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Tag: college degree

  • Trump administration accelerates its plan to shut down the Education Department

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    WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Tuesday accelerated the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education with a plan to transfer key, legally required functions to other agencies, including oversight of its $18-billion, core anti-poverty program, Title 1.

    Critics said the move was politicized and counterproductive and fear future program cuts. California Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said vital services to the state and nation’s most vulnerable students were likely to be disrupted.

    The steps move toward fulfilling a Trump campaign promise to eliminate the department, which some conservatives have long derided as wasteful, ineffective and unnecessary.

    “The Trump Administration is taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission.”

    President Trump called for the department’s elimination in a March executive order. Both he and McMahon have spoken of a broad goal of sparking innovation through local control.

    Even before this effort, states provided about 90% of their own funding for education, but federal investment is still crucial, advocates say. In particular, the federal role has focused on ensuring services are provided for overlooked students and students with higher needs, such as those facing discrimination and poverty, and students with disabilities.

    While slashing the Education Department workforce, which Trump officials have characterized as a bloated bureaucracy, the president has adopted an interventionist agenda in education as well. He has threatened pulling federal funding if states and schools don’t follow his directives to combat antisemitism, clamp down on campus protests, end diversity, equity and inclusion programs and oppose expanded rights for transsexual students, among other issues in keeping with his agenda.

    The strategy behind the moves

    The key strategy announced Tuesday creates partnerships with other federal agencies, which will take on Education Department responsibilities. The department would retain legal authority even as the actual work shifts elsewhere.

    These partnerships are meant to sidestep federal rules — under the jurisdiction of Congress — that place programs, including Title I, specifically within the Education Department.

    Title I is expected to shift to the Department of Labor, which is likely to absorb an unknown number of education workers with the necessary experience and expertise. The long-term goal is to win buy-in from Congress — and then to eliminate the Education Department entirely, which requires congressional approval.

    “As we partner with these agencies to improve federal programs, we will continue to gather best practices in each state,” McMahon said.

    She also spoke of working “with Congress to codify these reforms,” an acknowledgment that the Department of Education was created by an act of Congress.

    Administration officials insist that their actions to date are legal, citing as precedent earlier agreements between federal agencies, including one example from the Biden administration. The scale of the current effort, however, is a much larger order of magnitude.

    Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles) questioned Trump’s authority to take this action. “Not only is dismantling the education department without congressional approval illegal, but they chose today because they knew the Epstein vote would dominate the headlines. They clearly didn’t want the public to see what they were doing to our kids’ futures.”

    Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Assn., the nation’s largest teachers union, accused the administration of “taking every chance it can to hack away at the very protections and services our students need.”

    How the action affects vulnerable students

    The changes will complicate efforts to get money and services where they are needed, Thurmond said.

    “This is an unnecessary, disruptive change that is going to harm students, especially the most vulnerable,” Thurmond said. “It is clearly less efficient for state departments of education and local school districts to work with four different federal agencies instead of one.

    “Experience also tells us that any time you move expertise and responsibilities, you disrupt services. There is no way to avoid negative impacts on our children and our classrooms with a change of this magnitude.”

    But administration officials talked of new efficiencies and synergies, asserting that associating education with workforce development in the Department of Labor would make education more relevant to a student’s employment future.

    What happens to other programs?

    The Labor Department would oversee almost all grant programs that are now managed by the Education Department’s offices for K-12 and higher education. That includes funding pools for teacher training, English instruction and TRIO, a program that helps steer low-income students to college degrees.

    Tuesday’s action leaves in place the Education Department’s $1.6-trillion student loan portfolio and its funding for students with disabilities.

    But ultimately moving these programs seems likely if the mission remains to shutter the department.

    Another transfer puts Health and Human Services in charge of a grant program for parents who are attending college, along with management of foreign medical school accreditation. The State Department will take on foreign language programs. Interior will oversee programs for Native American education.

    Federal officials said states and schools should see no funding disruptions. Liz Huston, White House assistant press secretary, said Tuesday the administration “is fully committed to doing what’s best for American students, which is why it’s critical to shrink this bloated federal education bureaucracy while still ensuring efficient delivery of funds and essential programs.”

    The Education Department tested this approach in June, announcing the transfer of adult education programs to the Labor Department. Working out essential details took some five months, officials said Tuesday.

    The administration’s plan immediately drew support from Tim Walberg, a Republican who represents a southern Michigan district.

    “The past few decades have made one thing clear: The status quo is broken,” Walberg said. “As the bureaucracy swelled, left-wing bureaucrats were emboldened to waste taxpayer dollars on a radical agenda. As a result, our students have been left in the dust. Test scores are plummeting, students can’t read, and college graduates leave school burdened by debt rather than equipped with workforce-ready skills.”

    But the Education Department — and its central programs — has bipartisan support.

    One Republican expressing concern is Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick.

    “The United States Congress created the U.S. Department of Education for very good reason,” Fitzpatrick said. “And for millions of families, particularly those raising children with disabilities or living in low-income communities, the Department’s core offices are not discretionary functions. They are foundational. They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow, and succeed on equal footing.”

    Feds say programs’ funding will continue

    Department officials said programs will continue to be funded at levels set by Congress. But that doesn’t stop programs from running afoul of another portion of the Trump agenda. For example, the Tuesday announcement notes that a program to help with the education of the children of migrant workers will transfer to the Labor Department.

    However, on other fronts the Trump administration is trying to eliminate that program. The administration first tried to hold back funding approved by Congress. The administration relented under pressure. But the administration also cut funding for migrant education from its budget proposal for future years.

    Officials said they did not yet have details on whether the changes would bring further job cuts at the Education Department, which has been thinned by waves of layoffs and retirements under pressure.

    Blume is a Times staff writer. Binkley writes for the Associated Press. Times staff writers Daniel Miller and Michael Wilner contributed to this report.

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    Howard Blume, Collin Binkley

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  • 5 College Degrees That Are Least Likely to Land New Grads a Job

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    Recent college graduates face a remarkably inhospitable labor market as businesses pull back on hiring, and now suffer even higher unemployment rates than the general U.S. population. Were that not daunting enough, Gen Zers who often assumed heavy student debt loads to pursue higher education can now check to see which degrees are the least useful in securing work these days.

    As companies react to uncertainties from import tariffs, mass deportation of immigrants, and clashing indicators about the economy’s health, most U.S. employers have essentially stopped hiring. That precautionary move by businesses to neither increase nor cut headcounts has led to anemic job creation since May. That’s hit recent college grads hard. According to data published by the New York Federal Reserve bank in August, the unemployment rate for diploma holders aged 22 to 27 years old increased to 4.8 percent, compared to the current 4.3 percent national average. 

    More recent statistics from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis measured the jobless rate of those recent college graduates at a slightly lower 4.59 percent. Yet that still marks “a stark contrast to the 3.25 (percent) rate this same demographic experienced in 2019,” it said. It noted that newer entrants to the workforce constituted 10.8 percent of the entire jobless population at the end of August.

    A notably uninviting labor market for recent degree earners reflects two major shifts in company hiring practices and priorities.

    First, diplomas that were formerly considered a near guarantee for landing work have lost the power to unlock doors to career-track jobs, as businesses start prioritizing experience and skills — especially using artificial intelligence — over formal education. Second, the so-called college wage premium that often earned degree holders over 80 percent more in pay than non-graduates has fallen to about 25 percent now, especially for people whose majors are in less demand.

    “If you’re a college grad and you are underemployed, you’re basically making the same money as a college dropout on average,” said St. Louis Fed economic policy advisor Oksana Leukhina in a recent post on the bank’s site. Many plumbers, contractors, or mold inspectors now earn considerably more, she added.

    That shift in hiring and work priorities mean a growing number of college graduates are questioning the value of their educational investments. Now, thanks to recently released data by the New York Fed, those Gen Z job hunters can get a better idea — and perhaps a larger dose of dread — about exactly which degrees suffer the highest underemployment rates.

    The NY Fed found people who earned diplomas in criminal justice are the most affected, with a 67.2 percent underemployment rate. They were followed by majors in performing arts 62.3 percent, medical technicians at 57.9 percent, liberal arts at 56.5 percent, and anthropology at 55.9 percent.

    Diploma holders with the lowest levels of underemployment were elementary education students at 16.1 percent, miscellaneous education specialists at 16 percent, and nursing grads at 9.7 percent.

    One factor shaping those rankings is the shift of business sectors now creating the most jobs.

    Healthcare businesses led that hiring push for most of the past year, explaining the low underemployment rates for nursing degree holders. Strong recruitment by booming building companies similarly explains the relatively low 21 percent underemployment rate for construction services graduates.

    But Leukhina suggests another factor is the changing attitudes toward the inherent value of college degrees as the primary indicators of a job candidate’s continual learning capacities, adaptability, and increasing capabilities. That means the days may well be over when students could earn a diploma in a field they cared about most — even if it had little practical business application — and use that as their ticket into the labor market to land work they could learn on the job.

    As an example, the St. Louis Fed article cited the underemployment rate for criminal justice majors as a reflection of how a degree may no longer be considered necessary, or even desirable by certain employers.

    “(L)aw enforcement and security guard positions don’t tend to require college degrees, which could account for the higher underemployment rate for those majors,” it said. “Grads with majors in these fields undermatch at rates of 57 (percent) or higher.”

