At the Washington Post Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane report that “Democrats, in a stark shift in messaging, to make big tax-break pitch for middle class” — a plan which “calls for a massive transfer of wealth from the super-rich and Wall Street traders to the heart of the middle class.”
Give it up for Sean Penn, who just raised $6 million for Haitian relief at an event honoring President Clinton — in one night.
“Are Independents Just Democrats and Republicans by Another Name?” by Ali Elkin and Sasha Issenberg at Bloomberg Politics affirms that “A record number of independents in a country that is as ideologically riven as ever is a paradox that’s not really a paradox. Most of the new independents are liable to be indistinguishable from Democrats or Republicans by belief–they just wouldn’t want to call themselves that.”
Look who’s talking.
Aaron Chatterji’s NYT op-ed “Don’t Look to States for New Ideas” notes that “…State politics have become much more partisan. After the 2014 elections, 60 percent of the states are completely controlled by a single party. The power of state policy innovations is that they traditionally had bipartisan fingerprints, allowing an enterprising national politician from either party to lay claim to them. In the new world of single-party states, very little bipartisan legislation will emerge.”
$721 Million — the amount the energy industry spent on the 2014 midterm elections, reports Bill DiBenedetto at TriplePundit.
At Campaign for America’s Future Richard Eskow’s “Populism Rises – And The ‘Center’ Strikes Back” provides an update on the internal Democratic Party struggle between the liberal and conservative flanks and the debate about what constitutes “real populism.”
At last some highly favorable opinion traction for Obamacare, reports Juan Williams at The Hill.
Under the sub-category “Folksy Panderin,” The Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi posts on the latest weirdness from Republican presidential wanna-be Mike Huckabee, who may be experiencing some anatomical anxieties.

From TDS founding editor William Galston’s Wall St. Journal column “Common Ground for the New Congress“:

…Many Republicans believe that infrastructure is principally a state and local responsibility. Republicans are committed to tax reform, Democrats to increased infrastructure investment. The highway trust fund will run out of money by midyear, but there is little support in either party for increasing the gas tax, the fund’s traditional revenue source.
Despite support from economists of both parties, a broad-based carbon tax is deeply unpopular as well. It is hard to imagine most Republicans assenting to finance infrastructure with higher general-fund deficits. Neither do they want to be held responsible for infrastructure projects grinding to a halt.
One possible solution is to combine tax reform and infrastructure finance. There is agreement across party lines that corporations should bring home the roughly $2 trillion they have stashed overseas–and that they won’t do so if the tax on repatriated earnings remains high. So why not lower that tax substantially, with the proviso that at least a portion of the resulting revenues would be dedicated to infrastructure finance? Both sides would have to eat some crow, but the dish might still be palatable.

It’s an interesting proposal. Some Republicans are finally waking up to the reality that substantial investment in infrastructure upgrades can’t be avoided much longer if the U.S. is to remain economically-viable. A commitment to shared sacrifice — along with shared credit for forward progress on our infrastructure — could be a win-win for both parties.

In her Time magazine post, “Why Democrats Are Losing the Working Class,” Haley Sweetland Edwards distills some salient points from the new Pew Research Center study on “The Politics of Financial Insecurity.” (In the Pew Center study financial security is evaluated by ten metrics, including savings and checking accounts, retirement assets, health security and other factors). From Edwards’s report:

While 94% of the the most financially secure Americans were registered to vote, only 54% of the least financially secure were, according to the study. Even fewer actually make it to their polling booths. While 2014 voting records are not yet available, in 2010, 69% of the most financially secure cast ballots, while just 30% of the least financially secure did, according to Pew.
The least financially secure Americans also tended to avoid other aspects of the political system as well, the study found. Working class Americans called and wrote to their representatives at much lower rates than their richer neighbors, and paid much less attention to basic facts in national politics. Roughly 60% of the most financially secure Americans could correctly identify the parties in control of the House and Senate when the study was conducted before the 2014 midterm; just 26% of the least financially secure could do the same.

But it would be a mistake to infer that political indifference is the primary driving wheel of low voter participation for the less financially secure. As Edwards notes,

…Working-class folks, who tend to have less flexible hours at work, vote disproportionately more in states that allow early voting and mail-in ballots–measures that are overwhelmingly supported by Democrats. In Colorado, for example, which began allowing mail-in ballots saw much, much higher turnout in 2014 than it’d had in 2010. Oregon and Washington, which also allow for mail-in ballots, had turnout rates that were higher than average in 2014, too. In North Carolina, where early voting measures allowed people to go to the polls over the course of seven days also helped increase voter turnout in that state by 35% from where it was in 2010.

