Ten Policies That Most Democrats And Republicans Support

 

The chart above is from the Wall Street Journal Poll -- done between September 16th and 21st of a nationwide sample of 1,500 registered voters, with a 2.5 point margin of error.

U.S. Voters Blame Republicans For Rising Gas Prices

The chart above is from the Data For Progress Poll -- done between September 11th and 14th of a nationwide sample of 1,214 likely voters, with a 3 point margin of error.
 

The 3 Reasons Trump Won't Change Or Mitigate His Policies To Help GOP Candidates

Donald Trump's poll numbers are worse than any other modern president, and they keep going down. One of the main factors is the affordability issue. His tariffs and unnecessary war in Iran have insured that inflation remains high - and too many families, who were already hurting financially, find themselves falling further behind every week.

And because the congressional Republicans refused to oppose or try to mitigate those Trump policies, they find themselves in electoral trouble in the coming election. Only those in the reddest districts are likely to survive - and a few of them might even get defeated. They are all worried, because it looks like the House is lost and maybe even the Senate.

Most presidents, finding themselves in this position, would try to at least mitigate their policies to lessen the damage to their party. Donald Trump won't do that. Why?

First, he is not very intelligent. That was obvious when he threatened his high school and university with lawsuits if they released his grades. He claims to be a genius, but a genius would be happy to have his grades revealed. Trump has screwed up the economy due to his low intelligence, and he's not smart enough to know how to fix it.

Second, he exists is a bubble. The people he surrounds himself with are all sycophants who won't tell him the truth. They don't want to anger him, so they just keep telling him what he wants to hear (that he is doing a great job and doesn't need to change anything).

If the GOP candidates all got together and put some pressure on Trump, they could probably get him to change some things. But there is a third thing that they can't overcome - his pathological narcissism. He not only doesn't want to admit he's made some mistakes, but he is psychologically unable to do so.

He's been this way throughout his life. Instead of admitting error and making a correction, he just finds someone else to blame.

Trump will never mitigate his policies to help Republicans survive the 2026 election. He's not smart enough, knowledgable enough, or psychologically able to do so. 

Trump/GOP "Big Beautiful Bill" Moves The U.S. Closer To "Medicare For All"

Republicans have never liked the federal government helping Americans get health insurance. They opposed both Medicare and Medicaid during the Johnson administration. They also opposed the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as Obamacare) during the Obama administration.

The reason they opposed all these programs is that they don't consider health care to be a right. They consider it a product to be sold to those who can afford it. 

And they are adamantly opposed to a public option for health insurance - like a Medicare For All program. They claim that would be socialized medicine (even though conservatives in other developed democracies support their government help to get health insurance in their own countries). 

So it was not a surprise that to give the rich more tax cuts in their "Big Beautiful Bill", the Republicans cut off the help to purchase health insurance under Obamacare. This made it impossible for millions of Americans to afford to buy private insurance - and added millions of Americans to the number that don't have any kind of health insurance.

In that same bill, they also cut the number of Americans who could qualify for Medicaid (although they made sure it wouldn't start until after the Midterm elections). When this provision kicks in early next year, it will add millions more Americans to the ranks of the insured.

There was already about 10% of the U.S. population that was not covered by Obamacare, private insurance (which they could not afford), medicare, or Medicaid. The Republican cuts to Obamacare and Medicaid adds millions more. That's a significant portion of the population that has no health insurance (and therefore lacks access to proper and timely medical care).

The Republicans celebrated the cuts to health insurance, but they may soon regret that. I believe those cuts could have the unintended consequence of doing more people to accepting the idea of Medicare For All. Certainly, the millions of Americans that don't have any health insurance would love to have a public option for insurance they could afford.

And private companies have already said that insurance prices will rise again next year, which could force more people out of the insurance market.

Most working Americans are covered in health insurance provided by their employer. But that is getting more expensive also. Some employers are now expecting employees to bear some of the cost and others are giving their employees policies with very high deductibles (which the employee must pay). Other employers are dropping the insurance altogether, and just providing a stipend for the employee to buy private insurance. 

It won't be long before employers realize that paying a tax for government health cares much cheaper than trying to provide private insurance.

