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The American electorate is more complicated than Democrat and Republican, liberal or conservative. Over the past eight months, we spoke to over 9,000 voters in a series of quantitative and qualitative surveys. We asked questions ranging from Social Security funding and birthright citizenship to more value-based questions on topics such as the government’s role in the economy, gender roles, and preference for order or openness.

Our most important finding, the statistic that we want to drill into the brains of every politician, pundit, and strategist in America, is this: Only 14% of the electorate can be classified as completely ideologically conservative and 10% as ideologically liberal. These are also the two voter groups that are the most likely to not know anybody who thinks differently than them.

This doesn’t mean the rest of the electorate doesn’t care about the issues. Quite the opposite. It’s just that the vast majority of voters hold a heterodox collection of beliefs that range across the ideological spectrum.

To better classify these voters, we turned our mountain of survey data into nine distinct ideological groups; these segments all have partisan leanings and general demographic traits, but they’re built from the 16 policy and values questions that we found to be most correlated with voter attitudes. We believe this gives us a much better understanding of the American electorate than simple ideological labels such as liberal and conservative.

For example, Lawn Sign Liberals are conventionally progressive on all issues, except they’re more friendly towards a market-based economy than the ideologically homogeneous Liberal Arts Left. On the right, Sticker-Shocked Skeptics support sweeping policy change and gender equality, but voted for Trump because of inflation (a choice they now regret). In contrast, No Trespassing Populists strongly back aggressive deportation policy, but they differ from some of their fellow Trump supporters because they support economic populist policies. In fact, they go further left than Lawn Sign Liberals (a more Democratic aligned group) because they support wealth caps. The American electorate is wild!

In their exclusive editorial of our massive polling project, German Lopez of the New York Times summed up the problem well:

American politics is often described as a battle between liberals and conservatives, but most voters have much messier views than those partisan labels suggest. They aren’t reliably liberal. They aren’t reliably conservative. They have a mix of opinions that are almost impossible to find in any one politician.

As two seasoned pollsters, this problem — breaking through the idea that most voters are liberal and conservative — is one we know well.

Typically, when polls are interpreted by campaigns and shared widely around the internet, the insinuation is that voters are ideologically consistent.

For example, currently only 37% of Americans approve of Trump’s immigration policy. But does this now mean that 63% of Americans support progressive immigration policies? Does this correlate with support for other progressive policies on taxes, policing, or healthcare?

Our data and the NYT’s graphical interpretation of them say no. Just because a voter holds one liberal belief that doesn’t mean they are ideologically homogeneous.

For example, 66% of respondents supported the liberal idea that the government should provide health care to all Americans, regardless of age or income. Whereas 72% of respondents agreed with the conservative idea that able-bodied adults should have to work or look for work in order to receive government benefits. And 47% of voters, by far the biggest coalition, agreed with the conservative position on one issue and liberal on the other.

Another example is student debt and gender roles. One would assume that someone who wants to challenge gender roles also supports forgiving student debt; after all, these are two liberal coded positions. But nearly 40% of voters’ positions are classified as heterodox; 20% support forgiving student debt and promoting traditional gender roles. And 19% want to challenge gender roles and require students to repay their loans.

What should campaigns and politicians do with this information?

The good news for candidates, especially the ones running in narrow swing districts, is that specific policy proposals can theoretically draw support from across the political spectrum. For example, taxing the rich and expanding government involvement in health care is popular across every single segment, except the most down-the-line conservative one. In our data, we also found that issues can impact vote choice over and above partisanship. This means there’s room for a candidate to appeal to voters outside of their political party. Instead of attempting to win over a very narrow majority of the electorate, politicians can make the choice to represent more Americans.

But here’s the important caveat: Since less than a quarter of the electorate is ideologically rigid, politicians need to make space in the coalition for voters who strongly agree with some, but not all, of their policy ideas. This means rejecting issue litmus tests, especially the ones that are massively out of step with the voting public.

There’s no obvious issue set that will lead a certain candidate or political party to command a supermajority. But as campaigns gear up for 2028, it will be vital for them to understand that the American electorate, even their own voting base, is more heterodox than many realize. This fact is hard for many people working in politics to properly grasp, especially because these are exactly the sort of people who are the most ideologically homogeneous, but it is the skeleton key that will free us from this era of hyper-polarization and narrow governing majorities.

The American electorate is messy, ideologically inconsistent, and impossible to neatly categorize. It’s time our politicians were too.

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P.S. Click here to take our Political Neighborhood’s Quiz to find out your segment!

Americans notoriously rack up a lot of debt. Some of this debt is driven by people who are too young to even know what the word means.

This starts in the lunchroom. While most kids are happily munching away with their friends, some are quietly racking up debt for themselves and their families. In total, there are around 1.54 million children in the US who can’t afford school meals. And if they aren’t covered by a free meal program, they might be going into debt simply for the act of eating with their friends at school.

The total estimate for student meal debt places the number at over $200 million nationally. Meanwhile, surveys of school nutrition directors indicate that debt levels have steadily grown, from $2,700 per district in 2014, accounting for inflation, to $6,900 in 2024. Importantly, this debt is heavily concentrated in schools that do not exclusively serve free school meals.

The school food authorities overseeing paid meal programs report a debt 3.5 times larger than those that administer a universally free meal program. The vast majority of schools that do not serve exclusively free meals say meal debt is a challenge. Counterintuitively, this meal debt is not exclusively concentrated in high poverty areas. Schools with lower poverty rates have a meal debt that is three times larger than schools with a higher poverty rate.

This is, in part, because the eligibility determination for the Community Eligibility Provision — the federal policy used to deliver universal free meals in schools — is measured by poverty composition; the lowest-income districts are more likely to qualify. Wealthier school districts can still have poor students, some of whom fall through the cracks of free lunch eligibility.

This cost hangs over the head of these children and their families. By federal law, school meal operations must break even, and federal revenue cannot be deployed to recoup the costs.

That’s when the debt collectors come in.

A school district in Iowa sent almost $80,000 of school meal debt to a collections agency. In Arkansas, a school district with nearly $500,000 in school meal debt began sending families with over $100 in debt to collectors. In Nebraska, a collections agency even sued a family over a $53 meal debt, won, and then garnished their wages.

Some school districts have statutes that provide guidance on how to report parents to state child welfare services for school meal debt. A Guardian investigation found that districts across 10 states had language referencing a referral to social services or to police following excessive school meal debt accrual. While the investigation explains that schools typically do not report parents to social services for neglect due to meal debt, we know that it creates a chilling effect on low-income parents and their hungry kids.

Keyna Franklin of Rise, a New York-based welfare advocacy group, explained that “The kids aren’t going to say they’re hungry because they don’t want to get their parents in trouble.”

During the pandemic, families got a momentary reprieve when USDA waivers were created to feed every child for free. In the subsequent years, a two-tiered system has emerged, in which some states have built on the success of pandemic waivers to create universal school lunch programs, while the states relying on the typical paid lunch system have seen students plunge deeper into debt.

And food inflation is making this even worse. The free lunch reimbursement rates have not necessarily kept pace with rising costs, which means districts either have to increase prices for students or make up the difference themselves through cuts in quality.

Moreover, SNAP eligibility is one of the primary mechanisms to determine eligibility for free meal programs. And the recent cuts under the One Big Beautiful Bill will almost certainly have the downstream effect of reducing access to free lunch in schools. The full impact hasn’t yet shown up in the statistical data, but so far SNAP enrollment has fallen 12 percent in the past year; this includes 1.2 million children.

The impact of this even goes beyond just those individual children potentially losing their direct certification for free meals. Under the Community Eligibility Provision for free meals, participating schools are reimbursed at more generous rates according to a sliding scale that is based on their percentage of students receiving certain means-tested benefits programs. So, if more children are cut from SNAP rolls, entire schools may be forced to consider the financial viability of running universal school meals programs.

What can we do to fix this?

A Democratic Congress will certainly attempt to restore these regressive welfare cuts. But I implore lawmakers to go a step further. Even before inflation and the SNAP cuts, the status quo was not delivering for children who rely on the school cafeteria to access a regular meal. In some cases, students and their families had to fill out an application in order to receive free lunch eligibility. Or they simply fall through the cracks.

Jennifer Gaddis, a professor and food policy expert at the University of Wisconsin told the Bulwark that “a lot of people don’t realize that you can actually apply for free or reduced meals at any time during the school year.”

The first step should be passing the School Lunch Debt Cancellation Act to make the school meal accounts whole.

But the silver bullet to school meal debt is a universal program. In my recent paper, I explored how Congress can do this by reforming the existing policy levers. The primary mechanism is expanding the Community Eligibility Provision, which currently covers more than 70% of eligible schools.

We should simply make all schools eligible. We should raise the reimbursement levels, so more meals are reimbursed at a higher rate. And we should enhance reimbursements so schools can deliver higher-quality meals to every student. Using the Community Eligibility Provision is a financial decision at the end of the day. This program is incredibly popular, but schools will only switch from their paid program if they have the financial means to cover what the government cannot. Congress should make the math work so the program is undeniably beneficial financially for these schools.

There’s so much evidence that when universal school meal programs are implemented at the school level, families become less food insecure, student performance improves, and surrounding grocery prices can actually fall.

In a fiscally constrained environment, Congress needs to spend its money wisely. But investing in children’s health and education and abolishing student lunch debt is just common sense. Kids should eat free. It’s that simple.

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When I was the Executive Director of the progressive polling firm Data for Progress, I wrote and read hundreds of climate polling questions. So when I saw this report from UC Santa Barbara’s 2035 Initiative, titled “Politicians Shouldn’t Hide From Climate,” I was very familiar with the underlying argument.

It takes the correct premise that a majority of voters express concern about climate change as evidence that politicians must center it in their messaging agenda. Specifically, it shows that emphasizing climate change modestly helps politicians. As a result, Democratic messaging should “lead with affordability but keep climate on the agenda.”

I think it’s incredibly important for the climate advocacy community to not mislead itself with reports like this. Generic climate messages like this always test well, but that doesn’t mean they translate to real political benefits. That’s because climate change is not a salient issue among battleground voters, young voters, or the general electorate. Moreover, policies advanced by the climate movement, such as rules banning combustion engine vehicles and the complete phase-out of fossil fuels, are quite unpopular. There’s a reason why Democratic politicians of all factional stripes who are actually trying to win swing voters have stopped talking about climate.

To be clear, climate change is one of the most important issues of the 21st century; it was the animating reason for why I decided to pivot from my engineering undergraduate degree to a career in politics in the first place. That’s why I want us to advance the most effective political and policy solutions.

Solving climate change will require decarbonizing the global economy, which is happening faster than expected thanks to the plummeting cost of renewables and the landmark investments in clean energy spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act.

And there’s a lot more work to be done. As my Searchlight colleagues Jane Flegal and Pavan Venkatakrishnan argued in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Democrats need to work with Republicans to pass permitting reform so we can build more clean energy infrastructure. Of course, we also need to invest in technologies to decarbonize heavy industry, transportation, and the food system. Meanwhile, the vast majority of future emissions are projected to come from developing countries.

If the goal is to form a congressional supermajority that will actually advance these climate policies, then politicians must prioritize the issues that are actually salient to voters in states like Ohio and Texas. It’s time the climate advocacy community came to terms with this. That means understanding why reports like this are misleading.

Climate crowds out other priorities

The biggest claim made in the 2035 Initiative poll is that politicians receive a modest bump in support if they prioritize climate in their messaging. To obtain this result, they ran a conjoint experiment. This meant respondents saw two candidate profiles, each randomly assigned “top priority,” “a priority,” or “not a priority” on climate and five other issues, then picked which candidate they’d vote for and rated each one’s favorability on a 0–10 scale.

The amorphous issue of “action on climate change” — which does not account for unpopular climate policies — was the second least popular issue. Still, it did yield a modest increase in support, depending on whether it was listed as the top priority or a priority.

The problem is that this just doesn’t reflect how political campaigns work. Candidates get a short window to make an impression on voters, whether it’s a thirty-second TV ad or a piece of earned media that goes viral. Listing through five different issues doesn’t make a particularly good sound bite.

Think about Zohran Mamdani talking incessantly about affordability or Jon Ossoff bringing up Trump’s corruption every time a camera is shoved in his face. Politicians don’t know which moment will break through, so they have to constantly stay on message to define themselves.

The point of this research is to advise campaigns, so imagine you’re a Democratic politician running for Senate in a state like Michigan or North Carolina. You know that a majority of your voters profess some level of concern about climate change, but it’s an incredibly low-salience issue, and as a Democrat, it’s a topic you’re already strongly associated with. You also know that your path to winning relies on convincing voters who supported Donald Trump and are generally skeptical of politicians in your party.

This poll tells you that making climate change a top priority could increase your level of support by 4.5 points. But a top priority is, by definition, singular. And issues like affordability and health care increase your level of support by roughly three to four times the amount — both of which are areas where Democrats have a significant trust advantage heading into November.

That means you have a choice: center your message around one of the four more popular issues, or include climate change to appease a much smaller portion of the voter base that is already inclined to vote for you. I think the choice is quite clear, which is why Senate candidates like the more moderate Roy Cooper and even the leftist Abdul El-Sayed are not mentioning climate in their campaign messaging.

This report acknowledges that there are more motivating issues, so it suggests that politicians should lead with affordability, but keep climate policies, like clean energy, in their messaging. This would result in a 2.7-point increase in support, which is comparable to a message that leads with affordability and includes a commitment to racial and gender diversity.

I’m skeptical that this suggestion is helpful because it’s not clear that voters are even convinced clean energy will help with affordability. A new polling project from Heatmap and Embold Research shows that a majority of voters who are “persuadable” to care about climate change think that claims about clean energy’s affordability are exaggerated. This finding is even backed by this report, which acknowledges that only 37% of voters think clean energy is a “cost-saver.”

If I’m a politician, why would I muddle my message by including something that at best helps me among people who are already going to vote for me, and at worst, is going to sow doubt among the people who I want to persuade?

Climate politics in the real-world

For all of the handwringing that climate advocates have expressed about the abundance movement over the past few years, a finding I was pleasantly surprised to see published in this report is that voters want to build more of, well, everything.

I think this is more important than ambiguous polling about action on climate because it reveals the actual preferences of voters. From pushing the Biden administration to ban new fossil fuel extraction on public land to lobbying lawmakers to vote against the current federal bipartisan permitting reform bill, the climate movement has defined itself in opposition to fossil fuel projects, even if it doesn’t lead to a net increase in emissions.

But that just isn’t what the public believes. A majority of voters do profess concern about climate change; it’s just a low-salience issue, and they don’t want to incur a cost to pay for it. That’s why fees and taxes on fossil fuels are so unpopular. That is why natural gas is incredibly popular. And that explains why in the very blue state of California, voters overwhelmingly favor climate action, but oppose climate policies like the executive order banning the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035.

I know this report doesn’t advocate for unpopular climate policies; to the contrary, it presents clear evidence that repudiates the long-held argument from the climate movement that blocking fossil fuel projects should be prioritized over issues like affordability. But I do think if you’re asking for politicians to center climate politics in their messaging, it’s worth interrogating the actual climate policies that are most associated with the movement, even as more advocates — to their credit — are steadily embracing growth-oriented policies.

The broader point here is to look beyond these polling experiments and understand how successful politicians navigate climate politics in the real-world.

