Hats off for the top ‘regular guy’ actor James Garner — also a lifelong Democrat who supported the campaigns of “Dennis Kucinich (Congress in 2002), Richard Gephardt, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, and various Democratic committees and groups,” according to wikipedia. He was one of a handful of leading actors who supported MLK and sat in the third row during King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Below is a clip of Garner in one of his best performances as a reluctant warrior (he had two purple hearts in real life) in “The Americanization of Emily.” But don’t miss his hilarious portrayal of RJR Nabisco CEO Ross Johnson in “Barbarians at the Gates,” either.

FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten probes the data to determine whether or not “Voters Are Rational in Midterm Elections.”
Shout out to the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, along with supporting pollster and message-developer Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, for providing the leadership needed to make San Diego the largest American city to enact a minimum wage hike. Naturally, the fat cats are already scheming to undermine the victory.
David Montgomery has an interesting report at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader on the troubles of the South Dakota Democratic party, and what various players say is needed to repair the damage left by the upcoming retirement of Sen. Tim Johnson.
WaPo’s Philip Rucker and Robert Costa have an informative round-up of the array of Democrats making moves to get into position for a 2016 run, including Amy Klobuchar, Martin O’Malley, Kristen Gillbrand, Andrew Cuomo and others.
But some, if not most of them, may really be running for Hillary Clinton’s veep, suggests Chris Cillizza at The Fix.
National Journal’s Emma Roller rolls out “Elizabeth Warren’s 11 Commandments of Progressivism.”
Re Wendy Davis’s run for Texas Governor, Dan Balz reports, “Jeremy Bird, who set up Battleground Texas, said there is a path to victory for Davis: turning out registered minority voters who often stay home; registering unregistered minority voters; and attracting the support of suburban white women. She will do better among African Americans and Hispanics than the polls now show, he said.”
Macer Hall of the Daily Express reports that British Labour party Leader Ed Milliband, who is being advised by David Axelrod and Stan Greenberg, is due in the U.S. this week, no doubt looking for guidance and support in his quest to restore a Labour majority. Apparently, the UK’s electorate is as polarized as our own.

Amid new reports that African Americans had a higher turnout percentage than their white counterparts in the 2012 general election, Nate Cohn writes that “Black Southern Voters, Poised to Play a Historic Role” at NYT’s the Upshot. Cohn explains:

Nearly five decades after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, black voters in the South are poised to play a pivotal role in this year’s midterm elections. If Democrats win the South and hold the Senate, they will do so because of Southern black voters.
The timing — 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and 49 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act — is not entirely coincidental. The trends increasing the clout of black voters reflect a complete cycle of generational replacement in the post-Jim Crow era. White voters who came of age as loyal Democrats have largely died off, while the vast majority of black voters have been able to vote for their entire adult lives — and many have developed the habit of doing so.

Cohn then drops this:

This year’s closest contests include North Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia. Black voters will most likely represent more than half of all Democratic voters in Louisiana and Georgia, and nearly half in North Carolina. Arkansas, another state with a large black population, is also among the competitive states.

Cohn notes also that African American voters upset the tea party’s plans to replace Republican Sen. Thad Cochran with one of their own.
No pressure or anything, African American voters, but it’s kind of up to you to save America from descent into tea party madness. The African American vote has been pivotal for Democrats for a long time. But this year ups the ante, as Cohn projects,

… There has not been a year since Reconstruction when a party has depended so completely on black voters, in so many Southern states, in such a close national contest…If Democrats win this November, black voters will probably represent a larger share of the winning party’s supporters in important states than at any time since Reconstruction.

Such statistics also reflect the failure of too many white voters to vote in behalf of their own economic interests, and yes, the Democratic Party’s frustrating inability to effectively counter the GOP’s politics of distraction.
Getting down to cases, Cohn continues,

Nowhere has the remigration done more to improve Democratic chances than in Georgia, where Democrats have a chance to win an open Senate seat this November…The state’s growing black population will give her [Michelle Nunn] a chance to win with less than one-third of the white vote, a tally that would have ensured defeat for Democrats just a few years ago.

