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AMAC Exclusive By Claire Brighn

Beginning in earnest with Donald Trumps election in 2016, working class voters in the United States have fled the Democratic Party in droves, quickly eroding a once solid base of support for the party. Amid this seismic shift in the electorate, many elected Democrats and mainstream media pundits have over the past several months desperately tried to prop up this narrative of Democrats as the party of everyday Americans even as the policies emanating from Washington have grown increasingly opposed to their interests.

Following the 2016 election, many in media circles seemed to believe that Trumps performance with blue-collar and working class voters in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio must have been a fluke. Though 2018 was an electoral setback for Republicans in the House, 2020 quickly proved a continuation of the trend that began four years before. Analysis from The New York Times in 2020 on The Two Americas Funding Trump and Biden Campaigns found, for example, that in ZIP codes above [the median household of $68,703], Mr. Biden outraised Mr. Trump by $389.1 million. Below that level, Mr. Trump was actually ahead by $53.4 million. Additionally, the study also found that much of Bidens financial edge came from deep blue states along the coasts supporting the widespread perception of Democrats as the party of coastal elites. The donations mirror voting patterns, Republican pollster Whit Ayres noted at the time.

The reason why this shift is occurring is easy to see on issue after issue, Democrats policies are hopelessly out of step with the experiences of working class voters. On day one of his administration, Biden took actions like canceling the Keystone XL pipeline and ending oil and gas leases on federal lands policies favored by wealthy liberals, but which started a steady rise in energy prices that hit working class Americans particularly hard. Democrats $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was chock-full of woke priorities aimed at appeasing far-left activists, touched off an inflation crisis that has further devastated the financial lives of working class families. Instead of working to curb inflation, Biden and Congressional Democrats passed a bill dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act that economists believe will do nothing but increase inflation, and which contains subsidies for electric vehicles and solar panels more welfare for the wealthy. In just the past two years, every Democrat in Congress has voted for higher energy costs, ending coal, and unleashing an army of IRS agents on low and middle-income Americans.

Despite Democrats claims that these policies are targeted at working and middle class Americans, evidence suggests that the opposite is true. For instance, available data shows that 80% of electric vehicle subsidies end up going to individuals making more than $100,000 per year. A Wall Street Journal analysis of Californias push to switch to green energy sources, a plan similar to the climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, showed that while working class households saw their energy bills increase, wealthy households actually saw financial gain from the policies.

Additionally, though Democrats slammed the Trump tax cuts as tax breaks for the rich and insist that their tax plan would make the wealthy pay their fair share, real wages grew under Trump, and that wage growth went predominately to workers at the lower end of the pay scale. Meanwhile, an analysis from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that the tax code changes in Democrats Inflation Reduction Act would result in an increased tax burden of more than $17 billion on Americans making less than $200,000 in 2023 alone.

Democrats struggles with working class voters are perhaps best captured in middle American states that were once reliably blue or purple but are now trending Republican. The state of Iowa, for instance, which for decades was the reliable wind vane of American politics, has all but totally rejected Democrats. Obama carried the state twice in 2008 and 2012, but Trump also won there twice gaining ground in 2020 over 2016. Since then, Republican voter registration has almost doubled in the state, and Bidens approval sits at a dismal 23%.

A similar story has played out in Ohio, which also voted for Obama twice, but which Trump won handily in 2020. Though Biden managed to carry Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota two years ago, these once reliable bastions of Democratic support are now toss-ups.

In all of these states, which have been at the epicenter of the decline of American manufacturing in recent decades, working class voters are driving this shift, undoubtedly in large part thanks to Donald Trumps message of economic renewal and a return to American greatness.

In response, some Democrats have, to their credit, attempted to rebuild this base of support. A headline from The New York Times late last month asked: How Can Democrats Persuade Voters They Arent The Party of Rich Elites? In an apparent response, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio (D) wrote in an op-ed earlier this month, Were supposed to be the workers Party. Democrats must be that party again. (Never mind the fact that Senator Brown has garnered a reputation as one of the most far-left members of the Senate and was a strong supporter of Democrats spending binge.)

But this outreach effort has proven to be little more than lip service to the actual needs of working class voters. Far from re-calibrating their policy agenda as working class voters abandon them, Democrats appear poised to double down on their embrace of elite interests and a far-left social agenda, one that is completely at odds with the traditional values of most working class families. For Republicans, this presents a golden opportunity if they can follow Trumps lead and continue focusing on the issues that matter most to these voters.

Claire Brighn is the pen name of a conservative researcher and writer with previous domestic and foreign policy experience in the Executive Branch.

