Here's my long-delayed dive into last year's midterms.

The Red Wave crashed against the Blue Wall, but in every other sense 2022 only intensified the major features of Color War-era American politics: 1) geographic polarization and 2) class dealignment.

jacobin.com/2023/08/dealig… With national politics so evenly divided, it's easy to forget that at the local and state level, most Americans live in a one-party regime

This piece is good, but seems bound by the iron ratio of liberal-left writing on these topics: 80% of space must be devoted to an easy critique of the 'anti-woke' Sunak/DeSantis Right, in order to say one or two interesting things about culture on the left
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/… This too must be reckoned among the costs of today's moralized moment. In general, the strongest arguments re: "cancel culture" are not about high-profile cases, but the way ambient moralization constrains, dissuades, and disfigures all parties to debate on certain subjects

🚨 New Center for Working Class Politics report out today🚨

As in our last survey, we found that working-class voters strongly prefer

1) populist rhetoric
2) jobs policy
3) working-class candidates

But this study also has some major new features (1/5)

jacobin.com/2023/06/trumps… 1) We measured "class" not by education but occupation, hand-coding the jobs of 1,650 people in our sample.

So this CWCP study, unlike virtually every other poll, reports meaningful differences between occupational classes—and meaningful similarities within classes, too

Class dealignment critics: 'OK, but what if we, like, turn the map on its side???' More seriously, I don't know if anyone needs or wants a critique of Chris Maisano's critique of my critique of his critique

https://twitter.com/_ericblanc/status/1625571408725295104

The #1 story in the US History job market, over the last ten years, is the overall decline in tenure-track job openings.

But the #2 story is the change in which jobs are being offered. The US History market in 2011-13 compared to 2020-23, with data from the Academic Jobs Wiki: Overall postings in US history dropped from an average of 156 t-t jobs per year to an average of under 99. Even leaving out the Covid drop in 2020, the average over the last two years is 115.5. That's a substantial and possibly crippling decline, as @dbessner & others have noted.

How Democratic Senate candidates did with working-class voters, by income & education, according to the AP-NORC VoteCast survey (foxnews.com/elections/2022…)

Feels harder and harder to deny that campaign styles, messages & priorities made a real difference in 2022 here's white voters by education. You could call this the dealignment index

It's the defining problem of our age: No social-democratic project can succeed without a working-class base, but progressives have been losing workers' votes for years.

What to do? A new survey of 2,000 working-class Americans, out today, has some ideas:
jacobinmag.com/2021/11/common… The new Center for Working-Class Politics designed a survey to measure what kind of politics these voters like best—not just offering isolated policies for approval or disapproval, but folding them into a head-to-head choice between candidates.

The results were fascinating:

1)My meta-take on the Bernie Sanders Era is now up at @jacobinmag.

It's an attempt to take stock of both the real achievements and grim lessons of Bernie's two losing campaigns, fueled by a look at precinct returns I haven't seen analyzed anywhere else:
jacobinmag.com/2020/08/bernie… 2) Why do we need to reckon with the rise & fall of Bernieland? Why now? A quick thread:

First, for all its defeats, the Sanders movement has also won the American Left's most significant victory in a half-century, proving that 'democratic socialism' has a mass base in the USA:

After Iowa & N.H., the geography of the Sanders coalition is looking a bit different than it did in 2016: in this large field, Bernie is not quite so dominant in rural areas.

But in cities — where far more Democrats live — he looks even *stronger.* A few thoughts below the fold: In 2016, Bernie swept rural Iowa, but Clinton claimed her delegate "victory" in part because of her strength in cities, especially Des Moines.

But in 2020, despite the far larger field, Sanders won *27* Des Moines city precincts that voted for Hillary.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

For Jacobin, I took a long look at Bernie and Warren's electoral records.

We knew his was strong and hers was weak, but a deep dive into their 2018 reelection campaigns shows that contrast is even starker than I thought—especially in "Obama Trump" areas.
jacobinmag.com/2020/01/elizab… First, on Bernie's powerhouse electoral record in Vermont, especially compared to other Dems.

Comrade @mattyglesias did some excellent work to compile some of the statewide numbers here, but Bernie's strength in the most conservative part of VT is perhaps even more remarkable.

please don't fall for this cf @james_roe bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Lincoln built his career by attacking an entrenched political & economic elite, denying the authority of the Supreme Court, & calling for the "ultimate extinction" of $3 billion in property. If he was a "conservative," words have no meaning

https://twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1056516965848760320

On the handful of occasions when Lincoln called himself "conservative," he referred exclusively to the Republican Party's effort to conserve the antislavery principles of the Revolution, threatened in the 1850s by an aggressive Slave Power. quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/linc…

The years from 1857 to 1861, with Dred Scott freshly inscribed as “the law of the land,” saw a wave of radical challenges to the power of the Supreme Court.

Here’s a 30-part thread (lol) from my research-in-progress on antislavery politics and the early Republican Party. (2)
Today’s Left has begun to embrace FDR’s court-packing plan in the 1930s, but in some ways, the antislavery struggle of the 1850s represented an even more sweeping assault on the foundations of judicial power.