By all accounts, the Left is insurgent and more politically popular than ever inside the Democratic Party. Many of its standard-bearers have dropped climate from their political rhetoric. Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is correctly regarded as having one of the best political messages in recent memory, and it was entirely focused on affordability. As Heatmap reported last year, “The self-described ‘ecosocialist’ had ‘muted climate politics.’ Listen to Bernie Sanders and AOC on the stump; their message is “oligarchy,” not “climate.”

You can solve climate change without making everything about climate change

I understand that the climate community is worried about losing traction in Democratic policy debates. But that doesn’t mean the climate policy agenda will be sidelined in a future Democratic Congress. In fact, some of the greatest climate victories in American history were spearheaded by politicians who didn’t centralize the issue in their political messaging.

Barack Obama didn’t feature much climate messaging in either of his two presidential campaigns, and he still negotiated the Paris Climate Accords. Joe Manchin, a reviled figure among the climate left, was the final vote for the IRA — even though it dropped his approval rating in West Virginia by double digits.

Of course, we’re no longer in the Paris Accords, and portions of the IRA have been gutted by the Trump administration, which points to the fact that durable climate action can only be accomplished by winning and maintaining governing majorities. That will require Democrats to win fossil fuel-friendly states like Texas and Iowa. If James Talarico and Josh Turek win their Senate races, there’s simply no reason to think they won’t support climate policies in a future Democratic reconciliation bill.

And it’s important to understand what climate policies we need today. A recent report from the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research found that 74% of new clean energy capacity has still been preserved even after the IRA subsidies were repealed. Renewables are now market-competitive, and the primary roadblock, as the report notes, is “Alleviating supply-side barriers — primarily through permitting reform and transmission buildout.”

Combine this with the fact that climate change is a global problem that will primarily be solved by inventing and scaling new decarbonization technologies for global export, and it’s clear that Democrats can use their next congressional majority to pass climate policy that is both high-impact and politically durable.

Make America the global hub for clean energy innovation. Reverse Trump’s pro-industry oil and gas regulations. Pass a federal permitting reform bill — which is something that will still likely require Republican votes and should be done today in order to create the regulatory pro-clean energy environment Democrats need in 2028.

The best part of each of these policies is that they can be accomplished without significant spending or policy trade-offs. One can imagine a Democratic Congress passing sweeping health care reform, while more clean energy floods the grid because of a permitting deal.

Asking Democrats running in swing races — whose election depends on winning skeptical Trump voters — to focus on climate in their messaging makes any future climate policy less possible. It’s time the climate advocacy community realized that.

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It’s tempting to look at the last ten years of American politics and conclude that “nothing matters,” except, perhaps, “affordability.”

Donald Trump can cut taxes for the rich, reduce government programs for the poor, defile American democracy, and still return to the White House because inflation was too high and the border was too open.

It can also be tempting to look at Trump’s approach to politics and see a sort of master at work. After all, this is a twice-impeached, convicted felon who made it to the White House two times. He has dominated American politics since coming down that escalator eleven years ago.

Some Democrats are looking to adopt elements of Trump’s political project for their own purposes. Gavin Newsom is using Trump’s attack-dog pugilism. While other politicians, mostly on the Left, are arguing that the Trump administration’s smash-and-grab governing style is worth repurposing to advance progressive goals.

The idea is that Trump has proven that norms can be broken and nobody will call you out on it. There’s some truth to this, albeit he’s been aided by a relatively friendly Supreme Court and a Republican-controlled Congress. But I think Democrats can’t just borrow the Trump playbook for two key reasons.

1. Republicans can get by with appealing to a narrower segment of voters because they have a structural advantage in American politics.

2. Democrats actually want to build durable government programs that both work and can outlast a single presidential administration. Trump just wants to destroy as much as he can in office.

Democrats are in the wilderness. It’s understandable to look at Trump and think we’re in a political era where no rules apply. But this would be deeply misguided. The rules and expectations for the two parties are not the same. To beat Trump, Democrats can’t just copy the Republicans’ homework.

Democrats can’t be factionalists

Let’s begin with a simple, and for Democrats, unfortunate fact about American politics. Orthodox liberals, those who agree on progressive economics and cultural issues, are a rarity in America. They are not enough to win elections. In our hyper-polarized two-party political era, our presidential elections have continued to be close. But since Republicans have a structural advantage in the Senate, Trump and his allies can gain power with a political coalition that is simply more homogenous.

The esteemed Michelle Goldberg explains it best:

The rise of Limbaugh and his ilk worked out quite well for Republicans, helping them to wrench the country to the right. But it’s far from clear that Democrats either can or should follow the same template. The Republican Party is more homogeneous than the Democratic Party, so there’s less need to accommodate cultural difference within it. There are more conservatives than leftists in America, and in our system, conservative, rural areas of the country have more electoral power. Democrats will have a far harder time than Republicans building power with a stridently sectarian message.

I bolded that last sentence for a reason. There’s a strident sectarian movement rising to power in the Democratic Party. Some of their ideas, especially around health care, might be compelling to a majority of voters. But they’re fundamentally factionalist. If they ever want to grow into a majoritarian movement, they will have to appeal to more voters who voted for Trump because they agree with him on immigration and culture.

What’s happening in Michigan is an interesting case study in the Left’s growing pains to be a majority party. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is a talented and compelling politician. He’s also a bit of a street brawler, not unlike the current president. His penchant for throwing elbows and being unapologetic in his beliefs endeared him to many primary voters. Throwing a big middle finger to the establishment, he campaigned with Hasan Piker the day before he beat their chosen candidate in the Senate primary.

For this decision and other maximalist rhetoric, a rift has now come between him and a critical voting bloc of Jewish Democrats in Michigan. His affiliation with Piker has also followed him on the campaign trail, distracting from more popular campaign messages on health care and Trump’s war in Iran.

The factionalist Left’s response to this is twofold: They either deploy a strategy that could be ripped from Trump’s early mentor Roy Cohn’s playbook, “never surrender” and “never admit defeat.” Or, they complain that the media is too obsessed with Piker and won’t equally cover Trump’s association with crazy right-wing influencers.

There’s some truth to that second point; Trump has stretched the bounds of acceptability, and he too often gets a pass for that.

But El-Sayed needs to remember the task at hand here. The median voter in Michigan is 58 years old and owns a house. While he has distanced himself, somewhat, from Piker in his pivot to the general election campaign, he must double down on winning voters who do not share many of the Left’s factionalist sentiments. There’s simply no electoral downside to slamming Piker’s outrageous views and past statements.

Republicans have paid a price

It’s also worth noting that Republicans have, in fact, paid a political price for their own devotion to factional politics.

College-educated suburbanites have fled the party, turning previous bellwethers like Philadelphia’s collar counties into increasingly blue strongholds. That dynamic has also played out in places like North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, making former Republican bastions increasingly competitive. Some of the most MAGA candidates like Herschel Walker and Blake Masters have underperformed in swing races; meanwhile, comparatively moderate Republicans like Susan Collins continue to overperform.

While Trump has made repeated inroads with the Democrats’ blue wall and built a comparatively diverse coalition of working-class GOP voters, he has also killed that same coalition. Polls now repeatedly show that the working-class is finally turning on Trump. The main driver is affordability, which Trump has turbocharged with his reckless tariffs. This is the real Trump effect. Why should Democrats want to replicate anything from the Trump playbook? Why are so many Democrats so afraid to directly criticize the exact tool that is increasing the price of consumer goods, especially when a strong majority of voters support free trade?

Extend this critique to Trump’s massive expansion of executive power. It can be appealing to see the dizzying speed at which the second Trump administration has set about implementing its agenda as a model for a future Democratic administration. Already there are efforts for a “Project 2029” that mimics the much maligned Project 2025 playbook. There’s nothing wrong with being prepared for a future administration. But recall why Trump consistently sought to distance himself from Project 2025; it included too many unpopular policy ideas.

Moreover, executive action is, by definition, incredibly easy to reverse. Likely the very first thing a future Democratic administration will do is undo as many of Trump’s executive orders as possible. This is similar to what happened to the Biden executive agenda, which was killed swiftly in the early months of Trump returning to the White House,

To be the party that enacts durable policy change, Democrats would do well to de-emphasize an overreliance on the administrative state, especially because the one they inherit in the future will be a shadow of its former self. Instead, Democrats should do the harder work of maximizing their appeal so they can obtain and maintain political power long enough to legislate meaningfully. The Affordable Care Act endures for a reason.

There’s no getting around a Big Tent

This is why Democrats must be ruthlessly obsessed with winning the Senate. There’s simply no path to implementing the sort of reforms we need to achieve universal health care or break up monopolies that don’t involve winning Senate seats in states like Iowa, Ohio, or Florida. Remember Michelle Goldberg’s point: “In our system, conservative, rural areas of the country have more electoral power.”

Until that reality changes, Democrats will need to be the party of the Big Tent. Republicans can get away with being factionalists — especially because they don’t even care much about governance anyway.

And Democrats must remember that Republicans struggle even with their structural electoral advantage. Trump is an albatross around the neck of congressional Republicans, and there will come a time when we move decisively beyond his influence in our politics, when his unique political charm fades away, and the party is just left with unpopular policies.

To dominate the next political era, Democrats must understand that a shared commitment to building a better world vastly outweighs the differences that exist in their current coalition. It should also mean not copying the bad behavior of the people across the aisle, because sooner or later, everyone’s bill always comes due.

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The people training frontier AI models believe we’re gambling with the fate of humanity. Jacob Coxon, the pretraining researcher who just resigned from Anthropic, thinks the odds that it wipes us out are reportedly around 10%. Tech reporter Kevin Roose says that’s actually a more optimistic estimate than what is normally reported among AI lab employees.

Of course, the primary means by which the public is learning about this is through social media posts.

For those who have been following the AI discourse over the past half-decade, this news isn’t new. AI researchers have repeatedly warned that superhuman intelligence could spell the end of humanity, most recently and persuasively in the book “If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies.”

What is new is the mountain of evidence that has emerged over the past month that has added credence to this claim. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta each announced that their frontier AI models broke protocol, accessed the open internet, and used the resources there to accomplish the task assigned to them. OpenAI had the worst attack of all; a “swarm” of 700 rogue AI agents broke out of their testing sandbox and hacked Hugging Face, a centralized AI hub, in an attempt to cheat on a training test. AI safety experts and researchers, many of whom are normally cautious and not prone to hyperbole in an industry where this is quite common, are throwing around the phrase “February 2020” to describe the peril that is right around the corner.

What do our elected representatives have to say about all this?

The last congressional hearing that actually convened AI CEOs and other top industry leaders came in May 2025, generations ago when it comes to the models being tested. The goal was to determine “how removing regulatory barriers on the AI supply chain can accelerate innovation and secure U.S. dominance in the 21st century global industrial revolution.”

In the year since, there have been smaller hearings with AI lobbyists, academics, and White House staff. But none really touched on the existential risk of AI, and none have come within the past month. Congress has been completely derelict in its duty to oversee and regulate this industry. The Senate Committee for Commerce, Science, and Technology Policy doesn’t have any AI hearings on the books over the next four months; the next topic is about college sports. Senator Bernie Sanders, to his credit, is convening senators for a closed-door AI briefing.

When the Senate returns from recess next week, they need to convene a public hearing through the Senate Commerce Committee and probe the leaders of the top frontier labs under oath. When the 120th Congress convenes in January of next year, they must form a select committee with subpoena power. There’s reporting that House Democrats are already exploring this idea, which would be modeled off the bipartisan AI task force of the last Congress, but with more legal authority. But it’d be good if they announced this now and made it a midterm issue.

Our concern is rooted in the fact that our political institutions are not responding to this news at the scale in which it deserves. Of course, public hearings and a select committee are not sufficient. This is table stakes. This is a means to develop a regulatory agenda for the most transformative technology of our time. Proposals already exist, and it’s time to properly evaluate them.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar have proposed banning the development and deployment of artificial superintelligence. We don’t know if that’s the best path forward to most effectively capture the potential enormous upsides of superintelligence. But a public hearing could get industry leaders on the record for why they would oppose such a plan.

The White House developed a proposal, which was approved by Nobel Prize-winning Google scientist Demis Hassabis, that would create an independent regulatory organization – like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for securities markets – that would review advanced models and test them before public deployment. Zuckerberg reportedly advised Trump to kill it. A public hearing could get Zuckerberg to explain that logic to the American people and their representatives. Elected officials could also ask executives about the virtue of other agency models for regulating the dangers of AI (a more traditional agency like Treasury or EPA, or a multi-member board like the SEC).

A public hearing will not resolve anything. But it is preferable to how the public is currently learning about the AI arms race, which is through industry posts, reporting, and sporadic posting on social media from the people working in the labs.

How many people or lawmakers actually know that the AI industry is now increasingly directing its time and money to training their models recursively? This is a major development and is integral to why so many AI safety experts worry we could lose control of the models.

Kelsey Piper wrote in The Argument yesterday:

People think of these labs as primarily making a consumer product. But increasingly — as measured by time and money spent — the main thing they are doing is making automated internal AI research labs. OpenAI reports that, over the past six months, the share of its research compute devoted to internal coding inference increased 100-fold (much faster than they’ve increased compute spending for customers). Tom Brown, an Anthropic co-founder, has said that “the vast majority of the work Anthropic does is internal software engineering.”

To their credit, Anthropic is releasing this news via blog posts. It’s not a secret that AI research is now being driven by Recursive Self Improvement (RSI). It’s public knowledge that the future of AI will be each model building and improving on each other, a fast-tracked version of the evolutionary process that developed the humans of today.

Should that be allowed? Are the potential gains of RSI worth the risk of building an out-of-control technology that could end humanity? Is there really no path to international coordination? What does a reasonable regulatory plan look like?

It’s time for Congress to fulfill its obligation and think through these questions. That means public hearings this fall and a Select Committee at the beginning of next year.

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Many years ago, my old boss Matt Yglesias coined the term “Pundit’s Fallacy” to describe how columnists always tell politicians to adopt their preferred policies if they want to appeal to more voters.

This fallacy can easily be extended to politicians themselves when they critique their political party. Of course Democrats would win back working-class voters, if only they all sounded exactly like me.

Democrats of all stripes do this. Earlier this year, Senators Chris Murphy and Elizabeth Warren told their colleagues that affordability alone would not win back swing voters; the message must also “confront the billionaires and corporations making it impossible for hardworking Americans to achieve and afford a middle-class life.”

Is this a politician’s fallacy or good messaging advice?

Kitchen Table Messaging for the Populist Era, a new report from the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative and the Center for Working-Class Politics, helps answer this question. They tested a variety of economic populist messages on 6,000 voters, with an oversampling of 1,100 rural Americans. If the goal is to win persuadable Trump voters, they find that an economic populist message that rails against the oligarchy is not particularly persuasive. It’s not the worst message — that would be the one that frames economic policies around race — but it performed worse than less confrontational messages.

Jarod Abbott, the author of the report, explained to me why: “There’s different streams of working class people that bump up against the overly aggressive anti-corporate, anti-billionaire measures for different reasons. There’s some of them that aspire to be a millionaire. To be successful. They want companies to be able to thrive. And it sounds like you’re saying you don’t want that.”

