issue: Politics

PPI in The Nevada Independent: Nevada Democrats Advised to Lean in on Economic Issues, Ease up on Cultural Wars

Posted on by Alex Terr

Rudderless. Woke. Disorganized. Out of touch. Leaderless.

This is how non-college educated voters described the Democratic Party in recent focus groups hosted by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), a Democratic think tank that researches center-left policy issues and bills itself as “radically pragmatic.”

The results from the focus groups were shared at PPI’s New Directions for Democrats Summit, which took place in Las Vegas on Sept. 12 and 13. The group will be hosting summits across swing states that are likely to be political battlegrounds in the 2026 and 2028 elections.

Read more in The Nevada Independent. 

Marshall, Ainsley in Politico EU: How Britain’s Labour Party is (quietly) keeping up with the Democrats

Posted on by Alex Terr

Claire Ainsley, a former aide to Starmer who is now the director of the PPI’s project on center-left renewal, said: “Looking at who’s going to be the next candidate is actually only one part of the equation. The other part of it is which faction, if you like, is going to get their candidate to emerge?”

With Bill Clinton in the 1990s, she argued, “you build the platform and the candidate emerges. It wasn’t as if Clinton came with all these ideas — you had to build a platform.” But this becomes a battle of competing ideologies too, with different think tanks lobbying for the kind of center left they want to see. […]

Likewise, Labour’s recent former General Secretary David Evans, now an adviser to PPI, has been to the U.S. with Ainsley to speak to Democratic strategists, including at a Denver summit in April. The pair are due to attend a similar behind-closed-doors “retreat” in Las Vegas on Sept. 13, where speakers will include Obama’s former chief of staff (and potential presidential hopeful) Rahm Emanuel.

The PPI has its eye on talented governors such as Whitmer, Colorado’s Jared Polis, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, newcomers such as North Carolina’s Josh Stein and former governors such as Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo, who also served in Joe Biden’s cabinet as a commerce secretary.

Shapiro and Whitmer in particular, argued PPI President Will Marshall, embody an “impatience with government bureausclerosis” — a battle occupying Labour in the U.K. Friendly think tanks like to hail Shapiro for fixing a key interstate in just 12 days after it collapsed.

In the U.K., PPI is interested in center-left ministers such as Lammy, Wes Streeting, Bridget Phillipson, John Healey, Ellie Reeves, Alison McGovern, Torsten Bell, Kirsty McNeill and Lucy Rigby, along with new junior ministers such as Kanishka Narayan and Mike Tapp.

Democratic former Congressman Tim Ryan — who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2020 as well as against the now-Vice President JD Vance in a 2022 Ohio Senate race — came to the U.K. in July, facilitated by the PPI, and held briefings with Labour MPs and peers. Ainsley and Deborah Mattinson, a pollster and former Starmer adviser who works with the PPI, presented research on swing voters who are becoming disillusioned with center-left parties.

Read more in Politico EU.

Marshall for The Hill: Trump is Sinking, but Democrats Aren’t Rising — Here’s Why

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Like all good flimfam artists, President Trump is a master of misdirection.

As Americans grow increasingly skeptical of his inflationary tariffs, deficit-swelling tax cuts and senseless push to gut federal agencies and research, he floods the zone with a firehose of falsehoods to shift media and public attention elsewhere.

Take his grandstanding plan to dispatch U.S. troops to Chicago and other cities, as he’s already done to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. It’s a classic “wag the dog” ploy with a Trumpian twist: Instead of fabricating a foreign military crisis to divert voters from their domestic woes, he’s invading America’s blue metros.

Crime and public disorder, including sprawling homeless encampments, are serious problems. But a rational president would partner with local leaders to alleviate them instead of putting our cities under military occupation.

Trump’s grotesquely exaggerated claims of urban anarchy discredit America in the world’s eyes so he can score political points at home. Hard-core Republicans eat it up, but the rest of the country seems unswayed by the president’s gaslighting.

