The Confederate battle flag flying at The South Carolina state capitol, even after the mass murders of African American worshippers by a racist who proudly displayed the same flag, has created a political mess for Republicans.
In the past, Republicans felt they could get away with supporting the flying of the confederate battle flag, or equivocating on the issue. And get away with it they did, with the sole exception of GOP 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who took a stand against flying the flag.
But that has now changed as a result of revelations about the shooter, and his embrace of the flag, which has all but cemented its identity as a symbol of racist violence. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has joined with the speaker of the SC state assembly in calling for the removal of the flag from the capitol, and now other Republicans, including GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson are finally beginning to follow suit.
Of course the battle flag was always a symbol of the pro-slavery armies of the confederacy. But many white southerners saw it as more a symbol of their heritage, in non-racist terms. Southern racists manipulated the sentiment to keep it in the public’s face. Worse, few if any of the flag’s defenders protested against the adoption of the flag as a preeminent symbol by the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups. Their utter failure to do so further discredited the argument that it was a non-racist “cultural” symbol.
No doubt many of the less-educated southern ground troops who died under the flag in Civil War battles saw themselves as protecting their homeland against northern invaders, more than defending slavery. But no credible historians deny that the slaveholding landowners, slave-traders and commanding officers of the Confederacy understood that their core mission was to protect the institution of slavery.
In the 1960s, segregationists made the Confederate battle flag a symbol of their cause, joined by the Ku Klux Klan, the slightly less blatant white citizens councils and other hate groups. You had to be in denial after the 1960s to say that the Confederate battle flag was not a symbol of racial injustice.
Civil Rights advocates had some success in getting the battle flag emblem removed from the Georgia state flag, but it still occupies a corner of the Mississippi state banner. Republicans were able to politically navigate the troubled waters of the flag controversy in the south with the calculation that the votes they got from pro-flag southern whites offset those they lost from southern African Americans, whose collective votes they were able to shrink with a range of suppression tactics.
Republican Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas joined with liberal members of the court to uphold a Texas ruling keeping the flag logo off state license plates, but Georgia still allows the symbol on license plates. Since it has been revealed that Dylann Roof was influenced by the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, Republicans have begun backing away from the group. As Michael Wines and Lizette Alvarez report at the New York Times:

Since it rose in the 1980s from the ashes of the old and unabashedly racist White Citizens’ Councils, the Council of Conservative Citizens has drifted in and out of notoriety. But it is clearly back in: Last weekend, three Republican presidential candidates — Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky — announced that they were returning or giving away donations from the council’s president, Earl Holt III.

Senator Paul continues to equivocate when confronted about his views of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his father’s former newsletter, which parroted racist stereotypes. Republicans still glorify President Reagan who pandered shamelessly to racists.
But we have now reached the point where a critical mass of Americans is repulsed by the flag. That’s why the nation’s largest retailer, Walmart has decided to stop selling merch with the battle flag’s starred cross bar emblem.
It would be good for America if the Confederate battle flag becomes a museum piece, instead of a taxpayer-supported symbol intended to offend Americans of color, who have long been victimized by hate groups. The flag will continue to fly here and there and be seen on bumper stickers and other private property. But Republican leaders are now backing away from it as a symbol that should be tolerated on public property — at least for a while.
I expect that Republicans will continue to play the race card, perhaps in less blatant ways. They still have a southern strategy which includes pandering to racial prejudice. It’s just going to be a little less overt. Sad that it took such a horrific tragedy to move the GOP in a less offensive direction.

