"[P]robably the most alarming single state in the country for Democrats is looking at the Republican gains all along the border in south Texas."

"And the county that jumps out to me, there is Starr County. Starr County is the county that has moved the most in the entire country from 2012 to 2024. Hmm. This is a county that Barack Obama won overwhelmingly in 2012, and that Donald Trump won comfortably in 2024..... It's moved continuously in the Republican direction, and the sum of that movement is 89 percentage points. And what's interesting is Starr County isn't just this county that has moved the most, it also is the most predominantly Latino county in America. And it's not just shifting away from the Democratic party, it's stampeding away from the Democratic party. And while Starr County is this one small county in the Texas border, what you see is that same type of movement in counties with broad Latino populations, whether you're talking about the Bronx in New York City, Queens, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, places with diverse populations have moved steadily to the right, even in a lot of them, where Democrats are still winning, they're winning by less and by a lot less. I mean, to use like a fancy political science term, we're talking about racial depolarization.... For, for a long time, one of the most important markers of how a person was going to vote in America was what race are you?"

From today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast. Audio and transcript here (at Podscribe).

The guest is Shane Goldmacher, who wrote the NYT article "Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward" that we were talking about on May 27th, here.

"White, college-educated voters shifted to the right, and by significantly more than White, noncollege voters did."

So it says here in "The 2024 election was even weirder than we thought/An expansive new report challenges early theories about how Donald Trump won" (WaPo).

That's a free-access link, so you can read the details and form an opinion over whether to trust this rather than all that other polling and poll analysis that found a "continued leftward march of White, college-educated voters," supposedly "the only major racial subgroup shifting left," which "reinforced existing fears among Democrats that they were increasingly appealing to educated White voters with their policies and message at the exclusion of other groups."

Other headings at that link: "The gender gap was real," "Democrats held up better with rural voters than with urban voters," and "Democrats gained ground with engaged voters."

I don't trust any of this material. The Democratic Party has a big problem and must rebuild itself, but how? By increasing its appeal to white, college-educated voters, because that's actually where the problem is? 

"The rich are punishing Trump for siding with the neglected, humiliated working class.... People cannot believe that there is a President working for them... and telling Wall Street to go screw itself."

No matter what the screeching drama club says - Trump will be remembered well for trying to save the working class at a time when everyone is about to be replaced by robots. https://t.co/yJmmZU6UHc

— Sasha Stone (@realsashastone) April 3, 2025

The Democrats have elected their party chair.

Introducing the new Chair of the DNC: @KenMartin73. pic.twitter.com/PIC6zBO6u7

— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) February 1, 2025

See my discussion of the race for the chair, earlier today, here.

ADDED: Here's the NYT article on the subject, "Democrats Elect Ken Martin, a Party Insider, to Lead the D.N.C./The Democratic National Committee chose Mr. Martin, the leader of the Minnesota Democrats, to help oversee a demoralized national party split over its future and its response to President Trump."

"The intellectual property issue is another story we’ll get into, but this is basically the mob storming the castle saying, 'We’re here too, bitch, deal with it.'"

"You guys flaunted it and made it seem like we never get to be part of this, and now we get to be part of this fair and square."

Said Bethenny Frankel — a "Real Housewives" star — quoted in "Hermès tight-lipped on Wirkin bag, Walmart’s dupe of the Birkin/Walmart’s copy of the vastly more expensive and exclusive Birkin handbag has been praised on social media for breaking through the snobbery of high fashion" (London Times).

Hermès does not sell the Birkin online and until recently maintained a months-long waiting list, helping to protect its exclusivity. Hermès stores are only allowed to buy a select number of the bags bi-annually and the style of bags being delivered is rarely known before they arrive.... Hermès is yet to publicly comment on the Wirkin. Legal experts say the Birkin bag’s logo, its shape and design, are registered trademarks and therefore have legal protection....

Trump isn't going to shut down the federal Department of Education.

I'm reading "Trump Chooses Longtime Ally Linda McMahon to Run Education Dept./A friend and financial backer of Donald J. Trump’s, Ms. McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration during his first term, remained close to him during the campaign" (NYT):

While Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for an outright dissolution of the agency, any effort to shutter it would require congressional action and support from some Republican lawmakers whose districts depend on federal aid for public education....

So it's just something to talk about, not actually do. So what is McMahon really going to try to do? She's the chairwoman of the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.

[T]he America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding voucher programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.

"The French Revolution looms large in the philosophy of crowds because it was the first time that a 'mob' or what looked like one..."

