How can Labour win again?
Polling shows the party needs to learn to be populist
Keir Starmer has been at “rock bottom” with the electorate for more than a third of his time in No 10. Nothing in politics is fatal, but never has recovery for this beleaguered Prime Minister elected under a “change” manifesto looked so impossible.
Never before in charted polling history has a governing party or prime minister fallen this hard and fast with voters. Never before has British politics been quite so split.
I’ve seen polling from YouGov for Greenberg Research and the Democracy Corps, which asks: what is Labour’s route to winning again?
Labour’s 2024 general election-winning coalition, as conceived by Starmer’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, is dead and buried. Three in ten Labour 2024 voters who no longer back the party say they won’t vote Labour ever again – that’s more than a million of Labour’s 9.7 million votes wiped out.
The full article can be read at The New Statesman.
The Meaning of Trump’s Working-Class ‘Buyer’s Remorse’
Trump voters are rejecting Republicans in large numbers. But they’re not coming back to Democrats yet.
Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams recently conducted an innovative survey of Trump voters that was released in Jacobin. They conclude that “Donald Trump’s erratic, vindictive, and economically damaging first year in office has already given many of those same voters buyer’s remorse.” An astonishing one in five 2024 Trump voters now shun the Republicans in a prospective 2028 race.
This is a full-fledged working-class revolt, where 21 percent of Trump voters without a college degree say they are finished with Trump’s party.
How sweet is it that the groups leading the revolt are the ones Trump and the MAGA strategists thought would anchor the new Republican coalition. Fully 27 percent of Blacks and 41 percent of Hispanics now say to count them out. And in Abbott and Williams’s survey, 57 percent of “switchers” who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024 say they will not vote Republican in 2028.
The full article can be read at The American Prospect.
Not Left vs. Center, but the People vs. the Powerful
The flawed study ‘Deciding to Win’ may help Democrats get back to fighting for the forgotten middle class again.
We are digesting a wave of studies on why Democrats lost in 2024 and what they should do now. Deciding to Win, by Simon Bazelon, Lauren Harper Pope, and Liam Kerr, argues that Democrats must move to the center to succeed. It’s getting a lot of attention; after all, its findings seemed to be endorsed by Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and my partner, James Carville.
So, is the answer to eschew the left, to moderate and move to the center?
The study’s authors are right that Democrats have to address their losses with moderate voters, eschew the elite’s identity politics in favor of economic issues, and address fundamental doubts on crime, immigration, gender identity, and American exceptionalism.
The full article can be read at The American Prospect.
Why we expect an earthquake in the 2026 midterms
Primary voters in big states are sending electable candidates to general elections.
Zohran Mamdani’s expected victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City is sure to advance the conventional wisdom that the Democratic Party faces two very difficult years ahead.
As the prevailing story goes, the party has high and growing disapproval. Its own voters see it as a party with weak leaders who don’t get things done or lead on behalf of the middle class. And its primary voters pick candidates who appeal to the far left — such as Mamdani, a democratic socialist — not the mainstream electorate.
But the Democratic Party of New York City is not a microcosm of the nation. Recent trends leave us confident about Democrats. In primaries this month in New Jersey and Virginia, Democratic voters nominated moderate and progressive candidates for governor with broad appeal. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, a retired Navy helicopter pilot, and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, a former CIA officer, each flipped Republican-held House seats in 2018. They made affordability their top priority.
The party’s primary voters are the party. They’ve been picking candidates who are taking the Democratic Party in a different direction and by and large addressing its horrible brand problems.
The full article can be read at The Washington Post.
The Real Original Sins
What do Democrats need to do to win back voters’ trust?
Earlier this month on State of the Union, Jake Tapper challenged Democrats to get their house in order. “The stunning election result traced back to the original sin of the 2024 election, President Biden’s decision to run for re-election,” despite years of serious decline of his mental abilities, Tapper said. With his co-author Alex Thompson, Tapper conducted 300 interviews for the book Original Sin that surely proved that.
As a result, they said, “Democrats are now in the wilderness, and they are trying to figure out how to regain the trust of the American people.”
Many news shows and stories used the book’s launch to explore why the Democratic Party has such low approval now and what they must do to navigate a path back.
But you must be living in a bubble if you believe this “cover-up” is the main reason for the disastrous election last November.
The full article can be read at The American Prospect.