China emissions flat or falling for two years, study finds

The numbers, alongside China’s economic growth, imply that its carbon intensity — emissions divided by GDP — is down 12% over the period 2020-2025.

This Guy Stinks

Zayn Malik told Alex Cooper that he doesn't know if he was ever actually in love with Gigi Hadid, the mother of his child, and that he just really loves being single.

Rank-and-File Dems to Leaders: It’s Time to Take the Gloves Off

Recent polls show approval of Donald Trump hovering in a deep unlit trough around 40 percent. Yet his dismal ratings have done little to bolster the reputation of the opposition party. Commentators across the political spectrum have overwhelmingly agreed that the Democratic brand is shot. The American Prospect called it “damaged.” NBC said it was “weak.” Rolling Stone said it was “cooked.” Semafor announced that “left-wing ideas” had “wrecked” it, and Bill Maher compared Democrats to has-been companies like Sears or Kodak that had “screwed themselves out of relevance.” The pejoratives aren’t confined to the armchair critics. Arizona Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego lamented, with only slightly more finesse than the news outlets, the “national brand problem.” Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator from Colorado, delicately agreed that the branding is “problematic.”Is all lost for the Democrats, or is there opportunity in the shambles? When the only party offering a bulwark against Trump’s murderous, crackpot regime appears to be losing the vibes war—and as we approach the midterm elections that offer our last best chance to rein in the madness—these questions are not merely of political interest; they are a matter of existential importance.And so, in a survey of 2,421 Democratic voters, conducted January 7–16 by Embold Research, The New Republic sought to explore what rank-and-file Democrats want to see from their candidates and elected representatives. Is it true, as one popular strain of criticism goes, that some of the party’s more liberal social ideas are a liability? How important to voters are housing, prescription drug prices, trans rights? How should we approach economic policy, foreign policy? How conciliatory or aggressive should party leaders be toward their foes? What, in other words, do Democrats want from Democrats?Democrats overwhelmingly want their elected leaders to fight, and they know who they want to fight against: the superrich and corporate America.Perhaps the most notable conclusion to draw from our poll is just how unified committed Democrats appear to be on a range of central issues. To put it in a nutshell, the rank and file overwhelmingly want their elected leaders to fight, and they know who they want their leaders to fight against: the superrich and corporate America.Embold Research’s Andrea Everett was particularly struck by the “strength of sentiment favoring regulation”: Eight out of 10 respondents believe in strong government oversight over business. This emphasis was “very consistent across the board,” Everett said, and suggests that Democrats are “skeptical of business doing the right thing on its own.” A full 93 percent of respondents said they felt it was important to raise taxes on the rich; 91 percent want to raise taxes on corporations; and 77 percent want to regulate or break up big tech. When we asked whether the system is “rigged” against people like them, a resounding 71 percent said yes. Who is rigging it? Sixty-four percent blamed corporations and the rich.[It’s your turn to weigh in: Take our readers’ poll here.]It’s impossible to come away from these results without concluding that economic populism is a winning message for loyal Democrats. This was true across those who identify as liberals, moderates, or progressives: An unmistakable majority wants a party that will fight harder against the corporations and rich people they see as responsible for keeping them down.And if the system is rigged, as so many of these committed Democrats believe, it stands to reason that they would want their leaders to take bolder, more decisive action to stand up for them. In what seems like a striking repudiation of the rhetoric employed by Democratic presidents and presidential candidates over the years about working across the aisle, a clear majority—75 percent—would prefer that Democrats “be more aggressive in calling out Republicans,” while just 25 percent chose “focus more on working with Republicans.” Likewise, 62 percent said they want to see the party call out “corporate wrongdoing,” while only 38 percent said the party should “focus more on supporting businesses.”But although the poll shows strong agreement among Democrats about who their enemies are and how they want to see their party go after them, it also implies real disappointment in their elected representatives’ actions on that front. Respondents overwhelmingly attested to frustration with what they see as their party’s timidity: A whopping 69 percent agree that it would be somewhat to extremely appropriate to describe Democrats as “weak.”On a more hopeful note, our poll shows a persistent faith in what government can do: Nine of 10 respondents believe that it can make people’s lives better, and 81 percent believe “society mostly moves forward” by way of “government programs and solutions like Social Security and civil rights laws” rather than the innovations of the free market. This belief remains despite what appears to be a profound loss of confidence in the current administration (when rating their opinions of various institutions, respondents ranked the U.S. government near the bottom, only 2 points above oil companies). Unions, too, broadly retain Democrats’ good opinion; 87 percent view them favorably. How well our democracy functions, on the other hand? Just 7 percent feel good about that.There was also notable accord about whom they want to see representing the party in the 2028 election. While 81 percent view Kamala Harris favorably, a strong 66 percent think she “had her shot” and shouldn’t run again. Perhaps even more surprisingly, a plurality of poll respondents—46 percent—want to see a progressive represent the party in 2028, as opposed to a liberal or a moderate. This proportion is higher than the percentage self-identifying as progressive, which clocked in at 32 percent. Perhaps this signals a shift in how voters are calculating the old shibboleth of “electability.” In 2020, a prevailing narrative was that voters chose their primary candidates based on how likely they were to be elected in the general, as Everett observed: “Maybe the way they’re answering that question is changing.”Certainly there is evidence in this survey of a shift in attitudes toward the left wing of the party. When asked their opinions of various lawmakers, respondents felt most favorably inclined toward Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (They also like Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom, who came in third and fourth, respectively, after Kamala Harris. And Biden, despite the shame heaped on him for dropping out of the 2024 race too late, came in fifth, with 72 percent expressing a favorable view of him.) Perhaps thanks in part to New York’s freshly inaugurated mayor, Zohran Mamdani, nearly three-quarters of respondents said they think that the label of “socialist” either doesn’t matter or is a plus. These answers may be more suggestive of respondents’ personal feelings than how they assess those of other voters—whether they think a socialist could win, for instance, “in Omaha,” as Everett put it. But either way, the data shows an undeniable softening toward a term that Republicans and quite a number of Democrats still seem to take for granted is an insult. If our poll is to be believed, for a majority of Democrats, that insult no longer lands.For the moderates reading these results in alarm, take heart: There is still an identifiable pragmatic strain among loyal Democrats. Whereas 80 percent believe it’s important to protect transgender Americans from discrimination, they were more ambivalent about allowing trans teen athletes to compete in their gender identity, which just 39 percent think it’s important to do. And when it comes to electoral strategy, a wide majority believe it is more important to win over undecided voters than it is to energize the base (66 percent versus 34). They are more split about rights advocacy groups, which are often blamed for swaying lawmakers toward niche positions that don’t represent the opinions of the base: Exactly half feel such groups do good work, and half think they have too much power.Such a split, in this data, is the exception rather than the rule. The base is far more united than it sometimes appears to be. Democrats may be dispirited by their recent losses and the daily injury of Trump’s deliberate ongoing assault on government, but they have hardly lost track of their values or their aims. They wholeheartedly believe in regulation and taxation. They want to keep a tight rein on corporations and the rich. And they want representatives who know how to fight. Strategists and candidates, be encouraged: There is a strong brand here for the taking.[toplines; crosstabs]

