Subterms
What word best describes how you feel things are going in the country? What word best describeshow you feel things are goingin the country? “Bad.” Esteban, 22, Texas, Republican “Better.” Jeanette, 42, Fla., Republican “Conflicted.” Meranda, 28, Idaho, independent In November nearly half of Latino voters selected Donald Trump for president — a decisive change […] More
<!–> –>It seemed that the multiracialcoalition that elected Barack Obamawould secure a Democratic future for this country for decades.<!–> –>It seemed that themultiracial coalition that elected BarackObama wouldsecure a Democraticfuture for thiscountry for decades.<!–> –>But instead, as America growsmore diverse, it has become moreconservative. Why?<!–> –>But instead, asAmerica growsmore diverse, it hasbecome moreconservative. Why?<!–> [!–> […] More
In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 election, polls and focus groups suggested that the Democratic Party had suffered more than an election defeat. It looked as though key blocs of voters had irrevocably turned their backs on Democrats as triumphalist Republicans boasted about becoming the party of the working class.In the six months since President Trump took back the Oval Office, his favorability ratings, including on immigration, have fallen, but his decline has not been accompanied by a revival of support for the Democratic Party. The party continues to suffer severe reputational damage, which may not be reparable until 2028, when the Democratic presidential nominee will have a chance to redefine the party’s image as only a party leader can.Before exploring the dark side for Democrats, let’s first acknowledge three bright spots.One, prospective Democrats who are jockeying for early position and recognition in the party’s presidential nomination contest are moving toward the center. As Adam Wren and Elena Schneider report in “The Great Un-Awokening,” a June 6 piece in Politico, “Searching for a path out of the political wilderness, potential 2028 candidates, especially those hailing from blue states, are attempting to ratchet back a leftward lurch on social issues that some in the party say cost them the November election.”Wren and Schneider cite Gov. Gavin Newsom’s break with progressive orthodoxy when he declared that allowing transgender athletes to participate in female college sports was “unfair.” They also cite Gov. Wes Moore’s veto of “a bill that took steps toward reparations.”Two, there has been a burst of activity, including the formation of groups on the center left seeking a more moderate Democratic agenda, including Searchlight, led by Adam Jentleson, a former aide to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and Harry Reid, a former Senate majority leader. In addition, there is growing interest in Welcome PAC, a centrist Democratic group founded in 2021 that has contributed to moderate House Democrats like Jared Golden, Mary Peltola and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.Three, Democratic voters are far more enthusiastic heading into the 2026 election than Republicans are. A July 10-13 CNN poll found that 74 percent of Democrats described themselves as “extremely motivated” to vote next year, compared with 54 percent of Republicans, as are 75 percent of liberals compared with 52 percent of conservatives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Voters here in Oregon’s rural Yamhill County have backed Donald Trump for three presidential elections in a row, most recently by a six-point margin. His promises to crack down on immigration resonated in these working-class communities.Then last month ICE detained Moises Sotelo, a beloved but undocumented Mexican immigrant who has lived in the county for 31 years and owns a vineyard management company employing 10 people. Two of his children were born here and are American citizens, and Sotelo was a pillar of his church and won a wine industry award — yet he was detained for five weeks and on Friday was deported to Mexico, his family said.“Moises’s story just really shook our community,” Elise Yarnell Hollamon, the City Council president in Newberg, Sotelo’s hometown, told me. “Everyone knows him, and he has built a reputation within our community over the last few decades.”Christopher Valentine for The New York TimesThe result has been an outpouring of support for Sotelo, even in this conservative county (which is also my home). More than 2,200 people have donated to a GoFundMe for the family, raising more than $150,000 for legal and other expenses, and neighbors have been dropping off meals and offering vehicles and groceries.“Oh, my God, it’s been insane,” said Alondra Sotelo Garcia, his adult daughter, who was born in America. “I knew he was well known, but I didn’t know how big it would blow up to be.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
