The Opinions - The Working Class Is Fleeing Trump

Episode Date: August 1, 2026

What have Democrats learned from this season of primaries so far? “Their voters are so much angrier than I think they realized,” says the Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie in this week’s politics round table. He joins the Opinion contributors E.J. Dionne Jr. and Robert Siegel to discuss what the primaries portend for the 2026 midterms and beyond. Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. Video editing by Julian Hackney and Reshma Kirpalani. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Annika Robbins and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I saw this headline that Trump wants to impose 100% tariffs on generic drugs, which, as I say it out loud, is the craziest thing I've ever heard. And my first thought was, does he know who his voters are? Does he know who voted for him in his party? Hi, I'm Robert Siegel. And this is a conversation about politics with New York Times opinion contributor and regular panelist here, E.J. Dion. Great to see you, Robert. Good to see you. And joining us for you.

the first time, Times opinion columnist, Jamel Bowie. Hi, welcome. Hello there. Good to see you. Joy to be with you. Yeah, looking forward to it. We're coming to the end of a season of primaries, and I want to start by asking you what we've learned in the season about this country, particularly about the Democratic primaries. Jamel, what do we know about ourselves today that perhaps wasn't so clear a few months ago? I think for some of us who are professional political observers, what has happened is clear, but maybe for establishment Democrats, they have learned something, which is that their voters are so much angrier than I think they realize. And so angry, in fact, that seemingly the currency for success in primaries, it's just whether

you can credibly present yourself to be a full-blown opponent of Trump and willing to sort of reflect back at those voters, the level of anger and discontent that they feel. When I look at the relative success of progressive candidates and the defeats of more moderate or centrist candidates, I actually don't see a big ideological battle as much as I see a big battle about like affect and attitude and one's orientation towards the administration and willingness to say fight. And what's interesting to me is that because this is so much of a fight or not fight divide, it's entirely possible. to have like moderate or establishment Democrats who can embody that. And they haven't. And that to me really speaks to maybe a democratic establishment class that's a bit out of touch with where their voters are. And maybe we're a large part of the country is given the president's sinking approval ratings. Maybe a little old too. Right. Right. Could be part of the problem. E.J., we have a big

Democratic primary coming up next week in Michigan. It's one of the seats we say is a must win for the Democrats if they're to win a majority in the Senate. I wonder what you see as being significant about the Michigan primary. Yeah, I want to put Michigan in the context that Jamel just put on the table where I agree that a lot of this expression is more or at least as much about anger as it is about ideology. And I recently wrote about how I think this debate between capitalism and socialism is a really stupid debate for Democrats to engage in, partly because neither side is really a pure capitalist or a socialist, if such a thing even exists. And because it's about a lot of other things,

I would say, though, that there were an awful lot of candidates out there, you know, Rick Cooper in North Carolina, Mary Peltola, Sherrod Brown, Tellergo, all these folks, I think, embodied enough anger to sort of be fairly middle of the road progressives and still win the nomination. What I think is interesting about Michigan is the placement of this primary. If Democrats could redo this calendar, boy, would they not want to have perhaps the most divisive primary in the whole country happen this late in the process? Because I think what we're looking at is two things in parallel. A lot of summer noise about Democratic division, which Michigan is going to bring home. and the fundamentals of the election continuing to move away from the Republicans.

I was really struck by a CNN poll this week that showed, you know, Trump's approval down to 34 percent, as low as it was around the time of January 6th and 2021. 73 percent of U.S. adults said President Trump has not paid enough attention to the country's most important problem. 73 percent. That's astonishing. And if the election is, about the president, his policies, and his party, as midterms usually are, this is a real nightmare for Republicans, which is why their core campaign theme is going to be, well, we may be terrible, but they're worse. And Michigan is sort of the example, if there is any out there, of real ideological division, because you have Abdul El-Sayyad, who is probably the better candidate

of the two in terms of performance in reaching audiences and the like, and a clear progressive with a very strongly anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian view against Haley Stevens, who is a moderate, unapologetically moderate Democrats supported by APEC. And that has been a real source of division in the party. And they are battling it out. If at the moment it looks like El Cite, is ahead in most of the polls. But then on this electability front, there was one poll this week that showed Stevens beating the Republican or be running against one of them. Mike Rogers, by a point, El-Sayed losing by 10.

