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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: April 2015

Political Strategy Notes

Both The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates and Chauncey DeVega at Salon.com have made the point that simplistic appeals for nonviolence in response to rioting in Baltimore undervalue the role of systemic racial discrimination in creating the crisis. DeVega also notes that MLK’s impressive insights about the problem and its remedies are being overlooked by those who cherry-pick his quotes on the topic. Ed Kilgore has some salient thoughts on the traps awaiting Democrats, as well as Republicans, as they address the crisis in Baltimore and other cities.
At The Boston Globe James Pindell reports that “American millennials are split on whether the US justice system is fair to people of different races and ethnicities, a new poll from Harvard’s Institute of Politics found.”
Dems take note and prepare: Kevin D. Williamson of The National Review has the GOP’s message du jour about the Baltimore violence being parroted across Republican-friendly media outlets.
Regarding police-community violence in Baltimore, Ferguson and other cities, Democratic candidates may want to explore a two-part strategy, which recognizes that police in many cities need better training in race-relations and nonviolent conflict-resolution. But to prevent rioting and community violence, we also need more jobs and educational opportunities for Americans of all races. The best way to accomplish this is a major national investment in putting millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans to work on infrastructure upgrades, and funding the President’s proposal to offer two years of free community college tuition for students.”
At The London School of Economics Daily Blog John B. Holbein & D. Sunshine Hillygus explain “How preregistration can help increase youth voter turnout,” based on their paper ‘Making Young Voters: The Impact of Preregistration on Youth Turnout’, in the American Journal of Political Science.
A Bloomberg View editorial has a couple of good insights about the benefits of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential candidacy: “Sanders can also force Clinton to make and articulate choices on precisely the type of issues that she will be most eager to evade, including a host of knotty questions related to inequality…”The American people want Secretary Clinton, all candidates, to talk about why the middle class continues to decline, why the rich get richer, why Wall Street continues to have unbelievable power over the American economy,” Sanders has said. “The American people not only want a serious debate on this campaign, they want candidates who will deal with the most important issue, and that is are we prepared to take on the billionaire class which has so much power over our economic and political life.”
At National Journal Scott Bland, Andrea Drusch, Josh Kraushaar and Alex Roarty present “Hotline’s Senate Race Rankings: Majority Up for Grabs: Republicans have to defend many more seats than Democrats in 2016, putting their majority at risk. But they have opportunities in Nevada and Colorado.”
Roll Call’s Stuart Rothenberg is skeptical that campaign finance reform can become a pivotal issue: “Most voters are motivated by partisanship and mood (that is, whether they are reasonably content with the status quo), but issues like the economy, taxes, spending, abortion, the environment and national security also can energize them…Campaign finance reform, on the other hand, has rarely been a decisive issue to voters, though it certainly has been a frequent topic for editorial writers, reformers and especially under-funded, underdog candidates. Without a particular scandal that captures the public’s attention, that’s more likely than not to be the case again in 2016.”
In “Taking Back the States…Again,” Andrew Mayershon of Boston Review probes the weakness of Democratic fund-raising, particularly the dearth of sugar daddies willing to bankroll Democratic candidates in non-presidential year elections.


April 29: An Unwelcome Blast From the Past

Up until now, it was generally assumed the 2016 elections would revolve around some of the same issues discussed in 2012 and 2014: economic stagnation and inequality, immigration, national security challenges, and maybe executive powers and culture-war issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
But there’s been one too many incident of racially-tinged collisions between police and the communities they are supposed to protect to assume that any more. I wrote about that this week for TPMCafe.