In his National Journal post ‘Dear Democrats: Populism Will Not Save You,” John B. Judis writes, “I fear that the new populist approach is based on several assumptions–about the economy and the electorate–that are feeding false hopes of success…While incomes and wealth at the very top have soared, and while people at the bottom of the economic ladder–many of whom have only high school degrees or less–are indeed threatened with falling incomes and joblessness, middle America is not dying or disappearing…One problem with predicting more lasting majorities based on demographics is that opposition parties can adjust. Republican successes in 2014 were not just the result of low turnout among young voters and minorities. They were also the result of GOP candidates moving to the center to defuse criticism from their Democratic opponents.”
“Political insiders” of both major parties agree, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk is the most vulnerable incumbent U.S. Senator running in 2016.
Mark Murray notes at NBC News: “American voters say their top concerns about the upcoming presidential election are wealthy individuals and corporations who might have too much influence who over wins, as well as campaigns that spend more time on negative attacks than proposing solutions, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll…Thirty-three percent of voters say the influence of wealthy individuals and corporations is their top concern, while 25 percent say they’re more worried about negative attacks.”
At Business Insider Maxwell Tani explains why Hillary Clinton’s prioritizing voting rights could be good strategy: “A new poll released by Public Policy Polling on Friday shows that her focus on the issue may prove politically popular in 2016 among more than just Democrats. Automatic voter registration, something Clinton proposed earlier this month, enjoys relatively strong support, with 48% approving and 38% disapproving, according to the PPP poll.”
Among the reasons why the political polling industry is struggling, according to Cliff Zukin, past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, writing in The New York Times: “Political polling has gotten less accurate…and it’s not going to be fixed in time for 2016. We’ll have to go through a period of experimentation to see what works, and how to better hit a moving target…Those paying close attention to the 2016 election should exercise caution as they read the polls. Because of the high cost, the difficulty in locating the small number of voters who will actually turn out in primaries and the increasing reliance on non-probability Internet polls, you are likely to see a lot of conflicting numbers. To make matters still worse, the cellphone problem is more acute in states than it is at the national level, because area codes and exchanges often no longer respect state or congressional boundaries.”
Brendan Farrington reports at The Florida Sun-Sentinel on Democratic prospects for winning the Senate seat of Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, complicated by the possible “spoiler” role of Rep. Alan Grayson.
Current Republican presidential candidates are all evading the confederate flag issue in the wake of the Charleston massacre. But not all white southerners agree with them: “We ought to celebrate family members we love, the kindness of people in South, the land, the culture, the food, the music born there that has changed the world — and a Civil Rights struggle that did, too. There are so many things to be proud of that it strains credibility to believe we need a flag — one which hurts and offends others — in order to appreciate our heritage…The Confederacy was an attempt to create a slave-holding empire throughout the Western hemisphere…South Carolina did not fly the flag of this failed rebellion outside their State House until 1961, when its revival was less about regional patriotism than resistance to the Federal Government’s advancement of civil rights.” — from HuffPo’s “Pride in Southern Heritage Does Not Require the Confederate Flag — In Fact, It’s Now an Obstacle” by Paul Kendrick, a white southerner and author of Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader & a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery & Save the Union.
Heather Digby Parton nails “Rand Paul’s libertartian hypocrisy” on racial justice issues and now the confederate flag as emblematic of the GOP’s “rank cowardice at best and pandering to racists at worst” — with the exception of Mitt Romney, who alone among Republicans calls for the removal of the confederate flag from state houses. “For all of Rand Paul’s alleged independence,” notes Parton, “when the chips are down he can’t even match Mitt Romney’s courage and integrity. And that’s really saying something.”
Eric Lichtblau reports at The New York Times: “The leader of a white supremacist group that has been linked to Dylann Roof, the suspect in the murder of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns, including those of 2016 presidential contenders such as Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Rand Paul, records show.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, albeit officially (and for a very long time) an Independent, is a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, and votes with Democrats most of the time. Still, his Independent self-ID could create some problems for him on the presidential campaign trail, as I discussed today at Washington Monthly.