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Democrats Have Abandoned the Working Class - AMAC

COLUMBUS, Ohio A new campaign ad from Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the longtime Toledo Democrat whos running a tough race for re-election this year, would almost make you think its coming from a Republican.

It kicks off by calling out President Joe Biden for letting Ohios solar manufacturers be undercut by China.

But Marcy Kaptur is fighting back, working with Republican Rob Portman, protecting our jobs. Communist Chinas not happy, says the narrator for the ad, which references the Biden Administrations move in June to bar tariffs for two years on solar panels manufactured in Southeast Asia. The ad flashes a picture of Chinese President Xi Jingping for good measure before pivoting to criticize her Republican opponent, first-time candidate J.R. Majewski.

Kapturs ad is just the latest example of an Ohio Democrat this year, while running in political territory that Donald Trump won in both 2016 and 2020, trying to put daylight between themselves and Biden, as well as other national Democrats. Rep. Tim Ryan, a Niles-area Democrat whos running for Senate, also has taken pains to distance himself from Biden, including conspicuously skipping all three of the presidents visits to Ohio this year.

The strategy underscores Bidens low approval rating here, which polls consistently place in the mid-30s. But it also shows what Ohio Democrats think their best chance to win is in whats become an increasingly right-leaning state persuade some voters that theyre different than other Democrats.

Republicans, meanwhile, have signaled they once again plan to flood Ohio with ads tying the states Democratic candidates to Biden and other national Democratic figures.

Asked about the new ad on Wednesday, Kyle Buda, Kapturs campaign manager, said in a statement that the Toledo Democrat is happy to work with anyone to stick up for state workers.

They saw it when she fought against outsourcing with NAFTA, they saw it when she fought to protect and rebuild the American steel and auto industries, and theyre seeing it again as she leads the fight for an all of the above energy future, Buda said. No matter who is president, Marcy Kaptur will work with anyone Republican or Democrat to put Ohio workers first.

But Ohio Republicans say Kaptur, whos running in a redrawn district that Trump won by 3 points in 2020, is being disingenuous.

Both Kaptur and Ryan voted 100% of the time with Bidens legislative agenda, according to FiveThirtyEight, the data-focused political news website. Ryan ceremonially nominated Biden on behalf of Ohios delegation at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, while Kaptur also enthusiastically hit the campaign trail on Bidens behalf that year.

Marcy Kaptur and Tim Ryan pretending to be Republican shows you just how toxic the [Ohio Democrats] brand is, Justin Bis, executive director of the Ohio Republican Party, said in a Twitter post on Saturday. My prediction: it wont work! Democrat consultants behind these FAKE ads underestimate the average Ohio voter.

During mid-term elections, its not uncommon for candidates whose party controls the White House to try to distance themselves from the sitting president. Republican candidates did the same thing under ex-President George W. Bush and Trump, while Democrats did the same under then-President Barack Obama, according to Kyle Kondik, an Ohio native whos a political analyst for the University of Virginia.

But theres also a separate history of Democrats from more conservative areas of the country trying to differentiate themselves from their national, more liberal counterparts, with varying degrees of success, Kondik said.

In addition, within Ohios congressional delegation, Kaptur and Ryan are among the Democrats who for years have voted in a bloc against some international free-trade deals supported by Democratic and Republican presidents alike until Trump was elected in 2016. Both also used to support some abortion restrictions, although both have announced changes in their views in recent years.

Kaptur and Ryan are not voting with the Republicans a lot, if at all, whereas a generation or two ago you did have a fair number, Kondik said.

Ryan, a Youngstown Democrat whos tried to package himself to center-right voters as an independent voice, during a campaign stop in Columbus on Tuesday rattled off what he said were points of disagreement with Biden.

He, too, pointed to the solar tariff decision, which the Biden Administration said was meant to give domestic solar manufacturing time to ramp up, but which drew opposition from First Solar, which has three factories in the Toledo area, including an expansion with a planned 500 workers announced in 2021.

Ryan also said he opposed the Biden Administrations plans to end Title 42, a pandemic-era restriction imposed by the Trump administration that allowed the U.S. government to turn away people at the southern border on public-health grounds.

And on Wednesday, a spokesperson for Ryans congressional office told cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer that Ryan opposes Bidens plan to waive up to $20,000 in student loan debt for qualifying borrowers.

But, Ryan said Tuesday he does plan to attend a ribbon-cutting ceremony thats expected in the coming weeks to mark the upcoming construction of a massive Intel factory planned in the Columbus area. The White House has said Biden will be there, and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and other elected officials also are expected to be on hand.

The project will be subsidized by the CHIPS Act, which Congress approved last month with bipartisan support and which Biden quickly signed into law.

