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Last night, we witnessed the beginning of what could be a new era in American politics. The collapse of the MAGA coalition. The rise of the Big Tent Democratic Party.

We flipped Senate seats in Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, and Iowa. We turned Republicans’ gerrymandered districts into dummymanders. Counties that had backed Trump by as much as 30 points were painted blue. The states that normally turn on razor-thin margins, like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina, were not close. We saw an insta-call for a Democrat running for Senate in Georgia — truly something to marvel at.

A few months ago, I wrote an essay in the New York Times that laid out what an optimistic midterm might look like, given the fact that Democrats were embracing the exact sort of ideological diversity they needed to expand the map: “In every Senate race where, under favorable conditions, they are in contention, we will gain eight seats, taking a 55-seat majority.”

When we’re done counting votes in Alaska and Mississippi, my prediction might’ve been an underestimate. In January, JD Vance could be swearing in nine new Democratic Senators, and the Senate majority will be at 56 seats. That means a supermajority is within arm’s reach, and in two years they’ll have the opportunity to grab it.

Multiple ingredients go into a win this big. The first factor was obviously the backlash to Trump. When you start a reckless war abroad and raise the cost of living at home, the American people will notice. Trump’s galling levels of self-enrichment also seem to have finally made an impression on the voters, as corruption was one of the deciding issues this election.

But voters didn’t just oppose Trump; they also cast their ballot for heterodox candidates who followed an old and oft-forgotten lesson in American politics: Run on the issues that appeal to the voters in your race.

James Talarico built a historic coalition of Hispanics, disaffected long-time Republicans, and young voters to finally achieve the dream of a Blue Texas. He called himself a “border security Democrat” and pledged to stand up to his party on energy policy. He also threaded together issues like political corruption and corporate greed and connected them to voters’ concerns over cost-of-living. In the governor’s race, Gina Hinojosa unseated the seemingly invulnerable Greg Abbott with a campaign that blended a left-wing populist position on data centers and a tack to the center on crime and culture. In one ad, she said, “My pronouns are mom, Texan, and soon to be governor.”

Kansas elected the first Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century. Adam Hamilton, the megachurch pastor and community leader, called for an end to political corruption, but also promised to tackle the affordability crisis with an “all-the-above” energy strategy. In Iowa, Josh Turek blended prairie populism with a pragmatic stance on issues of trans participation in sports. Rob Sand, a politician who built his career on a brand of clean and accountable government, and separated himself from the national party, coasted in the state’s gubernatorial election.

From the Rio Grande Valley to the Lehigh Valley, we saw Democrats flip congressional seats by denouncing special interests such as AIPAC, while assuring skeptical voters that they agreed with them on important cultural values. Even in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed closed with a message that promised border security and penned an op-ed for Fox News targeting skeptical Trump voters.

It’s worth remembering how implausible all this seemed just a year, or even really a few months ago.

When my book Supermajority was published in September, I set an ambitious goal for the Democratic Party: 60 Senate seats and 370 votes in the Electoral College. To build this sort of durable political power, I said Democrats needed to expand into deep-red terrain and compete in swaths of the country that many pundits and political strategists had written off years ago.

Last night, that’s exactly what we saw. Democrats across the country successfully campaigned as a big tent. It’s possible to elect DSA candidates in our bluest cities and flip Senate seats in some of our reddest states.

Some will say that a coalition that stretches from Claire Valdez in Brooklyn to Jamie Ager in rural North Carolina couldn’t possibly hold, much less pass any real policy change. But this, too, is wrong; ideological diversity was a trademark of the governing coalitions that delivered the New Deal, Civil Rights, and the Great Society. The Democratic tent might be unruly, but when it comes to goals like achieving universal health care, expanding the safety net, and making rich people and big corporations pay their fair share, there will always be far more that unites us than divides us.

In the grand scheme of things, last night was just the first step in what will hopefully be at least a two-cycle process.

We learned that the map is far more expansive than many imagined — if Democrats expand the map to Kansas and Mississippi, then there’s no seat that is truly safe for Republicans.

But if we want to achieve the congressional supermajority that is a prerequisite to sweeping policy change, then we can’t forget the sort of heterodox politics that made last night possible. The big tent is the future of the Democratic Party. It can defeat right-wing authoritarianism, and when it holds governing power, it can deliver for the American people.

After last night, we know we don’t have to settle for narrow majorities — that we can break this cycle of polarization we have been stuck in for more than a decade.

Now, we know what is possible. And we’re just getting started.

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In the days and weeks after Election Day, takes will start flying around the internet — many of them will be ill-informed, designed to flatter a particular political bias, and detrimental to the epistemics of our election discourse.

As a veteran pollster, I’ve watched this cycle play out across numerous elections, and it seems to get worse every time. The truth is that we’ll learn a lot when voters head to the polls on Tuesday, but it takes time and patience to ascertain the right facts and form the right opinions.

Don’t let yourself be fooled into buying a B.S. narrative based on incomplete data or motivated reasoning. I’ve compiled a list of the most common ill-conceived post-election takes below. If you see them, please ignore them.

Take 1: “This electoral performance can be repeated next election cycle.”

This election is shaping up to be very favorable towards Democrats. That means that every Democratic candidate is benefiting from a voter base that is both more motivated to vote blue and incredibly unmotivated to vote red.

In these circumstances, the baseline expectation is that Democrats gain seats. While candidate quality and issue selection matter, I worry people will discount the simple fact that it’s a bad year to be a Republican. It’s boring to write “people are unhappy with Trump” for the 100th time, but they really are very unhappy with Trump.

It’s important to remember that Democrats will not be running against a desperately unpopular Republican president forever. That means an election performance in 2026 is not necessarily an indicator of being able to win in 2028 or 2030; the electorate simply will not be the same. That’s why I always look at relative performance between candidates and do not overvalue what are ultimately structural factors that will change between election cycles.

Take 2: “Everything this losing candidate did was wrong/everything this winning candidate did was right.”

Campaigns are complicated. And winning or losing is a single binary metric. It is entirely possible for a candidate to do many things right and still lose, or vice versa, which is one of the reasons we study metrics like overperformance. For example, Dan Osborn lost his Nebraska Senate race in 2024, but he was the single biggest overperformer of the election cycle.

It’s genuinely very hard to figure out what parts of a campaign went well or poorly. While I’m very happy to talk tactics on X dot com, I feel bad for the folks who have run solid campaigns that couldn’t quite get over the line to victory. Just take a deep breath and remember that one viral clip or embarrassing social media post you saw likely did not decide an entire election.

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Take 3: “The margin of victory is equal to this thing we did; therefore, we caused the win.”

This is my personal pet peeve. Margin of victory means the difference in votes between the winning and losing candidate, and in races that get a lot of attention it is often small, as low as a few thousand votes.

This leads people to use the margin as a way to stress how large the impact of their demographic or issue of choice is. For example, an issue-advocacy group might say “We knocked more doors than the margin of victory.” However, anyone vaguely familiar with statistics should know that just because two numbers are similar does not mean they are related.

An especially egregious instance of this false comparison showed up in a recent paper on the political effects of the Inflation Reduction Act — the researcher compared the number of voters potentially influenced by the economic effects of the IRA to Trump’s margin of victory, implying that a bigger clean energy package could have potentially won the presidential election.

The margin of victory in a marquee Senate race could be equal to the number of doors knocked by a particular organization, the number of people who went to see You Can See Everything last weekend, and the number of people who say that McDonald’s is their second-favorite burger, all at once, and still not be evidence that any of those things mattered.

Take 4: “Democrats didn’t do as well as expected”... before the count is finished.

Some states count faster than others; I’m looking at you, California. This means that even the day after an election, popular-vote totals can seriously underrate the number of Democratic votes nationwide. Alaska is also a bit slow, since they need to run its ranked-choice voting system. So while I’d love to see reforms to speed up vote counting, the best way to handle it is simply to wait… and not form any takes based on incomplete national ballot totals!

On election night, there are often minor panics during the ballot counting process. This year, we don’t quite know how this will play out, but usually, Democrats are more likely to vote early or use provisional ballots, which can mean their votes are not tabulated until the end of the night or the next day. If you’re watching raw totals, this could look like “red mirage” followed by a late blue shift. It’s important to remember that there are no new votes being cast after the polls close on election night. It’s just that counting takes a while.

There’s a lot we’re going to learn about American politics after tens of millions of Americans cast their ballot Tuesday: what issues mattered to voters, how leftist candidates compare to moderates, and how lame a duck Trump will be over the next two years. Jumping to sweeping and inaccurate takes before the data comes in will only undermine the important truths we must glean from election night.

This is a rare opportunity to get real data about voter behavior; let’s make it count.

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“Starve the beast.” “Read my lips.” “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

For more than a generation, and with the active encouragement of certain divisive figures such as Grover Norquist, those working inside the political arena have taken it as gospel that the American people are dead set against taxes. The fear is simple: that Democrats who propose to raise additional revenue will be framed as “tax-and-spend” liberals; that telling someone who is already struggling to shell out more to the government is political kryptonite.

Like death, taxes may be unavoidable—but the perceived wisdom has been that Americans will stop at almost nothing to minimize them, and there’s nothing more politically unwise than to be tagged as a Walter Mondale-style tax raiser. (For those too young to remember, Mondale lost 49 states to Ronald Reagan in 1984, and his tax plan was a major focus of the campaign).

There is no denying that no one takes joy in forking over a portion of their income for any reason—but, of course, we do it all the time. Americans buy goods and services every day. And we don’t invariably choose the cheapest option among what’s on the offer. Americans choose between the Cheesecake Factory and Burger King, between premium gas and regular unleaded, between a trip to the cinema and watching whatever they’re showing on TBS (probably The Shawshank Redemption, again).

It’s simply a fact of everyday existence that we each face disparate prices on similar but different products. And when asked to choose between them, we typically evaluate the options, not solely on cost, but on the value we’ll get from any given choice.

The same is true of taxes: People are often willing to move into jurisdictions with high property taxes in order to gain access to what they perceive to be higher-quality and better-resourced schools—not everyone is racing to live where the school boards run on a shoestring budget. Of course, many Americans are also moving to red states with low taxes because they don’t feel like high-tax blue jurisdictions offer a fair bang for buck. But that’s as much an indictment of blue-local governance as it is a reflection of American thriftiness.

This points to a different way of thinking about taxes, one that is much too underdiscussed: Are people getting real value for the financial contribution they’re making to the system?

This is the root of the problem, particularly for those of us who consider ourselves progressive: Too many Americans don’t believe the government offers them a good deal. Regardless of what they’re compelled to fork over to the IRS, their impression is that they’re paying too much for too little. And while that’s terrible news for those of us who believe that public authority is a necessary force in building a better society, reducing inequality, and pursuing social justice, it also offers a ray of hope.

Counterintuitively, the public’s growing resentment that government doesn’t deliver suggests that, rather than having a religious fervor for ever-lower taxes, voters would be willing to pay their fair share for higher-quality returns. And so rather than engage in a race to the bottom on taxes with Republicans, as Democrats such as Chris Van Hollen have proposed to do, we instead need to demonstrate that people are getting good value for their investment.

Recent Searchlight polling results bear this out. Yes, of course a majority of Americans say they pay too much in taxes. But by a margin of 43 percentage points, voters also say paying taxes is part of being a good citizen.

So why the discrepancy? By a 53-point margin, voters say they don’t trust the government to make good spending decisions with tax dollars. Put another way, much as Americans think they pay too much in taxes, they’re more concerned about whether what they pay is being expended in a useful way.

Perhaps even more revealing, when asked what would make them feel better about paying their taxes, even though they were not restricted to giving one answer, only 41% of respondents chose “paying less.” Meanwhile, 57% preferred the choice of “having a better sense of where my money went,” and, remarkably enough, Republicans (18 points) and Democrats (12 points) were both more likely to select this answer.

My interpretation: people object to paying taxes less out of principle than out of efficacy. If government worked well—if it delivered higher value—they wouldn’t object to the degree they do. So we should fix that.

There are, of course, other factors at play here: whether, for example, other people are paying their fair share of the nation’s burden. But all of this points to why the burgeoning effort to enhance what insiders call “state capacity” and what ordinary people likely think of as “making sure it doesn’t stink so bad to visit the DMV” is so important. The electorate’s (too frequently correct) assessment that government is incompetent is the foundation for its aversion to paying more.

This is part of a much broader challenge. For years, Democrats, fearful of abusive public authority, have sought (in the spirit of the legal scholar Nick Bagley) to impose procedural safeguards. And while curtailing the government’s propensity to make terrible mistakes, those procedural safeguards have worked to diminish the government’s ability to get things done.