We'll see if that has any impact. And she's trying to turn the fact that El-Sahed may be the most forceful and articulate into a kind of asset, basically saying, look, I sound like you. I'm not a fancy candidate, but I have done a lot of practical work. But however this turns out, I think the bitterness left by this primary creates problems for either of them if they win this primary. Jamel does the El Cyanid Stevens matchup? Does that fit the paradigm of a demand for performative anger in the campaign? I mean, I think it does. I want to be clear that I don't think performance here is a bad thing. I think part of politics is performing things, right? Like showing people.

in a public way that you understand their concerns and understand their anger or whatever the emotion might be. And I think that, you know, what I'm looking at how Democrats have maybe fallen short, according to their own voters, it's been this sense that, oh, our job isn't to perform. Our job is just to sort of like be workhorses, not show horses. And this is something that I think a lot of Democrats take pride in. But to my mind, it's political malpractice, right? You actually do have to be a show horse as well. You have to show what you're doing. You have to perform what you're doing. I think that the divide on Israel is really critical in this primary.

Although, as far as how divisive it is, I mean, the thing is that when you look at public opinion polling, Democratic voters on their views of Israel, they've become starkly negative, right? Like, most Democratic voters have much more sympathy towards Palestinians these days than they do towards the Israeli government. And this has been a sea change in opinion. And so the Michigan primary might be divisive along this axis. maybe, but like Elsaian also represents where Democratic voters are going, right? Like, looking ahead to the 28 presidential primary, I would be surprised if there are any candidates that sound like Stevens that are willing to accept APEC money or any of that.

That seems like a death knell for a Democrat. Let's talk more about Israel, the Democratic Party, and American Jews. Stevens, her campaign has got, I think, $30 million from APAC and APAC affiliates. And this is something that her opponent, I'll say it, has used against her. And as you say, he seems to have the trend within the Democratic Party on his side. Does this mean that a unique relationship between American Jews and the Democratic Party where you actually have a prosperous white group of the public that votes 70% plus for Democratic candidates, is their relationship with the Democratic Party conceivably on the rocks?

I mean, you don't see it in polling if it's happening. You don't really see it yet. I would say that what has to consider as well that many American Jews also hold complicated feelings about Israel? Yes, yes. And negative feelings about the Netanyahu government. And so to the extent that the larger Democratic Party turn against Israel is very much about Gaza, is very much about Israel's conduct, and not so much about Jewishness, but really about the conduct of this particular government, then I don't imagine there'll be that much change in terms of the relationship between American Jews and the Democratic Party. What do you think, E. I think, first of all, I think one of the difficulties for Democrats here is that, say, through the Obama, even the Hillary Clinton election, Jews and Muslims both voted overwhelmingly Democratic, American Jews, American Muslims, you know, two-thirds or more democratic. And this has pitted, particularly in Michigan, where there is a large Muslim-American population. And a very large Arab American population. This has pitted two constituencies inside the

Democratic Party in a way against each other. But I want to underscore something Jamel said, which is opinion on Israel, especially since Gaza, and even going back to the whole Netanyahu period, among American Jews has gone very negative among more progressive Jews. AP and Norc had a fascinating poll. 43% of Jewish adults, including 58% of Jewish Democrats, say the U.S. is not giving Palestinians enough support. And one of the most fascinating findings, 44% of American Jews held a favorable view of Zaraan Mamdani, just 32% held a favorable view of Bibi Netanyahu. So there's something going on here that is true within the progressive parts of the American Jewish community, even though I think there are times when American Jews feel that some of this opposition is

expressed in terms that start to barrel into anti-Semitism. So I get that. that reaction, but I think a lot of it is about the reality on the ground right now and a feeling about this Israeli government and its policies. I wanted to return to the bigger view for a moment. When we look at what's happened in the primaries around the country and we see people like El-Sayed in Michigan, how many progressives like him do we think they're going to be in the next Congress? Is, are we talking about five more seats, of 20 more seats?

