As 2024 draws to a close, I want to thank the many friends and partners who helped PPI grow and extend its reach here and around the world throughout the year. Although last month’s presidential election was dismaying, it at least has clarified the task before us. Because of its history and unswerving dedication to radical pragmatism, PPI is uniquely poised to catalyze the center-left revival our country urgently needs. It’s a big job, and we’ll need your help and support more than ever. If you’re interested in continuing to contribute to PPI’s mission, please donate or visit our website.
PPI’s 2024 Election Review: The Way Ahead for Democrats
The 2024 Presidential election sent shockwaves through American politics, and throughout the world, marking a stunning comeback for Donald Trump and delivering a sobering verdict on the Democratic Party’s current trajectory.
While many governments are grappling with what a change of U.S. administration could mean for their countries and their relationship with the United States, Democrats are coming to terms with why they lost the election, and the way ahead for their party.
New PPI research has been undertaken which reveals the crucial underlying problem: Democrats have lost their connection with working-class Americans.
This third and final installment in a series of PPI/YouGov polling of working-class voters in battleground states, along with focus groups conducted for PPI by Deborah Mattinson, former Director of Strategy for UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, reveal a sobering reality: Blue-collar voters now view the Democratic Party as weak, unpatriotic, incompetent, and out of touch, while seeing Republicans as stronger, more patriotic, and increasingly aligned with their concerns.
“Working class voters rendered a harsh verdict on Democrats on November 6,” said Will Marshall, PPI President. “They see the party as weak, unpatriotic, and out of touch with their everyday economic struggles and values. Democrats need a major course correction, because they can’t build a center-left majority without reconnecting with the working families that once were the backbone of their party.”
PPI’s analysis has been informed by its work around the world to promote durable center-left governments, which is proving challenging under the continued pressure from right-leaning populism. To that end, PPI’s Project on Center-Left Renewal, led by Claire Ainsley and Will Marshall, conducted a post-election trip to Europe, making stops in Brussels, Berlin, and London. The PPI delegation discussed what went wrong for Democrats and how we can work together to rebuild and solidify the center-left coalition.
PPI will continue to engage with party leaders, strategists, and policymakers to advance a vision that reconnects Democrats with the working-class voters who have been the backbone of the party for generations. Only by reconnecting and providing them with a credible alternative for change, can we hope to win the next Presidential election. That work has to start now, and here at PPI we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work on this mission.
WASHINGTON — With key provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act set to expire at the end of 2025, Congress faces a critical opportunity to reshape the nation’s tax code. Amid debates over how to balance revenue needs with economic fairness, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) offers a bold new framework to transform how intergenerational wealth transfers are taxed.
A new report titled “A Better Way to Tax Unearned Income,” authored by PPI Vice President for Policy Development Ben Ritz and Policy Analyst Alex Kilander, offers federal policymakers a detailed technical framework for a new inheritance tax that would progressively raise revenue and counter the political vulnerabilities that have hobbled the current estate tax. If enacted, PPI’s proposal could generate several hundred billion dollars in revenue over the next decade without slowing economic growth, providing tax writers with a promising option to extend some income tax cuts for workers without increasing the national debt.
“Nobody should pay more in taxes on income they earn through their own hard work or risk-taking investments than they do on the income they inherit simply for being born into a wealthy family,” saidRitz. “Every dollar raised by taxing unearned inheritance is one that does not need to be raised by taxing the earned incomes of working Americans.”
Although polls consistently show high levels of public support for taxing wealthy Americans who are exclusively affected by the current estate tax, the tax itself has become deeply unpopular with the general public after years of anti-tax advocates arguing that, because taxes are already levied on the income a person earns during their lifetime, taxing the assets a person leaves behind is an unfair “death tax” that amounts to double taxation. The estate tax is further undermined by large exemptions and loopholes that make it easy to avoid for even the wealthiest families.
PPI’s proposal tackles these challenges by:
Replacing the estate tax with a system that instead taxes inheritance when it is received by heirs as income
Reforming the taxation of capital gains, gifts, and trusts to ensure the system cannot be exploited by wealthy Americans
Expanding protections to prevent heirs from needing to sell family-owned farms, homes, or small businesses to pay their tax obligations
The new report expands upon one of six dozen ideas PPI’s Center for Funding America’s Future proposed this summer as part of a comprehensive blueprint for putting the federal budget on a path to balance within 20 years. That blueprint can be found here.