    Still, a New York Fed analysis earlier this year found that even after accounting for student loan repayments and other costs, the average college graduate continues benefitting from a comparatively easier time finding work than non-grads — and being paid more once they do. But as Gen Zers are learning to their increasing dismay, both of those advantages appear to be weakening, if not gradually vanishing as the labor market transforms.

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    Bruce Crumley

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  • Nearly 4 in 10 Gen Z college grads giving up on using their degrees—Poll

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    Nearly four in 10 Gen Z college graduates are opting away from the white collar work their degrees prepared them for and instead choosing blue collar jobs amid an uncertain job market, according to a new poll from Resume Builder.

    The survey of more than 1,400 Gen Z adults found 42 percent of Gen Z-ers are currently working in or pursuing a blue-collar or skilled trade job, including 37 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree.

    “Gen Z is being realistic,” HR consultant Bryan Driscoll told Newsweek, in part.

    Why It Matters

    The blue-collar share of young workers has grown since 2020. Despite often being seen as less prestigious, these jobs often have greater stability and higher salaries compared to entry-level positions for more white collar work.

    Gen Z, which includes those born from 1997 to 2012, has been described as the “toolbelt generation,” with college enrollment falling fast from 2019 to 2024.

    During that period of time, the number of bachelor’s degree students fell by 3.6 percent, and associate degree enrollment dropped by 15.9 percent, but even those with a degree might be turning to blue-collar work due to today’s difficult job market.

    A balloon reading “Congrats Grad” floats above the crowd during Harvard’s commencement ceremony on May 29, 2025, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    Libby O’Neill/Getty Images

    What To Know

    In the new report, 37 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree were working a blue-collar or skilled trade job.

    “Trade jobs offer a smart and rewarding path for many, especially those who prefer hands-on work and practical learning over traditional classroom settings,” Resume Builder’s Chief Career Advisor Stacie Haller said in the report.

    “They provide faster entry into the workforce, often without the burden of student debt, and also offer strong job security, with less risk of automation or outsourcing. These jobs often begin with apprenticeships and can lead to career growth through specialization, supervisory roles, or even business ownership, making trades a viable and stable long-term career option.”

    But Gen Z men were significantly more likely than Gen Z women to choose blue-collar careers, regardless of education level.

    Even among those with degrees, 46 percent of men were working in or pursuing trades, compared to 27 percent of women with degrees.

    For those who did choose these blue-collar jobs, avoiding student debt and reducing the risk of being replaced by AI were major factors.

    “Gen Z is being realistic,” HR consultant Bryan Driscoll told Newsweek. “They’ve seen older generations grind in corporate jobs only to be left with burnout, layoffs, and shrinking returns. Blue collar work offers something corporate America no longer guarantees – stability (to some extent), tangible skills, and often union protections.”

    Roughly 30 percent of those working in blue-collar roles said trade jobs offer better long-term prospects, and 19 percent said they couldn’t find a job in their original field.

    Another 16 percent said they weren’t earning enough with their degree, and 25 percent said these jobs are less likely to be replaced by AI.

    “It’s getting harder to find good-paying white-collar jobs, and many of the ones out there don’t pay enough to justify the debt students took on to get their degrees,” Kevin Thompson, the CEO of 9i Capital Group and the host of the 9innings podcast, told Newsweek. “On top of that, companies have slowed hiring, so a lot of graduates aren’t even landing jobs in their field of study.”

    What People Are Saying

    Haller said in the report: “More Gen Z college graduates are turning to trade careers and for good reason. Many are concerned about AI replacing traditional white-collar roles, while trade jobs offer hands-on work that’s difficult to automate. Additionally, many grads find their degrees don’t lead to careers in their field, prompting them to explore more practical, in-demand alternatives.”

    Thompson told Newsweek: “For Gen Z, blue-collar work often means quicker training, lower upfront costs, and jobs that feel more secure in the face of automation. That combination makes it a practical alternative to pursuing a four-year degree.”

    Michael Ryan, a finance expert and the founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek: “While their classmates are drowning in $100k in student debt, these Gen Z’ers are earning while they learn. Many are concerned about AI replacing traditional white collar roles. While trade jobs offer hands-on work that’s difficult to automate.”

    What Happens Next

    If this trend continues, college enrollment could decline while demand for apprenticeships and trade programs rises, Thompson said.

    “Longer term, as more workers pile into these fields, labor supply could increase and eventually put pressure on wages,” Thompson said. “That shift won’t happen overnight, but the ripple effects on career paths and the workforce as a whole could be significant.”

    Driscoll said the shift could end up rebalancing the workforce on a larger scale.

    “If more Gen Z workers choose trades, employers will finally have to rethink how they treat white collar workers,” Driscoll said. “It also strengthens labor power in industries critical to infrastructure and everyday life. This isn’t Gen Z settling. This is Gen Z rejecting a broken promise and building careers on their terms.”

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  • The Governor Who Wants to Be Trump’s Next Apprentice

    The Governor Who Wants to Be Trump’s Next Apprentice

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    As every politician knows, openly campaigning for the job of vice president is bad form. But Kristi Noem doesn’t seem to care.

    Last week alone, the South Dakota governor sent out a dozen tweets praising Donald Trump. She went on Fox News’s Hannity to condemn attempts in Maine and Colorado to remove the former president from the ballot. And she hosted a get-out-the-caucus rally for him across the border in Iowa. “Show up for a couple hours and fight for the man that’s fought for you for years!” the 52-year-old governor told the crowd at the event in Sioux City. “The only reason that we have this country is because of the good that he did when he was in that White House—and how he still continues to tell the truth out there every single day.”

    Asked by a reporter at the event whether she would consider the Trump VP slot, Noem smiled and replied, “I think anybody in this country, if they were offered it, needs to consider it.” Later, she retweeted the clip.

    Noem’s name has been popping up on vice-presidential shortlists in the media—and in Republican focus groups—for a while now. The way that she has defended and mimicked Trump’s actions for the past several years suggests that as his VP, she would be more of an enabler than a moderating force—and aggressive on Trump’s behalf in a way that Mike Pence never was. Picking Noem as his running mate would signal that Trump will be even less willing in a second term to kowtow to the Republican establishment. Compared with two other names that also appear regularly in shortlists, Noem would be more comfortable in MAGA world than the GOP conference chair Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, but less kooky than the Trump loyalist and Senate candidate Kari Lake. Noem also has more actual governing experience than either.

    Read: Trumpism has found its leading lady

    It’s still early in the primary season. Republicans have yet to settle on a nominee, and although all signs point to Trump, even his own team claims it hasn’t officially begun the brainstorming process for a running mate. “Much too soon for any of that talk,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser on Trump’s campaign, told me. Typically, a VP candidate is not announced until around the time of the convention, months after the presidential primary is concluded. Unofficially, though, the audition process began long ago.

    Noem will be “very competitive,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist, told me. “She’s burnishing her MAGA credentials, and the more she comes across as a fire-breathing populist, that’ll help her.” (The governor did not respond to my requests for an interview.)

    Noem, a former farm girl and South Dakota beauty queen, was elected in 2018 as the state’s first female governor. Before that, she spent four years in the state legislature and another eight in the U.S. Congress as South Dakota’s sole House representative. But most Americans probably heard Noem’s name for the first time in 2020, when she made national news for her laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus pandemic.

    Like most governors, at the start of the virus’s spread, Noem closed schools and ordered businesses to follow CDC guidelines. But quickly, taking cues from the Trump administration, she let up on those regulations. Noem never issued a statewide mask mandate, and she encouraged counties to return to business as usual sooner than other states did. She welcomed the return of the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in late summer of 2020, which ultimately resulted in “widespread transmission” of the virus throughout the Midwest, according to a study from the CDC. Her office used $5 million in pandemic-relief funds for an ad campaign promoting state tourism.

    Her pandemic-era decisions were evidence of bold, freedom-loving leadership, Noem has said, and her handling of the crisis remains a top bragging point as she travels the country giving speeches and hosting fundraisers. In other ways, too, Noem has perfectly reflected the zeitgeist of the modern Republican Party. She has repeated Trump’s claims that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” In 2022, she signed legislation banning transgender girls and women from playing on female sports teams; last year, she called upon an adviser from the conservative Hillsdale College to rework the state’s social-studies curriculum as part of a broader effort to eliminate “critical race theory” from public schools. “She’s brought legislation that is increasingly far-right for South Dakota—more so than any previous governor,” Bob Mercer, a longtime journalist in the state’s capital, Pierre, told me.

    Jonathan V. Last: Nikki Haley’s endgame

    Noem has also seemed much more focused on securing national media attention than past state leaders. In 2020, she built the first TV studio in the state capitol, and she’s become a regular on Newsmax, Fox News, and other major conservative outlets. Last spring, she signed a gun-related executive order onstage during a speech at the annual NRA convention in Indiana. (In that address, Noem boasted that her 2-year-old granddaughter already had a shotgun and a rifle.)

    She has also brought in several aides with national political experience, including the former Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski. And she kicked off a new national “Freedom Works Here” ad campaign that urges Americans living all over the country to move to South Dakota for jobs. Noem has starred in each of the spots, cosplaying as various members of the South Dakota workforce, including a welder, a plumber, and a nurse.