Think about that for a moment. A 35 percent uptick in midterm turnout in a key swing state is highly significant. It would be more interesting to compare the figures for those with different levels of financial security. No doubt the more financially-secure are able to take advantage of early voting opportunities with greater ease. But indications are that expanding early voting is a winner for Dems in terms of increasing turnout of less financially-secure voters.
The Pew Research Center Study also had some interesting data on political preference and turnout of different levels of financial security:

…in 2014, the Democratic Party left far more potential votes “on the table” than did the Republicans. For example, among all of those in the least financially secure category, more than twice as many favored the Democratic candidate over the Republican (42% to 17%). But just 12% of this group favored the Democrat and were likely voters; fully 30% supported Democrats but were unlikely to vote.

After the 2014 midterm election in which the GOP scored major gains in Congress and the statehouses, a particular theme of post-election analyses focused on the relatively low levels of support Democratic candidates received from white working class voters. It is true that Republican candidates were preferred to Democratic candidates among whites in all but the least financially secure group. But the overall relationship between financial situation, partisan choice and political engagement among the general public is evident among whites as well. Republican support declines as financial insecurity increases, while Democratic support is relatively flat. About three-in-ten (31%) of the least financially secure white adults declined to express a candidate preference in 2014, compared with just 6% among the most secure.

There’s a lot more that could be investigated about the interplay of financial security, race and political participation. But the Pew Study certainly suggests that Democrats have a lot to gain by becoming better identified as champions of financial security — and early voting.

From Sean McElwee’s Politico post, “The Income Gap at the Polls“: “…The gap between voters and non-voters breaks down strongly along class lines. In the 2012 election, 80.2 percent of those making more than $150,000 voted, while only 46.9 percent of those making less than $10,000 voted. This “class bias,” is so strong that in the three elections (2008, 2010 and 2012) I examined, there was only one instance of a poorer income bracket turning out at a higher rate than the bracket above them. (In the 2012 election, those making less than $10,000 were slightly more likely to vote than those making between $10,000 and $14,999.) On average, each bracket turned out to vote at a rate 3.7 percentage points higher than the bracket below it…This class bias is a persistent feature of American voting: A study of 40 years of state-level data finds no instance in which there was not a class bias in the electorate favoring the rich–in other words, no instance in which poorer people in general turned out in higher rates than the rich. That being said, class bias has increased since 1988, just as wide gaps have opened up between the opinions of non-voters and those of voters.”
Here’s an interesting by-product of lower voter turnout — fewer signatures are needed to get issues on ballots where applicable. Case in point: Ohio, where it will now require almost 80K fewer signatures to get pot legalization on the ballot.
No ‘exploratory’ yada yada yet. But it looks Like WI Gov. Scott Walker is running for the GOP presidential nomination.
A worthy strategic insight from Isaiah J. Poole’s post, “How Democrats in 2015 Can Honor Mario Cuomo’s Progressive Vision” at Moyers & Co, “Now that political timidity and triangulation is a proven loser, it’s time to be bold, passionate and visionary…”In the minds of a lot of voters, economic fairness and the Democratic brand have in some ways separated, which is really tragic because that really is what we stand for,” said Rep. Keith Ellison, (D-MN), co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus in an interview with the McClatchy News Service. “The president can help rebuild that brand.”
Democratic strategist Robert Creamer writes at HuffPo about the paradox of Nancy Pelosi’s political influence increasing as a result of GOP House gains in 2014.
And Bloomberg News provides an excellent and welcome example of Pelosi’s leverage — leading the successful opposition to a Republican measure to further weaken Dodd-Frank.
Greg Sargent previews the upcoming fight over President Obama raising the overtime pay threshold of the Fair Labor Standards Act, below which the private sector is required to pay overtime. Progressives want it increased to $51,000 from $23,660 — an excellent example of a reform which could have wide middle class appeal.
Jonathan Chait explains why “Why the Republican Congress’s First Act Was to Declare War on Math.” The GOP has implemented “dynamic scoring” to destroy the impartiality of the Congressional Budget Office.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has coined an apt term, which may prove useful for describing “dynamic scoring” and other forms of GOP statistical manipulations — “magical accounting.”

