The headline in Stephen Deere’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, “High voter turnout in Ferguson adds two black council members, for three total,” heralds good news. The lede notes, “For the first time in Ferguson’s 120-year history, the City Council will have three African-American members…”
But the article also notes “Perhaps the most significant aspect of the results for Ferguson City Council was that 30 percent of the city’s 12,738 registered voters cast ballots — more than double the typical turnout.” We are so accustomed to low turnouts in non-presidential elections that 30 percent in this context is good news, even though about two-thirds of those eligible to vote in Ferguson are African Americans.
The article goes on to add that two protest candidates supported by activist groups lost, and thunderstorms may have reduced turnout. Call it a qualified victory for activists, but at least the turnout trend is in the right direction.
After all of the protests, marches and rallies and all of the speeches have been made, it is increasing turnout of African American voters that offers the best hope for ending bias and abuse in law enforcement in Ferguson, North Charleston — and across the U.S. Yesterday’s election in Ferguson is a good start. May it inspire African American communities nationwide to energize their voter registration, education and turnout efforts.
In another important Tuesday election, Mitch Smith reports at The New York Times that Wisconsin voters rejected a conservative candidate in favor of the more liberal incumbent, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley. But they also approved a constitutional amendment that gives the states Supreme Court justices the power to elect the chief Justice, who has been chosen by seniority. This will likely lead to a conservative chief justice replacing the current liberal CJ, Shirley Abrahamson.

The following report is cross-posted from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research:
A recent nationwide survey shows that a majority of Americans worry about paying for retirement, affording health care, and losing their job. Retirement raises the most concern, as more than 60 percent of Democrats, independents, and Republicans are concerned about having enough money to retire or having Social Security available throughout their retirement. On all measures of economic security, women and those without a college education are the most concerned.
The following are key findings from a survey of 1010 Americans nationwide.[1] The survey, part of the ORC International Omnibus, was conducted for the Institute for Communitarian Policy Study, part of The George Washington University. Its director, sociologist Amitai Etzioni, stated that the findings of the study “support our hypothesis that the majority of Americans have a wide spread sense of economic insecurity.” He added that “it seems that no political party is addressing this issue directly.” His institute is about to issue a list of steps that seeks to address this wide spread anxiety. He can be reached at 202 460 3446 or etzioni@gwu.edu.

• Retirement raises fears among most Americans, even young people. Americans are skeptical about their ability to retire, or that Social Security will be around to help. This fear spans every demographic group, with 66 percent of those under 50 (and even 59 percent of those under 30) worried about having enough money to retire.
• Women of every demographic are more worried about their economic security than men. The gender gap is significant: on nearly every measure, by double digits, women are more concerned than men about affording retirement, paying bills, losing their jobs, and affording health care. For example, 62 percent of women worry about the cost of health care compared to 47 percent of men. The exceptions are “losing my home” (only a 6 point difference), and “being able to do the same job in 10 years” where only 33 percent of both men and women are concerned.
• A college education significantly reduces economic fears, but even 40 percent of college graduates worry about having enough money to pay the bills. Americans without a college education are fearful of affording retirement, paying their bills, and losing their jobs and homes. Compared to their college-educated counterparts, they are significantly more concerned about affording health care (41 percent to 60 percent). Yet, even among college-educated Americans, a majority still worries about having enough money to retire.
• Non-white Americans worry more about their economic security compared to white Americans, especially when it comes to losing their homes. Compared to affording retirement, paying for healthcare, and losing their jobs, the fear of losing one’s home ranks slightly lower, with 45 percent of Americans concerned about it. Yet, there is a significant gap between white Americans (41 percent concerned) and African Americans (51 percent) and, notably, Hispanics (61 percent).
• A majority of Americans still worry about affording health care. More than 60 percent of women and Americans without a college degree worry about the cost of health care.

