Progressive Democrats are angry about the sweet deal for bankers and big corporate contributors to political campaigns in the $1+ trillion spending bill, but fears of a shutdown may insure passage anyway, report Lori Montgomery and Sean Sullivan at the Washington Post. Elizabeth Warren is leading the vocal opposition to the bill: “…Warren said the changes in the spending bill “would let derivatives traders on Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money and get bailed out by the government when their risky bets threaten to blow up our financial system.” She added: “These are the same banks that nearly broke the economy in 2008 and destroyed millions of jobs.”
Let’s hope this trend for the worse is short-lived. As reported by Dalla Sussman’s “Americans Have Become More Accepting of Use of Torture” at The Upshot: “Fifty percent of Americans in an Associated Press-NORC poll conducted in August 2013 said torture against terrorism suspects to obtain information about terrorism activities could often or sometimes be justified, while 47 percent said it could rarely or never be justified. But partisanship is a factor, with Democrats less supportive than Republicans. In the A.P.-NORC poll, 40 percent of Democrats said torture could be justified sometimes or often. That rose to 55 percent among independents and 61 percent among Republicans.”
According to a nationwide, bipartisan survey conducted for the American Lung Association by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Perception Insight, “By a more than 3-to-1 margin, voters believe that the EPA, not Congress, should be setting pollution standards. This includes large majorities of Democrats, Independents and Republicans…Voters rate clean air as a higher priority than reducing regulations on businesses. By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, voters rate clean air as a higher priority over reducing regulations with 80 percent of voters rating clean air as extremely or very important…A majority of voters (63 percent) support standards for methane emissions. After hearing a balanced debate on both sides, support increases overall to 66 percent. In particular, Republicans move from 39 percent supporting to 53 percent supporting.”
John Guida has yet another “Should Democrats Write Off the South?” ramble, this one a New York Times “OpTalk” post. Pretty much the same ole ‘let’s pretend VA, NC and FL are not in the south’ riff to facilitate projection of a simplistic grand strategy.
Dave Weigel’s “Can Democrats Ever Compete for the Deep South? Should They Even Bother?” at Bloomberg Politics and John Cassidy’s New Yorker article, “Should the Democrats Give Up on the South?” explore the same theme. FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten doubts the permanence of the GOP’s southern sweep.
There’s lots of buzz about Michael Tomasky’s zinger-rich Daily Beast post “It’s Time to Dump Dixie,” which eloquently vents the disgust many of us who live in the south feel about our midterm electorate. Hindsight is always 20-20, and the resources invested in the failed campaigns of Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn in GA, for example, might have produced better results for Kay Hagan, who lost in NC by less than 2 percent. But I would agree with Ed Kilgore’s reality check that, generally “the national party did not really undertake any “concessions” to the South. So there’s no reason to swear off the South as an evil conservative seductress tempting Democrats to stray from the paths of righteousness.” In a way, the Dems dumped Dixie a while back, rightly or wrongly. All of that said, most major southern cities have progressive mayors, and that’s where the party-building should continue.
If The New Republic somehow gets revived, the editors should give Ta-Nehisi Coates’s critique at The Atlantic about the magazine’s staff diversity and reporting on racial injustice a sober reading.
It’s way early for 2016 Senate race prognostication, but Crystal Ball’s Kyle Kondik estimates that “because the Democrats need to net four or five seats to take control, depending on the party of the next vice president, the Democrats’ opening odds to win the majority are significantly less than 50-50.” As for the House, Kondik says “Our early expectation is that the Democrats will net at least a few House seats in the 2016 election,” but not enough to win a majority. We say upsets can come from all directions.
At Democracy: A Journal of Ideas Eric Alterman explains why mainstream reformist Democrats need the party’s radical left flank: “Constructive radical critiques serve two primary purposes: They provide a vision for the future, and they remind liberals not to get too comfortable with the here and now…Much has changed in American liberalism since the New Deal, but nothing quite so much as the loss of its fighting spirit. “I welcome their hatred,” bragged the self-described “militant liberal” Franklin Roosevelt of the “economic royalists” who sought to retain a status quo that operated by and for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Radicals of the day helped sustain some of that spirit, as well as planting many of the ideas that FDR and others helped bring to fruition. Our not-so-militant liberals of today could damn sure use some of that kind of help.”

