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I want to stop here and say I believe, as does Shor, that educational polarization is serving here as a crude measure of class polarization. We tend to think of class as driven by income, but in terms of how its formed and practiced in America right now, education tracks facets that paychecks miss. A high school dropout who owns a successful pest extermination company in the Houston exurbs might have an income that looks a lot like a software engineers at Google, while an adjunct professors will look more like an apprentice plumbers. But in terms of class experience who they know, what they believe, where theyve lived, what they watch, who they marry and how they vote, act and protest the software engineer is more like the adjunct professor.

Either way, the sorting that educational polarization is picking up, inexact as the term may be, puts Democrats at a particular disadvantage in the Senate, as college-educated voters cluster in and around cities while non-college voters are heavily rural. This is why Shor believes Trump was good for the Republican Party, despite its losing the popular vote in 2016, the House in 2018 and the Senate and the presidency in 2020. Sure, maybe he underperforms the generic Republican by whatever, Shor said. But hes engineered a real and perhaps persistent bias in the Electoral College, and then when you get to the Senate, its so much worse. As he put it, Donald Trump enabled Republicans to win with a minority of the vote.

The second problem Democrats face is the sharp decline in ticket splitting a byproduct of the nationalization of politics. As recently as 2008, the correlation between how a state voted for president and how it voted in Senate elections was about 71 percent. Close, but plenty of room for candidates to outperform their party. In 2020, it was 95.6 percent.

The days when, say, North Dakotas Republicans would cheerfully vote for a Democrat for the Senate are long past. Just ask Heidi Heitkamp, the defeated North Dakota Democrat whos now lobbying her former colleagues to protect the rich from paying higher taxes on inheritances. There remain exceptions to this rule Joe Manchin being the most prominent but they loom so large in politics because they are now so rare. From 1960 to 1990, about half of senators represented a state that voted for the other partys nominee for president, the political scientist Lee Drutman noted. Today, there are six.

Put it all together, and the problem Democrats face is this: Educational polarization has made the Senate even more biased against Democrats than it was, and the decline in ticket splitting has made it harder for individual Democratic candidates to run ahead of their party.

Atop this analysis, Shor has built an increasingly influential theory of what the Democrats must do to avoid congressional calamity. The chain of logic is this: Democrats are on the edge of an electoral abyss. To avoid it, they need to win states that lean Republican. To do that, they need to internalize that they are not like and do not understand the voters they need to win over. Swing voters in these states are not liberals, are not woke and do not see the world in the way that the people who staff and donate to Democratic campaigns do.

All this comes down to a simple prescription: Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff. Traditional diversity and inclusion is super important, but polling is one of the only tools we have to step outside of ourselves and see what the median voter actually thinks, Shor said. This theory is often short-handed as popularism. It doesnt sound as if it would be particularly controversial.

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Opinion | David Shor Is Telling Democrats What They Dont Want to Hear - The New York Times

Breaking up with the Democratic Party feels like the right thing to do because I believe I can have a greater impact this way, he wrote. Am I right? Lets find out. Together.

POLITICO reported early last month that Yang plans to form a third party following his experiences running as a Democrat and what he sees as the failures of both major political parties to address the needs of Americans.

Yang is set to release a book titled, Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy later this week. His nascent third party will carry a similar name, the Forward Party, according to several reports based on his book.

Yang said that his new focus is on promoting adoption of open primaries and ranked-choice voting, which New York City and several other cities have instituted in recent years. He said he believes those reforms would give voters more genuine choice and our system more dynamism.

Still, he said that he is not urging others to follow his lead in switching their party registration given that it could lock people out from participating in partisan primaries in many areas.

Yang first gained attention early in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign for making universal basic income his signature issue, as well as a smattering of other heterogeneous positions. He then sought to use the national media attention he garnered during that race to springboard into contention in the New York City mayoral race, and even became a frontrunner for a time before fizzling out and finishing fourth in the Democratic primary.

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Yang officially breaks with Democratic Party - POLITICO

Follow the sun. Thats the advice to Democrats from a leading party fundraising organization in an exhaustive analysis of the electoral landscape released today.