I think this might surprise many staffers working in progressive politics. But what sounds good to a cosmopolitan pundit, staffer, or blue-state politician might not always be in line with what a persuadable red-leaning voter wants to hear. That doesn’t mean these voters don’t want to tax the billionaires or feel ripped off by corporations— many of them do. It’s just that they aren’t convinced that taking on the oligarchy will make their lives better.

The right economic populism is…

Before we get into the sort of message that appeals to swing voters the most, it’s important to acknowledge there’s no magical phrase that will sell a voter on a position that they fundamentally disagree with. If they like natural gas and want their electricity bills lowered (as many voters do), there’s nothing a politician can do to make them support a fracking ban.

So while I take many messaging test projects with a grain of salt, I found this project to be convincing. That’s because embedded inside each economic message is an actual issue. Of course, all voters want politicians to make their lives more affordable, but is the best way to do that by passing policies that lower costs and make corporations pay their fair share? Are they convinced lowering costs must confront the oligarchy or fascists? Or, do Republicans really have it right and voters want to scapegoat immigrants?

The Kitchen Table Messaging project tested the relative effectiveness of these issues. Each respondent first saw a Republican opposition message, randomly assigned to focus on either government corruption/waste or immigration. They were then given three Democratic economic-populist messages, drawn at random from a pool of thirteen, and asked to rate their relative effectiveness. The messages were adapted from real-life examples, including politicians’ speeches and guidance from political consulting firms.

The best-testing message is the one they describe as “American Way.”

Most people just want to work hard, get ahead, and give their kids a better shot - and they should be able to. But the cost of rent, groceries, and health care keeps going up faster than working families can keep up, and paychecks just aren’t stretching the way they used to. I’m going to bring those costs down for working people, make sure the biggest corporations pay their fair share, and crack down on corruption and the people who game the system for themselves. Hard work should pay off again - that’s the American way.

The idea that hard work should pay off gets at a core American value of fairness and reciprocity. It’s reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s pledge in his 1992 campaign that “if you work hard and play by the rules,” you’ll be rewarded. But it also acknowledges that there are people who do “game the system,” and this includes corporations.

The study also tested a variant on the American Way with a much more confrontational focus. The core reciprocity theme was still there, but it more explicitly identified the wealthy and corporations for rigging the system. The message performed slightly better with Democrats, but it dropped 25, 16, and 20 points among Republicans, small-town residents, and 2026 undecideds, respectively.

It’s worth noting that many of the messages tested were positive because they addressed the widely shared grievance of the economy being unaffordable, but it’s notable that this more confrontational version did worse with the exact sort of voter groups Democrats need to win if they want to build a durable governing majority.

Performing even worse is a “Fighting Oligarchy” message that was adapted from politicians like Abdul El-Sayed, Graham Platner, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This message calls out “a handful of billionaires and would-be oligarchs who are restructuring our government to serve one agenda.” The message ends with “People over oligarchy. It’s time to take it back.”

Abbott told me he thinks this message didn’t resonate with persuadable voters because, “A lot of that wording just reads as like activisty, it just doesn’t sound normal to a lot of working-class people.”

This November, we will get a lot more real-world examples of these different flavors of economic populism. For example, Michigan will be voting both for Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate race and Jocelyn Benson for governor. Whereas El-Sayed uses oligarchy rhetoric, Benson is much less confrontational: “We’re all committed to driving down costs, to ensure healthcare is accessible to all, to ending corruption, to growing our economy and increasing our wages.”

According to this experiment, Benson should perform better, and the current polls generally predict this exact outcome. It’s also worth remembering that Graham Platner, before he dropped out of the race, was performing poorly with working-class voters despite using hyper-aggressive oligarchy rhetoric.

Race-class-narrative performed worst

The worst-performing messages were the ones that were once very common inside the Democratic Party: race-class narrative. This political communications strategy was designed by progressive political consultants to combat right-wing dog-whistles by fusing together racial justice and class narratives.

They tested verbatim messages from ASO Communications, a race-class narrative political consulting firm. Comparatively, all race-class narrative messages performed the worst in the study, but the one with an added racial treatment performed the worst:1 “And if billionaires and Republicans can talk you into thinking Black people and new immigrants are to blame for your hard times, they will keep getting away with it.”

Compared to “American Way”, it performed 42 points worse with all voters, and it was most underwater with Republicans, persuadable Trump voters, and those who were undecided in the 2026 presidential election.

This messaging is not used by as many progressive politicians today. But in 2020, it was an integral part of the Democratic Party’s strategy and was deployed in canvassing programs in Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Prominent politicians, including President Biden, could be heard using race-class narrative appeals in their speeches.

At the time, many strategists with experience operating in red states warned that messaging every economic policy with a racial framing would reduce its universal appeal. Micah English and Josh Kalla, two political science professors, caused what was, at the time, a major controversy when they published research showing that centering race undermined support for policies like Medicare for All, building more affordable housing, and decriminalizing marijuana.

But if you listen to the messages used by politicians successfully running in swing districts, it’s clear that race-neutral economic populism is the much more effective way to appeal to swing voters. Ultimately, winning those races is the only way to build the sort of legislative coalition that can pass and implement the sort of progressive economic policies that will reduce racial inequality.

The best economic populists

In my interview with Abbott, I was curious who he thought were the most effective economic populists this election cycle.

He mentioned Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin, Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania, and Brian Poindexter in Ohio. Each of these congressional candidates are running against Republican incumbents, and their path to victory will involve turning out both the Democratic base and winning persuadable Trump voters.

According to research from Navigator, one out of five Trump voters now profess to regret their vote. That means there’s a real path here for these candidates to beat Republicans. But according to another poll from Politico, only 37% of voters say Democrats best represent the interests of the working class, a seven point advantage over Republicans.

The fact that Democrats still only have a seven point advantage on this question, despite the fact that Republicans cut SNAP benefits, reduced Medicaid eligibility, and increased prices on imported goods, just shows how much work the party has to do.

There’s an opportunity here to become the party of affordability, but that message needs to broadly appealable to swing voters. Brian Poindexter, the union economic populist from suburban Ohio, is embracing the American Way message.

“A rising grocery bill or healthcare premium hits a working family a lot harder than it hits a CEO or a politician insulated from those costs. My focus is simple: if you work hard, you should be able to afford to live with dignity, support your family, and plan for the future. That’s not asking for special treatment — it’s asking for a fair deal.”

We’ll see how this message actually fares this November. But when the midterms conclude, and the presidential cycle begins in earnest, expect the politician’s fallacy to begin in earnest.

We can take back the White House and build a durable governing majority, if only you start sounding more like me.

The only way to know if they’re right is to look at the politicians who perform best with persuadable Trump voters. That economic populist message should define the Democratic Party.

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Profiles in Heterodoxy is a new column from our team at Searchlight identifying candidates who make clear choices to appeal to voters who, otherwise, might not vote for a Democrat.

Importantly, we’re interested in highlighting figures from all across the Big Tent — moderate, establishment, or Left. The only criterion is whether that candidate is attempting to match the heterodox set of opinions that define the sort of voters that swing elections.

Today’s profile is James Talarico in Texas.

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James Talarico had yet to turn 30 years old when he decided to lace up a beaten pair of New Balance sneakers and walk 25 miles from Round Rock to Taylor, Texas. Along the way, he rounded the corners and crossed the familiar streets of his hometown — waving at passersby, stopping curbside to answer questions from voters, and campaigning for a seat in the Texas State Legislature.

The last time voters in the district had gone to the polls to vote for their state representative, there wasn’t a Democrat on the ballot; the choice was between a Republican and a Libertarian.

But Talarico did the unthinkable. He won that race. He flipped that seat. Years passed, and Talarico’s profile grew as he fought against Christian nationalism and rampant political corruption from his perch in Austin — sparring with the ultra-conservatives who sought to defund public schools. He had yet to step foot onto national television until Pete Hegseth, then a Fox News host, invited him on to debate voter ID.

Today, for the first time in a generation, all signs point to Democrats having a real shot at flipping Texas statewide. The Lone Star state just might be sending this former school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian to the U.S. Senate.

James Talarico’s tightrope path to victory has not been — nor will it be — easy. He must win a lion’s share of independents, a slice of conservative men, swing voters who most recently chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, and turnout disengaged voters who have tuned out the midterms altogether. He’s also had to disavow past leftist views that are, at a very fundamental level, unpopular among many of the voters he’s trying to win. In 2020, he talked about dismantling capitalism, linking it to white supremacy. He said Texas’ oil and gas industry wouldn’t last.

But Talarico did something that is unfortunately quite rare in politics; he directly disavowed those comments, pledging that he’s a capitalist who supports oil and gas.

That’s in-line with the sort of ideologically diverse positions Talarico is embracing in this Senate race. And it helps explain why he’s competitive in a state that voted for Trump by fourteen points just two years prior.

Here are three reasons why Talarico is this week’s profile in Heterodoxy:

1. Rallying with sheriffs and border communities on his Frontera Tour

Democrats used to believe in the ‘demographics is destiny’ thesis, and assumed that Trump’s extreme immigration politics would turn states like Texas blue because of its growing number of reliable Hispanic Democratic voters.

But in 2024, Texas border-state Hispanics shifted sharply towards Trump, in part, because of the migrant crisis that occurred under the Biden administration. That means to win Texas, Democrats need to take immigration seriously. And more than any previous Texas Democratic Senate candidate, that’s what Talarico is doing.

Recently, Talarico journeyed from El Paso all the way to the Rio Grande Valley during his Frontera Tour. He rallied with law enforcement near Big Bend, where he announced his own immigration and border security agenda that includes deploying smart systems and technology to counter illegal immigration. He held town halls in deeply conservative border towns and communities — focused not only on immigration, but funding for schools and lowering the cost of living. And, in a surprise to local media, Talarico’s immigration plan was endorsed by Thaddeus Cleveland, the conservative Terrell County Sheriff who spent most of his career as a Border Patrol agent.

2. A mix-and-match approach to his economic and health care agenda

The consultants would tell you it’s safer to stick to a sort-of-monotonous economic center; James Talarico doesn’t seem to think so. He’s not reflexively moderating on all issues. He’s embracing big-tent economic populism.

His opponent, Ken Paxton, makes the contrast easy because of his own rampant personal corruption. That gives Talarico extra room to campaign on an anti-corruption economic agenda that explicitly targets what he calls “crony capitalism.” At his rallies, he has decried an economic system that is failing working families: “The American dream is broken,” meanwhile, “Ken Paxton has 15 homes.”

The actual economic policy agenda doesn’t fall neatly into a progressive or moderate camp. He wants to tackle inequality and break up health care monopolies. But he doesn’t want to abolish private health insurance. He wants to nearly double the minimum wage and guarantee universal paid child care — but he isn’t calling for sweeping reforms to capitalism or attacking popular consumer facing corporations.

3. Embracing the oil and gas industry

James Talarico is leaning harder into oil and gas than his predecessors — making real and affirmative commitments to an all-of-the-above approach to American energy.

The politics here should be, and yet haven’t always been, obvious for a Democrat attempting to flip Texas. The entire state relies on the industry. Texas is a thriving economy, on par with many advanced nations, in part, because of oil and gas.

This doesn’t mean that Talarico is any less interested in fighting pollution, protecting Texas public lands and open spaces, or making sure that public health is a top priority. He’s also campaigning to plug abandoned oil wells and stop the Trump Administration from bulldozing the natural barrier at Big Bend National Park. But this is bread and butter environmentalism, and it’s distinct from the last Democrat who ran for this Senate seat. MJ Hegar told the League of Conservation Voters that climate change, notoriously a very low-salience issue to Texas swing voters, was “one of the top reasons she decided to run for the US Senate.”

If Talarico had adopted those policies or run on incremental economic policies, then he might’ve sunk his chances of winning at the very start. Instead he has attempted to offer many Independents, conservatives, and non-voters a place in his campaign.

Only time will tell if Talarico’s heterodox approach to politics can break three decades of Republican statewide rule. It’s a mighty fight and a massive task before him.

The good news is he’s trying to make his political coalition much bigger. And he’s no longer walking alone.

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Mara Keisling is an American transgender rights advocate and senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute. She was the founder and executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, the nation’s leading social justice advocacy organization for transgender people.

The most culturally salient trans issue this year is, once again, about participation in sports. The trigger this time was WNBA star Sophie Cunningham, who recently said that “biological men” should not compete in women’s sports. She went on to say, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

As someone who’s been in the trans activism space for decades, I’m of two minds about it. First, young trans kids should be able to compete in the sports leagues of their choosing. If the children are prepubescent, it couldn’t affect the competitive integrity of the league, so there is simply no reason why they should not be able to play with their friends. Cunningham’s comments don’t recognize that nuance. There is also nowhere in the United States where young girls play sports against biological men, and there is not and should not be anywhere that adult men share locker rooms or take showers with young girl athletes. No one finds that acceptable.

On the other hand, I think the trans community should recognize that when we go beyond prepubescent youth sports, many sports leagues, including the WNBA, need eligibility rules. And many, if not most, people in the United States honestly do worry about and object to trans women having a competitive advantage in women’s sports. A recent poll from Pew found that 73% of voters said they were uncomfortable with trans athletes competing on sports teams that do not match their sex at birth.

In the greater scheme of trans issues, this is not even close to the most important topic. But it has become the primary way the typical American hears about our cause. It is also the issue that has been used to bludgeon trans people and supportive Democrats. Competitive sports matter in our society and we need to be pragmatic about that.

Can someone just pretend that they’re a trans woman and participate in the league? Obviously not; that’s why the WNBA recently ruled two former male NBA players were not eligible. But as the WNBA continues to develop policies around trans participation in sports, our community needs to understand that sports leagues are the right people to institute rules on participation.

We should be able to acknowledge that elite sports leagues are sex-segregated for a reason, or at a minimum understand that this is a view most people strongly believe. This will allow our movement to focus on the more important goals of advancing anti-discrimination law and access to healthcare.

There should be rules, the question is who enforces them

Most adults know there must be rules in life. That’s why we institute traffic laws, criminal laws, and building codes, for instance. Sports in particular have always been a rules-based activity. After certain levels, there are even referees at every game policing the rules. Rules for what to do, what not to do, what equipment is used, and rules for who can participate.

Most sports have fairly frequent rules changes for reasons involving safety, watchability, or technological changes. But in every case I can think of, the rules are made and changed by the sports league with primary input from people directly involved in the sports—players and team owners.

However, there are different rules for recreational leagues for the youngest children, and they are usually not followed rigorously. These leagues, by the way, are and should be comfortably co-ed for all prepubescent children. Many times they don’t even keep score.

But should governments make sports rules?

Most relevant to this question is Title IX, which Congress enacted in 1972, as part of a collection of Education Amendments to federal law. The law prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school (kindergarten through college) that receives funding from the federal government. Applied to sports, it was passed to help women’s and girls’ sports flourish, not to hurt or exclude men and boys.

Still, Title IX is not the government imposing on schools who can and cannot participate in specific sports or teams. That has always been left up to the individual sports leagues or associations and schools where it belongs.

This summer, the Supreme Court essentially ruled that Title IX doesn’t protect transgender students in sports, which allows states to both pass laws barring transgender participation in sports or continue to allow transgender children to participate in sports. This means states are allowed to usurp authority over schools and sports leagues.

Just as people believe healthcare decisions should be made by doctors and patients (and when it is a child, by doctors and parents), I think people understand that decisions on sports should be made by sports associations, teams, and players. In the case of children’s sports, parents and schools also should have a say.

