A Tale of Two Populisms

… Trump’s populism surely played a role in the surge of white working-class voters to the GOP ticket in 2016. But Trump’s brand of populism—and more importantly, that of working-class whites—differs in important ways from the populism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I don’t mean only that Trump’s populism […] Read more »

Emboldened by Trump but Divided by Generations, Democrats Look to 2020

A vast array of Democratic leaders, divided by generations but uniformly emboldened by President Trump’s perceived vulnerability, have begun taking palpable steps toward seeking the White House in an election that is still three and a half years away. … In a largely leaderless party, two distinct groups are emerging, […] Read more »

The New Party of No: How a president and a protest movement transformed the Democrats

… The Democrats have never been a natural opposition party, or a particularly effective one. Republicans from Reagan to the Tea Party broadly believed in reducing government, as the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist famously put it, “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it […] Read more »

One Problem for Democratic Leaders is Democratic Voters

Leaders on the Democratic left who want to represent the have-nots face an obstacle: their own voters. … Mark Muro, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, analyzed the differences between those communities that supported Hillary Clinton and those that backed Donald Trump. The findings of Muro and […] Read more »