    Trump has always favored a culture warrior, and Noem’s political choices alone are enough to warrant VP consideration. But the governor, who is married with three children, can also claim the kind of corn-fed American backstory that voters love and that most Republican politicians wish they had. She spent her childhood pulling calves and driving grain carts on the family farm. As a teenager, she was crowned South Dakota Snow Queen, and her 2022 memoir, Not My First Rodeo, is chock-full of folksy idioms and Bible verses; Noem’s political MO, she writes, citing Matthew’s Gospel, is to “be wise like snakes and gentle like doves.” The book also recounts her life’s biggest tragedy: When Noem was pregnant with her first child, her father was killed in a grain-bin accident, forcing her, she writes, to leave college and go home to run the farm. Noem ended up earning her college degree by taking online classes during her time in Congress.

    Noem has always been adept at appealing to voters by using “the great mythology of America that you can pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” Michael Card, a political-science professor at the University of South Dakota, told me. Those rural bona fides could be effective if she makes the Republican presidential ticket. But gender could work in her favor at least as much.

    “Trump is well aware of his deficiencies as a candidate,” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist and the publisher of The Bulwark, told me. And his weakness among women voters—compounded by a penchant for baiting women he perceives as a challenge and the long list of sexual-harassment allegations against him—makes choosing a female running mate seem advisable. He’ll likely try to find “somebody who normalizes him somewhat,” Longwell said, and exploit “the excitement of a woman on the ticket, someone to push back on the idea that the party is sexist.” Bannon agreed: Trump’s MAGA movement is mostly woman-led, he claimed—“smart to engage that base and make your case to suburban women.”

    Eric Schnurer: Kristi Noem’s National Guard deployment is America’s future

    Noem has downsides as a VP contender. It’s not as though Trump would need her on the ticket to win over rural voters; they already love him. Vice-presidential candidates can be chosen to deliver a state that might not be in the nominee’s column, but South Dakota is a safe Republican state, and, with only three Electoral College votes, it’s not a particularly useful pickup. And although Noem has yet to come under national scrutiny, she’s already had her share of controversy. In the spring of 2022, a Republican-controlled panel of South Dakota lawmakers found that one of Noem’s daughters had received special treatment in an application for her real-estate-appraiser license. (Noem has denied any wrongdoing.) And last fall, the New York Post and the Daily Mail ran reports about an alleged affair between Noem and Lewandowski. (In response, the governor’s spokesperson dismissed the allegation as “a false and inflammatory tabloid rumor.”)

    Trump has other options. He could run on a ticket with his current primary opponent Nikki Haley, as a way to appease moderate Republicans. The pairing doesn’t seem particularly plausible right now, given the sharp words both candidates have had for each other during this campaign, but Bannon sees it as a possibility—even if he and others in MAGA world don’t approve. “Haley has two constituencies—the Murdochs and the donors—and they are trying to buy her way on the ticket as VP,” he told me.

    As for Noem’s other potential rivals for a Trump VP pick, a lawmaker with Stefanik’s Ivy League credentials and political experience on the ticket could help Trump shore up support from moderates, some strategists said. “Elise could at least pass as somebody who eats with a fork in Washington circles but would satisfy the MAGA base,” Jeff Timmer, a Republican strategist and senior adviser at the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, told me. But Stefanik perhaps has to work harder to win over the MAGA crowd—she was dutifully parroting Trump’s lines on Meet the Press this weekend by referring to the convicted January 6 rioters as “hostages.” Aside from Lake, the former newscaster and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate whom I profiled in 2022, other women who could get consideration include Senator Katie Britt of Alabama and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee.

    If Trump has secured the nomination, the VP-selection process could look very different from the way it did eight years ago. Back then, Trump was still looking to consolidate support among Republicans; now his lock on the party is airtight, unquestionable. “He gets to pick whoever he wants,” Timmer said. Which makes competition for the spot pretty unpredictable: Trump could follow his gut and pick a MAGA-style politician and relative outsider like Noem, or make a more strategic choice with a GOP insider like Stefanik. Regardless of whether Republican leaders like either, “they’re gonna smile and go along with it.”

    One thing is certain: No candidate will be considered for the Trump VP slot without having demonstrated sycophantic devotion to the former president—a willingness to defend him no matter what. Noem is not the only one to clear that bar, but she has jumped higher than most.

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    Elaine Godfrey

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  • What It Would Take to Beat Trump in the Primaries

    What It Would Take to Beat Trump in the Primaries

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    This should be a window of widening opportunity and optimism for the Republicans chasing Donald Trump, the commanding front-runner in the 2024 GOP presidential race.

    Instead, this is a time of mounting uncertainty and unease.

    Rather than undermine Trump’s campaign, his indictment last week for mishandling classified documents has underscored how narrow a path is available for the candidates hoping to deny him the nomination. What should have been a moment of political danger for Trump instead has become another stage for him to demonstrate his dominance within the party. Almost all GOP leaders have reflexively snapped to his defense, and polls show that most Republican voters accept his vitriolic claims to be the victim of a politicized and illegitimate prosecution.

    As GOP partisans rally around him amid the proliferating legal threats, recent national surveys have routinely found Trump attracting support from more than 50 percent of primary voters. Very few primary candidates in either party have ever drawn that much support in polls this early in the calendar. In an equally revealing measure of his strength, the choice by most of the candidates running against Trump to echo his attacks on the indictment shows how little appetite even they believe exists within the party coalition for a full-on confrontation with him.

    The conundrum for Republicans is that polls measuring public reaction to Trump’s legal difficulties have also found that outside the Republican coalition, a significant majority of voters are disturbed by the allegations accumulating against him. Beyond the GOP base, most voters have said in polls that they believe his handling of classified material has created a national-security risk and that he should not serve as president again if he’s convicted of a crime. Such negative responses from the broader electorate suggest that Trump’s legal challenges are weakening him as a potential general-election candidate even as they strengthen him in the primary. It’s as if Republican leaders and voters can see a tornado on the horizon—and are flooring the gas pedal to reach it faster.

    This far away from the first caucuses and primaries next winter—and about two months from the first debate in August—the other candidates correctly argue that it’s too soon to declare Trump unbeatable for the nomination.

    Republicans skeptical of Trump hold out hope that GOP voters will grow weary from the cumulative weight of the multiple legal proceedings converging on him. And he still faces potential federal and Fulton County Georgia charges over his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.

    Republican voters “are going to start asking who else is out there, who has a cleaner record, and who is not going to have the constant political volleying going on in the background of their campaign,” Dave Wilson, a prominent Republican and social-conservative activist in South Carolina, told me. “They are looking for someone they can rally behind, because Republicans really want to defeat Joe Biden.”

    Scott Reed was the campaign manager in 1996 for Bob Dole’s presidential campaign and is now a co-chair of Committed to America, a super PAC supporting Mike Pence. Reed told me he also believes that “time is Trump’s enemy” as his legal troubles persist. The belief in GOP circles that “the Department of Justice is totally out of control” offers Trump an important shield among primary voters, Reed said. But he believes that as the details about Trump’s handling of classified documents in the latest indictment “sink in … his support is going to begin to erode.” And as more indictments possibly accumulate, Reed added, “I think the repetition of these proceedings will wear him down.”

    Yet other strategists say that the response so far among both GOP voters and elected officials raises doubts about whether any legal setback can undermine Trump’s position. (The party’s bottomless willingness throughout his presidency to defend actions that previously had appeared indefensible, of course, points toward the same conclusion.) The veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres has divided the GOP electorate into three categories: about 10 percent that is “never Trump,” about 35 percent that is immovably committed to him, and about half that he describes as “maybe Trump,” who are generally sympathetic to the former president and supportive of his policies but uneasy about some of his personal actions and open to an alternative.

    Those “maybe Trump” voters are the key to any coalition that can beat him in the primary race, Ayres told me, but as the polls demonstrate, they flock to his side when he’s under attack. “Many of them had conflict with siblings, with parents, sometimes with children, sometimes even with spouses, about their support for Donald Trump,” Ayres said. “And they are very defensive about it. That makes them instinctively rally to Donald Trump’s defense, because if they suggest in any way that he is not fit for office, then that casts aspersions on their own past support for him.”

    This reflex helps explain the paradoxical dynamic of Trump’s position having improved in the GOP race since his first indictment in early April. A national CBS survey conducted after last week’s federal indictment found his support in the primary soaring past 60 percent for the first time, with three-fourths of Republican voters dismissing the charges as politically motivated and four-fifths saying he should serve as president even if convicted in the case.

    The Republicans dubious of Trump focus more on the evidence in the same surveys that voters outside the GOP base are, predictably, disturbed by the behavior alleged in the multiplying cases against him. Trump argues that Democrats are concocting these allegations because they fear him more than any other Republican candidate, but Wilson accurately pointed out that many Democrats believe Trump has been so damaged since 2020 that he might be the easiest GOP nominee to beat. “I don’t think Democrats really want someone other than Trump,” Wilson said. Privately, in my conversations with them, plenty of Democratic strategists agree.

    Ayres believes that evidence of the resistance to Trump in the wider electorate may eventually cause more GOP voters to think twice about nominating him. Polls have usually found that most Republican voters say agreement on issues is more important for them in choosing a nominee than electability. But Ayres said that in focus groups he’s conducted, “maybe Trump” voters do spontaneously raise concerns about whether Trump can win again given everything that’s happened since Election Day, including the January 6 insurrection. “Traditionally an electability argument is ineffective in primaries,” Ayres said. “The way the dynamic usually works is ‘I like Candidate X, therefore Candidate X has the best chance to win.’ The question is whether the electability argument is more potent in this situation than it was formerly … and the only answer to that is: We will find out.” One early measure suggests that, for now, the answer remains no. In the new CBS poll, Republicans were more bullish on Trump’s chances of winning next year than on any other candidate’s.