What the Democrats Need to Do Now

I. Past and Present: The Democrats’ Four Core Problems1. Why Don’t the Democrats Fight More?Last July, I attended one of those Washington salon dinner-discussions. A private room at a restaurant, about two dozen invitees, discussion focused on some policy issue. The topic that night was wide-ranging but centered around the debate over the abundance agenda, and how blue states should move to counter the impacts of Donald Trump’s initiatives.Navin Nayak was there. I first met him at another such dinner, in the wake of the 2022 elections. At the time, he worked at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and he and some colleagues had undertaken a massive study of Democratic ad messaging during those midterms. He was interested in an issue that has obsessed me for a while now: why polls routinely find that Americans think Republicans—whose last three presidents have presided over 1) a massive savings and loan crisis and a double-dip recession, 2) the near-collapse of the entire global capitalist economy, and 3) a pandemic-related economic meltdown that saw the disappearance of 23 million jobs—are better stewards of the economy than Democrats. Nayak and his team looked at more than half a million pieces of Democratic communication to voters in 2022 and found that, to their surprise, “only 5 percent mentioned the words ‘economy’ or ‘economics.’” So maybe one reason Republicans outpoll Democrats on the economics question is that Democrats don’t talk about it much.But I tell the story of this dinner for another reason: something Nayak said that night. A range of views was represented at that table, but everyone was looking for answers to the basic question, the main question to emerge from the 2024 election, of how the Democrats—or “the progressive movement,” since the dinner was held under 501(c)(3) auspices, where Washington denizens know they need to make a good-faith effort not to be overtly partisan—could win the economic argument they’ve been losing for the better part of four decades and convince more working Americans that they are fighting for their interests.I forget the exact context—we were probably complaining about the Democrats not putting up much of a fight against Trump—when Nayak said (close paraphrase): “Well, Democrats come to Washington to get things done, and Republicans come to Washington to fight.”Sometimes, somebody says something at one of these dinners that cuts a little deeper than the usual policy chatter, and for me, this was such a statement. Nayak distilled in a few simple words a mindset I’ve observed and tried to write about for decades now; at least since the run-up to the Iraq War, when so many congressional Democrats seemed to be just terrified of criticizing George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld.That insurgent mindset among Republicans, that belief that they had to wage war against a powerful establishment whose values were destroying America, goes back to Newt Gingrich, who told the College Republicans in 1978 that “one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” This way of thinking has basically held sway ever since: Bush and his neocons challenging an inert foreign policy establishment, creating their own reality; the Tea Party movement; and, of course, Trump and MAGA.Democrats, by and large, are not insurgents. They don’t come to Washington to topple any establishment. They come to pass some legislation, help make people’s lives better. These are worthy motivations, but over the years they’ve left Democrats bringing a lot of knives to a lot of gunfights. Democrats, by and large, are not insurgents. They don’t come to Washington to topple any establishment. They come to pass some legislation, help make people’s lives better. These are worthy motivations, but over the years they’ve left Democrats bringing a lot of knives to a lot of gunfights.It has also produced in Democrats, Nayak believes, a kind of complacency. “I think the prevailing wisdom, certainly through ’24 among the Democratic Party, is that the system’s mostly working well,” he told me recently. “We just need to get a few more programs in place to improve people’s lives—they need a tax credit they don’t currently have, or they need a better health care program they don’t currently have, but mostly the system is working well.”There are signs that Democrats are finally understanding that they need to do more fighting, and that things are not mostly working well. Many—I still wouldn’t say most, but many—congressional Democrats now get just how angry people are. Their electoral losses among working-class voters in 2024 surely taught them a lesson about that. And, after a very confused first few months during Trump’s second term, many seem to grasp now that they need to fight harder. They did a good job during last fall’s government shutdown. True, eight of them eventually decided to end the shutdown. But the party basically won the argument about the importance of the Obamacare premium subsidies, and polls showed that the public blamed Trump and the Republicans more for the shutdown than the Democrats.They stood their ground by enough to win the PR battle in that episode. They’ve become better at defending their position against GOP attacks. They’re better at responding to Trump. But one thing they still don’t do well is play offense—create preemptive lines of attack against Trump and the Republicans that put them on the defensive. California Governor Gavin Newsom has done a pretty good job of this for a few months, using his social media account to mock Trump and goad him into responding. But most Democrats still don’t understand the attention economy—the fact that people’s time is a scarce commodity, and a politician is only going to get so much of it—and the hideous but unavoidable rules social media has imposed on political communication.Passing legislation and improving people’s lives are great things. But politics in this age is constant rhetorical war. And not only, or even chiefly, about issues. Today’s war is more over character and values, and it requires not just staking out positions but taking stands.What’s the difference? A position announces a belief or commitment; a stand describes an action a person will take to enforce or defend the position. A stand, in other words, threatens somebody. Fighting on this terrain is the first prerequisite of politics today. It’s often said that people have a hard time answering the question, “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” This is why.2. Why Do the Democrats Fight So Much?If they’re not great at doing battle with Republicans, there’s another contest to which many Democrats bring a lot of zest: the fight with one another.Anyone who thinks this is new should read a little history. The Democratic Party was literally created as an unholy alliance between “the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North,” in the words of the man who was really the party’s founder, Martin Van Buren. Throughout the nineteenth century, the party was basically a marriage of racist segregationists in the South and corrupt party bosses in the North: two rather unappealing contingents that never had a lot in common.Democratic infighting has a long history. The current iteration has its roots in the 1980s, when Al From founded the Democratic Leadership Council to move the party away from traditional liberal positions that weren’t popular at the time (on trade, crime, welfare, and other issues). Immigration and LGBTQ rights are more recent sources of division.Why do the Democrats quarrel so much among themselves? Well, the simple and superficial explanation, the answer most of the combatants on both sides would give, is ideological: The two wings of the party have genuinely strong disagreements, and that’s that.This is true as far as it goes. But there’s more to it. I’ve always felt there’s a strong psychological element to this fight, on both sides. Over the years, I’ve been in meetings where I’ve watched progressives become far more passionate while laying into Bill Clinton (about NAFTA or Glass-Steagall repeal, say) than when discussing George W. Bush; and I’ve seen moderates get way more worked up assailing leftists’ litmus tests than anything emanating from the right.Why? Sigmund Freud coined the phrase “the narcissism of minor differences” to explain the sometimes intense disputes between people who in fact have a lot in common. Nearly 200 years before, Jonathan Swift anticipated the phenomenon in Gulliver’s Travels, where bitter wars broke out between two different factions of people in the nation of Lilliput over the question of whether boiled eggs should be opened from the big end or the little end, the latter being the order of His Majesty. (“It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.”)This is not to say that some of their differences aren’t important. They are. Some fighting is inevitable and necessary. But is there something about the Democrats—emotionally, psychologically—that makes them want to fight with one another?I put the question to Drew Westen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University and the author of the 2007 book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, a groundbreaking and brilliant early discussion of how emotion is more important than reason in political debate and framing—and how Republicans got this more than Democrats did. Westen said he thinks the culprit is the Democrats’ tendency to start conversations by talking about specific policies rather than broad values.“Democrats are fundamentally committed to issues and policies, and they lose sight of the values that underlie those issues and policies,” he said. “It’s a difference with Republicans. They start with values, but they never bother to get around to policy, because they’re not really interested in running anything.”When you begin from values, Westen said, you inevitably are emphasizing points of commonality with others in your coalition, because you share those values. Whereas when you begin with policy, you inevitably end up emphasizing differences, because policies are particular, and people have different ideas about them. “If you start with values,” he told me, “by definition, you create a big tent of people who share those values. And it sort of doesn’t matter whether you’re for Medicare for All or whether you’re for some kind of mixed public-private system, because you’re all agreeing that everyone ought to have affordable health care.” But when you start with policies, he said, “You’re not only arguing about the policies, but you readily identify some policies as the left and some policies as center. That immediately creates an us and a them within the party. And that’s the last thing that you want to do publicly.” When people see that bickering, they see disorganization and weakness: “The meta-message”—i.e., the unintended message that is conveyed by actions—“is that Democrats can’t get their shit together.”Democrats can’t and shouldn’t stop arguing over important matters. They should stop relishing it so much. They probably agree on 75 or 80 percent of things, and they mostly agree on the underlying values. Representatives of the two factions might try publicizing their points of commonality sometimes. I noticed that, during the closing days of Abigail Spanberger’s gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, I received a fundraising email on her behalf from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This was gratifying to see, because the two had a widely reported feud at a caucus meeting back in 2020. But this email emphasized the things they agree on. Credit to Spanberger for asking, and to Ocasio-Cortez for agreeing. It can be done.3. What the Center Gets WrongLet’s now look a little more closely at these two wings. A key year for the centrists was 1989; though a long time ago now, it remains relevant in certain respects.It was the year after the Democrats lost their third consecutive presidential election, a rare occurrence in U.S. history. And they were all total wipeouts. The party did need a different direction. William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, now both of the Brookings Institution, wrote a famous white paper, “The Politics of Evasion,” that castigated the Democrats for being out of touch with regular Americans. Their most memorable turn of phrase had it that Democrats had grown “indifferent if not hostile” to middle Americans’ “moral sentiments.” Ouch. The critique stuck, Bill Clinton rode it to victory, and the Democratic Party embraced several more centrist positions: a more favorable stance toward corporate America, pursuit of free-trade deals, support for the death penalty.I will make no effort here to cover the intervening years in any detail. Those years do not tell a straightforward story of success or failure for the centrists. Like anybody, they won some, and they lost some. But with the center of gravity in the party having moved markedly to the left since Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign, the once-ascendant moderates have more often found themselves on the defensive in recent years.I think they get two big things wrong. The first is that they always want to believe on some level that it’s still 1989, and the left either has just led or is about to lead the Democratic Party to ruin. But today is nothing like 1989. The Democrats haven’t been slaughtered in three consecutive elections. Yes, they’ve lost two of the last three, narrowly; so there is work to do. The consequence of those losses has placed the nation in a grave moral crisis, but that’s not the same thing as arguing that the Democrats face a profound electoral crisis. They don’t. Kamala Harris lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a combined 230,000 votes, each by less than 2 percent. If she’d carried those states, she’d have won 270 electoral votes and would be president.Centrists carry on and on about the left’s “woke” cultural positions and how electorally costly they are. It’s certainly the case that the left can be insular and inflexible on these matters (see next section), and that liberal interest groups make too many specific demands of presidential candidates (I wrote about this at some length last year). But it’s far from clear that the right’s attacks along these lines always work to devastating effect. Trump’s anti-trans ads against Harris undoubtedly moved some votes away from her and toward him, though it’s hard to know how many (these things are notoriously difficult to measure). On the other hand, last year, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears ran a barrage of anti-trans rights ads against Spanberger, who didn’t exactly embrace the full LGBTQ agenda but also didn’t throw trans people under the bus. The ads failed pretty spectacularly.There actually isn’t a lot of evidence to support the claim today that the Democrats are hostile to the moral sentiments of the great middle. In fact, it’s the maga Republicans and their Christian nationalist allies who are far more guilty of this posture. There actually isn’t a lot of evidence to support the claim today that the Democrats are hostile to the moral sentiments of the great middle. In fact, it’s the MAGA Republicans and their Christian nationalist allies who are far more guilty of this posture. Nearly 70 percent of Americans support gay marriage, Gallup found last year; but support among Republicans had dropped 14 points since 2022. That is, they’re getting more out of touch with the majority. We’ve all seen poll after poll of majorities opposing Trump’s immigration crackdown. A December 2025 PRRI survey found that two-thirds of Americans oppose the crackdown—but Republicans (63 percent) and Christian nationalists (57 percent) back it. That poll also found that, while support for a pathway to citizenship had increased among Democrats since 2013 and held statistically steady among independents with a comfortable majority in the low 60s, it decreased among Republicans from 53 to 40 percent. Democrats and independents are going in one direction, and Republicans in another.These polls confirm what our noses tell us: It’s the Trumpist right that’s living in its own cocoon. It’s true that not many middle Americans would identify themselves as leftists or even liberals. But they don’t want to live in a cruel country. Their moral sentiments are not directed toward the rounding up of millions of decent people or the attempted erasure of a tiny and powerless percentage of the population. Centrists ought to link arms with progressives and play offense on these issues.The centrists’ second mistake is worse: the presumed yearning for “normalcy.” I hear some centrists say: People don’t want all these big plans; they don’t want Democrats to remake society. They just want things to get back to normal, by which they mean some sort of pre-Trump idea of business as usual.My critique of this is not political or electoral, but substantive. Normal, for most working Americans these days, sucks. Normal is falling a little more behind every year. Normal is worrying that in two years an AI chatbot will take your job. Normal is not having the time to pursue leisure or enjoy life with your family. Normal is not being able to join a union or schedule a vacation. Normal is being terrified of a family illness and a huge medical bill. Normal is living in a state of near-constant anxiety about your teen or young adult child’s mental health and, if you’re working class, about where to turn for help or how you’ll pay for it (young people’s mental health is the sleeper issue of 2028, if some Democrat is smart enough to seize on it). And, on a level that your typical person doesn’t feel but those of us who follow such things know: Normal means rampant and worsening economic inequality, record homelessness, and the growing power of a new breed of billionaires who increasingly control our political system and want to convert it from a democracy into something they own more directly (more on them later).If you’re an elected Democrat, and you just want to return things to that “normal,” if you think that’s all working people need and deserve—I say you’re aiming unpardonably low. It’s the richest country in the world. People are supposed to have better, happier, and freer lives than that.4. What the Left Gets WrongThe left has become the chief source of energy and creativity in the party. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez barnstorm the country, drawing tens of thousands. Zohran Mamdani vaults to his utterly stunning victory in New York’s mayoral election. Some other Democrats whom one wouldn’t quite call “left” have answered the Trump-era call and shown a willingness to dive into battle: Senator Chris Murphy, Representatives Robert Garcia and Ro Khanna and, as always, Jamie Raskin. But voices of the left have gotten millions of people excited about the Democratic Party for the first time in a very long time.That said, we still don’t really know how large the audience is for the politics that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani represent. Big and enthusiastic crowds are great—they’re a sign of something. But they aren’t necessarily a sign of majority support.What the left gets wrong stems from its general isolation and insularity. People willing to call themselves leftists or socialists tend on balance to be younger and to live in a relatively small number of urban areas and college towns where they’re surrounded by people who agree with them. They tend to spend more time on social media, where, again, the point of view they subscribe to is vastly overrepresented vis-à-vis the electorate. Operating in such an environment can make one forget that one’s community is in fact pretty small.Every year since at least 1992, Gallup has been asking Americans if they describe themselves as conservative, moderate, or liberal. In 2024, the results came in like this: conservative 37, moderate 34, liberal 25. That 37 is remarkably consistent over the last three-plus decades; that 34 is down from 43 back in 1992; and the liberal 25, while still a fairly distant third, is actually way up from the 1990s, when liberal routinely clocked in at the mid- to high teens (makes it a lot less mysterious as to why Bill Clinton wasn’t an aggressively liberal president, doesn’t it?).So that’s one thing I think the left doesn’t give a lot of thought to: There just aren’t that many liberals in the United States. The trend lines are encouraging, but still, the numbers are small. As for “leftist,” well, most polls don’t even measure that. The 2024 version of the Gallup survey did include the following breakdowns: very conservative, 10 percent; conservative, 27 percent; moderate, 34 percent; liberal, 17 percent; very liberal, 9 percent. So “very liberal” was dead last, albeit by only 1 point. In our exclusive new poll of rank-and-file Democrats, fully 32 percent of respondents said they identify as “progressive,” while 31 percent said “liberal,” 21 percent said “moderate to liberal,” and just 12 percent referred to themselves as “moderate” (and 3 percent “conservative”). People on the left shouldn’t read too much into that, according to pollster Andrea Everett of Embold Research; she said it’s basically in line with recent breakdowns of Democratic primary voters. In any case, there are more conservatives in this country than liberals or progressives, and there probably will be for the foreseeable future.A related problem: It also feels as if many people on the left forget that the first job of any political party is to win a majority. If the Democrats don’t win 51 Senate seats and 218 House seats, they aren’t doing anybody a lick of good. That means they have to win in states and districts that are purple at best. Candidates in those places are going to have to take some positions that progressives won’t like. The left has to show more tolerance for these candidates. You can’t run in Orange County, California, or upstate New York the same way you can run in Brooklyn or Seattle. Indeed, if anything, the Democratic Party needs more moderates—by which I mean simply candidates whose overall profile can help them win toss-up or Republican-leaning districts—because it needs to make more exurban districts competitive. Just look at the 2008 House election results map against the 2024 one, and note how much more blue you see in the older one. The Democrats controlled 257 seats after those 2008 elections, and that’s what made Obamacare possible. Likewise, there were Democratic senators then from Nebraska, Indiana, Arkansas, Montana, and both Dakotas.Two hundred fifty-seven seats in the House is likely impossible today, with gerrymandering and even sharper polarization. But is there an agenda that moderates and progressives can unite around that can get them, say, to 230 House seats, and a few of those lost Senate seats? And that can win them back enough working-class votes?Democrats don’t need to win back “the working class.” They need to win back a relatively small percentage of working-class votes. Kamala Harris, according to exit polls, won 43 percent of noncollege voters. In 2020, Joe Biden won 48 percent. That’s really all a future Democrat needs to do—get back up to Biden’s 48, maybe a hair better.“Enough” is an important word here, and this is a crucial point. Postmortems after the 2024 election often asked the question: How can the Democrats win back the working class? It’s the wrong question, and one framed to produce panic and argument. Democrats don’t need to win back “the working class.” They need to win back a relatively small percentage of working-class votes. Kamala Harris, according to exit polls, won 43 percent of noncollege voters (the proxy for working class). In 2020, Joe Biden won 48 percent. That’s really all a future Democrat needs to do—get back up to Biden’s 48, maybe a hair better.I think there is such an agenda. It is built, simply, around convincing more working people that they, Democrats, are on their side. But that can’t be done, as noted above, by taking positions. In this media environment, positions have little value. Instead, you have to take stands. And taking stands means taking on the bad actors who are making working people’s lives harder and, to a lesser extent, the uber-rich men who are openly contemptuous of democracy. People know who you’re for by the enemies you’re willing to make. And the Democrats need to make enemies.II. The Future: A New Way of Explaining the World5. Stories—and VillainsLet’s begin the discussion of how the Democrats should move forward to 2028 with this uncontroversial observation: People are struggling. Working people—and here, I mean everyone who lives on salaried compensation, from custodians to college deans, Pilates instructors to airline pilots; but especially those earning less than $100,000 a year, which one study last year found to be the minimum an individual needs to live comfortably in many states today—have difficult lives. Many live in communities that have never quite recovered from the loss of that factory or plant. They’ve lived through a pandemic followed by crushing inflation. Many feel their lives are more precarious than their parents’ or grandparents’ were, and most of them believe—in the United States of America!—that their children will be worse off than they are.In the public sphere, politicians step forward to try to help people make sense of all this—to explain to them why this is happening to them, and how they, the politicians, will make things better. Facts and statistics are one way to explain things. But what people really respond to are stories. Stories have narrative power that facts and statistics don’t. There’s a reason why stories date to the most ancient civilizations, and a reason why our parents tell us stories from the time we’re toddlers; our brains are hard-wired to understand them, and to see the world in narrative terms. Albert Einstein, a pretty smart guy, is said to have advised parents trying to raise brilliant prodigies to “read them fairy tales.”Stories have certain stock characters, or archetypes. The main one, of course, is the hero. But equally important is the antihero: the villain. Stories have heroes and villains. Snow White; the Evil Queen. Dorothy; the Wicked Witch. Harry Potter; Voldemort. Sheriff Bart; Hedley Lamarr. In every compelling story, there is conflict between the force trying to do good and the force trying to do evil. This tension hits home with us, and it’s how we make moral sense of the world.Donald Trump tells working Americans a story about why their lives are hard, and, boy, does his story have villains. Immigrants. Trans people. Radical left lunatics. The Chinese, sometimes. The globalist elites who sold your lives down the river. Actually, the naming of villains by Republicans long predates Trump. Since its inception in the 1950s, the modern conservative movement has named villains—the liberal elites, the Harvard faculty. Trump has merely updated the list, and of course he does it more bluntly—the dog whistle has yielded to the screaming siren.Democrats don’t tell stories. And they—or most of them—certainly don’t talk much about villains. Oh, sure, Trump is a villain, for Democrats. And Stephen Miller and the others. But those are gimmes. Obviously, the leading figures of the opposition party are going to be cast as bad guys. But who else? What story can the Democrats tell working Americans about why their lives are hard, and what villains can they name?There’s only one obvious answer: corporate wrongdoers who are ripping people off and making their lives harder. I hasten to note I don’t mean all corporations; there are plenty of good ones who treat their employees fairly and provide genuinely desired products and services at a fair price. They deserve praise. But bad actors who are bending or breaking the rules to pick the pockets of average people make for pretty compelling villains. Ditto tech billionaires who have more and more control over our lives with each passing year. And this story, unlike Trump’s story, has the benefit of being true. It’s not transgender high school swimmers who are moving factories to Malaysia or imposing algorithms on society that are driving teenagers to suicide. It’s corporate bad actors.But most Democrats don’t like calling out villains. Of course, campaign donations are one reason. (I’ll return to this topic later.) But money isn’t the only reason. Another key reason is psychological or attitudinal—there’s something in the genetic code of liberals that seeks consensus, that wants everyone to be happy.“I think there are a lot of people who feel that governing can be a kumbaya playbook that seeks to form alliances with very powerful interests to make incremental change,” said Rohit Chopra, who headed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Joe Biden and is one Democrat who’s taken on many a corporate malfeasant. “But on net, that strategy has only made people worse off. We have really seen that many of our leaders are simply unwilling to call out some of the most egregious business practices that are really making people’s lives worse.”Bharat Ramamurti, who was the deputy director of the National Economic Council under Biden and was an enthusiastic participant in the administration’s antitrust agenda, added: “We’re making everybody happy. The truth of the matter is, that rarely means that you’re accomplishing something. And also, nobody knows about it because nobody’s fighting against you. You need the controversy and the fight.”Ramamurti hits on something of vital importance. You need the fight. Conflict gets attention. Conflict tells people there’s a battle going on, and it has real stakes, and you’ve taken a side. Conflict activates the parts of the brain that remember the Wicked Witch locking Dorothy in her castle and flipping over that huge hourglass. Conflict also feeds the media the entrée it craves. And Democrats should have learned by now from Trump that he who starts the fight and creates the conflict has a built-in advantage because he sets the terms of the debate. The party that starts the conflict will always be cast as the active initiator, the second party as the passive responder.This instinct is just not in the Democratic Party’s collective DNA. It needs to be. “The simple fact is that a lot of Democrats weren’t built for this environment. They weren’t built for a world where the opposition party president breaks essentially all the rules, breaks them with gusto, and gets clout from breaking the rules,” said Alvaro Bedoya, who served as a federal trade commissioner under Lina Khan and took on many fights against corporate wrongdoers. “And the sad fact is that right now, what you need are street fighters. You need people who relish conflict. You need people who know how to be creative with the power they have and can do something with it.”And how do you show people that you’re up for a fight? Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has a simple and elegant answer: “The way you define yourself as a fighter best is by going and having a fight.”6. What Biden Did—and Didn’t—DoSome skeptical Washington insiders are at this point saying to themselves: “But Biden did that. It didn’t work.”There are several answers to this statement. The first is to agree that, yes, the Biden administration did pursue antitrust actions that were more aggressive than any administration since probably Lyndon Baines Johnson’s. And it had some significant successes—blocking several mergers, winning a major lawsuit against Google, forcing greater transparency from Ticketmaster, and more.So yes, Biden did do this to a considerable extent. But—and here’s the second answer to the skeptics—he and his team had four years to try to reverse more than 45 years of conventional wisdom about corporate consolidation, going back to policymakers’ adoption of Robert Bork’s “consumer-welfare standard,” which he laid out in 1978. Before Bork, antitrust policy assumed that competition was good, that monopoly power was inherently corrupt (the view, incidentally, of conservative hero Adam Smith, and even of Milton Friedman, until a Kansas City furniture magnate paid him and his brother-in-law to change their position), and that big was probably bad. Bork’s standard turned all that on its head and said that as long as mergers didn’t raise prices, big was fine. Democratic administrations tended be somewhat less permissive than Republican ones, but in essence, we’ve been living in an era of “Merger Mania” ever since; and, additionally, an era in which workers have lost both their share of national income—the percentage of income paid out as labor compensation has declined dramatically since the 1970s—and their political leverage against capital in a host of ways.There is no way all that was going to be undone in four years. Saying “Biden tried it and failed” is like insisting that the Colorado Rockies, who have the worst win-loss record in baseball over the last 20 years, either must win the World Series in a mere four years under new management or be declared an utter failure. It doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as an argument.A third answer is that, because of the Democrats’ tenuous hold on Congress during Biden’s first two years (and then their loss of the House in the 2022 midterms), Biden couldn’t bring actions legislatively. Even when the Democrats had full control of Congress, senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—as well as a number of others who were less theatrical about it—just weren’t going to confront corporate power in any direct way.That left the courts, and the courts are slow. Big corporations generally have excellent lawyers. And dozens, even hundreds of right-wing judges sit on the federal bench, thanks to the efforts of the Federalist Society. Ramamurti pointed out to me that the administration fought hard on student loans, junk fees, and noncompete agreements (which corporations sought to impose even on security guards … security guards?!), only to see courts rule against them. “We were willing to take on those fights,” he said. “The problem was that we couldn’t deliver the ultimate result because of the courts.”A fourth and final answer has to do with Biden as a communicator. His heart was in this fight. He just wasn’t a forceful articulator and promoter of these ideas. Heather Boushey, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers for the entire Biden term, told me: “There were too many times, as I traveled the country and talked to economic audiences, I was stunned how many times people said to me in 2024 that the speech I had just given was the first time they had heard our economic agenda clearly articulated. And I would be thinking, the president literally gave this speech earlier this week.”Jared Bernstein, who served alongside Boushey and then chaired the CEA for the last 19 months of Biden’s term, added that the administration’s constant hard work on these issues and many successes got them nothing politically. “I thought we got zero love for what was really a very concentrated attack on precisely the kinds of hassles we’re talking about,” he said. “We got zero for it. And, you know, maybe we didn’t do it right, but I do think that experiment does challenge your hypothesis.”“The main thing that I feel we could have done better was taking more public fights, certain bad actors in the private sector, to illustrate for people we were really fighting for them,” said Andrew Bates, Biden’s former senior deputy press secretary.It does. But I would argue that the administration, from Biden on down, didn’t promote its efforts often or forcefully enough. Andrew Bates, the former senior deputy press secretary, seemed to agree. “The main thing that I feel we could have done better was taking more public fights, certain bad actors in the private sector, to illustrate for people we were really fighting for them. And we did that to a degree,” he said. “I think if that had been a larger proportion of our messaging, I think people would have better received it.”Senator Whitehouse is withering on this point. “[Biden] didn’t want to have enemies, he didn’t want to have adversaries, he didn’t want to have villains,” he told me. “They wouldn’t think in those terms. They wouldn’t speak in those terms. They wouldn’t even set up infrastructure to prepare for a battle, like a war room to plot when it was a good chance to land a punch because they left themselves open in some grotesque way. So we had four years in which our bully pulpit was deliberately self-muffled, and that made it really, really hard to move.”Biden did call out some bad actors by name, or at least by category—Big Pharma, the large meat-packers, the various imposers of junk fees. But he didn’t make a crusade of it. It takes time to tell people how the four big meat-packers make life difficult for small ranchers and jack up prices for working consumers. It’s not something your average person has probably ever given one minute’s thought to. You have to tell that story over and over and over again. You have to use vivid, illustrative examples. You have to name a villain. That’s how you start to undo 45 years of conventional wisdom and get people who don’t have much time in their lives for politics to start thinking in a new way. And that, Biden didn’t do.Here is one lesson I hope the next Democratic president learns from Trump: In our present-day environment, the president needs to be out there nearly every day promoting his or her agenda—and doing so in terms that make the fight and the conflict readily apparent to people. This is one thing that Trump does well—virtually every day, he’s out there making it clear to people who his bad guys are and feeding the media a narrative of conflict that ensures coverage. True, he’s not popular, but that’s because his policies aren’t popular. He’s a successful agenda setter, and the next Democratic president needs to learn from his example and not regard the presidency as some precious, porcelain institution that should be shielded from too much exposure. That’s not the world we live in now.Biden, of course, was physically incapable doing that toward the end. But he and his many admirable economic aides did start us down a better path, and it’s exactly the wrong lesson to conclude that because Biden didn’t vanquish Meta, it’s time to throw in the towel. The right conclusion is that Biden started a job that a new generation of Democrats must now finish.7. TargetsSo: What stories should the Democrats tell working people, and what names should they name? Several suggestions emerged from the interviews I did for this article, but I’d like to kick things off with an idea of my own, one I’ve had for a decade or so.The next time they have the power to do so, Democrats should just make insulin free. It wouldn’t be complicated, or even very expensive. In 2022, Americans with diabetes spent around $22 billion on insulin. That represented a huge increase over the previous decade. But then, the government—the Democrats—stepped in and did good: The Inflation Reduction Act capped the price of an insulin dose at $35 for Medicare beneficiaries starting in 2023. Costs have gone down considerably, and the three manufacturers—Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi—have even lowered some prices voluntarily in response to government action. Figures aren’t in for what diabetes patients have spent in more recent years, after the cap kicked in, but experts say it’s well below $22 billion.The government should just pick up the tab. It should negotiate a fair price with the manufacturers and pay them, just as it does now for Covid vaccines—and not just for Medicare recipients, but for every insulin user in America. Said the economist Dean Baker: “You just say OK, we’re going to give you a lump sum, and as many people who need it will get it.” This doesn’t even require making a villain, unless the companies refuse to negotiate. If they do, Democrats can remind Americans that manufacturing a vial of insulin costs around $4, and the market price can still be north of $250.Democrats and liberal commentators (including this one) remark frequently on the disconnect between the party’s accomplishments and the public’s failure to see them and give Democrats credit for them. Well, life doesn’t get much simpler and clearer than “free.” It’s how things were always supposed to be, anyway. The three Canadian inventors of insulin refused the offer of a patent from the United States and sold their rights to it to the University of Toronto for one dollar each. Said Frederick Banting, the best-known of the trio: “Insulin does not belong to me. It belongs to the world.”For critics who think attacking these corporations is socialism, the answer is that it is exactly the opposite. Competition is supposed to be at the heart of capitalism. These bad actors are killing competition. They’re the anti-capitalists.The people I interviewed had a lot to say about the health care industry. Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, whose 2021 book, Antitrust, is a richly detailed history of anti-monopoly battles in the United States, said one of her chief goals as a legislator is “getting competition in the prescription drug market.” And by the way: For critics who think attacking these corporations is socialism, the answer is that it is exactly the opposite. Competition, as Klobuchar emphasized, is supposed to be at the heart of capitalism. These bad actors are killing competition. They’re the anti-capitalists.One blatant example: There’s something drug companies do called pay-for-delay—they literally pay generic manufacturers to keep their lower-priced drugs off the market. The Federal Trade Commission under both parties has been trying to move against this for years, with limited success. There are bipartisan bills in both houses to end this practice, but they’ve never gotten to the floor. Only a president making a crusade of this and calling out the culprits can defeat the lobbyists and get that legislation passed.The health care field is rife with targets. UnitedHealth Group has long been accused of monopolistic practices as it has gobbled up more and more of the health care market. “They’re essentially the poster child for vertical integration gone wrong, because they control the insurance, the pharmacy benefit manager, the physician practices,” and more, said Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project. “And that creates systematic conflicts at every level, allowing them essentially to turn health care into a rent extraction machine” (“rents” being the fancy economists’ term for excess profits). Biden’s Justice Department in 2022 sued to block UHG’s acquisition of another competitor. The judge, a Trump appointee and former Federalist Society member, blocked the suit.Pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, which have played a key role in a process that has led to the closing of many independent pharmacies in underserved areas, are another rich target. Independent pharmacies, said Alvaro Bedoya, “are often the few places [people] can speak to a medical professional about their medicine, because there aren’t that many primary care physicians that serve working-class urban areas.… And they’re wondering, why is this happening? Why is the pharmacy I used to always go to closing while the CVS is shortening their hours?” The PBM problem is well-known in the policy world, but your average American has almost surely never heard of it. Democrats need to change that. One politician has taken them on, and it’s not who you think: Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law last year barring the issuance of state permits to pharmacies owned by PBMs. If she can do that in Little Rock, can’t Democrats do it in Washington?Taking on fights like these can also win the good favor of voters who aren’t normally part of the Democratic coalition. The big four meat-packers—Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and National Beef—totally dominate the industry. According to Reuters, their share of all cattle slaughtered in the United States rose from 25 percent in 1977 to 71 percent in 1992 (funny coincidence: the dawn of the Bork consumer-welfare era). They squeeze ranchers, paying less for cattle even as beef prices rise.When’s the last time you heard a nationally prominent Democrat talk with passion about farmers? I don’t know the answer to that, but I can tell you the last time a Democratic presidential candidate devoted even a couple of sentences to discussing farmers in his or her convention speech: It was Al Gore, a quarter-century ago. Neither Harris nor Biden nor Hillary Clinton even used the word “farm” in their speeches. Imagine the signal it would send to farmers—and others in related fields—to hear national Democrats taking their struggles seriously. “When a [meat] plant closes,” said Hegde, “it impacts the truckers who are driving those lines. It impacts the grocery store.… You can really just build a wide-ranging coalition if you decide to pick this fight.”In addition, there are some sleeper issues that politicians and pollsters haven’t bothered to notice. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island told me about a trip he made to Florida, where people talked and talked about the rising cost of homeowners’ insurance. “I’m not the world’s most adept and sensitive public opinion guru, but I can detect when an issue is fully thermonuclear. And in Florida, this issue is fully thermonuclear,” he told me. He said that applies to Texas as well. Sounds to me like a good fight to pick, with a handy villain, in two states where Democrats badly need to break through.Some battles might not hasten the revolution, but they are highly visible and get people’s blood boiling because they involve such obvious rip-offs. Public enemy number one here is Ticketmaster/Live Nation. According to a recent study by the National Independent Talent Organization, Ticketmaster and another company, AXS, charged fees averaging almost 35 percent of a ticket’s price, nearly double that of competitors. (Also, NITO found, Ticketmaster was the sole vendor for 86 percent of events in New York state held at venues with seating capacities over 2,000.)The Biden administration’s FTC did force a change here: These firms must now use “all-in pricing,” meaning that the customer sees the full price, fees included, up front, instead of having their jaws hit their desks after the third or fourth click en route to purchase. That’s fine. But they didn’t reduce fees. How do they get away with charging a percentage in the first place? A good seat for a Sacramento Kings game can be had for around $100. A good seat to see Lady Gaga will set you back around $1,000. Is there really 10 times more labor involved in processing a Lady Gaga ticket than a Kings ticket? It’s preposterous. Democrats should legislate some kind of cap on what they can charge.Klobuchar is livid about this. “They’re owning a huge amount of the arenas, they own Live Nation, this talent piece of it, and the talent management, and then they own the ticketing, so you just can’t get around it,” she said. Added Bedoya: “What I think Ticketmaster is just so emblematic for is how people feel completely nickel-and-dimed every single moment of every single day, even when they try to do something for themselves.” Will it change the world? Maybe not. But it will show voters that the Democrats have picked a fight with one powerful interest and won it on their behalf. That’s taking a stand, as opposed to a position.Want to get men voting Democratic again? Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, suggests that Democrats should go after the streaming services and untangle these overly complicated packages and let people watch sports again for free, or at least without having to subscribe to other services they don’t want. The packages are “confusing and frustrating,” Stoller said. “Every year you get an email saying Netflix or Hulu has increased in price. And so I think people are experiencing a confusing ecosystem at higher prices.”A small thing? Maybe. But people are pretty damn passionate about sports. Millions of Americans would appreciate making it cheaper to take the family to a ball game and making it less anxiety-inducing to figure out how and where to watch one. And it has to be done by calling out the bad actors. As Bharat Ramamurti said above, to get people to pay attention, “you need the controversy and the fight.”I haven’t even gotten yet to the most obvious villains of all: big tech. We’ll circle back to them, but first I want to put forward another idea I’ve had for a few years, lifted from Franklin Roosevelt, that could do still more to show working Americans that Democrats are on their side.8. An Economic Bill of RightsIn late 1943, as FDR was preparing to head to Tehran for a Big Three conference with Churchill and Stalin at which the United States and Britain agreed to open a Western front against Nazi Germany, he received a communication from aide Chester Bowles, head of the Office of Price Administration. Bowles was thinking not about the war, but about life in the United States after the victory, which by late 1943 seemed to be well in the cards.Bowles asked the president to think about what kind of country troops would be returning to—one still mired in poverty and unemployment, or one committed to something better for a people who endured rationing and shortages during the war. The U.K. had already issued the Beveridge Report the year before, which committed postwar Britain to fighting disease, squalor, and other social ills. “I propose,” Bowles wrote to FDR, “a second Bill of Rights in the field of economics.”Roosevelt did not exactly jump for joy upon reading this. But by the time of his State of the Union address the next January, he did speak of the need for “a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.” It included eight proposed rights, among them: a “useful and remunerative job”; a wage sufficient to provide adequate “food and clothing and recreation”; a decent home; satisfactory medical care; a good education; and, interestingly enough, for small businesses, “freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.”Bowles hoped Roosevelt would make this Second Bill of Rights the core of his reelection campaign. He did not. He ran mostly as a wartime president. He mentioned the issue only one other time, in a speech in Chicago in October. But the marker had been laid down. In a 1945 address to Congress, Harry Truman laid out a 21-point reconversion program that expanded on Roosevelt’s points, although it didn’t assert these goals as rights as FDR had.The time is overdue for the Democratic Party, or one of its enterprising 2028 presidential candidates, to propose a new Economic Bill of Rights aimed squarely at saying to working people: You have these rights, and we will move heaven and earth to enshrine them for you, and we’ll fight like hell against the people who don’t want you to have them. The time is overdue for the Democratic Party, or one of its enterprising 2028 presidential candidates, to propose a new Economic Bill of Rights aimed squarely at saying to working people: You have these rights, and we will move heaven and earth to enshrine them for you, and we’ll fight like hell against the people who don’t want you to have them. The rights should include but not be limited to: a decent wage; cradle-to-grave basic health care, which expressly means both physical and mental health; a good elementary and secondary education, and an affordable higher education; basic workplace rights, even if a person is not in a union, that will ensure ample leisure time and the ability to plan vacations well in advance; sufficient access to recreational activities and facilities; fair prices for everyday goods that are set by fair market competition and not distorted by monopoly or oligopoly power; no hidden or exorbitant fees from banks, airlines, ticket vendors, streaming services, and other businesses that have consumers over a barrel.This Bill of Rights must also make an effort to lean in the direction of defending constituencies that don’t usually vote Democratic. The rights of small farmers must be made specific and explicit. It should proclaim a right for rural Americans to have access to hospitals and clinics and broadband. On the topic of housing, all I ever hear Democrats talk about is homeownership. That’s important, of course. But about one-third of Americans rent their housing, and they tend to be younger and/or working class. Anything for them, especially as evidence mounts that they’re being rooked by these algorithmic rent-setters like RealPage? On the subject of post–high school education, it should have language that speaks to the 60 percent or so of young people who don’t get college degrees. I hear Democrats talking all the time about the importance of college and the crushing problem of student debt, and these are real things. I can’t ever recall—literally, never—hearing a national Democrat talk at any length, or maybe even at all, about vocational school. How about making vocational and trade schools free? And community colleges? After all, some 40 percent of all college students in this country attend community college. Democrats need to talk to these future plumbers and electricians and dental hygienists and IT people. A big statement telling them that they have a right to a good life is a start.Yes, an Economic Bill of Rights is just words. But so was the Declaration of Independence. It didn’t make the colonies independent—that had to be won in a war that dragged on for another five years. Giving people actual economic rights will take an enormous amount of legislative will and work. And it will require killing—not reforming or softening; killing—the Senate filibuster, which is a debate for another day, but which, it should never be forgotten, is absolutely crucial to the Democrats ever being able to do anything for working people should they be in a position to do so again.A bold statement that builds on and modernizes Roosevelt’s 1944 declaration could be of enormous historical importance. People will notice it. It will be viciously attacked by right-wingers and libertarians and oligarchs and, now, the new-era Washington Post editorial page. Good. You need the conflict. Again: People know who you are by the enemies you’re willing to make.9. Conclusion: The Democrats’ Third Great ChallengeThe Democratic Party has faced two great challenges in its history, and it has risen to both. The first came in the 1930s, amid the Great Depression. It’s easy to forget this today, but global democratic capitalism seemed to many to be on its last legs. The Soviet Union had a firm hold on power in the East—and many promoters in the West argued that communism was the future. In Germany, Hitler was installed as chancellor about five weeks before FDR’s inauguration. To read histories of the period is to be struck by the number of commentators who believed that democracy was on the way out, and that humankind’s two choices were Soviet-style communism or Germany-Italy-style fascism.So Roosevelt and Democrats stepped in. The New Deal had many flaws—it didn’t attack segregation, a number of its prominent programs didn’t work as promised, and it didn’t fully dig America out of the recession until the war. But it made working people’s lives much better. Social Security, a minimum wage, the right to unionize, unemployment insurance, the safety of bank deposits—the list goes on and on. The Democrats made the bold move of embracing Keynesianism, they built the modern state, and they saved the United States from totalitarian extremes; in doing so, they gave people better, happier, freer lives.The second challenge came in the 1960s. The stain of legal racism in this country, which made a mockery of clichés like “the land of the free,” had finally to be erased. It took guts for LBJ, a Southerner, to press as hard as he did for the civil rights bill—and even more guts to turn around the very next year and, seeing that the Southern racists were circumventing the new law in terms of voter registration, pass the Voting Rights Act. And then, all the new laws that followed, about housing and lending discrimination and so on. We are of course still working on some of these problems, and we always will be. As we’re seeing with grim clarity in our time, the forces of reaction don’t just throw in the towel. But LBJ and the Democratic Party rose to the historic occasion.Today, the Democrats face their third great historical challenge: to wrest political power back from the new billionaire class and return it to working people; to make the system function again in favor of the many not the few; to work to ensure that people have faith again in this country and its government; to give them better, happier, and freer lives.With respect to the problem I’ve tried to describe here, Trump is merely a symptom. When a large percentage of people feel the system is rigged and has failed them, they will turn to a Trump. Democrats must create conditions such that the people will never again make that choice.I might also add: to reduce—or better yet end once and for all—the potential appeal of demagogues like Donald Trump. You perhaps will have noticed that, while Trump is mentioned several times in this piece in passing, he is not the focus here at all. Trumpism is a crisis for this country; there’s no doubt of that. But with respect to the problem I’ve tried to describe here, Trump is merely a symptom. When a large percentage of people feel the system is rigged and has failed them, they will turn to a Trump. Democrats must create conditions such that the people will never again make that choice.Come to think of it, that is a good three-word summation of what the Democrats need to do: unrig the system. That it is rigged is well beyond dispute. It’s rigged by the excess profit-seekers I’ve suggested the Democrats attack. And it’s rigged by these new billionaires, who have amassed fortunes the Founders would have considered obscene, and who are now spending their money on politics as never before to protect and even advance their privilege. Last November, The Washington Post published a searing report on this: “In 2000, the country’s wealthiest 100 people donated about a quarter of 1 percent of the total cost of federal elections, according to a Post analysis of data from OpenSecrets. By 2024, they covered about 7.5 percent, even as the cost of such elections soared. In other words, roughly 1 in every 13 dollars spent in last year’s national elections was donated by a handful of the country’s richest people.”Many of these people are building vast fortunes in a tech industry that the Democrats simply have to put in their sights. Steven Levy of Wired wrote an excellent report last September describing how Silicon Valley was shifting its allegiances to the GOP. Good. Good riddance. That should free the Democrats to regulate their companies and investigate their poisonous algorithmic formulas.Many of them also oppose democracy. Peter Thiel famously wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He went on in that essay to note that the last time when it was possible to be “genuinely optimistic about politics” in America was the 1920s. Paging Tom Buchanan! Thiel writes—I’m not joking—that the increase in the number of welfare beneficiaries and the giving of the franchise to women had “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”We all know about Elon Musk and his hard-right, anti-statist, and kind of white supremacist views. There’s also Marc Andreessen, whose “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” sees the democratic state as “a hindrance to be opposed, dismantled, and destroyed,” in the words of Guardian opinion editor Amana Fontanella-Khan.The problem of these uber-rich men is not the same thing as the problem of the bad corporate actors making people’s daily lives hard, but the two are obviously related. The second group picks people’s pockets and gets away with it because neither political party has the collective will to stop it; then, the first group comes forward to shout, “You see, democracy is a failure!” And they share a common goal: a state too weak and hollowed out to check their power and profits. For them, Trump is not some sort of culmination. Trumpism is the first stage in a process that they hope will produce a United States in which they and their kind call all the shots and have all the power.This is the fight of our time. It is the Democrats’ third great challenge. Are they up to it, as they were in the 1930s and 1960s? I honestly don’t know. Many of them are. I hear more openness, in my private conversations and in their public statements, to the idea of fighting excess corporate power than I’ve heard in a long time, or probably ever. When James Carville writes in The New York Times that “it is abundantly clear even to me that the Democratic Party must now run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression,” as he did late last year, something has changed.Some are still compromised by campaign contributions. Others still hold on to that old liberal faith in consensus. In theory, I support that consensus. And it can still happen on some issues. In fact, it can happen on some of these very issues I discuss in this piece—support for certain anti-monopolistic measures is gaining currency in the GOP, too. Where consensus is possible, it remains preferable.It’s time for the Democrats to say unambiguously to working people, “We are on your side—and we will pick fights on your behalf.” If they do this consistently and aggressively, I believe they can not only get back to Biden’s 48 percent support among working-class voters; they can win over a consistent majority. But increasingly, consensus is not possible. Democrats must see this clearly. There are working people struggling to get by. And there are the people at the top making their lives harder and trying to destroy the public services on which they depend. It’s time for the Democrats to say unambiguously to working people, “We are on your side—and we will pick fights on your behalf.” If they do this consistently and aggressively, I believe they can not only get back to Biden’s 48 percent support among working-class voters; they can win over a consistent majority of working people, who will be far less distracted by right-wing wedge issues if they see clearly that the Democratic Party is genuinely and consistently fighting for their interests.Between now and 2028, the Democrats have to decide whether they want to pocket their piles of crypto money and just get things back to an inadequate “normal,” or whether they want to be in fact what they claim to be in theory—the party of the working people—and create a new and better normal. The future of our democracy hangs on their decision.