"... was responsible for a decisive turn in the history of humankind. The Roman Republic was always an upper-class affair, with the mob a mere chorus, and even the American Revolution was... very much a legislative revolution, made by the manor, with the crowds much smaller than they are remembered to have been. The Boston Tea Party was more a publicity stunt than a significant popular protest.... Americans celebrate a group of merchants and planters signing a document on July 4th; the French celebrate a crowd of citizens storming the monarchical prison called the Bastille on July 14th. There is a difference.... When you are 'taking democracy into your own hands,' what you have in your hands is not democracy, because democracy begins with the recognition that other people have hands, too....  Can we speak of the wisdom of crowds? Sometimes. The madness of mobs? Sometimes, too. Perhaps, within the winningly minute range of terms that Bobrycki captures, vulgus and populus and the rest, lies a truth that resonates through centuries, even millennia. We see the shifting varieties of human assembly and search to give them meaning, when the meaning lies exactly in the mutability.... A crowd can become a mob; a crowd can even become an army. To turn a crowd into a community? Ah, that’s the hard work."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest? From the French Revolution to January 6th, crowds have been heroized and vilified. Now they’re a field of study" (The New Yorker).

Bobrycki = Shane Bobrycki, author of "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages."

"So what happened in this campaign is Donald Trump said to the American people, you are angry. You're really pissed off."

"And I know that, and you're right. And then he gave his explanation and his explanation, which was obviously nonsense and false and racist, et cetera, was that millions and millions of undocumented people were coming across the border. They were invading. America, we're an occupied country. They were taking your jobs, taking your benefits, eating your cats and your dogs. That is why you are hurting. Now, that is a crazy explanation, but it is an explanation. Now you tell me what the Democratic explanation was.... Well, the Democratic explanation was, hey, we have passed some good things, very important things in the Biden administration, which happens to be true.... There was no appreciation — no appreciation — of the struggling and the suffering of millions and millions of working class people.... You know, you can't fight something with nothing. You gotta have an alternative vision. Trump had his vision. It was incorrect, it was dishonest. It was in many cases racist and sexist. He had a vision, he had an explanation. To my view, Democrats really did not."

Said Bernie Sanders, in the new episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "Bernie Sanders Says Democrats Have Lost Their Way."

"Our ruling class is disgusting."

Hear Tucker narrate this ad. It captures the truth and emotion. Chills. 👇🏻🔊✊🏻

pic.twitter.com/qTAlLQcsRh

— Sheri™ (@FFT1776) November 4, 2024

"Researchers argue that home solar panels are raising the price of electricity and reducing the need for cheaper large solar farms — making the entire transition to clean energy more expensive...."

"Researchers say that... many states and utilities provide very lucrative deals for users of rooftop solar — often compensating owners of home panels more than the value of their solar to the grid. In states like California and Arizona... in the middle of the day homeowners might get 20 cents back for each kilowatt-hour they send to the grid. But for a grid already flooded with solar, the value of that extra energy is close to zero. The result is that richer homeowners who can afford solar get cheap electricity bills — while poorer residents see higher bills to compensate. In California alone, researchers at UC Berkeley and the California Public Advocates Office estimated that rooftop solar will add between $4 billion and $6.5 billion to customers’ bills in 2024...."

From "Everyone loves rooftop solar panels. But there’s a problem. One of the most popular methods to cut your household’s carbon footprint may be a mixed bag" (WaPo).

"Mr. Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Mr. Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations..."

"... according to three allies who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations. In a quintessentially Trumpian display of bravado, the former president has privately praised Mr. Vance by comparing himself to Vince Lombardi, telling people that his eye for political talent was now on par with the Hall of Fame football coach’s ability to find Super Bowl-caliber players. But beyond Mar-a-Lago, early returns on Mr. Vance are less enthusiastic. Polls show that he effectively amplifies Mr. Trump’s political strengths but that he also magnifies his weaknesses. Mr. Vance’s approval rating improved by nearly double digits among the nation’s least educated and poorest voters since joining the Republican ticket — but plunged by even wider margins among college graduates and independent women, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll...."

From "JD Vance’s Combative Style Confounds Democrats but Pleases Trump/Over dozens of events and more than 70 interviews, Mr. Vance’s performances as Donald Trump’s attack dog have endeared him to his boss, even if America broadly is less enthusiastic" (NYT).

For another class politics article in the NYT, try "Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters" by Nicholas Kristof. Why? It's "politically foolish." It's also "morally offensive, particularly when well-educated and successful elites are scorning disadvantaged, working-class Americans who have been left behind economically and socially and in many cases are dying young. They deserve empathy, not insults. By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him...."

AND: Take a look at "'Dangerous and un-American': new recording of JD Vance’s dark vision of women and immigration/Trump’s running mate rants against feminism, immigrants and Ilhan Omar in a newly unearthed podcast from 2021" (The Guardian). We're told — without a link to the audio or a transcript or even the name of the podcast — that there's a 2021 interview in which Vance said that "professional women 'choose a path to misery' when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were 'suppressed' in their masculinity." I don't trust the Guardian's summary and decontexualization, but it's important to know the line that is being sold to the nondeplorables.

