driving while under the influence. Click here for the full story.

Biden Should Approve the Nippon Steel Deal: My case in support of the needlessly controversial sale. Click here for the full story.

***

Trump may be a crude nationalist, but Biden is not a crude promoter of globalization. As Rana Foroohar explained for the Monthly back in October 2023, Biden took “commerce back to an earlier era in which it was broadly understood that trade needed to serve domestic interests before those of international markets.”

But while Biden strategically jousted with China on trade, and prioritized investment into American manufacturing and infrastructure, he didn’t demean American allies, undermine NATO, or claimed that across-the-board tariffs on imports wouldn’t jack up prices on American consumers.

Trump, meanwhile, continues his bizarre quest to rewrite the history of the late 19th century Gilded Age. As I wrote three months ago, Trump’s narrative of a nation made wealthy by tariffs and ruined by the income tax skips over the crushing poverty:

…while in the 1880s and 1890s funding the government with tariffs was mathematically possible, it worsened the yawning wealth gap between the monopolistic “Robber Barons” like J.P Morgan and John D. Rockefeller and the millions who toiled in brutal unregulated factories or scraped by on family farms.

And in the mid-1890s–when the nation suffered a four-year economic collapse known contemporaneously as the “Great Depression,” with unemployment estimated to have peaked around 20 percent–the political movement for replacing high tariffs with a progressive income tax began.

Opposition to the Nippon Steel deal is based on little more than xenophobia. It promotes the fiction that the American economy does not need foreign investment and will only grow if we build more economic walls.

Biden should not only approve the deal, he should take direct aim at Trump’s nationalistic nonsense, and warn that he’s about to drag American down into the abyss of protectionism.

Best,

Bill

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The post Trump Is About to Drag America Into the Abyss of Protectionism appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This autumn, I stopped by a local nonprofit run by a friend who helps refugees, immigrants, and formerly incarcerated victims of abuse get jobs that can transform their lives. I was there to donate, and when I found my friend distressed, I asked why he was so down. He had recently lost his dog of 14 years. Then, days later, his mother passed. I embraced him, expressing my condolences. As we embraced, he said, “And then my country died.”

He referred to the election, which put one party in charge of the White House, Senate, and House. And in that moment, I realized that perhaps half of the nation’s voting population is grieving what they perceive to be the death of their country.

I contemplated how America came to this. After an election marked by harsh and extreme rhetoric, whatever the outcome, half the country would dwell in grief, convinced that the world’s oldest democracy was finished. Why?

This moment warrants a much deeper examination of what happened, how it happened, and the impact on our health, well-being, and hope for the future. It’s a bit cliché, but this must become a teachable moment. We must learn from this campaign never to be so divided again.

The campaign rhetoric was often shaped in terms of strong men. Well, I have known some strong men in my life. My father was a strong man. Serving in Europe during World War II, he was lucky; he came home alive, met my mother, and started a family. I think of my son as a strong man. He is a choreographer, dancer, and artist. I have a friend who is Jewish but professes to be an atheist who’s dedicated his life to civil rights. Another strong man in my life is my handyman, who unclogs toilets, removes trees downed by high winds, and never says no to my obsession with needing new bookshelves.

What bonds them is a strength characterized by hard work, dedication, service, compassion, kindness, a minimum of complaint, and no self-pity. Each of my strong men supports a woman’s right to choose and to reproductive healthcare. Their qualities sharply contrast those targeted by campaigns in rural, suburban, and urban America toward men of all ages, races, and ethnicities with an urgent need to feel strong and victimized simultaneously. With extremist views rising at home and abroad, these men are the followers, searching for ways to embrace symbols and positions perceived to make them look strong.

Today, strength for too many males is characterized by bombast, lying, bullying, violence, and attacking the vulnerable.

ABC News reported that some campaign groups spent over $21 million on ads demonizing the transgender population. Only about 1.7 percent of the global and U.S. population experiences genetically based variations in sexual expression. It wasn’t until 1990 that medical and biological science discovered the gene that dictates how the “Y” chromosome is expressed in the developing fetus and is influenced by hormones and chemicals. For some, assailing transgender people evolved into a sign of strength, as did depicting immigrants as violent and criminal. “Immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—are less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born. This is true at the national, state, county, and neighborhood levels, and for both violent and non-violent crime,“ says the American Immigration Council. Yet vilifying rhetoric has rallied voters to support candidates who assail immigrants and transgender people.

