Here are my thoughts on the four most important strategic conclusions that can be drawn from the events of 2013:
1. Losing any one particular election does not and will not moderate Republican extremism or induce them to move back to the center. Democrats should not base their political strategy on the hope that this will occur.
2. Democratic firmness and unity in the face of Republican obstructionism was absolutely indispensable in 2013. It remains equally vital for the future
3. The state of the economy and the real-life consequences of policy decisions have far more influence on voters decisions than does the daily news cycle or the constant ups and downs of public opinion. Democrats should therefore not allow transient events and trends to overly influence their thinking.
4. Given the current partisan balance in Congress legislative gridlock cannot be overcome in the foreseeable future. Democrats therefore need to prioritize increasing Democratic voter turnout (especially in off-year elections) and expanding the Democratic coalition.
To read my entire memo reviewing these conclusions in more depth, click HERE.
Ed Kilgore: The Strategic lessons of 2013
Sincerely,
Ed Kilgore
Managing Editor
The Democratic Strategist

Dan Balz’s “What voter turnout means for efforts to remedy income inequality” reviews “Who Votes Now? Demographics, Issues, Inequality, and Turnout in the United States.” by Jan E. Leighley and Jonathan Nagler, and notes “The authors found that there have been some important demographic changes in voting patterns within the overall electorate. Women are now more likely to vote than men. And the gap between black and white participation has narrowed significantly. In the most recent election, blacks voted at higher rates than whites in some states…But in other ways, the overall shape of the electorate has been stable since 1972. During a time of rising income inequality, wealthier and better-educated people continue to vote “at substantially higher rates” than poorer, less-educated people. That gap existed 40 years ago and still does.”
Hotline on Call’s Scott Bland discusses 30 possible swing races in “The Hotline’s House Race Rankings: The House Seats Most Likely to Flip.”
Francine Kiefer’s Monitor post “Democrats to push income inequality as top issue of 2014. Winning tactic?” offers this insight from congressional historian Julian Zelizer at Princeton University: “A lot of Democrats feel the last two years have been consumed with health care … and the deficit,” he explains. “Until you shift the debate, you’re not going to be able to get in a position where you can push for legislation like the [higher] minimum wage. And this is the right time because the Republicans are in a moment of division” over whether to obstruct or to compromise.
A.P.’s Thomas Beaumont has excavated an interesting insight for Democratic strategy in winning back some governorships now held by the GOP: “Democratic strategist Tad Devine said his party needs to look beyond its shrinking union base for new blood…”We need new, younger high-tech Democrats who have not come up through the typical political farm system, are conversant in the new economy and can talk to blue-collar voters,” he said. An example is Mary Burke, a former executive for Trek Bicycles, who is the only announced Democratic challenger to Walker in Wisconsin.”
From “Economic inequality, unemployment top Democrats’ agenda as Congress returns” by Terence Burlij and Katelyn Polantz at PBS News Hour, Sen. Chuck Shumer observes, “This year, dealing with declining middle class incomes and not enough job growth will be the number one issue. And if, on the first day of the new session, the Republican Party says they won’t even support an unemployment benefit extension … they’re going to show themselves so far out of the mainstream, it’s going to hurt them in the election,” Schumer said Sunday on ABC.”
In her Bloomberg Politics post, “Democrats Target Unemployment Aid in 2014 Campaign Pivot ,” Heidi Przybyla notes “Democrats may stand a better chance of winning the unemployment insurance debate than they do a minimum wage increase, which Republicans say could hamper the ability of young Americans in particular to secure employment in a down economy.”
Ed Kilgore has a sobering reminder that repealing Obamacare is only one facet of the Republicans’ extremist health “reform” agenda: “…It’s worth remembering that the conservative movement’s goals in health care policy go beyond repealing Obamacare and extend to major “reforms” of the two big health care entitlements. Voucherizing Medicare and block-granting Medicaid remain central and almost universally supported pillars of the GOP’s agenda. At least some Republicans are sure to keep their eyes on that bigger prize instead of making Obamacare their sole boogeyman. ”
And at Talking Points memo, Dylan Scott explains why “ALEC’s New Obamacare Obstruction Plan Won’t Work.”
At The Daily Beast Jamelle Bouie reports “it’s worth reading a recent paper from Keith G. Bentele and Erin E. O’Brien, which brings statistical analysis to bear on the question of voter identification laws. What they found was surprisingly straightforward: Between 2006 and 2011, if a state elected a Republican governor, increased its share of Republican legislators, or became more competitive while under a Republican, it was more likely to pass voter ID and other restrictions on the franchise. Likewise, states with “unencumbered Republican majorities” and large black populations were especially likely to pass restrictive measures. Their broad conclusion, in other words, is that these laws are the result of fierce partisan competition…”

