November 11, 2024 | What A Day Newsletter

What A Day: Working Class Act

Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) speaks with reporters as he arrives for a vote the U.S. Capitol May 1, 2024. (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images)

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Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) speaks with reporters as he arrives for a vote the U.S. Capitol May 1, 2024. (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images)

BLUES CLUES

Progressive leaders are calling for a new Democratic playbook after Donald Trump’s crushing electoral victory, as questions swirl about the best way forward.

Democrats are locked in a wrenching debate over how to explain Vice President Kamala Harris’s defeat. The answer matters, since it will inform the party’s attempts to fight in both the midterms and the next presidential election. For now, theories are swirling — as are big questions. How much can be attributed to macro-economic factors, in a year when incumbents around the world lost re-election amid frustrations over pandemic-related inflation? Did President Joe Biden wait too long to bow out of the race? What about the mainstream media, which doesn’t have the influence it once had? Have Democrats simply lost touch with important constituencies — and if so, which ones, and how?

Progressive lawmakers are calling for Democrats to realign with working-class voters. “Democratic policies are more geared to working people, but that isn’t getting across,” Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), who’s running to lead the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told What A Day in a phone call. “That isn’t just a messaging issue. That’s a believability issue.”

The best way to flip the script, according to Casar, is by “picking real fights” against ultra-wealthy billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who both saw their net worths skyrocket after the election. Democrats need to convince voters that they’ll stand up to special interest lobbies, from big pharma to monopoly grocery chains, he added. “So many people want to see … us take on the economy in a populist way: Raise people’s wages, lower costs, and make sure that billionaires pay for their fair share of taxes, and that corporate monopolies don’t keep getting away with everything.”

Statewide elections this year provide evidence to support the case that Americans want progressive economic policies, regardless which party they identify with, Casar and his allies argue.

A few particularly striking examples: In Missouri, which favored Trump by 18 points, voters supported establishing paid sick leave requirements and raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. That’s the same hourly rate as in Massachusetts, where there’s not a single Republican elected to Congress. Alaskan voters also approved those two progressive measures, while voting for Trump by 15 points.

Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have been instrumental in pushing Democrats further left over the past decade. Now he’s arguing that the party hasn’t done enough to distance itself from “the powerful oligarchy” in the country. He outlined many of his own economic policies in a Boston Globe op-ed over the weekend, saying that “these are extremely popular ideas. The Democratic Party would do well to listen to the clear directive of American voters, and deliver.” Some political analysts say that Trump gained working-class voters who largely supported Sanders in his previous presidential bids.

Even Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), a relatively moderate Democrat, also delivered a scathing criticism of the Democratic Party, accusing it of not relying heavily enough on progressives’ playbook: “We don’t listen enough; we tell people what’s good for them,” Murphy wrote on X. “When progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”

Vice President Kamala Harris’s attempt to appeal to Republicans didn’t deliver victory. Now, some Democrats are wondering whether it would be smarter to lean further left.

DISORDER CZAR

President-elect Donald Trump’s new “border czar,” Tom Homan, is hardly the kind of guy we should welcome for this job, according to one of his own former colleagues, Olivia Troye, who worked as an adviser on national security issues in the first Trump White House.

Homan, who served as Trump’s acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was tapped over the weekend to oversee the nation’s borders and help implement Trump’s sweeping mass-deportation plan — a plan that Democrats, immigrants’ rights advocates and plenty of economists warn looks like a disaster in the making.

“Homan’s track record? Extreme & ineffective policies that targeted all immigrants not just criminals,” Troye posted on social media. “But the real goal here runs deeper: dismantling [the Department of Homeland Security] & unraveling our homeland security framework as we know it. It’s not about solutions; it’s about disruption.”

Got that? “Extreme” meets “ineffective!” What a combo. We can all feel better about this guy now!

Reviews like that may help explain why Homan hit the media circuit to argue that the spooky-sounding mass-deportation strategy will really be more “humane,” and less expensive, than critics have warned. Speaking on Fox News, Homan explained his “worst first” policy, which means prioritizing the deportation of people with criminal backgrounds and those deemed to be a threat to national security.

“We’re going to concentrate on the worst of the worst… It’s going to be a lot different to what the liberal media is saying it’s going to be,” Homan said. “It’ll be a humane operation, but it’s a necessary mass deportation operation.”

How Trump implements his deportation policy — and how it compares to the Biden administration’s crackdown on immigration — remains to be seen. Biden mostly focused on migrants deemed national security threats and those who recently crossed the southern border. His administration has actually deported more people than Trump did, according to Reuters, even using a Trump-era expulsion policy to return migrants back to Mexico.

There are two clear ways Trump’s policy could be different: Who is deported, and how they’re targeted.

Last month, Homan told 60 Minutes that he’ll try to remove anyone who came in illegally. The Biden administration was more sympathetic to migrants who weren’t deemed a threat, attempting, for instance, to create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants married to American citizens. However, Homan said that even grandmothers who are undocumented could be deported.

Homan has also said that large-scale worksite raids could be a key part in detaining and deporting unauthorized workers. The majority of the Biden administration’s deportations were carried out at the border. He also vowed to expand the use of the military in the deportation process.

All in all, the Trump administration doesn’t seem to have a solid plan for carrying out a mass deportation. Homan admitted it himself during the 60 Minutes interview: There is no written plan “that I know of.”

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No one tells the guy who cleans the bathroom, ‘Wow, you must love it when someone has explosive diarrhea.’” — John Oliver, explaining why his job is not easier after Donald Trump's victory.

NEWS NEWS NEWS

Republicans are very close to winning the House of Representatives, which would cement a trifecta with the presidency and the Senate. If that happens, the GOP will face few hurdles in implementing Donald Trump’s agenda for at least two years.

Trump named top adviser Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy in the coming days, CNN reports. This is the same guy who crafted Trump’s mass deportation plan and recently said that “America is for Americans — and Americans only.” Welcome back, daily waking nightmares!

Trump selected climate change skeptic and former Rep. Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Zeldin doesn’t have much experience with environmental issues, but he was a member of the Conservative Climate Caucus and served on the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus (which, don’t be fooled, included many climate skeptics). He also has a 14 percent approval rating from the League of Conservation Voters. Cool! Great! Love that!

On that note, John Podesta, the top U.S. climate diplomat, tried to ease global concerns about climate change after Trump’s win, saying that the fight for a cleaner and safer planet is “bigger than one election.”

Trump nominated Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She’s among Trump’s ultra-loyal supporters, objecting to the certification of the 2020 election after President Joe Biden won. But Stefanik used to be an outspoken critic of Trump, saying that she changed her mind because of his popularity in her district. Love that unapologetic admission of spinelessness!

Joe Biden honored Americans who have served in the military and their families during a Veterans Day observance at Arlington National Cemetery this morning. “It’s been the greatest honor of my life, to lead you, to serve you, to care for you, to defend you, just as you defended us generation after generation after generation.”

Trump reportedly called Russian President Vladimir Putin last week and told him to not escalate his war against Ukraine. Both Ukrainian and Russian officials have denied that the call happened.

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