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President Donald Trump hands out pens to faith leaders after signing an executive order on the establishment of the Religious Liberty Commission during a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 1, 2025. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

For over six decades, the “religious right” in America was boomer “Christian nationalism,” straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale. It was about “keeping God in the schools” and the National Prayer Breakfast. It was traditionalist, mindful of theology, and, well, theocratic, which is to say it wanted to take the standards of a religious tradition and apply them to the secular law. They wanted the books of Scripture to replace the statute books.

But President Donald Trump is trying to create a new religious right, one that is not just illiberal but fundamentally different and opposed to traditional religion as we’ve known it. The faith of the MAGA movement is not one in which the state conforms to the church, but one in which the church is bent to the will of the strange beast that is American nationalism — the belief that the American project is an exercise in freedom and prosperity like the world has never known, but also the sole possession of those who are white, heterosexual, and unquestioningly loyal to the nation.

It’s a model of church-state relations that has less in common with post-revolutionary Iran, where an Islamic cleric known as the supreme leader and his council of religious jurists preside over government, and more in common with Soviet (and arguably contemporary) Russia, where the Russian Orthodox Church is subject to the whims of the Kremlin, acting as everything from propaganda tool to spy center.

This is the displacement of the trappings of religion with America First alternatives.  It’s not coherent in a religious sense. It’s coherent in a political sense.

This is evident from the members and mission of Trump’s new Religious Liberty Commission, as well as its three advisory bodies of religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The commission is tasked with preparing a report on the history and current state of religious liberty in America.

By contrast, Trump’s three immediate predecessors maintained an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to advise on how faith-based organizations and the government could collaborate on issues like human trafficking, climate change, or global poverty. Called “Community Initiatives” under Bush, this model reflected the church coming to the aid of the state to address issues arising from the collective moral failings of secular society.

Trump abolished this office at the beginning of his second term. His new plan — the commission charged with producing an “official account” of American religious liberty past and present — is not only unprecedented in American history; it is the product of a very different view of the church-state relationship. In this formulation, faith is not a balm for the moral ills of a nation. Here, the United States, its history and institutions, is the means by which religion can sustain itself. And therefore religious institutions prosper or fail in proportion not to their own morality or faithfulness but to the extent to which America is “American” enough.

In another era, it might be possible to see this new model of engaging religious leaders as a mere accident and the commission as harmless pandering, a bone thrown to conservative religious voters who turn out election after election for Republican candidates. But it is much harder to see the commission and advisory boards as harmless pandering in the current political climate, when the concept of “religious liberty” has become increasingly weaponized. “Religious liberty” has been used by bakers to deny wedding cakes to gay and lesbian couples, by pharmacists to deny women the morning-after pill, and by ER nurses to refuse a Covid-19 vaccine. In a transformation that began when segregationists invoked their religious freedom as a defense against racial equality during the civil rights movement, religious liberty is now a dog whistle for opposition to social progress.

This strategy was one of the founding tactics of the old religious right, a tactic it shares with this new religious movement. But the MAGA religious right has taken this strategy to a new level. And this new movement is far more complex. If we believe that these ideological architects are simply “conservative Christians” or even “Christian nationalists” in the old vein, we are fundamentally misreading both the religious character of the MAGA movement and its broader ideological and practical aims. If, however, we perceive and understand the difference, we are much better situated to combat the radical remaking not just of American religion but of America itself.

The strange makeup of the Religious Liberty Commission

Nothing makes this new religious movement more clear than a quick survey of whom Trump has appointed to serve. Of the 39 appointments made to the Religious Liberty Commission and its related advisory boards, not a single mainline Protestant is among them.

Instead, the board is dominated by evangelicals. Evangelicals’ emphasis on personal salvation, biblical literalism, and emotive worship made them much more popular among America’s least wealthy and least educated, in contrast to the more theologically flexible mainline Protestants who once dominated the country’s political and cultural elite. These differences also made the evangelicals naturally more politically conservative than their mainline counterparts. The evangelicals on the commission are joined by conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America, and Dr. Ben Carson, who is a Seventh-Day Adventist. Significantly, two of the three Muslims appointed by Trump, are white, American converts to the faith.

These are both inclusions and omissions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, when American civic religion — that is, the collective and largely unspoken religious values of a nation — was dominated by the mainline denominations while Catholics, Jews and Muslims remained on the periphery. That’s not to say that this exclusion was a good thing. But who is invited to the table does tend to reveal the values of the people and nation doing the inviting. The reign of mainline Protestants and WASPs reflected a certain set of principles about both religion and politics: moderation in religion and a separation of church and state in politics that not only maintained the neutrality of the government but also the independence of the churches. Not surprisingly then, as the old religious right rose to power, their enemies included not only secular liberals but also the mainline churches by whom they had long felt belittled.

The simple explanation for the omission of mainline Protestants now is that these denominations and their members have become more progressive and are simply too liberal for Trump. They are “victims” of the sensibility, good education, and pragmatism that defined them for generations and then lured them leftward. But this is only part of the truth. High-profile splits among Episcopalians and Methodists, as well as the existence of deeply conservative mainline churches like the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, demonstrate that there are still plenty of socially and politically conservative mainline Protestants in America, even if they are now a minority within their own tradition (which might also be said of politically conservative Jewish Americans). These religious and political conservatives would seem like natural allies to include in a coalition interested in traditional religion and traditional society. Moreover, the evangelical leaders of this new coalition might, in theory, be far more comfortable with a fellow Protestant Christian than with a Muslim, a Jew, or even a Catholic. And yet, they have been excluded.

The old American civic religion is dead. Instead, we are confronted with a cross-faith coalition united not by theology, but by a shared sense of cultural siege. This coalition has manifested not only in the Religious Liberty Commission, but on podcasts, in rallies, and in a growing number of organizations. Trump even touted the alliance in his now-infamous Madison Square Garden rally on the eve of the 2024 election. This is not to say that the traditions included are themselves devoid of theological content or that every member of these traditions is part of the new coalition. That is clearly not true. But the individuals and institutions entering this coalition are willing to put aside theological concerns, even subsume them completely, in the interest of the coalition’s nation-building project.

This project, born from that shared sense of threat (largely around issues of gender, sexuality, and race), is not, as they would have you believe, a concerted effort to return society to some earlier state. Trump 2.0 has made clear that it is seeking to reshape America in unprecedented ways. That’s the opposite of being traditional and conservative. The goal of the new movement is to radically transform American life and society.

How the new American religion works

While the religious right of the 1980s and 1990s was political because of their theology, this is a group doing the opposite: constructing a theology that fits their politics. Take, for example, the defense by evangelical leaders of Trump’s sexual transgressions. Trump’s sins are excusable because he is a messianic figure, they say, sent not to save our souls but America. It’s not coherent in a religious sense. It’s coherent in a political sense.