Michael J. Mishak’s AP report “Democrats Breaking GOP’s Long Lock on Cuban Vote” spells serious trouble for the GOP in Florida. As Mishak sets the stage:

For more than two decades, running for Congress in this sun-soaked capital of Cuban exiles has required two things: a Republican registration card and a hard line toward the Castro regime.
So when Joe Garcia became the first Cuban-American Democrat from the state to win election to the House in 2012, it signaled a crack in a critical GOP constituency.
In a break with the exile community, Garcia campaigned in support of loosening restrictions on Cuban-Americans who want to visit relatives on the island or send them money. Since taking office, he has pushed for U.S. trials of a Cuba-developed diabetes treatment and for easing travel rules for Cuban diplomats who visit the U.S.
And while Florida Republicans, including Sen. Marco Rubio, fumed when President Barack Obama shook hands with Cuban President Raul Castro last month, Garcia dismissed it as a simple courtesy.
“Sometimes a handshake is just a handshake,” he said.

Mishak backs up his contention with data:

In 2012, Obama captured nearly half of the Cuban-American vote in Florida, a record high for a Democrat. He has since pledged to “update” a U.S. policy that prohibits even the most basic business dealings with the island…
Polls show new immigrants and younger Cuban-Americans are more motivated by domestic concerns, including health care, education and the economy, than by anti-communist fervor. A study by the Pew Hispanic Center found that Cubans are the Hispanic group most likely to say they have “only a little” or “almost nothing” in common with those living in their family’s native country.

With respect to Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County:

Florida International University’s most recent poll of that group, done in 2011, found that 44 percent of them opposed continuing the embargo, and 53 percent said it had not worked at all. Two decades ago, 80 percent favored the economic sanctions.

Mishak goes on to report on Rep. Garcia’s role in promoting a thaw in U.S. relations with Cuba as emblematic of the new generation of Cuban-American leaders emerging in Florida, much to the dismay of the old guard Republican Cubans and their younger followers, like Sen. Rubio. He also quotes GOP leaders saying that recent trends favoring Dems are temporary expressions of Republicans fielding inept candidates of late.
Dems still have an uphill campaign to win over a majority of Cuban-American voters. But even getting a healthy minority of such an important demographic group in this swing state can make a big difference, since “Cubans now make up about a third of Florida’s fast-growing Hispanic population,” as Mishak reports.

Earlier today TDS cross-posted a provocative op-ed by E.J. Dionne making the case that Democratic “moderates” have a stake in the revival of the “Democratic Left” as represented by Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren. I’m a big fan of E.J.’s, and appreciate his effort. But at WaMo, I took issue with some of the implications of his argument:

Anyone who knows WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne can tell you he’s an enormously decent man who dislikes unnecessary conflict. So it’s entirely unsurprising that E.J. took it upon himself to assure “moderates” that the resurgence of the “Democratic left” is a good thing for them and for the country. He does so via a simplified version of the Hacker-Pierson “Off Center” hypothesis:

For a long time, the American conversation has been terribly distorted because an active, uncompromising political right has not had to face a comparably influential left. As a result, our entire debate has been dragged in a conservative direction, meaning that the center has been pulled that way, too.

And thus, the prescription:

When politicians can ignore the questions posed by the left and are pushed to focus almost exclusively on the right’s concerns about “big government” and its unquestioning faith in deregulated markets, the result is immoderate and ultimately impractical policy. To create a real center, you need a real left.