[T]he riots in Baltimore this week brought back a lot of memories for Baby Boomers who remember Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964, Watts in 1965, Cleveland in 1966, Detroit and Newark and Cambridge in 1967, and cities across the country in 1968, including Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Some may or may not remember the extent to which police brutality charges and/or habitual racial profiling in arrests were major issues in many of these cities back then. But in any event, what seems like a growing drumbeat of incidents of black men being killed by police (or by would-be police like George Zimmerman), illuminating long-suppressed complaints about brutality and racial profiling, is interrupting this election cycle, supposedly focused on economic inequality and national security threats, like one of those special bulletins of yore….
For some pols this old/new challenge may appear to be the very last thing they need. That’s likely the case for former Baltimore mayor and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who cut short his pre-presidential campaign overseas trip to rush back to address a crisis he no longer has any power to control. He will immediately face claims that “zero-tolerance” policies he put into place as mayor contributed to the deterioration of police-community relations, thanks to a rising tide of arrests for minor offenses that ruined the employment prospects of many young black men (also a major factor in some of the 1960s “race riots”). This is not the kind of allegation someone seeking to cast himself as the Fighting Progressive candidate for president can easily overcome.
If the Baltimore saga is an existential challenge for O’Malley, it may serve as a devilish temptation for his successor as governor, Republican Larry Hogan. Being from an old political family, Hogan is surely aware that one of his Republican predecessors began an unlikely ascent to the vice presidency after Richard Nixon noticed with pleasure his tough talk towards protesters on the Eastern Shore (in 1967) and in Baltimore itself (in 1968). Indeed, had Mr. Law-and-Order Spiro T. Agnew not shown his contempt for the law by taking bribes as part of an arrangement that went back to his tenure as Baltimore county executive, he would have almost certainly become the 38th president of the United States. Did Larry Hogan think about that when he talked tough towards protesters in Baltimore this week?
More generally, Republicans everywhere may be tempted to exploit the reflexive support for police officers among white citizens that is beginning to exhibit itself everywhere black protests arise. As John Judis observed at National Journal this week, the likely election of Dan Donovan–the prosecutor who appeared to work hard to avoid any grand jury indictment of the cops who killed Eric Garner–to Congress in Staten Island next Tuesday may signal a new era of racial backlash, battening on conservative anxieties already aroused by the years of attacks on Obama and manufactured fears of his supposed mania for “redistribution.”
If there is a supply of backlash voters, there will certainly be a demand, if only among the crowded GOP presidential field where the candidates will soon run out of ways to demonstrate their True Conservatism. The more historically minded of them may realize that St. Ronald Reagan himself built his California political career on a foundation of backlash to rioters, albeit student radicals more than African-Americans per se.
Worse yet, if Republicans begin to return to backlash politics, some Democrats may get happy feet and return to their old habit of reflexively supporting aggressive police tactics and tougher sentencing in order to preserve their appeal to the shrinking minority of white voters willing to support them. All in all, it’s rational to fear that the rarest of phenomena, the bipartisan trend towards criminal justice reform, could be interrupted by polarization over police behavior, before it’s reached fruition. And in the long run, nothing would be more certain to perpetuate the oppressive fears of African-Americans for whom regular politics is sometimes little more than an interruption of lives spent under the gun.


An Unwelcome Blast From the Past

Up until now, it was generally assumed the 2016 elections would revolve around some of the same issues discussed in 2012 and 2014: economic stagnation and inequality, immigration, national security challenges, and maybe executive powers and culture-war issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
But there’s been one too many incident of racially-tinged collisions between police and the communities they are supposed to protect to assume that any more. I wrote about that this week for TPMCafe.

