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midterm elections
Democrats Can Win Back Trump Voters—If They Don't Blow It
The message from the 2025 election is clear: Some Trump voters will back Democrats if the candidates reach them where they are and talk to them about the issues that they care about most.
Nov 11, 2025
While the media has covered extensively Democratic successes in the 2025 off-year elections, there is one story that has been dramatically undercovered. This is the fact that the 2025 Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races show that Democrats can win over Trump voters. Granted, these are not dramatic slices of the Trump coalition, but they are enough in these hyper-polarized times to win elections.
According to CNN polling, in New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill in her race for governor was able to win 7% of those who had voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Interestingly, the Virginia exit polling data shows that Rep. Abigail Spanberger won the identical (7%) of Trump voters.
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn is one of the few journalists who has pointed to the New Jersey and Virginia Democrats’ ability to win over Trump voters. He concludes that:
Instead, the two Democrats won so decisively because they also flipped a crucial sliver of voters who said they supported Mr. Trump in 2024. Ms. Sherrill and Ms. Spanberger both won 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters, according to the exit polls. It may not seem like much to flip 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s backers, but consider: When a voter flips, it adds one voter to one party and also deducts one from the other, making it twice as significant as turning out a new voter.
Looking at the exit polling data makes it clear that while the Democrats margins in New Jersey and Virginia were helped by increased Democratic turnout, winning over 2024 Trump voters was critically important.
One of the key parts of the Trump coalition has always been strong and even almost overwhelming support from rural voters. An analysis by Politico of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows that:
Spanberger’s victory was largely driven by massive turnout in northern and eastern Virginia’s urban areas. But she picked up support across the state’s deep-red central and western counties, where Trump’s tariffs have hit the manufacturing and agricultural industries especially hard. Even as her GOP opponent won most of those places, Spanberger posed the best performance by a statewide Democratic candidate in several cycles, according to a POLITICO analysis of voting data in the localities classified as “rural” by the federal government.
To her great credit, Spanberger targeted rural voters and consistently hammered away on how the Trump administration’s tariff policies were hurting them. In comparison with former Vice President Kamala Harris’s performance in 2024, Spanberger outperformed Harris’ margin in 48 of Virginia’s 52 rural localities. The exit polling shows that Spanberger won 46% of rural voters—an eight-point deficit to Republican candidate Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, and a 19-point swing from 2021 gubernatorial Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe’s 27-point disadvantage.
There is also data in the exit polling data indicating that Democrats won back in 2025 Hispanic voters who backed Trump in 2024. The Washington Post reports:
This year, most Democratic statewide candidates won Latino voters by at least 30 points in exit polls, re-creating the margins their party held before 2024. In New Jersey, 18 percent of Latino voters who backed Trump last year cast their ballot for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, exit poll data showed.
The fact that Democrats won over Trump voters in 2025 has profound implications for Democrats in both the 2026 midterms and the 2028. The message is clear: Some Trump voters will back Democrats if the candidates reach them where they are and talk to them about the issues that they care about most. To assume that all Trump voters are absolutely committed to Trump no matter what the circumstances is a mistaken assumption that only hurts Democrats. Successful politics is always about addition.
Hopefully, Democrats learn from their success in 2025 and realize that they can make some Trump voters part of their winning coalition.
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The Democrats Must Regain the Working-Class Vote in 2026
To win back the House, the party needs an economic agenda that offers a viable path to a sustainable future.
Oct 04, 2025
With the Trump administration gradually altering the form of US government from a “flawed democracy” to an emerging dictatorship, the 2026 general midterm election becomes especially important for the future of the country. And for the future of the Democratic Party. The sad and unfortunate reality is that, with the United State being a two-party system, the Democratic Party is the only political alternative to a Trumpian dictatorship. But whether the current Democratic Party is able to fight Trump’s neofascism and actually save America is a dubious proposition at best.
For President Donald Trump to be able to remake everything and thus fulfill his dystopian vision of the United States of America, Republicans know that they must retain control of both chambers of Congress in next fall’s midterm election. For the Democrats to upset Trump’s plans, they need a gain of just three seats to flip the House of Representatives from Republican control and to flip a net of four seats to take control of the Senate.