Conservatives will continue to tag progressives as Mondale-style tax-and-spenders—and there’s no denying that those of us on the left and center-left do, in fact, believe that public authority should step in where the free market fails. Our counter shouldn’t be to deny what we believe—most Americans are on our side—but to demonstrate that we’re better suited to get Americans real value for their investment, and that our detractors are likely, through some combination of corruption and incompetence, to send those hard-earned dollars down the drain.

Rather than starve the beast, a better tomorrow demands that we make government work. Americans have had good reason to criticize the workings of the public sector—and those on the left and center-left should take those critiques seriously. But this nation has fixed these kinds of problems before—we’ve turned chaotic, incompetent, sclerotic institutions around.

This must be the essential subtext to conversations about tax policy. Rather than trying to sidestep reality altogether with ill-conceived anti-tax proposals, Washington’s policy agenda should get to the root of the reason Americans are so cynical about handing the taxman money they would otherwise invest on their own.

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Ashley Schapitl is a 15-year veteran of Congress and the Executive Branch, having most recently served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Chief Communications Advisor at the Senate Finance Committee. In these roles she oversaw communications strategy for passage of and implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act. In her spare time, she serves as an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in Hill East and writes the Capital Commonsense Substack with fellow Washingtonians.

While Democrats have a lot of policy ideas, it’s less clear how they’re planning on raising the revenue necessary to pay for them.

I spent four years on the Senate Finance Committee, from 2019 to 2023, working to solve this exact problem. We proposed a dozen different policies, but only two of the major revenue provisions—the Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (CAMT) and the excise tax on stock buybacks—were signed into law.

There was another somewhat overlooked provision: $80 billion was allotted to enhance capacity at the IRS.

Funding the IRS wasn’t the flashiest idea, but our theory of the case was that working people had to see the federal government prioritizing the enforcement and collection of tax obligations from the ultra-wealthy—those who could afford to dedicate resources to avoiding their taxes.

Following the law’s passage, I moved to the Treasury Department and led messaging efforts on how to sell this massive investment to the public.

I saw what the agency could do when it had the resources to do its job and change the incentives for tax avoidance at the very top of society. We pursued high-income non-filers, audited corporate jets, and unwound byzantine partnership structures.

Unfortunately, Trump and his GOP majority defunded our nation’s tax police, and much of this work was reversed. But this experience gave me a window into what America would look like if we had the sort of trust in our tax system that many Scandinavian countries have—when the public knows that everyone, including the ultra-wealthy, is paying their fair share.

I knew Republicans would never support this work, but what surprised me the most over the past two years was how my progressive allies began to mimic anti-tax GOP talking points. What started as a murmur has now turned into a full-blown bipartisan tax revolt.

While there are many examples, I’ll point to the one that has troubled me the most: Senator Cory Booker’s plan to exempt those making under $75,000 from federal income taxes by doubling the standard deduction. This reform alone would amount to a $5 trillion tax cut, one of the biggest in American history, and it would weaken our ability to not just expand social welfare programs, but fund our current ones.

I understand the impulse here. Democrats have seen Republicans promise tax cuts in exchange for political support for decades. But there are signs that this message is no longer working. A recent Politico poll showed that only 9% of voters say taxes is the most important issue, and tax cuts are significantly less popular than tax increases on the wealthy.

To advance good politics, Democrats don’t need to become a watered-down version of the anti-tax GOP. And to pass good policy, Democrats simply can’t fund the robust social safety net Democrats say they support if the party is going to adopt the view that only high earners should pay federal income taxes. Nor should revenue from new taxes on the wealthy be directed to blunt, costly tax cuts, rather than toward expanding social programs and credits that benefit low-income Americans.

As Democrats gear up for 2028, we need to combat this tax revolt and restore voters’ faith in our tax code.

There are a lot of great ideas for tax reform: raising the corporate tax rate, cracking down on loopholes that benefit wealthy small businesses, ending step-up in basis—but I want to focus on the one I had experience with: refunding the tax police.

If Democrats take back power, they need to restore robust funding to the IRS. And they should pitch this as an effort to unrig the economy and make the rich pay their fair share.

They should start small and secure quick wins. While complex audits of multinational corporations are important, these take time, and it’s better to deliver a proof of concept. Start with the low-hanging fruit.

For instance, in February 2024, the IRS launched an initiative targeting roughly 125,000 cases of high earners who simply had not filed a return since 2017—more than 25,000 of them with income above $1 million, and over 100,000 with income between $400,000 and $1 million. These were not particularly complicated cases; people just hadn’t filed at all. The only reason the program had lain dormant was that the agency lacked the staff to work the cases. This initiative quickly showed results. Within a year, these delinquent millionaires coughed up $1.3 billion in tax dollars.

A parallel effort opened audits into corporate jets that were written off as business expenses, when they were actually used for personal travel.

Not even the loudest anti-IRS member of Congress wants to defend a millionaire who didn’t bother to file or a private-jet user who was claiming a bogus tax break. And even relatively small-dollar wins had the power to demonstrate we were committed to enforcing the tax code at the top.

It’s important to remember that this can be redistributive policy. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that $1 provided to the IRS for these types of efforts can return $6 of already-owed taxes from the wealthiest Americans.

To build on the work the IRS did under the Biden administration, the IRS should also invest in new technology. The wealthy avoid and evade taxes with complexity, creating pass-through structures, tiered partnerships, layered entities that no human auditor can track in any reasonable amount of time. That is precisely the terrain where the IRS should begin deploying machine learning: unpacking large, complex partnerships in a multibillion dollar initiative, and using models to decide which complicated returns are worth a closer look. And with IRS staffing down by more than a quarter, the use of AI will be a necessity in a future Democratic administration.

Ultimately, it all comes down to rebuilding trust in our tax system. A recent Pew survey found that 61% of Americans are bothered “a lot” by the feeling that some wealthy people do not pay their fair share, and roughly four in five are bothered at least somewhat. At the same time, a poll from Searchlight found that the vast majority of Americans believe paying taxes makes them a good citizen.

Democrats need to learn this lesson: voters aren’t frustrated by the fact that they have to pay taxes; it’s that they don’t trust that other people are paying their fair share too.

In the end, a tax revolt is a legitimacy problem that must be answered by showing that the people at the top cannot simply buy their way out. Make the rich pay and make sure everyone else knows it. Then, we can expand the sort of social programs so many Americans rely on.

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Want to know what undecided voters are thinking about? Ask a (reputable) pollster. Want to know what campaigns want them to think about? Watch some ads.

At the tail end of a midterm cycle dominated by cost of living, Democratic attacks are converging on a closing message about corruption. By my rough count, there are dozens of ads dinging dirty-dealing Republicans airing all across the expansive Senate map.

Here are just a few examples. In Ohio, Jon Husted has been attacked for accepting outright bribes from an energy utility. Ashley Hinson in Iowa and Mike Rogers in Michigan are being hit for selling out to big pharma donors. In Mississippi, Cindy Hyde-Smith has been called out for “pocketing money from special interests,” while kicking voters off Medicaid.

The most obvious case is Ken Paxton, who even a good number of Texas Republicans think is corrupt. We also shouldn’t overlook Susan Collins, who has been credibly accused of rewriting federal contracting rules to benefit her husband.

While I haven’t waded into ad buys in frontline House races, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Democrats have spent a whopping $182 million on ads focused on corruption in the fight to control Congress. I also have to acknowledge the spectre of Jeffrey Epstein and his associates, whose financial connections to various Republicans loom large ahead of Election Day.

Clearly, Democratic campaigns are confident that corruption will be an effective cudgel as they look to close out the most competitive races in the country. Based on recent polling, they’re making a good bet. A recent FOX survey found that 88% of likely voters reported being extremely or very concerned about corruption.

Now, FOX’s findings don’t suggest that corruption is the issue that voters are most troubled by; that’s obviously the cost of living. But Democrats are savvily tying pocketbook issues to corruption in their messaging. And Searchlight’s research suggests that it’ll work.

While “corruption” and “affordability” are usually polled separately, we found that voters see them as linked: If corruption is addressed, then elected officials will focus on what actually matters to the people, such as cost of living. It’s not hard to understand why they feel that way. They’ve seen the same intractable issues get worse and worse over the years, while a paralyzed Congress is seemingly unable or unwilling to act on their behalf.

But here’s what Democrats need to understand: Searchlight polling shows that 71% of voters believe that any “Typical Politician” is corrupt. And that perception crosses party lines; 68% of voters think “Republicans” are corrupt and 61% say the same about “Democrats.”

This came up in corruption focus groups Searchlight conducted over the summer. Voters’ frustrations extended far past Trump and the construction site formerly known as the White House. The common refrain from the swing voters we talked to was that most elected officials in BOTH parties are corrupt and beholden to special interests or donors over their constituents.

Regarding presidential corruption, participants generally thought that Trump was “equally corrupt” as his predecessors. One man said, “I would say it was better hidden before, and Trump’s just more blatant about it.”

This should not be seen as an argument equating Trump’s corrupt conduct to Democrats. He’s treated federal dollars as an extractable resource, sold access to the highest levels of our government, and handed out more no-bid contracts to cronies than I can count. The steady drip of stories covering his outrageous corruption has started to burn in—almost two-thirds of Americans now believe that Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself.

But Democrats need to understand the very real perception voters have about how politics works, and they need to act on it.

This anti-corruption agenda can start with simple reforms. Searchlight president Adam Jentleson outlined some earlier this year: release a regular timesheet showing voters what you did with your day, commit to a minimum number of public town halls, and be willing to remove members who are suffering from mental decline. Rachel Bedard has an excellent idea for Congress to create an office of public physicians to regularly assess elected officials.

There’s a lot more to address, but these are all reforms that voters said would enhance their trust in our political system.

Democrats are right to run against corruption. But they can’t treat it as solely a campaign issue. They need to take voters at their word and do more to address corruption within our government should they take majorities in one or both chambers of Congress. Yes, that includes satisfying the urge to hold the Administration accountable, but it also means looking inward as well.

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A growing number of climate advocates, energy experts, and national security officials are voicing their support for BAAJA—the new bipartisan permitting bill that was introduced in the Senate. They’re attracted to the provisions that will turbocharge the clean energy buildout, meet growing electricity demand, and help decarbonize the economy.

But there is another reason to like this bill: it contains the strongest data center regulations Congress will likely be able to pass while Trump remains in office.

The most important feature is that it makes data centers pay for the new energy transmission infrastructure required to service them and the energy demand they place on the grid. This is important because currently, as Robinson Meyer explained, “Utilities are forcing all of their customers to pay for the cost of transmission upgrades to serve those data centers.”

The bill goes further because it forces data centers to pay for any energy infrastructure that is “stranded,” meaning it’s built for data centers that don’t end up using it. It also allows states to charge data centers higher rates, which could then be used to subsidize the rates paid by other customers. Altogether, these regulations will significantly increase the regulatory burden on data centers and respond to voters’ concerns over rising energy prices.

In an Orwellian turn, critics are trying to misrepresent the bill and its strong accountability measures as somehow being pro-data center. Today, Ro Khanna said, “It would be tone deaf if Congress makes it easier to build data centers right after an election with bipartisan rage against shoving them down the throats of local communities.”

Big tech behemoths can’t be allowed to drive up energy costs for everyone else and data centers certainly shouldn’t be shoved down the throats of communities. But what Khanna misses is that BAAJA is our best chance to prevent this from continuing to happen.

So where is this pro-data center argument coming from?

Last week, notable anti-data center groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, GreenLatinos, and Food and Water Watch, laid out their logic in a letter urging Congress to reject the “permitting bill’s sweetheart deal for data centers.”

Despite their striking claim, the listed reason here is indirect. They argue that by speeding up permits for energy infrastructure, the bill would make it easier to power the data center buildout. In other words, they’re opposing a bill that directly regulates data centers simply because it expands the grid and increases the energy supply data centers will be able to tap into.

This is deeply flawed reasoning, to the point that it doesn’t even make sense on their own terms. The alternative to passing these regulations into law is the status quo, which is the rapid data center buildout and utility hikes. Local and state moratoriums are obstructing some data center projects, but that’s the main roadblock. If data centers aren’t able to receive sufficient energy from the grid, many can simply generate their own sources “behind the meter,” which almost always means dirtier energy. Permitting reform could help end this practice because the grid would have expanded (and cleaner) capacity.

Even granting the premise that increased energy supply will benefit data centers, that argument needs to be weighed against all the numerous benefits for the climate and the economy that will come from dramatically increasing our electricity supply. It’s absurd to deny these positive outcomes simply over a fear that one potential user might benefit.