In what I assume is a moment of mischief, former NH Republican congressman Charlie Bass has penned a WaPo op-ed suggesting that Bernie Sanders’ robust poll numbers in NH may not matter because he will not be elgible to run for president in the Granite State as a Democrat. Here’s the logic:

[S]tate law makes clear that candidates must be registered members of the party on whose ballot line they wish to appear.
This is a problem for Sanders, who is not a registered Democrat. One might ask why the good senator can’t simply change his registration in his home state from socialist or independent to Democrat. The answer is that Vermont doesn’t have a party registration system, so he can’t. Similar issues arose with the candidacies of Al Gore and both George H.W. and George W. Bush because, like Vermont, Tennessee and Texas do not register voters by party. But Gore and the Bushes qualified for New Hampshire’s primary ballots because they could show that they had previously appeared on ballots as a Democrat and Republicans, respectively. In his last election, Sanders likewise won the Democratic primary in Vermont, but he declined the nomination and asked that his name not appear on the general election ballot as a Democrat.
In short, Sanders is not a Democrat, has not been elected as a Democrat, has never served as a Democrat and cannot plausibly claim, at least in New Hampshire, to be a Democrat.

According to Bass, a State Ballot Law Commission would rule on any challenge to Sanders’ ballot access, and he thinks it would be compelled to exclude Bernie. Presumably the courts could offer a way around the Commission; I’m not sure what the legal or constitutional rationale would be, but it would be a mite strange to hold that an independent could not contest a primary in which independent voters are allowed to participate. And even if Bernie was to be excluded, he could always run a write-in campaign (which have been known to succeed in NH, viz. Henry Cabot Lodge in 1964).
Whether or not Bass is pointing to a real problem in NH, it is a reminder that there could be issues for Sanders elsewhere, particularly in closed primary and caucus states deemed legally to be open only to registered Democrats. It would be a bit ironic if the candidate of people who view themselves as representing the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” wasn’t Democratic enough to get on the ballot.

In any event, the much-discussed advantages of calling oneself an “Independent” might have some consequences.

In the wake of the Charleston tragedy, The Fix’s Aaron Blake seems surprised that political divisions about gun control would come into play so fast. He notes that Republicans like Gov. Nikki Haley in South Carolina failed to applaud at a vigil, when SC’s House speaker called for new gun control reforms. What’s everyone supposed to do — pretend that it’s not a public concern for the sake of bipartisan kumbaya to let Republicans off the hook for their “guns everywhere” lunacy? Maybe Blake should look at the June, 2014 Quinnipiac poll, which indicated that 50 percent of respondents “support stricter gun control laws in the United States” and 92 percent want “background checks for all gun-buyers,” while 89 percent support “laws to prevent people with mental illness from purchasing guns.”
Further in PPP’s February SC poll, “There is 76/14 support for a law preventing domestic abusers from buying guns and 64/24 support for one making those people turn in any guns they currently own. In addition to overwhelming support from Democrats and independents, majorities of Republicans (71/17 and 54/31 respectively) support each of those measures as well. There’s also a strong consensus among voters in the state (61/27) that guns should not be allowed on college campuses.” — from Public Policy Polling, via Hunter’s “South Carolina residents want tougher gun restrictions” at Daily Kos.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has a moving NYT op-ed profile of SC state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, who was slain in the Charleston shootings, as a Democratic leader of impressive character, nobility and promise.
Good to see a Democratic presidential candidate making pension reform a leading issue.
Also at The Fix, Chris Cillizza reports on a new Gallup Poll indicating that “Democrats are more liberal today than at any point in the last 15 years.”
The headline for Phillip Rucker’s WaPo post “Latino leaders held a convention, but only one Republican candidate came” says it well. Turns out only Ben Carson of 16 or so declared/likely GOP presidential candidates cared enough to show up at the 32nd annual convention of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO).
Michael Tomasky explains “How Liberals Can Save Obamacare”
WaPo Republican columnist David Gerson worries that Trump’s candidacy will galvanize anti-establishment populism into “Ceasarism.” I worry more that Trump, as an inadvertent red herring, will suck up all the ridicule away from gaffe-prone candidates like Huckabee, Paul, Perry, Cruz and others, who may end up looking sane in comparison.
Matt Latimer opines at Politico, “Seven Reasons the GOP Should Fear Donald Trump
He’s a nuisance, a hothead and totally unqualified. But that’s what they said about Ross Perot.” From Latimer’s #5. “Voters Like Crazy – Speaking of Perot, this was a man who once claimed Cuban assassins had been sent to kill him. A man who dropped out of the presidential race, before dropping back in, because of an alleged Republican “plot” he uncovered to disrupt his daughter’s wedding. He picked as his running mate a totally unprepared candidate who at one point in the vice presidential debate confessed that his hearing aid wasn’t working. His campaign theme song was-and this is no joke-Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” And yet H. Ross Perot was at one point the frontrunner for the presidency and still, after finding himself immersed in plotlines that would be rejected as too far-fetched for “American Horror Story,” managed 19 percent of the popular vote. In other words, one out of five Americans thought he wasn’t too crazy to be president.”