That all means the time is now ripe for a Medicare For All program - or at least a viable public option for those who cannot afford private insurance. And the Republican BBB cuts are helping to push the country toward that (even though that is not what they intended).

Comparing Democratic And Republican Campaign Funding

 

From the website of Steven Rattner.

The Anti-Vax Agenda Is Being Driven By A Minority Of Right-Wing Republicans

 

From the website of Paul Krugman.

The 2026 Election Is A Referendum On Trump (Whether He Likes It Or Not)

Donald Trump says the voters may be angry about Republicans, but they are not angry at him. That's because even he is starting to see the election could well be a disaster for the Republican Party - and he doesn't want to be blamed for that.

He's wrong of course. The election is definitely going to be a referendum on him. Midterm elections always are. They are the voters report card on how the current president is doing. And the report is usually a negative one. The party of the president in office usually loses some of his congressional support - a little if he is doing pretty good, and a lot if he has angered the public.

And Trump has made the public very angry. Poll after poll shows that most people don't think he is doing a good job. His approval is down into the thirties - lower than any other modern president going into a midterm election. The voters especially don't like the rising inflation (caused by his ridiculous tariffs and an unnecessary war), and they are going to register their displeasure in November.

Some pundits say that because Trump is not on the ballot, each Republican will be able to run on his/her own record. That may have been true in past midterm elections, but not this one. The congressional Republicans, as a whole, have tied their own fortunes to Trump. By refusing to oppose him, even when the public disagrees with him, they have shown voters that they have (and will) back Trump no matter what he does. That makes it clear that a vote for any Republican this year is a vote of support for Donald Trump.

Trump may not like it, and individual Republicans are hoping its not true, but the 2026 election is a referendum on Donald Trump - and it is shaping up to be a disastrous verdict on Trump and the entire Republican Party. 

Democrats Now Outnumber Republicans In The United States

 

These charts are from a Pew Research Center survey -- done between January 30th and June 18th of 2026 of a nationwide sample of 5,511 adults, with a 1.8 point margin of error.

Populism Is Back - And It's Growing Stronger In Both Political Parties

 Robert Reich comments on the growing populist fervor in both political parties:

The most powerful force in both the Republican and Democratic Parties today is anti-establishment populism. It’s roughly similar to the late 19th century when the Populist Party challenged the dominance of corporate elites, national banks, and railroad monopolies, although this time I believe it will stick. 

Among today’s Republicans, this has taken the form of Trump’s MAGA movement against immigrants, Black people, Muslims, “woke,” “DEI,” and especially Democratic “coastal elites” who are supposedly enabling these groups to overtake white Christian America. 

Pitted against the Republican populists are “never-Trumpers” who cling to the older Republican virtues of fiscal austerity and isolationism. 

Among Democrats, anti-establishment populism has taken the form of a movement against economic elites who are rigging the system against average working people. Its major proponents are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, and other predominantly young Democratic politicians — such as Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, Janeese Lewis George, the presumptive mayor of Washington, D.C., and a bevy of newly-elected members of Congress from New York — Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander.

Pitted against these economic populist in the Democratic Party are so-called “moderate” and corporate Democrats who pine after the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and seek at most incremental reforms of American capitalism. 

In other words, the essential fissure inside American politics today doesn’t run horizontally from “right” to “left,” as those two poles have been defined since World War II. 

It runs vertically from bottom to top.

Trump’s MAGA voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of white Christian nationalism and believe the top has conspired to make them less dominant in American society.

Sanders’s, AOC’s, and Mamdani’s voters in the bottom view themselves through the lens of economic class and believe the top has conspired to rig the economy against them.

 

Both shifts have left the establishment behind. America’s corporate and financial elites love Trump’s tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks but feel uncomfortable with the white Christian nationalism now at the heart of the GOP. 

They’re likewise content to deal with incremental reforms pushed by moderate Democrats but dislike the wealth taxes, rent-controls, single-payer health plans, and other safety-net expansions at the heart of the emerging Democratic Party.

 

I expect the establishment will fight to regain control of both parties. 

One way will be to equate the populists with bigotry and extremism — in the GOP, to condemn the populists as racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and fascist; in the emerging Democratic Party, to condemn the populists as antisemitic and communist. 

There’s enough truth in both caricatures to cause many voters to back away from populism altogether.