Some argue that BAAJA would make it easier to build data centers on federal land, but this concern is also overblown. Aside from a handful of data centers Trump is considering, the vast majority of these projects are built on private land and are not subject to the permitting regime BAAJA seeks to reform.

It’s important to think practically here. There’s no sign that Congress would pass, or Trump would sign, legislation that regulates or bans data center construction. So really, if the goal is to increase the regulatory burden on data centers before a potential Democratic trifecta in 2029, then this is a no-brainer: BAAJA is the only option.

But let’s end the credulity, because data centers are not the primary reason why these groups are opposing permitting reform. The opposition is rooted in these groups’ resistance to any deal that makes it easier to build fossil fuels—even if clean energy is disproportionately built and emissions are reduced on the net. This is reflective of a longstanding and, hopefully, diminished line of thinking in the environmental movement that simply doesn’t see any utility in increasing energy production.

The politics of energy obstruction has never been particularly popular. So the data center issue essentially functions as a skin suit to build a broader base of opposition to permitting reform. Members of Congress likely aren’t hearing from their constituents about the danger of fossil fuel infrastructure, but they are more concerned about being associated with the politically toxic issue of data centers. That’s why, while the argument is weak, it needs to be thoroughly and vocally debunked.

This strategy was first hinted at in a leaked organizing call that occurred among several high-profile environmental organizations shortly after the bill was announced. When brainstorming ways to stop the bill, a senior advisor at the Environmental Protection Network raised the prospect of framing their argument around data centers: “You know, something that we really need to lean into, and I think it brings in data centers. I mean, he [Trump] could be issuing permits to Elon Musk to build a coal plant, you know, and build a data center in the Grand Canyon.”

Of course, this is an absurd exaggeration, but it’s the sort of fear mongering that is being used to distract from the fact that this bill contains robust ratepayer protections that are quite popular when voters hear about them. In a recent message test from Inclusive Abundance, the message about making “data centers pay for their upgrades” performed the best, even compared to the one about lowering energy bills.

Still, the data center skin suit is continuing to break through into the discourse. In a recent Heatmap piece titled “The Data Center Backlash Is Coming for Permitting Reform,” journalist Jael Holzman insinuated that a $250,000 ad campaign in DC from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) was strategically timed to sink the permitting reform bill.

The organization still has not formally weighed in on either side of the permitting debate. But as members of Congress decide how to vote, it’s important to clarify these kinds of distortions—which are a symptom of the larger epistemic crisis facing the left-wing advocacy community.

The truth is that BAAJA isn’t just critical to decarbonizing our economy and meeting future energy demand; it’s also the only realistic legislation we have that will hold data centers accountable and protect ratepayers from future price increases.

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

Importantly, we’re interested in 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 who swing elections.

Today’s profile is Jon Ossoff in Georgia.

Growing up in rural Georgia, you get used to a certain pattern: church on Sunday, Bible study on Wednesday, football game on Friday, and, for as long as I can recall, Republicans being in charge of just about everything. This meant that by and large, the odds were that your neighbors were Republicans. Your coworkers were Republicans. The teachers teaching your kids were Republicans. The coaches coaching little league were Republicans. The culture was just Republican.

Since 2016, Georgia’s politics have swiftly evolved. The Republican stronghold has given way to a perennial swing state that flirts with Democrats on the federal level, but Republicans still outnumber Democrats and retain a vise grip on most statewide offices. The only way for Democrats to prevail is to run up the score in the metro areas and the surrounding suburbs, while losing less in the vast rural areas around the state—in other words, they have to build an ideologically diverse coalition.

That’s why this internet ad from Jon Ossoff’s campaign struck me. In it, Richard, a big-rig-driving three-time Trump voter, endorses Ossoff because he wants someone in office “who will stand up for us.” It’s a pretty simple message, but I think it’s particularly effective because it embodies a foundational, and often forgotten, principle in American politics: persuading voters who often vote for the other side is the only way to expand your electoral coalition. There’s no secret coalition of ultra-ideological voters just waiting for the right candidate; persuasion is the key.

I’m guessing Richard isn’t showing up on any Democratic coordinated campaign’s turnout list. But the Ossoff campaign is right to highlight him because there are probably hundreds of thousands of ‘Richards’ in Georgia who are up for grabs right now. I went to high school with some of them. They aren’t hardcore partisans. They just grew up Republican and have conservative views on many issues, but ultimately just don’t care much about politics and really just want someone to keep gas prices low.

When you have a mindset that treats most, if not all, voters as potentially gettable, it shifts how you engage during campaign season and how you govern once in office. Jon Ossoff seems to understand this better than most folks in the big leagues right now. And I suspect some of it can also be traced to growing up in Georgia at a similar time, when Republicans were cementing their control of the state just about everywhere.

I worry that my fellow liberals who work and comment on politics miss this. While Ossoff gets a lot of attention in the media for his unsparing attacks against Trump and MAGA-aligned Republicans, what often gets overlooked is the simple fact that he has adopted a set of concrete issues that resonate with moderate voters in his state.

He wouldn’t be stoking presidential buzz if he only produced viral clips about Trump family corruption. His case is strong because he’s currently running 8 points ahead of his opponent in a state Trump carried just a few years ago.

For instance, in his recent debate against Mike Collins, Ossoff went viral (at least on my section of the internet) for saying, “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” But what went ignored in the cheerleading of this answer was Ossoff also endorsing voter ID—a position that is nearly universal among Republican voters in his state.

This political strategy dates back to before Ossoff won his first race. Back in 2017, he very nearly flipped a ruby-red district blue because he prioritized issues that were outside of the party orthodoxy—speaking out on things like fiscal responsibility and combating government waste. While he took some flak for not identifying as a progressive, three years later, he took that strategy statewide for his Senate campaign, and it paid off.

Now running for reelection, Ossoff is poised to win convincingly.

He boasts the endorsements of Republican leaders both in Georgia and beyond. And he pairs this coalition building with real breaks from Democratic Party orthodoxy, not just on voter ID, but also through his support for the tough-on-immigration Laken Riley Act. In short, he’s acting like a leader who understands the constituency he represents and is specifically creating a permission structure for those who are used to culturally supporting Republicans to vote for him.

Democrats are poised to do well in the midterms, but they should not misread that potential success as a panacea for the problems they face. The party is still broadly perceived as too far left, and there’s no promise that voters willing to bet on Democrats this year will carry over to future cycles.

So instead of being angry at the voters for returning Trump to power or doubling down on an insular strategy that, at best, ignores the existence of millions of Trump voters and at worst holds open contempt for them, Democrats should take a page from the Ossoff playbook. They should see each voter as a potential member of a grand coalition that finally banishes Trumpism to the ash heap of history. If it can work in Georgia, it’s certainly worth a shot everywhere else.

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Ashley All is a communications and political strategist with more than 20 years of experience working – and winning – in some of the most challenging places in the country. She’s led communication teams for numerous campaigns in red states, including for attorney general, governor, Congress, and U.S. Senate. And she served as Governor Laura Kelly’s first communications director.

There is an old saying that newspaper icon, author, and Progressive leader William Allen White had about his state: “When anything is going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas.”

The quote reminds us that trends often start in unexpected places. Sometimes it’s a good thing, like when Kansas was the first state in the nation to successfully defend abortion rights after the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

But sometimes it’s a warning. A little over a decade ago, Kansas faced a much worse first: the “Brownback Experiment.” As a communications and political strategist working to elect Democrats in my home state, I had a front-row seat as an ideological tax experiment pushed our state into a fiscal crisis. While I’m happy to say we’ve long been on the road to recovery, I think this fiasco and the political response to it hold important lessons for my fellow Americans today.

In recent years, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have engaged in a fiscal experiment of their own, cutting health care subsidies, reducing Medicaid eligibility, and increasing SNAP requirements. This all amounts to the greatest attack on the social safety net in decades; millions of people have already paid the price.

How will Americans respond in November? How can Democrats use this moment to make the case to skeptical voters that they should be trusted to govern?

This might surprise some of my fellow liberals in New York and California. But I think an important part of the answer can be found in Kansas.

The Brownback experiment

Coming out of the Great Recession, Kansas was the first state to adopt a sweeping tax experiment that slashed income taxes on businesses and the rich at the expense of working people. Then-Gov. Sam Brownback and his advisor Arthur Laffer claimed the plan would generate dramatic economic growth. In an interview on Morning Joe in 2012, Brownback boasted his “real live tax experiment” was the largest tax cut in Kansas history and would be a “shot of adrenaline to the heart of the Kansas economy.”

As it turns out, it was much more like a sedative. In the years that followed, Kansas underperformed the national economy and lagged behind its neighboring states in economic growth. State revenue plummeted, and our budget was turned upside down. To make up for nearly a billion dollars in lost revenue, Republicans hiked the sales tax on food and other necessities, raised property taxes, and slashed public schools, health care, and other services. Middle and low-income working families bore the brunt of these changes as the cost of living skyrocketed.

For almost five years, Kansans lived with the consequences of Brownback’s tax experiment. Our economy limped along, and our citizens struggled, while the rest of the nation saw economic recovery. To keep the state budget in the black, Republicans made massive cuts to public schools, causing larger class sizes, fewer teachers, four-day weeks, and school closures. Brownback diverted money intended for Kansas highways to pay the bills, leaving roads in disrepair, important infrastructure projects on hold, and construction jobs in limbo. Privatization and cuts to Medicaid led to rural hospital closures, billions in lost revenue, and more Kansans going without health care. In 2016, Kansas was on the brink of financial ruin.

In the fall of 2016, when Kansas joined the rest of the nation in electing Donald Trump, we were also kicking dozens of Brownback-aligned Republicans out of office.

Democrats connected the real-world consequences Kansans were experiencing to Brownback’s policies. This led to a significant shift in the makeup of the Kansas Legislature. It was still a Republican supermajority, but a responsible governing coalition emerged, made up of moderate Republicans and Democrats. That new coalition voted to reverse the tax plan in 2017 over Brownback’s veto—a striking accomplishment.

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That coalition was courageous but short-lived. In early 2018, Brownback left office disgraced with an approval rating of just 26 percent. And to this day, his name is toxic. Memories are short in politics, but Kansans remember Brownback.

The lesson from a decade ago in Kansas is exceedingly relevant today: Kansas didn’t recover because one party or one faction suddenly won a sweeping victory. It recovered because Democrats and moderate Republicans built a governing coalition committed to reversing the Brownback experiment and putting our state back on sound fiscal footing.

Brownback goes national

Kansas is not America, and Brownback was not Trump. But those of us who lived through the Brownback experiment recognized the economic platform of the Trump presidency immediately.

In 2017, as Kansas was reversing course, Trump, Laffer, and their allies in Congress pushed through a sweeping tax law that substantially reduced corporate and individual taxes—especially for the wealthy. At the time, Brookings and other experts explicitly compared the approach to the Brownback tax plan.

Again, Kansas and the federal government are different, and the policies were not identical. But the underlying wager was the same: cut taxes for businesses and the rich, and let the benefits flow down to those on the lowest rungs of the ladder.

Trump doubled down on that wager in his second term with another large tax package. And, just as before, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that federal revenues would drop by roughly $4.5 trillion.

This time, Trump cut spending and benefits for middle-to-low-income Americans to offset some of the tax cuts. CBO estimated that cuts to Medicaid will reduce spending by roughly $1.2 trillion through 2035 and push about 13 million eligible Americans off of Medicaid, including children. The law also cut projected SNAP spending by about $211 billion, ending support for millions of eligible families.

To be clear, many of the law’s largest changes were conveniently timed for after the midterms, which means many of their effects will unfold in the coming years. But so far, the consequences have been devastating to families who are already struggling under the weight of inflation and high costs resulting from Trump’s chaotic tariffs, policies, and wars. Millions of Americans have been kicked off SNAP in the last year, and millions have already lost access to affordable health insurance options.

What Kansas can teach America

Now for a ray of hope. Kansas recovered from the Brownback experiment, and I believe America will be able to recover from Trump.

The latest polls show Trump with negative net job approval in 41 states and the District of Columbia, including Kansas — a state he carried comfortably in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Americans of all political stripes may be turning on Trump as Kansans turned on Brownback.

But Democrats can’t just ride the wave of GOP backlash; they’ll need to govern and build a coalition that can actually pass legislation that substantively improves the lives of voters. Here too, Kansas can serve as a model.

By the time Kansans elected Laura Kelly governor in 2018, Democrats and moderate Republicans found enough common ground to reverse Brownback’s tax policy. These legislators saw the world differently in countless ways, but they shared a simple goal: fix the state budget and make life more affordable for families.