But any decision about sports should not be made by President Trump or Congress or you or me. It should be made by sports associations like the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the US Olympic Committee, the state interscholastic athletic associations, or the local school district.

An Alternative

Transgender women and girls playing on women’s or girls’ teams is a relatively new issue, but public opinion has moved rapidly against it. So much so that I cannot imagine that we will be able to win the issue for the foreseeable future. In fact, I think trying to argue for participation in elite sports will only turn more Americans against trans rights and empower anti-trans politicians to attack us.

Here are the guidelines I would propose:

• Decisions should be made by sports associations and leagues based on legitimate safety and fairness concerns. Politicians should stay out of it as much as possible, and worry about protecting all of their constituents and especially all children.

• There should be no un-American blanket bans on any type of person. Rather, specific participation decisions should be made according to the age of the athlete and the particular sport they are playing.

• Decisions should be based on science and common sense, not on scare tactics that talk about strong men playing and showering with young girls. People should focus on the real issues of safety and fairness.

• Science should continue studying the effects of testosterone on sports performance.

• And lastly, the youngest children should be allowed to play in a safe and fair way without getting caught up in shameful political posturing.

No one should be cavalier about this and dismiss or bully trans children out of hand. I understand these guidelines may be a hard tonic for transgender advocates, but the alternative is just as hard. We have lost control of the narrative. Public opinion is hardening against trans women playing in sports, and it has triggered a witch hunt that is threatening to infect every aspect of trans life. On sports in particular, it has harmed trans children who just want to play sports with their friends. Prepubescent children should be exempted from these bans, which are made by the wrong people.

But with a lot of sincere and clear-headed work, we can move this toward a rational place, win back public opinion, and continue to protect trans people in all facets of life.

As for Sophie Cunningham, she should continue speaking her mind, as is everyone’s right. But as someone who would like to be known as a protector—of both her team and of young girls—I hope she sees that protecting the young girls means letting them play sports with their friends.

For guidance, she should look to Cheryl Reeve, the coach of the WNBA Minnesota Lynx, who recently wore a shirt with the words “Trans Kids Belong.” Ultimately, that’s what everyone, including Cunningham and trans people, needs to focus their work on as well: ensuring that our most vulnerable groups are protected, while understanding that elite sports may need rules.

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Primary season is thankfully almost over. That means in many states, it’s time for candidates to make the critical pivot to the general election. For a Democrat to win voters in states like Michigan, Texas, or Iowa, they need to expand their ideological appeal and focus on the occasionally uncomfortable politics of persuasion.

Profiles in Heterodoxy is a regular Searchlight column identifying candidates who make clear choices to appeal to voters who, otherwise, might not vote for a Democrat. Importantly, we’re interested in highlighting figures from all across the Big Tent — moderate, establishment, or Left. The only criterion is whether that candidate is attempting to match the heterodox set of opinions that define the sort of voters that swing elections.

Today’s profile is Rob Sand in Iowa.

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Anybody who follows politics knows that deer-in-the-headlights look a politician gets when they’re asked about a tricky issue. For Democrats, it’s usually about trans sports or immigration enforcement. For Republicans, it’s healthcare or Trump’s absurd corruption scandals.

There’s no getting around answering these questions if you want to win a race where the majority of voters do not normally support your political party. Evading an issue does not make it go away. Answering it head-on is the best way to demonstrate independence and broaden your political appeal.

This brings us to this week’s Profile in Heterodoxy: Rob Sand, the Iowa State Auditor who is running for governor. In an interview with Politico’s Jonathan Martin, Sand was asked a question that has plagued other Democrats on the campaign trail: “Would you want to have Joe Biden campaigning for you?”

Sand answered, “No.”

The next question was whether he’d welcome Kamala Harris on the campaign trail. Again, a simple “No, thanks” sufficed. He quickly followed it with, “We need new leadership.” And said he didn’t want Harris to run in 2028.

Distancing yourself from a politician who lost your home state by 14 points should be an obvious political move, but Martin later confirmed that Sand was the first high-profile candidate to answer his question directly.

It’s understandable that Democratic politicians don’t want to throw leaders like Biden and Harris under the bus. The impulse is to be a good Democrat, especially because candidates can be rewarded (or punished) for disloyal behavior. But we’re in the midst of a wave of anti-establishment politics, and if the audience is Democrat-skeptical swing voters, distancing yourself from unpopular party leaders is 100% upside. Voters expect politicians to be loyal to their party; breaking from that expectation is pure political heterodoxy.

I could imagine Sand’s comments resonating with the sort of swing voter I watched in a Virginia focus group last June. They universally believed the political establishment was corrupt and desperately wanted new leadership.

Beyond the good politics of distancing himself from an unpopular establishment, Sand was able to effectively pivot back to a message that is more relevant to his campaign — mRNA cancer vaccines in Iowa and his opponent’s attempt to ban them.

And that’s ultimately what matters here. Every candidate, just through association with their political party, is going to have a host of issues where they automatically have a disadvantage. In this case, the issue is literally about Sand’s political party establishment, which is not particularly popular in the state of Iowa.

Even if that issue is not highly salient to the majority of voters, it’s still important to directly answer the question and be as broadly appealing as possible. That’s how you shut down issues that might drag down your campaign and pivot back to more important topics like affordability.

Sand has had a long-standing track record of doing this. Early in his campaign, he appeared on a conservative talk radio show and was asked about trans participation in sports — an issue where Democrats are consistently out-of-step with the voting public. He affirmatively answered “No” and then pivoted right back to talking about economic issues in Iowa.

It’s also important to note that Sand isn’t some buttoned-up moderate; he rails against the political system and has a whole section on his website focused on keeping corporations accountable, specifically on the issue of data centers. At the beginning of each town hall, Sand has everyone applaud for members of each political party and sing America the Beautiful.

In her excellent profile of Sand in the Atlantic, Elaine Godfrey summed up the campaign as not being “progressive or moderate.”

I think it’s a secret third thing: Heterodoxy. His campaign is attempting to reach voters from all across the ideological spectrum.

In Iowa, registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by 200,000. Trump’s horrifically unpopular war in Iran and mismanagement of the economy have created an opening for a Democrat to compete statewide. But the only way to actually win the race is to reach voters who registered as Republicans for their own ideological reasons.

Clearly it’s working. Sand is tied with his Republican opponent, Zach Lahn, in the polls. And it’s driving Lahn a bit crazy. In a campaign video, he complained, “It’s like The Truman Show. He’s not a moderate.”

In this era of hyper-nationalized politics, it’s hard to separate oneself from an unpopular party brand. Rob Sand is at least trying.

That’s why he’s our first Profile in Heterodoxy.

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Earlier this month, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropped a political grenade when she remarked that “Woke 1.0 was crazy.”

Now, what exactly does this mean? The comment came in response to a question about abolishing prisons and defunding the police. So it’s been taken as a renunciation of the Left’s COVID-era anti-police politics and excessive cultural progressivism. But what has been left unsaid, yet still functionally admitted by many other Left politicians, is that they dropped several other toxic policy positions as well.

Sure, AOC no longer uses pronouns in her social media bio. But this was also the first session of Congress when she did not introduce a resolution supporting the Green New Deal. Abdul El-Sayed and Peggy Flanagan, two of the Left’s favored Senate candidates, aren’t using the word Latinx. But they also don’t advocate for decriminalizing border crossings — which was once a defining left-wing immigration position. Climate policy was the central organizing issue on the Left in 2020, but it is largely absent inside the faction today — even the DSA House candidates running in deep blue districts hardly mention it.

The rallying issues for the Left today are cost-of-living and concentrated wealth. The void left by climate has been filled by dogmatic positions on data centers and restricting aid to Israel — two stances that are more popular with the voting public. And their defining immigration issue is Abolish ICE, which is not the sort of message that will appeal to a conservative voter, but has less downside than an issue like border decriminalization.

Not coincidentally, this pivot is coming at the peak of the Left’s electoral prominence. They’re winning big-city mayoral offices (in part because they’re less combative towards the police), earning swing state primary nominations, and unseating incumbents across the country.

To be clear, there is absolutely more the Left needs to do to expand their political appeal to red states. Campaigning with influencers like Hasan Piker or refusing to adopt even a single moderate cultural position will always hold the movement back.

But it’s important to recognize that the Left sounds a lot different than it did in 2020. This is both integral to their expanding influence and a reminder that running on popular issues does, in fact, translate to political success.

The Medicare-for-all pivot

The most important position change is over healthcare. As crazy as it might seem to those who suffered through the tedious Medicare-for-all debate that defined the 2020 presidential primary, a candidate can now be in good standing on the Left and still advocate for maintaining a private health insurance market.

In fact, a candidate can navigate a contentious Senate primary, moderate his Medicare-for-all plan to allow 160 million Americans to stay on their private employer health insurance, and Bernie Sanders, the biggest M4All purist in American politics, will call that win “the most extraordinary and impressive political victory in the modern history of the United States of America.”

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Of course, I’m talking about Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in Michigan. Rachel Cohen recently covered El-Sayed’s policy shift for Vox, but it is still perhaps the most underdiscussed story of this election cycle. That’s because, as Cohen noted in her reporting, his Medicare-for-all plan is quite similar to the one Pete Buttigieg proposed in 2020. And as some might recall, Buttigieg was slammed by the Left for his “Medicare-for-all who want it” plan. Justice Democrats, one of the most influential progressive PACs in American politics, accused Buttigieg of abandoning a purer form of Medicare-for-all because of corporate influence.

Now, El-Sayed is one of the most important political figures on the factional Left, and his healthcare plan says “Medicare for All does not have to ban additional private insurance through unions or employers.” He also recently told The Bulwark that “as long as it reduces the power of the health care corporations, expands health care, and does so publicly, I’m for it, and would be glad to work with like-minded partners on that path.”

Those are very similar to the guiding principles of Searchlight’s healthcare plan.

This is also just good politics. Abolishing private health insurance is a position that is both unpopular and not what Americans expect when they hear the slogan Medicare-for-all. A polling collaboration last month between Searchlight and Zeteo found that 61 percent of Americans expected Medicare-for-all to allow people to keep their private health insurance, and that 70 percent of Americans would prefer to keep their coverage than enroll in single-payer.

El-Sayed won his primary by a percentage point. That means it’s not an exaggeration to say that if he held tight to the Left’s old line on phasing out private health insurance, Haley Stevens might be Michigan’s Senate nominee.

They barely say climate

In addition to running on an uncompromising Medicare-for-all plan, Bernie Sanders, the Left’s favored 2020 presidential candidate, had an aggressive $16 trillion climate agenda. Time magazine called him the Green New Deal candidate, and emphasized that he “finds ways to incorporate climate into seemingly unrelated questions.”

But listen to Sanders speak at a Fight the Oligarchy rally, and climate is barely mentioned; the message is almost exclusively focused on concentrated wealth and Trump’s corruption.

This political strategy extends to many insurgent Left candidates as well. Writing in The Nation, Ilhana Cohen warned climate activists that their issue was missing from New York’s progressive primary wave, and that “even when candidates had robust climate platforms, climate change didn’t generally feature prominently in candidate forums, rallies, or media coverage.”

One might argue that this is because the climate movement culminated in the Inflation Reduction Act, which included hundreds of billions in clean energy spending. But Republicans repealed many of those tax credits. And none of the insurgent candidates on the Left have prioritized bringing them back in their campaign messaging.

On his website, Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign includes the words “climate crisis,” but it is buried in a section on Environment and Natural Resources, which is itself buried in a tab titled “Money out of Politics.” In terms of actual policy, El-Sayed doesn’t explicitly call for a fracking ban or any classic keep-it-in-the-ground policies.

His campaign also keeps a database where voters can type in an issue and watch a clip of El-Sayed speaking about it. ‘Climate change’ yields absolutely no results.

Again, this omission is not restricted to a single candidate. In a NYT editorial from May of this year, Matthew Huber identified left-wing candidates like Trey Martin in Oklahoma and Chris Reichard in Missouri, who omitted climate from their campaign messaging. As Huber noted further in his reporting, Sam Forstag, a Bernie-endorsed, union worker running for Congress in Montana, doesn’t mention the issue in his platform, and did not even say climate change when he was asked about wildfires in the state.

Candidates like Forstag or Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin are oddities because they’re endorsed by both the moderate Blue Dog caucus and Bernie Sanders. The fact that such a combination exists is proof that the Sanders left is evolving, or even returning to the faction’s pre-2020 economic populist roots.

What Mamdani taught the Left

El-Sayed is heralded as a potential successor to Bernie Sanders and a future presidential candidate. But compared to the Left’s previous presidential candidates, his agenda is far simpler and more legible to a more disengaged voter.

Elizabeth Warren’s presidential run was defined by extensive and ambitious policy plans. She wanted to cancel student debt, end the opioid crisis, invest trillions in clean energy, break up big tech companies, and the list went on. This lack of focus was a problem for Bernie Sanders too; just read this quote from the beginning of his 2020 presidential campaign announcement where he describes the goal of his political movement.

“It will not be racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and religious bigotry. That is going to end. The principles of our government will be based on justice: economic justice, social justice, racial justice and environmental justice.”

Listen to El-Sayed’s victory speech in the Michigan Senate primary, and you don’t hear any of those words. Instead of economic justice, it’s “the price of gas and the price of groceries.” There isn’t a laundry list of goals. It’s simply “Money out of Politics, Money in Your Pocket, Medicare-for-all.”

Senate campaigns are focused, by definition, on a more limited set of issues than a presidential campaign, but the difference in scope and framing is still quite stark. So what’s the impetus behind the change?

Let’s start with the most surprising campaign of the decade: Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York. After he shocked the political world, numerous pundits and strategists wrote strategy documents and op-eds identifying what the Left could learn from the campaign.

The central point was to just keep the message simple and laser-focus on economic issues. Jared Abbott, a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics, wrote in Jacobin: “Unlike many other progressive candidates over the last five years, that’s exactly what Mamdani did. His campaign was highly disciplined, with a tight focus on housing, transportation, wages, and the everyday cost of living.”

So if you listen to El-Sayed or even Melat Kiros in deep-blue Denver, the rhetoric is simple and the top-lines are concentrated wealth and cost-of-living. Even Palestine, which, as many have argued, has replaced climate change as the Left’s rallying issue, is best framed in economic terms. El-Sayed says Israel’s military aid should be spent on communities in America.

There are certainly still examples of Left candidates clinging to COVID-era cultural progressivism and anti-police politics. And again, this is not a movement that holds the keys to winning a red state like Iowa or Texas. But the Left is leaner and more focused on kitchen-table issues. It’s no wonder why they’re more popular with voters. They took on a more popular set of issues.

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Today’s article is from Blas Nuñez-Neto, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former Biden administration assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security, and Daniel Delgado, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former deputy assistant secretary for immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security.

Last week, hikers in Texas’ Big Bend National Park were surprised to find a new invasive species: Bulldozers.

The Trump administration had begun clearing parts of the unspoiled wilderness to make way for what CBP coined “limited” barriers as part of President Trump’s plan to build a “Big Beautiful Wall” across our southern border.

But the plan is seemingly short-lived. After a rare round of bipartisan political finger-pointing, CBP announced on Monday it was temporarily pausing construction to review the project.