    Read: Will Trump get a speedy trial?

    Another reason the legal proceedings haven’t hurt Trump more is that his rivals have been so reluctant to challenge him over his actions—or even to make the argument that multiple criminal trials would weaken him as a general-election candidate. But there are some signs that this may be changing: Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott this week somewhat criticized his behavior, though they were careful to also endorse the former president’s core message that the most recent indictment is illegitimate and politically motivated. Some strategists working in the race believe that by the first Republican debate in August, the other candidates will have assailed Trump’s handling of the classified documents more explicitly than they are now.

    Still, Trump’s fortifications inside the party remain formidable against even a more direct assault. Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump’s campaign, points out that 85 to 90 percent of Republicans approve of his record as president. In 2016, Trump didn’t win an absolute majority of the vote in any contest until his home state of New York, after he had effectively clinched the nomination; now he’s routinely drawing majority support in polls.

    In those new national polls, Trump is consistently attracting about 35 to 40 percent of Republican voters with a four-year college degree or more, roughly the same limited portion he drew in 2016. But multiple recent surveys have found him winning about 60 percent of Republican voters without a college degree, considerably more than he did in 2016.

    McLaughlin maintains that Trump’s bond with non-college-educated white voters in a GOP primary is as deep as Bill Clinton’s “connection with Black voters” was when he won the Democratic primaries a generation ago. Ayres, though no fan of Trump, agrees that the numbers he’s posting among Republicans without a college degree are “breathtaking.” That strength may benefit Trump even more than in 2016, because polling indicates that those non-college-educated white voters will make up an even bigger share of the total GOP vote next year, as Trump has attracted more of them into the party and driven out more of the suburban white-collar white voters most skeptical of him.

    But if Trump looks stronger inside the GOP than he was in 2016, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may also present a more formidable challenger than Trump faced seven years ago. On paper, DeSantis has more potential than any of the 2016 contenders to attract the moderate and college-educated voters most dubious of Trump and peel away some of the right-leaning “maybe Trump” voters who like his policies but not his behavior. The optimistic way of looking at Trump’s imposing poll numbers, some GOP strategists opposed to him told me, is that he’s functionally the incumbent in the race and still about half of primary voters remain reluctant to back him. That gives DeSantis an audience to work with.

    In practice, though, DeSantis has struggled to find his footing. DeSantis’s choice to run at Trump primarily from his right has so far produced few apparent benefits for him. DeSantis’s positioning has caused some donors and strategists to question whether he would be any more viable in a general election, but it has not yet shown signs of siphoning away conservative voters from Trump. Still, the fact that DeSantis’s favorability among Republicans has remained quite high amid the barrage of attacks from Trump suggests that if GOP voters ultimately decide that Trump is too damaged, the Florida governor could remain an attractive fallback option for them.

    Whether DeSantis or someone else emerges as the principal challenger, the size of Trump’s advantage underscores how crucial it will be to trip him early. Like earlier front-runners in both parties, Trump’s greatest risk may be that another candidate upsets him in one of the traditional first contests of Iowa and New Hampshire. Throughout the history of both parties’ nomination contests, such a surprise defeat has tended to reset the race most powerfully when the front-runner looks the most formidable, as Trump does now. “If Trump is not stopped in Iowa or New Hampshire, he will roll to the nomination,” Reed said.

    Even if someone beats Trump in one of those early contests, though, history suggests that they will still have their work cut out for them. In every seriously contested Republican primary since 1980, the front-runner as the voting began has been beaten in either Iowa or New Hampshire. That unexpected defeat has usually exposed the early leader to a more difficult and unpredictable race than he expected. But the daunting precedent for Trump’s rivals is that all those front-runners—from Ronald Reagan in 1980 to George W. Bush in 2000 to Trump himself in 2016—recovered to eventually win the nomination. In his time as a national figure, Trump has shattered a seemingly endless list of political traditions. But to beat him next year, his GOP rivals will need to shatter a precedent of their own.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Why Congress Doesn’t Work

    Why Congress Doesn’t Work

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    Control of the House of Representatives could teeter precariously for years as each party consolidates its dominance over mirror-image demographic strongholds.

    That’s the clearest conclusion of a new analysis of the demographic and economic characteristics of all 435 congressional districts, conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in conjunction with The Atlantic.

    Based on census data, the analysis finds that Democrats now hold a commanding edge over the GOP in seats where the share of residents who are nonwhite, the share of white adults with a college degree, or both, are higher than the level in the nation overall. But Republicans hold a lopsided lead in the districts where the share of racial minorities and whites with at least a four-year college degree are both lower than the national level—and that is the largest single bloc of districts in the House.

    This demographic divide has produced a near-partisan stalemate, with Republicans in the new Congress holding the same narrow 222-seat majority that Democrats had in the last one. Both sides will struggle to build a much bigger majority without demonstrating more capacity to win seats whose demographic and economic profile has mostly favored the other. “The coalitions are quite stretched to their limits, so there is just not a lot of space for expansion,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political-reform program at New America.

    The widening chasm between the characteristics of the districts held by each party has left the House not only closely divided, but also deeply divided.

    Through the late 20th and early 21st centuries, substantial overlap remained between the kinds of districts each party held. In those years, large numbers of Democrats still represented mostly white, low-income rural and small-town districts with few college graduates, and a cohort of Republicans held well-educated, affluent suburban districts. That overlap didn’t prevent the House from growing more partisan and confrontational, but it did temper that trend, because the small-town “blue dog” Democrats and suburban “gypsy moth” Republicans were often the members open to working across party lines.

    Now the parties represent districts more consistently divided along lines of demography, economic status, and geography, which makes finding common ground difficult. The parties’ intensifying separation “is a recipe for polarization,” Manuel Pastor, a sociology professor at USC and the director of the Equity Research Institute, told me.

    To understand the social and economic characteristics of the House seats held by each party, Jeffer Giang and Justin Scoggins of the Equity Research Institute analyzed five-year summary results through 2020 from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

    The analysis revealed that along every key economic and demographic dimension, the two parties are now sorted to the extreme in the House districts they represent. “These people are coming to Washington not from different districts, but frankly different planets,” says former Representative Steve Israel, who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

    Among the key distinctions:

    *More than three-fifths of House Democrats hold districts where the share of the nonwhite population exceeds the national level of 40 percent. Four-fifths of House Republicans hold districts in which the minority share of the population is below the national level.

    *Nearly three-fourths of House Democrats represent districts where the share of white adults with a college degree exceeds the national level of 36 percent. More than three-fourths of Republicans hold districts where the share of white college graduates trails the national level.

    *Just over three-fifths of House Democrats hold districts where the share of immigrants exceeds the national level of 14 percent; well over four-fifths of House Republicans hold districts with fewer immigrants than average.

    *Perhaps most strikingly, three-fifths of Democrats now hold districts where the median income exceeds the national level of nearly $65,000; more than two-thirds of Republicans hold districts where the median income falls beneath the national level.

    Sorting congressional districts by racial diversity and education produces the “four quadrants of Congress”: districts with high levels of racial diversity and white education (“hi-hi” districts), districts with high levels of racial diversity and low levels of white education (“hi-lo districts”), districts with low levels of diversity and high levels of white education (“lo-hi districts”), and districts with low levels of diversity and white education (“lo-lo districts”). (The analysis focuses on the education level among whites, and not the entire population, because education is a more significant difference in the political behavior of white voters than of minority groups.)

    Read: The GOP’s control of congress is only getting stronger

    Looking at the House through that lens shows that the GOP has become enormously dependent on one type of seat: the “lo-lo” districts revolving around white voters without a college degree. Republicans hold 142 districts in that category (making up nearly two-thirds of the party’s House seats), compared with just 21 for Democrats.

    The intense Republican reliance on this single type of mostly white, blue-collar district helps explain why the energy in the party over recent years has shifted from the small-government arguments that drove the GOP in the Reagan era toward the unremitting culture-war focus pursued by Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Many of the most militantly conservative House Republicans represent these “lo-lo” districts—a list that includes Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.

    “The right accuses the left of identity politics, when the analysis of this data suggests that identity politics has become the core of the Republican Party,” Pastor told me.

    House Democrats are not nearly as reliant on seats from any one of the four quadrants. Apart from the lo-lo districts, they lead the GOP in the other three groupings. Democrats hold a narrow 37–30 lead over Republicans in the seats with high levels of diversity and few white college graduates (the “hi-lo” districts). These seats include many prominent Democrats representing predominantly minority areas, including Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, Terri Sewell of Alabama, and Ruben Gallego of Arizona. At the same time, these districts have been a source of growth for Republicans: The current Democratic lead of seven seats is way down from the party’s 28-seat advantage in 2009.

    Democrats hold a more comfortable 57–35 edge in the “lo-hi” districts with fewer minorities and a higher share of white adults with college degrees than average. These are the mostly white-collar districts represented by leading suburban Democrats, many of them moderates, such as Angie Craig of Minnesota, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Sharice Davids of Kansas, and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey. A large share of the House Republicans considered more moderate also represent districts in this bloc.