The study, from the group Way to Win, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, argues that to solidify their position in Congress and the Electoral College, Democrats must increase their investment and focus on Sun Belt states that have become more politically competitive over recent years as they have grown more urbanized and racially diverse. The majority of new, likely Democratic voters live in the South and Southwest, places the Democratic establishment have long ignored or are just waking up to now, the group argues in the report.

Read: What does the Democratic Party stand for?

The study, focusing on 11 battleground states, is as much a warning as an exhortation. It contends that although the key to contesting Sun Belt states such as North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona is to sustain engagement among the largely nonwhite infrequent voters who turned out in huge numbers in 2018 and 2020, it also warns that Republicans could consolidate Donald Trumps gains last year among some minority voters, particularly Latino men. These trends across our multiracial coalition demonstrate the urgent need for campaigns and independent groups to stop assuming voters of color will vote Democrat, the report asserts.

The study echoes the findings of other Democratic strategists such as Mike Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, in arguing that the Democrats best chance to avoid the usual midterm losses is to turn out large numbers of those surge voters next year.

If all the consultants in the Democratic Party do is follow their same playbook, which is talking only to the most likely voters, or really focusing on white voters or white non-college voters, Democrats will likely lose, says Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Way to Wins vice president and chief strategy officer. The big message for us is that the core strategy of the 2022 midterm [should be] about engineering and expanding enthusiasm among this high-potential multiracial, multigenerational base that is really a critical part of the electorate across the Sun Belt states.

Way to Win was founded by Fernandez Acona and the Democratic operatives Tory Gavito and Leah Hunt-Hendrix after the 2016 election to channel more funding from Democratic donors into organizations and campaigns that focus on voters of color. Their work, which they say has raised $165 million so far, has centered on Sun Belt states, but has also included investments in diversifying urban and suburban areas in other regions, says Gavito, who now serves as Way to Wins president and CEO. Among the groups Way to Win has funded are grassroots organizations in Georgia and Arizona that are widely credited for the robust minority turnout that helped President Joe Biden flip both of those states last November.

The key analytical insight in the new report is its attempt to quantify the stakes for Democrats in continuing to engage the infrequent voters who flocked to the polls in 2020.

Using an analysis of voter files by the firm TargetSmart, the report studied the 64.8 million voters who cast ballots last year in the 11 states where Way to Win focused its efforts: a Sun Beltheavy list that includes Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida in the Southeast; Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas in the Southwest; and Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the Rust Belt.

TargetSmart projects that nearly 41 million of the voters in those states turned out in all three of the most recent elections2016, 2018, and 2020and that those dependable voters split almost exactly in half between Biden and Trump. Way to Win sees little opportunity for moving those voters through persuasion efforts, writing that they are polarized, deeply entrenched, partisan base voters. Only about one in seven of these habitual voters, the group concludes, might be genuinely persuadable from election to election.

Instead, the report argues that the Democratic Party has greater opportunity among less reliable voters. Despite Trumps own success at energizing infrequent voters, the study found that in these crucial states, Biden actually generated more support from voters who turn out only occasionally.

Across the 11 states, TargetSmart calculated, nearly 13 million 2020 voters participated in just two of the past three elections, and they preferred Biden 52 percent to 48 percent. Another 11.1 million 2020 voters did not vote in either 2018 or 2016, and they gave Biden an estimated advantage of 54 percent to 46 percent. Looking beyond these infrequent voters, the study found that another nearly 25 million registered adults did not vote in any of the three most recent elections, and they model as more Democratic- than Republican-leaning in all 11 states.

These concentric circles of irregular votersespecially those who have now turned out to oppose Trump or his party in either 2018 or 2020, or bothrepresent the Democrats best chance of expanding their support, and contesting new states, in the years ahead, the report argues. To expand the Democratic base with a durable coalition, the report maintains, all of these infrequent voters must be invited to become more habitual voters who consistently break for Democrats. Democrats cannot afford a scarcity mindset where we only talk to high-frequency persuadable voters in 2022.

David A. Graham: The Democrats greatest delusion

Even as it flags that opportunity, the Way to Win study echoes other Democratic analysts who have seen signs through Bidens first months that Republicans may be preserving the unexpected gains Trump recorded among Latino voters, particularly men, and even (though fewer) Black voters. In some ways this is a clarion call and a warning sign because it means that we need more investment and more work to figure out what is happening in these communities, Gavito says. One lesson thats clear already regarding Latinos, she says, is that emphasizing a traditional Democratic message thats centered on racial justice without delivering improvement in material day-to-day conditions is falling on deaf ears.