Kelly inherited the next part of the job. I served as communications director in the early days of her administration, and saw firsthand how difficult repair could be. The state government had spent years under enormous fiscal pressure. Rebuilding it was a long, laborious process. And it became even more challenging when the coalition began to crumble in the next election cycle as Republicans became less interested in fixing problems, and more invested in reflexive partisanship.

Over eight years, Kelly emphasized investments in schools and infrastructure, economic development, fiscal stability, and, eventually, eliminating the state sales tax on groceries. She set achievable priorities, acknowledged that recovery would take time, restored fiscal responsibility, and steadily rebuilt confidence in state government. At times, this was challenging with a GOP supermajority in the state legislature. She often had to use her veto pen to hold the line and prevent Republican leaders from moving Kansas backward and undercutting our recovery.

Importantly, Kansas Democrats did not respond to one ideological experiment with another. We focused on the issues that impact families every day: sales tax on food, class sizes, and roads. Gov. Kelly “governed from the middle” throughout the recovery—even when it caused tension with her own party. Her pragmatic, commonsense personality demonstrated how to be successful in a complex state. It also helped begin to rebuild trust in the Democratic Party.

With the foundation built in the last decade, Kansas might be on the verge of electing a Democrat to the US Senate for the first time in 94 years. That’s what people miss about Adam Hamilton’s Senate campaign: it’s not just because he’s running on the right issues and engaging Kansans around shared values. He’s also following a successful Democratic blueprint for winning in Kansas.

The blueprint is simple: make government work, focus on the problems families face, and build a coalition willing to solve them. In Kansas, that meant Democrats and moderate Republicans working together to put the state back on track.

A national governing coalition will almost certainly look different. There is no large bloc of moderate Republicans in Washington capable of playing precisely the role they played in Kansas. It might have to occur within the Democratic Party alone, the tent stretched wide enough to include fiscal moderates and DSA leftists.

That doesn’t mean everyone in a governing coalition must agree on everything. The Kansas coalition certainly did not. Nor does coalition government require abandoning strongly held principles. It requires agreement on enough of the fundamental tasks and priorities to move forward. Americans have made it clear what those priorities should be: lower costs, fair taxes, and a competent government.

The 2026 cycle could be a historic first step for Democrats to build this coalition. And if the conditions emerge once again in 2028, then the hard part will come: showing voters that a Democratic coalition of all ideological stripes can govern together.

To those who doubt this is possible, I say, remember William Allen White’s wisdom: “When anything is going to happen in this country, it happens first in Kansas.”

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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.

I don’t normally recommend political advice from Ronald Reagan, especially on LGBTQ issues, but he had an excellent rule for managing intra-party conflict: “The person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and ally, not a 20% traitor.”

Some Democrats, including my friends and allies in the trans rights community, may have forgotten that rule. But this election season, we need to remember it, because the stakes are very high. Trump is trashing the economy, engaging in another pointless, forever war, flaunting flagrant corruption, and launching vicious assaults on immigrant communities.

The trans movement, a cause that I have spent decades helping lead, has also seen significant setbacks under his presidency. Meanwhile, his Republican allies in Congress and around the country have considered or passed numerous laws that strip our rights and make us even more vulnerable.

The only way to stop them is to take power back. To do that, we need to vote. In America’s two-party system, this means engaging in a binary choice: Democrat or Republican.

I share many trans activists’ wishes that every Democratic candidate agreed with us on every issue, but unfortunately that’s just not the case. The alternative is the Republican, and we must vote for the candidate who is closest to our views across a wide range of subjects. This includes LGBTQ policies, but also healthcare, immigration, and welfare—all issues that are deeply impacted by the party that is in power.

Let’s take the Ohio gubernatorial race as an example. It’s a race between Dr. Amy Acton (D) and Vivek Ramaswamy (R).

Dr. Acton, who was appointed to run the state health department by Republican Governor Mike DeWine, is not a particularly progressive Democrat by recent standards. She doesn’t just disagree with me on certain issues; she has actively campaigned on those disagreements, most notably on trans participation in sports.

While I am not against rules and regulations on trans sports participation, her rhetoric has been too sweeping and not respectful to vulnerable members of Ohio’s trans community. I understand the importance of keeping within public opinion on trans issues and have written about how candidates can do this. But in my opinion, Acton went farther than she needed to. In June, she said, “I do not support boys playing in girls sports.” Would I say the same thing? No, of course I wouldn’t.

Still, as Reagan said, she is an 80% ally, not a 20% traitor, and I know she would be significantly better on the issues I care about than Mr. Ramaswamy—who is bad on LGBTQ rights and pretty much everything else.

He has called LGBTQ people predators, telling us to “leave … kids alone,” and has several times referred to trans people as “a cult.” When he co-led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he canceled more than 1,400 active government grants that used keywords like “homosexual,” gay,” “transgender,” and “LGBTQ.”

To me, the choice for the trans rights community and people who support us is clear: We should want Amy Acton to win and Ramaswamy to lose. Her positions on trans people may be careless, but she still believes we should have equal rights under the law. That’s a far better starting point than someone who would act to legally erase us from existence. If I lived in Ohio, I would vote for Acton.

What other choice would I have? I could refuse to vote. Or, I could vote for the Libertarian candidate, who is actually more aligned with my views on LGBTQ issues, but who has zero chance of being elected. I also disagree with him fundamentally on the role of government in improving people’s lives.

I’m not the only one with this calculus. Two trans elected officials in Ohio have expressed concern about Acton’s positions and language on trans people, but are still planning to vote for her. After Dr. Acton made her unfortunate statement about trans people in June, Equality Ohio, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, didn’t change their rating of Acton from A to F. They changed it immediately to “Pending” and then later to a B. They have rated Ramaswamy as an F because they know he would be uncontrollably bad.

Marcy Kaptur is definitely a harder case, but the same logic applies to voting for her. The swing-district Ohio representative has actively touted her vote to “keep transgender ideology out of our schools.” Again, I strongly disagree with the legislation she voted for and her characterization of it, but her opponent holds a worse rating. And elections are binary. If she’s part of a Democratic majority, that same legislation won’t be brought to a vote.

I have been doing this work for nearly three decades. When I started, everyone was against us. But I have seen how much can change, and I understand how important it is to have political leaders who, at least, mostly agree with you, rather than leaders who don’t believe you should exist.

This is a decision-making calculus trans activists and others will increasingly have to make as Democrats expand their tent and compete in red and purple parts of the country, where our cause is even less popular. No matter where we live, our general election vote will be binary. We can’t waste it. Even if that candidate disagrees with us on 20% of her issues, we should still call her an ally.

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One of Searchlight’s most important research findings is that voters are usually ideologically inconsistent: This usually means they lean liberal on economic issues and conservative on the cultural ones. But sometimes, voters will also display inconsistent opinions on the same issue, which can confuse advocacy groups and politicians alike.

This sort of conflicted thinking is especially common in discussions about the environment. In the abstract, most voters say they care deeply about environmental issues; they want clean air and water to be a top policymaking priority, and they express low levels of support for polluting industries. If you just looked at Americans’ abstract views on the environment, you might think that protecting the environment is high salience, bipartisan, and unifying.

But it’s not. That’s because voters have more nuanced opinions on this topic than many advocacy organizations publicly admit. When it comes to protecting the environment or fighting climate change, it’s easy to get a simple affirmative answer, but to really understand public opinion, you have to ask about concrete policies and trade-offs. As someone who wants the government to enforce stricter regulations on oil and gas companies and advance policies that will decarbonize our economy, I want more like-minded organizations and polling professionals to be clear-eyed about public opinion.

In polling from our recent project, How to Build a Supermajority, we asked voters a simple question: Do you want the government to prioritize protecting the environment or economic development? The environment beat the economy by over 50 points.

But then we asked those same voters a follow-up question: Would they be willing to accept a limitation on consumer choice in order to protect the environment?

The answer was unequivocally no.

In fact, when we compared the respondents, we found that over half of the voters who said the government should prioritize the environment also said that the government should not set limits on products with negative environmental effects.

The upshot of this isn’t to dismiss the importance of environmental regulations; many of the policy goals the environmental movement fought for over the last 50 years have been critical to cleaning our air and water, and improving public health. But it’s something for policymakers to keep in mind when they think about the political backlash that might result from fighting for certain environmental policies.

This tension is a live debate inside the Democratic Party. In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, the Biden administration issued a regulation that would effectively phase out the vast majority of combustion-engine vehicles by the year 2032, accelerating the transition to electric cars. The environmental and public health benefits here are obvious, but this rule also served as a de facto restriction on consumer choice. A survey from Pew Research a year before showed that six-in-ten Americans did not support a gasoline vehicle phase-out, which is roughly in line with our research on gas stoves.

The Biden administration pursued similar policies limiting the amount of water that can flow from new showerheads, dishwashers, and other household appliances. While these were not top voting issues at the ballot box, Trump did occasionally mention them in his campaign rallies. Some pundits like to make fun of Trump’s obsession with showerhead flow, but as our polling shows, it taps into a real sentiment voters have about being told what they can and can’t buy.

Public opinion on climate change functions very similarly.

The climate movement argues that Americans are concerned about climate change. Consequently, the argument goes, politicians should prioritize this issue in their political messaging and policymaking. But similar to the environment, it’s easy for people to express concern in the abstract. If you want a more realistic understanding of the politics of the issue, you need to understand its relative salience and ask voters what they are willing to sacrifice.

In this case, voters regularly rank climate as one of the least important issues in the country, and polls repeatedly find that voters are not willing to incur any real cost to fight climate change. An AP survey found that 57% of Americans would pay $1 a month to fight climate change, but when that amount was increased to $10, support dropped to 28%. Searchlight polling from last month shows that the majority of voters would prefer to keep energy costs low rather than fight climate change; only 33% supported climate over low energy costs. Many policymakers and advocates know this, which is why carbon taxes never pass, and why the Inflation Reduction Act was messaged as an economically beneficial piece of climate legislation.

Again, this should not be read as an argument for not passing policies that protect the environment and reduce carbon emissions. But with inflation and cost-of-living dominating voter concerns, policymakers need to be clear-eyed about the limits of simple polls and the complexity of voter opinion.

Ultimately, it comes down to how policymakers should spend their political capital. It’s worth passing policies that will fight climate change, but we should prioritize the ones that are durable and impactful. The bipartisan permitting bill that is currently being debated in the Senate is an example of this; it will dramatically increase the speed at which we build clean energy and lead to net emissions reductions in the long term. In contrast, unpopular rules and regulations that are subject to being overturned by the next administration should be approached with more caution.

Political capital is finite, and it must be spent wisely. The alternative is losing elections and empowering the politicians who will reduce regulations on the fossil fuel industry and undermine the fight against climate change.

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To those who think the Democratic Party is irrevocably divided between the “moderates” and “progressives,” I want to introduce you to three candidates who will break your brain. Three candidates who have the support of America’s foremost democratic socialist and a collection of lawmakers who rally around “fiscal responsibility, national security, and pragmatic solutions that last.”

Sam Forstag, Rebecca Cooke, and Bob Brooks are all running in districts Trump carried in 2024, all come from blue-collar backgrounds, and, as you may have guessed by now, were all endorsed by both Bernie Sanders and the ostensibly “centrist” Blue Dog PAC.

These “Berniedogs” are the textbook definition of heterodoxy. They defy our stale and unproductive factional debate, and their role in American politics is instructive to anyone who believes in the Big Tent.

Not-so-strange bedfellows

Before I get into the secret sauce that makes Forstag, Cooke, and Brooks so compelling, I want to marinate on why the seemingly odd couple of Bernie Sanders and the Blue Dogs actually makes more sense than many people realize.

The Bernie side is easier to explain. In my opinion, Sanders is at his best when he’s laser-focused on his message about the 1% vs. the 99%. The 2016 Bernie Sanders (whom I knocked over a thousand doors for) wanted, above all, to increase taxes on millionaires and billionaires and transfer that wealth to the working-class.

That’s what these endorsements are about. I’m sure he disagrees with Forstag, Cooke, and Brooks on plenty; in fact, none of them support Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan. But Bernie is demonstrating that he’s willing to accept some heterodoxy in the spirit of building a political movement that will win over swingy blue-collar voters. That’s a very productive attitude, and one that his potential successors on the left would be wise to adopt.

As someone who used to work for a member of the Blue Dog coalition, I firmly believe that they’re one of the most misunderstood factions in American politics. Crucially, I don’t think that the standard beltway definition of “centrist” accurately describes their coalition in 2026. Yes, they still advocate for a strong border, fiscal responsibility, and bipartisan policymaking. But current members like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez have an economic populist streak that would make Blue Dog co-founder Billy Tauzin, a conservative congressman-turned-PhRMA lobbyist, quake in his boots.