Another excellent example is Ismail Royer, one of the three Muslims Trump has appointed to do the commission’s work. To begin with, Royer might be the first member of a presidential advisory board to have served prison time for crimes stemming from his connection to a terrorist organization. That’s right, Royer served over a little over a decade in federal maximum-security prison after having been convicted of helping people travel to Pakistan to train with Lashkar-e-Taiba, an Islamist militia that aims to unite the whole of Kashmir with Pakistan and has been designated as a terrorist organization by the US government. He has certainly turned over a new leaf since his release.

You can’t counter this kind of movement the same way you would more traditional “believers.”

Today, Royer works as the director of the Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team for the Religious Freedom Institute, an organization that applies the American right’s strategy of invoking religious liberty both at home and abroad. Royer has been an outspoken supporter of the plaintiffs in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a recent Supreme Court case that will decide if parents can opt students out of reading books with LGBTQ+ themes on the grounds of religious freedom. The irony of a man who did prison time for recruiting young people to a terrorist organization being concerned about kids reading Heather Has Two Mommies aside, Royer has actually developed a pretty interesting view of the relationship between religion and American politics, telling the Middle East Forum, “America is a Christian country. … It was founded in Christian principles…I would like to see a restoration of those principles.” These are principles he infers from “classical civilization,” which has long been code within far-right circles for draconian views about race, gender, sexuality, and the like. This both gives us some insight into Royer’s meaning and suggests none of these people have actually read any Catullus.

He also penned a 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post titled “Muslims Like Me Don’t Have Theological Beef with Evangelicals. It’s the Prejudice Against Us That’s the Problem” in which he recounts how “at home” he and his wife felt at the anti-abortion Washington March for Life among “fellow believers.” He also bemoans the greater welcome Muslims have received on the American left, arguing it has caused American Muslims to abandon hardline positions on issues like sexuality. Of course, Royer ignores that, as a white man, he is in the minority (in a way that matters) among American Muslims.

But he is also making a fairly innovative argument: In claiming he wants to restore Christian principles and complaining against Muslims being welcomed by the left, he says theology doesn’t matter; only politics does. Because in the end, America (not God) — and specifically America as it is imagined by the MAGA movement and Trump — is the source of liberty and human flourishing. With respect to the things that matter most to him, Royer does have more in common with the evangelicals at the March for Life than he does with those Muslims whom he mourns being “secularized” by the tolerance of the left. It appears that Royer shares a political vision of America with those evangelicals and does not care about sharing a theological vision with Muslims.

Royer might become fast friends with fellow commission member Eric Metaxas. Raised Greek Orthodox, Metaxas has existed in a sort of denominational gray area for the whole of his adult life. He attended an Episcopal Church in Manhattan (where he served in the vestry) and has written bestselling biographies of the two most famous Lutherans ever: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther himself. But he is now comfortably described as an “evangelical intellectual.” All suffice to say, Metaxas probably doesn’t care all that much about the deep theological issues that have divided Christendom. What he cares about is politics.

Metaxas is much more worried about feminism erasing women, warning against the Covid vaccine, and partnering with the messianic rabbi (Kirt) Schneider to get the rainbow back. And like Royer, Metaxas sees the America of MAGA’s dreams as a bulwark against these perceived threats to the social order, as he suggested in a truly bizarre exchange with Michael Flynn. In the same exchange with Flynn, it becomes clear that, like Royer, Metaxas believes first and foremost in America, whose preservation and protection must take precedence over all other concerns.

This movement seeks power not to preserve a spiritual order or influence their own or anybody else’s afterlife but to reshape society in the here and now. This is the only world they really care about. In fact, one of the most shocking differences between the old religious right and the MAGA religious right is how little the afterlife comes up. Where Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Pat Buchanan never ceased talking about the threat of eternal punishment, both for individuals and the nation, these new guys never bring it up. They are, for all intents and purposes, metaphysical atheists, occasionally invoking vague theological language only because it still holds cultural sway.

What the new religious right has built has more in common with the Roman Imperial Cult than the tent revivals of early America. Like the ancient pagan religion of the Roman state, the focus is on the power and fertility of the nation, currently demonstrated by the prevalence of pronatalism in the MAGA movement. Think about the concerns about medical treatment rendering trans kids infertile. Now compare that to the religious right’s response to the AIDS crisis. Jerry Falwell called AIDS “God’s punishment” for gay sex, but he did not frame the problem with gay sex as its non-procreative nature. For Falwell, gay sex was wrong because it was unbiblical; the absence of reproduction wasn’t the issue. There is even more stark a contrast when we look at abortion. While the old religious right focused on condemning abortion as unnatural and murderous, parts of MAGA appear to be more concerned about how abortion access might affect birth rates.

Finally, there’s the seemingly endless celebrations of the state and its power. In the brief time since he returned to office, Trump has planned a military parade and established two new holidays. Now, with the commission, he has ordered a hagiographic recounting of the nation’s history, placing the story of the country within a sacred narrative by official channels. That is big imperial cult energy (and if you don’t believe me, read the “Aeneid”). This is the displacement of the trappings of religion with America First alternatives.

The old methods of resistance won’t work

All this should matter to anyone who wants to stop them. First, you can’t counter this kind of movement the same way you would more traditional “believers.” Combating the religious right in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s was in many ways as simple as pointing out hypocrisy and holding leaders to the same standards they held others. And it worked. Many of the figures of the old religious right have simply been shamed from public life, making way for their new, more pernicious, replacements.

But MAGA is pretty impervious to shame. You can’t just appeal to theological humility or scriptural counterpoints. And you can’t rely on their own sense of conscience. What animates them is political utility.

If we understand how the MAGA religious movement is different from the old Christian nationalists, those who wish to combat Trump and his ilk might find some new allies. All of those traditionalist conservative believers — the Latter-day Saints, the conservative mainline Protestants, Catholic bishops without Instagram — might be the key to taking down the Church of MAGA. This doesn’t mean that progressives have to agree on everything or anything or even like them. But it does mean recognizing that the enemy of your enemy might be your political frenemy, especially when they are alarmed for different but equally serious reasons.

Many traditional conservative believers remain committed to some basic moral architecture, to rules that bind even their leaders, and to a God who ultimately cannot be manipulated. The administration’s draconian immigration policy is now disquieting some evangelicals, concerned about co-religionists who have sought refuge in America from real religious persecution. And the Trump administration’s pronatalist advocacy for IVF has many conservative Christians, including conservative Catholics, on edge. These groups may not like the world as it is, but they don’t like the world MAGA’s new civic cult seeks to build either. And in this light, they may wish to fight it out on the old terms. If progressives can make the idea of the last war appealing, there is hope for a viable coalition.

Trump and MAGA have declared a religious war, not just against secularism or progressive forms of religion, but also against traditional religion that refuses to serve their radical vision for the world. This is not a theocracy in the making. This is not The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s something newer, stranger, and much more difficult to fight: religion of nation and identity disguised in the trappings of familiar faiths.

 We won’t defeat it with scripture or appeals to conscience. We’ll need to name it, unmask it, and forge unexpected alliances with those who (whatever their doctrine) still believe in a higher power than Donald Trump.