Launched in 2018, the Progressive Policy Institute’s Center for Funding America’s Future works to promote a fiscally responsible public investment agenda that fosters robust and inclusive economic growth. To that end, the Center develops fiscally responsible policy proposals to strengthen public investments in the foundation of our economy, modernize health and retirement programs to reflect an aging society, transform our tax code to reward work over wealth, and put the national debt on a downward trajectory.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
The belief that success should come from your personal initiative and hard work, rather than the good fortune of your birth, is central to our nation’s identity as the “land of opportunity.”
Rags to riches stories are deeply rooted in American history and folklore, with several of our founding fathers, such as Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin, rising from impoverished backgrounds to build a nation. Conversely, the American ethos has steadfastly rejected the “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth,” as Thomas Jefferson writes, in favor of one built upon “virtue and talents.” Success in America is supposed to be built upon merit and hard work rather than who your parents are.
Despite this national ethos, America has fallen behind many of our international peers in creating opportunities for social mobility. In the World Economic Forum’s measure for social mobility, the United States performs worse than the Nordic countries, France, and even the United Kingdom, with their long history of hereditary aristocracy. Declining levels of intergenerational mobility have come in tandem with rising levels of wealth inequality. U.S. wealth is densely concentrated among relatively few households, with the top 10% of households today owning roughly 67% of the nation’s wealth, compared to the 2.5% for the bottom 50% of households. Even among households that are exclusively above age 50, which removes cases where people are high-income but low-wealth (such as a recent law school graduate), the wealthiest 10% of households own 70% of wealth in that age range, while the bottom 50% of households only have 3%.
This combination of low social mobility and high wealth inequality produces a self-perpetuating hierarchy of economic privilege, making it difficult to get ahead on hard work alone. As much as 60% of all wealth in the United States is inherited rather than earned. Moreover, this inheritance income is skewed toward those who already enjoy comfortable lives: In 2021, the top 10% of earners received 55% of total inherited wealth, while the bottom 40% received less than 10%. It’s perfectly natural that people who have enjoyed economic success would want to pass some of their wealth on to their children. But the privilege cannot be limitless. Entrenched aristocracies built upon generations of inherited wealth create a substantially uneven playing field and pose a threat to our democracy, as concentrated wealth, in turn, leads to concentrated economic opportunities and political power.
The best tool for reconciling this tension between individual liberty and America’s promise of equal opportunity for all is the U.S. tax system. But as the next section of this paper explains, the current estate tax is undermined by large exemptions and loopholes that make it easy to avoid for even the wealthiest families. It has also become deeply unpopular with the general public after years of anti-tax Republicans arguing that, because taxes are already levied on the income a person earns during their lifetime, taxing the assets a person leaves behind is an unfair “death tax” that amounts to double taxation. But these critiques misrepresent who actually pays the estate tax. Someone who is already dead suffers no inconvenience from the estate tax or any other tax policy; the tax is instead borne entirely by heirs who never paid any tax on the income they receive from an inheritance.
The following sections of this paper offer federal policymakers a technical framework for reforming the taxation of intergenerational wealth transfers to progressively raise revenue and undercut the misleading political attacks levied against the current system. To start, we propose to replace the estate tax — which taxes a decedent’s estate — with a new system that would only tax inheritance as it is received by an heir. This approach would both limit Republican “death tax” arguments by making it more clear that the tax is paid by wealthy heirs and create a fairer system for heirs by only taxing the inheritance they actually receive as income. We also propose reforms to the gift and generation skipping transfer taxes — two taxes intended to complement the estate tax — to work better alongside our proposed inheritance tax.
Next, we offer a series of reforms to close the largest loopholes in the current wealth transfer tax system. One of the biggest is the stepped up basis, which permits previously unrealized capital gains to completely escape taxation after an asset has been passed down. In addition, our proposal takes aim at the myriad of loopholes that arise from the IRS’s favorable treatment of non-liquid assets, including tax deductions and discounts commonly abused by wealthy families. However, we also pair these reforms with expanded protections to ensure that no heir has to sell the family farm, home, or small business they inherit just to pay an onerous tax bill. Lastly, we make major reforms to the taxation of trusts, streamlining complicated tax rules and closing the many loopholes that arise from this complexity while preserving the use of trusts for valid reasons unrelated to tax avoidance.