And the same resources Dems put into turning out African American voters in GA to elect Nunn senator could also elect Jason Carter governor. That would be an historic Democratic twofer — in a big way.

In his post “The 2014 Midterms Matter More Than You Think: Winning the Senate would finally put Republicans on the spot” at The New Republic, Brian Beutler explains why a GOP takeover of the upper house would burden their party with elevated expectations they won’t be able to satisfy:

Republican hardliners in Congress and their enablers on the grassroots right will expect a Senate takeover to translate into the kinds of results they’ve been denied thus far. No more blinking in budget showdowns. No more balking at the prospect of confrontation.
But by the time those fights roll around, the presidential contest will be in full swing, and to the extent that mollifying the base would be politically damaging to the Republican party nationally, Congressional leaders will be more reluctant than they are now to do so. If GOP voters nominate a member of the Senate or House, that person will be linked to the Congressional party and all of its hijinx. If they nominate a governor or a former governor, that person will feel tremendous pressure to draw contrasts and divide the party ahead of the election. Those are both outcomes Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would like to avoid.

Beutler adds that Republicans would likely create confrontations with the White House over Obamacare, greenhouse gas regulations, nominee confirmations and impeachment, to name a few issues. While “Obama can counter each these impulses with a veto pen, the bully pulpit, and a determined minority party in Congress,” the Republicans will be expected “to behave like a governing party. And to succeed they’d have to overcome the impulse to behave like the opposition.” Not an easy challenge to meet when their tea party flank is screaming for blood at every turn.
Beutler concedes that “The flip side, of course, is that Republicans would gain agenda setting power.” But the problem is that the GOP lacks a popular agenda. Sure, many Americans want tax cuts for themselves, but the Republicans would have a tough sell ahead in pitching the rest of their agenda, particularly weakening environmental and financial regulations, greasing the skids for corporate tax dodges, restricting reproductive rights of women and gutting the popular provisions of Obamacare.
In short, the GOP would finally have to own and better explain its agenda in the spotlight, instead of just bashing away at Democrats. It wouldn’t be pretty.
All of that said, however, Democrats still have a huge stake in doing better than expected in November. Every senate seat held could make a tremendous difference, if not before 2016, then certainly afterwards.

We hear so many misleading reports about “civil war in the Republican Party” that it’s sometimes hard to see the real thing when it appears. But while Republican divisions over domestic policy are usually over strategy and tactics rather than ideology, there are growing signs the battle over international affairs could be the most serious in a very long time. That was the subject of a column I did this week for TPMCafe. Here are some excerpts:

The sharp exchange last weekend between Rick Perry and Rand Paul over Iraq — and more broadly, its relationship to the “Reagan legacy” in foreign policy — may have seemed like mid-summer entertainment to many observers, or perhaps just a food fight between two men thinking about running against each other for president in 2016. But from a broader perspective, we may be witnessing the first really serious division in the Republican Party over international affairs since the 1950s….
Yes, there was scattered GOP opposition to LBJ’s and Nixon’s Vietnam policies and a brief conservative reaction against Nixon’s and Ford’s detente strategy with the Soviet Union. And throughout the period of consensus, there were small bands of paleoconservative and libertarian dissenters against Cold War and post-Cold War GOP orthodoxy. But unless you think Pat Buchanan’s paleoconservative foreign policy views were a significant spur to his occasionally impressive 1992 and 1996 primary challenges (I don’t), none of this dissent rose to the level of a real challenge to party leadership, and generally lay outside the mainstream of conservative opinion.
The current discussion of Iraq among Republicans should not obscure the fact that party elected officials dutifully lined up behind the Bush-Cheney drive for a “war of choice.” Ninety-seven percent of House Republicans and 98 percent of Senate Republicans voted for the resolution to authorize the invasion. Republican backing for the later “surge” was nearly that unanimous, despite rapidly eroding public support for the war. Indeed, John McCain’s identification with the “surge” was crucial in making him acceptable to rank-and-file conservatives in 2008.
The current argument being fronted by Perry and Paul is different in three important respects. First, public opinion among Republican voters over what to do right now in Iraq is notably divided, with (according to an ABC/Washington Post poll last month), 60 percent opposing the deployment of ground troops that the Cheneys are promoting and 38 percent opposing the air strikes Perry favors.
Second, this strain of GOP reluctance to embrace a fresh war in Iraq (supplemented by significant evidence of “buyer’s remorse” over the 2003 invasion) is not, like past anti-interventionist sentiment on Libya or Syria, just a function of reflexive opposition to Obama, whose position on Iraq is not that different from a majority of Republican voters.
And third, GOP divisions on foreign policy are very likely to sharpen as we move into the 2016 cycle, partially for competitive reasons but also because the candidates will be forced to project their own vision of America’s role in the world and not simply play off Obama’s record. And while Paul and Perry have staked out early and sharply divergent turf (as has to a lesser extent Marco Rubio, another neocon favorite), it’s possible other candidates will find intermediary positions–viz. Ted Cruz’s claim that he stands “halfway between” John McCain and Rand Paul on foreign policy. It will be quite the contrast from the 2012 cycle, in which the entire field lined up in support of traditional conservative positions favoring higher defense spending and aggressive confrontation with Iran, Russia and China, with the lonely exception of Rand’s father Ron.