    The core of Democratic strength in the House is the “hi-hi” districts that combine elevated levels of both racial minorities and college-educated whites. Democrats hold 98 of the 113 House seats in this category. Many of the party’s most visible members represent seats fitting this description, including former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the current House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries; former House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These are also the strongholds for Democrats representing what Pastor calls the places where “diversity is increasing the most”: inner suburbs in major metropolitan areas. Among the members representing those sorts of constituencies are Lucy McBath of Georgia, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, and Ro Khanna and Zoe Lofgren of California.

    Though Democrats are not as dependent on any single quadrant as Republicans are on the low-diversity, low-education districts, each party over the past decade has been forced to retreat into its demographic citadel. As Drutman notes, that’s the result of a succession of wave elections that has culled many of the members from each side who had earlier survived in districts demographically and economically trending toward the other.

    The first victims were the so-called blue-dog Democrats, who had held on to “lo-lo” districts long after they flipped to mostly backing Republican presidential candidates. Those Democrats from rural and small-town areas, many of them in the South, had started declining in the ’90s. Still, as late as 2009, during the first Congress of Barack Obama’s presidency, Republicans held only 20 more seats than Democrats did in the “lo-lo” quadrant. Democrats from those districts composed almost as large a share of the total party caucus in that Congress as did members from the “hi-hi” districts.

    But the 2010 Tea Party landslide virtually exterminated the blue dogs. After that election, the GOP edge in the lo-lo districts exploded to 90 seats; it reached 125 seats after redistricting and further GOP gains in the 2014 election. Today the districts low in diversity and white-education levels account for just one in 10 of all House Democratic seats, and the “hi-hi” seats make up nearly half. The seats low in diversity and high in white education (about one-fourth) and those high in diversity and low in white education (about one-sixth), provide the remainder.

    For House Republicans, losses in the 2018 midterms represented the demographic bookend to their blue-collar, small-town gains in 2010. In 2018, Democrats, powered by white-collar antipathy toward Trump, swept away a long list of House Republicans who had held on to well-educated suburban districts that had been trending away from the GOP at the presidential level since Bill Clinton’s era.

    Today, districts with a higher share of white college graduates than the nation overall account for less than one-fourth of all GOP seats, down from one-third in 2009. The heavily blue-collar “lo-lo” districts have grown from just over half of the GOP conference in 2009 to their current level of nearly two-thirds. (The share of Republicans in seats with more minorities and fewer white college graduates than average has remained constant since 2009, at about one in seven.)

    Each party is pushing an economic agenda that collides with the immediate economic interests of a large portion of its voters. “The party leadership has not caught up with the coalitions,” says former Representative Tom Davis, who served as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

    For years, some progressives have feared that Democrats would back away from a populist economic agenda if the party grew more reliant on affluent voters. That shift has certainly occurred, with Democrats now holding 128 of the 198 House districts where the median income exceeds the national level. But the party has continued to advocate for a redistributionist economic agenda that seeks higher taxes on upper-income adults to fund expanded social programs for working-class families, as proposed in President Joe Biden’s latest budget. The one concession to the new coalition reality is that Democrats now seek to exempt from higher taxes families earning up to $400,000—a level that earlier generations of Democrats probably would have considered much too high.

    Republicans face more dissonance between their reconfigured coalition and their agenda. Though the GOP holds 152 of the 237 districts where the median income trails the national level, the party continues to champion big cuts in domestic social programs that benefit low-income families while pushing tax cuts that mostly flow toward the wealthy and corporations. As former Democratic Representative David Price, now a visiting fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, says, there “is a pretty profound disconnect” between the GOP’s economic agenda and “the economic deprivation and what you would think would be a pretty clear set of needs” of the districts the party represents.

    Each of these seeming contradictions underscores how cultural affinity has displaced economic interest as the most powerful glue binding each side’s coalition. Republicans like Davis lament that their party can no longer win culturally liberal suburban voters by warning that Democrats will raise their taxes; Democrats like Price express frustration that their party can’t win culturally conservative rural voters by portraying Republicans as threats to Social Security and Medicare.

    The advantage for Republicans in this new alignment is that there are still many more seats where whites exceed their share of the national population than seats with more minorities than average. Likewise, the number of seats with fewer white college graduates than the nation overall exceeds the number with more.

    That probably gives Republicans a slight advantage in the struggle for House control over the next few years. Of the 22 House seats that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report currently rates as toss-ups or leaning toward the other party in 2024, for instance, 14 have fewer minorities than average and 12 have fewer white college graduates. “On the wedge issues, a lot of the swing districts look a little bit more like Republican districts than Democratic districts,” says Drutman, whose own recent analysis of House districts used an academic polling project to assess attitudes in all 435 seats.

    But as Pastor points out, Republicans are growing more dependent on those heavily white and non-college-educated districts as society overall is growing more diverse and better educated, especially in younger generations. “It’s hard to see how the Republicans can grow their coalition,” Pastor told me, with the militant culture-war messages they are using “to cement their current coalition.”

    Davis, the former NRCC chair, also worries that the GOP is relying too much on squeezing bigger margins from shrinking groups. The way out of that trap, he argues, is for Republicans to continue advancing from the beachheads they have established in recent years among more culturally conservative voters of color, especially Latino men.

    Read: Are latinos really realigning toward Republicans?

    But Republicans may struggle to make sufficient gains with those voters to significantly shift the balance of power in the House: Though the party last year improved among Latinos in Florida, the results in Arizona, Nevada, and even Texas showed the GOP still facing substantial barriers. The Trump-era GOP also continues to face towering resistance in well-educated areas, which limits any potential recovery there: In 2020, Biden, stunningly, carried more than four-fifths of the House districts where the share of college-educated white adults exceeds the national level. Conversely, despite Biden’s emphasis on delivering tangible economic benefits to working families, Democrats still faced enormous deficits with blue-collar white voters in the midterms. With many of its most vulnerable members defending such working-class terrain, Democrats could lose even more of those seats in 2024.

    Constrained by these offsetting dynamics, neither party appears well positioned to break into a clear lead in the House. The two sides look more likely to remain trapped in a grinding form of electoral trench warfare in which they control competing bands of districts that are almost equal in number, but utterly antithetical in their demographic, economic, and ideological profile.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Biden’s Blue-Collar Bet

    Biden’s Blue-Collar Bet

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    When President Joe Biden visited Kentucky yesterday to tout a new bridge project, most media attention focused on his embrace of bipartisanship. And indeed Biden, against the backdrop of the GOP chaos in the House of Representatives, signaled how aggressively he would claim that reach-across-the-aisle mantle. He appeared onstage with not only Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, but also GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, a perennial bête noire for Democrats.

    But Biden also touched on another theme that will likely become an even more central component of his economic and political strategy over the next two years: He repeatedly noted how many of the jobs created by his economic agenda are not expected to require a four-year college degree.

    Throughout his presidency, with little media attention, Biden has consistently stressed this point. When he appeared in September at the groundbreaking for a sprawling Intel semiconductor plant near Columbus, Ohio, he declared, “What you’ll see in this field of dreams” is “Ph.D. engineers and scientists alongside community-college graduates … people of all ages, races, backgrounds with advanced degrees or no degrees, working side by side.” At a Baltimore event in November touting the infrastructure bill, he said, “The vast majority of these jobs … that we’re going to create don’t require a college degree.” Appearing in Arizona in December, he bragged that a plant producing batteries for electric vehicles would “create thousands of good manufacturing jobs, 90 percent of which won’t require a college degree, and yet you get a good wage.”

    Peter A. Shulman: What infrastructure really means

    Economically, this message separates Biden from the past two Democratic presidents, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Both of those men, as I’ve written, centered their economic agendas on training more Americans for higher-paying jobs in advanced industries (and opening markets for those industries through free-trade agreements), largely because they believed that automation and global economic competition would doom many jobs considered “low skill.”

    Although Biden also supports an ambitious assortment of initiatives to expand access to higher education, he has placed relatively more emphasis than his predecessors did on improving conditions for workers in jobs that don’t require advanced credentials. That approach is rooted in his belief that the economy can’t function without much work traditionally deemed low-skill, such as home health care and meat-packing, a conviction underscored by the coronavirus pandemic. “One of the things that has really become apparent to all of us is how important to our nation’s economic resiliency many of these jobs are that don’t require college degrees,” Heather Boushey, a member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me this week.

    Politically, improving economic conditions for workers without advanced degrees is the centerpiece of Biden’s plan to reverse the generation-long Democratic erosion among white voters who don’t hold a college degree—and the party’s more recent slippage among non-college-educated voters of color, particularly Latino men. Biden and his aides are betting that they can reel back in some of the non-college-educated voters drawn to Republican cultural and racial messages if they can improve their material circumstances with the huge public and private investments already flowing from the key economic bills passed during his first two years.

    Biden’s hopes of boosting the prospects of workers without college degrees, who make up about two-thirds of the total workforce, rest on a three-legged legislative stool. One bill, passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $75 billion in direct federal aid and tax credits to revive domestic production of semiconductors. An infrastructure bill, also passed with bipartisan support, allocates about $850 billion in new spending over 10 years for the kind of projects Biden celebrated yesterday—roads, bridges, airports, water systems—as well as a national network of charging stations for electric vehicles and expanded access to high-speed internet. The third component, passed on a party-line vote as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, provides nearly $370 billion in federal support to promote renewable electricity production, accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, and retrofit homes and businesses to improve energy conservation.

