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... are out of alignment dissatisfaction is the result.

Gift link: nytimes.com - Year old angst

With the midterm elections little more than a week away, these voters across the nation — their rage fueled by rent and gas prices that are devouring their paychecks — could prove pivotal in some major contests.

“This is a very real feeling across the U.S.,” said Jason Dorsey, a generational researcher who lives in Austin, Texas. “Thirty-somethings really feel like they have missed out and have been left behind.”

Nearly two dozen people in their early 30s said in interviews that the image of adult life that they had been promised turned out to be a sham.
Many work full time and earn enough to cover the cost of basic groceries (even if it means trips to three stores). But their salaries are losing ground to inflation, and their health care costs are skyrocketing. They’re cutting back on salon visits, social activities and fresh fruit runs — and they feel priced out of adulthood.

On Thursday, the long-running Harvard Youth Poll found for the first time in its history that more young Americans expect to fall behind, rather than surpass, their parents economically.

This could/should cause incumbents in this election a very rough season. At the national level this should favor the Democrats. But the Democrats should look back to Harry Truman in 1946.

martinlongman.substack.com - The lessons from trumans disastrous

Taegan Goddard is one among many who have recently noted that Harry Truman is the only president since the invention of polling who has entered a midterm election with approval numbers as low as Donald Trump is entering this year’s midterms.

In Truman’s case it was the midterms of 1946 and Gallup found that his approval stood at 33 percent, which is the same approval rating the latest Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos Poll found for Trump.

There are two things I think are important to know about Truman’s low standing in 1946. The first pertains to how his approval got so low, and the second is about what happened next and how he recovered.

Any fair historical assessment will agree that Truman got a raw deal. He became president only 82 days after assuming the office of the vice-president for the first time. He was wasn’t read in on everything that was going on with the war effort. Germany signed their unconditional surrender 25 days later. Japan surrendered 124 days later.

These were great victories and the American public initially responded by giving Truman an 87 percent approval rating. But America was completely unprepared for the sudden end of the war. If Roosevelt had an economic plan for demobilization and the return to a peacetime economy, he hadn’t begun to implement it and it wasn’t shared with Truman.

During the war, the federal government maintained strict controls on prices and wages through the Office of Price Administration to prevent wartime inflation. When price controls were abruptly lifted or relaxed in response to public demand, suppressed inflation exploded, including a six percent jump in one month in 1946.

Labor unions responded to the combination of suppressed wages during the war years and increased consumer costs by staging the most widespread strikes in American history, impacting the steel, coal, auto, and railroad industries. A panicked Truman used a very heavy hand with the unions, alienating a critical part of the Democratic Party’s base.

When Truman kept price controls on beef in response to public fury about inflation, the ranchers refused to sell their livestock, causing a massive beef shortage that outraged the electorate. In October, he caved and lifted the beef price controls only to be seen as an ineffective waffler.

The return of over 10 million soldiers from abroad caused massive disruptions. Factories weren’t prepared to employ them all as they shifted from wartime production of tanks and weapons back to cars and consumer goods. There was an enormous housing shortage.

The Republicans responded by blasting the Truman administration for not having a postwar plan and ran on the slogans “Had Enough?” and "To Err is Truman." On Election Day, they flipped 55 House seats and 12 Senate seats, sweeping into the majority in both chambers of Congress for the first time since 1931.

There’s an echo of the 1946 elections in 2026. Inflation, including with beef prices, is a major factor this year. There’s a general sense that the Trump administration has mismanaged the economy and made inflation worse than it had to be. And Trump policies have outraged and financially harmed key elements of his base. With Truman, it was labor unions. With Trump, it’s farmers and ranchers.

But there’s a lesson from 1946 for Democrats, too.

The Republican Congress of 1947-1948 spent its time passing unpopular legislation that went nowhere. Truman exercised his veto power 75 times in those two years. When the Republicans successfully overrode his veto, it was to enact the unpopular Taft-Hartley Act.

When Truman campaigned for president in 1948, most experts thought he was doomed, but he turned the Republican-led Congress into a foil. He made them share responsibility for the country’s problems, labeled them the “Do-Nothing Congress,” and was reelected in the biggest election night upset in American history.

Trump won’t be eligible to run for president in 2028, but whomever the Republican nominee is will try to repeat Truman’s strategy of blaming the opposition’s control of Congress for people’s dissatisfaction. The Democrats can’t make the same mistake of having very little legislation enacted and instead pursuing pet peeves and ideological messaging at the expense of addressing the voters’ primary concerns.

If anything, this will be harder for the Democrats to pull off in the next Congress than it was for the Republicans in 1947 and 1948. This is because the Republicans back then weren’t dealing with a criminal who was tearing the Constitution to shreds. The Democrats cannot avoid seeking accountability and the restoration of law and norms. But if they do this without finding a way to tackle inflation, they may meet the same fate as the Do Nothing Congress.

The Republicans lost control of Congress in the 1948 election. They gained it back, briefly in 1953-1954 in response to unhappiness about the Korean War. But, other than these two brief interludes of power, the Republicans were shut out in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1931 and 1995, and in the U.S. Senate between 1933 and 1981.

That’s a long time in the wilderness and it explains why the GOP developed an almost pathological hatred of the federal government over the latter half of the 20-Century. They never had control of the purse strings.

Looking back, the Republicans had an opportunity after the 1946 midterms to prevent this string of futility but they had unrealistic expectations about what the American electorate really wanted. They misinterpreted their mandate and thought the public was done with the New Deal. It wasn’t. It still liked FDR’s policies, but it hated inflation and homelessness and stagnant wages. The GOP didn’t have a plan for those things, so they were tossed after two years and relegated to near irrelevance for almost half a century.

All signs point to the Democrats having a great result from the 2026 midterms, but it isn’t a mandate for their policies and priorities as much as a rebuke of the policies and priorities of Trump.

This gives them some leeway to take Trump on in the next Congress, but they can’t be blinded by their victories into thinking they will have earned more than two year’s worth of rope. They have to produce, and that’s going to be a real challenge because it will require working with a criminal and crazy administration that they are simultaneously trying to rein in.

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