Readers’ Poll: What Do You Think of the Democrats?

An exclusive new poll of more than 2,400 loyal Democratic voters, commissioned by The New Republic, makes clear that they want their party to go after the people who are making their lives harder. Roughly four out of five respondents feel that Democrats are too timid about taxing the rich, making corporations pay their fair share, cracking down on corporations that break the law, and regulating big tech. And they’re big fans of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—above all other Democrats named in the poll.But now it’s your turn to weigh in. Take our readers’ poll below.

Mamdani Is Showing His Pragmatic Side as Mayor

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. In his first month as New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani has endorsed candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America—and also centrist incumbent New York Governor Kathy Hochul. He reached a deal with Hochul to expand childcare but remains at loggerheads with her over his proposals to increase taxes on the wealthy. He’s fixated on very local issues like snow removal but is also joining national progressives in calling for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On the latest edition of the Right Now, Peter Sterne, state editor of City & State New York, discusses the new mayor’s first month. He argues that Mamdani is showing his practical side, conceding to political realities in endorsing Hochul and reaching policy compromises with her.

Transcript: Mamdani Is Showing His Pragmatic Side As Mayor

This is a lightly edited transcript of the February 9 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.Perry Bacon: I’m honored to be joined by Peter Sterne. He’s the state editor at City & State New York, which is a publication that covers, as you can guess from the title, state and city politics in New York. Peter, thanks for joining me.Peter Sterne: Thanks so much for having me, Perry.Bacon: So what I want to talk to you about today is Zohran Mamdani’s first month as the mayor of New York. He been celebrated, covered extensively. The campaign was so extensively covered. So I want to get into what’s happening since he’s actually taken over one of the most important jobs in the U.S. and in politics particularly.I guess the first thing is, talk about the staffing of the administration. It’s not as if his staff and his administration’s full of, I’ll say, wide-eyed 23-year-old socialists. The staff is a mix of people with experience, people with less experience. Talk about the staff that he’s assembled so far.Sterne: Yeah, so I’d say a lot of the people he has turned to to staff his administration are veterans of the city government. In particular, you have a lot of people coming from the de Blasio administration. These are people who were in power when New York last had a very progressive—albeit not a socialist—mayor, who were out of power over the last four years.When Eric Adams came in, he’s more of a moderate, more conservative. And now as Zohran is looking for people to staff his administration, he’s looking for people who are ideologically aligned with him, but who actually have experience running the government.The best example of that is, of course, his first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, who was in charge of running the government, and especially budget matters, during the de Blasio administration. He had a long career in Albany working on the budget, and then he worked as de Blasio’s first deputy mayor. And so you’ve seen a lot of those same kinds of hires that he’s making.As you mentioned, it has been a mix. He has hired some people from the Democratic Socialists of America, which is his political home, into positions. But generally speaking, he’s not hiring DSA people to be first deputy mayor, or head of intergovernmental affairs, or at the commissioner level, or even the deputy mayor level.He hired Cea Weaver to be the head of the new Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, which is a new office that he started. That is more of an activist role. It’s going and trying to get tenants to report on if they’re having issues with their landlords. She’s not the head of Housing Preservation and Development or the Department of Buildings in the same way.He hired Tascha Van Auken, who was his field director and had previously run volunteer canvassing operations for other DSA candidates, to head the new Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement, which again, is focused on ensuring that the mayor’s office can reach out to ordinary New Yorkers and let them know what is going on and get feedback from them. But it’s not really the kind of thing where you’re actually running the government.Bacon: So ... Lina Khan—who is a person well known to people in Washington and people nationally from her term running the FTC—she’s been advising him, or was advising before. Does she have a formal role? What is her role now?Sterne: She does not have a formal role in the administration, but some of her acolytes do. So Sam Levine, for instance, who worked closely with Lina Khan in D.C., is now the head of the Department of Worker and Consumer Protection, and he has been out in front on a lot of initiatives that Mamdani has been doing in terms of things that were similar to what Lina Khan tried to do in D.C.—going after junk fees and going after unscrupulous businesses in New York City.While Lina Khan does not formally have a role in the administration, I’d say that her brand of politics is very clearly being expressed. You also have Julie Su, who was the Department of Labor under Biden, who is now a deputy mayor in the Mamdani administration. So you can see that he’s really pulling from people who had prominent roles under de Blasio and under Biden to staff what is, I think, the most exciting and closely watched progressive administration in the country.Bacon: Talk about his political role a little bit. I don’t remember everybody Eric Adams or de Blasio or Bloomberg endorsed, but it seems like he got involved even before he started to encourage DSA not to support a candidate against [Minority Leader Hakeem] Jeffries.This week he’s decided to endorse the governor, who’s a more moderate figure. He’s gotten involved in a lot of House races in the city to endorse candidates, including some who the outgoing incumbent didn’t want. So, two questions: talk about what he’s trying to do politically, and if you can ... talk about how unprecedented—or not unprecedented—his political role has been in these sort of endorsements so far.Sterne: Absolutely. I think when you look at the first month—even before he got into office—many mayors, you would only judge them based on the policies that they’re trying to implement. But Mamdani has really made an effort to be not just a figure focused on policy, but on politics as well. He is at heart a political organizer.And so while he certainly wants to accomplish his agenda, his campaign promises—which everyone knows because he made it the core of his campaign: freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments, taxing the rich to pay for universal child care, and having fast and fare-free buses—those are things that he’s working on.But in addition to trying to get his agenda though the City Council and Albany, he’s been very focused on trying to expand the slate of candidates that DSA and aligned organizations are pushing through.Obviously there have been some cases in which he has gone against what some of his comrades in DSA wanted. He spoke against DSA endorsing Chi Ossé, who is a very popular, very well-liked young city council member who actually lives in House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ district and was considering challenging him from the left—kind of a Zohran-style campaign.Zohran believed that would be a bad idea because Ossé had very little chance of winning. And going to war with the House minority leader could make it more difficult for Zohran to get his agenda through the City Council, and particularly through Albany, such as higher taxes on the rich.So he spoke out against that, and Chi Ossé’s planned primary challenge against Jeffries was very controversial within DSA—not because anyone in DSA supports Jeffries. They all hate him. They want him out. At the very least, they don’t want him to be the House Democratic leader.But they were concerned about whether or not Ossé would be able to win, and given the amount of resources and money they would need to pour into that campaign to make Ossé at all viable, that would take away from other races.There’s at least one more and potentially two more congressional races that NYC-DSA wanted to run, and there were also, like, seven Assembly races that they wanted to run in addition to defending seven or eight incumbents. And I think Zohran and many people in DSA felt that while there could be symbolic importance to challenging the House minority leader, it wouldn’t look great if they tried to challenge the House minority leader and got destroyed in the primary.And also it might be more important to actually elect another seven DSA members to the state legislature, where they could actually be the decisive votes in pushing Governor Hochul to increase taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and increase the corporate tax rate. So Zohran spoke out against DSA endorsing Chi Ossé, and indeed DSA narrowly voted not to endorse Ossé’s planned challenge.And then Chi Ossé decided not to run against Jeffries. He said: I would only do this with the support of DSA, and since they did not think I should do this, I’m not going to run.It’s very difficult. He would’ve had very little chance, even with the support of DSA. He would’ve had absolutely no chance without DSA.But in terms of the House races, there was also Lander in New York 10. Brad Lander is, again, not a socialist. I think he was a DSA member in college, but he’s clearly not aligned with the socialist project. He is a left liberal and he’s someone who progressives really like. He and Zohran cross-endorsed each other during the mayoral primary in order to try and stop former Governor Andrew Cuomo.And Zohran had considered bringing Lander into his administration, but ultimately decided against it and instead decided to support him in New York 10, where he is challenging Congressman Dan Goldman, who is, I would say, a moderate, at least by New York standards. He’s very staunchly supportive of Israel, which obviously Zohran and much of the left has turned against in recent years following the genocide in Gaza.So Zohran supporting Lander in New York 10 is definitely a sign of him supporting progressive primary challenges against more establishment Democrats.But it should also be noted: In that case as well, he went against DSA. DSA had actually endorsed City Councilwoman Alexa Avilés, who is a socialist, anti-Zionist Latina who is to the left of Lander, for that seat.But many people in the progressive establishment felt that Lander—who is a former councilman for that district and served as city comptroller for a few years—is much better known and much more supported by the kind of progressive, but non-socialist, wealthy liberals in places like Park Slope, [and] would be a much stronger challenger to Goldman.And so Zohran—in part because of that calculus, and in part because he felt that he owed Lander something for supporting him and cross-endorsing him during the mayoral primary—decided to throw his support behind Lander. At that point, Avilés, despite having the DSA endorsement, dropped out. And some people were not happy that he had endorsed this older, middle-aged white guy over an exciting Latina socialist. But ultimately, Zohran made that decision, and DSA pretty much followed it.But it’s also really important to point out that Zohran is not only endorsing against DSA candidates. In the case of New York 7, Zohran is endorsing the DSA candidate, Assembly Member Claire Valdez, who represents a neighboring district in western Queens to the one that he represented.And Valdez is 37 years old. She only got elected to the Assembly a year and a half ago. She ran in 2024. She was not seen by much of the political establishment as a viable candidate. But she is a cadre DSA member. She is someone who is a labor activist. She worked with UAW and she’s been working on DSA campaigns for a while.When she got elected to the Assembly, this was very much an example of DSA getting one of their own into the state legislature. And now DSA is very excited about the possibility of getting one of their own into Congress. If Valdez is elected, she would be in some ways the next AOC. But honestly, AOC wasn’t even a dedicated DSA member.DSA endorsed her, but her campaign was really more of a Justice Democrat campaign. She’s aligned with DSA, but she’s not accountable to the organization in the same way that someone like Valdez is.DSA’s top priority, I would say, is getting Valdez into Congress. And Zohran is a close ally of Valdez and endorsed her along with UAW President Shawn Fain the day after she announced her campaign.Bacon: Let me jump in and ask about the governor. Endorsing the governor. I know she endorsed him at the later stages, but does he have some agreement with her on taxes or other policy? What is driving this decision?Sterne: I think the main thing that’s driving the decision is that there isn’t really an alternative.Bacon: Delgado’s running, right?Sterne: Yes, the current lieutenant governor—he actually hasn’t resigned—and the governor’s former running mate, Antonio Delgado. He is a former congressman. He represented a kind of purplish swing district. He was seen as, if not a moderate, then someone who is very ideologically flexible, able to win upstate. And that is why the governor tapped him to be her running mate back in 2022.As lieutenant governor, you don’t do much. You’re basically going around the ... state doing ribbon cuttings. And Delgado is an ambitious young politician, a brilliant politician—I believe he was a Rhodes Scholar. He was not happy just doing ribbon cuttings, and he felt that the governor was not taking him seriously.And so he decided to launch a long-shot primary bid against her. And he’s doing so from the left. He’s someone who has embraced a lot of leftist policy proposals. He wants to tax the rich, he wants to abolish ICE, or at least he says all those things now. But again, he’s not a socialist. He’s not someone who is ideologically committed to these policies.But for people who are trying to push Governor Hochul to the left, they see supporting Delgado as a smart way to do that. And so that’s why you’ve seen a number of progressive groups—though not DSA—endorsing Delgado, and even two DSA-aligned lawmakers. People who are close allies of Zohran have endorsed Delgado.But Delgado’s polling is quite bad. The latest Siena University poll that came out a few weeks ago had the governor at 64 percent and Delgado at 11 percent. So I think Zohran feels that endorsing Delgado and starting a fight with the governor would be counterproductive.Maybe if Delgado was polling 10 or 15 points below the governor, then supporting this left-leaning challenger might make sense. But if the governor is winning by 50 points, then