ADDED: I think this is the podcast — "Moment of Truth" — "The Hillbilly Has a Moment, featuring J.D. Vance." 

Teen Vogue weighs in on "Why the Harris Walz Camo Hat Is Becoming a Status Symbol for Liberals."

"Nearly $1 million worth of Walz inspired hats have been sold through the Harris campaign" — by Alyssa Hardy.

On August 6, VP Kamala Harris posted a video asking Minnesota Governor Tim Walzto join the ticket as her vice presidential nominee. He gleefully accepted from his living room, where he was sitting on a wicker chair wearing a black t-shirt, khakis, bright white sneakers, and a camo hat.

"When Southwest launched in 1971, it specifically claimed the moral high ground. The company was consciously selling the American ideal of egalitarianism..."

"... saying its purpose was to 'democratize the sky.'... Over the last few decades, we’ve pivoted from the ideal of egalitarian fairness (first-come, first-served) to the ideal of 'pay more, get treated better.' This is evident not only in commerce, but in politics: Both Democrats and Republicans have moved from having government regulation assure fairness toward using market solutions to ration goods and happiness. Examples: Lexus lanes, deregulated airfares, phone service.... But maybe Southwest is embracing a new American way. In the country where efficiency became a science, we’ve been bamboozled into accepting the idea that you have to pay extra to get the basics. How sad."

"Why Southwest’s seating switcheroo is un-American/The move spurns egalitarianism and pushes the idea that only the affluent deserve decent service," writes Marc Fisher (at WaPo).

Here's a Southwest ad from the early 70s. I watched it twice and I really couldn't pick up the "democratize" message:

"There can be no single emissary for the more than 80 million people who make up 'the White working class' nationwide..."

"... (not all of whom have ties to Appalachia, itself a wildly heterogenous region). Force of personality — or in Vance’s case, rustic kitsch — is no substitute for research. In his recent book 'Elite Capture,' the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo warns of the eponymous phenomenon, whereby privileged members of oppressed groups become spokespeople for those groups — and, in so doing, co-opt them. For instance, the members of the 'black bourgeoisie' who are so often the face of movements for racial justice emphatically do not speak for the majority of Black Americans.... This is one problem with identity politics, with its mania for electing envoys: The members of a marginalized group who enjoy enough of a public platform to speak on its behalf are often not representative. Vance, who went on to land a lucrative job at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm after law school, is hardly a typical hillbilly, and there is no guarantee that he has the interests of his less fortunate peers at heart."

Writes Becca Rothfeld, in "'Hillbilly Elegy' and J.D. Vance’s art of having it both ways/In his memoir and for some time after, Vance told liberals what they wanted to hear — but then he wanted power" (WaPo).

The attack on Vance as an attack on identity politics? 

"There was one really good thing about 'Hillbilly Elegy,' meaning the response to it: People were actually genuinely trying to understand something about a part of the country they didn’t understand."

"But there was something that wasn’t so good, which is that people were looking for some interpretive lens for Trump’s voters that never really asked them to challenge their priors or to rethink what they felt about those people. And I realized that I was being used as this whisperer of a phenomenon that some people really did want to understand, but some people didn’t. And the more that I felt like, not an explainer and a defender, but part of what I thought was wrong about the liberal establishment, the more that I felt this need to go very strongly away from it...."

Said J.D. Vance in an interview with Ross Douthat, "What J.D. Vance Believes" (NYT). This is a long interview, and that is a free-access link.

ADDED: This interview made me want to go back and read the reviews of "Hillbilly Elegy," which became a best-seller in the summer of 2016, before the shock of Donald Trump actually winning the election. I bought the book then myself, and I had the sense that it was written for liberals... who were pretty much exactly like what Vance describes in his new interview. 

"Across the battleground, Biden is losing to Trump among working-class voters by 16 points."

"That compares to Biden’s national working-class deficit of just 4 points in 2020.... In Michigan, Biden’s working-class deficit against Trump is 24 points. In 2020, that deficit was just 6 points.... In Pennsylvania, it’s Trump over Biden by 19 points among working-class voters. That’s a sharp drop from Biden’s 9 point deficit among these voters in 2020 (States of Change data). This is a state that Biden won by only a single point last election. In Wisconsin, Biden is behind Trump by 6 points among working-class voters. That doesn’t sound so great but is actually 6 points better than Biden did in 2020, when he lost these voters by 12 points. This is the only state of the six surveyed by the Times where Biden is running better among these voters today than in 2020...."

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "The Working Class-Sized Hole in Democratic Support Widens/This is a big, big problem" (Liberal Patriot). He's looking at the recent NYT poll of voters in the battleground states.

