issue: Politics
Marshall for The Hill: Republicans Are Still Clueless on Health Care
No issue seems to befuddle Republicans more than health care. Last week, they failed for the umpteenth time to produce a convincing plan to make health coverage more affordable for working Americans.
The Republican-controlled Senate blocked a Democratic bill to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for health insurance beefed up during the pandemic to help working families pay their premiums. The Republican alternative also failed to get enough votes to avoid a filibuster.
House Republicans this week likewise rejected bipartisan proposals to scale back and better target the premium subsidies. Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) cobbled together a modest grab bag of proposals that bore scant resemblance to Senate Republicans’ bill.
Marshall in Politico EU: Europe’s center is barely holding — and Trump plans to blow it apart
[…]
“What [Europeans are] getting from Trump is the strategy of maximum polarization that hollows out the center,” said Will Marshall from the Progressive Policy Institute, the centrist American think tank that backed Bill Clinton in the 1990s. “The old established parties of left and right that dominated the post war era have gotten weaker,” he said. “The nationalist or populist right’s revolt is against them.”
[…]
“The fundamental failure that is common to the whole [centrist] transatlantic community is on immigration,” said Marshall from the Progressive Policy Institute. “All of the far-right movements have made it their top issue.”
Read more in Politico EU.
Marshall for The Hill: The Green New Deal Crashes to Earth
Less than a decade ago, young U.S. progressives started agitating for a Green New Deal to combat climate change and usher in a planned economy more planet-friendly than capitalism.
It was a bold, if implausible, demand for a crash program to rid America of fossil fuels. Animating it were decades of increasingly dire prophesies about how global warming is irreversibly impairing life on Earth.
Lecturing world leaders at a 2019 United Nations climate conference, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg won rapturous applause when she informed her audience, “You have stolen my childhood.”
In the U.S., environmental groups pressured politicians to keep fossil fuels “in the ground” even as advances in fracking technology were unlocking a bonanza of shale oil and gas.
In 2020, first-term Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) stoked a social media frenzy by joining Green New Deal activists in a ‘60s-style sit-in in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office.
President Joe Biden got with the program, portentously calling climate change “an existential crisis” rising above such humdrum public concerns as spiking inflation and uncontrolled immigration.
Today, however, the Green New Deal seems to have fallen to earth, borne down by the inexorable gravity of economic and political reality. Therein lies a cautionary tale for Democrats about the gulf that separates elite and popular opinion on climate change.
Put simply, green activists have failed to convert America’s non-college majority to their cause. Working class voters recognize the problem but it takes a back seat to their everyday economic and social concerns.
Read more in The Hill
Libert for The Well News: The Blueprint for Democratic Renewal Lies in New Jersey and Virginia
Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City, while historic, is not the story Democrats should focus on as they look to regain majorities in 2026 and win the presidency in 2028.
Why? Because Mamdani won just 50% of the vote in a reliably blue city — one that has voted Democratic for generations and likely will for generations to come. The real lessons for Democrats can be found in New Jersey and Virginia, where Govs.-elect Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger showed us how Democrats can win, and win big, by reconnecting with voters who have largely felt left behind by the Democratic Party.
At the Progressive Policy Institute, we have been speaking with these same kinds of voters. In a report authored by Claire Ainsley and Deborah Mattinson, PPI found plenty of evidence that the Democratic Party has moved further from the mainstream values of most Americans.
Marshall for The Hill: Wanna Be Radical? Make the Government Work.
The media is puzzling over voters choosing centrist Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey and democratic socialists in New York City and Seattle.
Take a step back, though, and this election looks a lot like President Trump’s sweep last year: An unsettled electorate still in revolt against the status quo and punishing whoever’s in power.
The voters’ message was less about ideology than institutions. Americans believe their political and governing institutions are broken and want someone who can fix them. They are frustrated with leaders who inflame tribal partisanship rather than forging consensus around tackling pressing national problems. And they think the government has grown too big, costly and stuck in a “can’t do” mentality that puts process over results.
Such attitudes are particularly a problem for Democrats, who present as defenders rather than reformers of failing public institutions. The problem isn’t lack of resources. Former President Joe Biden’s prodigious spending didn’t lower living costs or improve economic prospects for the non-college majority. Voters’ shifts towards Democrats this month, however, indicated that Trump’s tariffs and power grabs aren’t doing the job, either.