The Way to Win report arrives amid another spasm in the perennial Democratic argument over whether the partys future revolves more around the emerging electoral opportunities in the Sun Belt or restoring its strength in Rust Belt states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Iowa that have moved toward the GOP in the Trump era. That geographic argument also functions as a proxy for the partys central demographic debate: whether Democrats should place more priority on recapturing non-college-educated white voters drawn to Trump or on maximizing support and turnout among their more recent coalition of young people, racial minorities, and college-educated white voters, particularly women.

On a national basis, white voters without a college degree for years have been supplying a shrinking share of Democrats total votes, both because those voters are declining as a percentage of the overall electorate (down about two percentage points every four years to roughly 40 percent now) and also because Democrats are winning fewer of them, especially in the Trump years.

But that national trend still leaves room for plenty of regional divergence that, in practice, commits Democrats to relying on both strategies, rather than choosing between them.

In the Rust Belt, party candidates have understandably devoted enormous effort to maintaining support among white voters without a college degree. Thats partly because in these states, minority populations are not growing nearly as quickly as in the Sun Belt, and those blue-collar white voters remain about half the electorate or more. But its also because a history of class consciousness and union activism has allowed Democrats to historically perform slightly better with working-class white voters in these states than elsewhere, even if that ceiling has lowered amid Trumps overt appeals to racial resentment.

In the Sun Belt, non-college-educated white voters are both a smaller share of the electorate and more resistant to Democrats, in part because more of them than in the Rust Belt are evangelical Christians. (Although exit polls showed Biden winning about two in five non-college-educated white voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and even Iowa, he carried only about one in five of them in North Carolina and Georgia and only about one in four in Texas.) Conversely, the opportunity for mobilization is greater in the Sun Beltwhere people of color constitute a majority of the population turning 18 each year in many of the statesthan in the Rust Belt. Given those political and demographic realities, most Democratic campaigns and candidates across the Sun Belt believe their future depends primarily on engaging younger and nonwhite votersand the registration and turnout efforts led by Stacey Abrams in Georgia is the model they hope to emulate.

Fernandez Ancona says Way to Win isnt calling for Democrats to abandon the Rust Belt, or to concede more working-class white voters to the GOP. Rather, she says, the group believes that party donors and campaigns must increase the resources devoted to expansion of the minority electorate so that it more closely matches the greater sums already devoted to the persuasion of mostly white swing voters.

I dont think its expansion versus persuasion: Its that we have to prioritize expansion just as we have historically prioritized persuasion, she says. We saw that in 2020. Its very clear: We needed it all.

Read: Democrats 2024 problem is already clear

In fact, both Fernandez Ancona and Gavito argue, the entire debate over whether to stress recapturing more white voters or mobilizing more nonwhite voters obscures the partys actual challenge: finding ways to unify a coalition that is inherently more multiracial and multigenerational than the Republicans. Even with Trumps gains among some minority voters, white voters still supplied almost 92 percent of his votes across these 11 states, the analysis found. Bidens contrasting coalition was much more diverse: just under 60 percent white and more than 40 percent nonwhite.

Sometimes we are missing the whole and we are not grasping that the multiracial coalition includes white people and people of color, and we have to hold that coalition together, Fernandez Ancona says. Thinking about the whole coalition [means] we have to find messages that unite around a shared vision that includes cross-racial solidarity.

One of those messages, Gavito says, is boosting economically strained families of all races with the kind of kitchen-table programs embedded in the Democrats big budget-reconciliation bill, such as tax credits for children, lower prescription-drug prices, and increased subsidies for health- and child-care expenses. Those programs are very important at this stage, she says, to give Democrats any chance of avoiding the usual midterm losses for the presidents party, thats for damn sure.

On that point, Biden and almost every Democrat in both the House and the Senate agree. But unless they can also persuade Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to pass the bill, debates about the Sun Belt versus the Rust Belt, or white versus nonwhite voters, may be washed away by a tide of disapproval from all of those directions.