    All of these measures are projected to trigger huge flows of private-sector investment. The Semiconductor Industry Association reports that since the legislation promoting the industry was first introduced, in 2020, companies have already announced $200 billion in investments across 40 projects in 16 states. The investment bank Credit Suisse projects that the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean-energy provisions could ultimately spur $1.7 trillion in total investment (in part because it believes that the legislation’s open-ended provisions will produce something closer to $800 billion in federal spending). And economists have long demonstrated that each public dollar spent on infrastructure spurs additional private investment, which could swell the total economic impact of the new package to $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, the administration estimates.

    Taken together, the three bills constitute a level of federal investment in targeted economic sectors probably unprecedented in recent U.S. history. “The kind of money we are going to see going into these sectors is just unheard-of,” Janelle Jones, a former chief economist at the Department of Labor under Biden, told me. Though rarely framed as such, these three bills—reinforced by other Biden policies, such as his sweeping “buy American” procurement requirements—amount to an aggressive form of industrial policy meant to bolster the nation’s capacity to build more things at home, including bridges and roads, semiconductors, and batteries for electric vehicles. “This is a president that is taking seriously the need for a modern American industrial strategy,” Boushey said.

    Read: What Joe Biden has (and hasn’t) accomplished

    These measures are likely to open significant opportunities for workers without a college degree. Some analysts have projected that the infrastructure bill alone could generate as many as 800,000 jobs annually. Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, estimated that about four-fifths of the jobs created under an earlier version of the Inflation Reduction Act passed in the House would not require a college degree, and he told me he believes the distribution is roughly the same in the final package. A Georgetown University institute projected an even higher percentage for the infrastructure bill. More of the jobs associated with semiconductor manufacturing require advanced education, but even that bill may generate a significant number of blue-collar opportunities in the construction phase of the many new plants opening across the country. (The industry is also pursuing partnerships with community colleges to provide workers who don’t have a four-year degree with the technical training to handle more work in the heavily automated facilities.)

    Yet even if these programs fulfill those projections, it remains unclear whether they will reach the scale to improve the uncertain economic trajectory for the broad mass of workers without advanced education. These three bills mostly promote employment in manufacturing and construction, and together those industries account for only about one-eighth of the workforce (roughly 21 million workers in all), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total construction employment peaked in 2006, manufacturing in 1979. Far more workers, including those without degrees, are now employed in service industries not as directly affected by these bills.

    What’s more, both of those occupations remain dominated by men. And largely because of resistance from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Congress didn’t pass Biden’s companion proposals to bolster wages and working conditions for the preponderantly non-college-educated, nonwhite, female employees in the low-paid “care” industries such as home health care and child care. “We can’t [ignore] these millions and millions of care workers, particularly Black and brown women,” said Jones, now the chief economist and policy director for the Service Employees International Union.

    Another complication for Biden is that his plans are colliding with the Federal Reserve Board’s drive to tame inflation. Spending on his big three bills is ramping up in 2023, which could increase the demand for—and bargaining power of—workers without college degrees. But the Fed’s push to slow the economy may neutralize that effect by increasing unemployment. “They are undercutting the job creation that we are supposed to be incentivizing,” Hersh said.

    The list of further projects tied to these three bills is almost endless. The White House calculates that firms have announced some $290 billion in manufacturing investments since Biden took office; the Congressional Budget Office projects that spending from the infrastructure bill could be more than twice as high in 2023 as last year and then increase again by half in 2024.

    That pipeline means Biden could be cutting ribbons every week through the 2024 presidential campaign—which would probably be fine with him. Biden rarely seems happier than when he’s around freshly poured concrete, especially if he’s on a podium with local business and labor leaders and elected officials from both parties, all of whom he introduces as enthusiastically (and elaborately) as if he’s toasting the new couple at a wedding. At his core, he remains something like a pre-1970s Democrat, who is most comfortable with a party focused less on cultural crusades than on delivering kitchen-table benefits to people who work with their hands. In his instincts and priorities, Biden is closer to Hubert Humphrey or Henry Jackson than to George McGovern or Obama.

    Less clear is whether that throwback approach—the formula that defined the Democratic Party during Biden’s youth—still works politically. Over the course of Biden’s career, the parties have experienced what I’ve called a “class inversion”: Democrats have performed better among college-educated voters while Republicans have grown dominant among white voters without a college degree and more recently have established a beachhead among nonwhite, non-college-educated workers. For most of these voters, the evidence suggests that cultural attitudes have exerted more influence on their political allegiance than their economic circumstance has.

    Ruy Teixeira: Democrats’ long goodbye to the working class

    Biden, with his “Scranton Joe” persona, held out great hopes in the 2020 campaign of reversing that decline with working-class white voters, but he improved only slightly above Hillary Clinton’s historically weak 2016 showing, attracting about one-third of their votes. In 2022, exit polls showed that Democrats remained stuck at that meager level in the national vote for the House of Representatives. In such key swing states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, winning Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates ran slightly better than that, as Biden did while carrying those states in 2020. But, again like Biden then, the exit polls found that none of them won much more than two-fifths of non-college-educated white voters, even against candidates as extreme as Doug Mastriano or Kari Lake, the GOP governor nominees in Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively.

    The Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me she’s relatively optimistic that Biden’s focus on creating more opportunity for workers without a college degree can bolster the party’s position with them. She said the key is not only improving living standards, but “validating that this is real work … not the consolation prize to a job that a college degree gets you.” No matter how many jobs Biden’s initiatives create, she said, “if you are treating them as lesser jobs, we are still going to have our problems from the cultural side of things.” Biden has certainly heard (or intuited) such advice. In his speeches, he commonly declares that an apprenticeship as an electrician or pipe fitter is as demanding as a college degree.

    Yet Murphy’s expectations remain limited. “Just based on the negative arc of the last several cycles,” she said, merely maintaining the party’s current modest level of support with working-class white voters and avoiding further losses would be “a win.” Matt Morrison, the executive director of Working America, an AFL-CIO-affiliated group that focuses on political outreach to nonunion working-class families, holds similarly restrained views, though he told me that economic gains could help the party more with nonwhite blue-collar voters, who are generally less invested in Republican cultural and racial appeals. No matter how strong the job market, Murphy added, Democrats are unlikely to improve much with non-college-educated workers unless inflation recedes by 2024.

    What’s already clear now is how much Biden has bet, both economically and politically, on bolstering the economic circumstances of workers without advanced education by investing literally trillions of federal dollars in forging an economy that again builds more things in America. “I don’t know whether the angry white people in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are less angry if we get them 120,000 more manufacturing jobs,” a senior White House official told me, speaking anonymously in order to be candid. “But we are going to run that experiment.”

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Why This Election Is So Weird

    Why This Election Is So Weird

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    The two major factors shaping the 2022 midterm elections collided in tumultuous fashion on Tuesday morning.

    First came the government report that inflation last month had increased faster than economists had expected or President Joe Biden had hoped. The announcement triggered a sharp fall in the stock market, the worst day on Wall Street in two years.

    That same afternoon, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced legislation that would impose a nationwide ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

    The inflation report captured this year’s most powerful tailwind for Republicans: widespread dissatisfaction with Biden’s management of the economy. Graham’s announcement captured this year’s strongest Democratic tailwind: widespread unease about abortion rights.

    Molly Jong-Fast: Of course voters care about abortion

    The shift in the campaign debate away from Biden’s management of the economy and toward the GOP’s priorities on abortion and other issues has been the principal factor improving Democratic prospects since earlier this summer. But the unexpectedly pessimistic inflation report—which showed soaring grocery and housing bills overshadowing a steady decline in gasoline prices—was a pointed reminder that the economy remains a formidable threat to Democrats in November.

    These two events also underscored how, to an extremely unusual degree, the parties are talking past each other. As the Democratic pollster Molly Murphy told me, 2022 is not an election year when most Americans “agree on what the top priorities [for the country] are” and debate “different solutions” from the two major parties.

    Instead, surveys show that Republican voters stress inflation, the overall condition of the economy, crime, and immigration. For Democratic voters, the top priorities are abortion rights, the threats to democracy created by former President Donald Trump and his movement, gun control, climate change, and health care.

    Few questions may shape the November results as much as whether the issues Democrats are stressing continue to motivate roughly as many voters as Republicans’ preferred issues. Gene Ulm, a Republican pollster, told me he believes that pocketbook strains will ultimately prove decisive for most voters, particularly those without a college degree. Those voters, he added, are basically saying, “‘I am worried about putting food on the table, and you are talking to me about all this other crap.’”

    Yet there is no question that Democratic candidates are performing far above the consistently bleak public assessments of the economy, and especially Biden’s management of it. In one sense, that’s not shocking: Over the past few decades, voters’ economic assessments have become less predictive of election results, in large part because those judgments are themselves so heavily shaped by partisanship. But even in light of that trend, the disconnect between voters’ views on Biden’s economic management and their willingness to support Democratic candidates for the House and Senate remains striking.

    Read: How the Democrats rallied

    Biden has positive trends in the economy to celebrate, particularly robust job growth. He’s been cutting ribbons at a steady procession of infrastructure projects and manufacturing-plant openings (like last week’s groundbreaking for an Intel semiconductor facility in Ohio) tied to the tax incentives and direct spending from the infrastructure, climate, and semiconductor bills that he’s signed. Those economic milestones—yesterday, for instance, the White House touted $85 billion in new private investments for electric-vehicle production since Biden took office—will likely be a political asset for him in 2024, especially in the pivotal states across the industrial Midwest. But those accomplishments won’t necessarily sway voters this November, and in any case, all of these favorable trends for now are being overshadowed in most households by the persistent pain of higher prices on consumer goods.