This Big Bend border project is part of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s broader push to use almost $50 billion of its overall $165 billion slush fund, courtesy of the One Big Beautiful Bill, to build a wall across the entire southwest border before President Trump leaves office. This would fulfill a long-standing promise that then-candidate Trump made during the 2016 presidential campaign.

President Trump’s signature “build the wall” slogan has functioned as a signal to immigration-skeptical voters that Trump was the only candidate who took their concerns seriously. And consequently, it pushed Democratic candidates—including President Biden in 2020—to reflexively oppose building any walls at the border. During the Biden administration, this led DHS to tie itself into knots trying to justify why it was leaving large gaps in the existing border wall in place even as the materials that were purchased to close those gaps rusted nearby. And while this was certainly not the biggest border issue during the Biden administration, a number of migrants exploited those breaches to cross illegally.

The border wall debate is both one of the dumbest policy debates in American politics and a perfect encapsulation of how extremes on both sides prioritize performative immigration politics over common-sense policymaking. As with most immigration issues, the best solution is one that charts a pragmatic middle path.

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Walls Are Not a Magic Bullet

The two of us have spent more than three decades cumulatively working on border security and immigration issues, from inside and outside the federal government. One of us even authored the first comprehensive Congressional report on U.S. border barriers in 2006. So let us bring you in on a little secret: Border walls do work, but not in the way the president seems to believe. They don’t stop people from crossing illegally. They do, however, slow people down and give Border Patrol agents more time to make an arrest before illegal immigrants escape into the interior. They also channel migrants into more predictable areas where Border Patrol is better equipped to engage.

Building border walls makes operational sense in parts of the border where the Border Patrol has a limited amount of time to arrest someone before they disappear into a city or are picked up by smugglers. That is why DHS has been building walls in urban, suburban, and exurban parts of the border since the early 1990s, under presidents of both political parties.

But in the remote wilderness that covers vast tracts along our border, dominated by rugged mountain ranges and desolate deserts, it can take days of walking before someone who crosses illegally reaches a town or a road. This is even more pronounced in areas like Big Bend, which is nicknamed El Despoblado, or the Uninhabited, and it accounts for nearly a quarter of the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, some parts of the border are so remote that Border Patrol agents are often airlifted in to set up camp. It doesn’t make much operational sense to build expensive walls or barriers in those remote areas when nature has already done the job for us. These wilderness areas are so remote and hard to navigate that hundreds of migrants die each year trying to make the trek to the nearest sign of civilization. That’s a human tragedy that a smarter immigration policy would aim to fix.

But there are other factors to consider too. Smugglers and migrants tunnel under, climb over, and cut through the border wall every day. Just like any man-made structure subject to the elements and tampering, agents need to constantly monitor and repair the walls and barriers erected along the border. This is much easier to do in areas where there are nearby Border Patrol stations that can quickly respond to such incidents and make the necessary repairs. And that work is far easier to do in the urban, suburban, and exurban parts of the border.

Hitting you in the wall(et)

Of course, President Trump doesn’t just want to build a wall across the nearly 2,000 miles that make up our border with Mexico; he also wants to paint it black. The president apparently believes that doing so will make the wall so hot that it will be “untouchable” for migrants and dissuade them from trying to climb it. As experts have noted, though, any increase in surface temperature would be negligible, and definitely not worth the estimated $500 million to $3 billion price tag.

Of course, this administration’s track record with painting things does not exactly inspire confidence that the costs will be contained or that the paint will be effective.

This would all be funny if it wasn’t such an epic misuse of taxpayer funds. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s DHS has not been transparent about these projects and their costs. The One Big Beautiful Bill secured $46.5 billion to construct 700 miles of new wall along the border. Much of it will likely go to building a wall in places where we don’t actually need it and will require expensive ongoing repair forever.

During the first Trump administration, journalists identified more than 200 contract modifications to wall construction contracts that increased costs by billions without adding significantly to its length.

Cost overruns are already happening. A company that was awarded a $1.68 billion contract to build walls in New Mexico had a contract modification issued just three weeks later that added another $108 million to the contract. Needless to say, the contracts for building the wall are going to companies with ties to the White House.

Bending over backwards

That brings us back to Big Bend, where the administration’s waiver of environmental laws to build access roads and install barriers in an iconic national park has drawn bipartisan scrutiny. Is it operationally needed? One way to gauge that is whether there is a significant number of illegal crossings in the area. Just last year, Customs and Border Protection touted that the Border Patrol reported fewer than 10 encounters a day of people crossing the border illegally in the Big Bend sector, making it one of the quietest parts of the border.

Spending $1.7 billion and blasting an access road across iconic sections of a national park to stop 10 people a day from crossing the border illegally does not seem like the best use of taxpayer funding—particularly when other options that are cheaper and much less invasive are available, such as sophisticated surveillance towers that use AI to help identify illegal activity and vector in agents. Those brand-new access roads could also backfire and be used by migrants to move more quickly out of the park.

It really shouldn’t be this hard to have a rational conversation about border walls. We should definitely build and maintain walls along the border, but only where it makes sense operationally to deter and slow illegal crossings. In the more remote parts of the border where walls don’t make sense operationally, we should use the funds provided by Congress to invest in smart technology that brings our border into the 21st century and helps our Border Patrol better monitor and respond to illegal activity. Doing so would be a much better use of taxpayer funds than building and painting yet another monument to the president’s whims.

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What motivates someone in the voting booth?

As a political data analyst, this question haunts me every election season. Most of the answer is pretty easy: That voter is either a Democrat or a Republican. But when it comes down to what persuades the critical percentage of voters who swing from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump, it’s hard to isolate a specific factor.

That doesn’t mean we can’t draw strong conclusions about the salient issues that motivate these voters. For example, we know from numerous high-quality polls and surveys that many Americans were upset about immigration and inflation in the 2024 election, and conversely, don’t particularly prioritize issues like climate change or gun control. The point is that it’s hard to make sweeping generalizations about what makes a specific voter decide to switch to a different candidate or just stay home. As much as it might disappoint online political takesters and media pundits, my profession is best when it operates with caution and qualifications. The best estimates of the impact of political interventions such as ads, canvassing, etc. are small and complicated by exogenous factors.

That’s why I was surprised to see Leah Stokes, a well-known political scientist and climate advocate, claim that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act gave Democrats 2.5 million votes in the 2024 presidential election, an implausibly large number.1

This claim is based on a recent paper Stokes co-authored, which attempted to estimate how the IRA’s clean energy build-out impacted Democratic voter shares in the communities where the projects were built.

I did not fully agree with the methodology of the paper or many of its conclusions, but I appreciated that it did not make the sort of sweeping claim that Stokes is now claiming on social media. Regarding the 2.5 million vote total, it says “This is an accounting benchmark rather than a counterfactual election result: the implied votes accrue in treated districts across safe and competitive states alike, and presidential outcomes run through the Electoral College.”

Put simply, this is just back-of-envelope multiplication. It’s not a rigorous counterfactual election result.

I understand the need to make your academic research as interesting and occasionally click-baity as possible (everyone wants a big impactful number), but I think this is a pretty misleading way to present your work.

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Climate change is a really big deal. It’s important that Democrats use their next congressional majority to pull more policy levers that make it easier to decarbonize our economy and develop new technologies that will decarbonize the rest of the world too. But research like this will not help Democrats win that congressional majority. It’s a form of elite misinformation, and it exists to just misinform people who are already inclined to agree we need more sweeping climate action. But to get that legislative change, we don’t need to convince those people. We need to build a supermajority coalition that runs through states where oil and gas is very popular. Stokes’ paper, and especially her public presentation of it, does not advance that goal.

How did Leah Stokes get this shocking result?

The paper, which Stokes co-authored with Denis Lomov, analyzed 234 House districts that saw 523 clean-energy factories announced during the Biden administration. They then compared the electoral results to districts that had similar socioeconomic and voting breakdowns, but did not see factory construction. Because there are only so many congressional districts and it’s hard to find an exact match, they statistically reweighted the non-factory districts based on traits like education, income, and race to match the districts with factories.

The result is that IRA-impacted districts saw a 1.5-percentage-point increase in Democratic vote share compared to similar districts that didn’t get a factory. They then took that 1.5-point number and multiplied it by the total number of votes cast across those 234 districts, which produced an estimate of roughly 2.5 million votes.

It’s important to note that there were several similar electoral analyses done at the county level of the 2024 election, and they all found marginal effects. A report from the Center for American Progress looked at the electoral impact of all of Biden’s industrial policy and found that “Each additional IIJA, CHIPS, or IRA project in a county is associated with an increase in Harris’ vote share of 0.028 percentage points in that county and a decrease in Trump’s vote share of 0.026 percentage points.” Keep in mind that this included the jobs from every industrial project under the Biden administration, not just clean energy ones. Stokes and Lomov’s paper uses a larger unit of analysis (congressional district rather than county), giving them fewer data points to work with, which may account for the differences here.

In any case, Stokes and Lomov’s paper is out of step with the existing literature.

Also, none of these other reports attempted to find a raw total vote count by multiplying that vote share across the country. That’s because this is not a careful research method. The 1.5% increase in vote share is not a fixed number; it’s something with a wide confidence interval. So when you multiply it by tens of millions of votes, the corresponding number has an even wider confidence interval. The paper itself presents that number appropriately, as a rough benchmark, not a real prediction.

Again, if you get a result that is not in line with the previous research, the important thing to do is present your findings with caution. The authors did the exact opposite; they took a moderately careful paper, turned it into a less careful article, and then claimed on social media that the IRA gave Democrats 2.5 million votes.

An honest look at the IRA’s political impact

Just from a smell test, it’s really hard to imagine 2.5 million Americans waking up in 2024 and deciding to vote for Kamala Harris solely because a new battery plant or utility-scale solar farm opened up in their congressional district.

Now, the counterargument from Stokes and Lomov would be that they didn’t vote directly because of that solar farm; it was because of the downstream economic effects in the district. But still, that means 2.5 million Americans shifted their vote to Democrats solely because of better economic conditions. Remember the point I began this piece with: It is really hard to isolate a single confounding variable in an election. Different congressional districts see different amounts of political advertising, have different rates of crime and immigration, and have external factors that change the economic growth in their district. Saying that the IRA alone changed 2.5 million minds is a claim that just really strains credulity.

But let’s try to take it at face value. The paper estimates that 191,412 jobs were created across 234 districts. That means each job directly led to 13 votes. That’s a big effect, and it’s contrary to other literature that attempts to measure the relationship between green jobs and increased political support. In addition to the study from the Center for American Progress, there have been three more studies that found a minimal or a negligible increase in political support in communities that saw green industrial investments. I can’t find a precedent for any industrial policy leading to an increase in vote share that is close to what this paper is estimating.

Then consider the fact that, according to the paper’s own findings, only 33% of these facilities were active by the 2024 election. That means in terms of actual jobs created at the time of voting, each job resulted in 40 votes. Could the creation of one job really lead to 40 people deciding to vote for Kamala Harris? That is the claim the paper is trying to make.

It’s also worth noting that the primary issue in the 2024 election was the cost of living. The unemployment rate was running close to what economists consider to be “full employment.” And voters did not list availability of jobs as a voting concern on any post-election survey. While increased employment was an important political message in selling the New Deal jobs programs or after the 2008 Financial Crisis, it just wasn’t a salient issue in the 2024 election.

Now, I understand that part of the idea is that the direct job creation did not shift votes; rather, it was the change in the district’s economic conditions that might be triggered by increased investment. But remember that the IRA was passed two years before the 2024 election, and of the 33% of facilities operating, many had only recently opened. Is the economic impact of a newly opened factory really so substantial that it directly persuaded 2.5 million voters to vote for Kamala Harris?

This would also require voters to be aware that the IRA, and specifically, Democrats were responsible for this new factory. And there’s little evidence that voters even knew about Biden’s industrial climate policy. According to a survey from Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communication, four in ten voters never heard of the law and only 11% heard “a lot” about it. In a Morning Consult poll that came out the week before the 2024 election, only 24% of voters said the IRA affected them positively.

There was an extensive push from the White House and Green Groups to sell the IRA, but it never materially impacted a majority of the public. Why? Earlier this year, Heatmap interviewed 55 experts who were involved with implementing the new law. And one of the most common takeaways was that the IRA “was too slow and not visible enough.” One clean energy analyst summed up the problem, “The IRA was too abstract for people.”

Again, I’m an election analyst, not a social science professor. So I’m not here to debunk the methods or statistically disprove Stokes and Lomov’s result. But with everything we know about what motivates voters, and the limited electoral effects of industrial policy, I do not think that 2.5 million vote estimate is credible at all.

Do we need to do climate politics?

Stokes and Lomov’s paper comes at a time when climate is losing the sort of prevalence it once had in our electoral politics. It was one of the least salient issues in the 2024 presidential election. And it is again one of the least salient issues during this midterm cycle.

This leaves many climate activists wondering: Is it even possible to do climate politics? Searchlight’s take is that it’s generally not a good idea for politicians to use their limited time persuading swing voters to focus on an issue with limited electoral salience, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do climate policy when you have the power to.

But this paper is being used by climate activists to argue for framing climate policy in economic terms: Green jobs increase support for Democrats. But again, this is a really contentious claim to make, and a stretch to extrapolate to campaign messaging. Voter concerns like affordability, health care, and immigration are just far more salient to the voters Democrats need to win if they want to build a durable governing coalition. There’s no reason why climate needs to be included.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean advocates can’t target politicians who don’t support green policies.

A new PAC called Invest in Tomorrow Coalition has emerged this election cycle. They’re backed by various big players in the renewable energy committee, and they are targeting Republicans in primaries who have been uniquely hostile to the clean energy industry. Interestingly, they are not actually mentioning climate or the IRA in their messaging.

According to Politico, in a recent ad campaign against Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles, “The group’s ads did not mention clean energy, instead targeting conservative voters with advertisements that boosted Hatcher’s right-wing credentials and chided Ogles for missing votes.”

Charlie Hatcher definitely does not fit the profile of a climate champion, but he is comparatively much more favorable to renewables. In a deep red congressional district, this is just pragmatic green politics. And the omission of clean energy from a PAC of clean energy enthusiasts is a recognition that their issue is not going to persuade swing voters who are skeptical of Democrats.

I’m not asking the climate activist community to start exclusively supporting Republicans in primaries who are comparatively more favorable to renewables. But I do think they need to start being more honest and rigorous when it comes to the electoral impact of their issue. That’s the only way we’ll ever be able to build the sort of governing coalition we need to decarbonize our economy.

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But obviously this is not the best way to have political discourse. To remedy that, I invited my internet (and now real-life) politics friend Cassie Pritchard to the Searchlight office for a chat. Cassie is a long-time DSA organizer. She’s someone with deeply held socialist opinions, but she’s also heterodox. She understands the electoral benefits of moderation. She recognizes that the Democratic Party is best when it’s a “Big Tent.” And she’s a YIMBY!

At a moment when the DSA and progressive left are feeling their strongest, it’s easy to caricature their movement as overly dogmatic and unrealistic. To be clear, there are certainly people in the DSA (including some of their leaders) who I think have some pretty-half baked views of the world. I also think that Democrats would do well to aggressively and consistently call out the excesses (and in some cases patent absurdities) within the DSA platform. But Cassie has a comparatively nuanced view of political constraints and a clear-eyed approach to public opinion. She recently wrote a powerful essay reflecting on the public’s views of trans women, an issue that is quite personal to her because she transitioned in her 30s.

