Monday, November 09, 2026
Most Voters Support "Medicare For All"
This chart reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between November 4th and 6th of a nationwide sample of 3,166 registered voters, with a 2.2 point margin of error.
Most Voters Say Billionaires Don't Pay Enough In Taxes
This chart reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between November 4th and 6th of a nationwide sample of 3,166 registered voters, with a 2.2 point margin of error.
Celebrate The Win And Feel The Joy - Then We Must Continue To Fight!
I was moved to tears this week. I expect you were, too.
It wasn’t just a repudiation of Trump. It was a reaffirmation of our democracy, our diversity, our ideals. A confirmation of America.
I’m filled with gratitude for the hard work so many of you did — writing postcards, organizing friends and colleagues, going door-to-door to get out the vote, supporting good candidates. Also protesting and marching, demanding an end to the madness. And protecting the most vulnerable among us.
I also want to thank you for being a part of our small but mighty community here on this Substack. Thank you for joining me day after day. Sharing these posts, commenting on them, offering your thoughts, being respectful of one another. Thank you also for suggesting to others that they join us here. (And for supporting this effort, to the extent you can, with a paid subscription.)
But our work — yours and mine — is not over. In a real sense, it’s just beginning.
The billionaire oligarchs who put Trump and JD Vance into power and financed their Republican enablers still have extraordinary wealth and power — and motivation — to destroy our democracy.
Giant corporations and private equity firms that rigged the economy for themselves and against most Americans still want to increase their monopoly profits at the expense of average Americans.
Corporate Democrats — so-called “centrists” and “moderates” who drink from the same financial troughs as the Republicans — are still determined to protect the status quo and preserve the current allocation of power in America.
Trump himself is still in the White House, now buttressed by the most bigoted and belligerent chief of staff ever.
In other words, the regressive forces are as dangerous as they were before. What has changed is that We the People have shown our repugnance toward them — loudly and clearly — and voted people into government who might constrain them.
The contest between democracy and authoritarianism is hardly over. We have won this battle, but we have not won this war.
Let’s celebrate our win. Feel the joy. Appreciate the stunning beauty of America. Relish our diversity and decency.
But tomorrow, we continue the fight.
Sunday, November 08, 2026
Trump's Job Approval Is Only 36% With Registered Voters
The chart above reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between November 4th and 6th of a nationwide sample of 3,166 registered voters, with a 2.2 point margin of error.
How The Different Groups Voted Last Tuesday
The chart above is from the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between November 4th and 6th of a nationwide sample of 3,166 registered voters, with a 2.2 point margin of error.
Miller As Chief Of Staff Means The Cruelty, Bigotry, And Chaos Will Continue
From the website of Robert Reich:
Anyone wondering how Trump will respond to the biggest repudiation a modern U.S. president has ever received from American voters need wonder no longer. Today, Trump announced that Stephen Miller would become his chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles.
In a Truth Social post, Trump called Miller one of his “most trusted” advisers and said he would be starting in the new role Monday.
Miller as chief of staff is not a positive development for anyone interested in mending our government or healing our nation.
As Trump’s attention recedes into his vanity projects — the ballroom, the arch, the heliport, the golf links, the gold-leaf makeovers — Miller is likely to become de facto president, manipulating an increasingly incoherent and cognitively impaired old man.
I expect Miller to conduct a scorched-earth campaign of retribution and legal harassment — a war against all perceived Trump enemies — while burning down everything in his way.
Let’s be clear. Miller is bigoted, xenophobic, and vicious — the architect and chief advocate of Trump’s loathsome immigration policy. He is perhaps the most venal of all the obsequious sycophants surrounding the mad king.
In one of his most bizarre claims, Miller has said immigrants to the United States bring problems that extend through generations. “Not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller asserts. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
Rubbish. The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America.
Researchers have found that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than immigrants were a century ago. In fact, no matter when their parents came to the U.S. or what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.
Stephen Miller’s great-great-grandfather was born in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now Belarus. He came to America in 1903 with $8 in his pocket and spoke no English. Three generations later, little Stephen was born in 1985 to American parents — but somewhere along the way he developed a visceral hatred for immigrants.
Miller and Trump have been dealing with immigrants the same way Pete Hegseth and Trump have been dealing with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz — inflicting pain on both them and the United States in the hope their pain will be worse than the pain weendure.
Before Miller started his brutal Kristallnacht against undocumented immigrants, they had been paying roughly $60 billion annually in federal taxes, much of it going into Social Security and Medicare — programs from which they don’t benefit. Now, tax experts predict that many immigrants won’t file returns, and those who formerly had their taxes withheld in every paycheck will shift into under-the-table jobs. The Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, projected lost tax revenue of about $300 billion over a decade.
Miller’s vast, sadistic crackdown is also causing significant pain for the U.S. economy. There aren’t enough workers in construction, hospitality, and agriculture to keep these sectors going.
There’s an argument for “regularizing” immigration to the United States by making it more difficult for people to live in America illegally while making it easier to immigrate here legally. But this is not Miller’s agenda. Miller and Trump want to fuel division and bigotry. Their entire project depends on hate of the “other.”
Yet apart from Native Americans, we are all immigrants — all descended from “foreigners.” Some of our ancestors came here eagerly; some came because they were no longer safe in their homelands; some came enslaved.
As Ronald Reagan put it in a 1988 speech,
You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. But … anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. A person becomes an American by adopting America’s principles, especially those principles summarized in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Reagan understood that America is a set of aspirations and ideals more than it is a nationality.
We have just emerged from a remarkable midterm election in which Americans embraced these aspirations and ideals and elected the most diverse set of senators, representatives, governors, and state lawmakers in our history. Which makes Trump’s pick of Miller for chief of staff especially ironic and sad.
Like dictators before him, Trump’s and Miller’s road to tyranny is paved with stones hurled at “them” — whether “they” are immigrants, Muslims, Latinos, or anyone else who doesn’t fit the white Christian nationalist mold.
As Americans showed on Tuesday, we are better than Trump and his chief bigot, who’s now his chief of staff.
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