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The Democrats Future Is in the West - The Atlantic

RIDGEWOOD, N.J. On Election Day in 2018, Cathy Brienza opened her light blue colonial in a New Jersey suburb to dozens of Democratic activists for a get-out-the-vote rally. A freshman congressman, Josh Gottheimer, addressed a crowd filled with voters angered by Donald J. Trumps presidency and hopeful of regaining Democratic control of the House.

It worked. Fueled by a so-called blue wave, Democrats flipped four seats in New Jersey, re-elected Mr. Gottheimer and won the House.

Now, as another midterm election looms, Ms. Brienza is again thinking about Mr. Gottheimer. But this time she is disappointed and scared.

He is undermining President Bidens agenda, said Ms. Brienza, 62, the founder of Ridgewood JOLT, which grew after the 2017 Womens March into a 1,400-member political organizing group based in Ridgewood, N.J.

President Biden is under siege, she said. If he is not successful, we are going to end up with another Trump.

A moderate in a swing district that bends at a hard right angle along the western and northern edges of New Jersey, Mr. Gottheimer, 46, has emerged as a key player in high-stakes negotiations that have cleaved the Democratic Partys centrist and liberal factions and consumed Washington.

He is a leader among nine conservative-leaning Democrats in the House who initially said they would withhold support for a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint that includes far-reaching initiatives, including measures to combat climate change and expand child care, until a landmark, $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill was approved.

Progressive lawmakers are now holding firm to a similar ultimatum, only in reverse, bogging down the infrastructure bill, which is seen as a pillar of Mr. Bidens agenda. It includes funding to improve roads, bridges, airports and railways and expand high-speed internet access. It cleared the Senate with rare bipartisan backing, and polls show it has broad public support.

The standoff has imperiled both initiatives, and on Friday, after meetings with legislators on Capitol Hill, Mr. Biden said that a vote on the popular infrastructure measure would have to wait until Democrats passed his far more ambitious social policy package.

These so-called moderates, who really are acting like Republicans, are getting in the way of the presidents agenda, said Harry Waisbren, 36, a Democrat who lives in Mr. Gottheimers district in Glen Rock. Mr. Waisbren said he believed that delaying sweeping action on climate change would be catastrophic, noting the torrential flash flooding in New Jersey that led to at least 30 deaths last month in the wake of Hurricane Ida.

Im concerned that theyre acting on behalf of their corporate donors rather than our children, he added.

Mr. Gottheimer represents a large and varied district that includes some of New Jerseys few remaining Republican strongholds as well as populous, affluent regions closer to New York City that are filled with liberal-leaning Democrats who helped propel him to victory in 2016.

What I have said consistently is I believe both parts of the presidents agenda are critically important to New Jersey and to the country, Mr. Gottheimer said in an interview on Saturday. I just dont believe that we should hold one up for months on end.

At lunchtime on Friday, Jeff Bolson, a self-described die-hard Democrat who, like Mr. Gottheimer, lives in Bergen County, said he was worried that the brinkmanship in Washington could jeopardize the infrastructure bill and the climate change initiatives, both of which he supports.

We neglected the infrastructure, he said. If the economy is going to move forward, we need to build it up.

Still, Mr. Bolson, a certified public accountant, blanched at the sheer size of the $3.5 trillion package, which includes paid family and medical leave, an expansion of Medicare, funding for universal prekindergarten and initiatives to slow and combat the negative effects of a warmer climate.

Theres a lack of accountability when everything becomes free, he said. People need to have skin in the game.

In rural Sussex County, where Mr. Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points in 2020, many residents said they were supportive of Mr. Gottheimers approach.

Anybody thats willing to take a pause and seriously look at things, Im behind, said Rick Wahlers, who twice voted for Mr. Trump and owns a clock and watch repair shop down the street from Mr. Gottheimers district office in Newton.

The government hands them the money and does not have any accountability for how its spent, he added, adjusting the magnifying loupe he wears on his eyeglasses and uses to repair tiny clock machinery. Its way too much.

Nearby, in a bar run by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, men were gathered Thursday afternoon eating food left over from a funeral reception held the night before at the lodge.

Bill Schmitz Jr., an Army veteran who is the V.F.W.s quartermaster and who voted for Mr. Trump, said he agreed with ending the countrys dependency on fossil fuels and supported anything that would create new jobs.

Our infrastructure is crumbling I get that, Mr. Schmitz, 61, said as negotiations over the two plans were raging 250 miles away in Washington, where he worked for about 10 years for the State Department. But he said he feared the larger initiative would be filled with pork.