Angst over the Democratic Party’s relationship with “the South” (variously defined) is a traditional post-election preoccupation, and given Democratic losses in the region on November 4, it’s not surprising it’s started up again. At TPMCafe, I suggested that those who favor special appeals to white southerners or conversely demand a pox on the whole atavistic area chill and consider treating “the South” just like any other region. Here’s an excerpt:

As my use of quotations around “the South” suggests, this topic is plagued by definitional problems. When The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball, for example, calls soon-to-be-former Sen. Mary Landrieu “the last southern Democrat,” she is excluding two states of the former Confederacy (Florida and Virginia) that have Democratic U.S. Senators and were carried twice by Barack Obama; non-statewide Democratic elected officials like Tennessee’s Steven Cohen who don’t fit the moderate-to-conservative stereotype of southern white pols; and most importantly, the African-Americans who are hardly an incidental presence in “the South” by any definition.
If anything is dying in southern Democratic politics, it’s the idea that you can forge successful statewide majorities with white candidates who hang onto 30 to 40 percent of the white vote by positioning themselves as far to the right as possible–and then expecting 90 percent of African-Americans to get them across the finish line. The Blue Dog model has almost certainly run its course. And I’m not remotely as optimistic as some progressives (almost invariably non-southerners) who think “populism” is some sort of magical formula for getting southern white working class voters to stop thinking about God and Guns and start thinking about their paychecks. The southern “populist” tradition (heavily associated with racism) is even more anachronistic than the Blue Dog model.
There is some room for creating a backlash against corporate lackeys like Rick Perry and Nikki Haley, whose idea of “economic development” is to eagerly sacrifice the people of their states to every whim of “investors.” But “the South” is going to be more pro-business and anti-government than other parts of the country for the foreseeable future, if only because there’s no social democratic Golden Age memories to conjure up the way there are in the once-heavily-unionized rust belt. Right now staunch support for public education, proud and unconditional anti-racism, and a vision of the social safety set, taxes, and basic regulations as something other than an inconvenience to “job creators,” is probably “populist” enough.
For the national Democratic Party, there’s really no longer any reason to agonize over “the South” as some sort of existential challenge to Democrats’ ambitions or principles. Democrats can win presidential elections while losing the region; the last Democrat to rely on southern states as anything other than electoral college gravy was Jimmy Carter way back in 1976. Nor is the decline in ticket-splitting that doomed Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor this year an exclusively Democratic problem, as one might be misled to think by the very unusual Senate landscape of 2014. We’ll be reminded in 2016 of how many Republican senators are representing “blue states.”
But in any event, it is clear there was nothing the national party might have done to reverse the results in Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia or North Carolina this year. Just as importantly, unless you buy the dubious argument that the brief delay in the president’s executive action on immigration was purely a pander to “the South,” the national party did not really undertake any “concessions” to the South. So there’s no reason to swear off the South as an evil conservative seductress tempting Democrats to stray from the paths of righteousness.
Treating the South like the rest of the country makes the most sense for Democrats going forward. A return to presidential cycle turnout patterns should, in any close election, again make Florida, North Carolina and Virginia winnable for Democrats. The demographics of Georgia are making that state more “purple” every day, especially in presidential elections.

After noting some of the state-specific variations that too often get overlooked in discussions of “the South,” I conclude by asking Democrats for something southerners rarely request but could definitely use: less specific attention.

Seeing “the South” as a set of discrete political opportunities requiring skill, good candidate recruitment, the kind of ideological “flexibility” accorded to any other region, and resources calibrated to the risk and reward, is the best approach for Democrats. All the regional mythology should be treated as gone with the wind.

