On 23 February 2025, Germans will head to the polls in the first federal election since Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD) came from third to first to win the Chancellery in October 2021, following the departure of Chancellor Angela Merkel and a long period of Christian Democrat Union (CDU) dominance.
In 2021, the SPD became the lead party in a coalition government with the Green Party and Free Democratic Party (FDP), agreeing on an ambitious government programme based on their ‘four missions for the future’ outlined in the SPD’s winning manifesto.
Yet Sunday’s election looks set to provide a very different outcome, with the CDU back in pole position, and the ruling SPD trailing in a low third with the Greens just behind them in fourth. Second place in the polls is the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right challenger party that has doubled its support since the 2021 federal election, when it came fifth with 10% of the vote.
As attention turns to this historic election, what might we expect from the results? And what lessons can center-left parties elsewhere draw from the German experience?
Two government reform advocates, author and lawyer Philip K. Howard and Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, discuss Trump’s deep state blitz, what DOGE is getting wrong, and their advice for Elon Musk in a forum at Hofstra University.
In just three weeks, President Trump has set an all-too-familiar tone for his White House sequel: chaotic, dishonest, bullying and contemptuous of the rule of law.
Only it’s worse this time because Trump erroneously believes his narrow victory last November — he won the popular vote by just 1.5 percent — has given him a mandate to rule the U.S. by decree.
He’s lashing out madly in every direction — threatening our neighbors with massive tariffs, bullying small countries like Denmark and Panama whose territory he covets, proposing to depopulate and take over Gaza and settling scores with the very government he heads, which he imagines to be his worst enemy.
Americans are witnessing a naked power grab that would shred the Constitution’s checks and balances, rob Congress of its most important powers, neuter the courts and create the imperial presidency that Richard Nixon dreamt of long ago.
One thing all Americans should be able to agree on is that our government (and how it operates) leaves a lot to be desired.
Unfortunately, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seem ready to bring the same kind of arbitrary and ego-driven reforms that cut the value of Twitter (now X) by 80%, to the federal government. As its name implies, DOGE is supposed to focus on improving efficiency. But instead of presenting reforms to streamline government sensibly, Musk’s initial forays are mostly focused on political retribution and a desire to gut the federal workforce no matter the cost to efficiency, expertise, and security.
For too long both Republicans and Democrats have shied away from the hard choices needed to reform the federal government. If President Trump and Musk continue on their current path, another window of opportunity will have been tossed away. Fortunately, there is time to halt the madness, and instead adopt a reform agenda that draws on successful government reform initiatives—like the first Hoover Commission (1947 to 1949) and the Clinton-Gore reinventing government (REGO) policies—that offer a clear roadmap on how to save taxpayers dollars and enhance government performance.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is pleased to announce that David Evans, Baron Evans of Sealand, former General Secretary of the UK Labour Party, has joined PPI as a senior advisor. In his new role, Evans brings decades of political expertise to PPI’s Project on Center-Left Renewal, which fosters PPI’s ongoing dialogue with center-left parties across Europe and the world.
Evans served as General Secretary of the Labour Party from 2020 to 2024. During this time, he helped modernize the party’s structures and shape its strategic direction under Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s leadership. In addition to spearheading Labour’s 2024 general election campaign, his career includes playing a key role in Labour’s 1997 and 2001 election victories; pioneering work to promote cohesion, community engagement, and behavior change; and informing public policy and political strategy. During his tenure as general secretary, Labour secured 411 seats in the UK Parliament, their largest majority government in a quarter-century.
PPI’s Project on Center-Left Renewal, launched in 2023 and based in the United Kingdom, continues a long-running conversation with center-left parties in Europe and around the world. Its purpose is to exchange ideas, strategies, and tactics for making center-left parties more competitive and improving their governing performance. Led by Claire Ainsley, former Executive Director for Policy for Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the project has contributed immensely to a renewed transatlantic dialogue between Labour and Democrats.
As part of its commitment to revitalizing center-left politics, PPI recently released an in-depth analysis of the 2024 United States presidential election, co-authored by PPI President Will Marshall, Ainsley, and Deborah Mattinson. The report examines the key factors behind the Democratic Party’s electoral loss and offers a roadmap for reconnecting with working-class voters. Drawing lessons from the successes of the Labour Party and other center-left successes in Europe, the report outlines strategies for building durable governing majorities and addressing the economic and cultural concerns of working families.
“I am honored to join the Progressive Policy Institute and contribute to the Project on Center-Left Renewal,” said Evans. “In my tenure with the Labour Party, we demonstrated that with the right strategies and organizational focus, progressive parties can regain the trust of the electorate. I look forward to collaborating with colleagues at PPI to share insights and develop policies that resonate with working people across the globe.”
“David Evans is a key architect of the UK Labour Party’s revival and sweeping victory in last year’s elections,” said Marshall. “As Labour’s General Secretary, Evans worked closely with now Prime Minister Keir Starmer to help his party change course after its calamitous 2019 defeat and reconnect with its working-class base. That is fundamentally the same challenge Democrats face now. We’re proud that David has agreed to join forces with PPI as we work on revitalizing center-left politics here and abroad.”
“Lord Evans was central to reforming the UK Labour Party and making it electable again,” said PPI Chief Executive Officer Lindsay Mark Lewis. “His strong leadership took a center-left Party that had lost the trust of voters across the UK and took the party into a new era of election victory. His experience and lessons learned is something center-left leaders across the globe can learn from.”
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.
LabourList sat down with Will Marshall, president and founder of PPI, a US-based think tank once known as Bill Clinton’s “idea mill”. He said the continued erosion of the Democrats’ core voters, particularly among Black and Latino voters, was “disconcerting”.