Left out of our proposal are changes to address other vehicles that are sometimes used to avoid estate tax, such as leaving estates to questionable nonprofit “family foundations” or using life insurance to pass along wealth tax-free. Since closing these loopholes would require a much broader rethink of the taxation of nonprofits and life insurance overall, and our proposal makes them no worse than under current law, we have chosen to leave them unchanged. Despite these omissions, our proposal would be a substantial improvement over the status quo, raising several hundred billion dollars over ten years from the wealthiest households while creating a better and fairer tax regime. Furthermore, every dollar raised by taxing unearned inheritance is one that does not need to be raised by increasing taxes on the earned incomes of working and middle-class Americans, making it a strong option for policymakers to consider in the context of future tax reform or deficit reduction efforts.
For a generation, people living in the traditional industrial heartlands all over the world have been buffeted by a technological and services revolution, the decline of manufacturing, and the rise of a borderless global digital economy. The result is deepening inequality, ongoing political support for right-wing populists and a hollowing out of the middle class.
With this three-year project together with our partners from the U.S. and Germany we aim to create new opportunities in old industrial heartlands in both countries by forging a transatlantic dialogue, exchanging best practices and developing political strategies and policy solutions for a better, greener and more democratic future. The main goal is to deliver increased living standards and opportunities, while also working towards rebuilding trust in democracy in the U.S. and Germany.
Neel Brown talks with two of the program fellows, Colleen Dougherty and Friedrich Opitz, about their reflections on the fellowship’s October trip to Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.
Learn more about the program: https://www.industrial-heartlands.com/
Over the past few decades, most kids have grown up being told by their parents that getting a four-year college degree is the best way to get ahead in life. Today, however, as the cost of college has skyrocketed and employers have faced a shortage of skilled workers, people have started to look beyond traditional two and four-year colleges for their pathway to career success.
With so many employers in need of workers with qualifications in anything from IT services to healthcare to the culinary arts, short-term educational programs have been one of the fastest emerging career training opportunities for people looking to enter the workforce or change careers. These programs are typically highly accredited, providing workers with a quality education and the specific skills they need to thrive.
However, Washington lawmakers have created an unbalanced system that makes it harder for students to access these programs. Short-term training programs are popular, enjoy higher competition rates than two-year degrees, and tend to be dramatically cheaper than traditional colleges — but the cost can still be prohibitive, and very little financial aid in the form of grants or scholarships is available for them at the state, local, and federal levels. While some short-term programs are eligible for federal student loans, under current law, programs must span at least 600 hours over 15 weeks to qualify for Pell Grants.
Jacoby, who is based in Kyiv, talked about the mood there, after almost three years of war in the country. “People are tired,” she said, “and that word doesn’t quite even capture it. Kyiv is far from the front, and life goes on in Kyiv. People go to restaurants and bars, and do live their lives, but just about everybody knows or is related to somebody who’s fighting, and indeed, most have casualties in their circle of a family or acquaintances. And the war is coming increasingly to Kyiv and to the west of the country because of the intensified missile and drone strikes.”
Democrats are out of touch and disconnected from working class voters of all races, genders, and backgrounds. That isn’t exactly breaking news. It is obvious. For many of us in the industrial Midwest, this has been like watching a decades-long train wreck in slow motion. Many of us have been screaming this from the rooftops, and no one, and I mean no one, in Washington wanted to listen. Now here we are with a brand new Trump presidency and an even further damaged Democratic brand. My suggestion as a first step on the road to recovery: Move the Democratic National Committee headquarters out of Washington, D.C. to Youngstown, Ohio.
Democrats need to get the hell out of the D.C. bubble. It’s killed our party. Force the overpaid consultants and contractors who give really bad advice to get immersed into the culture of an old mill town trying to make its way in the new economy. Make them and the staffers who work for the DNC drink coffee, eat lunch and dinner, drink beer, bowl, play bocce, go to concerts and watch sports with normal everyday working people. And they should spend their time mostly listening—not talking or tweeting.