Keep reading in The Hill.

Marshall for The Hill: In a Liberal Society, Equity is a False Idol

Posted on by Alex Terr

Over the last two decades, progressive activists have introduced lots of sententious words and euphemisms into the U.S. political lexicon.

Examples include microaggression, intersectionality, cisgender, BIPOC, Latinx, “the unhoused” (that is, the homeless), returning citizens (ex-convicts) and “pregnant persons” (formerly “women”).

For those not up to speed on the latest academic conceits and ideological fads, including non-college voters streaming out of the Democratic Party, progressives might as well be speaking Esperanto.

They have also infused old words with new meanings. Take “equity.” Specifically, it means ownership in a house or stocks. But in its new meaning, it is used more generally as a synonym for fairness.

Now, it has become a pillar of DEI — the hallowed trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion that defines today’s “social justice” ethos. In this context, “equity” conveys a demand for something stronger than mere equality.

Read more in The Hill.

Marshall in The New York Times: The Seeds of Democratic Revival Have Already Been Sown

Posted on by Max Sherrill

We encountered more emphasis from the left than the center on countering corporate power. Centrists, by contrast, emphasized reforming the government itself (…)

Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a moderate think tank, put it this way: Democrats “need to get serious about reinventing government again. One big reason Bidenomics didn’t land with working families is that they don’t think the federal government works for their benefit or can deliver on its promises. By reflexively defending underperforming public institutions — from public schools to ossified federal agencies — Democrats only cement their identification with a broken status quo.”

Read the full article in The New York Times.

Ainsley for ABC Radio National Breakfast: UK’s Labour Party suspends four MPs in rising rebellion over welfare policy

Posted on by Max Sherrill

As British Prime Minister tries to reassert control of his party room, four rebel Labour MPs have been suspended after voting against the government’s welfare reform bill earlier this month.

Keir Starmer has defended the decision, which follows an earlier back-flip on key welfare measures in the wake of ongoing pressure from Labour MPs.

Critics say the suspensions could deepen divisions in the party and spark further unrest on Labour’s left.

  • Guest: Claire Ainsley, Former Director of Policy to Keir Starmer, now Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute

Listen to the full interview.

Build Back Belief: Why Voters Around the World Lost Faith in Government and How to Win it Back

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

INTRODUCTION: A BREAKDOWN IN TRUST 

Listening to swing voters in Pittsburgh, Brandenburg, and Accrington, we heard the same story over and over. Frustration, even anger, with the politicians they had elected to serve them.

A powerful sense of injustice fueled by the belief that government is no longer on the side of the people it has been elected to serve. Dismay that working people like them must work harder and harder just to get by, drained of hope and aspiration. Fearful for their children and grandchildren in an increasingly insecure world.

The change imperative could not have been more powerfully felt: change to break through the malaise with a different kind of politics led by politicians they can truly believe in. Perpetuating the status quo is no longer an option for many voters who feel ignored and disregarded as their futures ebb away.

When we looked at what has worked electorally for the center left – in the U.K. a year ago, in Australia, in pockets of the U.S. where some Democrats had outperformed the norm – we found common themes.

Successful candidates persuaded voters – against the odds – to believe in them: to believe that they would deliver for them, because they believed they could deliver for them (they were competent to do so) – and, even more importantly, to believe they wanted to deliver for them. Their conviction, sense of purpose and leadership shone through.

Conviction seems to be the deal breaker. Only by feeling the strength of political leaders’ own conviction was it possible to truly believe in them.

And only when voters believed in their political leaders was it possible to believe things could get better in their country, for their future, for their communities, for their families.

This pamphlet sets out to unpack the insight gained from hours of conversation with strategists and the crucial voters they set out to woo in the U.S., U.K., Australia and Germany – and to turn that insight into practical ways for progressives to remake the broken contract between government and the people, and start to win again.

READ THE FULL PUBLICATION.