[T]he riots in Baltimore this week brought back a lot of memories for Baby Boomers who remember Harlem and Philadelphia in 1964, Watts in 1965, Cleveland in 1966, Detroit and Newark and Cambridge in 1967, and cities across the country in 1968, including Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. Some may or may not remember the extent to which police brutality charges and/or habitual racial profiling in arrests were major issues in many of these cities back then. But in any event, what seems like a growing drumbeat of incidents of black men being killed by police (or by would-be police like George Zimmerman), illuminating long-suppressed complaints about brutality and racial profiling, is interrupting this election cycle, supposedly focused on economic inequality and national security threats, like one of those special bulletins of yore….
For some pols this old/new challenge may appear to be the very last thing they need. That’s likely the case for former Baltimore mayor and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who cut short his pre-presidential campaign overseas trip to rush back to address a crisis he no longer has any power to control. He will immediately face claims that “zero-tolerance” policies he put into place as mayor contributed to the deterioration of police-community relations, thanks to a rising tide of arrests for minor offenses that ruined the employment prospects of many young black men (also a major factor in some of the 1960s “race riots”). This is not the kind of allegation someone seeking to cast himself as the Fighting Progressive candidate for president can easily overcome.
If the Baltimore saga is an existential challenge for O’Malley, it may serve as a devilish temptation for his successor as governor, Republican Larry Hogan. Being from an old political family, Hogan is surely aware that one of his Republican predecessors began an unlikely ascent to the vice presidency after Richard Nixon noticed with pleasure his tough talk towards protesters on the Eastern Shore (in 1967) and in Baltimore itself (in 1968). Indeed, had Mr. Law-and-Order Spiro T. Agnew not shown his contempt for the law by taking bribes as part of an arrangement that went back to his tenure as Baltimore county executive, he would have almost certainly become the 38th president of the United States. Did Larry Hogan think about that when he talked tough towards protesters in Baltimore this week?
More generally, Republicans everywhere may be tempted to exploit the reflexive support for police officers among white citizens that is beginning to exhibit itself everywhere black protests arise. As John Judis observed at National Journal this week, the likely election of Dan Donovan–the prosecutor who appeared to work hard to avoid any grand jury indictment of the cops who killed Eric Garner–to Congress in Staten Island next Tuesday may signal a new era of racial backlash, battening on conservative anxieties already aroused by the years of attacks on Obama and manufactured fears of his supposed mania for “redistribution.”
If there is a supply of backlash voters, there will certainly be a demand, if only among the crowded GOP presidential field where the candidates will soon run out of ways to demonstrate their True Conservatism. The more historically minded of them may realize that St. Ronald Reagan himself built his California political career on a foundation of backlash to rioters, albeit student radicals more than African-Americans per se.
Worse yet, if Republicans begin to return to backlash politics, some Democrats may get happy feet and return to their old habit of reflexively supporting aggressive police tactics and tougher sentencing in order to preserve their appeal to the shrinking minority of white voters willing to support them. All in all, it’s rational to fear that the rarest of phenomena, the bipartisan trend towards criminal justice reform, could be interrupted by polarization over police behavior, before it’s reached fruition. And in the long run, nothing would be more certain to perpetuate the oppressive fears of African-Americans for whom regular politics is sometimes little more than an interruption of lives spent under the gun.


Reich: Epidemic Powerlessness Challenges Progressives

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has identified a source of ballooning discontent in America, which progressives must address. From his blog post:

As I travel around America, I’m struck by how utterly powerless most people feel.
The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count.
A large part of the reason is we have fewer choices than we used to have. In almost every area of our lives, it’s now take it or leave it.
Companies are treating workers as disposable cogs because most working people have no choice. They need work and must take what they can get.
Although jobs are coming back from the depths of the Great Recession, the portion of the labor force actually working remains lower than it’s been in over thirty years – before vast numbers of middle-class wives and mothers entered paid work.
Which is why corporations can get away with firing workers without warning, replacing full-time jobs with part-time and contract work, and cutting wages. Most working people have no alternative.
Consumers, meanwhile, are feeling mistreated and taken for granted because they, too, have less choice.
U.S. airlines, for example, have consolidated into a handful of giant carriers that divide up routes and collude on fares. In 2005 the U.S. had nine major airlines. Now we have just four.
It’s much the same across the economy. Eighty percent of Americans are served by just one Internet Service Provider – usually Comcast, AT&T, or Time-Warner.
The biggest banks have become far bigger. In 1990, the five biggest held just 10 percent of all banking assets. Now they hold almost 45 percent.
Giant health insurers are larger; the giant hospital chains, far bigger; the most powerful digital platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Google), gigantic.
All this means less consumer choice, which translates into less power.