He said: “What we have is a kind of general picture of a class-based politics, in which the Democrats increasingly represent upscale, affluent, college-educated voters, and the Republicans increasingly represent a kind of multi-ethnic working class. It looks like Trump is riding a working-class revolt against the political establishment.”
While Marshall said Democrats remained disoriented by the scale of their defeat to Donald Trump, he said there is consensus around some points as to why they lost in November.
“Cultural politics based on gender, immigration and crime were really damaging. They were major Democratic vulnerabilities for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.
“We need to find a centre ground on many of these fraught cultural issues.”
The inauguration of Donald Trump has the potential to be much more significant in our world history than his first inauguration in January 2017. Rather than complacently assuming the four years of the first Trump presidency to be an interruption on an otherwise centrist path to greater progress and freedom, a second Trump presidency shows the first not to be an anomaly and begins in a world that has taken a sharp turn towards authoritarian leadership.
The incoming administration has a clear political agenda for its second term and the outline of a plan to achieve it. While the primary focus of that plan is domestic, America’s relationship with the world is at the centre of the incoming government’s political philosophy. As we have already seen with the impact on UK domestic politics of the global markets anticipating potentially inflationary policies coming from the US, decisions taken well beyond our borders can have a big impact here at home. This is before Trump has even started his second presidency. What does Trump’s second term mean for the British Labour government and the global centre-left? And what next for Democrats in the US?
It’s not hard to lampoon DOGE, the misnamed “Department of Government Efficiency” sprung from the fevered brains of President-elect Donald Trump’s favorite tech oligarchs, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
The DOGE has grand ambitions — eliminating government regulations, jobs and agencies and slashing federal spending by $2 trillion — but no powers.
It won’t be a government department or even a formal advisory committee, say Musk and Ramaswamy. Instead, it will be a “lean team of small-government crusaders” feeding the Trump White House ideas for cutting the “deep state” down to size.
They maintain, implausibly, that Trump can drastically shrink the federal government through executive orders alone. Apparently, they expect Congress and the courts to roll over and grant Trump autocratic powers to “restore” democracy.
But before Democrats dismiss the DOGE as just more MAGA trollery, it’s fair to ask — where’s their plan for making government more efficient and effective?
A post-election YouGov poll commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, sent a clear message to party loyalists.
YouGov asked 5,098 working-class voters (defined as those without college degrees), including detailed analyses of voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and also asked 881 people in the national sample, to evaluate the political parties on measures of trust and commitment.
More significant, on two survey questions that previously favored Democrats — is the party “on my side or not” and which party do you trust “to fight for people like me” — the Democrats lost ground to Republicans. Fifty percent of all voters participating in this survey said that the Republican Party would fight for people “like me,” while 36 percent said the Democratic Party would.
In an essay accompanying the release of the poll, Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote:
The most lethal attack ad of the presidential campaign was a clip from a 2019 interview in which Kamala 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.”
Today marks the fourth anniversary of a shameful first in the 236-year old saga of American democracy — the Jan. 6, 2021 plot to overturn a U.S. presidential election and block the peaceful transition of power.
As then-Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell told Congress and the nation, the author of this attempted coup was then-President Donald Trump, whom Biden had handily defeated in the 2020 election.
Instead of accepting the voters’ verdict, Trump launched a campaign of lies and intimidation intended to nullify the election result and prevent Biden, the rightful winner, from taking his seat. When that failed, he summoned a mob of supporters to Washington and instigated a violent and destructive attack on the Capitol, where Congress was meeting to certify Biden’s victory.
That insurrection likewise failed. But it claimed the lives of rioters and police officers alike, forced Congressional leaders to hide and flee and led to criminal prosecutions for more than 1500 Trump backers.
Trump’s obvious complicity in these criminal and treasonous acts should have disqualified him from ever serving in public office again. But Senate Republicans – led by McConnell – failed to rise to the defense of Constitutional government and impeach a president gone rogue.
Even worse, honest Republican election officials who withstood Trump’s attempts to corrupt them and political leaders who condemned his subversion of our electoral system have been hounded out of public life.
When U.S. voters last November elected Trump president, they set a baleful precedent in normalizing deviant political behavior. Our country has crossed a moral and legal Rubicon, and it’s essential that all patriotic Americans regardless of party resolve to repair the damage done to peoples’ confidence – at home and around the world – in the integrity of America’s democratic institutions and rules.
Here the people are sovereign, and Democrats and independents must accept their decisions even if we find them hard to understand or respect. That’s why Trump is now receiving from President Biden that which he refused to give him – a orderly and peaceful transfer of power.
But as citizens, we should never forget or forgive what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. Instead, let’s stay vigilant and resolute in repelling further attacks on what remains the world’s foremost experiment in democratic self-government.
Americans voted for radical change in November, and judging by the chaos he’s already generated before taking office, Donald Trump might give them more than they bargained for. Can Democrats offer a saner alternative?
So far, the signs aren’t encouraging. Instead of taking a hard look at how they managed to lose to the most ethically tainted and unpopular presidential candidate in memory, many in the party seek refuge in self-exonerating excuses.
President Biden was too old. Kamala Harris didn’t have time to wage a real campaign. Republicans and Elon Musk dominated social media and flooded the campaign debate with lies and bigoted attacks on immigrants and transexual people. The high cost of living warped voters’ perception of the nation’s economic health.
Voters clearly sense that the inmates are running the asylum. In an interesting finding from a Progressive Policy Institute postelection survey of working-class (noncollege) voters, just 34 percent of respondents said they trusted Harris to stand up to the extreme members of her party. By contrast, a majority said they thought Trump could do so.
But the issue goes deeper than fear. Far too many Democrats simply believe they are on the “right side of history” when it comes to policies around immigration, crime, race, and trans issues.
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/
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.
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.