Marshall for The Hill: How Trump Can Capitalize on Autocrats’ Setbacks

Posted on by Alex Terr

The defanging of Iran — chiefly by Israel, with a strong assist from President Trump and the U.S. Air Force — doesn’t just signal a dramatic power shift in the Middle East. It is also a setback to Iran’s senior partners in the anti-American axis — Russia and China.

Neither has offered their battered ally anything more than boilerplate denunciations of Israel and the U.S. for violating international law. For now, at least, the fearsome “Axis of Autocracies,” bent on disrupting the U.S.-led global order — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — looks rather brittle.

Dictators rarely make reliable allies. Apart from coveting absolute power, each has little in common with other nations’ despots. Their pacts tend to be opportunistic and fleeting. Even as the tide of war turned against them, for instance, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan never found a way to align their strategic goals or military strategies.

Alliances between liberal democracies seem to have more tensile strength. That’s because they are bound together by shared political beliefs and institutions, not just common adversaries.

Even Trump, the arch-realist, may be stumbling into that reality.

Read more in The Hill.

The People Who Brought You Bill Clinton Want to Introduce You to the ‘Colorado Way’

Posted on by Alex Terr

“We tried moving to the left under Biden. … It really helped shrink the party’s appeal,” PPI president and founder Will Marshall told me a few days after the retreat. “What will work in a deep blue district is one thing. What will work in swing states and swing districts is something else altogether.”

PPI’s own polling and focus groups with non-college voters over the last three years showed a more moderate or even conservative outlook on issues like immigration or policing, Marshall explained. That’s why they went to Denver: Marshall and others at PPI believe the key to the party’s future success is to be found in the unique combination of libertarian ideals, progressive programs and pocketbook-focused governance that has become a hallmark of western liberalism. The pragmatic approach, they say, reflects the growing number of unaffiliated voters in the country.

PPI’s plan to take the strategy sessions national has a compelling pedigree: After Democrats’ dismal 1988 election showing — when George H. W. Bush beat Democrat Michael Dukakis with nearly 80 percent of the electoral college vote — PPI went to the American South looking for answers. Marshall and other PPI strategists held similar sessions that grew into the bones of the influential New Democratic movement. Involved in those strategic discussions was a little-known governor named Bill Clinton.

Read more in Politico.

Passage of ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ Renders Republican Deficit Hawks Extinct

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

Republicans have sent their “One Big Beautiful Bill” to President Trump’s desk and it’s hard to overstate the consequences. Not only will the bill be one of the most regressive transfers of wealth from society’s poorest to its richest in recent memory, but it will also add trillions of dollars to our national debt and hurt our economy. By passing this obscene budget-busting bill with near-unanimous support from their members in Congress, Republicans have proven that their party’s deficit hawks have gone extinct.

According to analysis from the Yale Budget Lab, the bill’s deep cuts to safety-net programs such as SNAP and Medicaid will reduce annual incomes for the bottom 20% of Americans by roughly $700 per person. But the savings from these cuts won’t be used to pay down the national debt or improve the programs for the people who need them most — rather, they will help offset tax cuts that will increase average after-tax incomes for individuals in the top 1% by roughly $30,000. The bill also guts pro-growth investments in the clean energy transition while propping up coal production and other conservative special interests with new giveaways, such as expansive new aid for wealthy farmers and large tax deductions for whaling boats.

Despite the bill’s large cuts, it would add roughly $4.1 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years.  Moreover, if ostensibly “temporary” policies in the bill are eventually made permanent without offset — as Republicans have made clear they had no trouble doing when writing this bill— the cost would swell to $5.5 trillion, making it more expensive than every COVID stimulus bill combined. This is not only the most expensive bill ever passed using the filibuster-proof reconciliation process, it is also the first one to permanently increase budget deficits outside the 10-year window. This unprecedented outcome was only possible because Senate Republicans effectively invoked the “nuclear option” to blow up budget enforcement mechanisms, which will open the floodgates for future Congresses to add trillions more to the national debt with barebones majorities.