That’s true, in terms of the rather mindless echoing of whoever makes the most noise that is so annoyingly common in the MSM. But while positioning language like “left,” “right” and “center” is an indispensable short-hand in sorting out political tendencies, it can be taken to the point that it distorts what people who answer to (or are forced to associate with) such labels actually care about.
My colleague Martin Longman’s reaction to E.J.’s piece over at Booman Tribune illustrates part of the problem:

The problem is that, on any subject you might choose to consider, the right wing in this country is wrong, and they have enough power to keep us paddling in place at best, and, more often, moving in the wrong direction.
That a portion of the left is waking up to the problem is a good thing. But, nothing will come of it if it does nothing more than reinvigorate the center.

I suspect Martin’s objection would be widely shared by many progressives who don’t see themselves as simply a counter-weight to the Right for purposes of making “centrism” viable again.
But the positioning analysis also sells many “moderates” short as well. A lot of those folk (say, my colleagues at the Progressive Policy Institute who advocated what ultimately became Obama proposals on health care and climate change many years before Obama did) support “centrist” policies because they believe in them, not just because more liberal policies are politically difficult or because they favor bipartisanship as an end in itself. Moreover, many “moderates” or “centrists” don’t agree with each other all the time. Some (and I would put most though hardly all self-identified Democratic “moderates” in this category) share the left’s–which is to say the historic progressives’–values and policy goals, but disagree over program design or political strategy and tactics. Others hew to the kind of “centrism” that represents elites as against popular movements of the left or the right, or really do make a fetish of bipartisanship in a way that plays right into the conservative movement’s efforts to keep political debate on its own ground as defined by its own terms.
The bottom line is that all the positioning language should not obscure the sharp divisions between the Left (including the fairly large Center-Left) and the Right (including the small and shrinking Center-Right) over values and goals. Everyone legitimately on the Left favors, for example, universal health coverage; those on the Right just don’t, much as they pretend to favor “reforms” that would allegedly improve coverage.
What this means for the Left and Center-Left is that its advocates should respect each other’s point of view as something other than an instrument for their own success. They can and should argue and fight with each other over the specifics of policy and politics without for a moment forgetting the gulf that still separates them from those who champion unfettered capitalism or “state’s rights” or inequality as a positive thing or the perpetual disabling of the public sector or an “American exceptionalism” that becomes an excuse for militarism and unilateralism in foreign policy or a government-mandated return to the cultural values of the 1950s.
Much as I honor E.J. Dionne and his irenic motives, “moderates” shouldn’t think of the “revived left” as a cat’s paw any more than “true liberals”should think of moderates as sell-outs who don’t have the guts to advocate the correct policies. For all the silly “civil war” talk, a big portion of the success of the Right in skewing the political conversation is its essential unity. Karl Rove’s view of the ideal America isn’t that different from Ted Cruz’s, and should be equally horrifying to those on the Left and Center-Left. We should keep that in mind even as different factions on the progressive side of the spectrum maneuver with and sometimes against each other. A “revived Left” is good for “moderates” because it represents a new and enthusiastic set of allies, not a device for triangulation.

This is an important topic, and we’ll certainly return to it again, particularly if the specter of Democratic factionalism materializes more visibly.

George Will’s column today is really a doozy. Quoting from a book by Illa Somin, a law professor at George Mason Law School, he spends most of the column reciting a familiar litany of facts about most peoples’ very limited knowledge – political and otherwise – a list that many, many, many others have cited before.
But then Will takes a mighty leap off what might be called the “anti-populist cliff.” He says:

Political ignorance, Somin argues, strengthens the case for judicial review by weakening the supposed “countermajoritarian difficulty” with it. If much of the electorate is unaware of the substance or even existence of policies adopted by the sprawling regulatory state, the policies’ democratic pedigrees are weak…
… An engaged judiciary that enforced the Framers’ idea of government’s “few and defined” enumerated powers (Madison, Federalist 45), leaving decisions to markets and civil society, would, Somin thinks, make the “will of the people” more meaningful by reducing voters’ knowledge burdens. Somin’s evidence and arguments usefully dilute the unwholesome democratic sentimentality and romanticism that encourage government’s pretensions, ambitions and failures.