The political consequences are also quite disturbing, as Reich explains:

…As voters we feel no one is listening because politicians, too, face less and less competition. Over 85 percent of congressional districts are considered “safe” for their incumbents in the upcoming 2016 election; only 3 percent are toss-ups.
In presidential elections, only a handful of states are now considered “battlegrounds” that could go either Democratic or Republican.
So, naturally, that’s where the candidates campaign. Voters in most states won’t see much of them. These voters’ votes are literally taken for granted.
Even in toss-up districts and battle-ground states, so much big money is flowing in that average voters feel disenfranchised.

Reich is on to something here. The decline in personal power felt by millions has happened so slowly that most of us take it for granted, as if it’s just ‘the way things are’ and there isn’t much we can do about it. The rioting in Ferguson and Baltimore may also be more an expression of the growing sense of powerlessness than anything else.
Reich goes on to identify a common denominator that feeds the spreading feelings of powerlessness — the lack of choice. He stops short of suggesting remedies. But it is clear that Democratic political leaders face both a crisis and opportunity here: If Democratic leaders fail to address the growing sense of powerlessness in a direct way, we shouldn’t be surprised if voters keep it home or cast their ballots for other parties.
But there are things that can be done about it, such as intensified voter registration and turnout drives, reinvigorating America’s labor movement, energizing the co-op and credit union movements and launching boycotts and stockholder’s campaigns to compel corporations to conduct business with a greater sense of social responsibility, to name just a few possibilities. If Democratic leaders will directly address the underlying causes of powerlessness in a way that average Americans will find credible, we just may be able to win something that now seems far out of reach — a Democratic landslide and a real working majority in congress.


Actually, Americans Do Want to ‘Soak the Rich’

At In These Times Jim Naureckas has an interesting post, “Why Don’t the American People Want to Tax the Rich? Oh Wait, They Do: Despite what the New York Times would have you believe, Americans have said over and over that they want the wealthy to pay more.” Naureckas, editor of Extra!, the magazine of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), presents data which pulverizes Neil Irwin’s New York Times article “Why Americans Don’t Want to Soak the Rich“:

…When I look at polling over time on taxing the wealthy, what’s striking to me is how consistently popular it is. Gallup has asked 17 times since 1992 whether upper-income people pay too much, too little or their fair share of federal taxes, and every time a majority has said they pay too little. Only twice-in 2010 and 2011-have less than 60 percent said they thought the rich were not paying enough federal taxes.
The same series of Gallup polls found people saying that lower-income and middle-income people were paying either their fair share or too much in taxes. Corporations, like the wealthy, were seen as paying too little, by an even wider margin–only twice in 11 repetitions of the question did less than 66 percent say corporate taxes were not high enough.
And the Gallup results are no outlier. An AP/GfK poll from February found 68 percent saying that wealthy households pay too little in federal taxes. Politifact cited a handful of polls, with findings that range from 59 percent to 72 percent, in support of Paul Krugman’s claim that “large majorities support higher, not lower, taxes on the wealthy.”
And it’s not just taxes on the wealthy; on the relatively rare occasions when they’re asked to pick a side in the class conflict, the American people generally choose the left side of the field:
“The income gap between wealthy Americans and those who are less well off”: 51 percent called it “a major problem,” while 15 percent said it was “not a problem” (ABC News/Washington Post, 1/12-15/15)
“The economic system in this country unfairly favors powerful interests”: 62 percent agree (Pew, 2/18/15)
“Should the government do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor in this country?”: 55 percent say yes (CBS News, 1/9-12/15)
“The government should work to substantially reduce the income gap between the rich and the poor”: 66 percent agree (CNN/ORC, 1/31-2/2/14)
“Do you feel that the distribution of money and wealth in this country is fair, or do you feel that the money and wealth in this country should be more evenly distributed among more people?”: 62 percent called for more redistribution (CBS News, 1/17-21/14)
“How much, if anything, should the government do to reduce the gap between the rich and everyone else?”: 69 percent said “a lot” or “some”; 26 percent said “not much” or “nothing at all” (Pew, 1/15-19/14)

