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    Musk’s Third Party Starts With a Good Idea

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    Elon Musk has finally done something predictable (for a gazillionaire with a political itch, that is): He says he’s launching a third party devoted to the cause of deficit reduction. Instead of the quadrennial dream of No Labels, in which high-minded donors put up the money for an imaginary white knight who never materializes, we may get the “America Party,” in which the world’s richest man puts his fortune behind, he says, “extremely concentrated force at a precise location on the battlefield.”If you parse Musk’s postings and re-postings, that seems to mean a third party strategy that targets a handful of close Senate and House seats, trying to create a legislative faction that exerts control over both bodies by preventing anything from passing without their crucial votes.Credit where due: This is a somewhat better plan than just backing a doomed third-party presidential bid in 2028. The most compelling suggestion for would-be third partyers during Joe Biden’s presidency was that they should persuade a clutch of discontented senators to caucus as independents, creating a potent Joe Manchin-Mitt Romney-Lisa Murkowski-Susan Collins-Kyrsten Sinema bloc. Musk’s concentrated-force idea, presumably, would be an attempt to create this kind of bloc from scratch, discovering the next Murkowskis and Manchins and making it possible for them to fund and win a race without an R or D beside their name.Before the travails of DOGE, I would have said that it was a mistake to automatically bet against Musk; now it seems safer to just acknowledge up front that this plan is unlikely to work out, and that Musk will probably find it too difficult to seriously pursue.But in the spirit of possibility, and because the House-and-Senate plan is an advance on most third-party fantasias, let’s consider the things that would need to happen for Musk to succeed.First, the America Party couldn’t just target the tightest swing states. You’ll notice that of the independent-minded senators and former senators listed above, only Sinema comes from a hotly contested state. That’s because under polarized conditions, a true swing state is usually the place where both parties make the strongest efforts at persuasion, where the stakes of each election seem highest and the fear of the other party’s rule is sharpest among partisans on either side.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

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      The Grip That Race and Identity Have on My Students

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      In the spring of 2023, in a cramped classroom in the Hudson Valley, I taught an undergraduate seminar on the courage to think about race in unconventional ways. It revolved around reading books by Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson and Albert Murray. These minds had shaped and refined my thinking about the idea of America, the fundamentally mongrel populations that inhabit it, as well as the yet-to-be-perfected flesh-and-blood nation of the future we might one day bring forth in unison.Early in the semester, as I waxed exuberant about the unifying possibilities of the 2008 election, I was met by a conference table ringed with blank stares. For my clever and earnest students, I realized, the earth-shattering political achievements of the beleaguered but still unfolding present were nothing but the vaguest rumor of an abstract history.“Professor,” a diligent young woman from Queens who described herself as Latina and applied a no-nonsense activist lens and corresponding vocabulary to most engagements with the world, voiced what all her classmates must have been thinking. “I was 4 years old in 2008. I don’t know what you’re talking about!”Their experience of this country, and themselves, couldn’t have differed more from my own, or from many of the 19th- and 20th-century authors on our syllabus. I assigned these writers because they had so courageously laid the intellectual and moral framework that a figure like Barack Obama would one day harness.I am old enough now to appreciate that there can be only one politician in your lifetime who can truly move you to dream. I feel lucky to have had that experience through Mr. Obama. My students that semester — white, Latino and Asian teens and 20-somethings whose political views had been forged in relation to the reactionary populism of Donald Trump and through a certain skepticism of the American idea itself — had yet to encounter such an inspirational figure. Race pessimism, even a kind of mass learned helplessness, was instead the weather that enveloped them.When my friend Coleman Hughes guest-lectured on his case for colorblindness, several of them were visibly unnerved, suggesting that the idea itself was a form of anti-Blackness. Most maintained that one could no more “retire” from race, as Adrian Piper — another of the authors we wrestled with — aspired to do, than one could teleport up from the classroom.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

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      Israel Is Fast Alienating the Democratic Base