Trump himself is fully aware of the significance of the outcome of the 2026 general midterm election and has already embarked on a series of strategic moves designed not only to ensure that both chambers of Congress remain under GOP control but that they have wider majorities. First, he has called on GOP-led states to redraw the electoral map in favor of the Republican Party; second, he is using his role as GOP kingmaker to shape the primaries; thirdly, he is trying to change the way people vote by eliminating mail-in ballots and making voter identification a requirement; fourth, he is trying to rebrand “The One Big Beautiful Bill,” which is not popular with voters, and the law’s tax cuts overwhelming benefit the wealthiest Americans, as “a working families tax bill;” and, finally, he has announced on his social media platform, Truth Social, that the Republican Party will hold a convention ahead of the 2026 midterm election in order to show the American people the “great things” that his presidency has done since the presidential election of 2024.
Various polls have shown over the past few months that Trump’s popularity is declining, especially with independents but also, however slightly, with Republicans. Whether this drop will last or not is hard to predict. That said, it is important to underscore the point made by political scientist Larry Bartels and author of such path-breaking works as Unequal Democracy and Democracy Erodes from the Top that, when we discuss the Trump phenomenon, we need to “separate the electoral process from the outcome.” As Bartels states, “The outcome of the election is certainly aberrant and hugely consequential, but the electoral process.… operated in much the same way that it usually does, and in particular, in much the same way that it has over the past quarter century or so.”
In the current political climate, the leadership of the Democratic Party should be able to recognize on its own the urgency of adopting an aggressive class-based approach in order to bring back the working-class vote.
Trump received 49.9% of the popular vote, which is actually less than what George W. Bush received in the 2004 presidential election, and not that different from what other Republican presidential candidates received over the past 20 years. The political landscape is fairly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans and has been so for many years. As such, all is not yet lost. The tide can turn. The only question is whether today’s Democratic Party has what it takes to shift the balance of power in the House and the Senate in 2026. To do so, it needs vision, strategy, and boldness. It needs an economic agenda that offers a viable path to a sustainable future. It needs to fight back against plutocracy and thus put class at the center of politics because it needs to regain the working-class vote.
Most white working-class voters cast their ballots for Trump in all three elections that he ran as president. But this is not a new development related specifically to Trump’s appeal. Working-class voters have been shifting toward the Republican Party over the past few decades, according to data collected from The Vanderbilt Project on Unity & Democracy. Yet, some Democrats did not seem to mindthe defection of the working class to the Republican camp. The great strategist Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) asserted back in 2016 that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” The fact that this lifelong politician with his long ties to the finance industry is now senate minority leader presumably leading the fight against Trump and his extreme agenda speaks volumes of what has gone so terribly wrong with the Democratic Party.
In saying that the Democrats needs to bring back working-class voters if they expect to regain control of the government, one does not miss the irony that today more Republicans identify themselves as working class than Democrats do. An even bigger irony of course is that neither party is the home of the working-class people.
The truth is that the American working class is trapped in the two-party system. The country needs a mass working-class party, and it is not realistic to expect that it can be built through the Democratic Party, which is a capitalist party. By the same token, building a workers’ party may be a noble and necessary undertaking, but it needs to be recognized that such a political project cannot be completed in a short span of time and that it is very difficult anyway for third parties to tip the electoral scales in the United States. As such, progressive and radicals cannot afford to abandon struggles for the type of reforms that might make an immediate improvement to the lives of working-class people by devoting all their energies to building a new party.
What this suggests is that those aspiring to radical change have to necessarily work mostly outside the system but also do what they can to support the progressive left inside the Democratic Party and cast their votes for progressive candidates running for public office like New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. It is through such activism that the Democratic Party was pushed a bit closer to the left during the last few years.
In the current political climate, the leadership of the Democratic Party should be able to recognize on its own the urgency of adopting an aggressive class-based approach in order to bring back the working-class vote. This is clearly what Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are trying to do. Those of us on the sidelines should give them a helping hand. It’s the only way that the tide will turn. And take very seriously next fall’s general midterm election. If the Democrats fail, at the very least, to flip the House, Trump’s dystopian vision for the United States will come ever closer to becoming a reality.
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This Government Shutdown Is Not Normal
Democrats finally have some bargaining leverage. They should use it.