Just to go out and drop trillions and trillions, he said. Wheres that money coming from?

Colleen Waselik sees it differently. A mother of five who works for a school district, she recently left the Republican Party, yearning for a spirit of greater cooperation and bipartisanship.

I was embarrassed sickened by the way Republicans were behaving, said Ms. Waselik, 61, who said the need to improve internet connectivity in rural Sussex County and repair the countrys faulty infrastructure was urgent.

It hasnt been addressed for so long, she said outside Hayeks Market in Newton. They have to go big.

Much of the ambitious social policy bill would be paid for by rolling back Trump-era tax cuts. One version of the plan called for raising the corporate tax rate to 26.5 percent for the richest businesses and imposing an additional surtax on individuals who make more than $5 million.

Mr. Gottheimer, a prodigious fund-raiser, has $10 million on hand for his re-election campaign, according to a July report filed with the Federal Election Commission nearly five times as much as Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington State, who has emerged as the voice of the left in the House.

Ms. Brienza, the Ridgewood activist, said she was concerned that Mr. Gottheimer was more worried about catering to the needs of wealthy donors than creating an economy that works for everyone.

On Friday night, after talks had reached a new standstill, Mr. Gottheimer issued a statement that criticized Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not holding a promised vote on the infrastructure bill and pinned fault for the delay on a small far left faction.

We can create these jobs and help invest in infrastructure this week if we just pass it and send it to the presidents desk, Mr. Gottheimer said on Saturday. The other ones not written yet.

Still, fear that it all might fall apart and intensify pressure on Democrats trying to defend a slim majority in Congress in next years midterm elections was not far from the minds of many voters.

To show a rift makes it very easy for the Republicans that I dont like to see, said Harriet Sausa, 71, a retired teacher who lives in Glen Rock and is a registered Republican, even though she said she rarely voted for that partys candidates.

She is hoping for a quick compromise.

I do think that a lot of the things in the big bill are important, she said, but not enough to jeopardize the infrastructure bill.

Sherouk Aziz and Yusuf Waiel, a newlywed couple who live in Hackensack, a midsize city, said they were watching the negotiations carefully, worried that the process could spell trouble for the future of the Democratic Party.

This is kind of just one more issue that makes them look more divided and more broken, said Ms. Aziz, 28, a software engineer and a Democrat who said she votes left.

We are going to lose an opportunity to reinvest in our own country, said her husband, Mr. Waiel, 25, who is also a software engineer.

And its going to cost them in the midterms, he added.

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Democratic Voters See Many Losers in Party Schism, and One Winner: Trump - The New York Times

In a private meeting with Mr. Biden and nearly a dozen House Democrats in swing-districts on Tuesday, the prospect of limiting who could benefit from a promised two years of free community college came up as part of a broader discussion about the program, according to Representative Susan Wild, Democrat of Pennsylvania.

But, she added, the general sentiment was, we should not be putting means-testing in on universal child care, or lets call it universal preschool.

Its completely out of the childs control, obviously, and, its an unfair impediment, she said.

The politics of the debate are murky. Republicans relish attacking Democrats for showering benefits on the rich. They caricature tax credits meant to transition the nation to electric vehicles as subsidies for Tesla owners and mock federally paid family and medical leave by singling out executives who already receive the benefit from their companies. The children of millionaires, they warn, will be among those going to community college for free.

The Democrat party has become the party of the wealthy and affluent, Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, wrote in an essay for The Washington Examiner published on Tuesday.

Many of the charges are exaggerated. Millionaires children may not be flocking to community college, free or not. Ms. Sherrills amendment lifted the income cap on the child care tax assistance, but the benefit is still set up to limit child care costs to no more than 7 percent of a familys spending. For truly affluent families, child care is a much smaller percentage than that, so subsidies would still be limited. A million-dollar wealth cap still applies to the program as well.

And as Republicans argue the spending helps the rich, they decry tax increases clearly aimed at the rich.

Still the charges could sting.

There are programs where I say, if the government is helping out somebody like me, that money is probably coming away from somebody who needs it a lot more, Mr. Kaine said.

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Benefits for All or Just the Needy? Manchins Demand Focuses Debate - The New York Times