 

But I urge cooler heads to see something else in the rising populism within both parties — a potential political alliance against the grotesque inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity that have scarred modern America and fueled the populist anger in the first place.

 

The share of the U.S. economy going to working people is the lowest it’s been since 1947; the share going to corporate profits, the largest since 1950. One trillionaire and a brute of billionaires are now, in fact, running much of America.

 

Neither income nor wealth are zero-sum contests in which some people’s success can be achieved only at the cost of other people’s losses. But power is a zero-sum contest. And as power has gone to the top — and is has, whether we’re talking about the top 0.01 percent or 0.1 percent or 1 percent — everyone else has lost agency over their lives.

 

Both never-Trumper Republicans and “moderate” Democrats are struggling to articulate a message that isn’t just “we’re not Trump.” But given the gross inequalities in American society today, that’s a nearly impossible task.

 

Both Republican and Democratic establishments would be better served by overtly rejecting racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, as well as antisemitism and communism, while joining with populists to boldly change the system so that none of these were attractive. Make homes affordable, make healthcare accessible, put childcare and eldercare within reach of the average working family, and they won’t be.

Voters Still Think Trump/GOP Are Focused On The Wrong Issues

The chart above is from the Navigator Poll -- done between June 4th and 8th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.

 

Why Is The Economy So Bad For Most People? Because It is Being Run By Billionaires!

The following is an excellent history of economic politics in the United States by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report: 

When FDR took over America in March of 1933, we’d been a largely laissez faire nation since our founding. There wasn’t much government help for anybody other than the rich and powerful. 

Three preceding Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) had dismantled what little regulation was left from the progressive Republicans (Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) and dropped Wilson’s 91% top income tax rate down to 25%, kicking off the Republican Great Depression.

In 1933 a third of America was unemployed, hunger and homelessness were rampant, and only about 20 percent of us were in the middle class; the country had never gone above a third of us in that class. So, FDR, his wife Eleanor, and Labor Secretary Francis Perkins set out to reinvent America. They legalized unions, restored the 90% income tax rate on the morbidly rich, made government the employer of last resort, and instituted the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, built schools and infrastructure nationwide, etc.

The result was dramatic. By 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, fully a third of us had good union jobs and they set the wage floor for another third of us; as a result, two-thirds of us were in the middle class, and could do it with a single paycheck. A single-family home, a car, an annual vacation, send the kids to college, and retire on a good pension.

But from 1933 forward FDR’s New Deal had been under continuous attack by a handful of extremely wealthy oligarchs who resented capping their paychecks to avoid that top 91% tax rate and hated the regulations that made both consumer products and the workplace safer but cut into their profits.

That backlash movement found its voice with Lewis Powell’s infamous Memo in 1971, and Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court the following year.

 

The Memo called for the creation of rightwing think tanks that could influence public opinion, taking over schools and colleges, buying and running media operations, seizing control of the courts (particularly the Supreme Court), aggressive pushback against the Civil Rights movement, and the promotion of “free market” ideology. It was essential, Powell wrote, to “save” America from an incipient communist takeover.

The Memo electrified what we today call the Epstein/Billionaire Class of morbidly rich men. They endowed and built all of that infrastructure, spending literally billions in today’s dollars, putting a rightwing radio station in every city and town, rightwing TV networks, well-paid pundits, “alternative” colleges like Hillsdale, a billion-dollar effort to pack the courts, challenges to textbooks, and an embrace of hard-right Christianity.

Their main message was that government had grown “too big,” a result of the New Deal that must be reversed, and the GOP they own has run with it ever since. 

Although the federal government of the US was smaller as a percentage of either population or GDP compared to virtually every other developed country in the world, it was a meme that resonated with average people who were horrified that we’d been lied into the bloody Vietnam War, resented paying taxes, and felt they were being left behind as a result of the severe oil-shock inflation of the Nixon/Ford 70s.

Their plan worked. Trust in the American government went from nearly 80 percent in the early 1960s to a mere 17% last year. And, just like a marriage doesn’t work when the partners don’t trust each other, neither does a society or a government.

Reagan cemented this by declaring in his first inaugural speech that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” It was the perfect encapsulation of the billionaire hatred of taxation and regulation, but was sold so well that a majority of Americans bought it hook, line, and sinker.