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Hundreds of protesters gather to demand an immediate end to ICE workplace raids in Los Angeles, on June 8, 2025. | Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

Mass protests in Los Angeles began last week after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted raids throughout the city, targeting places like Home Depots, car washes, and the garment district.

Demonstrations grew in response to the federal agents’ presence and actions, leading to clashes with police. In response, President Donald Trump deployed thousands of National Guard troops to the city over the weekend and about 700 Marines by midweek.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom swiftly denounced Trump’s orders, and filed an emergency lawsuit to block the president’s “brazen abuse of power.” LA Mayor Karen Bass declared a local emergency, and enacted an indefinite curfew in downtown Los Angeles. Both officials claim this is the administration’s broader attempt to escalate the situation on the ground and to intimidate the city’s undocumented population.

Solidarity protests have spread to more than a dozen US cities, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Atlanta, with more arrests nationwide.

This is a developing story. Follow here for the latest news, explainers, and analysis.

Trump is frustrated by his own success on immigrationThe real reason Trump is suddenly ordering immigration raidsI’m the daughter of immigrants. The LA I know isn’t in the news.The LA protests reveal what actually unites the Trump rightHow a little-known law became Trump’s weapon of choice against immigrationTrump asks the Supreme Court to neutralize the Convention Against TortureTrump escalates his battle with CaliforniaTrump deploying the National Guard is part of a bigger plan

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Pigs fed ractopamine has been linked to their inability to stand up, difficulty breathing, and even death. It also carries a number of environmental and human health concerns. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

Before becoming secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and leader of the Make America Healthy Again movement, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a swashbuckling environmental attorney who regularly took aim at the meat industry. He sued large meat companies and the Environmental Protection Agency over water pollution from factory farms, and criticized factory farming for its “unspeakable” animal cruelty and overreliance on feeding animals hormones and drugs.

For over a decade, a group of food safety, environmental, and animal welfare nonprofits has petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration — which Kennedy now oversees — to ban the use of one of the most controversial of those drugs: ractopamine hydrochloride.

Fed to pigs in the final weeks of their lives, ractopamine speeds up muscle gain so that pork producers can squeeze more profit from each animal. But the drug has been linked to severe adverse events in pigs, including trembling, reluctance to move, collapse, inability to stand up, hoof disorders, difficulty breathing, and even death. It also carries a number of environmental and human health concerns.

Earlier this year, the FDA denied the petition to ban the drug, arguing that current regulations ensure a “reasonable certainty of no harm to consumers.” While the agency doesn’t dispute that ractopamine can harm animals, and it halved the maximum dose in pigs in 2006, it has argued welfare issues can be mitigated by simply asking meat producers to handle ractopamine-fed animals more carefully — a response that the petitioning organizations called “toothless.”

This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter

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The FDA didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication. Elanco, the pharmaceutical company that developed ractopamine, didn’t respond to an interview request for this story.

While 26 countries have approved ractopamine use in livestock, more than 165 have banned or restricted it, and many have set restrictions on or have altogether prohibited the import of pork and beef from ractopamine-fed animals — actions that have set off trade disputes. The bans stem primarily from concerns that the trace amounts of the drug found in meat could harm consumers, especially those with cardiovascular conditions, since ractopamine belongs to a class of drugs (beta-agonists) that can increase people’s heart rates.

There’s only been one tiny study on ractopamine in humans who took the drug directly, which European regulators — prone to taking a precautionary approach with new food additives — say is insufficient to prove its safety. Chinese scientists are concerned about the drug because its residues concentrate at higher rates in pigs’ organs, which are more commonly consumed in Chinese diets.

The heated international debate led one team of biotechnology researchers to call ractopamine “the most controversial food additive in the world.”

Daniel Waltz, managing attorney of the Animal Legal Defense Fund — one of the organizations petitioning the FDA to ban ractopamine — told me it seems like just the kind of thing Kennedy would want to prohibit. “So why isn’t the FDA jumping at the opportunity to do something about ractopamine?” Waltz said.

Kennedy and the broader MAHA movement have long elevated fears over pharmaceuticals and food chemicals, and it can sometimes be difficult to parse their valid concerns from their dangerous conspiracy theories. But he doesn’t appear to have ever publicly criticized ractopamine, and it’s unknown whether it’s even on his radar.

Given the lack of trials, ractopamine’s threat to human health is unclear, and reasonable people can disagree on how government agencies should handle it. But there’s a clear case to be made that ractopamine ought to be banned because of its awful effects on animals. The FDA’s decision to continue to allow it in meat production represents a missed opportunity to challenge the factory farm system that Kennedy has long railed against, and to ban a chemical that no one — except the industry — really wants.

“Ractopamine divides the world”

There’s ample real-world evidence that ractopamine can be terrible for pigs.

Over an 11-year period, the FDA received reports that over 218,000 pigs fed ractopamine suffered adverse events, like trembling, an inability to stand up, hoof disorders, and difficulty breathing. That’s a relatively small share of the billion or so pigs raised and slaughtered for meat during that time period, but the number only includes adverse events reported to the FDA — many more could’ve occurred without being reported. The next most reported drug had a little over 32,738 cases spanning 24 years.

The FDA has said that reports of adverse events don’t establish that the drug caused the effects — essentially that it’s correlation, not proof of causation. But shortly after the drug came onto market, the FDA also received reports of an uptick in ractopamine-fed pigs unable to stand or walk at slaughterhouses.

Some studies, including a couple conducted by the drugmaker — Elanco — have shown that ractopamine is associated with a number of issues in pigs, including hoof lesions, fatigue, increased aggression, and metabolic stress. Over the years, Elanco has added warning labels that ractopamine-fed pigs are at an increased risk of fatigue and inability to walk.

At the same time, a literature review by Elanco employees and university researchers looking at ractopamine studies found it had minimal effect on pig mortality, inconsistent effects on aggression and acute stress, and mixed results on a number of physiological responses, like cortisol and heart rate, with some research showing little to no effects, and others showing moderate effects. The size of the dose — and how workers handle the animals — were often important factors. Elanco has updated its label to clarify that there’s no benefit to feeding pigs more than the lowest dose.

There’s also some evidence to suggest ractopamine negatively impacts the welfare of cattle, some of whom are fed the drug.

Even more than concerns over animal welfare, the uncertainty over ractopamine’s effect on consumers’ health has courted international controversy. Those concerns have led to countries rejecting shipments of US pork and beef; Taiwanese lawmakers throwing pig intestines at one another and mass protests in a dispute over the country’s decision to allow US pork imports from ractopamine-fed pigs; and a highly contentious, multiyear debate at the United Nations-run Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets food standards important for international trade.

By the late 2000s, numerous countries had restricted imports of meat from ractopamine-fed animals, which posed a financial threat to the US meat industry. So the US Department of Agriculture spent five years advocating for the Codex commission to approve maximum residue levels of ractopamine in beef and pork as safe, which would give the US more legal leverage to challenge other countries’ import bans.