From former DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (D-NY), reported by Kate Nocera at Buzzfeed: “The Republicans have done a much better job of laddering up taxes and spending where Democrats ladder down to 16-point plans. That’s our problem,” Israel said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “We have to the ladder up to that one theme that voters identify with…. We’re building out an infrastructure we’ve never built out before.”
At The Plum Line Greg Sargent laments the Democrats’ position at the state level, and wonders if “the Democrats’ best near-term hope for winning back the House may be a Republican president who is unpopular enough to trigger big Dem wave elections, like those in 2006 and 2008.”
The “Dems should skip the south” argument is back, big-time, notes Sargent in another post. No one doubts that the GOP has a lock on most southern states, but the case is always compromised with the rather large exceptions of FL, NC and VA, the 3rd, 10th and 12th largest states. Still, the electoral votes of GA, the 8th most populous state, are probably out of reach in 2016, and it may be wiser to put campaign resources in the other three.
Kyle Trystad wonders “What’s Next for Michelle Nunn?” at Roll Call. Democrat Nunn lost her race for U.S. Senate to David Perdue by 8-points, but left a good impression on political observers, who noted that she became a much more confident debater and speaker by the end of the campaign. It seems unlikely, however, that she could best the popular Republican Senator Johnny Isakson in 2016, who perfectly fits the genteel reactionary style Georgians seem to like in their Senators.
James Hohmann’s Politico post, “Can Southern Democrats make a comeback? The populist, middle class “vision” that could turn it around for them” offers a slightly sunnier take on Democratic prospects in the south. Hohmann notes, “Former Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove said…Democrats need a broader, more comprehensive plan. “To me, the sweet-tea-and-grits crowd still likes our economic issues,” said Musgrove, who served from 2000 to 2004 and narrowly lost a 2008 Senate race. “Democrats need an economic message based on opportunity: education, job training, infrastructure rebuilding, and even health care – where voters know that Democrats can make a difference in these issues…[Atlanta Mayor Kasim] Reed praised Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine in 2012 and Gov. Terry McAuliffe in 2013 for not running away from Obama, espousing progressive principles and aggressively attacking their opponents. “The Virginia model is the model we need to follow in the South,” he said.
In similar vein Caitlin Huey-Burns explains “How Democrats Can Get Their Mojo Back” at Real Clear Politics.
The election of Montana Gov. Steve Bullock to head the Democratic Governors Association may signal a new emphasis on strengthening state parties in the mountain west, says Reid Wilson at The Washington Post.
For a disheartening tale of meddlesome digerati screwing around in political journalism, read Dana Milbank’s WaPo column, “The New Republic is dead, thanks to its owner, Chris Hughes.” TNR had threaded numerous crises over the decades to become a reliable source of nuanced progressive political analysis. But now it’s suddenly gone. Is there no chance that a wealthy liberal can somehow clean up this mess?
The demise of The New Republic is not the only indication that American journalism has taken a turn for the worse.

I gotta say, J.P. Green is a lot more positive than I am about Sen. Chuck Schumer’s big speech telling Democrats the time and energy they spent enacting the Affordable Care Act was a big mistake. Here’s part of my response to Schumer–over at TPMCare:

In a much-discussed National Press Club speech last week, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York argued that by prioritizing health care reform, Democrats had elevated the interests of “a small percentage of the electorate”–the uninsured–at the expense of the interests of middle class voters who wanted economic magic. Schumer did not identify exactly what sort of proposals Democrats might have embraced to meet that demand, leading one to suspect he thinks agitating the air on behalf of the desired constituency and its demands might be enough, particularly if combined with a conspicuous decision to abandon the decades-long progressive project of health care reform as a sort of propitiatory sacrifice….
Some left-bent critics of Obama and the Democratic Party do have a specific parallel economic agenda in mind, mostly involving the financial sector: breaking up the largest banks, for example, and perhaps jailing some bankers for their role in the pain and suffering of the Great Recession. That may well represent good policy. And yes, this sort of agenda may have exerted some political appeal. But would financial shock-treatment have had any immediate effect on middle-class incomes? Would it have reduced inequality? And would it have sped up the recovery from the Great Recession? That’s all unlikely. The most-discussed positive policy prescription among progressives, an expansion of Social Security benefits, had less than a snowball’s chance in hell of being enacted by Congress even before, much less after, 2010. And it, too, like the much-derided minimum wage increase proposals of Democrats in the 2014 cycle, and like Obamacare, would have appealed to a relatively small share of voters.
If the point is simply that Democrats would have benefited from a more “populist” political message, that’s easy to agree upon, though it’s not so easy to agree on the components of such a message. You can certainly make a strong case that Democrats were incompetent in conveying their actual accomplishments in economic policy, and the threat Republicans pose to their preservation and extension. For example: how often or well did Democrats explain the Affordable Care Act as an economic initiative? When did they focus on the economic calamities risked by excessive reliance of fossil fuel energy? And in discussing poll-tested policy proposals like a minimum wage increase, to what extent did Democrats nestle these commitments in a broader agenda–that most certainly did exist–of measures aimed at boosting wages and real incomes?
In sum, there are too many variables involved, many of them having nothing to do with policy, to conclude with any degree of precision that a different economic agenda or subordinating health care and the environment to “jobs” would have made a big difference in 2014. And this entire debate is a distraction from what Democrats can do to win in 2016 when they will be in a much better position to hold a comparative “two futures” debate over economic policies instead of a “referendum” on hard times.