Seems like the key for Biden is understanding Wisconsin. What's happening here that isn't happening in Michigan and Pennsylvania?

Teixeira ends his column with the idea presented in Blueprint, which he quotes:

"Researchers are unsure... but theories include that it is a playful manifestation of the mammals’ curiosity, a social fad or..."

"... the intentional targeting of what they perceive as competitors for their favourite prey, the local bluefin tuna."

From "Yacht sinks after latest incident involving orcas in strait of Gibraltar/Vessel measuring 15 metres in length sank after encounter with the animals, Spain’s maritime rescue service reports" (The Guardian). 

Also: "Experts believe them to involve a subpopulation of about 15 individuals given the designation 'Gladis.'"

From last year in The Guardian: "The orca uprising: whales are ramming boats – but are they inspired by revenge, grief or memory?" That's a much more interesting article....

"The days when Democrats could get away with thinking of Hispanics as one of 'their' minority groups are, or should be, over."

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "Postcard from the Hispanic Working Class/Education polarization comes to America’s Latinos"  (The Liberal Patriot).

In terms of voting intentions, Biden leads by just one point among working-class Hispanics but by 39 points among their college-educated counterparts. Interestingly, this 38-point reverse class gap is actually larger than the class gap in this poll among whites (30 points).... And here’s something that should concentrate their mind when considering the working-class Hispanics problem and how seriously to take it. The simple fact of the matter is that there are far, far more working-class than college-educated Hispanics. According to States of Change data, Hispanic eligible voters nationwide are 78 percent working class. And working-class levels among Latinos are even higher in critical states like Arizona (82 percent) and Nevada (85 percent).

I'm giving this post my "Biden's racial nightmare" tag, though I can't remember what made me invent that tag and will need to publish this post and click on it to find out. 

UPDATE, right after posting: I now see why I created the tag. It's a pretty different topic, but I want to go back into it. It was August 13, 2020:

"[T]ensions between the White House and the [New York] Times... had been bubbling beneath the surface for at least the last five years."

"Biden’s closest aides had come to see the Times as arrogant, intent on setting its own rules and unwilling to give Biden his due. Inside the paper’s D.C. bureau, the punitive response seemed to typify a press operation that was overly sensitive and determined to control coverage of the president.... Although the president’s communications teams bristle at coverage from dozens of outlets, the frustration, and obsession, with the Times is unique, reflecting the resentment of a president with a working-class sense of himself and his team toward a news organization catering to an elite audience — and a deep desire for its affirmation of their work. On the other side, the newspaper carries its own singular obsession with the president, aggrieved over his refusal to give the paper a sit-down interview that Publisher AG Sulzberger and other top editors believe to be its birthright."

Writes Eli Stokols, in "Inside the NYT-White House Feud" (Politico).

I read the NYT every day and have closely followed presidential campaign news for the last 20 years. I want the NYT to hold to the highest journalistic standards, and — without question — any deviation from that has been in favor of Biden.

"Even 30-mile-an-hour wind gusts whipping down from the nearby Poconos couldn’t move the bubble of Donald Trump-scented awe and alternative reality ..."

"... that descended on this hilltop village for about eight hours on Saturday.... This Schnecksville extravaganza was the fourth Trump rally in the Mid-Atlantic that I’d attended since 2016. I go largely because I think the media still fails to understand America’s most important story of the last 10 years. U.S. democracy is staring out into the abyss not so much because of the narcissistic bluster of one alleged billionaire ex-president, but because of the people with fleece hoodies over their MAGA hats who spent hours in an April windstorm to see him.... So who are these people? A new best-selling book blames Trump’s unshakable popularity on 'White Rural Rage' and that is something you might expect to see here in Schnecksville, where the urbane Eastern Seaboard melts into live-bait shops, Baptist churches and red-brick 19th-century homes. The only problem is that almost everyone I met scoffed at their Green Acres stereotype...."

Writes Will Bunch, in "'Trumpstock' brings peace, unity and a ton of disinformation to Schnecksville/Fierce mountain winds in Lehigh County couldn't move the bubble of misinformation surrounding the throng at a Trump rally" (Philadelphia Inquirer). 

Here's video of that Trump's rally:

 

Trump: "This is a hell of a rally. I just heard there are 42,000. You know we expected maybe — because it's freezing, right, it's freezing. I'm freezing my ass off up here. At least they could have given me a little bit of a heater underneath this. They gave me nothing! See, they take advantage — my own people take advantage of me. They gave me nothing. But... you know we expected maybe 10,000 people. We have 42,000 people tonight. 42,000. As far as the eye can see. I wish the I wish the fake news media would turn those camera look at all those cameras. Wow wow wow wow...."