There are arguments about how much of a tax hike on the wealthy most Americans would like to see, and there are nuanced distinctions to be made about just who should be taxed more heavily and under what circumstances. But Irwin’s NYT piece now looks more like a pile of shreds than worthy tax policy strategy for Dems.


Political Strategy Notes

Despite gushing reports about Marco Rubio’s presidential candidate debut, like this one, somehow, his epic water-break, depicted here in slo mo, still resonates:

At The American Prospect Heather Hurlburt spotlights what may be a transformative election for American women, especially Democratic women: “The number of visible women in the pipeline behind Clinton and Warren is also unprecedented. Women hold one-third of Democratic Senate seats up for election in 2016. At least seven GOP incumbents also have potential Democratic women challengers, from party stars like Tammy Duckworth in Illinois to Michelle Nunn in Georgia or Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky. Women are stacked deep in the party leadership, from established figures such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senator Patty Murray, and current Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to potential future presidential candidates such as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar.”
Those who worry about the potential “age gap” between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are probably wasting their time, according to the historical record, reports Geoffrey Skelley at Sabato’s Crystal Ball.
Nate Cohn explains “How to Read the Ups and Downs of Polling in the G.O.P. Race” and notes “…it’s better to focus on the fundamentals — whether the candidates appear to hold the support from party elites necessary to win the nomination, whether they are broadly appealing throughout the party, and whether they seem capable of building support in the early states…These factors, not their post-rollout bounces, will decide whether they can take the lead — and keep it.”
A former Republican Speaker of the Iowa State House, Christopher Rants, offers some unsolicited advice to Democrats: “Primaries, or internal family feuds, are never fun. But they are useful. They ensure the victor has been fully vetted, that if someone stumbles, someone else is ready to pick up the mantle, and the victor comes out with a full head of steam behind them. Democrats need a primary, not a coronation. But that is what they are set up for at the moment.” A fair point, but it should be measured against the advantages of not having a bruising primary season.
Political heir of Joe McCarthy sets new standard for arrogant hypocrisy.
At The Week Paul Waldman posts on “The absurd spectacle of the GOP’s working-class nostalgia.” Waldman notes the working-class pretensions of WI Gov. Scott Walker and other GOP presidential wannabes and explains, “There may be some small differences, but they’re all Republicans, which means they’ll advocate the same things: tax cuts (particularly on the taxes that hit the wealthiest hardest, like those on capital gains and inheritances), loosening of restrictions on Wall Street, and scaling back regulations that affect corporations.”
At the National Journal “How the Democratic and Republican Parties Have Changed, in 8 Charts” by Ronald Brownstein and Libby Isenstein indicates that Democrats’ attitudes have become more liberal and substantially more favorable toward immigrants.
Twerkage, GOP style.


Galston: Why Dems Should Advocate for Growth, Rather Than Redistribution

William Galston’s latest Wall St. Journal column “A Better Campaign Theme Than Inequality: Income disparity doesn’t much worry America. Advocating for growth holds more promise” encapsulates a viewpoint gaining support among centrist Democrats.
Galston notes polling data which indicate that, despite all of the media buzz about economic inequality as a growing concern, it really doesn’t rank all that high as a public priority:

Hillary Clinton was reportedly struck that no one had asked her about inequality. She shouldn’t have been surprised… Recent opinion surveys show inequality well down the list of public concerns. In a February CBS News poll, for example, only 4% of Americans named income disparities as the most important problem facing the country. In March only 2% told Gallup that the income gap was at the top of their list.