The Democrats have, whether we like it or not, become an arrogant, preachy, coastal, inside-the-beltway, Twitter Party. We’ve become an organization of loosely tied, self interested groups who make a lot of money pitching outrage so they can raise more money for their own self preservation. Then, if any fellow Democrat has an honest, fact based disagreement, they scream and yell and call you corrupt.
It’s pretty pathetic. Our party has no clear unifying vision for America. The Party has taken extreme positions that are not connected to reality generally and do not resonate with the sensibilities of working class voters. We’ve lost touch with the hopes and dreams of everyday Americans. And we won’t reconnect with those hopes and dreams by having all of our operatives living and working just blocks from the stupid echo chamber that has become Washington, D.C.
Many states’ standardized test scores mislead the public about whether students have mastered the lessons taught at their grade level. In other words, scores some states label as ‘proficient’ doesn’t match the knowledge the nation’s top experts in student assessment say children should attain by their age.
Wisconsin now joins their ranks.
In June, with nary a public hearing, Jill Underly’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) unilaterally watered down Wisconsin’s achievement standards. Without input from the governor, legislators, parents, or assessment experts, DPI lowered the “cut” scores for the state’s annual Forward exam.
Not surprisingly, Underly’s new performance standards manifested as a mirage on the Forward exam scores released earlier this fall:
In 2023, 39% of Wisconsin students tested proficient in reading; in 2024, 51% did.
In 2023, 41% were proficient in math; in 2024, DPI claims 53% are.
That’s a 12% jump in both subjects in one year – extremely unusual, even when students get intensive academic remediation.
On this episode of RAS Reports, Curtis Valentine, the Co-Director of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project, and Naomi Shelton, CEO of the National Charter Collaborative, sit down with Ronald Falls Jr., a member of the Board of Trustees at Stillman College.
The group discusses Stillman’s charter school partnership, as well as the crucial role HBCUs can play in K-12 education as charter authorizers.
After a pandemic-induced recession and several years of high inflation, many Americans are pessimistic about both their own personal finances and the overall economy. Unfortunately, the incoming Trump administration will likely bring more economic turbulence, with sweeping policy promises that could cause economic growth and employment to drop, while reigniting high inflation. Americans without robust savings are especially vulnerable in such turbulent times.
One of the most unnecessary contributors to inflation over the past four years was an excess of deficit-financed stimulus spending. But Trump and Congressional Republicans appear likely to repeat the mistake of their predecessors by extending and possibly expanding upon the tax cuts they enacted in Trump’s first term — which would cost more than $4 trillion over 10 years — without offsetting most of the cost. Furthermore, while the tax cuts’ largest benefits will disproportionately flow to wealthy Americans, the inflation they could cause would be borne primarily by working-class Americans who consume more of their household income than their upper-income peers.
As both a candidate and as president-elect, Trump has promised several other policy shifts that would wreak havoc on American households’ financial stability. For example, Trump promised throughout his campaign to impose a 10-20% tariff on every imported good, with at least a 60% tariff on Chinese goods. More recently, Trump also threatened a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico, two of our largest trade partners. If implemented, these proposals would lower most Americans’ incomes by thousands of dollars, as importers pass the cost onto consumers through higher prices for everyday items.
If enacted, these policies and the many others Trump has advocated for, such as mass deportations, would send shockwaves through the economy. One prediction from the Peterson Institute for International Economics suggests severe consequences for Americans: Prices could skyrocket as much as 28% above the baseline prediction, gross domestic product could be $6.4 trillion lower, and employment would fall in exporting industries such as agriculture and manufacturing. While other estimates may be smaller, they all point to disastrous consequences for American households if Trump succeeds in enacting the economic agenda he campaigned on.
Households without savings to rely upon will be especially vulnerable to these economic disruptions. Emergency savings can not only provide a crucial financial cushion during unexpected events such as job loss but can also reduce reliance upon debt when a household’s costs rise faster than its income. Yet the past few years of inflation have taken a toll on American households, with 65% of adults in a Federal Reserve survey published earlier this year saying price increases have worsened their financial situation. One consequence of higher prices is that it becomes harder to adequately save for emergencies: According to the same survey, 46% of Americans surveyed did not have emergency savings to cover three months of expenses, up from 41% in 2021. Another recent survey by Blackrock found that more than one in four Americans lack any form of easily accessible savings to draw from during a crisis.