    Even before this week’s inflation report, voters gave Biden an extremely negative grade for his economic performance. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Institute poll released last week, just 34 percent of those surveyed said that his actions have helped the economy, while 57 percent said they have hurt it. Not surprisingly, that discontent was most intense among Republicans and also among white voters without a college degree (a stunning 76 percent of whom said Biden’s actions had hurt the economy.) But that belief was also shared by 63 percent of independents, 55 percent of Generation Z and Millennial voters, 47 percent of nonwhite voters, and even 16 percent of people who voted for him in 2020.

    However, the share in each of these groups that gave Biden an overall positive mark on his job performance was consistently five to nine percentage points higher than those who believed his actions had helped the economy. And the share in each group that said they intend to support House Democrats in the November election was higher still—enough to give Democrats a narrow lead on that crucial question. Independents, for example, were split evenly on which party they intend to support in November, even though they were negative on Biden’s economic performance by more than two to one.

    This stark pattern points to another consequential anomaly in the 2022 polling so far. One of the most powerful modern trends in congressional races is a correlation between voters’ attitudes toward the president and their willingness to vote for candidates from his party. Virtually all voters who “strongly disapprove” of a president have voted against his party’s candidates in recent House and Senate elections. In 2018, two-thirds of voters who even “somewhat disapproved” of Trump voted for Democratic House candidates, according to exit polls. In 2010, two-thirds of voters who “somewhat disapproved” of Barack Obama likewise voted for Republican candidates.

    By contrast, in the Marist survey, and another recent national poll by the Pew Research Center, Democrats led slightly among those who “somewhat disapproved” of Biden—a stunning result.

    Murphy told me this disconnect has been evident since the outset of Biden’s presidency: Even when his approval numbers were high during his first months, she said of her polling, that didn’t lift other Democratic candidates, so she’s not entirely surprised that his decline hasn’t tugged them down. But Murphy, like others in the party, believes that concerns about Republicans—centered on their abortion-restriction efforts, their nomination of extremist and election-denying candidates, and their unflagging defense of Trump—also explain why Democratic candidates are consistently running ahead of Biden’s approval rating.

    “It should have been pretty easy for [Republicans] to put these races away, given how concerned voters are about the economy and inflation,” Murphy told me. Now, she said, “I do think they are having to go back to the drawing board.”

    Graham’s abortion legislation is certain to benefit Democratic efforts to shift voter focus from what Biden has done to what Republicans might do if returned to power. In a press conference, Graham flatly declared, “If we take back the House and Senate, I’ll assure you we’ll have a vote on our bill.” Although many Republican senators and candidates quickly distanced themselves from his proposal, his pledge meant that every Democratic Senate candidate can plausibly argue that creating a GOP majority in the chamber will ensure a congressional vote on a national abortion ban.

    Dan Sena, the former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who now consults for many party House candidates, told me that the abortion fight’s biggest impact will be to inspire higher turnout from liberal-leaning and young voters. Abortion, he said, “has energized a group of people that we saw in 2018 and we saw in 2020 that traditionally don’t participate in midterm elections and are much more motivated by the cultural fight.”

    Read: Abortion could define California’s elections

    Yet few Democrats believe that the political threat from inflation and general unease about the economy is behind them in this election cycle. In focus groups, Ulm, the GOP pollster, told me, “We hear more gripes about groceries than anything.” Sena largely agrees: “Jobs and paychecks still matter, pal,” he said.

    One Democratic pollster, who asked not to be identified while discussing private campaign research, told me that inflation and crime—the principal issues Republicans are stressing on the campaign trail—remain tangible and immediate concerns in swing districts. In House district polling, the pollster said, the firm often asks voters whether they worry more that Democratic policies are fueling inflation and crime or that Republicans are too extreme on abortion and too soft on the January 6 insurrection. On balance, the pollster told me, most respondents in swing districts say they worry more about Democratic policies.

    Yes, the pollster said, the Supreme Court abortion decision, the revelations about Trump from the House January 6 committee hearings, and the Justice Department’s investigation into his stockpiling of classified documents have energized and awakened Democratic voters. But, the pollster added, it’s not as if everyone has decided that abortion and January 6 are more important than crime and inflation.

    Strategists and pollsters on both sides believe that these diverging agendas could intensify one of the most powerful trends in modern American politics: the class inversion in which Democrats are running stronger among white voters with college degrees and Republicans are gaining ground among white voters without them, as well as among blue-collar Latino voters.

    In white-collar America, inflation may be more of an inconvenience than an existential threat, which provides space for voters to prioritize their values on issues such as abortion or Trump’s threat to democracy. In blue-collar America, where inflation often presents more difficult daily choices and sacrifices, abortion and the fate of democracy may be less salient, even among those who agree with Democrats on those issues. In the Marist poll, twice as many white voters without a college degree picked inflation over abortion as their top concern in November, while slightly more college-educated white voters picked abortion than inflation.

    Even with inflation at its highest level in 40 years, Republicans appear unlikely to significantly cut into such key Democratic constituencies as college-educated white voters, young people, and residents of large metropolitan areas. And even such a seismic shock as the Supreme Court abortion decision may not significantly loosen the Republican hold on white women without a college education. Although there may be some movement around the edges (inflation, for instance, could help Republicans gain among Latino voters), the biggest story of 2022 may be how closely it follows the lines of geographic and demographic polarization that the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections have engraved.

    As in those contests, a handful of competitive swing states (Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) will tip the precarious national balance of power between red and blue areas that now behave more like separate nations than different sections. The November elections seem likely to demonstrate again that the U.S. remains locked in a struggle between two coalitions that hold utterly antithetical visions of America’s future—yet remain almost equal in size.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Biden’s Cancellation of Billions in Debt Won’t Solve the Larger Problem

    Biden’s Cancellation of Billions in Debt Won’t Solve the Larger Problem

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    For years, American lawmakers have chipped away at the fringes of reforming the student-loan system. They’ve flirted with it in doomed bills that would have reauthorized the Higher Education Act—which is typically renewed every five to 10 years but has not received an update since 2008. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s student-debt portfolio has steadily grown to more than $1.5 trillion.

    Today, calls for relief were answered when President Joe Biden announced that his administration would be canceling up to $10,000 in student loans for those with federal debt, and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. As long as a borrower makes less than $125,000 a year, or makes less than $250,000 alongside a spouse, they would be eligible for cancellation. The president will also extend the current loan-repayment pause—originally enacted by then-President Donald Trump in March 2020 as a pandemic-relief measure—until December 31.

    The debt relief—which by one estimate could cost a total of $300 billion—is a massive benefit for Americans who have struggled to repay loans they accrued attending college, whether they completed a degree or not. But equally as important as addressing the damage that student loans have caused is ensuring that Americans aren’t saddled with overwhelming debt again. And the underlying issue of college affordability can be addressed only if America once again views higher education as a public good. Belatedly canceling some student debt is what a country does when it refuses to support students up front.

    According to a White House fact sheet, 90 percent of Biden’s debt relief will go to those who earn less than $75,000 a year—and the administration estimates that 20 million people will have their debt completely canceled.  “An entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for an attempt, at least, for a college degree,” Biden said at a White House event. “The burden is so heavy that even if you graduate, you may not have access to the middle-class life that the college degree once provided.” That Democrats arrived at this point at all, though, is a testament to how grim the student-loan crisis has become. A decade and a half ago, Democrats were advocating for small increases in the federal grant program to help low-income students afford college. Over successive presidential campaigns, Democratic hopefuls, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have called for canceling most, or all, student debt issued by the government—effectively hitting reset on a broken system. And now the party is announcing one of the largest federal investments in higher education in recent memory.

    Read: How the Democrats got radical on student debt

    When he was running for president in 2007, Biden advocated for a tax credit for college students and a marginal increase in the size of individual Pell Grant awards—tinkering around the edges of solving a brewing mess as America lurched toward a deep recession. From 2006 to 2011, college enrollment grew by 3 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; at the same time, states began to cut back on their higher-education spending. On average, by 2018, states were spending 13 percent less per student than they were in 2008.

    Historically, when states look to cut their budgets, higher education is one of the first sectors to feel the blade. Polling shows that the majority of Americans agree that a college degree pays off. But college, unlike K–12 schooling, is not universal, and a majority of Republicans believe that investment in higher education benefits graduates more than anyone else. So lawmakers have been willing to make students shoulder a greater share of the burden. But this shift leaves those with the fewest resources to pay for college—and those whose families earn a little too much to qualify for Pell Grants—taking on significant debt.

    The shift flies in the face of the Framers’ view of higher education, though. “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature,” George Washington, an early proponent of the idea of a national university, said in his first address before Congress, in 1790. “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, and others believed that colleges might be a place where Americans could build a national identity—a place where they could, for lack of better words, become good citizens.

    In that spirit, the federal government provided massive investments in the nation’s colleges, albeit inequitably—through the Morrill Act, which formed the backbone of state higher-education systems as we know them; the GI Bill; and the Pell Grant program—which directly subsidize students’ expenses. But in the past half century, radical investments in higher-education access have dried up. Now a political divide has opened up: Conservative lawmakers—whose voters are more likely not to have attended college—have grown not only suspicious of but in some cases openly hostile toward the enterprise.