it seems like endorsing Delgado and trashing your relationship with the governor—whose support you need to pass tax increases on the rich—might not be the best course of action.Bacon: I mean, did he have to endorse her at all? Could he have just waited? Or, he had to endorse somebody, and it made sense to do this?Sterne: I think that he could have tried to wait, but if he waited until after the primary ...Bacon: Sure.Sterne: Then I don’t think his endorsement would matter as much. At least in this case, he can maybe go to the governor and say: Hey, you need help appealing to progressives. I can do that. You should consider taxing the rich.Bacon: She’s not agreed to anything ... the governor is still opposed to the tax increase he’s been calling for. She’s been saying for weeks ...Sterne: Absolutely. She is not budging on that. She insists that she will not. And she certainly does not seem to have agreed to any concessions. And so a lot of people are saying: Why did Zohran do this?Bacon: Or I know AOC endorsed her today, too.Sterne: I think the reason is because he didn’t really see an alternative. He felt that he had to endorse her before or at the same time as the Democratic State Convention, which is today.Bacon: I see.Sterne: She’s being formally nominated for reelection by the Democratic Party. The WFP—the Working Families Party, the progressive third party—is also planning to meet this weekend, and will potentially endorse her or Delgado. So I think he felt that timing was ... he had to do it this week. The entire New York congressional delegation also endorsed Hochul for reelection today, at the same time as the Democratic State Convention. And that includes, of course, AOC.So the governor’s really consolidating her support. I think that Zohran felt this was the time he had to do it. Maybe he could have tried to play hardball and refused to do it. But ...Bacon: 64-11 is 64-11. That number clarifies the decision. Let’s talk about policy a little bit. So she has worked with him on child care. Talk about what they agreed to on child care.Sterne: So she agreed to, I believe, $1.7 billion in additional child care funding. Although almost all of that—$1.2 billion—is going towards subsidies for low-income families. It’s not going to universal child care. So it’s essentially means-tested.But in addition to that, the governor has committed to expanding 3-K ... so that would be 3-K for three-year-olds across the state over the next few years. Right now there is universal 3-K in New York City—there are gaps, but it aspires to be universal—that is thanks to de Blasio.And then before de Blasio left, he also tried to institute universal 3-K, which Adams rolled back slightly. And Zohran is pushing for full universal 3-K. And then they are also starting a universal “2-care” pilot program in New York City. That would be like pre-K but for 2-year-olds.So they’re just slowly going down. [Pre]-K is four-year-olds. And then 3-K is three-year-olds. And then 2-K, or “2-care,” would be two-year-olds. And so that is a pilot program for this year. That would only be about 2,000 seats, but the hope would be that in the next year it would expand to 12,000 seats. And then by the end of Mamdani’s term, it would be universal. It would have at least 30,000 seats. That’s not what he promised, to be clear. He promised that he would work for universal child care, which would be from when babies are six weeks old all the way up to kindergarten. So it’s a while to get there. But still, the fact that he was able to announce on his seventh day in office that he was taking steps and had reached this agreement with the governor to at least start to implement universal 3-K across the state, and especially universal 2-K in New York City, was seen as a major victory.People said: There’s no way you can get universal child care. And then in seven days he was like: I talked with the governor and this is what we’re doing.But it’s important to note that the governor is funding this through existing revenue. She has refused to tax the rich in order to fund this universal child care rollout. And many of Mamdani’s allies and Mamdani himself are saying: We need permanent revenue to fund this. It’s not enough to just say, “We want to fund this for two years, and then we’ll find the revenue later.” We should be taxing wealthy New Yorkers and increasing the corporate tax rate and then dedicating that money to this expansion.But I think that Mamdani’s feeling is: Let’s at least get this rolled out, and then it will be much more politically difficult for the governor to say, “We don’t have the money to do this. We’re going to have to cancel it or not expand it.”The governor has said she does not want to tax the rich just for the purposes of taxing the rich. Only if it is necessary.Bacon: Talk about rent and rent freezes and the other promises. Rent freeze was a big campaign promise, child care ... I’m forgetting the third one for some reason.Sterne: The fare-free buses?Bacon: Yes. Talk about the buses and the rent. Those are the things I wanted to ... are those moving at all?Sterne: Yeah. The rent freeze is something that will be decided later this year. Every year the Rent Guidelines Board meets, they consider: How much are costs going up for landlords? And how much is the cost going up [for tenants]?Bacon: Adams stacked the board before he left ... I read that correctly?Sterne: He tried to, but I believe one of his appointees did not end up joining the board. They refused. I believe that the Adams appointees don’t currently have a majority. So it likely will be possible for Zohran to appoint more people and have at least a slight majority, like a one-vote majority.Now, again, whether or not all of them are going to vote to ... it’s not the case that all of the people who might support a rent freeze are Zohran appointees. The way that the board works is you have some people who are supposed to represent the interests of tenants, and some people who are supposed to represent the interests of landlords, and then some who are just supposed to represent the interests of the public.So if you assume that the people representing the interest of tenants ... I mean, you assume the landlord appointees are not going to support this. But if the people who have the interest of tenants do, and then the public members who are appointed by Mamdani do, then you should have at least a one-vote majority in favor of a rent freeze.By law, the Rent Guidelines Board does have to consider the economic circumstances of tenants and landlords. If they did say: We are going to vote for a rent freeze despite what the numbers say, then they likely [would be sued]. Either way, they likely will be sued, but that could be an issue if they’re not following the law.That is something that landlord advocates and representatives have said: If they insist on freezing the rent despite what the numbers show, then we will take them to court.Mamdani’s argument is that the rents have increased so much over the past four years under Adams that any fair analysis of the economic conditions will show that a rent freeze is deserved. But so that is something that we’ll really see in June when they make that vote, whether or not they will actually vote that the rent on rent-stabilized apartments should go up by 0 percent.In terms of the fare-free buses—I don’t know if you saw, but the Trump administration is trying to limit, or I guess cut off, federal funding to large cities that have free buses. Which could would be an issue for Mamdani. But I also feel like the Trump administration has threatened to cut off federal funding to New York City for four or five different reasons. Everything from supposed antisemitism to being a sanctuary city and all of that.I actually think that if the Trump administration tries to fight against fare-free buses, it could help Mamdani. Because then he’ll be able to portray fare-free buses as a way of going against the Trump administration. But in terms of the state politics, this is something that the MTA—the state transit authority—has been against. They don’t like the idea of giving up any revenue. They want to continue their Fair Fares initiative, which is essentially means-tested discount fares for low-income New Yorkers.Mamdani wants to have fare-free buses everywhere. He believes in universal programs; in making transit a public good, not just something you need to pay for, and then you have a means-tested discount program. That’s the difference between the socialist politics and the ... liberal politics.Bacon: I guess before we close out here, talk about the snow, because that’s the thing that people really care about.... There was a big snow all over the country, including New York. How did the administration do in terms of the snow removal? I know it is one thing you would only know if you’re there. How did they do? And how were they perceived as doing?Sterne: So it’s interesting, because I think in the immediate aftermath of the snowstorm, people generally felt Mamdani did a very good job, on par with previous administrations. The most important thing is that they plowed the roads. Famously, there was an incident where former Mayor John Lindsay did not plow the roads in certain neighborhoods, and he was highly criticized for that.Mamdani did a good job of plowing the roads everywhere. What you’ve seen in the week or two since is that people are very upset that the snow is still there. It’s on the curbs. Sometimes it gets pushed into bike lanes. It’s tougher to use the bike share system, Citi Bike, because many of them are snowed in. Many of the cars that were parked on the street are also snowed in, because it’s not the city’s job to dig out people’s private vehicles. I think there’s been a lot of criticism of Mamdani, especially from conservatives, in the week or two after the snowstorm. It wasn’t so much that he mishandled the snowstorm as it is people are frustrated that the snow is still there. But that is a function of the weather. New York has experienced below-freezing temperatures for almost two weeks now. There isn’t really much that the mayor can do. They’re trying to do some things, like they go around and they literally melt the snow—like they pour hot water on it to make it melt—but you can’t really do that citywide.The other thing I’ll say about the snow—it’s not directly related to the snow, but related to the cold temperatures—is that there’s been a lot of criticism of Mamdani over the fact that 17 homeless people have now died on the street over the course of two weeks or so. Some people have tried to tie that directly to Mamdani’s policy of no longer dismantling homeless encampments.Under Adams, Sanitation and the NYPD would go, and if they saw a bunch of homeless people living together on the street, they would tear down their tents and throw out their personal belongings as a way of forcing them to apply for shelter.And now Mamdani has been sending out homeless outreach workers to try to get people into shelters, sending around warming buses so that homeless people can go on the bus and at least warm up. Because obviously these very cold temperatures are a threat to people’s lives. But he is no longer going around and throwing out their personal belongings and tearing down their encampments. Even though none of the 17 people who died actually were living in encampments, I think that some of Mamdani’s conservative critics have been seizing on this and saying that the fact that he’s no longer tearing down their encampments, and the fact that he believes homeless people have right to live on the street and not go to shelters if they feel they’re unsafe is directly leading to these deaths. Which I think is an unfair criticism.Bacon: So final thing: anything else, anything big that I haven’t asked about that, before ... we usually have you half an hour. Anything big that’s happened this first month that is worth people nationally understanding?Sterne: So one thing I think that’s interesting is looking at Mamdani’s relationship with the police. He is a socialist back in 2020. During the George Floyd protests, he called for abolishing the NYPD, defunding the police, like many progressives.When he then ran for mayor, he ... backpedaled a bit and said that he supports the police, but he doesn’t believe they should be involved in dealing with homeless individuals and emotionally disturbed individuals. He wants to send social workers to mental health calls because there have been incidents recently in New York where the police get called because someone is mentally disturbed and having a mental health crisis, and the police fear that they are dangerous and then end up shooting them. And what happened this month, just a few weeks ago, was a very similar situation where the police actually were called on a mental health call to a young man, a 22-year-old named Jabez Chakraborty. They went to his home and he grabbed a kitchen knife and started coming toward them, and they ended up shooting him.And initially Mamdani released a statement—your standard statement that you’d expect from a politician—saying: There’s been an officer-involved shooting and I’m waiting to learn more information, but I’m grateful to all our first responders for what they do.An anodyne statement. But not necessarily what you’d expect from a socialist. And many people in DSA criticized him. And then even more importantly was that DRUM—Desis Rising Up and Moving, which is a South Asian community organization—Jabez Chakraborty was Bangladeshi. DRUM was one of the first endorsers of Zohran’s campaign, and they released a statement from the Chakraborty family criticizing the police, saying: They came to our house and they shot our son without trying to get him the help that he needs.They claimed that the NYPD had then tried to interrogate them and even asked for their immigration status, and they said: We were very disappointed that the mayor thanked the police and said he was grateful. Why is he grateful for them?And so that was a kind of political crisis for Mamdani when you have his coalition and his supporters feeling that the NYPD is acting inappropriately and he’s now the head of the NYPD.And so he did end up later meeting with Jabez Chakraborty, who’s in the hospital in critical condition, and with the Chakraborty family, and releasing a subsequent statement calling for the NYPD not to solely respond to these mental health calls, but instead to have a Department of Community Safety—which is one of the things that he had campaigned on—which would send social workers either in lieu of, or along with, the police on these calls in the hopes that hopefully you have people who are trained to actually deal with people who are going through a mental health crisis and who are not necessarily going to resort to shooting them, even if the situation seems unsafe.Bacon: Peter, this is a great conversation. I learned a lot. You brought a lot of depth to this conversation about a mayorship that I think a lot of us are following closely.... You should check out City & State if you don’t live in New York. It’s a great website. A really good place to read about politics and the intersection between politics and policy. Peter Sterne, thanks for joining. It’s good to see you.Sterne: Thank you so much, Perry. Bye.