Donald Trump’s voting base is especially at risk: Blackrock’s survey found that 36% of rural households, which backed Trump by a 28-point margin, had no form of emergency savings — one of the highest of any demographic group. But these communities will also be among the hardest hit by Trump’s economic policies: The trade wars caused by his across-the-board tariffs will not only raise the prices they pay on consumer goods, but hit export-reliant industries that are important for rural economies, such as agriculture. As other countries respond with retaliatory tariffs, the industry will suffer as American products become substantially less competitive overseas.
Ideally, policymakers should avoid pursuing policies that will cause economic uncertainty or chaos. But in any case, they should pursue policies that promote financial capability to help vulnerable households weather whatever turbulent times lie ahead. PPI will be highlighting some potential policies that could advance these objectives in the next year.
On Wednesday, outgoing Senate Majority Chuck Schumer announced his intention to bring the House-passed “Social Security Fairness Act” up for a vote before the end of the year. While the bill may sound good and have some admirable goals, passing it now as written would undermine the future of Social Security. It would be both political malpractice and bad governance for Democrats to rush this bill into law as their final act before handing control of the White House and U.S. Senate to the GOP in January.
Social Security is currently built around two core principles. The first is that workers should receive benefits based on what they paid into the program. Although this principle is heavily strained today, as workers have not paid enough in Social Security payroll taxes to cover the cost of benefits for many years now, benefits are calculated based on the average wages upon which workers paid payroll taxes over their careers. The second principle is that the benefit formula is progressive, meaning workers with lower lifetime incomes receive a greater benefit relative to the money they earned (and paid into the program) compared to higher earners.
At issue are two provisions, known as the windfall elimination provisions (WEP) and government pension offset (GPO), that attempt to enforce these principles fairly for people who spend part of their career working for state and local governments in jobs that offer pension benefits in lieu of Social Security. Earnings from these jobs are considered “uncovered,” which means workers don’t have to pay payroll taxes on the income, but those earnings also aren’t taken into account for Social Security’s benefit formula. WEP and GPO are intended to prevent someone who consistently earned a $100,000 annual salary over a career that was split evenly between covered and uncovered jobs — and thus would be treated by the benefit formula as if they received a $50,000 over their whole career — from getting a higher return on their payroll-tax contributions than someone who consistently earned $60,000 in covered employment.
As President Biden “runs through the tape” in his last weeks in office, he should take a few minutes to approve U.S. Steel’s purchase by Japanese firm Nippon Steel. Doing so would have myriad benefits and virtually no costs. The merger would help America’s heavy industry, support a core U.S. international alliance, and promote fair competition and supply for steel users in the United States. Approving the merger is, basically, the right thing to do.
Nippon Steel’s bid to purchase U.S. steel succeeded in late 2023. That is, at least as far as the money, the terms, and the agreement of U.S. Steel’s management and Board of Directors. The two companies agreed on a $14 billion deal that would bring new blue-chip Japanese technology and capital to a fading U.S. industrial icon and help preserve metal production in Pennsylvania.
Nonetheless, the Nippon-U.S. Steel merger has proved controversial. Fears about foreign ownership of a major American metals producer quickly generated opposition from both the Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration. The issues have also divided the United Steelworkers union, with union leadership opposing the deal while many Pennsylvania members support it.
Over the course of the Biden administration, the federal government borrowed more than $5 trillion to pay for programs it did not have the tax revenue to finance. Under current law, the Congressional Budget Office projects these primary deficits — the difference between non-interest spending and tax revenue — to total $7.4 trillion over the next decade.
Financing government spending with deficits is not inherently bad. In fact, it is often necessary to support the economy temporarily during widely recognized emergencies such as wars or recessions. When the crisis subsides, the government can raise taxes or reduce spending to compensate, and the debt is either repaid or at least shrinks as a share of the economy. Debt can also be a useful tool to make investments that will grow our economy over the long-term, such as funding scientific research that lays the foundation for technological progress.
But most federal debt isn’t taken out for these productive purposes. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half of the national debt could be attributed to the cumulative cost of interest payments. This means that most of our debt wasn’t used to finance tangible benefits like providing public goods, uplifting the poor, or subsidizing long-term investments. Instead, it was borrowed just to pay the cost of past debt.