From MGP’s obsession with right to repair legislation (and sea lions) to Adam Gray’s fight to protect water rights in California’s Central Valley, today’s Blue Dogs are less guided by ideology and more driven by a place-based politics that embodies the character of their districts.

Before readers on the left jump down my throat, I’m not saying that the Blue Dogs have a monopoly on working-class politics. But it’s important to understand that working-class voters in rural California will care about different sociocultural issues than working-class voters in Queens. Adam Gray would be a bad fit for NY-07, and Claire Valdez likely wouldn’t be able to get elected in Central California.

The long and short of it is that, despite their differences, there’s an economic populist thread that ties the Blue Dogs with the Bernie Sanders wing. People confused by the Berniedogs should get comfortable with that friction. After all, the Big Tent is a state of mind.

The Berniedog difference

There are plenty of economically populist Democrats who don’t draw this sort of cross-factional interest. So what makes the trio of Forstag, Cooke, and Brooks different?

Cooke and Brooks are both polling ahead, while Forstag’s race is a coin flip. So a big part of the answer is that they all have a great shot at actually winning. Still, their broad intraparty appeal and the reasons behind their potential victories carry valuable lessons for the next generation of Democrats.

There are three main things that bind Forstag, Cooke, and Brooks together. The first is their shared commitment to a working-class agenda. Their economic message focuses on corporate greed, bringing costs down for working-class Americans, and getting rid of the corrupting influence of money in politics. But that doesn’t classify them as members of any particular ideological movement. For instance, Rebecca Cooke says, “I do not identify as a progressive.”

The Berniedogs also all come from blue-collar backgrounds. Forstag is a smokejumper and union leader, Cooke a working waitress, and Brooks a firefighter. While vibes and identity certainly aren’t everything, they do matter, and that kind of personal history makes the Berniedogs trusted messengers to their future constituents.

Ultimately, that’s what drew Bernie Sanders to Cooke in the first place. Faiz Shakir, a senior advisor to Sanders, explained in a recent Politico Magazine story:

He was very excited to see someone run for office who has the experience and the understanding of what struggling people are going through, people living paycheck to paycheck. In order to be a working-class candidate in Sen. Sanders’ mind, you have to really understand: What is your community going through?”

The final and most compelling commonality is their ability to combine positions from across the ideological spectrum. This does not mean they are just picking the center position on a left-to-right binary for every issue. On one end, the Berniedogs are all committed to left economic populism. On the other, they stake out more culturally-conservative coded positions on social issues.

Forstag has a whole section on his website dedicated to protecting Second Amendment rights, Brooks highlights border security, and Cooke has bucked calls to abolish ICE. All three recognize that moderation for moderation’s sake isn’t the way forward; they must authentically reflect the values of their districts. For a candidate like Forstag, that means representing the interests of his gun-owning voters and also fighting to keep Western Montana’s public lands in public hands.

To me, the Berniedogs show the way forward for Democrats writ large. They’ve managed to unite seemingly diametrically opposed factions of the Party because they’re committed to the sort of working-class politics that delivered 40 straight years of Democratic House control — all while staking out popular positions on the issues that matter to swing voters in Trump districts.

If Democrats are ever going to build a supermajority, these are the sort of candidates they need to recruit and support.

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Recently, the election discourse was set ablaze when Rebecca Traister dropped a reported story in New York Magazine about Troy Jackson’s campaign against Maine Senator Susan Collins.

Embedded inside the piece was a thesis that, for many, summarizes exactly what’s wrong with the Democratic Party: Troy Jackson’s populist politics have been watered down by a nefarious class of DC consultants. The socialist commentator Nathan Robinson put it bluntly in a widely shared piece: “The Consultants Will Kill You.”

Campaign consultants make the best boogeyman. They’re portrayed as faceless, gutless, poll-waving buzzkills. In the 1972 film The Candidate, Robert Redford plays a firebrand Senate candidate in California who is convinced by consultants to moderate in order to appeal to more voters. He wins, but the movie ends with Redford ideologically adrift and seemingly regretful. The viewer is left with a negative impression of campaign consultants. And Traister’s story leaves the reader with a similar impression of Troy Jackson’s campaign in Maine.

Now, is this true? Are consultants really as bad as they say?

As in any profession, some consultants are just bad at their jobs; this piece shouldn’t be read as a defense of the industry as a whole. But I’ve never bought into the theory that DC-based Democratic consultants are sabotaging left-wing politicians in races against Republicans. For one, a consultant’s primary goal is to win the campaign; this yields them status and financial reward and, because they’re partisan Democrats, it satisfies their urge to beat Republicans.

More broadly, the theory doesn’t account for one of the biggest problems in Democratic politics over the last decade, which is that a variety of left-wing advocacy organizations and their campaign advisors issued polling and election analysis that misled the party about what voters actually want.

Bad political advice can come from all over the factional spectrum. This isn’t an establishment conspiracy.

The consultants come to Maine

But is Troy Jackson the victim of an establishment conspiracy?

Let’s investigate. When Graham Platner was forced from the race, Maine Democrats scrambled to replace him. Despite finishing third in the gubernatorial primary, Jackson quickly consolidated support for the Senate nomination. He wasn’t the most charismatic or energetic campaigner, but he was backed by Platner’s consultants and grassroots supporters because he shared Platner’s hard-left politics.

According to Traister, as well as additional reporting from Drop Site, establishment consultants who recently worked for candidates like Dan Goldman and Mallory McMorrow are now advising Jackson. Former Chuck Schumer aide B.J. McCollister is running his media, and Jackson’s old campaign staff have been sidelined.

The charge from the journalists at Drop Site is that Jackson has dropped his harder-left positions. In the American Prospect, Robert Kuttner made a similar claim in a piece titled “Chuck Schumer Neuters Troy Jackson.”

Drop Site says Jackson has been advised to stop using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, instead calling for a block on “offensive weapons” and an end to “horrific, senseless violence.” Kuttner focuses on the consultants’ decision to cancel local grassroots events in favor of out-of-state meetings with donors. Traister reports Jackson occasionally swapped out “Medicare for All” for “universal healthcare” and qualified his call to abolish ICE with a mumbled pledge to stop sex traffickers. Campaign staff has also limited his interaction with voters.

There’s merit to the criticism that the campaign is being too cautious about Jackson’s voter and media interactions. Consultants can be overly risk-averse and avoid putting their candidates in tricky public positions; this was a problem during the Harris campaign, and it usually backfires.

But it’s also worth noting that Jackson’s campaign held nearly 50 events between August 1 and mid-September, some of which have been town-hall style. This isn’t some sort of dormant campaign.

On the actual issues, if Jackson thinks what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide, it’s reasonable and politically fine for him to use that word. If he believes in Medicare for All, he should continue saying that too. But he should also let voters know that he won’t forcibly remove them from their private insurance, which is what Abdul El-Sayed promised in Michigan. Abolishing ICE is trickier because, while it fires up the base, it is also divisive with swing voters. But beyond his tepid qualification, Jackson hasn’t even explicitly moderated, so it’s unclear what the problem actually is here.

It’s really all about what fits your narrative. If you think DC campaign consultants are the scourge of the party, then you’re going to pick up on a few anecdotes and campaign gossip and write a story confirming that idea. But if you look at Jackson’s substantive positions or the fact that Bernie Sanders is planning to hold three rallies with Jackson this month, it’s clear that this campaign has not been “neutered” by moderate DC consultants.

In fact, this was a post on the campaign X account just two days ago.

What this debate is really about

The consultant question is basically a stand-in for the never-ending debate over how to win elections. In this case, the left is convinced that Jackson has abandoned his unapologetic brand of leftist politics and consequently lost support among Maine voters.

I don’t think there’s any evidence for that thesis at all. First, there’s the fact that Jackson’s stances on ICE, Gaza, and Medicare for All have not substantively changed. More importantly, there’s no proof that orthodox left politics are even the best way to win a state like Maine.

Some left-wing pundits have recently expressed their regret over Graham Platner’s exit, believing his politics would have resonated more in a general election campaign against Susan Collins. Setting aside the disturbing dismissal of the sexual assault allegation, this idea doesn’t make sense on the merits. That’s because before the biggest scandal broke and he was forced out of the race, Platner was nearly tied with Collins and notably trailing with working-class voters.

Most revealing is a recent New York Times poll, which found that Maine voters preferred a Democratic-controlled Senate by twelve points, while still supporting Collins by a three-point margin (subsequent polls show the race closer).

This confounded many people, since a Democratic Senate might hinge on Collins losing. But I think it laid bare the political realities of Maine. A strong majority of voters don’t like Trump or the national Republican Party, which is why Kamala Harris won the state by seven points in 2024 and why voters currently favor a Democratic Senate by twelve points. They’re still not ready to drop Collins because they (wrongly) think she’s a moderate bulwark against Trump.

So how do you win Maine? You talk to the voters who supported Susan Collins in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024, want Democrats to control the Senate in 2026, but still aren’t persuaded to move away from their longtime senator.

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My guess is that these voters are not secretly burn-it-down populists. They just need the permission structure to move from a moderate-coded Republican to a Democrat. There are plenty of candidates around the country who are currently winning over those sorts of voters, from Roy Cooper in North Carolina to Mary Peltola in Alaska. And Jackson still has a month left to be one of them.

Consultants vs. The Groups

Some of this reporting reads as a preemptive excuse for the left if Jackson loses. Sure, he was their hand-picked candidate, but then the consultants ruined the campaign.

Here, I’d encourage some self-reflection. The Democratic Party can certainly benefit from a robust debate about the policies and political style that win elections, but that conversation is not enhanced by the conspiratorial charge that the establishment is always trying to sabotage the left. If anything, the causal story is backward. Left-wing interest groups have actually had tremendous influence on the establishment, especially since Obama departed the political scene and left the party rudderless.

These organizations and their pollsters and policy advisors are not “campaign consultants” in the traditional sense, but in many ways they have had more influence on the party’s national policy agenda and governing choices. That’s because while consultants are merely trying to get the candidate elected, these interest groups prioritize raising the salience of their cause.

When virtually every Democratic candidate raised their hand during the 2020 presidential debate and pledged to decriminalize border crossings, that was because the Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party advised them to. When the Biden administration waited too long to act on the border crisis, it was because left-wing immigration groups pressured them not to. The same story can be told about the Democrats’ position on energy or hot-button cultural issues. Interest groups published misleading polls showing that centering climate policy in their messaging wins young voters, that running to the left on immigration wins Hispanic voters, or that race-class narrative language wins working-class voters. And the Democratic Party listened.

The problem isn’t as bad this election cycle, although many environmental groups are lining up against the bipartisan permitting reform bill. But when the 2028 presidential nomination begins in earnest, expect many of these groups to flex their influence over the Democratic Party.

Again, this isn’t to dismiss the fact that establishment consultants are sometimes bad. It’s to show that the Democratic political class, taken as a whole, is usually not a moderating force on the party. After all, this is a group of highly-educated, politically engaged city-dwellers. A 2022 study from Data for Progress found that political elites, who include campaign consultants, lobbyists, and think tankers, are more supportive of progressive policy than the average voter. Notably, this applies to economic policies such as Medicare for All, paid family leave, and a wealth tax.

That’s why the typical campaign consultant or staffer is more liberal than the candidate they work for, especially if the candidate represents an ideologically diverse electorate. But the job of the consultant isn’t to incept their views into the candidate. It’s to help her win.

In The Candidate, Robert Redford’s campaign consultant did exactly that; he crafted a message that resonated with a majority of Californians and helped unseat a popular Republican incumbent. A cynical interpretation is that Redford betrayed his ideals, but those same ideals are certainly better served with him in office than on the sidelines.

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This week, a group of senators announced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), a permitting reform deal that will cut red tape and reduce the time it takes to build new clean energy projects. The lead negotiators on the Democratic side, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich, are staunch climate champions, and they have produced a very strong bill.

According to a just-released analysis by Greenline Insights, BAAJA lowers Americans’ energy bills by $1.1 billion, reduces natural gas from 45% to 39% of our energy mix, increases the deployment of battery storage by 65%, solar by 22%, and wind by 14%—all while cutting emissions by 9%. My colleagues Jane Flegal and Pavan Venkatakrishnan make a persuasive case for the bill on the merits. I want to explain why this is good politics—and why it needs to get done fast.

The plan

The current plan is for the Senate to vote on the bill first thing when it reconvenes after the midterm election, during what’s known as the lame duck session. It’s good to see permitting reform prioritized, but having worked through several lame duck sessions myself, I can tell you that this doesn’t guarantee that the bill will pass—far from it.