Forget Congress—the Real Leaders Who Might Stop ICE Are Local

One of Abigail Spanberger’s first moves last month after becoming Virginia’s governor was to withdraw state law enforcement agencies from any formal agreements with federal immigration officials. New York and Maryland Democratic leaders are considering legislation to bar any localities in their states, including small, Trump-friendly counties and towns, from working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, and other local officials are announcing restrictions on where ICE can operate in their cities. Local and state prosecutors such as Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner are warning federal law enforcement officials that they will file charges against them if they violate city or state law. We are in the midst of a dramatic shift in the Democrats’ posture toward immigration enforcement. In Washington, Democrats have moved from being scared of what they viewed as one of President Trump’s signature issues to pushing some piecemeal reforms of ICE. The real action, though, is in blue cities and states. Democrats outside of Washington are essentially declaring war against ICE and the broader anti-immigration apparatus that Trump has created. This Blue America posture is critical for two reasons. In the short term, it will make it harder for Trump to execute his agenda of deporting as many immigrants as possible and terrorizing others so that they leave on their own. Long term, these blue-state officials’ words and deeds will likely push their counterparts in purple and red states, Democratic congressional candidates, and even the party’s 2028 presidential hopefuls to take stronger stands against immigration law enforcement. Some blue cities and states took steps in 2025 (and from 2017 to 2020) to push back against Trump’s anti-immigrant approach. But many blue state officials were worried that seeming too pro-immigrant would result in the Trump administration sending federal law enforcement personnel to their communities as a punishment. The events in Minneapolis over the last month seem to have changed these politicians’ calculations. They now realize Trump will deploy ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and other federal officials whenever and wherever he wants, no matter how cooperative local officials seem. Appeasement won’t work. And liberal activists are so angry about the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti that they are demanding action from their elected officials. So we are seeing both new policies and more aggressive rhetoric. New Mexico this week adopted a law that not only bans local law enforcement from working with ICE but also bars immigration detention centers from being created on public lands in the state. New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office is organizing New Yorkers to serve as volunteer monitors, wearing purple vests and recording ICE agents’ behavior on their phones. The New York Democratic Party last week passed a resolution declaring, “ICE has become an agency that operates with violence, impunity, and total disregard for human and civilian life.” The mayors of Chicago and New York City have become perhaps the highest-profile figures urging the abolition of ICE. “They’re a rogue agency out of control,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said of ICE in a recent NPR interview, the latest illustration of a moderate in the party using decidedly non-moderate language to blast ICE. Gaby Goldstein, founder of a left-leaning group called State Futures, told me, “State policymakers whose values align with civil rights and liberties are thinking more expansively about state-level power, testing its limits, and getting more creative about how to use it to defend people, communities, and the rule of law itself.” And officials in blue states who aren’t sufficiently anti-ICE for activists are being criticized. Governor Maura Healey is under fire for allowing Massachusetts to remain one of the few blue states that continues to have a formal agreement to work with ICE. I don’t want to overstate the importance of all of these moves. Some of this is simply political posturing, with Democratic politicians seeing that the wind is blowing against ICE right now and acting accordingly. They might backtrack from these stances, as they did when momentum around police reform dampened a few years ago. Even if local law enforcement agencies in blue states don’t work with ICE and CBP, these agencies have thousands of armed personnel to carry out Trump’s orders. Federal authority generally trumps that of state and local officials, so it will be very difficult for Krasner and other local prosecutors even to file charges against ICE and CBP officials, never mind win convictions. That said, policies that even slightly impede ICE, CBP, and Trump’s other goons are worth trying. Perhaps James’s monitors or the threat of Krasner filing charges will make ICE agents pause before shooting someone. After all, tens of millions of Americans live in solidly blue states, so having officials in those areas not collaborate with Trump’s immigration forces matters. Also, these blue state officials’ actions will reverberate beyond February 2026. By so aggressively blasting ICE now, they are entrenching skepticism of ICE, CBP, and the broader federal immigration apparatus as Democratic orthodoxy that everyone in the party feels compelled to follow. This is already happening. Even Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who is positioning himself as a center-left candidate for the 2028 nomination, sharply blasted ICE, in an appearance on The View this week. He called for ICE agents to be withdrawn from every city they are deployed to, the retraining of every ICE agent, the dismissal of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and for ICE “to be reformed from the top down.” I can’t imagine Beshear uttering those words in December 2025, before the events in Minneapolis made the Democrats a more firmly anti-ICE party. What’s happening now is different from 2018–2020, when “Abolish ICE” was a mantra of the party’s left wing. Unlike then, more centrist figures like Hochul and Beshear are also bashing ICE. And the party is rolling out ideas, like barring ICE agents from wearing masks, that Democratic pols in red and purple states will feel comfortable supporting. Those officials would never call for abolishing anything, even if that’s the right policy. In Washington, the Democrats are unlikely to be able to rein in Trump’s immigration forces much in this latest round of budget negotiations. But all politics isn’t in D.C. In the blue areas that Democrats control, many liberals consider ICE agents akin to, in Krasner’s words, “Nazi wannabes.” And Blue America is fighting back. Thank goodness.  

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