Although it might appear that the share of debt attributable to interest has since shrunk, this is an artifact from the unusual surge of borrowing to finance temporary programs following the COVID-19 pandemic. As the federal government begins paying interest on the debt accumulated over the past four years, and then pays interest on the debt used to pay for future interest payments, cumulative interest payments will snowball to the point where they again make up the majority of debt within the next decade.
The problem will only get worse as time goes on if current law remains unchanged. Over the next 30 years, cumulative interest payments are projected to grow twice as fast as gross domestic product. At the end of that window, the amount of money spent financing past debts will exceed the total value of all goods and services produced by our economy each year.
When we borrow, we are making a transfer from future taxpayers to current ones. By continuing to neglect the long-term cost of debt, we are setting our future selves and subsequent generations for a snowballing debt burden, most of which will not even have been used to buy anything other than time for politicians to procrastinate.
Despite the nation’s deteriorating fiscal health, President-elect Trump and his Republican allies in Congress want to accumulate even more debt. Their top fiscal policy priority for next year — fully extending the expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act without offsetting the cost — would increase primary deficits by $5.2 trillion over the next 10 years alone. Implementing all of Trump’s proposals from his 2024 presidential campaign, including tax cuts on income from tips, overtime pay, and social security payments, could add as much as $13.5 trillion to primary deficits over the coming decade.
If there is one key takeaway from this analysis, it is that when policymakers pass unfunded tax cuts today, future taxpayers will be stuck with a debt burden that is many times the cost of the tax cuts themselves. When each dollar of debt we undertake is unlikely to be repaid soon, it comes with a far higher cost of interest. This should set the standard for what’s worth borrowing for higher, not lower.
President-elect Donald Trump believes Americans have given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate to govern.” Like so much of what he says, this claim blurs the line between hyperbole and fantasy. His Nov. 5 victory was solid, but no landslide.
Trump won just under half the popular vote, only 1.6% more than Vice President Kamala Harris received. With a public disapproval rating of 50%, he is the least popular presidential winner in modern times.
It’s certainly possible to look at Trump’s return to power as reflecting the new norm in U.S. elections of small and unstable majorities. Since Barack Obama’s departure, U.S. voters have tossed out the incumbents in one “change” election after another.
But such an interpretation might tempt Democrats, who were shut out of power in Congress as well as the White House, to do little but wait for their chance two and four years hence. That would be a colossal mistake.
Instead, Democrats must face a hard truth: their coalition is inexorably shrinking as non-college voters continue to defect. It’s time for honest answers to three vexing questions:
How did they lose again to the deeply flawed Trump? Does their loss signal a U.S. political realignment? And why are Democrats — and indeed center-left parties across Europe — alienating the working-class voters they once championed?
The sweep of Trump’s victory — both demographically and geographically — came as a shock. He shaved his losing margins in Democratic regions and made large gains among Democratic-leaning voter groups — young voters, Blacks, and especially Latinos.
Despite spending a half-billion dollars more than Trump, Harris won not one of the seven battleground states. In the brief time allotted her (107 days), she ran a competent campaign but could not avoid being sucked into the undertow of President Biden’s unpopularity.
Tactics aside, however, the defeat highlighted Democrats’ strategic political failure under Biden-Harris to stop hemorrhaging working-class voters.
Biden talked incessantly about fighting for working people, but his policies did not align with their interests.
Instead, he and his advisors fell victim to the fallacy of “deliverism” — the notion that passing big, multitrillion-dollar bills in Washington would impress working families and show them the “system” at last was working for them.
Instead, they got blindsided by inflation. Forty percent of these voters identified the high cost of living as their top concern. Economists differ as to its causes, but working-class voters link inflation to high government spending.
Immigration ranked second for these voters. Here again, they blamed the Biden administration for liberalizing asylum policy and presiding over a surge of over 7 million illegal migrants over the past four years. In fact, on almost all the key issues except for abortion, non-college voters expressed far higher levels of trust in Republicans than Democrats. They also were more likely to say Democrats had moved too far to the left than Republicans had to the right.
The aftershocks of Trump’s victory and U.S. voters’ rightward shift are felt across the Atlantic. Like his populist-right counterparts in Europe, Trump is riding a working-class revolt against governing elites. First confined to white Americans without college degrees, it’s now spreading to the non-white working class.
