Tyranny Is Unaffordable
I have a backlog of items that are valuable follow-ups on things I have previously covered, and I’m going to cover two of those topics today as I try to work through all of them.
Special Thanksgiving Sale
But first: I normally do an end-of year roundup of the top stories of the year, combined with a Holiday Sale, and a pitch for donations to support my work at this newsletter. For reasons that I can’t really talk about yet, I won’t be able to do that in December as usual. So I’m going to be doing it between now and the end of this month, as a Thanksgiving Sale and fund-raising drive.
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I’ll be starting my end of year roundup in a few days—I think we’re close enough to know what the big stories of the year are, though one of the top stories is something that may be brewing right now.
After months of alternately sucking up to Vladimir Putin and seemingly expressing anger towards him, it turns out the Trump administration has been secretly negotiating with Russia for a while now, cutting the Ukrainians out of the process, and a report at Axios says they’re now planning to present the plan to Ukraine and force it on them. As for Europe, “We don’t really care about the Europeans.” I tried to warn them.
That story just broke this morning, so I’ll return to it as it develops.
Tyranny Is Unaffordable
My first follow-up relates to my comments on the off-year elections from a few weeks ago.
My new favorite polling analysis guy, G. Elliott Morris, has a follow-up describing how the combination of voters that delivered Donald Trump a very narrow victory last year has melted away.
It is a matter of fact that Donald Trump won the 2024 election in large part by shrinking the vote margins for Kamala Harris among non-white, working-class, and young voters, relative to past Democratic nominees.
But the interpretation of Trump’s 2024 win is a matter of opinion. Some, like the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, have argued Trump’s inroads with traditionally left-leaning voters represented a fundamental realignment in American politics.…
But…[f]rom 2024 to 2025 Republicans lost the most support — 25 points, on average—among the very voters they theorized would remake the GOP into a vast, multi-racial, working-class coalition. Today’s Chart of The Week looks at subgroup vote choice in 2025. The data suggests Trump’s winning coalition has all but evaporated—if it ever existed at all.
Note the pronounced shift away from Republicans among the groups that powered Trump’s 2024. Non‑white, lower-income, and young voters all shifted toward Democrats at above-average rates. GOP vote margin fell by over 40 points among Asian American voters, 20 points among Hispanic/Latino voters, and 22 points among 18–29‑year‑olds. White voters moved only five points, underscoring that most of the swing came from the very constituencies some analysts claimed were “realigning” right last year. The gender gap persisted but both halves moved left: men by 3 points and women by 15.
Another measure of this is that Republicans appear to be pulling out all the stops for a special election in Tennessee in a district that would not normally be in any danger, in part because of a potential “dummymander.” This is what happens when you scoop some of the other party’s voters into a district dominated by your party, in order to dilute those votes, only to find out that you put your party’s supposedly safe district in danger. Thus, in Tennessee, “when Republicans gerrymandered the state’s congressional map in 2022, they added a slice of Nashville to the 7th District, giving Behn [the Democrat] a base of voters who may be especially motivated to show up for an otherwise lower-turnout election that will take place the week after Thanksgiving.”
By the way, this is from The Downballot, which is a good source for information on these lesser-known congressional races and on important state and local races.
But the most interesting lesson to emerge from the last election is one that I am hoping Democrats can learn. My big frustration right now with the Democratic Party leadership is that they assume Americans don’t really understand or care about democracy or the structure of government or the constitutionality of Trump’s grab for unchecked power. So they focus on “affordability” instead and use a lot of the same rhetoric they would if Mitt Romney were president and we were still in the realm of “normal politics.”
So I was glad to see Greg Sargent, a Washington Post refugee who ended up at The New Republic, argue that this is a false alternative.
The Democratic Party’s blowout wins on Tuesday night underscore a fundamental reality about the Donald Trump era: Anti-Trump politics is affordability politics, and affordability politics is anti-Trump politics. It’s not just that there is no need to choose between attacking Trump’s lawlessness and addressing the “price of eggs,” in the hackneyed shorthand for costs and inflation. It’s that the two missions are inseparable from one another….
Trump’s tariffs, his killing of the tunnel project [in New Jersey], his potentially illegal federal-worker firings, his DOGE bloodbath, and more show that the economic carnage he’s unleashed is inseparable from his consolidation of autocratic power. Democrats can say these things are bad because they’re both authoritarian abuses of power and have terrible economic consequences, while vowing to stand up to that lawlessness—and do well with the working class.
“This firewall that exists in the punditry between Trump and economic messaging—that is not how working-class voters thought about these issues,” a Democratic strategist familiar with strategic thinking in both gubernatorial races tells me. Both candidates offered their own substantive economic and health care agendas, as well.
The whole piece is worth reading and also hinges on the idea that Trump’s 2024 victory as not “an enduring, authentic ideological shift toward Trumpism” and that “his victory was incredibly narrow and he remains widely disliked by popular majorities.”
All of this, of course, generally agrees with my outlook and my view of what is important in American politics right now. Not only can Democrats run on Trump’s unconstitutional seizure of power, they must do so. They have an obligation to take this issue seriously, because otherwise, there will be no one ready or willing to rebuild and restore the American system after the damage that is being done to it right now.
The Illusion of Authoritarian Capitalism
Speaking of affordability and its link to the abuse of executive power, one of the most predictable consequences of Trump’s policies is that his totally arbitrary power over tariffs is bad for the economy—and particularly so for manufacturing, which he supposedly wants to save.
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