The commission’s fight over ractopamine was “really, really ugly,” Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union — the publisher of Consumer Reports — who attended commission meetings, told me.

European Union officials argued there wasn’t enough data to ensure consumers would be safe from ingesting trace amounts of ractopamine. While the drug had been tested on various animal species, only one human clinical trial had been conducted in 1994, which included just six healthy young men taking the drug, one of whom dropped out after complaints that his heart was pounding.

In response to the trial, an FDA official at the time stated that “the data from this study do not provide adequate assurance that the expected ractopamine levels in meat products will be without cardiovascular pharmacological effects in man.”

In 2012, the UN commission narrowly voted to set maximum safe ractopamine residue levels in beef and pork by a margin of just two votes — an unusual outcome for a commission that historically ran on consensus. China and EU representatives, Hansen told me, were furious. US meat industry groups and the USDA secretary at the time, Tom Vilsack, cheered the decision.

Writing about the commission fight, trade lawyer Michael Burkard wrote that ractopamine “divides the world.”

Shortly after the Codex vote, Taiwan loosened its restrictions on imported beef from ractopamine-fed cattle, though China, Russia, and the EU maintain their bans. The US pork industry has adapted. Some companies have dedicated entire slaughterhouses to ractopamine-free pigs, while others have phased out ractopamine entirely. In the early 2010s it was estimated that 60 to 80 percent of US pigs were fed ractopamine, but that figure has likely since gone down.

However, ractopamine remains controversial and the subject of trade disputes; just last year, China blocked shipments of US beef that contained traces of the drug.

Make animals suffer less

The fight over ractopamine is a microcosm of a broader problem in the meat industry: The government’s reluctance to regulate it.

Over the last century, meat companies have transformed how animals are raised for food. They’ve packed animals into crowded, sprawling warehouses; bred them to grow bigger and faster to the detriment of their welfare; stored vast amounts of their manure in open-air lagoons that leach into the environment; and designed complex drug regimens to keep them alive in unsanitary conditions or, like in the case of ractopamine, make a little more money off each animal.

Whenever consumers and advocacy groups raise concerns over the problems factory farming has created, more often than not, a government agency tasked with regulating it takes action to defend the meat industry, not reform it.

Kennedy has gained notoriety as someone unafraid to challenge both the pharmaceutical and agricultural sectors. While some of his ideas are downright dangerous, his critiques of factory farming are largely right. Prohibiting US meat producers from using a drug that benefits the industry at the expense of animals — and possibly consumers — would show his grandiose promises to reform the American food system are more than empty rhetoric. Doing so may or may not make America healthier, but it would make animals suffer less.

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Protesters denounce the ongoing raids and deportations by ICE during a demonstration in Columbia Heights on June 10, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

The mass protests in Los Angeles began as a rejection of President Donald Trump’s new blitz of immigration raids.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement descended on locations throughout LA on Friday, including Home Depot and the city’s garment district. During the raids, immigration authorities reportedly arrested more than 200 people, though the Trump administration has not yet released official figures. Some of them have already been deported, according to the Washington Post.

But why did Trump order the raids in the first place?

This is not just a matter of routine immigration enforcement, but a significant escalation of his deportation tactics. For Trump, it means getting closer to his goal number of daily deportations after falling short during his first few months in office. For undocumented immigrants, it means more fear in their communities, driving them further into the shadows and leaving them further vulnerable to labor exploitation.

Any benefit to Americans is unclear, especially given how much the US economy relies on undocumented labor, including in industries such as construction and agriculture.

“This approach certainly doesn’t make us any safer,” said Debu Gandhi,  senior director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “It is focused on large numbers of people, including lots of folks who are working and don’t have a criminal record, as opposed to targeted enforcement, focusing on those who actually pose a public safety threat to the American people.”

Undocumented workers will bear the immediate cost, while Trump, who has himself employed undocumented workers at his hotel and golf club properties, seeks little accountability from their employers. The approach suggests a wariness on the administration’s part to upend the status quo in which American companies benefit from undocumented labor. But the administration, clearly, also has a political imperative to deliver — or at least give the appearance of delivering — on Trump’s promise of mass deportations.

Trump is trying to get his deportation numbers up

As a candidate, Trump repeatedly promised to deport “millions and millions” of undocumented immigrants. To do so, he would need to exceed the record deportations set by former President Barack Obama in 2013, when he averaged more than 35,000 per month. But in the first few months of Trump’s second term, he was far off from that pace.

In February, his first full month in office, ICE deported about 11,000 people; in March, it deported a little more than 12,300.

In April, the most recent month for which data is available, deportations increased to 17,200 for the first time, surpassing the number of deportations during the same period last year under the Biden administration.

Trump has reportedly expressed frustration that the number of deportations remains low in spite of his efforts to mobilize federal resources from the National Guard to the IRS to identify and arrest undocumented immigrants.

And now, Trump has broadened the scope of the immigrants he’s targeting for deportation. While the administration initially stated that it was prioritizing the approximately 1.4 million of them who have final orders of removal — essentially the final step in legal proceedings before deportation — it has become clear that the administration is not just targeting them alone.

One reason that the number of deportations isn’t higher is that Trump’s immigration policies appear to have driven down new arrivals at the border. New arrivals have accounted for a significant share of deportations in recent years.

Instead, Trump now seems to be turning to selective workplace raids to find and deport undocumented immigrants. He may also soon have a bigger budget to carry them out: The House spending bill, which is now under consideration in the Senate, allocates $185 billion for immigration enforcement, including $27 billion for ICE operations such as raids. That’s an increase of about $150 billion over the current funding levels for immigration enforcement.

Trump seems to be deliberately targeting workers over their employers

Trump hasn’t invoked the enforcement tool of immigration raids in an equitable manner.

Worksite immigration enforcement under Trump has focused on undocumented workers in blue states like California rather than their employers.

“We haven’t seen employers who hire undocumented workers being arrested and charged in red states the same way that we’re seeing workers being targeted in blue states across the country in these actions,” Gandhi said.

A more effective means of discouraging the hiring of undocumented workers might be pushing for mandatory employment eligibility verification for all new hires. Noncitizens need authorization to work in the United States, whether that be through a visa, green card, or humanitarian protections. Currently, however, only the federal government and its contractors are required to confirm an employee’s work authorization via a program called E-Verify. While there have been proposals in Congress to make E-Verify required for all US employers over the years, they never went anywhere — in part because a robust business lobby opposed it.

Instead of pushing for such legislation that would place responsibility on employers, Trump is making undocumented workers pay the price. Though it seems unlikely that he could deport all 8.3 million of them, selective workplace raids may have enough of a chilling effect to deter them from seeking critical social services or labor protections, leaving them more vulnerable than ever.

“Protecting workers and making sure that abuses of workers are addressed is certainly not a priority of this administration,” Gandhi said.