Ryan missed the other Biden appearances earlier this year for what his campaign said were scheduling conflicts. In February, Ryan took a tour of a Columbus-area factory the same day Biden appeared in Lorain to tout the bipartisan infrastructure bill. In May, when Biden stopped in Cincinnati to push for Congress to advance the CHIPS Act, Ryan tweeted he had attended a funeral in Akron. And in July, when Biden touted a pension fix provision in Cleveland, Ryan spent time in Southeast Ohio, publicly sharing a photo from a restaurant outside Steubenville, where he met with local business owners, and a video from a brewery in Athens.

But Ryan told reporters he will move heaven and Earth to go to the ribbon-cutting for the Intel plant.

I have some disagreements with Biden, and those remain, but we were able to get this done. And thats a really big deal, Ryan said.

Nan Whaley, the former Dayton mayor whos challenging DeWine in this years governors race, has also skipped Bidens campaign events this year. But Courtney Rice, a campaign spokeswoman, like Ryan cited scheduling conflicts.

Nan is very focused, understandably, on Ohio and the Ohios governors race, Rice said. There is so much at stake, specifically in Ohio this November. And I would say she will welcome anyone who believes in her vision for Ohio.

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Ohio Democrats try to put daylight between themselves and President Joe Biden - cleveland.com

From Jan. 1, 2022, to the Aug. 16 primary, there was a 20 percent drop in Democratic voters. Republican voters jumped 10 percent, according to the Wyoming Secretary of States office.

Voting records dont specify how many individuals are registering for the first time versus switching their party, nor which party they are switching to. But anecdotally, Democrats in Wyoming have said they re-registered as Republicans to vote for Cheney in the primary.

Wyoming voters can change their party affiliation at least 14 days before the election or at the polls. Cheney included these instructions on her campaign site, and sent out mailers detailing the steps.

The change in voters was even more apparent beginning in July after Cheney began asking for Democratic support. From July 1 to the primary, Democratic registration dropped from about 43,000 to 36,000 a 15 percent decrease in just a little over a month. Republicans picked up nearly 15,000 voters in that span, increasing to a record-breaking number of 215,000 people registered by the primary.

And in the two weeks between Aug. 1 and the primary, Democrats lost over 3,000 voters, going from 40,000 to 36,000 registered Democrats the lowest its been in decades. Republican voters increased by almost 8,000 from Aug. 1-16.

Cheney wasnt the only lawmaker calling for voters to make a temporary switch for her. An organization called Wyomingites Defending Freedom And Democracy ran two ads from Democratic Reps. Dean Phillips (Minn.) and Tom Malinowski (N.J.) earlier this month urging Wyoming Democrats to vote for her.

You might be a little surprised that Id be supporting Liz Cheney in her bid to continue representing Wyoming in the U.S. House, Phillips said in his video. But principle must always come before politics, and nobody has shown more honor, integrity and courage than she.

Cheneys next steps include preparing for the launch of a new outside group dedicated to keeping Trump away from the presidency. The group, The Great Task, filed its switch from Cheneys candidate committee to a leadership PAC with the FEC in the early hours of Wednesday morning following her defeat.

Read more here:
Democrats switched party registration in Wyoming. It couldn't save Cheney. - POLITICO

Wes Moore presses the flesh at the Maryland Association of Counties crab feast last week. Photo by Josh Kurtz.

By Dayvon Love

The writer is director of public policy forLeaders of a Beautiful Strugglein Baltimore.

Black people in Maryland, as is the case around the U.S., are a captured electorate of the Democratic Party. The core of the party, which is dominated by an overwhelmingly white donor class (made up of white corporate and political elites and a multiracial gatekeeper class), has benefited more from Black peoples consistent patronage than Black people have benefited from Democratic Party representation.

Given the latent racist agenda of the Republican Party and the lack of electoral viability of other political parties, Black people generally find themselves in a position where they have nowhere to go. The Democratic Party takes advantage of this reality. It does not have to deliver on policy, particularly for working-class Black people, in order to maintain its electoral hegemony of the Black vote. Furthermore, many working class and poor Black people dont even participate in the electoral process, I would argue, because of how poorly the party delivers material benefits for the masses of Black people.

The Democratic Party voter base in Maryland is largely Black and Brown and has nominated a Black person for governor for a third election cycle in a row. While this is largely symbolic, it says something about supposedly progressive Maryland that Democrats have not been able to elect a Black governor in a state that is 30% Black and 11% Latino.

In light of this challenge, Wes Moore, the 2022 Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland, and his team have a choice to make. He is running in a general election against a Trump-backed Republican, which is unprecedented in Maryland politics.