At The Wall St.Journal Laura Meckler notes in “Democrats Rethink Social Security Strategy,” that “The liberals’ argument is that Social Security benefits are meager and that people in retirement need more, not less, money. Some also contend that concerns about the program’s solvency are exaggerated. And inside the Democratic Party, that argument is gaining traction. Legislation increasing benefits, and boosting payroll taxes to cover the cost, now has 58 co-sponsors in the House.”
Re legislation giving lawmakers the final say over any nuclear agreement with Iran, Burgess Everett writes at Politico, “Many Democrats are demanding that the measure be amended so it doesn’t kill the deal before it can be finalized by a June 30 deadline. So the onus is on Republicans to work with Democrats — particularly if they want to assemble a 67-vote veto-proof majority — although it’s not clear exactly what legislative changes would preserve the complex and still-evolving agreement.”
“What mainly matters is income growth immediately before the election. And I mean immediately: We’re talking about something less than a year, maybe less than half a year.” — from Paul Krugman’s NYT column on “Economics and Elections.” Krugman mulls over some possible reforms and concludes that there is really no short cut to a better-informed electorate, which requires both improved reporting and a more alert electorate.
All of the caveats about an election 19 months away notwithstanding, Deirdre Shesgreen’s report on a new Quinnipiac poll showing broad-based strength for former Governor Ted Strickland offers well-grounded hope that Dems can pick up a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio.
Here’s hoping Wisconsinites aren’t too distracted by the big March madness upset over KY and making it to the Big Dance, because they have a hugely important election tomorrow. Mitch Smith’s “Wisconsin Supreme Court Election Raises Concerns About Partisanship” at The New York Times reports that out-of-state money has been pouring in to the state to force a hard right turn on the WI high court.
In another potentially transformative election tomorrow, watch Ferguson, MO for an object demonstration of the power of increasing African American voter turnout. A political earthquake in Ferguson just might reverberate elsewhere. Lauren Victoria Burke sets the stage at The Root.
Amrita Jayakumar explains how “Technology aims to improve the voting experience” in her WaPo syndicated article. There’s a lot of room for improvement, considering that only 21 states provide on-line registration.
Davide Weigels’ Bloomberg post “Rand Paul and the GOP’s New Civil Rights Movement” reviews the skepticism about Paul’s and the GOP’s outreach to African American voters with respect to criminal justice reform. I’m thinking Paul is trying to fog over his opposition to the Civil Right Act of 1964 and his father’s racist newsletter.
Jonathan Chait has an amusing goof on conservatives’ tortured conflating of the debates about the Iran nuclear program agreement and Indiana’s LGBT discrimination dust-up. Teaser: “Both places begin with “I,” and are in the news, and have leaders who care about religion. It’s basically the same thing.”

With today’s announcement by the president (carried live in Iran, BTW) of a “framework” for a deal on Iran’s nuclear program, to be completed by the end of June, we’ll hear an acceleration of cries from Republicans to kill the deal in its cradle, and actual promises from GOP presidential wannabes that they will not honor it if elected.
It’s time for Democrats to go on the offensive, as I argued at the Washington Monthly today:

For those who, like Scott Walker, are already promising to blow up such an agreement on his first day in office, it’s time, as Greg [Sargent] suggests, to ask him what he plans to do about the blowback from our European allies, who, after all, are full participants in the negotiations and will not look kindly on a key signatory cutting and running.
Beyond that, what do the critics think we should do? Seek a different, tougher agreement with different goals (e.g., an Iran with no nuclear capacity at all)? This would almost certainly require that the U.S. go it alone diplomatically. Or are the Scott Walkers of the world ready to follow John Bolton into outfront advocacy of war with Iran? And if that’s the case, where does that leave the fight against IS, which a lot of the same people are anxious to expand as well? Who’s going to replace Iran and its client Iraqi Shia militia in that battle? US troops? Guess we just need to nuke Iran while we are at it, since there are just not enough available boots to put on the ground in both places. Or I guess we could bring back conscription. It’s hard to say, until the critics stop second-guessing Obama and the others negotiating with Iran, and start proving they’ve thought this through beyond tomorrow afternoon.

The sense of outrage Democrats had when Republican senators wrote an open letter to Tehran warning there was no point in negotiating needs to be revived. We’ll need it in the weeks just ahead.