As a general rule, lame duck sessions are unpredictable and fraught with risk. That’s because the deadline to adjourn is hard and fast—there is no extending it past January 3rd, per the Constitution. Anything left undone at that point gets erased, like wiping a hard drive; Congress adjourns sine die, a new one is sworn in, and every bill must be introduced anew. (The permitting reform bill is number 5653—starting on January 3rd, bill numbers will go back to number one.)

These weeks can be sleepy or enormously productive. When I was working for Senator Harry Reid, we used the 2010 lame duck to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, pass a major nuclear treaty, and enact a sweeping new tax law.

This current lame duck is shaping up to be a doozy. In addition to permitting reform, Congress needs to pass a government funding bill, a defense authorization bill, and legislation to extend expiring surface transportation programs. Majority Leader Thune has also floated taking action on the debt ceiling. That’s a lot of work in what will ultimately amount to four legislative weeks, accounting for holidays.

Why pass permitting reform in the lame duck?

The main reason to pass this bill now is that it’s a very good bill and if Congress doesn’t pass it, it gets erased on January 3rd.

Theoretically, negotiators could always reintroduce it. And some have argued that Democrats should wait until they have more power—as of today, they are favored to take control of both chambers.

But for a deal like this to come together, pass both chambers, and get signed into law by the president requires a perfect storm. It’s not just about hashing out the text of the bill—negotiators need to be motivated to support it, as do enough members in each chamber to pass it.

The conditions that produced this breakthrough are going to change next Congress. Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the two lead Democratic negotiators, is rumored to want to leave the Energy Committee to chair the Judiciary Committee. His successor might be less likely to prioritize negotiations, or may want to rewrite the bill entirely to assert their ownership. On the Republican side, negotiators will understandably feel burned if Democrats walk away during the lame duck, and are unlikely to be motivated to come back to the table during the next Congress. When the band breaks up, it’s hard to get them back together.

Congressman Jared Huffman, who is poised to take over as chair of the House Natural Resources Committee if Democrats win the House, has floated the idea that he can secure a better deal. Specifically, he and other Democrats want a deal that does more to constrain Trump’s ability to cancel wind and other clean energy projects.

The problem with this thinking is twofold. First, the existing deal provides strong new tools to constrain Trump, and rejecting it will give him free rein for as long as it takes to secure a new deal—which likely would be years, leaving him free to cancel clean energy projects in the meantime. The new tools to constrain Trump in BAAJA are better than no new tools, which is what you’d have if you reject this deal.

The second problem with the “get a better deal later” line of thinking is that Trump will still be president. For any bill to become law, he has to sign it. The idea that Democrats can reject this deal and force Trump to accept a new one next Congress with even stronger restraints on his power is downright fanciful.

Don’t forget about the House

There is nothing the House hates more than getting jammed by the Senate—that is, having the Senate drop a bill in its lap as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. The House is a coequal branch of government. Under regular order, each chamber would pass its own version of the bill, then get together and hash out what’s called a “conference report,” or a consensus version that would then be approved by both chambers. While true regular order is vanishingly rare these days, it is still typical for one chamber to pass a bill, then have the other chamber make changes and bounce it back. This “ping-pong” happens until consensus is reached.

Unfortunately, we don’t have time for ping-pong. If the House changes so much as a comma of BAAJA, the bill will have to go back to the Senate to be passed again—a daunting proposition given the time crunch. Moreover, there is the larger threat that reopening the bill to major substantive changes is likely to upset the delicate balance negotiators achieved, and alienate any of the factions and stakeholders whose support is necessary to pass it into law.1

Set the next Democratic president up for success

Another reason to pass this bill now is that it will set the next Democratic president up for success.

The fate of our democracy could very well ride on the 2028 presidential election, and if Democrats do not win the White House, we will have bigger problems than permitting. But if Democrats do win, they will come into office with an ambitious agenda and an urgent need to show the American people they can deliver. Time and political capital are finite resources, and the next president will want to dedicate them to things like achieving universal healthcare, expanding the social safety net, and making the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes. The next Democratic president does not need permitting reform eating up valuable legislative energy.

On climate specifically, Democrats can’t afford to repeat the mistakes made under Biden’s presidency, when onerous permitting requirements—those targeted for reform in BAAJA—caused climate investments to go unspent and left them as sitting ducks for Republicans to kill when they took back power. It would be a self-own on a historic scale for Congressional Democrats to make the next Democratic president start from square one, facing the same hurdles to building clean energy projects that hamstrung Biden.

Moreover, the problem of high energy prices will not magically disappear. BAAJA will bring down energy prices, but it will take time for its effects to be felt—indeed, this could begin right around 2030, when the new Democratic president will be facing their first midterm.

I’m thinking a few elections into the future here, but that’s exactly the sort of mindset Democrats need to adopt. Republicans will remain an active threat to democracy and the rule of law after 2028. It is vitally important to position the next Democratic president to hit the ground running, with a legislative blitz that shows the American people we can deliver for them.

Passing this bill now isn’t just about fighting climate change and lowering energy prices—it is about setting Democrats up to govern successfully. This is a good bill, and Congress should pass it.

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More than 60 years have passed since Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Hofstadter published The Paranoid Style in American Politics, a searing exposé of the way conspiratorial thinking has forever shadowed our democracy.

His book, published a decade after the horrors of McCarthyism and a year before Barry Goldwater claimed the GOP nomination for president, has once again been proven prescient by Donald Trump’s dominance of American politics.

Hofstadter’s argument was that paranoia was a very real, yet fringe political phenomenon that existed primarily on the American right. Trump’s political career has been premised on the paranoid notion that some band of conspirators—most notably the “deep state”—is responsible for the “carnage” that he alone could end.

This has had the effect of moving a politics of paranoia to the very center of the American right. But I’d argue that, in ways we don’t fully appreciate, the left has embraced much of the same sort of paranoid mindset. The upshot is undermining our ability to build what my colleague Adam Jentleson describes as a “supermajority.”

Admittedly, the left and right’s respective fears of centralized authority aren’t manifested to the same depths, as evidenced by the fact that nobody on our side seems nearly so inclined to storm the Capitol. But if the right has evolved from being cynical about government to believing it’s conspiring against them, the left has moved more quietly from advocating for more expansive government to strangling public authority in service of protecting the powerless. And it’s this second shift that deserves greater attention.

Before going any further, we should properly understand the distinction. Both New Deal Democrats and Reaganite Republicans embraced certain theories of what needed to change for America to become her best self. In the first case, liberals believed we needed to empower government to solve big problems. In the second, conservatives argued that we needed to push the government out of the way of free enterprise.

While those ideas still float around their respective circles today, the old narratives have more recently given way to something else entirely—a notion that some nefarious group is cutting away at the common good. Those on the right blame the egg-headed intellectuals and social justice warriors, many of whom, in their view, control the levers of public bureaucracy. Those on the left ascribe our severe housing shortage, dilapidated infrastructure, and warming climate to the nefarious influence of tech plutocrats and corporate monopolists, so many of whom have purchased access and influence at the highest reaches of government.

The shame isn’t just that elements of both stories are true—it’s that both conspiracies distract us from the more banal reasons America is struggling. Evidence in the 1960s and 1970s that discretion among government officials was a scourge—that they were too prone to raze neighborhoods through urban renewal and approve industrial plants that soiled the public landscape—led reformers to clip bureaucracy’s wings. And we reacted by imposing process-oriented restrictions on executive branch agencies to ensure that public authority wasn’t used for bad.

Those restrictions have certainly made our air cleaner and empowered the average citizen to protect themselves against the powerful elite. But they’ve also largely rendered the government unable to address some of society’s greatest problems. They have eviscerated what so many people now refer to as “state capacity.” But there’s no grand conspiracy here—just well-intentioned 20th-century reforms gone awry.

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I want to be clear on the terms here. In his famous 1937 Constitution Day speech, FDR declared: “In our generation, a new idea has come to dominate thought about government, the idea that the resources of the nation can be made to produce a far higher standard of living for the masses of the people if only government is intelligent and energetic in giving the right direction to economic life.” This became the central tenet of liberalism in the following decades, and in some more intellectual notion, it remains the heart of the progressive project. But with conspiracy thinking now shrouding our belief in public power, I ask: Is it really our animating narrative anymore?

Ronald Reagan, perhaps the most important 20th-century answer to FDR, summed up conservatism with his oft-quoted aphorism: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” This long defined the Grand Old Party. But today, as Donald Trump unilaterally increases the price of consumer goods by imposing tariffs on a whim, and deploys masked federal officers to our streets in ways that flirt with undermining the rule of law, or worse, can we really argue that Reagan’s creed is still central to GOP dogma?

It’s not that FDR- and Reagan-style liberalism and conservatism didn’t cast bogeymen—they both certainly did, including Wall Street financiers and “welfare queens.” But both dogmas were anchored in core notions about how government ought to work. Today, by contrast, a perusal of stump rhetoric on both sides of the aisle suggests that, even if Democrats and Republicans are prone to nod their heads to the old narratives, their respective appeals are centered on something else altogether: thwarting malign actors who are actively conspiring against our common interests.

In some cases, the threats are personified—note the dual focus on Elon Musk and George Soros. Sometimes they are focused on subsets of the population—immigrants or Zionists. Sometimes they are more amorphous—corporate monopolists or critical theorists. Some of these indictments have merit, while others are so ridiculously unfounded that adherents are prompted to raid pizza restaurants in search of pedophilia dungeons or assassinate public intellectuals with high-powered rifles. However they differ, they are all born from the same underlying paranoia that Hofstadter identified during the Eisenhower administration and that Sean Wilentz summarized as “a frightening view of the opposition as the superhuman incarnation of perfect evil, endowed with superhuman powers of deception.”

The shame of paranoia’s triumph is threefold. First, and most obvious, wholesale endorsement of conspiratorial narratives belittles the smaller conspiracies that are real. Jeffrey Epstein was a true reprobate, doing terrible harm to a very real set of victims; he may well have been abetted by a network of powerful men and women. But in some circles, the dastardly conspiracy has risen to be viewed as evidence of some broader darkness, as if a full airing of the Justice Department’s files will reveal a modern-day illuminati-like phenomenon.

Second, when paranoia consumes so much political oxygen, the political system is rendered incapable of responding to very real problems. In Making a New Deal, Lizabeth Cohen made clear why ordinary people were suddenly willing to turn more authority to FDR’s government bureaucracies in the early 1930s—the old system of mutual aid had failed. Similarly, Reagan’s antipathy toward government reflected a widespread belief that government had become a problem. We too easily forget that Jimmy Carter’s, Ted Kennedy’s, and Ralph Nader’s consensus view during the late 1970s was that federal regulation was, in many cases, overwrought to the point of catastrophe. Reagan was responding to something even the left acknowledged to be real.

Today’s conspiratorial thinking is so pervasive that we’ve lost sight of the real things standing in the way of broader and deeper American prosperity, namely government’s inability to deliver what people want. We’re not building enough housing, or hardening our infrastructure, or taking full advantage of the clean energy revolution. We’re not teaching kids to read, or bringing down the costs of health care, or responding to the ways younger generations feel that the social contract is broken. Government fundamentally doesn’t work.

Indicting some conspiracy of monopolists, on the one hand, or campus activists, on the other, does not address the underlying source of the public’s frustration and dismay. For those of us on the left, that seems obvious enough when it comes to, say, trans activists. But the specious notion that financial cabals have gobbled up the ownership of single-family homes around the country to drive up rents is a clear and present distraction from the real reason housing costs are so inflated: process-oriented reforms have made it too hard to add supply to the market. This, in turn, drives up rent and mortgage payments.

And that then points to the third shame, which falls disproportionately on Democrats. Whether we like it or not, we are the party of government. People who want more done to fight economic inequality, combat social injustice, and restore the American Dream are right to presume that we’re the movement more willing to apply public authority toward those ends. But if the ordinary voter’s (correct) impression is that government is fundamentally incompetent—that it is incapable of making progress on those fronts—many are going to be tempted to exit our tent, no matter how big we stretch it. And so long as the movement is transfixed by a paranoia that’s focused on the nefarious influence of shadowy right-wingers, we’re unlikely to address that problem.

Not so long ago, denizens of the so-called neo-Brandeisian left—a movement focused in theory on the threat of monopoly power—tested their anti-corporate messaging against the catch phrases that define the so-called Abundance movement that is focused, apart from castigating business-led conspiracies, on efforts to build more housing, reform our permitting system, drive technological innovation, and more. The anti-monopoly crowd crowed when their anti-corporate message proved more compelling.

