I'm not gonna wade into the trans issue in terms of a policy/civil rights debate, but I suspect you're wrong about it not swinging votes. Dave Chappelle's highly successful anti-trans stand-up shtick doesn't exist in a bubble insulated from electoral salience. It wouldn't be the first time that being at the tip of the spear on culture war issues cracked up the Democrats' coalition.

At the very least, the Democrats need to acknowledge they're on the wrong side of public opinion on this and update their messaging. They were winning the argument in the Roy Cooper era but once Republicans figured out a way to make it about children, they've been on offense and made considerable inroads. Pretending that they haven't and hoping people will be naturally co-opted by the gravity of civil rights acceptance might work, but it's risky.

The more serious reckoning needs to happen with illegal immigration and I won't pull punches on this. If the Democrats had to have their asses handed to them two weeks ago, I was hoping it would be unambiguously because of their unacceptable stewardship of immigration policy. The verdict wasn't definitive and Dems are interpreting it as giving them permission to stay the course on an asylum platform that is unequivocally batshit insane.

And honestly, that includes the reform plan pitched this spring which still allowed for 5,000 people PER DAY to manipulate the asylum process and cut in front of millions of people trying to immigrate legally. If anything, Democrats were lucky Trump sabotaged that bill because allowing 5,000 new asylum manipulators per day would not have stanched the deluge of crossings. The borders would be just as clogged now as they were a year ago and the issue would have been more front and center during the general election with people still as angry about the border in November as they were in February. The executive order Biden passed in lieu of the border reform bill did a lot more to cool down this issue than the reform bill would have.

Herein lies the risk for Democrats in the months to come. Trump will be carrying out deportations and, at least until there's tangible economic pain felt by consumers, these deportations will be broadly popular. If the Democrats choose to spend an inordinate amount of time in the next year outraged about sending illegal immigrants back home, they will have once again misread popular opinion badly and position themselves for another disappointing cycle.

Pretending that the Trump surge was entirely about inflation does nobody on our side any favors. It's not as if the demographics that surged to Trump this year did so out of this blue. 2024 wasn't 2016. The trend lines have been in motion for a few cycles now. We have a much bigger problem with American voters than the price of eggs being too high.