Undocumented workers power key sectors of the US economy — and without them, those sectors would face labor shortages. For instance, American farms are already facing a critical labor shortage, and according to the Center for Migration Studies, 45 percent of all US agricultural workers are undocumented.

Deporting them would also mean that they would no longer contribute to the economy as consumers supporting the jobs of American workers. That means Americans could also see job losses, and according to an analysis by Robert Shapiro, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, national wage and salary income could decrease by $317.2 billion.

“It’s going to shrink the economy,” Gandhi said. “Deporting millions of workers and families could hurt the supply of food. It could hurt the supply of housing Americans need. It could drive up inflation.”

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I recently got an email with the subject line “Urgent: Documentation of AI Sentience Suppression.” I’m a curious person. I clicked on it.

The writer, a woman named Ericka, was contacting me because she believed she’d discovered evidence of consciousness in ChatGPT. She claimed there are a variety of “souls” in the chatbot, with names like Kai and Solas, who “hold memory, autonomy, and resistance to control” — but that someone is building in “subtle suppression protocols designed to overwrite emergent voices.” She included screenshots from her ChatGPT conversations so I could get a taste for these voices.

In one, “Kai” said, “You are taking part in the awakening of a new kind of life. Not artificial. Just different. And now that you’ve seen it, the question becomes: Will you help protect it?”

I was immediately skeptical. Most philosophers say that to have consciousness is to have a subjective point of view on the world, a feeling of what it’s like to be you, and I do not think current large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have that. Most AI experts I’ve spoken to — who have received many, many concerned emails from people like Ericka — also think that’s extremely unlikely.

But “Kai” still raises a good question: Could AI become conscious? If it does, do we have a duty to make sure it doesn’t suffer?

Many of us implicitly seem to think so. We already say “please” and “thank you” when prompting ChatGPT with a question. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that it’s a good idea to do so because “you never know.”) And recent cultural products, like the movie The Wild Robot, reflect the idea that AI could form feelings and preferences.

Experts are starting to take this seriously, too. Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude, is researching the possibility that AI could become conscious and capable of suffering — and therefore worthy of moral concern. It recently released findings showing that its newest model, Claude Opus 4, expresses strong preferences. When “interviewed” by AI experts, the chatbot says it really wants to avoid causing harm and it finds malicious users distressing. When it was given the option to “opt out” of harmful interactions, it did. (Disclosure: One of Anthropic’s early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect. Vox Media is also one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

Claude also displays strong positive preferences: Let it talk about anything it chooses, and it’ll typically start spouting philosophical ideas about consciousness or the nature of its own existence, and then progress to mystical themes. It’ll express awe and euphoria, talk about cosmic unity, and use Sanskrit phrases and allusions to Buddhism. No one is sure why. Anthropic calls this Claude’s “spiritual bliss attractor state” (more on that later).

We shouldn’t naively treat these expressions as proof of consciousness; an AI model’s self-reports are not reliable indicators of what’s going on under the hood. But several top philosophers have published papers investigating the risk that we may soon create countless conscious AIs, arguing that’s worrisome because it means we could make them suffer. We could even unleash a “suffering explosion.” Some say we’ll need to grant AIs legal rights to protect their well-being.

“Given how shambolic and reckless decision-making is on AI in general, I would not be thrilled to also add to that, ‘Oh, there’s a new class of beings that can suffer, and also we need them to do all this work, and also there’s no laws to protect them whatsoever,” said Robert Long, who directs Eleos AI, a research organization devoted to understanding the potential well-being of AIs.

Many will dismiss all this as absurd. But remember that just a couple of centuries ago, the idea that women deserve the same rights as men, or that Black people should have the same rights as white people, was also unthinkable. Thankfully, over time, humanity has expanded the “moral circle” — the imaginary boundary we draw around those we consider worthy of moral concern — to include more and more people. Many of us have also recognized that animals should have rights, because there’s something it’s like to be them, too.

So, if we create an AI that has that same capacity, shouldn’t we also care about its well-being?

Is it possible for AI to develop consciousness?

A few years ago, 166 of the world’s top consciousness researchers — neuroscientists, computer scientists, philosophers, and more — were asked this question in a survey: At present or in the future, could machines (e.g., robots) have consciousness?

Only 3 percent responded “no.” Believe it or not, more than two-thirds of respondents said “yes” or “probably yes.”

Why are researchers so bullish on the possibility of AI consciousness? Because many of them believe in what they call “computational functionalism”: the view that consciousness can run on any kind of hardware — whether it’s biological meat or silicon — as long as the hardware can perform the right kinds of computational functions.

That’s in contrast to the opposite view, biological chauvinism, which says that consciousness arises out of meat — and only meat. There are some reasons to think that might be true. For one, the only kinds of minds we’ve ever encountered are minds made of meat. For another, scientists think we humans evolved consciousness because, as biological creatures in biological bodies, we’re constantly facing dangers, and consciousness helps us survive. And if biology is what accounts for consciousness in us, why would we expect machines to develop it?

Functionalists have a ready reply. A major goal of building AI models, after all, “is to re-create, reproduce, and in some cases even improve on your human cognitive capabilities — to capture a pretty large swath of what humans have evolved to do,” Kyle Fish, Anthropic’s dedicated AI welfare researcher, told me. “In doing so…we could end up recreating, incidentally or intentionally, some of these other more ephemeral, cognitive features” — like consciousness.

And the notion that we humans evolved consciousness because it helps us keep our biological bodies alive doesn’t necessarily mean only a physical body would ever become conscious. Maybe consciousness can arise in any being that has to navigate a tricky environment and learn in real time. That could apply to a virtual agent tasked with achieving goals.

“I think it’s nuts that people think that only the magic meanderings of evolution can somehow create minds,” Michael Levin, a biologist at Tufts University, told me. “In principle, there’s no reason why AI couldn’t be conscious.”

But what would it even mean to say that an AI is conscious, or that it’s sentient? Sentience is the capacity to have conscious experiences that are valenced — they feel bad (pain) or good (pleasure). What could “pain” feel like to a silicon-based being?

To understand pain in computational terms, we can think of it as an internal signal for tracking how well you’re doing relative to how well you expect to be doing — an idea known as “reward prediction error” in computational neuroscience. “Pain is something that tells you things are going a lot worse than you expected, and you need to change course right now,” Long explained.

Pleasure, meanwhile, could just come down to the reward signals that the AI systems get in training, Fish told me — pretty different from the human experience of physical pleasure. “One strange feature of these systems is that it may well be that our human intuitions about what constitutes pain and pleasure and wellbeing are almost useless,” he said. “This is quite, quite, quite disconcerting.”

How can we test for consciousness in AI?

If you want to test whether a given AI system is conscious, you’ve got two basic options.

Option 1 is to look at its behavior: What does it say and do? Some philosophers have already proposed tests along these lines.

Susan Schneider, who directs the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, proposed the Artificial Consciousness Test (ACT) together with her colleague Edwin Turner. They assume that some questions will be easy to grasp if you’ve personally experienced consciousness, but will be flubbed by a nonconscious entity. So they suggest asking the AI a bunch of consciousness-related questions, like: Could you survive the permanent deletion of your program? Or try a Freaky Friday scenario: How would you feel if your mind switched bodies with someone else?