When things aren’t working, radical change becomes the pragmatic course for political leaders. But radical change in which direction?
Marshall Interview for Times Radio: Trump Falters Amid Democrats’ ‘Changing of the Guard’
Will Marshall joins Scott Lucas from Times Radio to discuss the Democrats’ big election night and potential ‘changing of the guard.’
Marshall for The Hill: France’s Right and Left Wing Parties Are Surging. Can It Hold the Center?
French President Emmanuel Macron took power in 2017, the same year Donald Trump first moved into the White House courtesy of the Electoral College. Both were insurgents but stood on opposite sides of today’s new political barricades.
Macron upended his country’s established ruling parties, conjuring up an entirely new centrist bloc as a bulwark against Marine le Pen’s far-right National Rally. Trump took over the Republican Party, ousting traditional conservatives and turning it into a vehicle for a belligerent MAGA populism.
Both leaders are still in power, but their fates have diverged. Macron is mired in a crisis of collapsing governments and risks becoming a lame duck with two years yet to run in his second and final term. Meanwhile, the National Rally has become France’s most popular party, taking the pole position in the 2027 presidential sweepstakes.
President Trump, triumphantly reelected last year despite his farcical attempt to steal the 2020 election, is riding roughshod over his political opponents — and the rule of law — with the acquiescence of a do-nothing Republican Congress.
Marshall for LabourList: This Week Brought Good News for Democrats and Progressives in the UK and Worldwide
Demeaned and taunted by President Trump for nine dispiriting months, Democrats finally had a chance on Tuesday to respond with something more than theatrical gestures of resistance. Tapping a rich vein of anti-Trump sentiment, a party famished for wins racked up one after another in America’s odd-year elections.
Suddenly, Democrats seem politically relevant again. The victories, coming in mainly blue states and cities, don’t necessarily presage big gains in next year’s national midterm elections. For that, they’ll need to win on more competitive terrain. Nonetheless, Tuesday’s outcomes confirmed growing public dismay with Trump’s imperious rule, as well as Democrats’ ability to start reclaiming ground he seized in last year’s presidential contest.
This is good news for Labour activists in the UK and around the world, as it shows the fractures in the administration are beginning to take political effect.
Most consequential were the big Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey. Abigail Spanberger won the Virginia’s governor’s race by 15 points, leading a sweep of top state offices that flipped the state back into the blue column. Democrats also added seats in the state legislature, amassing their biggest majority since 1989.
Marshall for The Hill: Reindustrialization Is Just Central Planning, MAGA-Style
Why is President Trump so intent on inflicting his unpopular tariffs on the U.S. economy? How did America, always a trading nation bordering two oceans, suddenly become the free world’s glowering bastion of protectionism?
The president’s logic is often fuzzy, but for once he and his economic team have a clear answer: They’re on a mission to reindustrialize America. They call it “economic nationalism,” but it’s really just central planning, MAGA-style.
Trump believes free trade agreements and globalization eviscerated U.S. manufacturing, studding the landscape with shuttered factories — “tombstones” as he put it in his bleak 2017 inaugural address.
In fact, U.S. manufacturing output has grown substantially since 1980. What has declined is factory employment and manufacturing’s share of GDP. That tracks the trend of deindustrialization and rising demand for services in all advanced countries, regardless of trade policies.
Nonetheless, the president is ripping up trade agreements and taxing imports from friends and foes alike, in hopes of generating lots more factory jobs. But building walls around our economy won’t change the fact that automation has severed the old relationship between increased industrial production and blue-collar job growth.
Women in Policy Alliance Coffee & Conversation
Ainsley for The Liberal Patriot: Can Liberal Patriotism Save Britain From the National Populists?
Under pressure from the national populists and a restless party, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has come out fighting. His landmark speech to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool last week gave his premiership more definition than ever before, firmly in the mold of the modern liberal patriot.
It is political definition that has never been more needed. On the eve of its annual conference, Labour had been rattled by authoritative constituency-level polling showing that its landslide victory just a year ago would be wiped out by right-wing challenger party Reform UK, taking two-thirds of Labour’s MPs with it. 267 Labour MPs, many newly elected, would lose their seats. The British Conservatives would win just 45 constituencies. Reform UK would eat up former Labour and Tory support with 306 gains, putting leader Nigel Farage on course to be the next Prime Minister.