To some extent such responses depend on how the question is framed. Regardless, if a candidate’s tone is too class warfare-like, some upwardly-mobile small business people, for example, may think rightly or wrongly, that they are being targeted by “soak the rich” rhetoric. Even if they represent only 1 or 2 percent of voters (and it could well be more), their decision to vote Republican could have disastrous consequences for Democrats. Why alienate them unnecessarily, the centrist Democratic argument goes. Better to advocate for growth that screws no one who is working hard to get ahead. As Galston explains:

What matters most is growth that includes everyone. To get that kind of growth, we will have to act on a broad front to expand opportunity for those who now lack it — and ensure that workers earn enough to provide opportunity for their children. These measures will reduce inequality, all the more so if they are financed by linking real wages to productivity gains and terminating tax preferences that don’t promote growth while benefiting mainly the wealthiest Americans.

That last sentence could broaden debate, even among centrist Democrats, about tax policies that facilitate exporting better-paying jobs and the wide range of trade concerns in the Trans Pacific Partnership. Where Democrats should come down on the free trade vs protectionist continuum will be an ongoing debate into the foreseeable future. But if Democrats can make growth their ‘brand,’ rather than ‘end inequality,’ it’s hard to see how that could fail to broaden support. When a majority of likely voters perceive the Democratic Party as the party of growth, we will at long last be on the path to securing a real working majority, the argument goes.
It’s an appealing vision, and with a measure of message discipline, it could be a doable image make-over. It doesn’t preclude tax reform that makes the wealthy more likely to pay their fair share — Galston supports “terminating tax preferences that don’t promote growth while benefiting mainly the wealthiest Americans.” But perhaps its chief virtue is that it checks drift into “bash the rich” rhetoric that upwardly-mobile middle class voters could perceive as an assault on their aspirations. Given our highly polarized electorate and fragile, see-sawing majorities, such a message/policy strategy merits consideration.


April 23: Mythbusting: No, Governors Aren’t Always Better Presidential Candidates

We’re far enough into the 2016 election cycle to hear the sound of a few myths exploding. A notable one is the idea that governors are inherently better presidential candidates. I took a jaundiced look at that one at TPMCafe this week:

This ancient trope is based partly on statistics, notes Five Thirty Eight‘s Nate Silver:

Throughout American history, about twice as many governors as senators have been chosen to be standard bearers by the major parties, even though at any given moment there are only half as many sitting governors as sitting senators.

