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Hello, everyone! You may have noticed that it’s been a while since my last newsletter. That’s because I’ve been on leave for the last three months — and I’ll be on leave for most of the next three — but I wanted to check in with a few thoughts and programming notes.
Since a few of you asked: Yes, The Tilt goes on. The newsletter will ramp back up as I return to work, and needless to say, there is a lot to cover. This is not an ordinary moment in American political history.
From the usual job approval surveys to more profound issues regarding executive power, attitudes about President Trump will probably be the topic of the year.
To that end, my colleagues have already started collecting polls on his approval rating (we’ll add charts with the polling average in the weeks ahead).
Already, Mr. Trump has squandered his post-election honeymoon. His approval rating is back under 50 percent, with slightly more Americans disapproving than approving of his performance. This puts his standing more or less where it was before the election.
There are good reasons to think his ratings will continue to slip. One of the better rules of thumb in American politics is that public opinion tends to shift against the direction of policy change. Some political scientists call this “thermostatic public opinion,” in which the public turns up the A.C. to cool things down when the government starts running too hot. Few presidents have run the government as hot as Mr. Trump, and there isn’t much reason to think he’ll turn anything down on his own.
The public reaction to Trump’s second term
The 2024 election may seem like old news, but it will reverberate for years to come. We have plainly entered a new era of politics, as I wrote in December, and there will be no way to make sense of where things are headed without making sense of the enormous changes of the last decade.
The implications are that Democrats might have lost in a landslide if they had faced a more typical Republican. With the exceptions of abortion and democracy (Republican own-goals), Democrats comprehensively lost the election on essentially every other issue. Democrats haven’t faced a challenge like this since 1980.
The debates about the Democrats’ future have already begun. There are a few novel angles, like the call for a politics of “Abundance” co-written by my colleague on the Opinion side, Ezra Klein. But most discussions have been just another rehash of the recurring debate between the party’s moderates and progressives. This time, it’s hard to see how either side can argue they have the answers to the major problems facing the party.
This will be a big topic this year. The next Democratic presidential primary campaign isn’t as far away as it might seem today; the New York Democratic mayoral race is already underway.
This is what it looks like: special elections, the Virginia and New Jersey governors’ elections in November and the run-up to the midterms next year.
I am not sure this will be the most suspenseful year or two of elections. We have already seen enough over the first eight years of the Trump era — including the first special elections and the special congressional election in Florida.
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