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Watching the Republicans glory in their new majority in the Senate and expanded majority in the House is hard to take for progressive Democrats. Democrats have dug ourselves a deep hole, and the country will suffer as the most conservative political party in American history controls the Congress. What very few people (especially progressive activists) understand, though, is that it is in moments like this when really important victories can be won.
America’s political history is full of examples. Decisive defeat in an election doesn’t automatically spell doom to the side either in the short run or long run in terms of policy fights. The election of hard pro-slavery President James Buchanan, followed by the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, was the pinnacle of slave power, where it looked like all political power had been stripped from the abolitionist movement, yet less than a decade later, slavery was outlawed for all time. William McKinley’s decisive 1900 defeat of William Jennings Bryan looked like the end of populist hopes and dreams, yet within a few years much of the populist agenda was starting to be enacted. It was a bitter disappointment when Nixon pulled out an incredibly close win against liberal stalwart Humphrey, but in Nixon’s first term OSHA and the EPA were founded, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed, and the first affirmative action programs were put in place.
And here are some questions about more recent times: when were the only two minimum wage increases between 1980 and 2007? 1990, after the devastating win by GHW Bush in 1988, and 1996, after the Republicans swept into power in the 1994 elections. When was the tax reform bill essentially written by the strongest progressive tax group (Citizens for Tax Justice) in the country passed? 1986, after the Reagan landslide in 1984. When was the landmark bill providing health insurance to children passed? 1997, when Gingrich was Speaker. When was the only progressive legislation on corporate corruption (Sarbanes-Oxley) passed since 1980? 2002, after the second Bush won the first time and with Tom DeLay the most powerful man in the House. When did the President’s top priority legislation, Social Security privatization, never even come up for a vote in spite of the Republicans having control of both Houses of Congress in the aftermath of two bad elections for the Democrats? 2005, after both Bush and several new GOP Senators won.
It is time for progressives to stop thinking only defensively (although defensive battles can be great wins as well, like the Social Security fight against Bush), and start thinking about what we can win. While it is true that the Republican party keeps getting further and further to the right, making it hard to pass good legislation, let me give some examples of some of the ways we can fight and win progressive victories over the next two years:

Read more…

We’re all accustomed to the reality that demographic changes are occurring that all in all are friendly to the prospects of the Democratic Party, at least as they have been manifested in recent elections. There’s plenty of argument over how fast these changes are occurring; whether they are at least partially reversible; and the wisdom or folly of relying on them. But they’re real.
Now the Center for American Progress is first out of the box with a study of how demographic changes could affect the 2016 elections. I wrote about this today at the Washington Monthly:

The write-up from CAP’s Patrick Oakford notes that two scenarios were analyzed: what would happen in 2016 if the party preferences of 2012 are projected four years down the line, and what would happen if the party preferences of 2004 are assumed to reassert themselves. This second scenario reflects the theory–understandably popular among Republicans–that not having Barack Obama on the ballot would cause the Democratic vote share to relapse to pre-Obama “normal” levels.
Obviously the first scenario would produce a larger Democratic victory than in 2012, with North Carolina rejoining the blue state ranks. I find the second scenario more interesting:

In some states, such as Florida, restoring party preferences to their 2004 levels would enable the GOP to narrowly win back states they lost in 2012 but had won in previous elections. However, in order to win back other key states that the GOP won in 2004, such as Ohio and Nevada, the GOP would need to exceed the share of support it received from voters of color in 2004.

This last observation is interesting insofar as George W. Bush won an impressive 16% of the African-American vote in Ohio in 2004. Does anyone see that performance being exceeded in 2016? I sure don’t.

Overall, the numbers suggest Democrats have a bit of a margin of error in battleground states even if percentages of minority voters drop a bit. But the turnout needs to stay up, and the whole proposition would look a lot stronger if Democrats cut into Bush04 levels among older and whiter voters.

For a transcript of NPR’s new interview with TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeira, click here.
Here’s another transcript worth reading — of Steve Inskeep’s NPR interview with President Obama, nicely summarized up by Peter Sullivan at The Hill. “At the end of 2014, Obama said he could “look back and say we are as well-positioned today as we have been in quite some time economically, that American leadership is more needed around the world than ever before — and that is liberating in the sense that a lot of the work that we’ve done is now beginning to bear fruit…Obama finished the year with a flurry of executive actions, including moves to give 4.5 million illegal immigrants legal status and open relations with Cuba. Along with a climate change agreement with China and a deal with congressional Republicans that will keep the government funded through September, the jolt of work pushed back at any sense he’s entering the lame-duck, powerless portion of his presidency…”I think one of the things I’ve learned over six years, and it doesn’t always suit the news cycle, is having some strategic patience.”