At New York magazine’s National Interest, Jonathan Chait cuts through the fog and challenges his readers to get real and face the central issue of the 2016 campaign, which is being largely ignored by our easily-distracted media. As Chait explains:

In her official presidential campaign announcement speech, Hillary Clinton endorsed a bevy of liberal policy initiatives: She would reform the tax code, increase public investment in research, help communities transitioning to cleaner energy sources, establish an infrastructure bank, make preschool and child care universally available, increase college affordability, expand leave time for illness and family needs, raise the minimum wage, ban discrimination against gay people, reform campaign finance, and create automatic voter registration.
Clinton’s campaign rollout has taken shape amidst a fervent struggle to define the ideological character of her platform. Is it timid and cautious, as some liberals charge? Radically progressive, as some of her critics claim? For the purposes of evaluating a prospective Clinton presidency, this is all beside the point, because the number of these proposals she will sign into law hovers around zero.

Barring a blue wave election, Dems are going to have a tough struggle winning back the senate, Chait observes, and have no real chance of taking back the house. What the Democratic nominee must do is defeat an extremely serious threat that is getting overlooked by the candidate-focused reportage:

The presidential election carries hugely important stakes, not just in policy realms where the president wields significant influence on her own, like foreign policy and judicial appointments, but also on domestic policy. It’s just that the stakes have nothing to do with Clinton’s proposals. What’s at stake is the Paul Ryan budget.
The influential Republican activist Grover Norquist explained this in 2012:
We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. … We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate. …Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.

Norquist, Rove and other top GOP strategists don’t much care which of their candidates gets to the white house, as long as he/she has a pulse and “enough working digits to handle a pen.” No matter which Republican gets elected president, Ryan’s budget will define the quality of life for millions of people under Republican rule. That’s what 2016 is about.
Further, adds Chait:

Jeb Bush has already endorsed the Ryan budget. Marco Rubio has voted for it and said, “by and large, it’s exactly the direction we should be headed.” The other candidates have positioned themselves to their right. Now, it is true that some prospective Republican presidents might insist on some change or another in the details of the Ryan plan. The Ryan plan itself has a lot of wiggle room due to the simple fact that it lacks detail. But the overall thrust is perfectly clear: deep cuts in marginal tax rates along with large reductions in means-tested spending, and a deregulation of the energy and financial industries. Its enactment would amount to the most dramatic rollback of government since the New Deal. Its enormous implications have simply been forgotten because the political world’s attention has moved on.

Don’t expect the media to bring much attention to this sobering reality. As Chait explains, “News coverage has oddly failed to frame this question as the center of the election. Journalists like personal drama, and they prefer to place the candidates and their individual ideas in the center of the portrait. The candidates themselves have every incentive to cooperate in this fiction.”
Chait concludes that “Clinton needs badly to inspire base voters” and “she can’t very well promise gridlock.” However “running mainly to veto Republican legislation is a powerful and consequential rationale. Whether the candidates will sign or veto the Ryan budget is the most important issue of the campaign.”
Candidates avoid talking much about budget issues with a not entirely unjustified concern about glazing over the eyes of voters. Yet Norquist’s nightmare scenario of minimalist government “drowning the baby in the bathtub,” with the Ryan budget as their opening salvo, is a very real threat — no matter which Republican gets elected. The Democratic nominee, whether Clinton, Sanders, Chafee, Biden or otherwise, who prevents this disaster from happening will have accomplished something extremely important for America’s future.