From “Voter turnout during 2014 midterm elections ‘especially low among Latinos’” by Nicole Rojas of International Business Times: “Latino Decisions’ Matt Barreto points to data from the state of Florida as particularly crucial. Florida had a 50.5% state-wide voter turnout but only a 36.5% Latino voter turnout. According to Barreto, if Latino voter turnout had matched state-wide voter turnou, an additional 276,000 Latino votes would have been cast…”Given the Florida governor’s election was decided by just 64,000 votes, those additional 276,000 Latino votes could have proved critical,” Barreto wrote…All states where complete data was available showed a significantly lower Latino voter turnout than overall turnout.”
Paul Waldman explains at the Plum Line “Mike Pence just handed gay Hoosiers and liberals a significant victory,” noting: “Up until now, Pence has been saying that the law was not intended to give businesses in Indiana the right to discriminate against gay people. Now he’s saying that he wants to put that explicitly within the law itself. That’s a huge win for gay people who don’t want to be discriminated against, and makes it more likely that the next state that passes a law like this one — and there are similar bills pending in multiple states — will include a similar clarification.”
NYT’s Jennifer Steinhauer explains how “Rights Measures Expose Divisions in G.O.P.’s Ranks.” She quotes Michael D. Tanner a senior at the Cato Institute: “”There is no doubt that the continued opposition of gay rights is an electoral loser,” he added. “Younger Republicans are as pro-life as older Republicans, but gay rights is a huge generational shift and Republicans are going to have to find a way to deal with that issue.” Steinhauer adds “Now, 52 percent of Americans support gay marriage, according to a Pew Research Center poll, compared with 40 percent who oppose it; in 2001, Americans opposed it by a 57 percent to 35 percent margin in the same poll.”
In her article, “State GOP strategy makes them sound like Democrats,” Sandra Chereb of the Las Vegas Review Journal illuminates Republican strategy in the NV legislature — in a state where Dems have a 62,000 edge in registered voters.
President Obama’s “economic approval rating” is now in “net positive territory,” with an impressive increase among self-described “independents,” explain Dan Balz and Peyton Craighill at the Washington Post. “Obama’s approval rating today is 11 points higher among independents than it was last October and his economic approval is 15 points higher.”
Kali Holloway’s “WATCH: 10 of the Most Fear-Mongering Political Ads in Recent History” at Alternet discusses the psychology behind some of the worst offenders — and why they worked.
At Sabato’s Crystal Ball Kyle Kondik notes a slight tilt favoring Democratic candidates for Governor in IN and MO in 2016. At this point Kondik sees only two toss-ups of 15 governor’s races, MO and WV. He rates 3 states “Safe R,” vs. none safe for Dems. But Dems have an edge with 4 states “Leans D,” compared to 2 states “Leans R.”
National Journal’s Alex Roarty reports that Republican U.S. Sen. Richard Burr, “one of the Senate’s most vulnerable members in 2016,” is pegging his re-election hopes on foreign policy concerns — which pleases Democrats who believe the economy is still the overriding concern of swing voters.
At Roll Call Emily Cahn adds “The most vulnerable include Sens. Mark S. Kirk of Illinois, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, who are running in states President Barack Obama carried by at least 5 points in 2012.” Also at Roll call, Alexis Levinson and Niels Lesniewski note “Of the 34 senators up for re-election in 2016, 24 are Republicans, several in highly competitive swing states. Just two Democratic incumbents are running in competitive states. Democrats need a net gain of five seats to secure the majority.

One of the memes we are now hearing is that progressives are being churlish and perhaps even self-destructive in resisting “religious liberty” statutes like those enacted last week in Indiana because, after all, they represent a face-saving device, or even “terms of surrender,” for the Christian Right. I addressed that seductive but misleading argument at some length today at the Washington Monthly:

If you want a good example of what cultural conservatives are telling themselves about the backlash over Indiana’s… “religious liberty” law, there’s none better than the pity party Timothy Carney held at the Washington Examiner yesterday afternoon:

[O]ur culture is speeding down the icy Left slope of the cultural mountain, and a few conservatives are now dragging their hands on the ice to slow the acceleration — and the Left is crying that this will send us catapulting back uphill.
Religious liberty is the terms of surrender the Right is requesting in the culture war. It is conservative America saying to the cultural and political elites, you have your gay marriage, your no-fault divorce, your obscene music and television, your indoctrinating public schools and your abortion-on-demand. May we please be allowed to not participate in these?