But that should have come as a shock to no one: Messages that pit good against evil are bound to draw more interest and tear at heartstrings more than dry notions of how we can enhance “state capacity.” Page Six likely draws more clicks than the New York Post’s coverage of City Hall for the same reason. The point, in the end, isn’t about our visceral reaction to political rhetoric—it’s about the realities that shape what Walter Lippmann once called the “pictures in our heads.”

Americans have, beneath their partisan jerseys, and voting records, and polling responses, narratives in their minds about how the world works. They know, having waited interminably at the DMV, or seen road reconstruction projects run late and over budget, that government doesn’t work. They’re right on the merits. But the reason that government doesn’t work has less to do with some conspiracy and more to do with the fundamental tensions within government that are, to note, the focus of those associated with the so-called Abundance movement. That’s why, polling aside, the effort to build state capacity is so crucial for the left.

This isn’t the first time that paranoia has played such a profound role in American politics—that was a message from Hofstadter’s original essay. And it won’t be the last. But Washington, and Democrats more specifically, need to realize that the salve for the underlying frustration Americans have at this moment is not served well by our reliance on conspiratorial narratives.

Democrats should call out bad actors. But whatever tactical strategies we employ in any given campaign can’t be allowed to obscure our own sense of why nothing seems to work. The party of government needs to ensure that public institutions can deliver. Changing that story in people’s heads will have a more consequential effect on the movement’s progress and destiny than any political knife fight over competing paranoias.

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Jane Flegal is a Senior Fellow at Searchlight. Previously, she served in the Biden administration as Senior Director for Industrial Emissions. Pavan Venkatakrishnan is a fellow at the Searchlight Institute. Previously, he served as a policy advisor at the Foundation for American Innovation

After years of negotiations and scuttled deals, a bipartisan group of senators just released a sweeping bill that will reform America’s onerous permitting system. A regulatory overhaul has been needed for decades, but we’re in a new era of unprecedented electricity demand. Reforming the regulatory regime that approves transmission lines and utility-scale energy projects is the only way to meet that growth.

There will be opposition, including from those who are wary of striking a deal with the Trump administration and fossil fuel interests. We’re sympathetic to those concerns. But that does not dampen our enthusiasm and complete support for this permitting reform package, which is the most substantive and important piece of energy legislation in years.

If you care about decarbonizing the economy or reshoring American manufacturing, or cutting bills for ratepayers, then you should support this bill. No agreement is perfect, but there’s something in this permitting reform agreement that will, on net, benefit everybody.

And there isn’t a better deal out there.

What’s in the bill

The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) is 400+ pages long, and it covers everything from establishing limited and unified federal review processes to robust protections for ratepayers.

Let’s start with one of our favorite parts of the bill: permitting certainty. One of the main reasons why some climate advocates are skeptical about this agreement is that the administration is currently unilaterally blocking onshore and offshore wind projects. In turn, this has created uncertainty in the wind development sector, which is understandably nervous about spending capital that will be tied up in years-long legal disputes.

Building on bipartisan, bicameral legislation introduced earlier this Congress, this permitting agreement solves that exact problem. It introduces a series of deadlines that apply to all classes of federal permits, and if the government unreasonably delays an authorization or improperly rescinds it after issuance, developers can be reimbursed. This will make it far more difficult for this administration and future administrations to successfully use the permitting system as a means of targeting otherwise lawful and environmentally sound projects. Moreover, bill negotiators have gotten Trump to approve several dozen wind projects he had previously blocked.

Let’s move on to transmission. Right now, a single interregional transmission line generally takes around 10 years to build. Given the transmission capacity we need to build in the coming decades, this is just not sustainable. This agreement fixes that problem on several fronts. First, it substantially reforms environmental statutes in ways that will speed project development (described in further detail below). It also creates a federal backstop that kicks in when states obstruct the construction of interregional transmission lines that would alleviate congestion and improve grid reliability. And it requires neighboring regions to coordinate on new transmission projects. In short, it contains the exact kinds of reforms transmission experts and climate advocates have been calling for.

Again, it’s a big bill stuffed with other good reforms, including regulations stating that data centers must pay for the full cost of their electricity and disclose their power usage to the Energy Information Administration. But it’s important to make the case for why the climate community should support this bill.

Reforming environmental statutes is good for clean energy

This permitting reform agreement will make it easier to build clean energy and fossil fuel projects. But it will disproportionately benefit the sort of energy infrastructure that will be needed to decarbonize the economy.

The primary reason is land. Solar and wind require roughly twenty to two hundred times more permitted land area than natural gas. Transmission lines are roughly two to three times wider than gas pipeline corridors. This means that clean energy projects are subject to more permitting exposure, and consequently more rigorous permitting timelines.

Surveys have shown that the vast majority of transmission and solar developers find federal permitting more “onerous” than state and local permitting. And there’s plenty of on-the-ground evidence to back this up: while the federal government currently owns roughly 21% of land in the continental US, it hosts only 3% of the country’s clean energy capacity.

This is because federal land triggers more substantial permitting reviews. Well-intentioned laws, most notably the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), as well as the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA), have all been used to obstruct and delay critical energy projects. This problem is set to get worse in the coming years. Of the 26,000 miles of transmission lines currently being planned, roughly 14,000 will be subject to the most burdensome levels of NEPA review.

This permitting reform bill looks to ease these issues in a number of ways. It narrows the definition of major federal action, limiting the number of projects that trigger NEPA review in the first place; it restricts the statute of limitations for NEPA, NHPA, and ESA lawsuits from six years to 150 days; it requires would-be plaintiffs to participate in the NEPA and NHPA permitting process before bringing a lawsuit, and it ensures that purely procedural violations no longer trigger the pause or outright abandonment of energy projects.

Importantly, if that law still violates the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, or the Administrative Procedure Act, project-stopping remedies remain available. In other words, these reforms would preserve substantive environmental protections, but limit the ability of project opponents to use paperwork errors to block critical infrastructure.

Additionally, the bill reforms Sec. 401 of the Clean Water Act to prevent pretextual denial of linear infrastructure projects, extends the availability of nationwide permits for transmission, and reduces the scope of review under the National Historic Preservation Act—all of these are likely to disproportionately benefit clean energy over the long term.

Early modeling backs up the idea that this package will carry outsized benefits for clean energy. A new report from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and Greenlight Insights projects that the deal will reduce emissions, on net, by 9% over the next decade.

Yes, there are trade-offs with the fossil fuel industry. But that’s a given in any permitting reform agreement that can get 60 votes in the US Senate. But this bill is overwhelmingly likely to reduce emissions while also bringing about a host of reliability and affordability benefits.

We need energy abundance

The biggest word in American politics these days is “affordability.” And this permitting agreement will help address the massive rate increases that have driven up the cost of electricity bills for households across the country.

The reason is simple: permitting reform will dramatically increase our energy supply, easing the shortages that have exploded costs. After twenty years of flat electricity demand, total US electricity consumption is expected to increase by 35% to 50% by 2040. Data centers are driving this growth, but it’s also manufacturing and the mass electrification of the American economy.

The best and most sustainable path to protecting ratepayers is flooding our grid with clean energy, and the only way to do that is to make it easier to build new clean energy. We know supply-side measures work. During the 20th century, electricity demand grew four times, while inflation-adjusted energy prices fell by 20%. The reason is that we increased our electricity generation.

Sure, there’s some utility in policies that will increase energy efficiency, but supply is just a far more important tool for lowering energy costs and fighting climate change. We need to see an electricity generation boom comparable to what we accomplished in the 20th century, and we need it to happen in a much shorter time frame.

Moreover, many industrial technologies such as battery manufacturing, domestic aluminum and steel production, and transportation—all key ingredients of a successful energy transition—will require substantially more electricity generation. Many models predicting energy growth don’t even factor in this sort of electricity demand, even though it will be needed for future decarbonization.

Again, permitting reform is a prerequisite for building the energy necessary for all of this. If we do not cut down on the time it takes to site a transmission line, construct a utility-scale solar project, or get approval for a wind farm, then costs will go up, and the rate at which we decarbonize our economy will slow.

It’s time to pass permitting reform. This is a win for everybody.

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When I attended the DNC in 2024, I witnessed my fair share of pandering to the left. A land acknowledgment kicked off the DNC’s Council on the Climate Crisis. There were also some silly identity focused groups like “White Dudes for Harris.” In my attempt to be a good-faith critic, I wrote up some of those criticisms, but emphasized that the bulk of the messaging I saw seemed intended to win over swing voters. A Texas border county sheriff was given a key speaking slot and Harris was hyped up as a career prosecutor; a dogmatically left convention it was not.

Evan Barker, the Democratic behind-the-scenes fundraiser turned party critic, saw it a very different way. After a few days hanging around the convention, becoming increasingly enraged by her fellow out-of-touch staffers and their excessive cultural progressivism, she eventually stormed out. The instigating event was a speech from Oprah Winfrey, which in her mind epitomized the party’s obsession with cosmopolitan elites. A few days later, she voiced that critique in a viral TikTok. A few months later, she voted for Trump.

Two years after that, she wrote a book: Nothing Left: Confessions of a Former Democratic Operative, cementing herself as a pundit dedicated to criticizing the Democratic Party for being too woke and out-of-touch with the working class.

There’s nothing wrong with moving from party operative to critic. And as someone who works for a think tank that was founded, in part, on criticisms of the Democratic Party, I see the virtue in voicing concerns about the party in public. But in order to actually be effective, one must also be willing to call balls and strikes and give credit to the party when it’s due. That means not being the living embodiment of this meme.

It’d be tempting to dismiss Evan Barker as just another “reformed” Democratic op, pivoting to the right for attention and cash. But the book and her rising public profile are now being discussed in some Democratic staffer-class circles. She’s on the New York Times Best Sellers list. She’s podcasting with well-known journalists. And recently she landed an opinion column at a mid-sized publication. This Democratic critic has been handed a megaphone.

And to be fair, Barker is animated by what are, on their face, valid criticisms. When she describes her experience fundraising at Left Rising, the firm that provided the financial plumbing for the Bernie Sanders left, she persuasively argues that the movement was not doing anything to build a broad governing coalition. She’s correct that the Democratic Party is staffed by people who are overwhelmingly to the left of the median voter. And she rightly points out that many Democrats backed away from sensible border policy and embraced bad political messages like race-class narrative.

The good news is that in the years since, new institutions (such as Searchlight) as well as many new candidates have emerged to attempt to reset the direction of the party.

A good-faith critic would, at the very least, acknowledge this fact. They’d look at the candidates who are attempting to expand the Senate map, such as Mary Peltola in Alaska and Josh Turek in Iowa, and see that the Democratic Party isn’t just tolerating ideological diversity, but actively supporting it. Both were top Senate recruits from party leadership, and both have the full support of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The same goes for James Talarico in Texas or Roy Cooper in North Carolina. Each candidate has been vocal in breaking with the party’s 2020 stances on immigration, fossil fuel production, and culture. And each is being rewarded for it by the party and the voters.

Even factional left candidates, such as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, while not explicitly moderating, are now running on a narrow economically populist message. Look to the congressional races, and one will find a whole crop of culturally moderate and economically progressive “Berniedog” candidates popping up around the country, such as Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania or Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin; the name is derived from the fact that both have been endorsed by Bernie Sanders and the moderate Blue Dog PAC.

It’d be one thing to say this isn’t sufficient, but Barker still levels the same critique that the Democratic Party is structurally broken. In a recent column, she rips into Nebraska independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn for a hypocritical leaked comment about border policy, and then ends by declaring, “Neither wing of the Democratic Party is giving working-class voters what they really want.” Missing is any mention of the candidates who are giving her what she wants, which is progressive economics and social moderation.

Barker is far from the only offender here. In a recent Wall Street Journal review of Supermajority, Ruy Teixeira writes about the current crop of Democratic politicians: “None seems prepared to challenge Democratic orthodoxy on issues such as climate, trans rights, immigration enforcement, diversity mandates and affirmative action.” He continues, “Today’s Democrats would seemingly rather lose an election than adopt any position deemed conservative—the horror!—even if that position is popular and correct on the merits.”

Just like Barker, Teixeira completely misses the fact that numerous Democratic candidates competing in red-leaning districts or states are challenging Democratic orthodoxy.

There’s another implicit problem in these critiques: they treat the Democratic Party like a centralized, monolithic authority. Any bad action is automatically attributed to the Democrats rather than just to the singular person. That is at best a misunderstanding, and at worst a willful misrepresentation of how the party operates. Fundamentally, the Democratic Party is a coalitional institution shaped by millions of dedicated party base voters, as well as a collection of interest groups, candidates, and strategists who jockey for influence. Ultimately, there’s no disciplining actor in all of this. The party, as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld persuasively argue, is hollow.