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      To grasp the significance of Zohran Mamdani’s shocking victory in last month’s Democratic primary for mayor of New York, it’s worth recalling another upset, which took place 11 years ago and some 300 miles to the south, in a Republican congressional primary near Richmond, Va. In 2014 Dave Brat, a little-known economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, challenged Eric Cantor, who was then the House majority leader. Mr. Brat was outspent by a margin of more than 10 to one. Despite that, he won by 11 percentage points, thus becoming the first primary challenger to oust a House majority leader in American history.Ideologically, Mr. Brat and Mr. Mamdani have little in common. But they won their primaries for similar reasons: Each exploited the chasm between his party’s grass roots and its elites. In 2014 many Republican voters loathed the G.O.P. establishment. Today, many Democrats feel a similar fury toward the politicians who claim to represent them. In 2014 Mr. Brat used one issue in particular to illustrate that divide: immigration. Democratic alienation today is more nebulous. No single topic seems to loom as large as immigration did among Republicans a decade ago. Still, Mr. Mamdani’s victory illustrates the huge gulf between many ordinary Democrats and the Democratic establishment on one subject in particular: Israel.Mr. Mamdani focused his message on making New York City affordable. The campaign of the race’s presumed front-runner, Andrew Cuomo, in addition to attacking Mr. Mamdani as inexperienced and soft on crime, focused intensely on his opponent’s unapologetic commitment to Palestinian rights. That commitment was one reason that many political commentators and operatives assumed Mr. Mamdani, a young state assemblyman, could not win. They didn’t appreciate how broadly public opinion on this issue has changed.The shift has been national. In 2013, according to Gallup, Democrats sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 36 percentage points. Those numbers have now flipped, after more than a decade of nearly uninterrupted right-wing rule by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the rise to power of crude bigots like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and Israel’s mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip: This February, Gallup found that Democrats sympathize with Palestinians over Israel by a margin of 38 percentage points. According to a February survey by The Economist and YouGov, 46 percent of Democrats want the United States to reduce military aid to the Jewish state. Only 6 percent want to increase it, and 24 percent want it to remain at the level it is.These opinions aren’t restricted to young progressives. Older Democrats’ views have swung even more sharply than young ones against Israel in recent years. Between 2022 and 2025, according to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Democrats age 50 and over with an unfavorable view of the Jewish state jumped a remarkable 23 percentage points. This shift has largely erased the party’s generation gap on the subject.Only one in three Democrats now views Israel favorably, according to Gallup. That makes Israel significantly less popular than Cuba, and only slightly more popular than China. Despite this, the party’s most powerful figures — from the minority leaders Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries to many of the Democrats likely to run for president in 2028 — oppose conditioning U.S. military support on Israel’s willingness to uphold human rights. This places them in clear conflict with their party’s base.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

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      Can Democrats Find Their Way on Immigration?

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      The Democrats onstage saw themselves as morally courageous. American voters, it turned out, saw a group of politicians hopelessly out of touch.Standing side by side at a primary debate in June 2019, nine of the party’s candidates for president were asked to raise their hand if they wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings. Only one of them held still.Six years later, the party remains haunted by that tableau. It stands both as a vivid demonstration of a leftward policy shift on immigration that many prominent Democratic lawmakers and strategists now say they deeply regret, and as a marker of how sharply the country was moving in the other direction.Last year, 55 percent of Americans told Gallup that they supported a decrease in immigration, nearly twice as many as in 2020, and the first time since 2005 that a majority had said so. The embrace of a more punitive approach to illegal immigration includes not only white voters but also working-class Latinos, whose support Democrats had long courted with liberal border policies.“When you have the most Latino district in the country outside of Puerto Rico vote for Trump, that should be a wake-up call for the Democratic Party,” said Representative Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, who saw Mr. Trump win every county in his district along the border with Mexico. “This is a Democratic district that’s been blue for over a century.”The Trump administration is pursuing the harshest crackdown on immigrants since World War II, an effort many Democrats see as a national crisis.Gabriel V. Cárdenas for 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