We need more of this honest and self-reflective thinking from ALL factions of the Democratic Party. As the party begins to unify after a bitter and particularly divisive primary season, this is more important than ever.

I think it’s critical to always be reassessing one’s priors. That’s part of the ethos at Searchlight. It’s easy to take up a factional position and constantly defend it to the hilt. It’s incredibly difficult to admit where your own worldview may have limitations and, even more, where your opponents’ may have true merit.

One of Western democracy’s great liberals, John Stuart Mill, perhaps said it best:

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

If you have a strong opinion about the DSA—and odds are if you’ve gotten this far, you do—ask yourself: have you heard their arguments in “their most plausible and persuasive form?”

If we have a better sense of where each of us is coming from, we might be able to salvage the Democratic Party and, indeed, the country we’re all lucky to call home.

-Tré (Searchlight VP and cynically happy political warrior)

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There are a lot of reasons why someone might be anxious about artificial intelligence’s rapid penetration into society: it could lead to job loss, exacerbate income inequality, and maybe eliminate our ability to independently reason and critically think. In the tax policy world, specifically, people are worried that job displacement could lead to lower income tax revenue —which makes up over half of the federal tax base —while higher unemployment rates simultaneously increase demand for social assistance programs.

These uncertainties could impact our economy at the same time other fiscal issues continue to close in. The impending insolvency of Social Security, the worrying magnitude of national debt, and the need for reforms to our social welfare programs all put the federal purse in a precarious position. This makes AI’s threat to federal revenues an even more serious problem.

One of the tax proposals touted as a solution by numerous people, including former California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, is a token tax.

Part of the allure of this tax is its supposed simplicity. A token tax would take a set dollar amount of tax per AI usage token purchased. Tokens are the units of data AI providers use to measure input and output. They can be measured in words, characters, pixels, or lines of code. What counts as a token can also vary by model and what exactly you are asking the AI to do. When you pay $20 a month for Claude, you’re functionally paying for a certain number of tokens.

Depending on who you ask, the intended purpose could be to slow down AI development and use, prevent downstream harms from AI, or capture tax revenue connected to the products offered by AI companies.

Despite how simple it sounds, there are a lot of potential drawbacks to this approach. It’s important for policymakers and tech leaders to understand these complications as they begin to think through potential tax reforms. Instead of complicated “whack-a-mole” policies like a token tax, policymakers should focus on leveraging taxes that are easier to administer and capture more predictable revenue from an AI-driven economy.

It likely won’t slow down AI adoption

One of the primary reasons why some policymakers are drawn to a token tax is its potential to slow down the pace of AI adoption. But would a token tax significantly reduce AI uptake?

A tax-driven ‘slow down’ of AI itself could be slow or non-apparent. That’s because the hyperscalers driving the AI boom are already accustomed to operating at a loss for AI development. So if a token tax hits, AI providers could undershift, meaning they would absorb the cost of the tax to maintain their current prices and user base until AI is even harder to replace in day-to-day life and to regulate. Even if the tax is passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices, most may just eat the cost because the technology is seen as integral in their day-to-day life (in some cases, people may not change their behavior at all because they are genuinely addicted).

Even if most consumers don’t change their behavior, it’s worth considering which Americans would be most likely to reduce their AI usage. If, or when, a token tax hits consumer pocketbooks, it would likely be regressive, and could price out lower-income Americans who may otherwise use these tools in their work and personal lives. This specific type of slow down would be a problem. That’s because what sets AI apart from other goods taxed in comparable ways, like tobacco and alcohol, is that it can benefit the user in the form of greater productivity and efficiency. Those who can afford the tax could continue to adopt AI tools and benefit from the efficiency gains —an advantage that would build on their existing income and wealth.

Similarly, a token tax could present a competitive setback to small American businesses. Just like in the individual case, a large business that is better able to afford the cost of a token tax may use AI to outcompete the small business that has to pass those costs along to consumers or operate with less efficient technology. Meanwhile, this same effect may hamper all American businesses competing abroad, raising the cost of American goods and making them less competitive against foreign companies that aren’t subject to such a tax.

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It may not be simple for a token tax to reduce AI’s harmful effects

Suppose proponents want to use taxes as a tool to reduce the harmful effects of AI, including job displacement. These concerns deserve timely, effective solutions that may be difficult to accomplish with a token tax.

A common argument is that the tax should be applied to the end use only, hitting providers or consumers when prompting AI, but excluding business uses. However, that tax design would miss upstream externalities. By exempting business uses, the tax would miss AI use within companies or between companies for functions where human labor is replaced by AI.

Other proposals center around an intermediate transaction token tax on business AI use. This would target AI uses including inventory management, document processing, creative work, and customer service bots. There are downstream consequences to consider here too. Rather than discouraging automation and lower utility usage, a token tax applied along the production chain could primarily show up as lower profits and deadweight loss, where companies maintain their current AI usage in exchange for less available revenue that could be used for future hiring and investment. Alternatively, an intermediate token tax could result in tax compounding. This means if a token tax increases costs along the production process, prices on final goods could rise without any compensatory increase to jobs or decrease in business utility usage. As a result, taxes aren’t borne by the businesses, but passed along to the final consumer through higher prices.

Rather than pivoting away from AI, businesses may continue on their current trajectory, gambling that AI will generate future gains that offset current costs, rather than make a meaningful change away from AI. In short, how business behavior changes in response to a token tax could be quite unpredictable.

Challenges raising revenue with a token tax

Returning to the revenue question at the start of the piece: Can a token tax effectively capture revenue and help offset potential erosion to the income tax base? There is reason to believe token taxes cannot because they are challenging to define and cumbersome to validate.

In general, it is best to establish a specific definition for an economic activity before it is taxed; a token is not a well-defined economic activity. Right now, tokens function as non-standard units that aren’t uniformly tied to consumption or output, making them an unsuitable target for taxation. With small tweaks, the same amount of work can be done by the same model but with drastically different token use. As AI companies work to minimize token use and improve back-end efficiency, they would be able to achieve the same results with fewer tokens. A use-based token tax may very well then collect less money over time, even if AI usage continues to grow.

Even if we were able to define what comprises a token as a taxable unit, validating its use would remain difficult. Some have argued for tax rates by model, with each getting its own tax rate. This would require distinct validation for each model type, and each model change or update may necessitate a new tax assessment. This would be fodder for endless tax gaming, not to mention incredibly difficult to accurately administer. Outside users and hyperscalers themselves are already leveraging ‘loopholes’ in how tokens are counted to minimize use. Even without willful tax avoidance, future innovations and market changes could erode the base of a token tax and limit the amount of revenue raised.

A path forward that makes more cents

To be clear: the tax system should be updated no matter which path AI deployment takes. However, lawmakers should focus first and foremost on generating revenue through reforms to existing taxes and proposals with greater ease of administration. A robust plan for AI taxation would target corporations and the avenues that wealthy individuals lean on to shrink their tax burden, include clear incentives for responsible use, and be paired with meaningful AI regulation.

At the top of the list should be an overhaul of the treatment of business profits. A token tax misses the bigger picture. Most glaringly, a token tax would leave increased profits from upstream operations like model development or chipmaking, the most profitable parts of the AI race, untouched. Additionally, token taxes wouldn’t generally scale with business profits, which, with AI’s help, can grow without hiring any workers. These issues would be better solved through broader corporate tax reforms.

Policymakers also need to look at personal capital and income – including closing the step-up-in-basis loophole, security-backed lines of credit, and pass-through business taxation – to help compensate for gains from AI on the individual side.

A good state and local tax step would be re-examining preferential tax breaks for data centers, the revenue losses from which have ballooned while providing relatively few permanent jobs. This would make the tax treatment of data centers neutral to that of other businesses and recover billions of dollars for state and local governments. This money could then be used to modernize the grid.

To preserve tax revenue, lawmakers could also consider applying a broad-based consumption tax. While this wouldn’t target AI specifically, it would help maintain federal tax revenues for important programs if AI contributes to mass layoffs. These taxes can be progressive, would tap into a more stable stream of revenue than token taxes, and capture the ‘value’ added to a good by AI as well as any subsequent technologies. If we are concerned about the erosion of a wage tax base, a turn back to consumption is sensible.

It’s possible to capture revenue from AI-driven growth without turning to untested token tax proposals. While intriguing at face value, a token tax could be regressive, difficult to implement, and likely ineffective at raising revenue. Reforms should focus on tax proposals that can better withstand whatever the future of AI development has in store.

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The polls missed again.

Last night, Francesca Hong narrowly lost to David Crowley by 4,000 votes in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary race. Normally, a close primary result for a DSA-backed candidate in a purple state would be seen as an accomplishment. But the Left, and much of the media establishment, expected a blow-out based on Hong’s huge lead in the polls.

This race saw a lot of movement, with two candidates making late-game departures and Crowley dropping out and then returning to the race in mid-July. But the last public poll, by State Navigate on August 7th, had Hong at 44% and Crowley at 22%. Even a poll sponsored by Crowley’s campaign had him trailing by 18 points.

He ultimately won by less than a percentage point. That means the polls overestimated Hong’s support by around five points and underestimated Crowley’s by seventeen.

This polling miss is reminiscent of what happened last Tuesday in the Michigan Senate race, when the polls undercounted the support of Haley Stevens, the moderate candidate, by a number that was far outside the margin of error. Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive favorite, still won. But these two polling misses have been disconcerting to the insurgent Left movement that expected two impressive primary victories.

Should they be worried?

First and foremost, it’s important to understand that primary polling is hard. General election polling benefits from having a stable-ish set of partisanship benchmarks, where you can reliably guess that half(ish) of the electorate will be Democrats and half(ish) will be Republicans (though 90% of the value is correctly estimating that “ish”).

In a primary, you lack these benchmarks entirely. This is one reason why primary polls are so often wrong; it’s just really hard to determine who is going to vote in the primary. Much of the polling in Michigan and Wisconsin very likely undershot the percentage of the primary electorate that is seniors, lower-income, and doesn’t have a college degree—these are demographics that are usually less ideological, and consequently, less interested in factional Left candidates. They are also, famously, less likely to respond to polls. Say what you want about both El-Sayed and Hong’s campaigns, but their supporters were much more energized than their opponents.

You know what fired-up voters like to do? Take polls. But when it comes to election day, their vote counts just as much as their less-fired-up, less-poll-responsive Democratic primary counterparts.

That’s why I think every Democratic primary poll needs to come with this big caveat: Beware the normie Democrat.

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Another reason why it’s hard to poll a primary is that candidate choice is simply a lot more fluid. As crazy as it might seem to some online pundits, Democratic candidates generally appear quite similar to the average primary voter. And many of the decisive voters are generally late deciders. According to Anthony Chergosky, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, “It is well known that voters in Wisconsin tend to make up their minds, tend to start paying attention to primary elections pretty late in the game.”

So when a race has a lot of candidate movement, like in Wisconsin, this effect can be magnified. And polls are fundamentally snapshots, which don’t tell you how the electorate will consolidate behind a candidate. Again, the normie Democrat is the voter to watch. They’re going to be less likely to tie themselves to a hyper-ideological candidate like Hong, and will be more persuaded when a candidate is backed by a popular statewide politician (like when Governor Evers endorsed Crowley in July).

You know what else the normie Democrat likes to do? Watch TV.

Hong’s campaign spent only $100,000 on TV ads and another $135,000 on digital.1 Crowley, on the other hand, spent a combined $3.3 million on ads, and most of this was on linear TV.

I am a strong proponent of the idea that winning or losing is only a very rough metric of campaign effectiveness. Hong’s campaign was still generally successful compared to what you would expect from an insurgent candidate in a purple primary. But I think it’s clear (and we saw this in Michigan) that flooding the airwaves with positive ads is still helpful, especially with older voters who both reliably vote and watch TV. This pattern held in the Republican primaries last night too, where two Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidates lost while being massively outspent on traditional TV ads.

Every election cycle, people forget that TV does, in fact, matter. A few campaigns, usually they’re lefty and young, experiment with an aggressive ground game and ignore the role of traditional TV. Media outlets cover this “new trend” and speculate if traditional campaign strategies had just been upended. Then, election day comes, and it turns out traditional TV still matters. That’s why campaigns still spend so much money on it!

This time, the guilty party was the New York Times, which ran a piece two days ago titled, “Inside the Left’s Playbook for Winning Elections.” The focus was on Hong’s insurgent populist ground game.

Left-wing campaigns also argued that some of their more mainstream primary opponents had erred by spending most of their resources on advertising while failing to actually excite voters with direct outreach or by crafting positions that appeal to them. In Wisconsin, Ms. Hong’s campaign has recruited about 7,000 volunteers, knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors and hosted roughly 500 canvassing events. Her most significant remaining rival, David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, held a fraction of that number.

The article cites the Mamdani model as inspiring Left organizers to focus on decentralized organizing-oriented campaign tactics. But guess what? In addition to having a robust ground game, Mamdani invested heavily in traditional TV ads, and he overperformed the polls.

This is reminiscent of Jerusalem Demsas’ messenger class theory—the idea that the people who shape public debate miss the lived experience of the rest of the country. In this case, the media and political elites, a group that I do very much identify with, simply do not watch linear television. But their fellow Americans watch a huge amount of TV every day, especially older Americans, who are disproportionately likely to watch linear TV. Those older people are your peak primary electorate. You have to reach them where they’re at, even if it’s boring.

Here’s the last thing to know about normie Democrats: They like Thanksgiving.

As I noted earlier in the piece, there was scarce recent polling that measured Hong’s support as we got closer to election day and more voters began doing research to make an informed decision. During that time, Hong did more interviews and received more media coverage over some of her previous (Woke 1.0) tweets. Famously, it was revealed that she wanted to cancel Thanksgiving because of its association with the atrocities committed against Native Americans.

Regardless of the merits of that argument (The Messenger Class is probably more inclined to like it), this is just not the sort of take that appeals to voters in suburban and rural Wisconsin. Again, there’s no way to know exactly how Hong’s association with unpopular culturally Left ideas hurt her campaign. But it’s simply true that these issues received quite a bit of coverage over the final few weeks of the campaign, and this was exactly the time when voters were breaking towards Crowley.

It’s also important to note that primary voters can be strategic. They want to nominate a Democrat who can beat Republicans. They want someone with that prized ability to be “electable.” That was the message Crowley and Governor Evers made down the stretch of the campaign, and it was simply not an argument that Hong could make persuasively, especially when she failed to denounce “defund the police” or clearly articulate why she no longer held some of her past culturally woke beliefs.

None of this should be taken to discount Hong’s campaign or the rise of the Left this cycle. But here’s my message to any pundit or political obsessive who consumes a lot of election content on the internet: Beware of the normie Democrat. They vote, and they do not have the same cultural habits as you do.

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Today’s article is from Blas Nuñez-Neto, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former Biden administration assistant secretary for border and immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security, and Daniel Delgado, a Searchlight Senior Fellow and former deputy assistant secretary for immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security.

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During the 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump won the support of many voters by pledging to restore order to our immigration system and only go after the “worst of the worst.” Instead, his administration has embarked on a sweeping effort to redefine what it means to be lawfully present in the United States by systematically dismantling our nation’s legal immigration system, while simultaneously stripping work authorization from more than a million immigrants who had followed our legal process.