The explosion of federal debt will have lasting consequences for Americans. In the short term, deficit spending by the federal government will increase by up to $632 billion in a single year, putting upward pressure on inflation rates that have remained stubbornly above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Increased government borrowing will also put upward pressure on already elevated interest rates, making everything from mortgages to car loans more expensive for ordinary families. Over the long term, higher rates will make it more expensive for businesses to finance new investments, slowing innovation and job creation. The federal government already spends roughly a trillion dollars each year on interest payments – more than it spends on national defense or Medicare. Now those costs will grow even faster, putting them on track to rival Social Security as the single-largest line item in the federal budget within 20 years. Instead of being used to fund investments in America’s future, taxpayer dollars will be almost exclusively used to pay for previous obligations.

Perhaps what is most remarkable is that this massive assault on our country’s fiscal integrity was only made possible by the people pretending to be its loudest defenders. For years, self-identified “deficit hawks” in the House GOP conference repeatedly called the deficit an “existential threat.” And even though they relied on completely fake growth assumptions to argue that $2.5 trillion of tax cuts would pay for themselves, these representatives insisted they would not support legislation that included any additional tax cuts without offset. They went so far as to get a commitment from House Speaker Mike Johnson that he would step down if he passed a bill that crossed this red line. Yet when the Senate sent them a bill that blatantly violated their agreement, these “fiscal hawks” quickly folded under pressure and rubber-stamped it.

Compare that to what happened just four years ago under the Biden administration. President Biden’s full “Build Back Better” agenda, while no model of fiscal responsibility, would have added less than $3 trillion to budget deficits over the first 10 years if it had been permanently enacted. Even though they used budget gimmicks to do it, Democratic deficit hawks in the House ensured the reconciliation bill advancing this agenda was scored as roughly deficit-neutral under traditional accounting. And when Democratic deficit hawks in the Senate forced party leaders to strip out those gimmicks, the bill eventually became something that actually reduced deficits. While deficit hawks may be endangered within the Congressional Democratic Party, today it is clear they are functionally extinct on the Republican side.

Deeper Dive: 

Fiscal Fact: 

As President Trump’s chaotic and destructive economic policies have shaken investor confidence in the first half of 2025, the U.S. dollar has lost over 10% of its value relative to foreign currencies — the worst such decline in more than 50 years. A weaker dollar results in more expensive imports, lower spending power when traveling internationally, and higher borrowing costs for both the American people and their government.

Other Fiscal News:

More from PPI and the Center for Funding America’s Future:

Senate Republicans Go Nuclear to Blow Up the National Debt

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

Senate Republicans on Monday took the dangerous step of “going nuclear” to pass their One Big Beautiful Bill in violation of the rules governing the filibuster-proof reconciliation process — and the fallout will add trillions of dollars to the national debt.

The reconciliation process, which was designed to fast-track policies needed to help Congress hit its budget targets, does not allow lawmakers to increase deficits outside the 10-year scoring window. These rules have always been enforced by measuring how enacting provisions in the legislation would affect the federal budget relative to a “current law baseline,” which is a scenario defined in statute and generally assumes laws are left unchanged. Senate rules require 60 votes to waive this restriction. 

Republicans couldn’t find a politically palatable way to pay for the trillions of dollars in tax cuts they wanted to make permanent, so they instead decided to make those tax cuts appear free by scoring against a “current policy” baseline, which assumes every policy in effect today is extended in perpetuity — even if the law as written would have them expire. But it gets worse: to enact new tax cuts without paying for them, Senate Republicans scheduled those provisions to expire within the 10-year window and scored them as temporary. The result is a Frankenstein scorekeeping system in which no consistent accounting is used, and legislation is assumed to cost whatever the majority wishes it did. 