This post from Jack Metzgar is the ninth contribution to the Washington Monthly/The Democratic Strategist roundtable discussion of Stan Greenberg’s new article on government reform and the white working class from WaMo’s June/July/August issue.
Metzgar is a professor of humanities at Roosevelt University, and a participant in the Chicago Working-Class Studies consortium.
Stan Greenberg is right to focus on “white working-class and downscale voters” as key to a dominant Democratic majority and to advocate a bold progressive economic narrative as a way to attract a larger portion of these voters. But his sketch of such a program is too narrowly focused on the most popular reforms and fails to match the scale of the crisis facing American workers.
The programs Greenberg put “at the heart of” the “middle-class economic narrative” he tested with voters–“assistance with making college and child care affordable and ensuring equal pay for working women,” “tax credits for low-wage workers and the middle class and a promise to protect Medicare and Social Security”–are all both worthwhile and politically attractive. But they are “little helper” programs that promise some relief from economic stagnation and decline, but no fundamental change in direction in economic prospects. The economic narrative they suggest–a version of President Obama’s aim to “help people struggling to get into the middle class”–is thin. Neither “creating jobs” nor “raising wages” make it into the heart of Greenberg’s test program, probably because he thinks that job growth is now “robust.”
Neither job growth nor the economy is anything like robust. The long, painfully slow recovery we are still slogging through comes on the back of decades of erosion and decline in working-class wages, living standards and working conditions. A fundamental change in economic direction is needed. That’s what those big “wrong track” numbers should be telling Democrats. Rather than the current rate of job growth of about 200,000 net new jobs a month, we need at least double that and for a sustained period of time. Any credible program that promises that kind of job creation will get the attention of a wide array of voters, including the white working class. Combine that with a dedicated effort to raise wages, especially but not only at the low end, and Dems can make large inroads into changing their “white working-class problem.” Anything short of that, I fear, and they will also have difficulty turning out their base voters, large patches of whom are all out of whatever audacity of hope they once had.
Fortunately, a much bolder, more thoroughgoing economic vision and program has been articulated by of all people Larry Summers, who arguably speaks for the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party. Summers’ “long-run secular stagnation” thesis argues that the economy has no chance of becoming genuinely healthy without major boosts from government investment to create jobs and increase wages. In a recent report from a commission organized by the Center for American Progress, Summers advocates a large increase in the federal minimum wage, a large increase in infrastructure spending, and a more fair tax system that produces a large amount of new revenue. The key economic concept here is that our outsized inequality of income has so severely weakened worker spending power as to undermine demand and long-term economic growth. The key word for Democratic politicians, however, is “large.”
The value of Summers’ analysis is that anything that increases wages and creates well-paying jobs increases consumer demand, which is what our slow-growing economy needs above all. Likewise, anything that improves the economy’s public infrastructure and human capital improves productivity and U.S. economic competitiveness in the long run. This is a growth narrative that can demolish the Republicans’ empty tropes about “job killers” and “job creators.”
The 10-year infrastructure program that Summers advocates would create 1.1 million jobs a year, heavily tilted toward construction jobs that do not require bachelor’s degrees. That would cost the government about $100 billion a year in increased spending–four times the Obama infrastructure proposal recently rejected by Congressional Republicans. Summers also advocates a residential housing program that would make both rental and owned housing more affordable, while creating additional construction jobs and further stimulating the economy. Likewise, early childhood education and free community college would not only be good for children and young people and improve the economy’s human capital, it would create more jobs, aid in tightening labor markets, and thereby increase wages–all of which would further stimulate our stagnant economy by increasing worker spending power.