Is it going to be a, if the Democrats have a decent year, a big block, or a few safe Democratic seats that have been won by a progressive? You know, I went back and did some searching around on this question. As best I can tell, there may be seven, possibly another one or two Democratic Socialists of America in the Congress. We've talked a lot about DSA. They certainly won some important victories in the New York primaries, but still, their number is going to be around seven. So that's something, and they can have a voice. But Democrats, if they win, let's say a small victory, they have 225 seats. Where are the rest of them going to be?

Right now, there are 100 members of the Progressive Caucus. There are actually, last I checked, 116 members of the new Democratic coalition, which is this more centrist group. If the Democrats gain seats, my hunch is they're probably more likely to gain seats in districts where more moderate candidates will prevail because the party will have nominated in general, not everywhere, but in general, more moderate candidates in those seats. So paradoxically, despite the gains, some of the gains DSA will make and despite all the talk about how the Democratic Party is moving left, you may have a mix in that conference, which is ever so slightly more moderate than it is today. And to that I would add, I think this is where I think it's really important to not get so bogged down on the ideological debates. Because setting beside like policy differences, I think what's really going to have an effect is if there is a big victory, people are going to be paying attention to how Democrats, not what they did to win in terms of like campaign strategy, but sort of like their general approach, right? And so you look at someone like John Ossoff in Georgia who was likely to win a nice, comfortable reelection victory. And he's running this very explicitly anti-corruption campaign, Tala Rico in Texas, is also running on this anti-corruption line, also sort of taking this, like, they ought to be ashamed of themselves kind of approach.

I think you're going to be, you're going to see Democrats observe all of this. Like, how are these successful candidates speaking? How are they orienting themselves towards both other Democrats and towards Republicans? And that's where the influence is going to show, right? That's where I think you're going to see the effect of the elections, not so much on ideology. Because, again, Trump will still be president, right? So it's not like anything is kind of getting done. But what will be viable are investigations, our hearings or these sorts of things.

And so how are Democrats going to be approaching those questions? And if it's a narrow victory, it might be a much more sort of like, you know, the public barely wanted us here. We should cooler horses. If it's a big victory, it may be a much more aggressive. Oh, they really want us to go after these people. Who is doing that? Who can I emulate? Right. I think the corruption issue, first of all, the polling shows it's actually starting to grab some voters, one survey by echelon. 8% said corruption was the most important issue in politics back at the end of 2024. It's up to 17%. Now, so this is starting to take hold among a lot of people.

And I think the way corruption sort of builds into policy is in two ways. One is obviously Trump is looking out for his own interests and the interests of the very wealthy and not yours. And that has a lot of implications where Democrats have a lot of different stripes can play with that to push policies that are more egalitarian. But it also creates the sense of a kind of kleptocratic country that is in danger of becoming more like Russia. Fortunately, we still have free elections, a lot of other good things that have not, we hope, are not destroyed, and hope underlined several times are not destroyed in this election. But this sense of the linkage between unfairness and a corrupt government, I think, has a lot of political potential going forward.

I think that's right. We talk so much about the divisions within the Democratic Party that we overlook the not entirely harmonious Republican Party. when you look at the Republican Party, is the whole idea of MAGA and non-Maga finished? It's just a subsidiary of MAGA? You know, I think there are a couple of things here. One is the people who think of themselves as a Republican now are not the same people entirely who thought of themselves as Republicans a decade ago,

that Trump has pushed a bunch of people out of the Republican Party. And Jamel alluded to this in his chimes chat last week, that, you know, Gallup shows that 30% of Americans call themselves Republicans in 2024 in their latest average for this quarter of 2026. It's down to 25%. So you've got a Republican Party that if you don't like Trump, you are less likely to call yourself Republican than you used to. And I think that explains a lot of these primaries we've seen. It explains why Trump's approval rating among Republicans, even as it's cratering among independents, is that. not cratering among Republicans. The question is, is MAGA sustainable without Trump himself?