In fact, social class, now defined chiefly by education level, is replacing race and ethnicity as America’s deepest political fault line.
Since the high-water mark of Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats have experienced a 30-point drop in non-white working-class support. That’s shattered a cherished progressive myth that “voters of color” think and vote alike along reliably Democratic lines. Harris improved on Biden’s 2020 performance with only one group — white college graduates. Yet that only underscored the strange inversion of America’s partisan loyalties: Democrats have become the party of the highly educated and professionals, while Republicans represent a multiethnic working class.
For the first time in memory, Harris won Americans making more than $100,000, while Trump won those making less than $50,000.The blue-collar exodus from the Democratic Party has been decades in the making. It won’t be fixed by minor tweaks. Democrats need to make dramatic course correction to head off a U.S. political realignment around a new populist right majority.
Voters without college degrees constitute roughly two-thirds of the U.S. electorate. Mathematically, there’s no way to build durable governing majorities with college-educated voters alone.
Morally, if Democrats hope to resume their historical role as the “party of the people,” they’ll need to reflect the mainstream values of middle-class America rather than the rarefied “luxury beliefs” of upper-class elites.
According to a post-election analysis by More in Common, Americans overwhelmingly believe that Democrats care more about advancing progressive social causes than the economic interests of average working families.
Asked to describe the party’s highest priorities, they picked “LGBT/transgender policy” second, after abortion. Actually, Democrats, like all other voter groups, picked the cost of living first, followed by health care and abortion. Transgender issues were 13th on their priority list.
Why are public perceptions so skewed? A big reason is that U.S. political discourse is mainly driven by progressive activists and right-wing populists. This leads members of both parties to assume the other party holds more extreme views that it actually does.
The outsized influence of progressive activists associates Democrats with a raft of unpopular positions on race/gender, immigration, crime and education. Trump exploited that to devastating effect against Harris.
The most lethal attack ad of the presidential campaign was a clip from a 2019 interview in which Harris explains her support for publicly-funded sex change surgery for prisoners, including detained immigrants. The kicker: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”
After watching the ad, 2.7% of voters shifted to Trump. That’s a stunning result. And even if most Democrats hold more moderate views on culturally fraught issues, they pay the opportunity costs that come with the progressive left’s fixation on race, gender, police brutality, fossil abolitionism and other “social justice” issues. The amount of time Democrats spend talking about such issues diverts their focus from the kitchen table struggles of working-class families.
It is the kitchen table struggles of working-class families that now need to become the fixation for Democrats. PPI has been working with Deborah Mattinson, most recently director of strategy to U.K. Labour leader and now Prime Minister Keir Starmer, to understand how those crucial voters experienced the U.S. election. In this report, PPI presents insight and analysis of the election, and draws on our learning from the center-left around the world to set out the way ahead for Democrats.
Only by re-connecting with the working-class Americans we have lost, and providing them with a credible alternative for change, can we hope to win the next Presidential election. That work has to start now.
WASHINGTON — As the cost of higher education continues to rise, students and families are turning to Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) programs to reduce tuition expenses and graduate sooner. However, despite the increasing popularity of these programs — over 5.2 million AP exams were taken in 2023 — a new analysis from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) reveals that many colleges and universities are imposing restrictive policies on how AP and IB credits are applied, making it harder for students to save both time and money.
A new PPI report, “Diminishing Credit II: How Colleges and Universities Restrict the Use of AP and IB Towards Earning a Degree in Less Than Four Years”, authored by PPI Senior Fellow Paul Weinstein Jr., dives deeper into these trends. The report highlights how institutions limit the value of pre-college coursework through measures such as capping the total credits allowed, raising minimum exam score thresholds, and making credit policies opaque and difficult to navigate. These restrictions force students to take more courses than necessary, prolonging their time to degree completion and inflating the overall cost of a college education.
The report is a follow-up to PPI’s groundbreaking 2016 study and reveals that colleges are increasingly reducing the value of pre-college coursework, worsening the student debt crisis. Key findings include:
Credit Caps: Half of the surveyed institutions cap the number of AP and IB credits students can apply toward graduation.
