Nate Cohn

I am generally pretty skeptical of gimmicky policies.

It reminds me actually a little bit about how Biden and Harris handled this.

I mean, you may remember shrinkflation and they were going to go after price gouging and they had their own bucket of gimmicks that they proposed in 2023 and 2024.

It probably did help them compared to saying nothing at all, but it didn't solve the problem.

It wasn't going to solve the problem.

They didn't champion these ideas in a full throated, incredible way that had a chance to persuade voters that they were going to be solutions either.

So, you know, as long as the problems persist, Donald Trump is still going to be weighed down by this issue.

And if these gimmicks don't amount to actual solutions, he's still going to be weighed down by the problem.

I think that they're absolutely up for grabs.

I think that some of them probably lean Republican.

The sort of political damage that was done to the Democrats during the Biden years will prove to be lasting to some extent or another.

That's usually what happens in politics.

When groups swing, they rarely go all the way back.

There's some someone in this process was won over.

to the Republicans for good or alternately, if you prefer, has been alienated from the Democrats for life.

That said, a lot of them are likely dissatisfied now with both sides.

I would guess that many could return to the sidelines of politics, that they may not vote in the next election, while others will be more genuinely persuadable voters who, if Democrats introduce a new set of ideas, a new message, a new candidate, and things continue to stay this bad, the Democrats will have a chance to win many of them back.

I mean, I think that stepping back for a second, you can see the signs of these issues beginning to weigh on the parties for a long time.

I mean, beginning in the 2015 campaign, whether it was Bernie on the left or Donald Trump on the right or the emergence of Mamdani in the New York mayoral race this year.

What all these things have in common is that there's a growing share of the electorate, relatively young, relatively low income people.