I’ve observed elsewhere that while Rand Paul has a lot of support from GOP rank-and-file on Iraq, and has been clever in projecting his longstanding call for eliminating assistance to the Palestinian Authority into a pro-Israel measure, he’s not quite into the party mainstream just yet. Republicans reflexively favor higher defense spending and lethal aggressiveness towards America’s enemies, real and perceived. It’s not clear Paul’s amalgam of libertarian and Old Right perspectives on the world will pass muster with elites or with the GOP rank-and-file. But he’ll certainly force long-buried issues out into the open.

Heather Digby Parton’s Salon post, “GOP’s sales-pitch swindle: Why Dems need to push Obamacare harder: When Republicans do something, they sell it big time. With the left tentative on the ACA, here’s what’s at stake” addresses a chronic Democratic failure. Parton explains “Once again the Democrats, afraid of being associated with something unpopular, distanced themselves from their own accomplishments rather than seeing the long-term advantage in being the party that brought people “freedom plus groceries.” In this case that would be the liberty afforded to every individual when they are able to move to change jobs, start a business or otherwise operate as free individuals without fear of losing their health insurance — and “groceries” meaning a government that delivers a bit of financial security in an increasingly unstable economic environment.”
In his New York Times letter from Washington,” Albert R. Hunt explains why “Some business interests and entrenched congressional politicians argue the party’s right wing is in retreat. Not so.” Says Hunt, “Many of the more establishment Republicans who prevailed in primaries had moved decidedly to the right. The Republican agenda on Capitol Hill largely is framed by the most conservative of the conservatives.”
In his Washington Monthly post, ““Temporary” Insanity from the Hard Right?,”TDS Managing Editor Ed Kilgore puts it this way: “it’s important to remember that on the really big issues, movement conservatives are pushing against an open door; the GOP has already conceded much of what they’re being told to do, particularly on matters of core ideology rather than tactics.”
Re Thomas B. Edsall’s NYT Opinion piece, “The Coming Democratic Schism,” when has there not been profound differences about priorities, often generational? The Democratic Party could also evolve toward greater unity of its diverse constituencies, with better rank and file education. Young and old share a common interest in secure retirement for all citizens, so aging people don’t have to work and take entry-level jobs away from younger workers.
Kilgore writes of Edsall’s reliance on Pew Research categories: “…Some of the questions (some from the Pew “typology” report in June, some from a study commissioned by the libertarians at Reason, some from a couple of academic papers) about the economy and the role of government have the familiar problem of offering false choices between private sector and government “solutions” to economic and social challenges, as though one excludes the other…I would warn that his adoption of the Pew typology categories of “Solid Liberals” and “Next Generation Left” as the two pro-Democratic groups most at odds with each other gives the dubious impression one is passing from the scene while the other represents the future of liberal politics…Truth is Pew constructed these typological groups based on ideological and voting-behavior coherence and then slapped on the labels. Perhaps there’s a true trend line here, but the impression a lot of people may get that “Next Generation Left” means millennials is entirely unfounded. It’s really not that simple.”
Put Harold Meyerson’s American Prospect post “Why the Democrats Need to Take Sides” on your ‘read and distribute’ list. A teaser: “Bettering the economic lot of their constituents–particularly since those constituents are represented disproportionately among those Americans who now call themselves lower-class–will require the Democrats to do something they haven’t really contemplated, and have consistently avoided, since the 1930s: taking a side, with all that entails, in a class war.”
Class war, or at least conflict, may be unavoidable in these times of growing economic inequality. But E. J. Dionne, Jr. discusses prospects for Democrats nurturing a “pro-business populism.” It’s possible that enhanced class solidarity can make room for a thriving entrepreneurial culture that supports business innovation and creativity — perhaps a bridge between the traditional progressive Democratic values and young voters’ aspirations to succeed, referenced by Edsall’s argument noted above.
Here’s an interesting stat, from Kyle Kondik’s Crystal Ball post “The Hidden Barrier to a Republican Senate Majority: The GOP has had little recent success defeating Democratic incumbents“: “Incredibly, in the 16 Senate elections since then [1980], the Republicans have flipped only 12 Democratic Senate seats where the incumbent was running again.”
Another indication that Sen. Elizabeth Warren has the Dems’ best quiver full of zingers, from her remarks at a Buckner, KY town hall: “Mitch McConnell believes that when it comes to a choice between protecting tax loopholes for billionaires or reducing student loan interest rates, he will work to protect every last dollar of every last tax loophole,” said Warren. “And then he tells students to dream a little smaller, to do with less and give up a little sooner.”