Take away the five-dollar words and overactive thesaurus and what you have here is a prescription for overriding the people’s democratic choices because “unwholesome democratic sentimentality” (AKA belief in majority rule) allows the plebian riff-raff to make choices that encourage the government’s “pretentions and ambitions.”
But no worries mates, no worry at all. Good old Captain George Will has your best interests at heart. After all, letting conservative judges make decisions for you will make the “will of the people more meaningful by reducing voters’ knowledge burdens.”
Gee, what a swell guy he is. What a pal. He’ll let all us dummies relax and watch TV while we leave all that complicated “decision stuff” to smart guys like him who know what’s really best for us.
It would almost be funny if it wasn’t also genuinely and profoundly disturbing.

TDS rarely cross-posts entire columns from the Washington Post, but we make an exception for this excellent op-ed by E. J. Dionne, Jr:
The reemergence of a Democratic left will be one of the major stories of 2014. Moderates, don’t be alarmed. The return of a viable, vocal left will actually be good news for the political center.
For a long time, the American conversation has been terribly distorted because an active, uncompromising political right has not had to face a comparably influential left. As a result, our entire debate has been dragged in a conservative direction, meaning that the center has been pulled that way, too.
Consider what this means in practice. Obamacare is not a left-wing program, no matter how often conservatives might say it is. Its structure is based on conservative ideas. The individual mandate was the conservatives’ alternative to a mandate on employers. The health-care exchanges are an alternative to government-provided medicine on the Medicare model.
Obamacare is complex because the government is trying to create a marketplace in which people shop for private insurance and receive government subsidies if they need them. It goes to a lot of trouble to preserve the private insurance market. The system does not even include a government plan as one option among many.
But once conservatives succeeded in pulling the health-care debate to where they had always wanted it, they abandoned the concepts they pioneered and denounced Obamacare as a socialist scheme. It’s a classic case of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose politics: Move toward me, and I’ll just keep moving farther away from you.
The right’s strong hand also prevented more aggressive action to ease joblessness. After the crash of 2008, the country desperately needed government to step in to bolster mass purchasing power, the point of stimulus efforts. With interest rates near zero, there was no better time to borrow in order to rebuild a decrepit national infrastructure and make other long-term public investments.
Instead, relentless pressure from the right made the initial stimulus smaller than it should have been — and then prevented any further expansion of government spending. In the blink of an eye, the public discussion was engulfed by an obsession with the deficit as millions languished without a job. Even Republicans are frustrated over how ideological fears about government’s size have stalled transportation bills that were once the stuff of bipartisan concord.
This pattern was repeated over and over on other issues, and the new militancy on the Democratic left is a consequence of a slowly building backlash against the skewed nature of our politics. A dramatic manifestation of this sentiment was New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s unabashed attack on inequality in his inaugural address Wednesday.
You might summarize the revived left’s basic gripe with this question: Why was it so much easier to spend public money on rescuing financial institutions than on rescuing families caught in a cycle of unemployment, collapsing incomes and foreclosures?
Take the most recent flash point. Discussions about entitlements have revolved almost exclusively around the question of how much to cut them. By contrast, progressives such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) say we must begin dealing with a coming retirement crisis fostered by the near disappearance of traditional private pensions.
They argue that Social Security is not providing enough for low- and middle-income retirees and that making the program financially secure will necessarily involve lifting the cap on income taxed for Social Security. That cap requires middle-income Americans to pay a much larger share of their income than the highest earners do. Ask yourself: Are these unreasonable concerns?
More generally, the Democratic left is animated by the battle against growing inequality and declining social mobility — the idea, as Warren has said repeatedly, that “the system is rigged for powerful interests and against working families.” She and her allies are not anti-capitalist. Their goal is to reform the system so it spreads its benefits more widely. Warren has argued that everything she’s done on behalf of financial reform has, in fact, been designed to make markets work better.
The resurgent progressives are battling a double standard. They are asking why it is that “populism” is a good thing when it’s invoked by the tea party against “liberal elites” but suddenly a bad thing when it describes efforts to raise the minimum wage and take other steps toward a fairer system of economic rewards.
And here’s why moderates should be cheering them on: When politicians can ignore the questions posed by the left and are pushed to focus almost exclusively on the right’s concerns about “big government” and its unquestioning faith in deregulated markets, the result is immoderate and ultimately impractical policy. To create a real center, you need a real left.