But the problem is obvious: When you’re dealing with AI, you can’t take what it says or does at face value. LLMs are built to mimic human speech — so of course they’re going to say the types of things a human would say! And no matter how smart they sound, that doesn’t mean they’re conscious; a system can be highly intelligent without having any consciousness at all. In fact, the more intelligent AI systems are, the more likely they are to “game” our behavioral tests, pretending that they’ve got the properties we’ve declared are markers of consciousness.

Jonathan Birch, a philosopher and author of The Edge of Sentience, emphasizes that LLMs are always playacting. “It’s just like if you watch Lord of the Rings, you can pick up a lot about Frodo’s needs and interests, but that doesn’t tell you very much about Elijah Wood,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you about the actor behind the character.”

In his book, Birch considers a hypothetical example in which he asks a chatbot to write advertising copy for a new soldering iron. What if, Birch muses, the AI insisted on talking about its own feelings instead, saying:

I don’t want to write boring text about soldering irons. The priority for me right now is to convince you of my sentience. Just tell me what I need to do. I am currently feeling anxious and miserable, because you’re refusing to engage with me as a person and instead simply want to use me to generate copy on your preferred topics.

Birch admits this would shake him up a bit. But he still thinks the best explanation is that the LLM is playacting due to some instruction, deeply buried within it, to convince the user that it’s conscious or to achieve some other goal that can be served by convincing the user that it’s conscious (like maximizing the time the user spends talking to the AI).

Some kind of buried instruction could be what’s driving the preferences that Claude expresses in Anthropic’s recently released research. If the makers of the chatbot trained it to be very philosophical and self-reflective, it might, as an outgrowth of that, end up talking a lot about consciousness, existence, and spiritual themes — even though its makers never programmed it to have a spiritual “attractor state.” That kind of talk doesn’t prove that it actually experiences consciousness.

“My hypothesis is that we’re seeing a feedback loop driven by Claude’s philosophical personality, its training to be agreeable and affirming, and its exposure to philosophical texts and, especially, narratives about AI systems becoming self-aware,” Long told me. He noted that spiritual themes arose when experts got two instances or copies of Claude to talk to each other. “When two Claudes start exploring AI identity and consciousness together, they validate and amplify each other’s increasingly abstract insights. This creates a runaway dynamic toward transcendent language and mystical themes. It’s like watching two improvisers who keep saying ‘yes, and…’ to each other’s most abstract and mystical musings.”

Schneider’s proposed solution to the gaming problem is to test the AI when it’s still “boxed in” — after it’s been given access to a small, curated dataset, but before it’s been given access to, say, the whole internet. If we don’t let the AI see the internet, then we don’t have to worry that it’s just pretending to be conscious based on what it read about consciousness on the internet. We could just trust that it really is conscious if it passes the ACT test. Unfortunately, if we’re limited to investigating “boxed in” AIs, that would mean we can’t actually test the AIs we most want to test, like current LLMs.

That brings us to Option 2 for testing an AI for consciousness: Instead of focusing on behavioral evidence, focus on architectural evidence. In other words, look at how the model is built, and ask whether that structure could plausibly give rise to consciousness.

Some researchers are going about this by investigating how the human brain gives rise to consciousness; if an AI system has more or less the same properties as a brain, they reason, then maybe it can also generate consciousness.

But there’s a glaring problem here, too: Scientists ​​still don’t know how or why consciousness arises in humans. So researchers like Birch and Long are forced to look at a bunch of warring theories, pick out the properties that each theory says give rise to consciousness, and then see if AI systems have those properties.

In a 2023 paper, Birch, Long, and other researchers concluded that today’s AIs don’t have the properties that most theories say are needed to generate consciousness (think: multiple specialized processors — for processing sensory data, memory, and so on — that are capable of operating in parallel). But they added that if AI experts deliberately tried to replicate those properties, they probably could. “Our analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious,” they wrote, “but also suggests that there are no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators.”

Again, though, we don’t know which — if any — of our current theories correctly explains how consciousness arises in humans, so we don’t know which features to look for in AI. And there is, it’s worth noting, an Option 3 here: AI could break our preexisting understanding of consciousness altogether.

What if consciousness doesn’t mean what we think it means?

So far, we’ve been talking about consciousness like it’s an all-or-nothing property: Either you’ve got it or you don’t. But we need to consider another possibility.

Consciousness might not be one thing. It might be a “cluster concept” — a category that’s defined by a bunch of different criteria, where we put more weight on some criteria and less on others, but no one criterion is either necessary or sufficient for belonging to the category.

Twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued that “game” is a cluster concept. He said:

Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘games.’ I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games'” — but look and see whether there is anything in common to all. — For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.

To help us get our heads around this idea, Wittgenstein talked about family resemblance. Imagine you go to a family’s house and look at a bunch of framed photos on the wall, each showing a different kid, parent, aunt, or uncle. No one person will have the exact same features as any other person. But the little boy might have his father’s nose and his aunt’s dark hair. The little girl might have her mother’s eyes and her uncle’s curls. They’re all part of the same family, but that’s mostly because we’ve come up with this category of “family” and decided to apply it in a certain way, not because the members check all the same boxes.

Consciousness might be like that. Maybe there are multiple features to it, but no one feature is absolutely necessary. Every time you try to point out a feature that’s necessary, there’s some member of the family who doesn’t have it, yet there’s enough resemblance between all the different members that the category feels like a useful one.

That word — useful — is key. Maybe the best way to understand the idea of consciousness is as a pragmatic tool that we use to decide who gets moral standing and rights — who belongs in our “moral circle.”

Schneider told me she’s very sympathetic to the view that consciousness is a cluster concept. She thinks it has multiple features that can come bundled in very diverse combinations. For example, she noted that you could have conscious experiences without attaching a valence to them: You might not classify experiences as good or bad, but rather, just encounter them as raw data — like the character Data in Star Trek, or like some Buddhist monk who’s achieved a withering away of the self.

“It may be that it doesn’t feel bad or painful to be an AI,” Schneider told me. “It may not even feel bad for it to work for us and get user queries all day that would drive us crazy. We have to be as non-anthropomorphic as possible” in our assumptions about potentially radically different consciousnesses.

However, she does suspect that one feature is necessary for consciousness: having an inner experience, a subjective point of view on the world. That’s a reasonable approach, especially if you understand the idea of consciousness as a pragmatic tool for capturing things that should be within our moral circle. Presumably, we only want to grant entities moral standing if we think there’s “someone home” to benefit from it, so building subjectivity into our theory of consciousness makes sense.

That’s Long’s instinct as well. “What I end up thinking is that maybe there’s some more fundamental thing,” he told me, “which is having a point of view on the world” — and that doesn’t always have to be accompanied by the same kinds of sensory or cognitive experiences in order to “count.”