Do give a read to Jenee Desmond-Harris’s post, “Will White Voters in the Black Belt Ever Get Out of Their Own Way?” at The Root. It’s a great title, which encapsulates the political neurosis of too many white voters in the south who habitually vote against their own economic interests. But it also contains a couple of insight nuggets, including:

In the area of the American South informally known as the Black Belt, cross-racial political coalitions should form naturally. After all, the poverty rate in the region hovers around 16.5 percent and cuts across racial lines. Plus, polling has shown that white Southerners hold populist views similar to those of their black neighbors–the majority agreeing that the government should spend more on health, education and improving people’s standard of living.

Desmond-Harris quotes former NAACP President Ben Jealous, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress:

“White conservative leaders have systemically undermined these coalitions by playing up racially divisive wedge issues” and “the strategy of divide and conquer has worked…In recent years, candidates in the Black Belt have consistently voted differently than voters of color, even if this has meant voting against their economic self-interest.”

Desmond-Harris adds, “Repairing this disconnect–and building coalitions based on shared interests–is…”the key to transformative political power” in the region.
Further, Even if white voters don’t budge…there’s still the possibility of change when it comes to race and political representation. “Registering just 30 percent of unregistered black voters would yield enough new voters to upset the balance of power in North Carolina and Virginia in presidential or midterm election year,” says Jealous. This, he predicts, “could allow voters of color to elect a candidate of their choice, and, at a minimum, affect the political decisions of all candidates in the race.”
For Dems, the challenge is not to pursue one path or the other, but to work like hell to support both of them.

It’s just a midsummer snapshot, but viewed as the latest of a series of snapshots in a trendline, Democrats are in decent shape to hold their Senate majority at this political moment, according to recent polls. Put another way, it could be a lot worse for Dems, considering the number of seats they have to defend compared to the GOP (21-15).
From Harry Enten’s take at FiveThirtyEight:

If Democrats win all the states in which the polls now favor them, the party would lose four seats (Alaska, Louisiana, Montana and West Virginia) and pick up Georgia. Add on a probable loss in the Senate race in South Dakota (which isn’t included here because it’s a three-way matchup), and Democrats will hold on to a 51-to-49 seat majority in the next Senate. Sum up the probabilities of each race, and Democrats end up with about 50 seats, on average, in the new Senate. That would be good enough for them to keep control of the chamber, with Vice President Joe Biden acting as a tiebreaker.
…In other words, the final outcome for the Senate could be anything from a minor Republican gain to a GOP romp. At the moment, the state of play seems manageable from a Democratic perspective, but the party’s position is perilous. A tiny shift could tip the canoe and spill a lot of Democrats overboard.