Statistics aside, it’s plausible that executives are a more natural fit for Chief Executive than career legislators. And in an era of raging anti-Washington sentiment, it makes sense that a record free of complicity with the federal government’s deeds and misdeeds could be an advantage.
All these factors were supposed to make the rich bumper crop of GOP governors and former governors in the field this year the collective frontrunners. But in case after case, their records back home are undermining their credibility or even threatening their freedom.
Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal are both suffering from calamitously bad approval ratings in the states they govern. Christie’s is at 38/56 according to a new Quinnipiac poll. Jindal was at 27/63 in a March poll, and with a frightful state budget situation, it looks as though he hasn’t hit bottom. And the otherwise high-flying Scott Walker’s popularity in Wisconsin has recently hit a very bad patch, with the famously objective Marquette Law School poll just last week showing him at 41/56, and worse yet, trailing Hillary Clinton by double digits. Walker’s most recent budget is also getting panned by big majorities of Wisconsin voters. This is a particularly unfortunate development for a candidate whose entire “electability” argument is based on his popularity in Wisconsin, a state that Obama has carried twice but Walker has won three times (in lower-turnout nonpresidential elections, to be sure).
Rick Perry has left office, but is under indictment for alleged abuses of power as governor. Christie and Walker also have to worry about prosecutorial footsteps, though experts differ on the risk of the hoosegow either faces.
Jeb Bush, for whom the statute of limitations has probably tolled on any violations of law he might have committed, is suffering from some gubernatorial blowback. His Florida rival Marco Rubio is reportedly setting up a superPAC to be lavishly funded by a billionaire who is still angry about a 2004 Bush veto of an appropriation to benefit a cancer research project set up in his sister-in-law’s name.
We already know from what they did to him in 2008 that Mike Huckabee’s nemesis, the Club for Growth (or as he has called it, the “Club for Greed”) is undoubtedly waiting in the weeds with another recitation of his tax-raising behavior as Arkansas governor.
And then there’s Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a might-have-been presidential candidate whose national viability was atomized almost overnight by his clumsy handling of a “religious liberty” bill, which wound up offending just about everybody while making him look like a deer in the culture-war headlights.
The exception to the rule that gubernatorial service has been at least a mixed blessing in the GOP field is the barely-visible John Kasich of Ohio, but even in his case gubernatorial duties have caused him to mosey up to the starting gate of a potential presidential candidacy with an unimpressive lack of dispatch or focus.
(Perhaps the gubernatorial sins of Jim Gilmore and George Pataki will come back to haunt them if anyone notices their presence on the campaign trail. For now they are operating safely under the radar screen.)
Even on the Democratic side, Martin O’Malley’s two terms as governor of Maryland have become an unexpected millstone in a possible presidential run, as his tax policies have drawn some blame for the shocking November 2014 loss by his intended successor, Anthony Brown.

All in all, it’s not that bad to be one of those despised Washingtonians in 2016. I’m reasonably sure Bobby Jindal wishes he had never returned to Louisiana to run for governor.


Mythbusting: No, Governors Aren’t Always Better Presidential Candidates

We’re far enough into the 2016 election cycle to hear the sound of a few myths exploding. A notable one is the idea that governors are inherently better presidential candidates. I took a jaundiced look at that one at TPMCafe this week:

This ancient trope is based partly on statistics, notes Five Thirty Eight‘s Nate Silver:

Throughout American history, about twice as many governors as senators have been chosen to be standard bearers by the major parties, even though at any given moment there are only half as many sitting governors as sitting senators.

Statistics aside, it’s plausible that executives are a more natural fit for Chief Executive than career legislators. And in an era of raging anti-Washington sentiment, it makes sense that a record free of complicity with the federal government’s deeds and misdeeds could be an advantage.
All these factors were supposed to make the rich bumper crop of GOP governors and former governors in the field this year the collective frontrunners. But in case after case, their records back home are undermining their credibility or even threatening their freedom.
Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal are both suffering from calamitously bad approval ratings in the states they govern. Christie’s is at 38/56 according to a new Quinnipiac poll. Jindal was at 27/63 in a March poll, and with a frightful state budget situation, it looks as though he hasn’t hit bottom. And the otherwise high-flying Scott Walker’s popularity in Wisconsin has recently hit a very bad patch, with the famously objective Marquette Law School poll just last week showing him at 41/56, and worse yet, trailing Hillary Clinton by double digits. Walker’s most recent budget is also getting panned by big majorities of Wisconsin voters. This is a particularly unfortunate development for a candidate whose entire “electability” argument is based on his popularity in Wisconsin, a state that Obama has carried twice but Walker has won three times (in lower-turnout nonpresidential elections, to be sure).
Rick Perry has left office, but is under indictment for alleged abuses of power as governor. Christie and Walker also have to worry about prosecutorial footsteps, though experts differ on the risk of the hoosegow either faces.
Jeb Bush, for whom the statute of limitations has probably tolled on any violations of law he might have committed, is suffering from some gubernatorial blowback. His Florida rival Marco Rubio is reportedly setting up a superPAC to be lavishly funded by a billionaire who is still angry about a 2004 Bush veto of an appropriation to benefit a cancer research project set up in his sister-in-law’s name.
We already know from what they did to him in 2008 that Mike Huckabee’s nemesis, the Club for Growth (or as he has called it, the “Club for Greed”) is undoubtedly waiting in the weeds with another recitation of his tax-raising behavior as Arkansas governor.
And then there’s Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a might-have-been presidential candidate whose national viability was atomized almost overnight by his clumsy handling of a “religious liberty” bill, which wound up offending just about everybody while making him look like a deer in the culture-war headlights.
The exception to the rule that gubernatorial service has been at least a mixed blessing in the GOP field is the barely-visible John Kasich of Ohio, but even in his case gubernatorial duties have caused him to mosey up to the starting gate of a potential presidential candidacy with an unimpressive lack of dispatch or focus.
(Perhaps the gubernatorial sins of Jim Gilmore and George Pataki will come back to haunt them if anyone notices their presence on the campaign trail. For now they are operating safely under the radar screen.)
Even on the Democratic side, Martin O’Malley’s two terms as governor of Maryland have become an unexpected millstone in a possible presidential run, as his tax policies have drawn some blame for the shocking November 2014 loss by his intended successor, Anthony Brown.