Reagan and the billionaire-owned Republicans in Congress broke the back of the union movement, slashed taxes on the morbidly rich and corporations, stopped enforcing our anti-monopoly laws, sold off federal lands, increased subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, slashed federal spending on education and college, enabled stock manipulation through stock buy-backs, etc., etc.

Five corrupt Republicans who the Powell movement billionaires had helped install on the Supreme Court helped amplify the damage with their 5-4 Bellotti (written by Powell) and 5-4 Citizens United decisions, freeing both billionaires and corporations to buy elections by claiming that “corporations are persons” and “money is free speech.”

As a result, our elections now typically go to the highest bidder and billionaires are the biggest players in our political system. Just 100 billionaires put $2.6 billion into the 2024 election, about a fifth of all spending, and will probably beat that number this fall; in recent elections, roughly nine times out of ten the better‑funded candidate wins, especially in House races.

Meanwhile, 45 years of Powell Memo-style Reaganomics have gutted the middle class. Only around 43 percent of us can now claim that status, and it takes two full-time paychecks today to live like one could in 1981.

Nobody has halted this slide from a highly functioning government and a vibrant, healthy middle class into the mess we have today, all as the result of nearly a half-century of Reaganomics.

The income tax rates are still stupidly low, incentivizing yachts for billionaires and massive bonuses for corporate executives. Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over” as was “welfare as we know it.” Obama turned our healthcare funding system over to a handful of massive insurance companies who are now turning the screws to extract as much wealth from us as they can.

So, people are — quite reasonably — pissed off. Our legislators are bought-and-sold, sometimes even by foreign-loyal entities like AIPAC, our judges are hand-picked by billionaires, and Trump has gutted our “big” government even further.

By the end of 2025, the federal civilian workforce had shrunk by roughly 300,000+employees compared with Trump’s inauguration, a drop of around 10% in a single year.

Education Department staff fell by 43% in 2025 alone, the U.S. Agency for International Development was effectively dissolved, the agency housing the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities lost more than half its staff; AmeriCorps shrank by 44%; the Small Business Administration by 33%; the agency overseeing Voice of America and other international broadcasters by roughly 33%; and the National Science Foundation by about 30%.

During the 2025 shutdown, the Trump administration used that crisis they created to carry out at least 4,200 immediate layoffs across seven agencies in a single day, rather than furloughing workers. Cuts hit Treasury (1,446 workers), Health and Human Services (around 1,100–1,200), Education (466 on that day, after earlier large cuts), Housing and Urban Development (442), Commerce (315), Energy (187) and Homeland Security (176), with additional reductions at EPA and the Patent Office.

Laying off over 7,000 people at Social Security has left seniors with frustrating day-long hold times and a lack of in-person appointments, while the feds under Dr. Oz are experimenting with partially privatizing and starting pre-clearances done by big insurance companies and inflicted on traditional Medicare recipients in six states, Arizona, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Washington.

As our government is gutted, our social services are crushed, our unions are enfeebled, wages are flattened, and our politicians and judges are wholly-owned properties of a handful of billionaire families and industries, Americans are justified in looking for alternatives.

Ironically — and perhaps alarmingly — billionaires are now looking for alternatives, too. 

Peter Theil, the guy who funded JD Vance’s political career who, through Palantir, has access to mind-boggling amounts of data on us and our future, just moved his entire family to Argentina. Mark Zuckerberg has a 5,000 square-foot doomsday bunker in Hawaii, and Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison are reported to have similar “bolt-holes” in case the public gets too restive or Trump starts a nuclear war.

The bunkers-for-billionaires business is among the fastest-growing in America, with Survival Condo, Oppidum Bunkers and Vivos advertising architect-designed what Oppidium calls “ultra-luxury fortified underground residences.”

Meanwhile, because of Reagan’s cuts to education and civics, two generations have grown up without a good understanding of how government works in a democracy; only 1 in 20 Americans can name the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and a third of Americans can’t name the three branches of government. No wonder they’re curious about fascism and communism.

So, the next time somebody asks you why America is in such a mess, why people no longer care or even despair about the future, let them know the simple and real answer: “It’s the billionaires, stupid.”