    Read: America is divided by education

    Meanwhile, 77 percent of Democrats believe that the government should subsidize college education. “We want our young people to realize that they can have a good future,” Senator Chuck Schumer said in April. “One of the best, very best, top-of-the-list ways to do it is by canceling student debt.” He wanted the president to be ambitious and called for giving borrowers $50,000 in relief—“even going higher after that.” A month into his administration, though, Biden shot down the idea of $50,000, to the chagrin of relief advocates. “Canceling just $10,000 of debt is like pouring a bucket of ice water on a forest fire,” the NAACP’s Derrick Johnson and Wisdom Cole argued today. “It hardly achieves anything—only making a mere dent in the problem.”

    The administration is coupling its announcement with a redesign of payment plans that allows borrowers to cap their monthly loan payments at 5 percent of their discretionary income. But the basic problem remains: Young Americans of modest means can no longer afford to attend their state university by getting a part-time job and taking out a small loan. For millions of students, borrowing thousands of dollars has become the key to paying for an undergraduate degree. Biden’s plan will give graduates—and those who have taken out loans but not finished school—some relief, but the need to overhaul a system reliant on debt remains as urgent as ever.

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    Adam Harris

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  • Democrats Might Avoid a Midterm Wipeout

    Democrats Might Avoid a Midterm Wipeout

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    If Democrats avoid the worst outcome in November’s midterm elections, the principal reason will likely be the GOP’s failure to reverse its decline in white-collar suburbs during the Donald Trump era.

    That’s a clear message from yesterday’s crowded primary calendar, which showed the GOP mostly continuing to nominate Trump-style culture-war candidates around the country. And yet, the resounding defeat of an anti-abortion ballot initiative in Kansas showed how many voters in larger population centers are recoiling from that Trumpist vision.

    Democrats still face enormous headwinds in November, including sweeping voter dissatisfaction over inflation, low approval ratings for President Joe Biden, and the near unbroken history since the Civil War of the party that holds the White House losing seats in the House of Representatives during a president’s first two years.

    Polls indicate that many college-educated center-right voters have soured on the performance of Biden and the Democrats controlling both congressional chambers. Yet in Tudor Dixon, the GOP gubernatorial nominee in Michigan, and Blake Masters, the party’s Senate selection in Arizona, Republicans have chosen nominees suited less to recapturing socially moderate white-collar voters than to energizing Trump’s working-class and nonurban base through culture-war appeals like support of near-total abortion bans. With Trump-backed Kari Lake moving into the lead as counting continues in the Arizona Republican gubernatorial primary, the top GOP nominees both there and in Michigan will likely be composed entirely of candidates who embrace Trump’s lie that he won their state in 2020.

    In the intermediate term, most Democratic strategists believe that the party must find ways to combat the GOP’s strong performance during the Trump era with working-class voters, particularly its improvement since 2016 among blue-collar Hispanic voters. But with inflation so badly squeezing the finances of many working- and middle-class families, recovering much ground with such voters before November may be tough for most Democratic candidates. Those working-class voters “know the shoe is pinching,” says Tom Davis, the former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, quoting the late political scientist V. O. Key Jr.

    The more realistic route for Democrats in key races may be to defend, as much as possible, the inroads they made into the white-collar suburbs of virtually every major metropolitan area during the past three elections. Although, compared with 2020, the party will likely lose ground with all groups, Democrats are positioned to hold much more of their previous support among college-educated than noncollege voters, according to Ethan Winter, a Democratic pollster.

    An array of recent public polls suggest he’s right. A Monmouth University poll released today showed that white voters without a college degree preferred Republicans for Congress by a 25-percentage-point margin, but white voters with at least a four-year degree backed Democrats by 18 points.

    A recent Fox News Poll in Pennsylvania showed the Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman crushing Republican Mehmet Oz among college-educated white voters, while the two closely split those without degrees. Another recent Fox News poll in Georgia found Senator Raphael Warnock trailing his opponent Herschel Walker among noncollege white voters by more than 40 percentage points but running essentially even among those with degrees (which would likely be enough to win, given his preponderant support in the Black community). The most recent public surveys in New Hampshire and Wisconsin likewise found Republicans leading comfortably among voters without advanced education, but Democrats holding solid advantages among those with four-year or graduate degrees. A poll this week by Siena College, in New York, found Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul splitting noncollege voters evenly with Republican Lee Zeldin, but beating him by more than two-to-one among those with a degree.

    This strength among college-educated voters may be worth slightly more for Democrats in the midterms than in a general election. Voters without a degree cast a majority of ballots in both types of contests. But calculations by Catalist, a Democratic-voter-targeting firm, and Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voter turnout, have found that voters with a college degree consistently make up about three to four percentage points more of the electorate in a midterm than in a presidential election. “When we see lower turnout elections,” like a midterm, “the gap between high-education and low-education voters increases,” McDonald told me. In close races, that gap could place a thumb on the scale for Democrats, partially offsetting the tendency of decreased turnout from younger and nonwhite voters in midterm elections.

    Republicans have mostly counted on voters’ dissatisfaction with inflation and Biden’s overall performance to recover lost ground in white-collar communities. But as the polls noted above suggest, many voters in those places are, at least for now, decoupling their disenchantment with Biden from their choices in House, Senate, and governor’s races. “Voters have concerns about the direction of the country,” the Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me, “but they’re terrified of the direction it would take if these MAGA Republicans took power.”

    Geraldo L. Cadava: The battle for Latino voters in the rust belt

    One reason for this decoupling may be that, although all families are feeling the effects of inflation, for white-collar professionals, it generally represents something more like an inconvenience than the agonizing vise it constitutes for working-class families.

    That doesn’t mean white-collar voters are unconcerned about the economy, but with less worry about week-to-week financial survival, they are more likely to be influenced by the trifecta of issues that have exploded in visibility over the past several months: abortion rights,  gun control, and the threats to American democracy revealed by the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.

    As last night’s Kansas result showed, abortion rights may be an especially powerful weapon for Democrats in white-collar areas. Polls, such as a recent survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, have generally found that about two-thirds or more of voters with at least a four-year college degree believe abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances. That support is evident even in states that generally lean toward the GOP: Recent public surveys found that strong majorities of voters with college degrees supported legal abortion in Georgia and Texas, and another survey showed majority backing among more affluent voters in Arizona.

    In deep-red Kansas, two-thirds or more of voters have just supported abortion rights in four of the state’s five largest counties. Particularly noteworthy was the huge turnout and massive margin (68 percent to 32 percent at latest count) for the pro-choice position in Johnson County, a well-educated suburb of Kansas City that demographically resembles many of the suburban areas that have moved toward Democrats around such cities as Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Austin, and Phoenix.

    Republican candidates this year have ceded virtually no ground to the pro-abortion-rights or pro-gun-control sentiments in those suburban areas. With the national protection for abortion revoked by the Supreme Court, almost all Republican-controlled states are on track to ban or restrict the practice. In swing states that have not yet done so, GOP gubernatorial candidates are promising to pursue tight limits. Dixon, the GOP’s Michigan nominee, said recently that she would push for an abortion ban with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the health of the mother (while she would allow them only in cases that threaten the mother’s life). Asked during a recent interview about a hypothetical case of a 14-year-old who had been impregnated by an uncle, Dixon explicitly said the teenager should carry the baby to term because “a life is a life for me.”

    Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican consultant, told me that the magnitude of the pro-abortion-rights vote in Kansas was “unexpected,” but it does not guarantee Democratic candidates’ suburban domination in November. “This was a rare up or down vote on this issue,” he told me in an email. “November will be different, as voters will have lots of reasons to vote and lots of issues to consider … Polls consistently show the economy trumping this issue in the minds of the voters.”

    But Democrats believe that the contrast on abortion will be highly consequential, especially in governor’s races, where Democrats such as the incumbent Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and the nominee Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania are presenting themselves as a last line of defense against Republicans intent on banning the procedure. Suburban “voters might have been thinking about voting Republican because they are unhappy with the direction of country and inflation, and they might decide to back Whitmer because of abortion,” Winter, the Democratic pollster, told me.

    The choice may not carry such immediate implications in House and Senate races, but leading Democrats are running on promises to pass legislation restoring the national right to abortion, while Republicans are either opposing such a bill or signaling openness to imposing a national ban. The two top Democratic challengers for Republican-held Senate seats (John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin) have both called for ending the filibuster to pass legislation codifying national abortion rights.

    Davis, the former NRCC chair who represented a suburban Northern Virginia district, believes that even in white-collar communities supportive of abortion rights and gun control, Democrats won’t escape discontent over inflation. If Republicans could frame the election simply as a referendum on Biden’s performance, Davis told me, “that’s their path to victory and a path to an electoral landslide.” But, he added, the choice by GOP voters in so many states to nominate “exotic candidates” mostly linked to Trump has provided Democrats with an opportunity, particularly in higher-profile Senate and governor contests, to make this “a choice election.” And that, he said, gives Democrats a shot at winning enough “white ticket-splitters” to at least hold down their losses.

    Given the headwinds, Democrats would take a November outcome in which they narrowly lose the House but hold their Senate majority and preserve control of the governorships in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while perhaps adding some others, such as Arizona. With Biden’s approval rating still scuffling, that outcome is hardly guaranteed. But it remains a possibility largely because, as yesterday’s primaries showed, Republicans have responded to their suburban erosion by betting even more heavily on the policies and rhetoric that triggered their decline in the first place. In November, white-collar suburbs may be the deciding factor between a Republican rout and a split decision that leaves Democrats still standing to fight another day.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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