There are two paths the campaign can take toward the general election. One path is to tack politically toward the right in an attempt to appeal to moderates (Hogan Democrats). This path is an attempt to appeal to a whiter and more suburban base, a base that tends to have less of an appetite for criminal justice reform, investment in Black-led grass-roots organizations, police accountability, and community control of public resources. Additionally, this base tends to have attitudes about Baltimore City (and Prince Georges County, as quiet as that is kept, as evidenced by Del. Mary Ann Lisantis use of a racist epithet to talk about it) that are rooted in notions of inherent Black pathology.

Efforts that are perceived to help Black people specifically trigger these deeply held racist attitudes. A study done in 2014 by Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt observed that, Rather than treating racial disparities as an outcome to be measured, we exposed people to real and extreme racial disparities and observed how this drove their support for harsh criminal-justice policies.

Additionally, they examined the relationship between racial disparities in incarceration and peoples acceptance of punitive policies. For decades, social psychologists have demonstrated an association between race and crime (e.g., Allport & Postman, 1947; Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink, 2002; Duncan, 1976; Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004; Payne, 2001). Not only are Blacks strongly associated with violent crime, but also the more stereotypically Black a persons physical features are perceived to be, the more that person is perceived as criminal (Eberhardt et al, 2004). Even in death-penalty cases, the perceived Blackness of a defendant is related to sentencing: the more Black, the more death-worthy.

The electoral impact of this dynamic is that among a whiter and more suburban base, there are political benefits to co-signing these societal notions of inherent Black pathology and a disadvantage to policies that would seek to truly empower working-class Black people.

The other route that the Maryland Democratic Party can take to the 2022 general election for governor is to invest in going after voters who have been traditionally ignored and taken for granted. There are hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown voters that choose not to participate because they are not offered policies that lead to true empowerment. At best, what we typically get are what I refer to as disaster management policies (I explain this concept more in-depth in When Baltimore Awakes), which are mere sustenance, i.e., public benefits, temporary housing support, and child tax credits.

These are not bad policies, but by themselves, they render Black people primarily as recipients of services, as opposed to a people who can practice sovereignty and self-determination. This would certainly trigger notions of inherent Black pathology mentioned earlier that would likely be perceived negatively by the Hogan Democrats base of voters. In my estimation, there is no electoral strategy that successfully appeals to both of these constituencies.

The Democratic Party will only deliver on meaningful policy to the masses of Black people to the extent that we have an organized power base inside and outside of it. Wes Moore and his campaign have an opportunity to use the general election to organize a meaningful Black power base within the Maryland Democratic Party that is actually accountable to working-class Black people who are typically taken for granted by the party. We should all pay close attention to which path he, his campaign, and the Maryland Democratic Party take to this general election.

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Opinion: The Maryland Democratic Party in 2022 - Josh Kurtz

Democrats' new drug pricing law will likely deliver a financial blow to one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative segments of the pharmaceutical industry: cancer drugs.

Why it matters: The drug industry argues that the new law will keep oncology treatments from reaching some patients who need them. But experts say the current system lets companies profit from developing drugs that yield only incremental advances and that cancer drugs will still be valuable enough for companies to pursue.

The big picture: The dispute over how Medicare drug price negotiations affect cancer care is a microcosm of a larger debate, in which the pharmaceutical industry argues that price controls will reduce their incentive to bring new drugs to market.

What theyre saying: Research on cancer drugs after initial approval "will be gutted by this bill," Stephen Ubl, CEO of the industry trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, wrote in an Aug. 4 letter to Congress.

How it works: Cancer drugs are usually launched to target one type of cancer. Companies then do additional research once the drug is on the market to see if it is also effective against other forms of cancer, which can earn approvals for other "indications."

State of play: Under the new law, beginning in 2026, certain older drugs without generic competition will be subject for Medicare negotiations. That means there will be a limited amount of time during which a drug company has monopoly pricing power, even if a competitor hasnt yet materialized.

The other side: Some experts dismiss the industry's concerns as fear mongering, countering that expanding the market for a particular oncology drug will still be more than profitable enough to justify R&D costs.

By the numbers: Nearly half of the drugs in the FDA pipeline were cancer drugs as of January 2021, according to a University of Chicago white paper. The authors argue that means oncology drugs will be significantly impacted by the new law and fewer will come to market.

The intrigue: Research suggests that not all cancer drugs nor all approved indications offer the same value to patients.

The bottom line: Capping the price of a new drug after a certain amount of time certainly does decrease the incentive of a manufacturer to pursue different indications, because functionally they have significantly less revenue per unit, said Avalere Health's Massey Whorley.

Go deeper: The search for next-generation cancer treatments

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New drug pricing law puts cancer drugs in the spotlight - Axios