So let’s say that to do all these things would cost about $300 billion a year, creating some 2.4 million additional jobs a year–that is, tripling the current average of about 200,000 new jobs a month. How would we pay for such a large increase in government investment spending? It would actually be more stimulative and would create substantially more jobs if the government simply borrowed the money. But besides giving the GOP a “fiscal responsibility” whip to reinitiate the debt-and-deficit debate, borrowing the money would miss the opportunity to right some wrongs in the U.S. tax code.
Summers, like President Obama, attacks some of the most egregious corporate and individual giveaways, but even the ones that are not small are very complicated to explain– like eliminating the “step-up in basis” rule for inherited assets and reforming “earnings stripping” by corporations. These are great things to do “in committee” when you own both the executive and legislative branches. But they are a waste of the precious little explanatory time candidates have to talk taxes during an election campaign.
Where Dems can most clearly differentiate themselves from Republicans is in the economic rationale for using tax hikes on the highest-earning individuals in order to pay for a large government investment in creating jobs. But Dems need to be willing to substantively engage in “class warfare” and to “redistribute” large amounts of money, even if they might understandably want to avoid using those terms.
Both the individual and corporate tax codes are loaded with narrowly targeted and often relatively small special-interest giveaways, but more importantly, the basic structure of the code redistributes money from workers/consumers to investors. In my experience teaching working-class adults, most people do not know that and are incensed when they find out. Here are a few innocent questions I would love to see Democrats asking in 2016: Why do people who work for a living pay higher marginal tax rates than people who gain income from investing? Why do families pay sales tax on meals at McDonald’s, but investors don’t pay sales tax when they buy stocks and bonds? Why do state and local governments tax wealth when it is in the form of real estate, but nobody taxes wealth when it is in the form of financial assets like stocks and bonds?
There are semi-defensible answers to these questions, but they all involve a trickle-down presumption that investors are more important in driving the economy than workers and consumers–a presumption that once may have had a reasonable rationale, but that was long ago when workers had a much larger share of total income than they have now. Such a public discussion about what truly drives the economy and about the classism embedded in the way we tax ourselves would be good for the American soul. But in addition, correcting just the unearned income inequity would produce $160 billion in new revenue annually, and imposing a very small sales tax on the purchase of stocks and bonds would produce another $150 billion every year–more than enough to finance not only a 21st century infrastructure (and the millions of jobs it would take to build it), but early childhood education, free community college, and a lot of other highly popular programs Democrats are associated with. But equally, and possibly more, important is the broad economic principles Dems would have to articulate. Rather than “tax fairness” being one in a list of discrete programs, with “infrastructure investment” another discrete item, the two would be linked to a broader economic narrative of “inclusive prosperity” that would raise wages and living standards for almost everybody.
I can understand why Democratic strategists may be wise to focus on financing their popular spending programs by eliminating or reforming more narrow (and complicated) tax giveaways. They have to raise money for campaigns, after all, and for that they have to go where the money is–the investor class. But if Greenberg is right that “reform of government and the political process is the price of admission with [disenchanted] voters,” then it will be hard to avoid risking a large part of their Wall Street constituency if Dems are to gain a stronger presence among the white working class, let alone give working-class blacks and Latinos a reason to vote despite the obstacles Republicans are putting in their way. In any case, little helper programs won’t do it. Democrats need to think big about jobs and wages–and taxes too.