I guess this is the season for 20-20 hindsight. But it needs to end soon as we enter the 2016 cycle.

Michael Tomasky is lead dog for this edition of TDS Notes with his must-read Daily Beast post “Democrats Are Petrified of Defending Government–but They Need to Start.” There’s a lot here worth quoting, but I’ll just go with this excerpt and demand that every sentient Democrat read the rest of it: “This hatred of government we see in this country is sickeningly childish and hypocritical. The rot starts from the top–the appalling Republican members of Congress who voted against the 2009 stimulus and then had the audacity to go cut ribbons in their districts at venues given life because of that very stimulus bill they traduced as Satan’s handiwork…But it extends down to the millions of people who accept and applaud the right-wing rhetoric even as they suck on the government tit every day of their lives in one way or another, either without knowing it or (worse) knowing it but denying that they do because they’ve stuffed their own heads full of some nonsense narrative about how tough and independent they are.”
A month out from the red wave, Sean Miller of Campaigns & Elections ‘Shop Talk’ presents a panel discussion addressing a question many campaign managers must be wondering: “Is a Digital Obsession Handicapping Campaigns?”
At Brookings Fred Dews addresses an interesting question, “Is Compulsory Voting a Solution to America’s Low Voter Turnout and Political Polarization?” and quotes from a TDS founding editor: “Senior Fellow William Galston, the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies, imagines a “future in which Americans must vote, or face a penalty.” In that hypothetical future, Galston sees campaigns appealing to more moderate, swing voters who “preferred compromise to confrontation and civil discourse to scorched-earth rhetoric.” He sees the House and Senate “doing serious legislative work” and congressional leaders returning power to the committees, “where members relearned the art of compromise across party lines.” Read more at CNN.com.”
Here’s a variation on the tax credit for voting idea, sort of a carrot with an implied stick.
Joan Walsh explains why Rand Paul’s soulless, insipid response to the Eric Garner tragedy indicates that his presidential campaign will likely tank.
Paul Krugman weighs in on Sen. Schumer’s critique of President Obama’s decision to use his political capital to enact health care reform: “Democrats had their first chance in a generation to do what we should have done three generations ago, and ensure adequate health care for all of our citizens. It would have been incredibly cynical not to have seized that opportunity, and Democrats should be celebrating the fact that they did the right thing…If more Democrats had been willing to defend the best thing they’ve done in decades, rather than run away from their own achievement and implicitly concede that the smears against health reform were right, the politics of the issue might look very different today.”
As a presidential swing state with hot races for governor and U.S. Senate in 2016, North Carolina is likely to get more attention than any other state from both parties and the media, explains Alex Roarty at National Journal.
At Roll Call Alexis Levinson has an insightful explanation of Tom Tillis’s well-played endgame, resulting in his narrow (1.7 percent) victory, despite Kay Hagan’s exceptionally-good U.S. Senate campaign.
Here’s a nifty widget for determining whether you are in red, blue or purple territory at any given moment.