That means one can always find a candidate or an interest group to be angry about, and one can also find someone to praise; that’s just the nature of commenting on an entity characterized by diffuse and competing factions. Hopefully a strong party leader emerges in 2028, but until then this is the reality that Democratic critics must reckon with.

To be clear, moderates are not the only ones who are unwilling to see any positive narratives inside the party. Many on the left denounce elected Democrats as dominated by corporate and special interests, despite the fact that the party moved significantly to the left on economics under the Biden presidency. Most Democratic members of Congress also agree on issues like raising taxes for the wealthy and dramatically expanding the government’s role in healthcare.

When it comes to elections, while some on the left complain that the establishment is undermining El-Sayed’s Senate run, the truth is that the party establishment swiftly and unequivocally backed his candidacy after the primary. This is for the incredibly obvious and boring reason that the party wants to control the Senate.

Again, there’s plenty to criticize the Democratic Party about, across all ideological factions. But those criticisms need to be informed by the reality of what’s actually happening on the ground. This election season, both moderates and leftists are seeing some of their ideas being absorbed and promoted by the party they love to hate. I urge them to at least acknowledge it.

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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.

Voters are turning on Donald Trump, and that extends to what used to be his best issue: immigration.

The Administration’s reckless pursuit of its indiscriminate and chaotic immigration agenda, and the overtly racist way they talk about it, has achieved something that would have been unthinkable a year ago: A recent New York Times / Siena poll found that voters now support Democrats by a seven-point margin on immigration.

How is the Administration responding? By launching a messaging blitz that doubles down on their darkest nativist impulses.

Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security’s X account posted this:

After a storm of criticism, including from Hasbro, the post was eventually removed. But the message was exactly what we’ve come to expect from America’s top immigration enforcement agency and the president who leads it.

Inflammatory and xenophobic language is hardly new to President Trump or his administration. For years, they have claimed the country has been invaded by immigrants, going as far as accusing migrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”

While DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin promised senators he would get the agency out of the headlines when he was sworn in this past March, this promise has not held. A spate of shootings by ICE personnel has been accompanied, according to a recent Politico analysis, by DHS increasingly posting about “hunting” illegal immigrants online.

This has all contributed to the slide in Trump’s immigration numbers, and Republican politicians are starting to run for political cover. This week, Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) demanded on X that ICE coordinate with local authorities, while Representative Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL) released a remarkable video last week telling President Trump that his immigration crackdown had “gone too far.”

Democrats have an opening here to win on immigration this election cycle. But they can’t let Republicans down-ballot seize the moderate ground.

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This means avoiding the temptation to swing the pendulum too far to the left and rejecting many of the policies that defined the Democratic Party during the early days of the Biden Administration. Instead, Democrats should run on a commonsense immigration agenda that restores trust with the American people.

What voters want on immigration

Last month, Searchlight asked persuadable voters in battleground districts to describe what they’re looking for in our immigration system. Their responses made it clear that they are tired of the chaos. Importantly, they do not respond well to hyperpartisan messages that focus on our “obligation” to protect migrants on the left or to stop the “invasion” of illegal immigrants on the right.

When asked to describe their ideal immigration system, persuadable voters said they wanted it to be humane, consistent, and fair—a clear rejection of the wildly swinging pendulum we’ve seen on immigration over the past 15 years.

Notably, the messages being put out by President Trump and his Department of Homeland Security are deeply unpopular with persuadable voters. When we asked voters to choose from a list of ideologically diverse immigration messages, only 11% chose the one that was concerned that the “country has been invaded by illegal immigrants.”

Similarly, only 17% of persuadable voters selected a message that said, “Every illegal immigrant is a criminal. All of them should be arrested and deported.”

Instead, voters preferred messages that emphasized the need to enforce our laws firmly, but fairly (33%) and requiring migrants to come through the front door (35%).

To the politicians who want to know what this looks like in practice, listen to James Talarico on his “Frontera Tour” or Bobby Pulido speaking to voters in South Texas. Their messages are helping win back people who supported Trump in 2024 because of the border crisis, even as they remain deeply opposed to Trump’s inhumane and chaotic immigration policy.

How to navigate the toughest issue

Our message testing also dove into a topic that is quite controversial inside the Democratic Party: the question of whether to call for reforming or abolishing ICE in response to the long parade of horribles the agency has delivered over the past 18 months.

When it comes to America’s top deportation agency, Democrats should keep in mind that persuadable voters in our poll strongly supported immigration enforcement in the interior. However, they also wanted ICE reined in and the agency to be held accountable. Specifically, the best-performing message with persuadable voters was: “I’m for fair immigration enforcement, not abolishing ICE. ICE needs to be held accountable, and that means reforming it from the ground up.”

Democrats can and should call for significant reforms at ICE, but if the goal is reaching persuadable voters, they should steer clear of calling for “abolishing” ICE.

It has only been two short years since voters soundly rejected the party’s immigration platform and reelected Trump. And while voters are recoiling from President Trump’s inhumane and chaotic policy, they still believe our immigration laws need to be enforced firmly—they just also want those laws to be enforced fairly, and humanely.

Persuadable voters—and even some Republicans—are becoming fed up with the chaos that Trump has unleashed in our immigration system. Democrats have an opening to win on the issue. But in order to maximize that opportunity, they should focus on messages that connect with the persuadable voters who will decide elections in the fall.

That means choosing their words and their policies carefully.

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You’re likely familiar with the debate about the electoral benefits of ‘moderation.’ One side argues that moving to the center will appeal to more voters, and the other is in vehement opposition, preferring the agenda established by the most left-wing interest groups.

I’ve always found the debate to be overly simple and frankly tedious. That’s because labels like ‘moderate’ or ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ do not define the vast majority of the American electorate. In an era that offers the potential for political realignment, parties looking to build durable power will need to appeal to the incredibly diverse and often vexingly inconsistent viewpoints of the public.

Last week, in an exclusive collaboration with the New York Times, we released findings from a sprawling research project that demonstrate this concept in hard data. Across four qualitative and quantitative surveys and 9,000 voter contacts, we found that nearly three-quarters of the American electorate can be classified as heterodox: their worldviews are composed by taking a little from column A and a little from column B, and do not map neatly onto liberal or conservative templates.

Some of them want the government to provide universal healthcare, but also believe in traditional gender roles. Others want the border secured, and for the government to tax the hell out of rich people. But in their refusal to be pigeonholed, this supermajority of voters reflects the dynamism and originality of the American people.

You can read the full spread of voter groups and the ideological findings here. But for the purposes of this piece, I want to explain what I think this means for the future of Democratic politics.

As I explain in my recently released book, Supermajority, Democrats are aiming too low if they set their goal at winning narrow congressional majorities. To pass the ambitious policy agenda and structural reforms we will need to defeat the fascist threat, they don’t just need to win; they need to win big, which requires competing in swaths of the country where the Democratic brand is currently toxic. That doesn’t mean moving to the center or to the left. It means embracing the ideological diversity—the heterodoxy—that defines the American electorate.

A clear-eyed view of the American electorate

While the electorate is ideologically inconsistent, we were able to segment voters into nine groups with distinct clusters of beliefs. For example, the Neighborhood Watch category describes an older, racially diverse group of voters who support a strong welfare state, increased government regulation, and a more orderly society, whereas folks who fall into the Stars, Stripes, and Steeple category likely share the concern about order but are more supportive of international humanitarian aid. They’re also more likely to be white and favor more conservative domestic economic policies.

Looking at these nine voter segments, I was struck by the fact that only one of the groups reliably supported the policies that defined the left during what we’ve all come to call ‘Woke 1’—and contributed mightily to defining the Democratic Party brand.

We call this the Liberal Arts Left; they’re the most likely to favor policies like border decriminalization, student loan forgiveness, or aggressive climate policy. They also have a high tolerance for social disorder and are by far the most dogmatically socially liberal.

During the last competitive Democratic presidential primary, virtually every candidate was tripping over themselves to appeal to this group. It’s no wonder the Democratic brand began to sour in states like Ohio or Iowa, where Liberal Arts Left voters are far outnumbered, despite the fact that both used to reliably elect Democrats just a few election cycles ago.

At the same time, only one voter group, the Cul-de-Sac Conservatives, supported the sort of small-government economic policy that is most associated with traditional Republicans like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. That explains why Trump was able to expand the party’s tent in 2016, when he performed his own version of heterodoxy by embracing liberal ideas such as universal healthcare and opposition to the Iraq War, while promising to protect Medicare and Social Security. This enabled him to draw from a larger pool of voters, many of them working-class.

Of course, Trump hasn’t built a supermajority coalition for the same reason that Democrats haven’t been able to defeat his MAGA movement. Both parties have overwhelmingly prioritized ideological purity over heterodoxy, failing to build a big tent capable of housing the three-quarters of the electorate who hold a heterodox mix of views.

The path to a supermajority runs through those voters.

The secret third thing

Some party strategists agree with our diagnosis that the party has become too influenced by left-wing interest groups, but then default to the idea that the Democratic Party must moderate across all issues and all races.

And I think that’s wrongheaded too. First, our survey data shows that the Beltway definition of ‘moderation’ isn’t what people are looking for—for example, most voters actually want more government intervention in the economy.

The second problem is that it treats the American electorate like a monolith. Heterodoxy doesn’t imply a blanket ideology for everyone in the country; it understands that a voter in the suburbs of Michigan is going to want something different than a voter in northern Alaska.

In practice, this could mean embracing fossil fuel production in a state like Texas where the industry supports hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs, while also supporting economic populism. Even within economic policy, there’s room for maneuver; a politician like Chris Deluzio can favor more protectionism because his western Pennsylvania district faced deindustrialization, whereas Gabe Vasquez can more vehemently support free trade in his southern New Mexico district because his voters rely on cross-border trade. Both approaches are well-suited to winning swing voters in the areas they represent.

The Democratic Party is at its best when it tolerates this kind of ideological diversity and disavows litmus tests, even when it comes to our most sensitive topics.

As a reflection of how heterodoxy matters on trans issues, our polling shows two important things: First, there is broad support among the public for virtually every category of civil rights protections for trans adults. Second, breaking with the maximalist, left-wing positions on children and sports yielded an increase in candidate support of 10.9 points—one of the biggest boosts out of any issue we polled.

Democrats have become more heterodox, but can be better

The good news is that Democrats today have a much better shot at building a supermajority than Republicans.

That’s because they’ve become more heterodox, while Republicans have become less so.

Republicans such as Susan Collins in Maine, Mike Lawler in New York, and Mike Rogers in Michigan built images for themselves as independent-minded, heterodox candidates by occasionally breaking with their party, but that’s over. Today, they have been cowed into becoming rubber stamps for Trump, supporting his price-raising tariffs and reckless war in Iran.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, we are seeing the opposite trend: ideological diversity is breaking through.

In Alaska, Mary Peltola is embracing fossil fuel production and oil refining, all as part of her pledge to reduce energy costs for residents as quickly as possible. This has meant criticizing her party and the Biden administration in their approach to energy policy and calling out the green groups that protest expanded Alaska oil projects. In a recent radio interview, she said: “I don’t feel like they—many of the people in that movement—are willing to curtail any of their energy uses, whether it’s on their computer or in their car or plane trips, but they expect us to stop producing.” She’s leading her Senate opponent in the polls, despite the fact that Trump won the state by nearly thirteen points.

In Iowa, Rob Sand is running a tight gubernatorial race with an agenda that was described in The Atlantic as not being “progressive or moderate.” It’s that secret third thing, heterodoxy. He’s talking about holding big corporations and data centers accountable while breaking with the left on trans participation in sports. And it’s making his Republican opponent, Zach Lahn, furious. In a recent video, he complained, “It’s like The Truman Show. He’s not a moderate.”

Whether it’s James Talarico touring Texas border counties and getting his immigration plan endorsed by a conservative sheriff or Roy Cooper running tough-on-crime ads in North Carolina, the top-performing Senate candidates are the ones who are embracing heterodoxy and defying ideological labels. In doing so, they’re connecting with the broad swath of the electorate that does not identify as singularly liberal or conservative.

Democrats have a unique and very real opportunity here. Republicans are not attempting to win over the supermajority of ideologically inconsistent voters we identified in our polling project. They are deep in the throes of MAGA, putting them squarely in what I like to call the “pain cave,” forced to loyally back a profoundly unpopular president and his failed policies.

Winning a supermajority is possible. But it will mean continuing to embrace the ideological diversity that defines the American electorate—that secret third thing.

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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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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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