And it seems to me that he has particular gifts, if I may use that term about Donald Trump in terms of appealing to people, certain habits of forcing people in his direction, intimidating Republicans in Congress, that I don't see either J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio have. The other thing is we tend to talk a lot about how the extreme left is given to sectarianism, you know, the socialist vanguard workers party splitting off from the socialist workers party. And, you know, Jananganesha, columnist for the Financial Times, made a great point. You're seeing this splitting on the far right. In Europe, you're seeing it in Italy where there's a split.

Now there are two parties on the far right. In Britain, where there's a split. where the Reform Party is not the only far-right party. There's a new one. You're seeing it in Poland, where the formerly ruling law and justice party just split last week. So that I think on that level, absent Trump's both iron hand and peculiar charisma, it's not clear where this goes. And I guess the question is, is there such frustration with Trump at the end of his term, if it stays on the current trajectory, will there be some Republicans who come along and say to the party, you don't want Rubio, you don't want Vance, you want something different. And that's the only possibility I see of

recreating anything that looks like the old Republican Party. Yeah, even in that situation, I'm not entirely certain if there is in just a single cycle the ability to recreate the old Republican Party. And certainly I very much agree with you, E.J, that I think people understate the importance of Trump's kind of celebrity charisma. You know, the thing that has delivered him victories or near victories in presidential elections is that he can turn out loosely attached voters, people who otherwise would not be voting and who critically in some cases don't even vote down ballot. They just vote for Trump. And in doing so, they've delivered him these very narrow victories. And I tie that explicitly to the fact that he's a celebrity first and

foremost to many, many Americans, they don't register or read him as a Republican, which does two things. First, it's hard to convince voters that he'll do things that Republicans do that they don't like, right? You can say he's going to cut taxes for rich people. He may have already done it, but precisely because he's not associated with the Republican Party in this sort of intimate way, a lot of voters say, well, you know, is he really, right? Like, you know, he signed the checks. Is he really going to be that bad. So I think there's no other Republican politician who has that, who had this decades-long pre-political career where they essentially became a byword for wealth, right? Like Trump was associated with wealth and pop culture. That doesn't exist for anyone else.

And I'm very skeptical that any of the people who seem to be presidential contenders have the ability to reconstitute or pull together anything like the Trump coalition. And the other thing, is if you think of the Trump presidency as being this sort of like, I mean, there are three legs in the stool, but they're like awkwardly placed together like you're like a two-year-old might do. Yeah. Of kind of maga populist neocons, people who know aggressive foreign policy and then Christian nationalists for lack of a better term. They're able to come under Trump because fundamentally Trump just doesn't care that much. Trump is in it for Trump. And this kind of allows these these other parts that call.

coalition to kind of be under him as sort of like, who'll do what we want him to do because he just wants to be able to make some money and stay out of jail. Any president, any Republican president, Republican candidate who comes after Trump is going to have a particular ideological vision they want to pursue. And will that have room for these other more discordant elements? I'm really struck by the fact that in his exploration of the limits of presidential power, Donald Trump has imposed a tremendous number of tariffs, a policy that seems to have almost no constituency. If there is one, I don't know who it is, who argues in favor of Trump tariffs.

There have been plenty of people trying to manufacture, you know, backfill some kind of rationale here, but I think you're right. It's it's him. It's what he wants. And he's going to leave a party at some point that inherits this as certainly a centerpiece of tax policy. You know, I think, you know, interestingly, the coalition for tariffs used to be a working class coalition and the labor movement. I grew up in a town where tariffs were very popular. And the problem is Trump has almost given tariffs a bad name because, you know, Joe Biden had some tariffs, but they were strategic tariffs for particular purposes. And these have been so sweeping that they have ended up not delivering what he promised, which is more manufacturing jobs. But I think that Trump has begun to even blow apart what had been one of his greatest assets, which is turning the Republican Party into significantly a working class party. Clearly, he won a lot of working class whites. He had started converting a lot of working class Latinos and he even got a share, small share, but, of working class black votes.