While the Senate GOP’s “official” score of the bill using this Frankenstein accounting shows they would reduce deficits, traditional scoring against the current law baseline would show it adding more than $4 trillion to the deficit over 10 years (including higher interest payments) — and the cost would swell to $5.5 trillion if all the “temporary” provisions were made permanent. Notably, if the bill were measured in a way that treated the scheduled expirations of both new and existing policies consistently, it would violate the rules of reconciliation by permanently increasing deficits relative to either a current policy or a current law baseline. 

The Senate’s parliamentarian, who is responsible for interpreting the chamber’s rules, almost certainly would rule against the GOP’s attempt to use their Frankenstein score for enforcement purposes. Any effort to circumvent the parliamentarian’s official interpretation of the rules – whether by firing her, overruling her, or formally changing the 60-vote supermajority requirement with just 51 votes — would be invoking a “nuclear option” that fundamentally changes the character of the Senate. 

Senate Republicans insist they found an alternative to going nuclear by asserting the Senate Budget Committee chairman has unilateral authority to determine scores — something they argue Senate Democrats did in their 2022 budget resolution. But the two situations are not remotely the same: Senate Democrats used their authority to consistently assume discretionary spending for both the IRS and Head Start continued at baseline levels, when the original CBO score was inconsistent. Moreover, Democrats made sure the move was blessed by the parliamentarian ahead of time, whereas Republicans actively prevented the parliamentarian from making any ruling. 

The fact that Republicans prevented the parliamentarian from weighing in before voting to break their own rules with a simple majority vote, rather than overruling her directly, is a distinction without a difference. Republicans have gone nuclear with their chicanery and destroyed the Senate’s budget enforcement mechanisms.

The fallout will radiate throughout fiscal policy for years to come. Not only will the national debt be up to $5.5 trillion larger 10 years from now than it would be without the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” but there will be little to stop future Congresses from doing the same thing that Republicans did this week: adding trillions more to the debt while claiming they are doing the opposite.

New PPI Report Asserts Democrats Must Reclaim Obama’s Vision of American Identity

Posted on by Alex Terr

WASHINGTON  —  A new report from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) warns that Democrats have strayed from former President Barack Obama’s unifying vision of American national identity — and paid a steep political price. In “How Democrats Have Lost Sight of Obama’s Vision of American National Identity,” PPI contributor Ian Reifowitz contends that the party’s embrace of identity-based rhetoric and policies has alienated working-class voters of all races while failing to deliver electoral gains among communities of color.

Reifowitz, a historian and longtime observer of Obama’s political philosophy, traces how the 44th president’s inclusive and aspirational message helped build a multiracial coalition and win decisive victories. By contrast, he argues, Democratic leaders in the post-Obama era — most notably during the Biden administration — have too often leaned into the race essentialist worldview popular among progressive academics and elite institutions, emphasizing division over universal solutions and common purpose.

“Barack Obama offered Democrats a winning formula: an inclusive patriotism rooted in both realism and hope,” said Reifowitz. “My report shows that abandoning that vision has not only weakened the party’s appeal to working- and middle-class voters — it’s also left a vacuum that demagogues are eager to fill. It’s time to reclaim the idea of America as a unifying force.”

The report details how this shift coincides with declining Democratic support among key demographic groups, including nonwhite and working-class voters, and critiques the left’s overreliance on divisive frameworks such as equity mandates, race-based preferences, and pessimistic historical narratives. Reifowitz calls for a return to a politics that balances acknowledgment of past injustices with belief in America’s capacity for renewal and unity.

The report reinforces the mission of PPI’s American Identity Project and follows the announcement earlier this week of a new advisory group co-chaired by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers and New York Times columnist David Brooks. The project seeks to revitalize the civic traditions that sustain American democracy and promote unity in an age of polarization.

“We are proud to publish this splendid report as part of PPI’s larger effort to help Americans escape the thicket of racial identity politics that is so pronounced on both the left and right,” said Richard D. Kahenberg, Director of the American Identity Project. “Ian Reifowitz reminds us of how far many Democrats have moved away from Barack Obama’s powerful, unifying story of America, and the importance of reinvigorating that vision today.”