No one should be surprised that the GOP is relying on a wave of right wing judicial activism to advance their agenda, as Michael D. Shear reports at The New York Times — all the more reason for Democrats to never again allow an easy ride for Republican court nominees.
At Bloomberg News, Billy House’s “Political wake or wake-up? House Dems mull strategy” explores how Democratic members of congress will cope with Boehner’s enhanced majority. House notes, “”We’ve got to get ready for an alley fight” with House Republicans, said Rep. Raul Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat and progressive caucus co-chairman with Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota…The question is what agenda House Democrats will push heading toward the 2016 presidential election year after losing 13 seats in the Nov. 4 election. The 247-188 House majority won by Republicans will be their largest since the Congress elected in 1928. Democrats lost the majority to Republicans in 2010.”
The Huck revs his engine for the GOP’s 2016 demolition derby. If he greases his way through to win his party’s nod, Dems will put his sound-bite powers to the test when they make him explain his serial encitement of voter suppression and sabotage.
A GOP lion passes, and evokes memories of a time when Republicans opposed voter suppression and actually negotiated in good faith for the benefit of the country.
Speaking of the the current Republican party’s inability to negotiate in good faith, departing Sen. Saxby Chambliss now sheds crocodile tears for the decline of bipartisanship, even though he supported his party’s ‘wall of obstruction’ strategy with very few exceptions.
Michael Tomasky says Dems must assertively defend government, and plugs a new website dedicated to doing just that. “I believe that it is possible to make government interesting and appealing, says Tomasky, “and to surprise people with all that government does for them every day that they take for granted and just assume was the handiwork of the “more efficient” private sector…When the Republicans come after the EPA, Democrats need to be ready to talk about all that the EPA has accomplished over the years–the rivers and lakes made swimmable and fishable, the polluting power plants made cleaner, and all the rest. I never hear a Democrat talk about these goods, which are, in the literal sense, indivisible–for us all.”

While a substantial sector of the Democratic coalition has enthusiastically embraced the rise of Elizabeth Warren and adopted the term “populist” to describe the philosophy she embodies, other Democrats have serious reservations. In a recent column, Brookings Institution fellow William Galston, argued the case for an alternative approach of “nonpopulist liberalism.”
Galston agrees that there are indeed real grievances and issues that lie behind the current regard for populism:

The ills against which populists inveigh are rarely illusory. On the contrary: Populism typically gives voice to genuine grievances, and in so doing gains credibility and energy.
At the heart of the American dream is the promise of opportunity. But in the ABC/Washington Post survey conducted days before the 2014 midterm elections, 71% of Americans said the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy. Only 24% disagreed. The favors-the-wealthy supermajority included 54% of Republicans, 59% of conservatives, 64% of college graduates–and even 57% of those making more than $100,000 per year.
In January, a Pew Research Center survey found that 65% of Americans–including 61% of Republicans–agreed that the gap between the rich and everyone else has increased during the past decade.
The issue is not whether these perceptions are mistaken–they aren’t–but what to do about them.

Galston identifies contemporary populism with the movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century of that same name and argues for the limitations of that perspective:

Populism is the politics of nostalgia. It appeals to a better time in the past–whether that means the mid-19th century, when sturdy yeoman farmers and craftsmen formed the backbone of the economy; or the decades after Congress slammed shut the gates of immigration in 1924; or the mid-20th century, when assembly-line workers enjoyed secure jobs and middle-class incomes.
Populist movements flourish when established leaders and parties fail to solve their countries’ most urgent problems. Throughout the market democracies, one problem dominates all others: the economic squeeze on working- and middle-class families. Neither the center-left nor the center-right has responded in ways that make sense to rank-and-file citizens. So they are looking elsewhere.
Populism offers many satisfactions. Its narrative is clear and easy to understand. It identifies villains–corrupt officials, unresponsive bureaucracies, arrogant elites, large corporations, giant banks, immigrants, even the Jews. It legitimizes outrage, the expression of which is one of the greatest human pleasures. It flatters the people, whose virtue and common sense, it claims, could set the country right if only rich and powerful forces didn’t stand in their way. “The humblest citizen in all the land,” declaimed William Jennings Bryan more than a century ago, “when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the whole hosts of error that they”–the elites–“can bring.”

He then suggests his preferred alternative:

To reject the populist response is not to affirm conservatism. In his controversial postelection speech, Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) made the case for a nonpopulist liberalism more interested in diagnosing conditions than in identifying enemies.
“Large forces–technology, automation and globalization–are not inherently malign forces,” he said. The task for Democrats is not to turn back the clock to the fleeting period when the American economy dominated the world. It is rather, Mr. Schumer said, to “figure out ways for the middle class . . . to be able to thrive amidst these forces.”
But how?…The old rules no longer apply, but it is not clear what the new rules are–if any exist….Which forms of public investment are needed to expand opportunity for the middle class and for those struggling to reach it? What kind of tax reform will promote faster economic growth whose fruits are broadly shared? How can productivity gains also mean progress for job creation and wages? What are the responsibilities of employers toward workers and communities, and what incentives do employers need to meet them? Faced with volatile oil prices, how can we sustain the rapid growth of a diverse U.S. energy sector? How can we accelerate the return of manufacturing jobs? How can we turn around an alarming drop in entrepreneurial activity? On what terms should we engage with the global economy?
The answers to these questions will define the future of the Democratic Party. And so will the failure to answer them. Like nature, politics abhors a vacuum. The right response to populism is to offer real solutions.

Galston ends by looking at politics:

On the Democratic side, populist economics has found its voice; not so for nonpopulist liberalism. That is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ‘s most important test as she contemplates a presidential run.