And now he has delivered almost nothing for them. I'm struck by this move that looks like a cut in the Medicare drug benefit. I cannot fathom. I got to say, I saw this headline that Trump wants to impose 100% tariffs on generic drugs, which, as I say it out loud, is the craziest thing I've ever heard. And my first thought was, does he know who his voters are? Does he know who voted for him in his party? You're telling me in an election year, you're going to raise drug prices

on working class seniors. Like known as people who vote. All of them vote. No, and you're seeing that that I think in all of this polling, one of the most striking things is how non-college voters who were part of his base are actually fleeing. There's a drop of, you know, 25 points or more without the working class. I don't know what the Trump movement looks like.

Now, a lot of those folks don't like and don't trust the Democrats. Democrats. And that is going to be an enormous task for Democrats. It's going to be very interesting this year to see which of these Democrats who win have managed to recreate some of the Democratic Party's appeal to the working class, which used to be the base of the Democratic Party. Is that over? Or do they have a chance to start putting that back together? Because Trump seems who have abandoned them, and he doesn't win any support when he says affordability as a made-up thing. That's not how these voters feel. Yeah.

I want to really underscore the extent to which this isn't just, you know, standard issue political malpractice. In the wake of 2024, I think there was this sense that that election was some kind of maga cultural victory as well as like a political victory. But I think at the time and clearly looking back, what that election was. was a narrow majority of voters said, this guy will lower prices. This guy will reduce inflation. That's what he was elected to do. And the extent to which he not only has not done that, but has made it worse, right? Like, has some things in the opposite direction.

I would say it's like the proximate cause for like the total deterioration of his political support. I have the same question as you, EJ. I don't know how Democrats begin to reconstitute their support with working class, or at least begin to get their support with breaking class whites up from like 30% to somewhere closer to 40%. That's exactly the key, and especially in the swing states, if you look at the Obama and Hillary Clinton elections, you know, 2012 to 2016, it was a drop in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, from the low 40s among white non-college voters to the mid-30s. They don't need to win the whole group. But they haven't for a long time, especially because of the southern white voting is largely racially polarized. But in those states, they need that.

And Biden bumped it up just a little bit, but they really need to find a way to get back to those Obama levels. Ironically, you know, for everything that said about him in politics, he spent a lot of time, Obama on the white working class, white non-college vote and got it to the levels he needed. And the challenges facing the Republicans? I think number one, how to deal with two of their issues going south. One is prices. The other is immigration. Who knew that the president would lose support on immigration? Because I think that was the other key to 2024, which is bring order to the southern border. And instead, he launched this massive campaign that went after so many people, including, by the way, people were illegally, people who were citizens, there were killings involved. Nobody in the country wanted this.

And I think that is, these are two big issues they got to deal with. Go ahead, John. I just want to say that I totally saw this coming. I want to claim that I was very much on the, given what he is saying, mass deportations, we're going to remove 20 million people. And given the reality that there is about 11 to 12 million undocumented immigrants, that very few of them are the kind of criminals that Trump is describing, that any attempt to do mass deportations will inevitably involve deporting people who are here lawfully, people who are just like working, living their lives during their job, and that the kind of militarization, expansion of ICE and Customs and Border Protection that he was calling for was likely going to result in some pretty ugly stuff. I just want to say that like in 2024, I was like, yeah, that's going to happen.

And I think you're right that voters who do not have a particularly coherent view of immigration of the immigration system. I think that the typical voter probably thinks the immigration system, you know, you show up. There's a line you get in and then you wait. And then once you've waited long enough, you can get some sort of legal status or citizenship. And the anger, right, is that, oh, all these people are trying to skip the line. And so when Trump says, I'm going to bring order, I think what voters here is, he's going to make the line work better. But in reality, there is no lime.