The following article by Anna Greenberg, senior vice president of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, is cross-posted from Politico:

What if Democrats are about to learn the wrong lesson from the 2014 midterm election? In the initial period after the Democratic Party’s dramatic defeat, there was much criticism about how the party focused too much on “women’s issues,” an emphasis that allegedly cost the party races like Mark Udall’s Colorado Senate seat. Indeed, just days after the election, unnamed Democrats expressed frustration with Nancy Pelosi for “focusing so strongly on women without a broader message that could play to other groups, such as older voters and men.”
But as post-election research suggests, it increasingly appears that both parties actually missed an opportunity to appeal successfully to female voters. There’s no evidence that Democratic candidates went too far discussing “women’s issues” or that “women’s issues” represent a narrow rather than “broad” message. In fact, there is considerable evidence the discussion (and Democrats) did not go far enough.
Part of the problem with “blaming” Democratic losses on a hyperfocus on women is the narrow way “women’s issues” have been defined by the media and party politicians. The “fight” over the women’s vote has been seen primarily in terms of reproductive rights, with the Democratic Party as the defenders of a woman’s right to choose and the Republican Party as the defenders of “traditional motherhood.” Make no mistake, access to safe, legal abortion is foundational to women’s social and economic freedom. But this focus excludes the broader range of concerns — particularly economic — that women face.
It is true that in 2012, President Barack Obama’s “women’s agenda” expanded slightly to include touting the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter equal pay legislation and opposition to the defunding of Planned Parenthood. But it was not until this year that party leaders like Pelosi and Rosa DeLauro put together a comprehensive proposal called “When Women Succeed, America Succeeds.” It included pay equity, paid sick leave, increasing the minimum wage, expanding educational opportunities and protection from pregnancy discrimination. The agenda was supported with events in congressional districts and a bus tour; many Democratic candidates for the House and Senate in a number of races trumpeted their support for equal pay.
Republican candidates, too, clearly saw the benefit of appearing to be advocates for women. (After all, the electorate is majority female.) Unlike 2010, when Todd Akin and Richard Mourdoch’s statements about gender collectively launched a “war on women,” this time around the GOP moderated its rhetoric and blurred distinctions on issues like access to reproductive health care. The party devoted a lot of energy to training its candidates to be less scary to women, to perform better on abortion rights and to appear more moderate. Some Republicans in swing districts even talked about pay equity, including Frank Guinta in New Hampshire, who beat Carol Shea-Porter, and Elise Stefanik in New York’s 21st District, who will be the youngest women ever elected to Congress.
As such, this focus on women’s issues turned out to be mostly symbolic — less to promote a comprehensive women’s economic agenda and more an issue sprinkled here and there. Democrats used equal pay as an attack on Republicans to suggest they were out of the mainstream, and Republicans used equal pay to demonstrate that they were squarely in it. Their Republican opponents even attacked Democratic candidates Kathleen Rice (New York’s 4th District) and John Faust (Virginia’s 10th District) for being unsupportive of women in the workplace.
Far from hurting them, a more fulsome conversation about the economic standing of women might very well have helped Democrats, as at least one post-election poll shows that a candidate’s position generically on “women’s issues” was among the top reasons to vote Democratic. In regression analysis, a candidate’s position on women’s issues was the strongest predictor of the vote for a Democratic candidate, stronger than a candidate’s position on issues like Social Security and Medicare and on health care.

A Message From Managing Editor Ed KIlgore:
Dear Readers:
Since Obama’s election in 2008, The Democratic Strategist has repeatedly insisted on the unprecedented nature of the political transformation that has been occurring within the GOP.
In a series of strategy memos we have tracked the growing influence of extremism as a political strategy and philosophy within the GOP–an extremist strategy and philosophy that views politics as essentially a form of warfare and political opponents as literal enemies.
The 2014 elections represented the final triumph of this strategy within the GOP and demonstrated its very successful employment in a range of political campaigns. Democrats now urgently need to understand how this political strategy works and what can be done to combat it.
We are therefore pleased to present the following TDS Strategy Memo by contributing editor James Vega:
The most important and unstated “lesson” of 2014 is that the GOP’s embrace of extremism as a calculated political strategy worked perfectly. It has invalidated key elements of Democratic political strategy and it is urgent that Democrats now face this reality.
You can read the memo HERE:
We believe you will find the memo both useful and extremely important.
Sincerely,
Ed Kilgore
Managing Editor
The Democratic Strategistbr />