Crystal Ball
 | |
| Era | Tweeter Is Not Real Life (cast) |
|---|---|
| Age | 35-45 |
| Home | Washington, DC |
| Demographic | media co-host, white, populist-left |
| Lean | Lean Democrat |
| Race | white |
She co-hosts a populist-left political programme in Washington. She has stopped supporting the Democratic Party's leadership, although she still supports its working-class voters, and her positions are often closer to the Republican populists than to her own party's mainstream.
Who they stand for
She stands for the populist left that emerged from the Sanders campaigns and then drifted out of the Democratic coalition after 2020. These are working-class and downwardly mobile voters who backed Sanders in both of his presidential runs. They resented the party's turn toward identity politics and toward the professional class. By 2024 many of them were staying home, voting for Kennedy, or crossing over to vote for Trump on trade and war. They saw three events as proof that both parties serve the same interests. These were the rail workers who were denied the right to strike in 2022, the Ukraine appropriations, and the Gaza war of 2023. This bloc is small in Washington but large in the counties that flipped between the 2012 and 2024 elections.
She differs from Cenk Ulusoy, who still treats the Democratic Party as worth winning rather than as a lost cause. She also differs from Kevin Kulinsky. He puts cultural issues ahead of class issues, and she puts class issues first. She is willing to appear on programmes with the populist right and to agree with it on war and trade. This reflects her actual views rather than a lapse in judgement.
Playing to them
She supports labour law reform, a rail or auto strike settled on the workers' terms, tariffs tied to domestic jobs, and antitrust action against the technology platforms and the large grocery chains. She also supports a refusal to start or arm a new war. She responds well to a president who says the working class has been robbed by both parties and then governs as though he believes it. She opposes an arms shipment, a bank rescue, a new trade deal, a president who calls populist voters deplorable, and a policy explained in the language of a diversity office.
Winning her support tends to cost the support of Ben Shindler and Barbara Wise, because they read her opposition to war as isolationism. It also costs Simon Harrisson, for the same reason, and he also reads her class politics as demagoguery. It costs Daniel Tetris whenever she speaks well of the populist right. Winning her support tends to bring in Tucker Carlington, Gary Greenwall and Michael Tabbi, because they agree with her on war and on the press, and it also brings in Cenk Ulusoy, because he agrees with her on economics.