Our immigration system is nonsensical. And the number of people in the United States who are the kinds of folks that I think voters think, oh, you have to remove dangerous criminals is low. And so voters, they heard a vision of immigration policy that was not going to be delivered. And then they immediately saw what was being delivered. And the reaction was, oh, I don't like that. Right. And so the reversal, Trump's reversal in immigration, which I'll note began last March, not March 2026, but March 2025 with the controversy over Kilmar, Brago-Garcia. That's when you begin to see the inversion happen. And I think it's 100% because that's when the public began to understand that what they're getting is not what they thought they were getting. Right. And I think I'm going to bring order to the southern border. That's popular. As soon as you say the words mass deportation.

as you suggested, it inevitably leads to something like this. It doesn't have to be this bad, but close to this bad. I think on your question about the Republican Party rebuilding, I think, again, you know, perhaps everything I have said is going to be wrong and this Trump coalition is going to hold together better than I think. I just don't see it without Trump. If you don't have Trump and you don't have that appeal, same appeal to white work class voters or working class voters more generally, the Republican Party is going to have to go back and try to win suburban moderates and moderate conservatives. Because if you're building the alternative party, I don't see who else is out there who is likely to vote for them. But that

would require a real revolution from what the Republican Party is now. It's a party that George H.W. Bush would recognize. But that was a long time ago. erosion Republicans have suffered amongst suburban voters. It's stark and dramatic, you know, in Virginia, right? Virginia is now a state where a liberal Democrat can win by 15 points in an election. And that is 100 percent the complete collapse of the Republican Party in the kinds of suburbs that it used to handily win. I'm... But as a resident of one of those suburbs, it's still a state where Terry McCalliff could lose state. It's not a lock for Democrats. But you know that Glenn Yonkin was very much running, at least his campaign, was like, I am the kind of Republican you recognize, right?

Like, I'm the kind of guy. You know, I work for a big corporate firm. Even the way he dressed. I wear a fleece. I'm not scary. You know, you know that my actual social views are normal, right? That's the whole vibe he's going for. And I, you know, I figure J.D. Vance is smart enough to see what the numbers are.

I would expect that he would try to remake himself once again in this kind of way. But in the absence of that kind of effort, like EJ, it's hard to see how the Republican Party begins to build back. I'll just say that I can't get rid of the thought that MAGA and Trump are basically royalist. And the successor in a royalist system would be a younger Trump. And that's all right. Anyway. And on that note, let's move on to our weekly feature when we talk about joy. the joyful experiences we've had since last we met.

Jamel? So I live right down the street from what was an old public housing project built in the 1960s, and it was not in great shape. Over the past year, the city where I live, Charlottesville, Virginia, has been aggressively rehabbing and revamping and rebuilding that housing. And so basically beginning last summer, they tore down a lot of units. Prior to that, they built some new units for people who, who live there to be in while they're doing this big rehab.

And in basically a year, they've almost finished this project. And it's remarkable to watch. Beautiful new homes that are going to be for public housing residents, additional new units to further increased capacity. And this has been done in conjunction with public housing residents. So it's been a collaborative effort between the city and residents. And they're doing this kind of work across all the public housing units. And at a time when there's just a lot of cynicism about the government,

government's ability to just do anything. And I'm not going to raise up Charlottesville's sort of like the most efficient government in the world. But it's been really cool to see this come to fruition and to see, see government producing things for people in a way that improves their lives. That is joyous. E.J. Leave it to Jamel to underscore how self-oriented and not socially oriented my joy is this.

because I wanted to talk about pure, entirely predictable, but deeply felt summer joy that last month has been about. It's about, you know, Mary, my wife and I kayaking on a quiet pond, beach walking and beach reading. And it's like baseball, where I finally have a Red Sox team that you can actually root for and they might win. And the great sound of the game on radio, it's a wonderful time of year. And so I will try. try to sort of up the game of my joy by saying Shakespeare got it right when he said, shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Very good.

My sources of joy were, first of all, a lot of time with family, with my daughters and grandchildren in New York, where we spent some time this summer. And also, it was surprised when we came home. My wife and I went to see The Odyssey, or Odyssey, I guess it is. And I was really very much taken by Christopher Nolan and Matt Damon's take on The Odyssey and found myself far more entertained and engrossed than I thought I would be. I recommend it hardly if you haven't seen it yet. I'm kind of curious to see if there's going to be any uptick in classics majors after this movie,

given its success. Jamel Bowie, thanks a lot for doing this. And E.J., thank you, of course. Thank you. You know,