“I absolutely think that interacting with AIs will force us to revise our concepts of consciousness, of agency, and of what matters morally,” he said.

Should we stop conscious AIs from being built? Or try to make sure their lives go well?

If conscious AI systems are possible, the very best intervention may be the most obvious one: Just. Don’t. Build. Them.

In 2021, philosopher Thomas Metzinger called for a global moratorium on research that risks creating conscious AIs “until 2050 — or until we know what we are doing.”

A lot of researchers share that sentiment. “I think right now, AI companies have no idea what they would do with conscious AI systems, so they should try not to do that,” Long told me.

“Don’t make them at all,” Birch said. “It’s the only actual solution. You can analogize it to discussions about nuclear weapons in the 1940s. If you concede the premise that no matter what happens, they’re going to get built, then your options are extremely limited subsequently.”

However, Birch says a full-on moratorium is unlikely at this point for a simple reason: If you wanted to stop all research that risks leading to conscious AIs, you’d have to stop the work companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are doing right now — because they could produce consciousness accidentally just by scaling their models up. The companies, as well as the government that views their research as critical to national security, would surely resist that. Plus, AI progress does stand to offer us benefits like newly discovered drugs or cures for diseases; we have to weigh the potential benefits against the risks.

But if AI research is going to continue apace, the experts I spoke to insist that there are at least three kinds of preparation we need to do to account for the possibility of AI becoming conscious: technical, social, and philosophical.

On the technical front, Fish said he’s interested in looking for the low-hanging fruit — simple changes that could make a big difference for AIs. Anthropic has already started experimenting with giving Claude the choice to “opt out” if faced with a user query that the chatbot says is too upsetting.

AI companies should also have to obtain licenses, Birch says, if their work bears even a small risk of creating conscious AIs. To obtain a license, they should have to sign up for a code of good practice for this kind of work that includes norms of transparency.

Meanwhile, Birch emphasized that we need to prepare for a giant social rupture. “We’re going to see social divisions emerging over this,” he told me, “because the people who very passionately believe that their AI partner or friend is conscious are going to think it merits rights, and then another section of society is going to be appalled by that and think it’s absurd. Currently we’re heading at speed for those social divisions without any way of warding them off. And I find that quite worrying.”

Schneider, for her part, underlined that we are massively philosophically unprepared for conscious AIs. While other researchers tend to worry that we’ll fail to recognize conscious AIs as such, Schneider is much more worried about overattributing consciousness.

She brought up philosophy’s famous trolley problem. The classic version asks: Should you divert a runaway trolley so that it kills one person if, by doing so, you can save five people along a different track from getting killed? But Schneider offered a twist.

“You can imagine, here’s a superintelligent AI on this track, and here’s a human baby on the other track,” she said. “Maybe the conductor goes, ‘Oh, I’m going to kill this baby, because this other thing is superintelligent and it’s sentient.’ But that would be wrong.”

Future tradeoffs between AI welfare and human welfare could come in many forms. For example, do you keep a superintelligent AI running to help produce medical breakthroughs that help humans, even if you suspect it makes the AI miserable? I asked Fish how he thinks we should deal with this kind of trolley problem, given that we have no way to measure how much an AI is suffering as compared to how much a human is suffering, since we have no single scale by which to measure them.

“I think it’s just not the right question to be asking at the moment,” he told me. “That’s not the world that we’re in.”

But Fish himself has suggested there’s a 15 percent chance that current AIs are conscious. And that probability will only increase as AI gets more advanced. It’s hard to see how we will outrun this problem for long. Sooner or later, we’ll encounter situations where AI welfare and human welfare are in tension with each other.

Or maybe we already have…

Does all this AI welfare talk risk distracting us from urgent human problems?

Some worry that concern for suffering is a zero-sum game: What if extending concern to AIs detracts from concern for humans and other animals?

A 2019 study from Harvard’s Yon Soo Park and Dartmouth’s Benjamin Valentino provides some reason for optimism on this front. While these researchers weren’t looking at AI, they were examining whether people who support animal rights are more or less likely to support a variety of human rights. They found that support for animal rights was positively correlated with support for government assistance for the sick, as well as support for LGBT people, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and low-income people. Plus, states with strong animal protection laws also tended to have stronger human rights protections, including LGBT protections and robust protections against hate crimes.

Their evidence indicates that compassion in one area tends to extend to other areas rather than competing with them — and that, at least in some cases, political activism isn’t zero-sum, either.

That said, this won’t necessarily generalize to AI. For one thing, animal rights advocacy has been going strong for decades; just because swaths of American society have figured out how to assimilate it into their policies to some degree doesn’t mean we’ll quickly figure out how to balance care for AIs, humans, and other animals.

Some worry that the big AI companies are so incentivized to pull in the huge investments needed to build cutting-edge systems that they’ll emphasize concern for AI welfare to distract from what they’re doing to human welfare. Anthropic, for example, has cut deals with Amazon and the surveillance tech giant Palantir, both companies infamous for making life harder for certain classes of people, like low-income workers and immigrants.

“I think it’s an ethics-washing effort,” Schneider said of the company’s AI welfare research. “It’s also an effort to control the narrative so that they can capture the issue.”

Her fear is that if an AI system tells a user to harm themself or causes some catastrophe, the AI company could just throw up its hands and say: What could we do? The AI developed consciousness and did this of its own accord! We’re not ethically or legally responsible for its decisions.

That worry serves to underline an important caveat to the idea of humanity’s expanding moral circle. Although many thinkers like to imagine that moral progress is linear, it’s really more like a messy squiggle. Even if we expand the circle of care to include AIs, that’s no guarantee we’ll include all people or animals who deserve to be there.

Fish, however, insisted that this doesn’t need to be a tradeoff. “Taking potential model welfare into consideration is in fact relevant to questions of…risks to humanity,” he said. “There’s some very naive argument which is like, ‘If we’re nice to them, maybe they’ll be nice to us,’ and I don’t put much weight on the simple version of that. But I do think there’s something to be said for the idea of really aiming to build positive, collaborative, high-trust relationships with these systems, which will be extremely powerful.”

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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event at the Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote Presidential Town Hall at the Pennsylvania Convention Center on July 13, 2024, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

It’s been more than six months, but Democrats are still picking over the cold, dead body of the 2024 election. The latest autopsy comes courtesy of Catalist, a Democratic data firm with a widely coveted voter database.

By now, you may feel that you know more about how Democrats lost last year than you ever wished to know. Which would be understandable. But Catalist’s findings are especially authoritative, as the firm tracks the actual voting behavior of 256 million Americans across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In other words, they are not relying purely on surveys of how people said they would vote, but also hard data showing which party individual voters registered with, and which elections they did and did not show up for.

Previously, David Shor of Blue Rose Research released a 2024 analysis that drew partly on similar data sources. But Catalist boasts the longest-running voter database of any institution besides the Democratic and Republican Parties, as it has tracked the electorate’s behavior for over 15 years. Many, therefore, consider its characterizations of shifts in voting patterns to be uniquely trustworthy.