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      A Road Map for Undoing the Damage of the Big, Awful Bill

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      In the 30 years I have been a part of fiscal policymaking I don’t think I have ever seen a legislative push as impressive as the passage of President Trump’s big, dubious tax and policy bill.Don’t get me wrong: The consequences for health insurance, poverty, climate change and macroeconomic stability, in roughly that order of importance, will be horrendous. The Medicaid and other health care changes would undo about three-quarters of the coverage expansion from President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion. The law repeals much of what Joe Biden did for climate change in the Inflation Reduction Act. The tax provisions sustain most of the cuts from Mr. Trump’s first term and add in several others for good measure.But before Democrats — and hopefully some Republicans — even try to fix the damage, they should learn the lessons of how the Republicans got all this done, working against tremendous odds on a much faster timetable than the major legislative accomplishments from Mr. Trump’s three predecessors.The first lesson is that ideas really do matter. This legislation did not happen because the public or lobbyists were clamoring for it. Instead Donald Trump and congressional Republicans wanted it and were willing to overcome public disfavor and opposition from vested interests.Sure, special interests were at play in ways big (preserving workarounds to limits on state and local tax deductions) and small (getting new tax breaks for Alaskan whaling captains). But no major lobbying groups were asking for the broad contours of this legislation. The health care industry, which is expected to lose about half a trillion dollars, and the energy industry, which is losing huge tax breaks and subsidies, put up a fight. Their opposition, like that of other industries, went nowhere. And neither did Elon Musk’s — further evidence that oligarchy is the wrong lens through which to view this political moment.The second lesson is that while ideas matter, expert ideas do not necessarily matter. Past fiscal debates have divided economists and policy wonks. In President Trump’s first term, some economists would write opinion articles or go on TV news programs defending his tax cuts as adding to growth while other economists (including me) would write rebuttals.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

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      In Trump’s Bill, Democrats See a Path to Win Back Voters

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      Top party officials consider the president’s sweeping domestic policy bill to be cruel and fiscally ruinous — and they’re betting the American public will, too.Demoralized Democrats who have denounced President Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill have landed on a silver lining. It is so unpopular with voters, they say, that it could win them back one, if not both, chambers of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.Top officials in the party, who see the bill as cruel, fiscally ruinous and the single biggest wealth transfer in American history, expect that they can blame Republicans who voted for the loss of health care coverage, nursing home care and food security for millions of Americans in order to extend the 2017 tax cuts that favor the wealthy.And they have plenty of quotes from Republicans like Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska denouncing their own bill that, Democrats say, will make the argument that much more potent.“There’s going to be some powerful ads,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the chamber’s Democratic leader, before rattling off potential scripts for advertisements that are set to begin airing as early as next week. “‘My daughter had cancer. She was doing fine. Well, all of a sudden, her health care was blown up.’ ‘I worked at this rural hospital for 30 years. I put my heart into it because I wanted to help people. I was fired.’ Stuff like that is going to really matter.”It may take a while for people to feel the full effects of the bill because Republicans front-loaded some temporary tax cuts for working people, like no taxes on tips, that were engineered to appeal to working-class voters. The cuts to Medicaid are not set to be implemented until after the midterm elections.Still, there were some immediate effects. A clinic in southwest Nebraska announced this week that it was closing, blaming anticipated cuts to Medicaid. And Democrats said they expected millions of people to feel the impact from the bill’s allowing credits from the Affordable Care Act to expire. It will be up to Democrats over the next year to drive home the argument that these policies are the fault of Republican lawmakers.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

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      Trump Faces the Biggest Test Yet of His Second-Term Political Power

