Last July, Our Downeast Democratic Representative Predicted a Trump Win and Suggested How Congress Should Handle the Second Trump Presidency
Last July, Our Downeast Democratic Representative Predicted a Trump Win and Suggested How Congress Should Handle the Second Trump Presidency
Think of Trump’s impact on America the same way you would about a massive natural upheaval and you’ll understand why I’ll be doing posts like this one along with more conventional webcasts and writing on ocean, climate, disasters, etc.
Wednesday afternoon the Bangor Daily News called the tough race for Maine’s conservative Second Congressional District in favor of three-term incumbent Democrat, Rep.
, who narrowly fought off a tough challenge from Trump-backed Austin Theriault, heavily backed by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Team Trump. (There’ll be a recount.)
I haven’t met Golden yet since our move to the coastal side of his sprawling district three years ago, but look forward to doing so. I’ve been impressed by his ability to navigate a political and cultural landscape as full of hazards and bounty as the reef-laced, fogbound waters here.
His traits and insights are worth examining given the need for everyone to navigate a similarly rocky nationwide landscape revealed by President-elect Trump’s victory in the popular vote as well as the Electoral College.
Golden is a maverick Democrat, having pushed for a 10-percent tariff on all imports. He broke with his party on Biden’s student-loan forgiveness package and offered a compelling argument centered on privilege and the new class wars - which are not just about money, and which Trump exploited in his win:
Is it bad to be working-class and good to be upper-class? Why do we simultaneously argue that the cost of a college education is crushing one generation while lending support to the myth that to succeed the next generation must get a college education? Perhaps we should question the logic of an economic and higher education system that forces young men and women to borrow against their future to “get ahead.”
This matters to me not just because we need a politics of compromise but because a clean-energy and resilience buildout (whenever that can still happen) requires a vastly increased skilled-trades work force, and that expansion will require a lot more support for vocational education. (See my conversation with journalist-turned-electrician Nathanael Johnson for more.)
I came to appreciate this glaring issue - and opportunity - after watching a compelling Commonwealth Club talk on donor-class-dominated politics by the journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon, whose new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, powerfully reveals some of the forces behind the Trump surge:
She summarized the issue this way (I doublechecked the numbers and they’re shockingly right):
We give $200 billion a year to fund higher education and just one measly billion to fund vocational training, which is an immensely profitable avenue to the American dream for working class people. That's just a scandal. It's just an absolute scandal. Especially because we are overproducing college educated people. So 50% of people who have a college degree are what's called underemployed. They're working a job that doesn't require a single skill they learned in college.... So our economy simply cannot sustain any more college educated people. So there has to be another way for people to achieve the American dream, getting rid of degree requirements for jobs that don't require them, making it illegal to use software that immediately funnels out anybody without a college degree...
Governing from the middle
By aligning with Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia in other splits with his party and the Biden agenda, Jared Golden ended up facing attacks from the left even as he grappled with the MAGA movement.
His race was widely considered one of the most critical and uncertain in the country. If Democrats hold off the Republican wave and prevent a governing trifecta, his win will be a big part of that. I’m writing this as vote counts in some 18 other House races continue.
I’m drawing attention to Golden now because of something he wrote back in July, when Biden was still the candidate. It was an op-ed published just days after the Trump-Biden debate forced Biden out of the race and the entry of Vice President Kamala Harris. The headline was unthinkable coming from a Democrat - even one who’d distanced himself from his party’s line more than a few times: "Donald Trump is going to win the election and democracy will be just fine.”
And here we are, hardly feeling fine.
Here’s an excerpt making what I see as some vital points about the months and years ahead:
Some of Congress’ best work in recent years has happened in spite of the president, not because of him. A handful of responsible Democrats, including myself and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, rejected Biden’s bloated “Build Back Better” bill and instead passed a law that supercharged American energy production, saved Medicare billions of dollars and reduced the deficit. Years earlier, Congress stood up to the GOP establishment who tried to hijack Trump’s agenda to achieve their long-held goal of repealing the Affordable Care Act. Defeating them saved health coverage for tens of millions of Americans and protections for people with preexisting conditions.
It was Congress that wrote and passed the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act to bring back manufacturing so we can once again be a nation of producers, not just consumers. We wrote laws to unleash American energy by tapping domestic natural resources — oil and gas, biomass, the sun and wind — as well as nuclear power to ensure a steady supply of affordable, reliable energy. And we passed an infrastructure law that’s already building and improving roads, bridges and ports.
In 2025, I believe Trump is going to be in the White House. Maine’s representatives will need to work with him when it benefits Mainers, hold him accountable when it does not and work independently across the aisle no matter what.
Congress will need to stand up to economic elites and so-called experts in both parties who are already working overtime to stop Trump’s proposed trade policies that would reverse the harms of globalization and protect American businesses from unfair foreign competition. We need to protect from extremists the law I helped pass that caps seniors’ insulin costs at $35 and forces Big Pharma to negotiate and lower the cost of prescription drugs.
Perhaps more importantly, members must stand up to the GOP old-guard who will use a Trump presidency as cover for handouts to the wealthy and powerful at the cost of America’s working families and communities.
We must stabilize Medicare and Social Security, without cuts for seniors. We must guarantee women’s reproductive rights. And Congress must be ready to once again protect the ACA and to end huge tax breaks for the wealthy and for multinational corporations.
I urge everyone — voters, elected officials, the media, and all citizens — to ignore the chattering class’s scare tactics and political pipedreams. We don’t need party insiders in smoke-filled back rooms to save us. We can defend our democracy without them.
I know this is a departure from the normal flow here, but there’ll be little progress on environmental or resilience challenges without more governing of this sort. And I’m aware of course that there’s no “middle” without other factions pushing the edges of what’s possible. But even there, politicans like Senator Bernie Sanders are echoing some of the same points, as he did the other day on X and elsewhere:
It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.
Postscript - a Slow Boring pocket card for Dems
In a great tweet,
posted the smartphone equivalent of a pocket cheat card for commonsense Democrats “to reform governance in the blue zones and be competitive in the red zones — delivering a coalition that can win on health care, reproductive rights, the safety net, and quality for all”:
Another really important and insightful piece Andy. Thank you again.