Of course there is no general election imminent, with the next national vote expected in four years, but together with internal rumblings about Starmer’s leadership, it set the backdrop for a bumpy few days at the Labour annual conference after a bumpier first year since Labour returned to power after fourteen years in opposition.
Marshall in CNN: How Today’s Democratic Soul-Searching Echoes the Clinton Era
Will Marshall, who has served as the Progressive Policy Institute’s president since its founding, says so many efforts are competing that none is likely to exert as much concentrated influence as the DLC did in its heyday. (The DLC itself officially closed its doors in 2011 but faded as a force in the party after Clinton left office 10 years earlier.) “If you wanted to show that you were a reform-minded Democrat, a modernizing Democrat, you joined up with the DLC and it was really the only enterprise dedicated to changing the party’s governing agenda,” Marshall said. “Now you have a slew of so-called centrist groups that are out there operating independently, and it’s all very disjointed.”
Marshall, like others I spoke with, sees another big obstacle for today’s efforts — these projects are primarily led by consultants and strategists. The DLC, he notes, was defined mostly by elected officials representing politically swing constituencies. That contrast, Marshall says, will make it harder to move these ideas into the party mainstream.
“We had a large cadre of credible Democratic figures-governors, senators, House members, state leaders-who embraced the mission of the new Democrats because they could feel the ground shaking under their feet,” Marshall said. Winning buy-in from large numbers of elected Democrats will be harder today, he says, “because the party is so shrunken, and the number of competitive seats is so shrunken, that the Democrats left standing are mostly safe.”
Marshall for The Hill: Democrats Need Tough Liberals Like Bobby Kennedy
Bending laws and norms to the breaking point, President Trump is ordering political show trials of critics, stifling free speech, subjecting Spanish-speaking citizens to police state tactics and choking our economy with tariffs.
Trump’s MAGA followers greet his autocratic power grabs with vindictive glee — finally, we’re on top! Everyone else is asking: Where are the Democrats?
The party establishment seems adrift, unwilling to make a clean break with flawed policies like Bidenomics, climate alarmism and tolerance of illegal immigration and social disorder that have thoroughly alienated working class voters.
Democrats need a new breed of leader — liberals tough enough to challenge progressive orthodoxies and move the party back to the political mainstream.
For inspiration, they could do worse than look back to Sen. Bobby Kennedy’s (D-N.Y.)1968 presidential campaign. Although tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet, Kennedy’s run offers Democrats valuable clues for building a bigger, cross-class coalition.
Ainsley in BBC News: What lessons can Starmer learn from world leaders on fighting Reform?
Claire Ainsley, who was Sir Keir Starmer’s policy chief when he was in opposition, is now overseeing a project on centre-left renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute, and her advice is to grow the “seeds of doubt” about Reform in the electorate’s minds in the three years between now and the election.
She believes that while people are happy to cast a protest vote, they currently question whether Reform are really a government in waiting – so challenging them on whether their policies hold together, or whether their numbers add up, is a way of undermining their support.
But it does also mean doing more to tackle the core issue. She says the party leadership realised “the previous set of answers on immigration were not going to wash with the British public that want to see action”, and says she was encouraged by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s promise that “nothing is off the table” in tackling illegal migration.
But tackling Reform isn’t just about immigration. Ms Ainsley says it’s about people feeling worse off and not feeling they have got a fair deal on the economy, and a sense that other people are getting treated better than them.
Marshall for New York Daily News: How Citizens Can Fight MAGA Cancel Culture
The outbreak of political and corporate cowardice in America since Donald Trump’s return to the White House is reaching epic proportions.
ABC’s short-lived suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” is just the latest example. With some honorable exceptions — I never thought I’d be cheering for Harvard — almost every public or private entity seems to be caving in to Trump’s dictates.
The president is engaging in a kind of Godfather cosplay, turning the executive branch into a Mafia-style extortion racket. Nice little network you’ve got there; it’d be a shame if something bad were to happen to it.
His consiglieri in this case was FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who threatened to yank the broadcast licenses of ABC’s affiliates that carry the Kimmel show. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way” he warned them.
Carr knows better. In 2019 he declared: “The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest’ ” He was right then, and his willingness now to act as Trump’s censor is craven hypocrisy.