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      If President Trump gets his domestic policy bill over the finish line, it will be a vivid demonstration of his continuing hold over the Republican Party.President Trump has gotten almost everything he has wanted from the Republican-controlled Congress since he took office in January.G.O.P. lawmakers approved his nominees, sometimes despite their doubts. They ceded their power over how federal dollars are distributed, impinging on constitutional authority. And they have cheered his overhaul of the federal bureaucracy, even as he has bypassed the legislative body’s oversight of federal agencies.But now, Mr. Trump is pressuring Republicans to fall in line behind his sprawling domestic policy bill, even though it has elements that could put their party’s hold on Congress in greater peril in next year’s midterm elections. Fiscal hawks are appalled by estimates that the bill would add at least $3.3 trillion to the country’s ballooning debt, while moderate Republicans are concerned about the steep cuts to the safety net.Yet Mr. Trump is still getting his way — at least so far. The Senate narrowly passed the bill Tuesday, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie. The bill now heads back to the House, where the president can only lose three votes, and where anger among both moderates and conservatives about changes made by the Senate is running high.Getting the bill through the House may be the biggest test yet of Mr. Trump’s second-term political power. If he gets the bill over the finish line, it will be another legislative victory and a vivid demonstration of his continuing hold over the party.The process of driving the legislation forward has exposed deep divisions among congressional Republicans, as well as concern about the huge political risks of supporting the bill. In the end, fear of crossing Mr. Trump kept defections in the Senate to a barely manageable level.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

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      Taking From the Poor and Giving to the Rich Is Not Populism

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      “I love the poorly educated,” President Trump declared during the 2016 campaign. His intense support for the “big, beautiful” $4.5 trillion tax-and-spending bill now before Congress shows that he has a unique way of demonstrating his affection.Republicans are on the verge of enacting Trump’s upwardly distributive fiscal policy measure, which has become an extreme test of the loyalty of his more downscale MAGA supporters, who not only oppose the bill but stand to bear the brunt of its negative consequences.In its current form, which is changing by the hour, the measure, known popularly as B.B.B., would provide the upper classes, including Trump’s allies and donor base — corporations and the rich — with tax cuts worth approximately $4.45 trillion over 10 years. The measure would offset the cost with the largest reductions in safety net programs in recent decades, if not all time, for those on the lower tiers of the income distribution.This pared-back social spending would adversely affect a large bloc of rural and exurban Republicans who played a crucial role in putting their party in control of the House and Senate, and Trump in the White House.“You can very safely say,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, told The Washington Post, that “this is the biggest cut to programs for low-income Americans ever.”Many of the details of the legislation remain in flux as the Senate continues to vote on amendments. If the Senate approves the legislation, the House and the Senate will still have to come to agreement on a final version for the measure to become law.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

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      With Tillis Out, North Carolina’s Senate Race Will Draw Parties’ Firepower

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      A popular former Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, is expected to announce a bid this summer. The Republicans are banking on an endorsement by President Trump to clear their field.The announcement this past weekend from Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina that he will not seek re-election is renewing the focus on a Senate race that was poised to be one of the two top contests on the 2026 midterm map.For months, Democrats were eager to run against Mr. Tillis, who was being squeezed from both the political left and right as he sought to navigate life as a battleground-state senator with President Trump in the White House.Officials in both parties acknowledged that Mr. Tillis was in a weakened political state. He won his last re-election in 2020 only after his Democratic opponent was engulfed in an extramarital sexting scandal, and he has long had an arms-length relationship with the Trump base of his party.In recent months, several North Carolina Republicans have inquired about either mounting a primary challenge to Mr. Tillis or seeking the nomination with the expectation that the senator would not run again.Democrats, for the most part, have yielded to their expected front-runner, former Gov. Roy Cooper, who left office at the start of this year. During his farewell address to the state in December, he pointedly declared: “I’m not done.”Here are four key questions about North Carolina’s Senate race.Will former Gov. Roy Cooper run?Mr. Cooper is by far the most popular Democrat in North Carolina. He is undefeated as a statewide candidate, having won four elections as attorney general and two as governor. In 2012, Republicans did not even bother to put up a candidate against Mr. Cooper.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