Read and download the report here.

 

Founded in 1989, 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. Find an expert and learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Follow us @PPI.

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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org

How Democrats Lost Sight of Obama’s Vision of National Identity

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

Roughly two decades ago, Barack Obama burst onto the national stage with an address at the 2004 Democratic Convention that captivated millions of Americans. He offered what became his most widely quoted line: “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”

Obama connected the language of American unity to progressive policy goals. He described his: “belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother.”

The speech was not a one-off. I have carefully studied just about every word Barack Obama uttered or wrote in a public forum from the early 1990s through the end of his presidency, and most of the rest since. My book, Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity, examined his deeply held concepts of America and Americanness. His soaring depiction of our country’s story in which we’ve committed terrible wrongs but drawn upon the founding documents to make remarkable progress resonated with enough Americans to elect and re-elect him to the presidency with commanding margins — a feat accomplished by none of the Democratic Party’s three subsequent presidential candidates.

It should be obvious that Donald Trump’s vision of America represents something like the antithesis of Obama’s. Where Obama sought to unite, Trump divides. As my coauthor and I demonstrate in a forthcoming book, Trump plays on racial stereotypes as a routine feature of his rhetoric. He labeled Mexican immigrants “murderers, child predators and bloodthirsty rapists and drug dealers.” He stated: “I think Islam hates us,” impugning people of an entire religion. He told America that Haitian migrants were eating their pets. And his Defense Secretary ordered the removal from the curriculum of U.S. military service academies any topic focusing on “race, gender or the darker moments of American history.” In large part, Trump rode racial divisiveness to the Republican nomination in 2016 and then to the presidency. For Obama, being divisive was one of the most shameful things a public figure could be. It was, in fact, the strongest criticism he leveled at his own leftwing former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, in his vitally important 2008 speech titled: “A More Perfect Union: Race, Politics, and Unifying Our Country.” Whereas Trump revels in “blood and soil” nationalism, Obama champions the idea of America.

What’s less obvious but equally important is that Democratic politicians — influenced by far-left academics — have in important ways departed from how the 44th president talks about our history and our national identity in the years since he left office. In fact, I have been astonished by how much influence the views of the academic left — views that depart significantly from Obama’s — have gained even among Democratic officials.

Read the full report.

Ainsley for the New York Times: A Progressive Future Depends on National Identity

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

When Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain stepped before a lectern at 10 Downing Street last month, he made clear how misguided he thought the country’s immigration policies had been. He described its recent approach as a “one-nation experiment in open borders” that Britons never voted for. In its place, he announced a slew of measures to toughen border controls, raise skill requirements for immigrants and effectively end mass migration.

All this is coming from Britain’s center-left Labour Party, which long favored openness toward migrants. That reflected Labour’s modern base of urban progressive voters. Higher immigration was economically advantageous for them, in particular by holding down prices, and it was consistent with their humanitarian worldview.

The trouble is, these views tend to be at odds with the views of many working-class voters. Those less affluent voters have questioned the impact of mass migration for years, worried about its impact on housing, public services, wages and communities. The response of urban progressives in Britain, as in other parts of Europe and the United States, has often been to denounce working-class voters as narrow-minded or racist. It should hardly be surprising that voters responded by switching their political allegiances. Immigration, more than any other issue, symbolizes the wedge between center-left parties and their traditional class base.

Keep reading in The New York Times. 

Ainsley on ABC Radio National: Lessons for Global Centre-Left Parties from Labor’s Win

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Centre-left parties the world over are lamenting the loss of their heartland, as low paid, working-class and non-graduate voters defect to the right.

Claire Ainsley was a key aide to the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and is now part of the Progressive Policy Institute, a US-based group with close links to the former US president Bill Clinton.  She’s been in Australia speaking to voters about Labor’s election victory.

Listen to the podcast episode.