The demonization is possible because of toxic social media, algorithmically driven communications, and the news landscape. This social media environment manipulates emotions using fear and hatemongering for personal and political gain. There must be reform and regulations to stop the lies and fake news from becoming ingrained as conventional wisdom. This must not be allowed to shape future campaigns.

Unregulated social media is contributing to the stress and grief experienced during and after this recent campaign. It’s naive to think this tumult will pass on its own. This level of despair and hopelessness does not bode well for our democracy. Violent rhetoric and bullying the vulnerable can unleash an addictive cascade of hormones. In other words, the more you bully, the more likely you want to do it. Most of us have experienced bullies. Life has taught us they only stop when you stand up to them. So how does a society accomplish that against the onslaught of violent rhetoric, lies, dehumanization, and cruelty that is centered in a presidential election campaign?

We stop it by seeing it like we saw the COVID-19 virus. A virus finds its way into the body until there’s an opportunity to take over cells. And it’s not even the virus itself that kills the body. It’s the body’s reaction to the virus that causes the demise. An inflammatory cascade triggers the body’s fight against COVID-19, but many people didn’t have the reserves to mount that defense and died.

As with COVID-19, America needs an inoculation strategy, making us immune to inflammatory, dehumanizing, rhetorical assault. The lesson comes from the human body—a vaccination mobilizes our inherent capacity to heal, and an amazing panoply of cellular reactions and rapid responses respond to the invasion without being overwhelmed.

What would it take to inoculate the American population to mobilize a defense mechanism so that we instinctively turn away from algorithmic toxicity? What would it take to inoculate enough of the population so that they could not be easily manipulated or, in neurological terms, have their amygdala hijacked, their emotional centers of the brain swayed into an addiction to violence or violent rhetoric? It would take wide-scale development of the innate capacity for compassion and empathy. We are social beings, and our most fundamental human need is connection to others in a loving and nurturing way.

With our scientific world created and dominated mostly by men, the focus on human adaptation has centered around fight-or-flight mobilization as a stress response. This refers to the physiological changes in the body when faced with a perceived threat, preparing it to either confront the danger (“fight”) or flee from it (“flight”) by activating the sympathetic nervous system and releasing hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Little attention has been paid to a more dominant innate response—nurturing, loving, and caring. In other words, the human experience’s normal state is not one of fight or flight. The normal state of the human body is of resonance and balance.

Continuous exposure to stress and fight or flight mobilization makes us sick and breaks down the capacity of our immune system to protect us. We need a national campaign to elevate and strengthen individual and collective capacity to balance calm, empathy, compassion, and caring about our fellow human beings.

We’ve never invested in developing this capacity. It’s a form of healing. To those languishing in despair and hopelessness, no matter who you voted for, use established self-healing tools to ease grief and perceived loss. These include focused meditation, often called loving-kindness meditation, or social engagement, like greater participation within your community, whether racial, religious, or based on some other affinity. These methods open our hearts and restore balance. There are dozens of efforts at the city, county, and state levels around this country trying to build bridges of civility and trust. There is an urgent need for this country to invest in these efforts and scale them up so that we will never be so vulnerable to this type of toxic, algorithmically racial, and gender-driven manipulation of our psyches.

For instance, Healing Illinois is an initiative launched by the state of Illinois to promote healing, unity, and equity. It addresses disparities in healthcare, education, criminal justice, employment, and housing with grants to community organizations and local governments to support healing and racial equity projects, healing circles that allow individuals to share their experiences, emotions, and perspectives in a safe space; and a fund that supports organizations promoting healing, equity, and justice.

For decades of the 20th century, a universal phrase in high school typing instruction books was: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” Today, I think that needs to be updated to: “Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of ourselves and our country.” We are in a moment when we need to be fully present on behalf of our country, and that calls for self-care. Grief and despair are emotional, mental states of mind that compel us to look back or forward in anxious anticipation. Neither allows us to be fully present and marshal our innate healing, restorative powers. But that is what we must do.

Our country didn’t die on November 5, but our country needs us to have open hearts and open minds during these transitional times.

The post Our Country and Democracy Demand Open Hearts and Minds appeared first on Washington Monthly.