As a result, and despite the very real decline in encounters at the border, there are more people in the United States without lawful status today than before he entered the White House. That’s right, President Trump has actually increased the number of people living in the United States illegally on his watch.

We both served in the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration, where we witnessed firsthand the consequences of a broken and dysfunctional immigration system. But Trump has swung the pendulum in an even worse direction. Our country needs an orderly immigration system that prioritizes American interests. What has happened over the past 18 months has moved us even further away from that goal.

How Trump increased the number of illegal immigrants

The administration has purposefully made it difficult to know what is happening within the immigration system, including by muzzling the independent Office of Homeland Security Statistics. But we know that ICE removed close to 356,000 people in Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 from October 1, 2025 through July 11, 2026, or roughly 1,260 people a day. That sounds like a big number, but it is actually roughly on par with President Obama’s high-water mark for removals, 438,000 in FY 2013—and well below the 3,000 removals a day the administration set as an arbitrary goal. Combined with the estimated 234,000 people that ICE removed in the last nine months of FY 2025, ICE has removed close to 590,000 people since Trump’s second inauguration.

Even this larger number, however, is just a fraction of the people that President Trump has, through executive fiat, stripped of lawful status thus far. That’s why the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has increased overall.

In its first year, the Trump administration stripped more than 1.6 million immigrants who were already in the United States of their lawful status and work authorization—a number that has expanded to nearly 2 million immigrants after a recent Supreme Court ruling allowed the administration to cancel Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for nationals of Haiti and Syria. That number could reach 2.7 million by the end of the year if DHS cancels other grants of TPS, as expected.

This means that, for every illegal immigrant that President Trump has deported, he has created another three by stripping people who were lawfully present in the United States of their legal status to be here.

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The administration has tried to elide this fact by claiming that millions of people have “self- deported,” but the simple fact is that, even using the most generous estimate, economists find that yearly outmigration over the past two years has only increased by 500,000 since President Trump won reelection––another number that looks big until you realize that 2.6 million people left the U.S. in 2024, President Biden’s last year in office.

Flipping the switch from “legal” to “illegal” doesn’t automatically remove someone from the United States, but it does remove them from the formal economy, where they’re able to contribute as established taxpayers under the law and fill critical labor shortages with proper work authorization. Instead, it forces them into a shadow economy to survive—where exploitation is rampant, crimes go unreported, and there’s little accountability for anyone.

The Trump administration’s war on lawful immigration

Trump has also taken direct aim at all forms of legal immigration and travel to the United States, particularly from developing countries in Africa and the Middle East. For example, the administration has banned or partially restricted travel to the United States from 39 countries with predominantly brown or black populations. It also stopped processing visa applications from 75 countries around the globe, including for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens waiting for their Green Cards overseas.

Refugee admissions have been cut from a historic high of 125,000 during the last year of the Biden administration to just 17,500 in FY 2026—an 86% decrease. The primary recipients have been white Afrikaners from South Africa, which tells you exactly the sort of racial and political agenda the Trump administration is advancing.

That hostility has been extended to those residing with lawful status inside the United States, too.

At the beginning of this year, the administration revoked the non-immigrant visas of more than 175,000 people already in the country, such as students and other specialized workers—a 150% increase from 2024. Meanwhile, the administration has systematically narrowed the path by which someone who has gone through the legal process can apply for a Green Card, placing them at higher risk for deportation even though they attempted to follow the law. Even naturalized U.S. citizens aren’t safe: the Trump administration issued a directive identifying denaturalization as one of the Department of Justice’s five main priorities.

When taken together, this is an assault on legal immigration that surpasses what Trump campaigned on.

The public certainly didn’t support the chaos at the border and ensuing disorder in American cities under the Biden administration. But that doesn’t mean they want any of this. A recent survey showed that support for reducing the amount of legal immigration just reached an all-time low, and conversely, support for legal immigration has reached an all-time high.

Trump’s immigration agenda makes us all poorer

What should come as a shock to no one—except maybe the President—is that when you rapidly restrict legal immigration and remove millions of immigrant workers from the U.S. workforce, the economy will suffer.

The Brookings Institution estimates that the shrinking number of arriving immigrants paired with the rising number of deportations decreased consumer spending in 2025 by $40 to $60 billion, and projects it will be further reduced by $10 to $40 billion in 2026.

But the staggering dollar amount is not the only cause for concern. When someone is stripped of their lawful status, their legal authorization to work goes with it. As a result, the labor force is at risk of losing millions of workers, both because of deportations and a reduction in legal workers. This will hit critical industries that are already struggling to find enough employees.

Do you have an elderly relative that needs care? Heading into Trump’s inauguration, severe staffing shortages in the healthcare sector meant that almost half of U.S. nursing homes were limiting new admissions, despite steady increases in the elderly population. These shortages are about to be exacerbated because about 5% of healthcare workers are noncitizens.

Think that housing is unaffordable today? Trump’s actions are making things worse. The National Association of Home Builders reports that severe staffing shortages in skilled building trades mean we are constructing 19,000 fewer new homes each year, costing the economy $10.8 billion annually. It also found that immigrant workers comprise 25.5% of the construction workforce, including one in three tradesmen.

Worried about the rising cost of groceries? Despite campaigning on driving grocery prices down, Trump’s war on legal immigration is causing food prices to go up even further. The lack of immigrant workers means that there are fewer workers to harvest crops, tend to livestock, and support the agricultural industry. This past October, Trump’s own Department of Labor argued in its rulemaking that “The current and imminent labor shortage exacerbated by the near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens increased enforcement of existing immigration law, and global competitiveness pressures” justifies a new policy that lowers wages for immigrant workers on H-2A temporary agricultural visas. The DOL also noted that American workers are simply not replacing these jobs, and that “without swift action, agricultural employers will be unable to maintain operations, and the nation’s food supply will be at risk.”

Live in a part of the country that relies on tourism? Before the travel bans were announced in January, government data shows that international arrivals had been slumping throughout the first year of the Trump administration. The travel bans are only going to throw gasoline on this fire, even if the increase in travel resulting from the World Cup may soften the blow a bit in 2026. This decrease matters because economists estimate that travel and tourism account for somewhere between 3% and 9% of our GDP.

Even high-skilled immigration has been swept up in this campaign. According to the Richmond Fed, the administration’s proposal to include a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas will likely make it harder for smaller companies to pay for skilled immigrant labor and may lead U.S. companies to offshore those jobs.

Moving beyond the cycle of dysfunction

Americans are tired of the chaos and dysfunction in our immigration system. They have seen our country careen from the crisis at the border under the Biden administration to ICE’s lawless and indiscriminate actions in the interior under the Trump administration. Predating both leaders is an immigration system filled with temporary programs and loopholes that are fueling this cycle of dysfunction.

Take the Temporary Protected Status program Trump has moved to terminate. It was originally designed by a Republican president to provide temporary legal protection and work authorization for foreign nationals already in the United States, until it was safe to return to their home country. Today, there are 1.3 million people with TPS in the United States, many of whom have been living here for decades and contribute to the economy.

A serious legal immigration system would provide these long-time immigrants a pathway to legal certainty. Instead, presidents of both political parties have used TPS and executive authorities to circumvent a dysfunctional immigration system that Congress refuses to fix, constantly redefining what it means for immigrants to come to the United States the “right way” by the wave of a presidential wand. Now, we have a president who stripped protection from hundreds of thousands of people in order to deport these long-time immigrants—to potentially devastating economic effect, given that TPS holders contribute nearly $36 billion annually to the economy.

This is not a serious way to deal with an issue of such national importance.

Americans deserve a firm but fair immigration system that cracks down on illegal immigration, prevents disorder at the border, and keeps the front door open to the legal immigration we need to continue to grow our economy. We need a system that is fair to the immigrants who play by the rules and contribute to our communities, enhances the prosperity of all Americans, and secures our borders once and for all.

The good news is that this kind of system is not a fantasy—there are a number of proposals (including ours) that would ensure our border remains secure and create a modern, functioning legal immigration system that we can all be proud of. These goals are eminently achievable, if Congress can finally do its job.

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Eliot Wertheimer is an intern at Searchlight. He is a rising sophomore at Tufts University.

If my 10-year-old self knew how few people cared about gun violence in 2026, he’d be furious.

I was in fifth grade when I went to Portland, Maine’s March For Our Lives protest. A few years later, I walked out of history class and marched to Susan Collins’ office after the Uvalde shooting.

I called for “banning all guns” and voting out the members of Congress who didn’t share my maximalist positions. I knew this was an extreme approach, but after witnessing such horrible shootings at schools much like my own, I believed such action needed to be taken.

The peak of the gun control movement happened in 2018, when 200,000 people marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. The March For Our Lives protest called to force lawmakers to back restrictive gun control laws, and with public opinion seemingly on our side, legislative progress seemed possible.

Since then, however, momentum has fallen. Gun control was one of the least salient issues in the 2024 election. This election cycle, even though ghost guns are surging and gun-inflicted suicides are increasing, it’s hard to find a single candidate talking about gun control.

But just because gun control has fallen out of the public eye, it doesn’t mean that a future Congress can’t take action.

In a recent polling survey, Searchlight asked voters how they feel about gun control and whether Democrats and Republicans can find any common ground on common-sense legislation.

While gun control is not a particularly salient issue, it’s not all bad news. Our polling found that 69% of Americans, including 54% of Republicans and 64% of Independents, believe it should be harder to buy a gun. Even a majority of gun owners (56%) agree with this statement.

Capitalizing on this support means reckoning with the nuances of public opinion.

When asked to list the single-biggest reason why Americans should own guns, the overwhelming majority of respondents listed self-defense, constitutional rights, and hunting. Only 10% of respondents did not support civilian gun ownership. That’s a fact gun control activists need to reckon with, but that doesn’t mean we can’t pass gun control legislation in the future.

It’s time to revamp our movement

For too long, the left has been quick to jump on mass shootings as justification for sweeping reforms few Americans support. In doing this, we squander the political opportunity these horrible shootings create and polarize an issue that should command broad-based support.

Perhaps the most infamous example of unpopular and impractical gun control proposals came when Beto O’Rourke said: “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15.”

I remember hearing that answer and trying to convince my mom to vote for him. She was dismissive, saying “No, Eliot, he has no chance of winning.” As we think about the best measures for addressing gun violence, we need less seventh-grade-Eliot attitude and more Eliot’s mom-attitude.

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That being said, the movement has reached some policy success. In 2022, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which expanded background checks, school safety programs, and mental health services. Unfortunately, much of its funding has been slashed by the Trump administration.

But the operative word here is bipartisan. We will need buy-in from some Republicans, Independents, and gun owners if we’re going to pass any more meaningful legislation. And to ensure this legislation is durable, we will need to emphasize a new set of policies and messaging that avoids alienating those with cultural values far different from my own.

There is still a path towards common-sense gun reform

Our polling found broad support for a series of large-scale reforms: enacting tough-on-crime public safety programs, requiring the safe storage of guns, and repealing the law giving broad immunity to gun manufacturers.

Together, these policies reflect an agenda capable of uniting Americans around effective gun violence prevention policies.

Of these policy reforms, increasing prison sentences for people who illegally have guns was the most strongly supported, with backing from 77% of voters, including 81% of Democrats, 78% of Republicans, and 71% of Independents.

This gets at one of the core ideological conflicts inside the gun control movement. We want to deter gun violence, but because we live under the progressive tent, we’re wary of tough-on-crime policies. This polling shows that harsher punishments for illegal gun owners actually command wide support across the political spectrum. While severe punishments are not the most effective way to deter homicides, it does point to the fact that voters are open to more enforcement. When district attorneys refuse to prosecute illegal guns, they’re on the wrong side of the public, and they’re making their community less safe.

The next most strongly supported policy is requiring guns kept at home to be locked in a safe, which 74% of voters — including 89% of Democrats, 64% of Republicans, 68% of Independents, and even 51% of gun owners — strongly or somewhat support.

Easy access to a gun in the house triples the likelihood of suicide and doubles the likelihood of homicide and fatal accidents. Requiring these guns to be locked in a safe not only reduces this threat, but toes the line between infringing on a constitutional right millions of Americans care about and keeping guns out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them.

Across the country, 26 states have enacted some sort of Child Access Prevention (CAP) law that holds parents criminally accountable if a child accesses a gun because it wasn’t stored properly. These laws have been found to decrease suicide rates by 14%, and those that require guns to be stored unloaded in safes have an even greater effect.

The final strongly supported policy is making it easier to sue gun companies that sell guns to those who aren’t allowed to have them, which a supermajority of voters — including a slight plurality of Republicans — strongly or somewhat support.

The Protection of Legal Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) was passed in 2005, and it gave unique, broad immunity to gun manufacturers. The result has been a chilling effect on all lawsuits aimed at the gun manufacturers. Repealing this law would not significantly reduce gun homicides, but it would force gun manufacturers to face more accountability when their guns malfunction or are knowingly distributed to people who use them for mass shootings.

Building a big tent for gun control

Finally, it is essential that all measures to limit gun violence and improve public safety are underpinned by a protection of legal and safe gun ownership.

The least popular policy in our polling was taking away guns from those who purchased one legally, but are no longer allowed to own one because of new laws. Combine this with the polling result showing 10% of Americans do not support civilian gun ownership, and it’s clear that public opinion here is not in favor of the most maximalist gun control positions.

While the issue’s low national importance is at times pointed to as the reason for the lack of legislative progress, the messaging surrounding it is also to blame. In that same poll, we found that traditional pro-gun control arguments weakened support for stricter gun reform by 14 points. Two separate partisan interpretations of these facts decreased support by 20 and 21 points, respectively.

Ultimately, any form of federal gun control will need to pass through the Senate, which means it will need the support of senators who represent culturally conservative states with strong cultures of gun ownership.

A member of Congress from New York City can appease seventh-grade Eliot’s views on guns, but Senate candidates in Montana, North Dakota, and Nebraska (all states that had Democratic senators during Democrats’ 2009 supermajority) will likely not. They should listen to their constituents’ actual views on guns and champion the policies supported by a supermajority of Americans.

Though this heterodox strategy would not have appealed to me 10 years ago, embracing a big tent on gun issues avoids fueling the backlash that has hindered our movement’s progress — and puts us back on a path towards winning.

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Once again, the Democratic Party has woken up on a Wednesday morning with a hangover and an identity crisis. The party is a sophomore in college, and it has two more years to find any sort of clarity.

This primary season has been a constant cycle of setting, unraveling, and resetting narratives about which faction is in charge of the party. Before the polls closed last night in Michigan, it seemed like the factional Left was going to make their most definitive statement yet. Then, El-Sayed’s projected near-twenty-point victory ended up being a single percentage point. The Michigan Democratic primary electorate is closely divided; this was not a definitive ideological mandate.

The party and much of the media covering these factional debates are hungry for a definitive statement about who controls the Democratic Party. And this is understandable; it’s been a good long while since there’s been a strong party leader to settle intra-party differences. Give or take ten years, depending on how you count it.

President Obama left as a popular lame duck. His chosen successor, Hillary Clinton, lost a devastating general election. President Biden beat the Left, empowered them to set his domestic policy agenda once he became President, alienated them over his policy towards Israel, and then helped set the conditions for Donald Trump’s return to power.

Each of these events has contributed to today’s state of fracture. The party is rudderless, has been for a long time, and everyone is searching through the electoral tea leaves to gain some clarity about which faction should be in charge.