All in all, it’s not that bad to be one of those despised Washingtonians in 2016. I’m reasonably sure Bobby Jindal wishes he had never returned to Louisiana to run for governor.


Political Strategy Notes

Jonathan Bernstein explains “Why Clinton is pushing campaign-money reform” in his Bloomberg syndicated column: “Campaign-finance reform is a safe subject. It’s hard to see how events will make current talking points on it look silly or embarrassing in the future. Restricting money in politics is broadly popular (especially with a lot reporters and their editors), even if it isn’t something that will sway a lot of votes in the general election next year.”
Amy B. Dean, a fellow of the Century Foundation, rolls out a compelling argument that “Democrats must have a concrete plan to empower workers.”
At The NYT Noam Scheiber reports that “Democrats Are Rallying Around $12 Wage Floor.” Scheiber elaborates: “A January 2014 poll by the Pew Research Center showed that 73 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Republicans, supported raising the minimum wage to $10.10…”In a deeply polarized country, the minimum wage is one of a small handful of issues that gets broad bipartisan support,” wrote Daniel H. Pfeiffer, who until recently was a senior adviser to President Obama, in an email in response to questions. “The Republican problem of opposing the minimum wage grows much worse when paired with their support of tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations. The 30-second ad writes itself.”
Nate Silver addresses an interesting, if way-too-early question “Is Bush Doomed In The General? (Or: A Lesson In Conditional Probability).”
At Vox Ezra Klein argues that “Raising Social Security’s retirement age is a disaster for the poor.” Klein says “A 2012 Pew poll found that 56 percent of Americans opposed even gradually raising the Social Security retirement age — more than opposed cutting military spending, or increasing taxes, or reducing Medicare benefits for richer seniors. In 2014, the National Academy of Social Insurance performed an even more detailed survey and found that 75 percent of Americans opposed raising the retirement age to 70. Hell, even self-identified Tea Partiers would prefer to raise taxes than raise the Social Security retirement age.”
At Sabato’s Crystal Ball Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven Webster explore “the Republican lock on the House.”
Despite mounting incidents of police abuse of African American citizens, Nick Wing reports that “Most Americans Still Have Faith In The Police.” Says Wing: “White Americans were more likely to support the police, with 67 percent indicating some level of trust in their local police and 63 percent saying the same for police nationwide. Black Americans expressed considerably less support, with 36 percent indicating some level of trust in their local police and only 27 percent saying the same for police nationwide.”
National Journal’s Karen Bruggerman’s probes whether “Is Virginia Becoming a Liberal State? Some Democrats Are Betting on It.”
Yes, that’s the spirit! Let the GOP’s demolition derby begin. But I have a feeling that this is not going to end well for Paul the younger.