I don’t know if actual tears were falling on the keyboard as Carney typed this column, but he certainly wants to give the impression that he speaks for a poor, persecuted minority that has no interest in controlling anybody’s behavior but its own.
Which is, of course, complete hooey.
Yes, conservatives have little choice but to accept legal and political setbacks over marriage equality, but they’re making it as clear as ever that given the opportunity they’d reverse those trends, ban gay marriage all over again and probably bring back the sodomy laws to boot. Look at the huge field of Republican proto-candidates for president. Do any of them actually support marriage equality? Sure, they’ll not talk about it or mumble about it being a state matter or engage in various other evasions, but they’re a long way from “surrendering.” And that’s even more obvious on the abortion issue where (a) the only meaningful difference among 99% of Republican politicians is about whether 99% or 100% of abortions should be banned; (b) Republican controlled state governments are beavering away at new restrictions that strike mainly at the availability of any abortion services; and (c) the right to choose hangs by a thread in a Supreme Court that any Republican President would be lynched for failing to tilt with his or her next appointment into a reversal of Roe v. Wade.
All this weepy talk of being attacked while trying to surrender also misses the even more obvious point that conservatives are hardly impotent politically; they do sorta control Congress and a majority of states.
So no, there’s no real “surrender” going on here, and Lord knows conservatives aren’t withdrawing from political combat; otherwise Carney would have punctuated his long whine by quitting his job. What they are doing is better understood as a strategic retreat: unable to outlaw or (increasingly) even to stigmatize gay behavior as a matter of law, they’re working to protect private discrimination. It’s what a big part of their constituency expects of them, and it’s the obvious next front–not some sort of Appomattox–in the culture wars.

As it happens, it may not even be necessary for Democrats to stiffen their own spines on this subject, since Republicans are drawing friendly fire from their corporate allies on “religious liberty” laws that just aren’t good for business. But don’t cease fire until you see the whites of their flags for real.

Derek Willis’s “The House Democrats Who Are Voting With Republicans More Often” at The Upshot can be read as an update on party unity. Among Willis’s observations:

A small group of House Democrats has begun moving to the right in the current Congress, breaking from a majority of colleagues on votes that pit lawmakers from liberal areas against those from more rural and conservative districts.
The lure of a Senate seat, which in many cases requires shifting from a narrower ideological focus to a broader one, and the threat of a well-funded challenger are among the reasons for this this shift.
A few members of this group, which numbers fewer than a dozen, are congressional veterans like Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who survived a tough challenge in 2014 and is voting with a majority of his fellow Democrats 64 percent of the time, down slightly from the previous Congress.

What is most striking here is that “fewer than a dozen” is a pretty small faction. Take it as either a reassuring affirmation that Democratic Party unity is fairly impressive in 2015, or alternatively that there is a need for more healthy dissent within party ranks. Willis cites slipping party unity scores for them in recent years, though not dramatically in most cases.
Party disagreements among Democrats tend to be between moderates and liberals, while Republican bickering seems to be more between right-wingers and the extreme, fever-swamp types in the GOP, exacerbated no doubt by the size of the GOP presidential field. The “thunder” on the right seems increasingly shrill in comparison to internal debates within the Democratic Party.
The Dems identified by Willis disagree with their party over a few key issues, such as the Keystone XL pipeline, but Willis reports that “there are limits to their willingness to cross party lines. No Democrats voted for full [ACA] repeal in February, and none voted for the Republican-written budget that also repeals the law.” Most of the new House blue dogs identified by Willis come from the far west.
In terms of percentages, the numbers seem more or less in line with the percent of Senate Democrats who occasionally stray from the fold in key votes. Also noteworthy is the tame tone of their dissents with the majority of the Party, common to dissenters in both houses.
All in all, at this political moment Democrats are more unified than is usually the case, and unlike Republicans, they are not bitterly riven about a host of social and cultural issues. Hillary Clinton’s unusually high popularity in opinion polls may be more a reflection of Democratic unity on issues, despite a significant percentage of Democrats who prefer Elizabeth Warren and other candidates. At this juncture it seems a safe bet that an overwhelming percentage of Democrats will rally behind the presidential nominee, whoever it may be, and the positive effects will also be felt down ballot.