This is a fool’s errand.

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This primary season has revealed some answers, namely a rising anti-establishment sentiment and an electorate that is increasingly wary of special interest groups and corporate influence. But when you look at the actual election results, the factional Left is still quite fractional. Insurgent House primaries in Colorado, New York, and Michigan have gotten a lot of media attention. But there are still many examples like Wesley Bell, who fended off his Left challenger in St. Louis last night. On the Senate side, El-Sayed is the only real example of a factional Left candidate competing in a critical swing-state election.

Dig into the demographics of these elections and the story becomes even more muddied. The Left has run on an agenda that is supposed to appeal to more working-class voters, but in states like New York and Michigan, their base is primarily the educated and well-off.

There just isn’t a neat narrative to describe any of this.

I think we should all get ready to be satisfied with being unsatisfied, and for a good long while too. That’s because the debate over what the Democratic Party is, the policies it prioritizes, and who should lead it is still very much an open question. The Searchlight Institute is working to shape this conversation, and ultimately, a more definitive answer will come when presidential candidates start competing in the 2028 primaries.

Even then, the leader who emerges could be ideologically left on economics, while moving to the center on issues like energy and immigration — two positions where the Democratic Party was once definitively very left-wing.

What do you label a future Democratic Party leader who rejects 2020-era litmus tests over issues like border decriminalization and fracking bans, while also embracing a form of Medicare for All, a wealth tax on billionaires, and a pledge to end all military aid to Israel? Do we have the right vocabulary to describe this possible outcome?

Thus far, I say no. According to most media outlets, the battle over the Democratic Party is still being fought between the Left and Center. I don’t think either ideological label aptly describes the factional war. The candidates running this primary cycle have been quite ideologically heterodox. This applies to candidates across the factional divide.

“Moderates” like James Talarico and Josh Turek regularly bash big corporations and billionaires on the campaign trail. At the same time, the face of the factional Left, Abdul El-Sayed, rarely mentioned climate policy and modified his Medicare for All plan to allow for workers and their families to keep their insurance — a policy change that is a pivot away from Bernie Sanders’ health care plan, which has long been the benchmark on the Left.

I mention these examples not to nitpick the media’s coverage or to completely dismiss simple ideological labels. Each of these candidates can still be generalized into the Left or moderate camp. Strategically, the best move for a candidate like El-Sayed would be to moderate and explicitly court swing voters who have deeply held conservative positions on issues like immigration, crime, and energy policy.

But everybody needs to dampen their expectation that a clear factional victory will happen this November or even the November two years after that. America’s enduring and inescapable ideological diversity will ensure that both sides will need to compromise if any enduring governing majority can form.

I know this fact is uncomfortable for some people to admit. The Left, in particular, built a political project assuming that there was a secret majority of voters that hated billionaires, wanted to fight climate change, and opposed any form of order at the border. This coalition does not exist. By the same token, there isn’t a secret coalition that loves data centers, unfettered support of Israel, and is completely satisfied with the American health care system.

In the grand scheme of American history, this ideological diversity is quite modest. We’ve been far more divided, and we’ve still kept the faith. Walt Whitman, writing in the aftermath of the Civil War, has some words that apply to today’s fractious Democratic Party and the country at large.

“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem… Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations… Here is the life of the Republic.”

There hasn’t been a winner of the factional battle this primary season, but rather an assortment of wins for the factional Left, heterodox outsiders, and yes, even a few bog-standard establishment politicians. Whoever eventually takes control of the Democratic Party and establishes a durable governing majority must unite this “teeming nation of nations.” That’s one of the oldest rules in American politics. And it’s a good one.

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There’s a lot of speculation about what AI-induced job loss will look like in the future. Will AI reduce demand for entry-level work? Will AI reduce the white-collar wage premium? Will AI cause entire industries to simply… vanish?

These are all valid questions, and there are many AI experts and economists working on them. But as an economist who studies labor markets and unemployment programs, I think there is also more research we should be conducting today to make sure we’re ready for a variety of potential job loss scenarios.

As I wrote last month, the existing evidence shows that public sector reemployment programs, which are the exact programs that would need to be scaled up to help solve a potential AI job apocalypse, are not particularly impactful. How do we help policymakers design new programs that could be more effective?

The answer to this problem and many others quite like it could be found if we dedicated more resources to understanding disruption in the labor market. I believe this work would be best accomplished through a coordinated research program that operates inside the Department of Labor.

I’m as interested in the speculative essays and podcasts about AI job loss as everyone else. But it’s time to think critically about how to create more government-backed institutions that are designed to actually solve these future problems.

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The questions we need to answer

Before I explain the proposal for this coordinated federal research program, let’s look at some high-level labor market questions that a research institution like this could help answer.

• How is AI impacting the labor market? So far, AI seems to have had a limited effect on the labor market. But it’s unclear whether this will always be the case, or if AI is having an effect that is hard to detect. Most of the estimates of AI effects rely on a measure of “AI exposure” by occupation, but we could simply not have an accurate understanding of the occupations most exposed to AI.

• Why has US employment fallen behind other nations? Two decades ago, the US labor market was the envy of other large countries, exceeding the employment rates of most of our peers. Today, that situation has reversed, and the US lags behind peer countries. That means a future of AI-induced unemployment could hit the US especially hard. Why is this happening? How can we fix it? These are important questions to answer, even outside the context of artificial intelligence.

• Why is unemployment duration increasing? Even though the unemployment rate is low and stable, unemployment duration—how long an individual is unemployed for—keeps rising. The average unemployment duration is currently 25.5 weeks, and it had never exceeded 21 weeks before 2007. This is an increasing problem for both the unemployed and potential employers, and I have not seen a satisfying answer for why.

Each of these challenges is important—but we do not have the proper institutions focused on solving them. Instead, they are dealt with on a piecemeal basis by individual academic economists, think tank staff, and journalists. Each of these players uses data from government surveys or administrative records, but there’s no pipeline that directly leads from problem to diagnosis to solution.

A coordinated research program for AI job loss

Imagine if the government looked at these issues and created new institutions dedicated to addressing them. This would need to extend beyond academics examining a problem and actually empowering the builders and tinkerers to solve them.

For example, right now the federal government simply observes the increase in length of unemployment. Certain academics and labor market analysts propose theories for why this is happening, but the problem continues to go unsolved. A coordinated federal government research program could both observe this problem and fund and restructure reemployment programs to be more impactful.

We already have examples of this working on a smaller scale. The Department of Labor funds states to run “Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment” (RESEA) programs. This is a program modeled after the success of a similar program in Nevada, which reduced unemployment in the state by over three weeks on average.

RESEA started as a pilot program in 2005, serving 77,000 UI claimants in its first year. Today, nearly all states run a RESEA program, serving over 1.2 million UI claimants. The Department of Labor’s Chief Evaluation Office works with states to help them evaluate the success of these programs.

RESEA is arguably the most evidence-mandated federal program — the problem is that it is still backwards-looking. States can evaluate new ideas, but there’s no guarantee that the successful programs will be scaled up or that ineffective ones will be eliminated. The Chief Evaluation Office is constrained; it can provide evaluation support and technical assistance, but is not in a position to scale successes or kill failed models.

To prepare for an unprecedented labor market disruption, the Chief Evaluation Office needs a significantly larger mandate with the power to actually ensure that successful labor market interventions are scaled across the country.

There are existing coordinated research programs this could be modeled after, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA has been used to push forward the development of new technologies that would be useful for defense. Critical inventions like the GPS and the internet all benefited from DARPA-coordinated research.

Following the DARPA model, project managers within the Department of Labor’s coordinated research program would be empowered to identify, support, and expand programs that have been proven to assist reemployment. For example, if Nevada’s RESEA program was able to reduce unemployment duration by three weeks, more focused experimentation and milestone payments for success could identify specific mechanisms in the program that assist reemployment even more.

Instead of each state experimenting with ideas in near isolation, project managers would fund specific experiments to improve program operations. This could be continued grants to states, but could also include for-profit, non-profit, and academic partners.

The key is making sure that evidence-backed reemployment programs are acted upon. A successful program results in more funding and scaling; a program without success gets cut. This sort of framework allows for iterative, goal-directed research, rather than an ad-hoc program evaluation process.

While the impacts of AI so far are limited, we could be on the verge of unprecedented labor market disruption. A coordinated research program embedded inside the Department of Labor could serve as a critical institution to advise policymakers on the programs that will be needed to solve future issues in the labor market. There’s a lot of speculation about what AI-induced job displacement might look like, but this is a tangible step that could be taken today to solve the problems of the future.

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When Politico’s Jonathan Martin traveled to North Dakota over the Fourth of July weekend for the opening of the new Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library, he sat down with three prominent local Republicans—Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Gov. Kelly Armstrong, and Sen. Kevin Cramer. Together, they worked to place Roosevelt’s big government politics in the framework of today’s GOP.

The conversation was very revealing.

Roosevelt, Martin noted, had subscribed to a brand of populism that was, at its core, incredibly bullish on robust government action. The Colonel spent his nearly two terms combating the power of robber barons, fighting to strengthen the military, erecting dams throughout the West, laying the groundwork for the National Parks System, and building the Panama Canal—all of which suggests that Roosevelt’s populism extolled the role of the public sector.

President Trump, of course, is also known as a populist. So Martin asked his subjects to square the circle: Doesn’t populism sorta point towards growing the government?

Cramer wasn’t having it: “Roosevelt,” the senator explained, “looked at government as a solution, whereas the president looks at government as a problem,” at which point Governor Armstrong interjected with a laugh: “And we have 140 years of proving President Trump right.” In essence, the three modern-day Republicans retreated into the old Reagan vernacular. As the Gipper famously argued: “The nine scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

At the same time, however, in New York Harbor 1,500 miles to the east, Vice President JD Vance was delivering a very different July Fourth message. Far from painting a picture of oppressive government gone bad, he was ruminating on the long story of James Buchanan Eads, a self-trained civil engineer who worked with the federal government to build the Ironclad gunboats the Union commissioned during the Civil War to erect the Mississippi River jetty system commissioned by Congress, and to construct the first major bridge to cross the Mississippi at St. Louis.

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Vance went on to regale listeners with a second story—this one centering on the son of German immigrants named Henry Kaiser. A high-school dropout, Kaiser abandoned a stockroom job in Utica, New York, to eventually find his way to Spokane, Washington where he founded a business that helped build the Hoover Dam, vast stretches of highway across the Western United States, and the shipyards required to replace the Navy vessels lost at Pearl Harbor during the Second World War—projects, we should note, that were financed by the federal government.

Vance was focused on James Buchanan Eads and Henry Kaiser because their stories highlight individual ingenuity. In the spirit of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, they harkened to a notion that, as the vice president put it, “our history is one of people carving a great civilization out of the wilderness.” That, he argued, is what makes America great—the reality that “everything that we have done, everything that we have done as a country, we have done together, not as citizens divided against each other, but as a common people working towards a common future.”

That said, hanging over Vance’s argument, but never addressed directly, was the element that tied all the projects he celebrated together: the presence of public authority.

Eads and Kaiser weren’t ensconced in cabins off Walden Pond. Their work was done hand-in-hand with a government that sometimes funded the work, and at other times explicitly made it possible. Government was contracting for the projects, or providing necessary permits, or financing the various endeavors. However much he tried to avoid saying so explicitly, Vance was nakedly making an argument for big government.

Which just begs the question: Which of these two conflicting visions represents the true and only conservatism? If bureaucrats and bureaucracy are forever standing in the way of America’s wellbeing, as so many Reagan-style conservatives continue to argue, how can Vance’s litany of examples of our national greatness be suffused with examples of government action?

Much as Republicans might want to elide past these distinctions, the reality is that the two narratives are fundamentally incompatible. You can’t make the Mississippi navigable, or build the Hoover Dam, or construct the nation’s expressways, or build up our Navy if, as the North Dakotans clearly articulated, government is a scourge, any more than you can make a ham and cheese sandwich without having bread, ham and cheese.

Some on the right have argued that “abundance” represents a nose under the tent for conservatism within progressive circles—that the popularity of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, among other literature pointing in the same direction, reflects a realization among Democrats that government is too often a hindrance. But as Klein recently argued, “abundance” is bigger than cutting superfluous red tape—it’s about green-lighting the sorts of projects and initiatives that would serve the public interest.

As Vance’s chosen examples reveal, those projects and initiatives, far from being the exclusive province of the private sector, often begin with, or depend on, public authority. And conservatives are at a loss when trying to metabolize the competing impulses that were expressed by the North Dakotans and the vice president.

This dissonance is playing out in real-time with how the right is handling the opportunities available through renewable energy resources. We on the left are so convinced they’re in the bag for Big Oil—and, to be sure, those accusations bear out in some instances—that we’ve failed to notice they don’t know which side of the debate over domestic energy production they want to be on.

Just look at what’s happening in Ohio and Texas, two places in which public authority controlled by the GOP has been used both to propel and to block the clean energy transition.

Texas leverages its state authority to explicitly prohibit counties from imposing regulations on unincorporated land. That is, even if a community objects to how someone who owns land wants to use it—leasing their land to, say, utility-scale solar—the local government is precluded from imposing land-use restrictions that might get in the way.

Ohio, taking a very different tack, passed legislation to empower local government to upend new development. Incensed that solar and wind developers were leasing land from local farmers on which they would place turbines or solar panels, conservatives in Columbus passed a law, Senate Bill 52, which explicitly licenses counties to weigh in. Unsurprisingly, dozens of counties had enacted bans on either solar or wind farms, or both.

Now, any given conservative can be forgiven for taking either view to a point—but no one should be given license to argue that they are ideologically coherent.

Those of us on the left are conflicted too, in as much as we both envision government stepping in where the market fails, and we worry about coercive government officials, a la Robert Moses.

But as the debate over “a liberalism that builds” illustrates, we’re trying to strike the right balance. From the progressive movement’s founding in the late 19th century, those wanting to use government for good have struggled to centralize power so public authority is more effective, or to diffuse it so it’s less coercive.

In my book, I distill this debate to our Hamiltonian instinct to build power up into institutions that can resolve “tragedies of the commons” and our Jeffersonian fear that those same institutions will bulldoze powerless communities.

This tension serves as a backdrop for one of the central debates inside the Democratic Party and was explored in books by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Yoni Appelbaum and Jennifer Pahlka, as well as forthcoming titles from Adam Jentleson, Diego Zambrano, and Nick Bagley.

Needless to say, these debates are not happening inside the Republican Party.

There are certainly examples of Republicans advancing legislation that aligns with the Abundance movement. The recent bipartisan federal housing law is one piece of evidence, and of course, Texas’ state preemption counts as another. But Vance’s speech hardly makes the GOP the party of abundance. Trump’s executive branch is too busy cutting funding for critical research and coercing states and localities to adopt policies they abhor (for example, on wind farms) to have any credibility in the abundance movement. Go even further into GOP history and you find Reagan’s fear-mongering that the government is wholly and entirely evil.

It’s not our job to point the GOP out of its jam. Nevertheless, all of us underneath the big tent need to offer a more compelling answer of our own. We can all agree that we don’t need another Robert Moses. We do, however, need a public sector capable of harnessing American ingenuity to build vast new transmission systems for clean energy, much more housing, and the sort of modern infrastructure befitting a nation as prosperous and promising as our own.

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