An audit being conducted by the D.N.C. is not looking at Joe Biden’s decision to run or key decisions by Kamala Harris’s team, according to six people briefed on the report.The Democratic National Committee’s examination of what went wrong in the 2024 election is expected to mostly steer clear of the decisions made by the Biden-turned-Harris campaign and will focus more heavily instead on actions taken by allied groups, according to interviews with six people briefed on the report’s progress.The audit, which the committee is calling an “after-action review,” is expected to avoid the questions of whether former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. should have run for re-election in the first place, whether he should have exited the race earlier than he did and whether former Vice President Kamala Harris was the right choice to replace him, according to the people briefed on the process so far.Nor is the review expected to revisit key decisions by the Harris campaign — like framing the election as a choice between democracy and fascism, and refraining from hitting back after an ad by Donald J. Trump memorably attacked Ms. Harris on transgender rights by suggesting that she was for “they/them” while Mr. Trump was “for you” — that have roiled Democrats in the months since Mr. Trump took back the White House.Party officials described the draft document as focusing on the 2024 election as a whole, but not on the presidential campaign — which is something like eating at a steakhouse and then reviewing the salad.Producing a tough-minded public review of a national electoral defeat would be a politically delicate exercise under any circumstance, given the need to find fault with the work and judgment of important party leaders and strategists. It is particularly fraught for the new D.N.C. chairman, Ken Martin, who promised a post-election review from his first day on the job but whose first few months in the role have been plagued by infighting and financial strains.“We are not interested in second-guessing campaign tactics or decisions of campaign operatives,” said Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska Democratic chairwoman, who heads the association of Democratic state chairs and is a close ally of Mr. Martin. “We are interested in what voters turned out for Republicans and Democrats, and how we can fix this moving forward.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Now is an agonizing time for Democrats. Some days are dominated by feelings of despair, others by recriminations. But in fact the Democratic Party is on the cusp of a renaissance if it plays its cards right.The claim that a revival may be near at hand might seem bizarre, given that the party is at its weakest point in at least half a century. It is all but shut out of power in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. Its popularity is at a record low, according to a report by Third Way, a center-left think tank and advocacy organization. Since 2022, according to Gallup, more Americans identify and lean Republican than Democratic, the first time that has been true since 1991. Leading figures in the Democratic Party, such as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, call the Democratic brand “toxic.” Democratic support has collapsed among non-college-educated voters, who make up some 64 percent of electorate. Voters are leaving blue states for red ones. And if that were not enough, based on current demographic trends, blue states will lose up to a dozen electoral votes after the 2030 census.Despite this, Democrats have an opening. The Trump administration’s wall-to-wall incompetence, and the human suffering that is resulting from it, will become more and more obvious. Disenchantment with President Trump and his party is already spreading. But can Democrats exploit the opportunity?To help figure out an answer, we conducted written interviews with 19 Democrats, from progressives to centrists. They included officeholders, analysts, strategists and state party chairs chosen because they represent a range of views and experiences and have given careful thought to how the Democratic Party needs to change. We also plowed through a stack of white papers, articles and published interviews.These Democrats agree that attacking Mr. Trump is not sufficient; the party must make a new offer to Americans. They also agree on a main theme of that new offer: making the American dream affordable for the middle class and especially the working class. But Democrats across the ideological spectrum, not just on the party’s right flank, also recognize that their economic message will fall on deaf ears if they cannot re-enter the cultural mainstream and stop talking down to ordinary people.Rahm Emanuel, a former Democratic representative in Congress and mayor of Chicago who served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, was blunt: “If you’re outside the mainstream on culture, the public will never trust you enough to listen to your ideas on economic ‘kitchen table’ issues.”When It Comes to ‘Prosperity’, Republicans Have an Edge. But That Hasn’t Always Been True.“Which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous?”