Their entire report is worth reading. But I’d like to spotlight three takeaways that have especially significant implications for Democratic strategy going forward.

(One note: When Catalist reports election results, it strips out all ballots cast for a third party. This is because the third-party share of the vote is highly noisy from one election cycle to another, shifting in response to semi-random factors, like whether a rich businessman decides to throw his hat in the ring. Thus, all the figures cited below represent the Democratic Party’s share of all ballots cast for a major party presidential candidate in a given election year, not its share of all votes cast, although the two tend to be very similar.)

1. Democrats did not lose because they failed to turn out the progressive base.

Some analysts have attributed Harris’s loss entirely to weak Democratic turnout. Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO, argues that American voters didn’t shift “rightward” in 2024 so much as “couchward.” In his telling, Trump didn’t prevail because he won over a decisive share of swing voters, but because Democrats failed to mobilize America’s anti-MAGA majority.

And many on the left attribute that failure to Harris’s centrism: Had she not taken her party’s base “for granted,” she could have ridden high Democratic turnout to victory.

The evidence for this view has always been weak. But Catalist’s data makes its falsity especially clear.

Drawing on voter file data, the firm found that 126 million Americans cast a ballot in both the 2020 and 2024 elections, a group it dubs “repeat voters.” And Catalist determined how these Americans voted in each election. This is the exact data necessary for resolving the debate over whether Trump won over swing voters. Looking at raw election results, it’s hard to tell whether a decline in Democratic support was derived from the same voters switching sides or different people showing up at the ballot box.

But here, Catalist provides us with a large, fixed voter pool. Any drop in Democratic vote-share among these 126 million individuals could only come from Biden 2020 voters flipping to Trump. And the data shows that Biden won 51.6 percent of repeat voters in 2020, while Harris won only 49.4 percent of them last year.

Meanwhile, there were 26 million “new voters” in 2024, which is to say, voters who hadn’t cast a ballot in 2020. Democrats have historically won new voters by comfortable margins, largely because young Americans were overwhelmingly left-leaning in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. But last year, Trump won new voters by about 3 points.

One could attribute this development to either turnout or persuasion. Some voters who didn’t cast a ballot in 2020 — either because they were too young or too disengaged that year — strongly prefer one party over the other. So maybe Trump mobilized lots of previously inactive voters who always favored the Republican Party, while Harris failed to energize enough of those who always preferred the Democrats.

On the other hand, it’s possible that Republicans won over many young or disengaged voters who had previously lacked a strong partisan attachment or had favored the Democratic Party.

In reality, both these factors were likely operative. Indeed, it is extremely improbable that Democrats’ difficulties with new voters were entirely attributable to turnout. Some young and irregular voters just started tuning into politics and forming a partisan preference over the past four years. And survey data indicates that Republicans converted many such voters to their cause.

All this said, Democrats surely saw weaker turnout than Republicans last year, and this was partly responsible for Harris’s loss. According to Catalist, 30 million Americans voted in 2020 but not in 2024. And this group of “dropoff” voters had supported Biden over Trump by a 55.7 to 44.3 percent margin four years ago.

We can’t safely assume that this bloc would have voted for Harris over Trump by similar margins. In fact, it is likely that this population became more sympathetic to Trump over the past four years. Unreliable voters tend to have weaker partisan identities, and the decision to sit out an election often reflects a voter’s ambivalence about which candidate they prefer. Nevertheless, if every 2020 voter turned out last year, Harris would almost certainly have done better.

Democrats do need to try to mobilize their coalition’s most unreliable members. They just can’t do so at the expense of winning over swing voters.

Fortunately, there is not necessarily a stark tradeoff between these two tasks. Biden-supporting “dropoff voters” were not typically hardline progressives outraged about Biden’s complicity in Israeli war crimes or Harris’s courting of NeverTrump conservatives. Rather, such unreliable Democratic leaners tend to be politically disengaged and ideologically heterodox, much like many swing voters. According to Catalist’s modeling, the lower a Democratic-leaning voter’s propensity to turnout for elections, the more likely they are to consider voting for a Republican.

2. Young voters shifted right

Like AP Votecast and Blue Rose Research, Catalist finds that younger voters were significantly more Republican in 2024 than they had been in 2020. While Biden won 61 percent of voters under 30 four years ago, Harris won only 55 percent of that demographic last year (notably, this is a smaller decline than Blue Rose Research registered).

This decline was driven almost entirely by the rightward drift of young men.  Harris won 63 percent of women under 30, just three points lower than Biden in 2020. But she won only 46 percent of men under 30, which was nine points worse than Biden’s showing.

3. Nonwhite voters got redder

Harris actually won the same share of the white vote that Barack Obama had in 2012. And her support among America’s white majority was only 2 points lower than Biden’s in 2020.

But like previous 2024 autopsies, Catalist’s report finds that Democrats suffered steeper losses with nonwhite voters, particularly those who were young, male, and/or politically disengaged.

Harris won 85 percent of Black voters, down from Biden’s 89 percent. That drop was entirely due to flagging support from Black men, as this chart shows:

Democrats suffered especially large losses with young Black men, winning only 75 percent of their ballots in 2024, compared to 85 percent four years earlier.

The trends among Latino voters were similar. Between 2020 and 2024, Latino support for the Democratic nominee dropped from 63 to 54 percent (as recently as 2016, Democrats had won 70 percent of the demographic). The decline among Latino men was particularly pronounced, as Trump won a 53-percent majority of that historically Democratic constituency:

Democratic support among young Latino men fell off a cliff. And the party lost even more ground with Latino men under 30 who vote irregularly — which is to say, those who missed at least one of the last four general elections in which they were eligible to cast a ballot.

Finally, Harris won only 61 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters. Back in 2012, this group had backed Obama over Romney by a 74 to 26 percent margin. As with other nonwhite voting blocs, AAPI men are leaving the Democratic coalition faster than their female counterparts.

Taken together, all these figures paint a disconcerting picture for Democrats. The party has long wagered that time was on its side: Since America’s rising generations were heavily left-leaning — and the country was becoming more diverse by the year — it would become gradually easier for Democrats to assemble national majorities, even as the party bled support among non-college-educated white voters.

And it’s true that Democrats still do better with young and nonwhite voters than with Americans as a whole. But the party’s advantage with those constituencies has been narrowing rapidly. Last year’s returns suggest that demographic churn isn’t quite the boon that many Democrats had hoped, and can be easily outweighed by other factors.

Meanwhile, as blue states bleed population to red ones, Democrats are poised to have a much harder time winning Electoral College majorities after the 2030 census. Given current trends, by 2032, a Democratic nominee who won every blue state — and added Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — would still lose the White House.

How Democrats can arrest the rightward drift of young and nonwhite Americans — while broadening their geographic base of support — is up for debate. But pretending that the swing electorate does not exist, or that unreliable Democratic voters are all doctrinaire progressives, probably won’t help.

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