The Diagnosis Problem
Donald Trump's net approval rating sat at negative 14.1 on February 25, 2026, according to Nate Silver's polling averages. That tracks almost exactly with where Trump stood at the same point in his first term. Yet Democrats were up only 5.4 points on the generic congressional ballot, a notable decline from the eight-point lead they held at this stage in 2018.
Matthew Yglesias flags this gap as potentially consequential for the 2026 midterms, and his Sunday mailbag column spins out from that observation into a wide-ranging meditation on what it means to correctly diagnose a political situation. The thread connecting the D.C. mayoral race, the Emerging Democratic Majority thesis, Habsburg war strategy, and Soviet whaling turns out to be the same: organizations and movements fail not because they lack resources or conviction, but because they misread the problem in front of them.
Trump's approval is basically tracking where it was eight years ago, but Democrats in Congress are doing worse.
The D.C. Mayoral Race as Case Study
The column's longest and most detailed section concerns the contest between Kenyan McDuffie and Janeese Lewis George for mayor of Washington, D.C. Yglesias finds McDuffie's candidacy compelling not because of charisma or policy innovation, but because of something more fundamental.
Every central city in America was dealt a negative shock by Covid and remote work. But then just when cities should be trying to recover from that shock, D.C. was hit by a secondary wave of negative economic shocks coming from DOGE and congressional Republicans.
The argument is that McDuffie understands the city faces an economic crisis requiring a growth-first response, while George is running as though the underlying economy is booming and the only task is redistribution. Yglesias notes that McDuffie warns of a possible return to the bleak conditions of 30 or 40 years ago, a warning that resonates with his base of older D.C. natives who lived through that era.
He also clearly understands that there is no inclusive growth without growth, and that a city being rocked by negative shocks from forces beyond its control needs to take that seriously.
George, by contrast, draws criticism for a platform that Yglesias characterizes as ignoring the private sector entirely.
Her "good jobs for all" plank does not appear to envision any role for people working in the private sector — there's no construction, no restaurants or retail stores, and nobody launching a successful firm that would diversify our economy.
The critique extends to George's legislative record on housing. After a spell of rapid production, permitting activity in D.C. has ground to a halt because no one wants to finance new projects under current market conditions. Yglesias argues that George's push for stricter Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act rules will make financing harder, not easier.
One counterpoint worth noting: Yglesias somewhat undersells the value of congestion pricing as a long-term policy signal, even if Congress would likely block it in the near term. Political leaders who articulate a vision for the future, even when implementation is not immediately feasible, can shift the Overton window in ways that matter over a decade. Dismissing George's congestion pricing endorsement as pure factional signaling may be too cynical.
Greater Greater Washington and Endorsement Logic
The local urbanist outlet Greater Greater Washington endorsed George, largely on the strength of her support for congestion pricing. Yglesias finds this baffling given the current state of the D.C. economy.
Traffic jams are just honestly not a large problem in D.C. at the moment (the District is suffering much more from the reduction in commuter volumes).
He also points out that both candidates answered yes to the question of whether apartments should be legal citywide, which would represent a genuinely radical overhaul of land use. The local YIMBY community, Yglesias argues, has failed to cultivate a legislative champion comparable to California's Scott Wiener or Buffy Wicks. Without that, there is no sharp contrast on zoning in this race.
On the incumbent, Yglesias offers a measured assessment. He has sided with Mayor Muriel Bowser in her policy fights with the progressive D.C. Council, but he is not sold on her as exceptional.
She has struggled to get on top of really basic problems of first-order service delivery (garbage crews not picking up garbage, weak traffic enforcement, A.N.C. members struggling to get city agencies to do their jobs).
Democrats, Demographics, and Misdiagnosis
A reader question about the "Emerging Democratic Majority" thesis prompts Yglesias to draw a useful distinction between two ideas that are often conflated. The original thesis from John Judis and Ruy Teixeira held that Democrats could win without clawing back non-college white voters relative to Al Gore's performance. The later "Coalition of the Ascendant" idea, associated with Ron Brownstein, went further, suggesting Democrats could simply write off right-leaning white voters altogether.
Yglesias remains a defender of the original thesis, at least in a modified form. The book failed to predict that both parties would shift leftward on policy. But on substance, he argues, the underlying cultural shifts did move policy in a Democratic direction. Trump's 2024 positions on retirement programs and marriage sat to the left of Barack Obama's 2008 positions.
I think "underlying shifts in American society will make Democrats win most elections" turned out to be wrong but "underlying shifts in American society will shift American public policy in the direction of the ideas espoused by the Democratic Party" turned out to be absolutely correct.
The Brownstein thesis, however, is a different matter. Yglesias calls it mathematically implausible and suggests it encouraged a paranoid conservative counter-response, feeding "great replacement" rhetoric. This is another instance of misdiagnosis producing cascading consequences.
Habsburgs, Whales, and the Cost of Stubbornness
The column's most entertaining sections involve a question about Germany's decision-making on the eve of World War One and another about Soviet central planning. Both serve the same argumentative purpose.
On the Habsburgs, Yglesias draws an explicit parallel to Democrats in the Trump era. Austria-Hungary correctly identified Serbian state-sponsored terrorism as an existential threat, but then refused to make modest territorial concessions to Italy that would have secured a crucial ally. The logic was incoherent: if the threat was existential, make whatever deal is necessary to survive; if it was not worth concessions, then perhaps it was not existential after all.
My critique of Austria's approach to Italy is that they, like the Democrats in the Trump era, were not taking their own diagnosis seriously.
On Soviet whaling, Yglesias argues that the real problem with central planning is not Hayekian calculation failures but political dysfunction. Soviet planners knew whale oil had limited value. They kept killing whales anyway because the whale fleet had political clout. It is a neat illustration, though one might note that the Hayekian critique and the political dysfunction critique are not as separable as Yglesias implies. Centralized power structures create the conditions for exactly this kind of captured decision-making.
Bottom Line
This mailbag installment is unified by a single theme that Yglesias states plainly in the D.C. section but that echoes through every answer: correct diagnosis precedes effective action. Democrats polling worse than 2018 despite Trump's unchanged approval ratings, a mayoral candidate whose platform ignores the private sector during an economic crisis, a 110-year-old empire that refused to trade land for survival, a Soviet bureaucracy that killed whales it could not sell. The pattern is the same. When organizations cannot name the actual problem, they solve the wrong one, often at enormous cost.
The column is at its strongest when it connects local D.C. politics to these broader patterns. It is at its weakest in the book recommendation section, which feels like filler. But the throughline holds: in politics, in war, and in economic planning, the leaders who see the situation clearly tend to outlast those who do not.