Oct 03, 2025
I’ve been directly involved in government shutdowns, one when I was secretary of labor. It’s hard for me to describe the fear, frustration, and chaos that ensued. I recall spending the first day consoling employees—many in tears as they headed out the door.
In some ways, this shutdown is similar to others. Agencies and departments designed to protect consumers, workers, and investors are now officially closed, as are national parks and museums.
Most federal workers are not being paid—as many as 750,000 could be furloughed—including those who are required to remain on the job, like air-traffic controllers or members of the US military.
So-called “mandatory” spending, including Social Security and Medicare payments, are continuing, although checks could be delayed. (President Donald Trump has made sure that construction of his new White House ballroom won’t be affected.)
Were Democrats to vote to keep the government going, what guarantee do they have that Trump will in fact keep the government going?
There have been eight shutdowns since 1990. Trump has now presided over four.
But this shutdown—the one that began Wednesday morning—is radically different.
For one thing, it’s the consequence of a decision made in July by Trump and Senate Republicans to pass Trump’s gigantic “big beautiful bill” (I prefer to call it “big ugly bill”) without any Democratic votes.
They could do that because of an arcane Senate procedure called “reconciliation,” which allowed the big ugly to get through the Senate with just 51 votes rather than the normal 60 votes required to overcome a filibuster.
The final tally was a squeaker. All Senate Democrats opposed the legislation. When three Senate Republicans joined them, Vice President JD Vance was called in to break a tie. Some Republicans bragged that they didn’t need a single Democrat.
The big ugly fundamentally altered the priorities of the United States government. It cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act—with the result that health insurance premiums for tens of millions of Americans will soar starting in January.
The big ugly also cut nutrition assistance and environmental protection, while bulking up immigration enforcement and cutting the taxes of wealthy Americans and big corporations.
Trump and Senate Republicans didn’t need a single Democrat then. But this time, Republicans couldn’t use the arcane reconciliation process to pass a bill to keep the governing going.
Now they needed Senate Democratic votes.
Yet keeping the government going meant keeping all the priorities included in the big ugly bill that all Senate Democrats opposed.
Which is why Senate Democrats refused to sign on unless most of the big ugly’s cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act were restored, so health insurance premiums won’t soar next year.
Even if Senate Democrats had gotten that concession, the Republican bill to keep the government going would retain all the tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations contained in the big ugly, along with all the cuts in nutrition assistance, and all the increased funding for immigration enforcement.
There’s a deeper irony here.
As a practical matter, the US government has been “shut down” for over eight months, since Trump took office a second time.
Trump and the sycophants surrounding him—such as Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and, before him, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficnecy—have had no compunctions about shutting down parts of the government they don’t like—such as US Agency for International Development.
They’ve also fired, laid off, furloughed, or extended buyouts to hundreds of thousands of federal employees doing work they don’t value, such as at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. (The federal government is already expected to employ 300,000 fewer workers by December than it did last January.)
They’ve impounded appropriations from Congress for activities they oppose, ranging across the entire federal government.
Wednesday, on the first day of the shutdown, Vought announced that the administration was freezing some $26 billion in funds Congress had appropriated—including $18 billion for New York City infrastructure (home to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries) and $8 billion for environmental projects in 16 states, mostly led by Democrats.
All of this is illegal—it violates the Impoundment Control Act of 1974—but it seems unlikely that courts will act soon enough to prevent the regime from harming vast numbers of Americans.
Vought is also initiating another round of mass layoffs targeting, in his words, “a lot” of government workers.
This is being described by Republicans as “payback” for the Democrats not voting to keep the government going, but evidently nothing stopped Vought from doing mass layoffs and freezing Congress’ appropriations before the shutdown.
In fact, the eagerness of Trump and his lapdogs over the last eight months to disregard the will of Congress and close whatever they want of the government offers another reason why Democrats shouldn’t cave in.
Were Democrats to vote to keep the government going, what guarantee do they have that Trump will in fact keep the government going?
Democrats finally have some bargaining leverage. They should use it.
If tens of millions of Americans lose their health insurance starting in January because they can no longer afford to pay sky-high premiums, Trump and his Republicans will be blamed. Months before the midterms.
It would be Trump’s and his Republicans’ fault anyway—it’s part of their big ugly bill—but this way, in the fight over whether to reopen the government, Americans will have a chance to see Democrats standing up for them.
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