Minimum Score Inflation: The percentage of top schools requiring a minimum AP score of 4 or higher has grown, with some elite institutions only accepting scores of 5.
Opaque Policies: Many colleges bury or omit information about their AP/IB credit policies, leaving students in the dark until after enrollment.
“Colleges and universities are creating unnecessary obstacles for students striving to graduate early and reduce tuition costs,” said Weinstein. “By capping credits, raising score requirements, and limiting transparency around AP and IB policies, these institutions are driving up the cost of a degree and forcing families to shoulder even greater financial burdens. It’s time for policymakers and colleges to remove these barriers and deliver on the promise of affordable, accessible higher education for all students.”
The report recommends reforms to make credit policies more transparent and equitable, including:
A national database detailing AP and IB credit policies for all colleges
Mandating that colleges provide detailed credit assessments to admitted students before enrollment
Limiting caps on AP/IB credits to one year of coursework
Expanding access to AP and IB programs in underserved schools
The findings are especially timely given the Biden administration’s focus on reducing student loan debt. While President Biden has made strides to address the financial burden of student loans, such as his executive order to cancel up to $20,000 of student debt for many borrowers, PPI maintains that these measures are not enough to tackle the root cause of the crisis: skyrocketing tuition costs.
Instead of relying on costly and potentially inequitable debt forgiveness programs, PPI emphasizes the need for colleges and universities to lower costs and allow students to capitalize on pre-college achievements like AP and IB coursework. These steps would provide a more sustainable and equitable path forward by ensuring that families can reduce the cost of higher education upfront rather than retroactively addressing debt burdens.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visitingprogressivepolicy.org.Find an expertat PPI andfollow uson Twitter.
In 2016, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) released an analysis of school policies regarding Advanced Placement (AP) credit. Despite being one of the few ways students could seek to graduate in fewer than four years, we discovered that the vast majority of the nation’s top schools restricted students from applying AP coursework toward degree credits. Unfortunately, despite strong evidence that successfully completed AP courses meet the standards of achievement expected by colleges and universities, the situation has deteriorated significantly as more schools seek to protect their revenue streams.
Furthermore, schools have significantly diminished the value of other college-level coursework completed before matriculation. For example, U.S. universities and colleges limit the amount of course credit awarded to students who have completed coursework through the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum, which is increasingly offered throughout the country. PPI’s study shows that IB credit was typically denied at the same rate as credit as AP.
Today, more students than ever enroll in AP courses and exams. In 2023, 5.2 million AP exams were taken by high school students, up from 1.6 million in 2002. A study from the College Board, which owns AP, shows that 738,698 students, or 21.7% of students in the class of 2023, scored at least a 3, more than 2 points higher than the class of 2013.
Although still small by comparison to the reach of AP (almost 23,000 high schools offer AP courses), 900 high schools in America now offer the IB diploma. This number has risen considerably since 1971, when the first IB program was taught in a U.S. school. The granting of credit for AP and IB is one of the few ways students can reduce the cost of attending college. Presently, the average cost of attending a private, nonprofit college or university is $38,421, and $15,868 for a public university.
Students who successfully complete AP or IB courses in high school could graduate in some cases either one year or one semester early, saving them anywhere between 12.5% to 25% of the total cost of the degree.
Students have other tools that help them graduate college at a lower cost. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between 20% to 50% of new university students have transferred from community college. But as students move between community college and four-year programs, many find it very difficult to navigate the system of credit transfers and agreements.
Furthermore, students looking for information on credits for AP or IB work (and courses completed at community colleges as well), often have to wait until they arrive on campus and have paid their first tuition installment. Many schools have made it increasingly difficult to figure out how much AP or IB credit will be awarded before stepping on campus. Many institutions are leaving that decision to academic departments. And more and more schools are offering only waivers on introductory courses in lieu of course credit.
For too long students have been at the mercy of college administrators — forced to pay higher tuition bills and fees for things that should be free — transcripts, tickets for graduation, etc. Policymakers need to help level the playing field by using the government’s bargaining power (the federal government is the largest source of financial aid and provides billions in research grants to colleges and universities) to negotiate lower prices and force schools to accept coursework completed elsewhere. An important step to help students get through college faster and, therefore, at a lower cost is to ensure they get credit for successfully completing college-level work before matriculating.