We knew about the ‘perilous’ party position already. However, Dems being competitive at midsummer, given the number of exposed senate seats, is a lot worse for Republicans than they had hoped. A narrow victory or loss is pretty dicey for them too. And with Democratic candidates leading in some polls in states like GA and KY, where their senate leader is in danger, something isn’t working for the GOPs.
At NBC First Read Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann observe:

…Our brand-new NBC/Marist polls of Colorado and Michigan show Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) leading Cory Gardner (R) by seven points among registered voters, 48%-41%, in Colorado’s key Senate race. They find Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) ahead of GOP challenger Bob Beauprez by six points, 49%-43%. They have Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI) up over Republican Terri Lynn Land by six, 43%-37%, in Michigan’s Senate contest. And they show Gov. Rick Snyder (R) leading Democratic challenger Mark Schauer by two points, 46%-44%. So why are Udall, Peters, and Snyder all ahead in their contests? Here’s an explanation: mind the gaps — the gender gap, the Latino gap, and the independent gap. In Colorado, Udall is up by 12 points among female voters (50%-38%), as Democratic groups like Senate Majority PAC are up with TV ads (like this one) on abortion and contraception. Indeed, 70% of Colorado voters in the NBC/Marist poll said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who supports restrictions on the use of contraception. And in Michigan, Peters is ahead by 13 points with women (46%-33%).
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: The Democratic path to survival in this very difficult midterm season for the party is through women. And that’s especially true after the Hobby Lobby decision. There’s no doubt Democrats are going to win women voters in the fall; the questions are by how much and whether it will be large enough to save the party’s Senate majority.

Todd, Murray and Dann also cite Dems’ favorable edge with Latinos as a big plus, while the GOP leans increasingly on stale whining about Obamacare, a dubious lawsuit fronted by an intemperate House Speaker and reduced to ugly immigrant-bashing, as the economy improves. This is not the political — or economic — landscape smarter Republicans wanted to see at midsummer.
Sure, there is plenty of time left for Dems to screw up, or the economy to falter. But right now, polls everywhere give the Republicans little to be encouraged about. The trendline at this juncture has an increasingly blue tint.

The sudden and fateful separation of the two parties by the variable of age has created a lot of speculation about the future of a GOP that could literally die out some day. But it’s not a generational accident, as I noted briefly today at Washington Monthly:

Matt Yglesias riffs a bit today on a theme he’s developed in the past: the price Republicans are paying for the old-white-folks “base” that is so helpful to them in midterm elections:

There’s something very oldsterish about contemporary conservative politics. The constant bickering about Ronald Reagan is very odd to anyone too young to have any particular recollection of the Reagan years. Calling a group of people “Beyoncé Voters” as an insult is weird. Some of this oldsterism is just ticks, but some of it has policy implications. The sort of budgetary priorities that call for huge cuts in all domestic spending, except no cuts at all for anyone born before 1959 is kind of weird. The huge freakout over New York City starting a bicycle program last summer was bizarre. It’s easy to imagine a political party that’s broadly favorable to low taxes and light regulation without sharing this particular set of ticks.

That’s all true, but there’s something a bit more profound going on in the conservative “base” that makes this “oldersterism” so evergreen. The cultural wing of the Right has been for years in active revolt against much of what’s happened to social norms since the mid-twentieth century. You could make the argument, in fact (I’ve been making it for nearly a decade), that the original sin of the Christian Right is to confuse the Will of God with pre-mid-twentieth century family structure and gender relations (and a generally authoritarian civic life). Now the “constitutional conservatives” (most of whom have roots in the Christian Right) have come along and made the same culture the eternal measurement not just of divine providence but of national identity. This is “oldersterism” that’s more than a demographic accident; it’s a powerfully-held ideology.

As anyone familiar with the twentieth-century concept of “the politics of cultural despair” remembers, threats to “eternal” cultural patterns are felt intensely and can produce quite literally reactionary political movements that can sometimes jump the rails into dangerous extremism. That’s worth remembering when thinking about today’s increasingly radical Right.