If you were looking for a succinct critique of the ‘centrist policies are needed to drive prosperity’ meme, check out “Centrists Have No Right to Lecture Anyone on Growth” by Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research. As Baker writes in a nut graph responding to NYT column by Bill Keller touting the virtues of centrism, “Keller may not remember, but his center-left were in the driver’s seat putting in place the policies that gave us the stock bubble in the 1990s and the housing bubble in the last decade. The collapse of the second bubble gave us the downturn from which the country is still suffering. It has cost us millions of jobs and already more than $5 trillion in lost output, more than $15,000 for every person in the country. This economic collapse is the opposite of growth.”
Michael O’Brien’s “Different election, same playbook: Why 2014 will look a lot like 2012” at NBC Politics points out that thus far the GOP House and Senate candidates are stuck with the strategy that failed them in the last election — “a referendum on the president and his health care law.” Granted, the Republicans were burdened with a weak candidate at the top of the 2012 campaign. But it could be a very big mistake to think that the same theme will produce different results next year, just because of roll-out glitches that are now largely fixed.
Obamacare has weaknesses than can be fixed. But, to get a good sense of what has changed for the better as a result of the ACA, when 2014 dawned on America yesterday, read Joan McCarter’s Daily Kos post, “Happy Health Insurance Day.” McCarter explains, “The law still has powerful enemies, like the Republican U.S. House of Representatives. But it also has more than six million new beneficiaries, by Kossack Brainwrap’s ongoing count: 2,104,332 in private plans and 4,002,609 in Medicaid/CHIP. For everyone in existing plans, annual and lifetime caps are gone. Some basic stuff–like hospitalizations, prescription drugs and mental health–now has to be covered…From now on, every attempt by Republicans to repeal the law means trying to take away those benefits and all the benefits that have already kicked in for millions of people. And that changes the politics of this law immeasurably.”
Meanwhile, The Plum Line’s Ryan Cooper reports that an estimated 5 million Americans are being denied health insurance because Republican-controlled states have opted out of Medicaid expansion, which TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore terms “the wingnut hole.” Cooper points out that ‘the wingnut hole’ amounts to “the combined population of Delaware, Vermont, the District of Columbia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming and Alaska…It could very well work out that refusenik states will not even save money because of additional spending on the uninsured in emergency rooms and elsewhere.”
At The New York Times Politics Jonathan Martin and Michael D. Shear report that “Democrats Turn to Minimum Wage as 2014 Strategy.” Shear and Martin note that Dems “have focused on two levels: an effort to raise the federal minimum wage, which will be pushed by President Obama and congressional leaders, and a campaign to place state-level minimum wage proposals on the ballot in states with hotly contested congressional races.”
John Hudak’s post “2014, a make-or-break year for legal pot” at CNN Politics doesn’t explore the political ramification of the marijuana legalization trend for the 2014 elections. But he believes that favorable experiences of states and localities with relaxation of pot laws could broaden the trend considerably moving toward 2016 — and that should help turn out pro-Democratic constituencies.
Froma Harrop has some really juicy economic stats in her San Antonio Express-News post, “Democrats have better economic record,” including “Suppose that in 1929, you put $100,000 in a 401(k) fully invested in stocks. Under the 40 years of Republican presidents, you would have ended up with $126,000. Under the Democrats, you would have amassed a retirement nest egg of $3.9 million!” Also, “The gap between the top 1 percent and bottom 99 percent widened 20 percent in the 40 years Republicans ran the Oval Office. In the Democratic presidential years, it narrowed 16 percent.”
“The Gallup Obama approval daily tracking poll reveals that the president’s approval rating has jumped five points since the days before Christmas from 39%-44%. Disapproval of the president has fallen from 54%-49%,” reports Jason Easley at PoliticusUSA.
From an A.P. report by Charles Babington and Jennifer Agiesta re a new poll by AP/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research: “On the economy, an area historically driven by the private sector, the poll finds a clear public desire for active government. Fifty-seven percent of Americans say “we need a strong government to handle today’s complex economic problems….Even among those who say “the less government the better,” 31 percent feel the nation needs a strong government to handle those complex problems.”