Source: GallupBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
In a wide-ranging interview, the junior senator from Michigan took stock of her party’s deep-seated woes, warning Democrats not to be “so damn scared.”As Democrats battle over age, ideology and how to wrest back power, they increasingly agree on one idea: Their party needs an affirmative vision.That is where the consensus ends.So Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan, is trying to help her party fill in those details.Ms. Slotkin, who gave the Democratic response to President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress in March, is delivering a series of speeches that are part candid diagnosis of her party’s problems, part policy prescription and part political pep talk, sometimes irritating more left-wing Democrats in the process.Last month, she laid out what she called her “economic war plan,” focused on rebuilding the middle class and slaughtering “some sacred cows” in the process.She is planning to give speeches about security and democracy later this year.“You cannot win a game, a war, anything, just by playing defense,” Ms. Slotkin said in an interview this week. “You can’t just point at Donald Trump every day and point out the bad things that he’s doing. You have to show a positive, affirmative vision of what you’re going to do if you’re in power.”In the half-hour interview, Ms. Slotkin discussed her party’s messaging problems, the new fault lines defining Democratic debates and the 2028 presidential race.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
“N.Y.C. art schools see record-high application numbers as Gen Z-ers clamber to enroll,” Gothamist’s Hannah Frishberg reported earlier this month. Art school has a reputation for being totally impractical and mildly dissolute. But what members of Gen Z like about art school, Frishberg explains, is that it has “a comforting, human sense of purpose.”The art school trend sounds counterintuitive at first. During times of economic uncertainty, the cliché is that young people usually go to law school or do something else that seems pragmatic, steady and lucrative. Yet art school can offer young people a set of tangible, hands-on skills and a road to employment that is set apart from an increasingly artificial-intelligence-driven corporate world.I have been interviewing 20-somethings about dating, politics, faith and their aspirations for a couple of years now. Dozens of conversations with members of Gen Z have convinced me that the most prominent aspect of their generational character is that they’re small-c conservative.This is frequently misunderstood as politically conservative (more on that in a second). But what I mean is that they’re constitutionally moderate and driven by old-fashioned values. It might be hard for us to recognize just how wholesome Gen Z is, or what that represents for America’s future. But we should try.It’s not just their “Shop Class as Soulcraft” disposition — their bias for the local and the handmade and against tech overlords — that makes this generation seem like a throwback. Or their renewed and unironic interest in things like embroidery, crocheting and knitting. There has been a lot of grown-up chatter in the past few years about the fact that Gen Z teenagers are having less sex, drinking less and doing fewer drugs than millennials and members of Gen X did. Teen pregnancy is at record lows.There’s probably not a single reason behind these shifts. Of course, Gen Z consists of millions of people, and generalizations are not going to apply to every member. But I can see, in the ways this generation is different from previous ones, a clear desire for moderation in all things.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
Administration officials have already begun the process of transferring certain functions to other agencies.The Trump administration on Tuesday announced plans to shift key functions from the Education Department to other corners of the federal government, moving quickly to implement changes just one day after the Supreme Court cleared the way for mass layoffs.The department’s main purpose has been to distribute money to college students through grants and loans, to send federal money to K-12 schools, particularly for low-income and disabled students, and to enforce anti-discrimination laws. But soon after President Trump’s return to the White House, he signed an executive order aimed at dismantling the Education Department.The order acknowledges that the department cannot be shuttered without approval from Congress. Still, Mr. Trump’s education secretary, Linda McMahon, has been focused on what she has called the department’s “final mission.” So far, at least 1,300 workers have been fired, an effective gutting of the agency, while more than 500 accepted the administration’s offer of early retirement. Ms. McMahon has said that there will be additional job cuts.Ms. McMahon told Fox News in an interview on Tuesday that one of her immediate goals was to “transfer different jobs that are being done at the Department of Education” to other agencies.Here is what we know about the next phase of the Trump administration’s effort to reshape and reduce the federal government’s role in education.Key training programs are outsourced to the Labor Department.Under the changes announced on Tuesday, the Labor Department will assume a larger role in administering adult education, family literacy programs and career and technical education. The Education Department will send $2.6 billion to the Labor Department to cover the cost of the programs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