This post from John Russo is the eighth contribution to the Washington Monthly/The Democratic Strategist roundtable discussion of Stan Greenberg’s new article on government reform and the white working class from WaMo’s June/July/August issue.
Russo is a Visiting Research Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Metropolitan Institute and former Co-director, Center for Working-Class Studies.
The traditionally-defined white working-class and “downscale” voters described by Stan Greenberg have a well-founded disbelief in the Democratic Party. This disbelief has even expanded to include the black working class, which has benefited little from the first African-American Presidency.
The disbelief is based on a history of betrayals of campaign promises and “Republican-lite” economic and social legislation that have undermined working-class support in both the white and black communities. Democrat reforms in the 1990s, such as the Violent Crime and Enforcement Act (VCEA, 1994), the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA, 1996), and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, 1994), resulted in policies that had an immediate and devastating impact on people of color, the white working class, and organized labor. Particularly in regions like the Rustbelt, white working-class support for Democrats has shifted increasingly to Republicans. Michael Lind puts this in an historical context, suggesting that Democrats are now largely “anti-New Deal.”
So we should not be surprised that Greenberg found that predominantly white working-class and downscale voters have been leaving the Democratic Party. But Greenberg also found that the disenchantment with Democrats has increased within other segments of the Party’s core constituency. People are not necessarily voting Republican. More likely, they are not voting at all. For example, in 2014, Ohio had second smallest voter turnout in recent history, with Republican voters over 50 overrepresented. In Democrat strongholds in Northeast Ohio, the turnout was below 40%, and in working-class Youngstown, only 12,000 people voted.
Low turnout is a problem, but I think the Democratic Party has a much bigger problem than Greenberg and other pollsters suggest: the party is losing the support of millennials, a core constituency that doesn’t fit easily into the standard pollster definition of working class. Because such definitions emphasize education, they leave out millennials, many of whom belong to the growing precariat [those whose economic existence is characterized by unpredictability and insecurity along with limited means]. Some have high school degrees, so polls identify them as working class, but many have bachelors’ and advanced degrees, so in polls they count as middle class–even though their earnings and working conditions would put them in the working or poverty class. As more people complete college, while polls continue to identify class by education, it can seem like the working class is shrinking. Some pundits have even argued that Democrats can forget the working class.
In many ways, downscale millennials have a different mistrust problem than do older working-class voters. Millennials probably don’t have either a clear memory of or a strong sense of resistance to the policy betrayals of the older working class. Rather, they have learned from their own experience, especially in the workplace, that government is likely to be of little help, regardless of the political party.
While Greenberg doesn’t provide a clear definition of what he means by “downscale voters,” a recent National Employment Law Report may offer some insight. Currently, 42% of the American workforce makes less than $15/hour. This includes retail and service workers, as well as those in manufacturing where, for example, 50% of autoworkers now make less than $15/hour. In the future, while more people will have college degrees, only one out of four jobs will require a college degree. Of the remaining 75% of the workforce, most will work in the lower wage and benefit sectors of the economy. Perhaps this is why a recent Gallup poll showed that fewer people see themselves as middle class and a growing number of Americans self identify as working and lower class. Guy Standing has identified these workers as part of the precariat, and his research shows that their numbers are growing.
These downscale precariat millennials may not share all of the working class’s same ideas about work and cultural values, they do share many economic security issues. But they deal with those issues differently. In Youngstown, researchers have found that millennials have internalized their insecurity, and they justify their precarious work situations as offering more freedom. Many willingly cobble together multiple contingent jobs, pursue avocations over vocations, lack confidence in institutions, and view their personal relationships as contingent and episodic, like their work relations. This leaves them without a sense of agency, and that in turn has led to a growing depoliticization and lack of hope. As the playwright David Mamet has suggested, freedom is what you believe in when you believe in nothing else. If they want to motivate millennials to vote, Democrats must provide something to believe in.
No doubt, as the formal economy increasingly looks like the informal economy, the precariat millennial constituency will only grow and become an increasingly important part of the electorate. That will require political pundits to rethink definitions of “working class” and the questions they use in polls to identify working-class voters. If Democrats recognized the precariat millennials as potential voters, they might develop political programs that could better engage them.
Unfortunately, Greenberg’s strategy is too, well, conservative. Rather than advocating for significant reforms, he and other Dems have focused on modest measures, such as incremental changes in the minimum wage and preserving social security and Medicare. While such policies help to address inequality and have some populist appeal, they won’t either make significant change in the economic reality or engage millennial voters. To give the precariat a reason for civic engagement, Democrats must offer a broader economic and social platform. This will require some serious rethinking of policy reform.
Perhaps a good place for Dems to begin is with Standing’s book, The Precariat Charter. He presents an explicit set of ambitious principles that include, among other ideas, redefining work as productive and reproductive activity, regulating flexible labor, decommodifying education, a universal basic wage, and reviving the commons and deliberative democracy. Using these principles, progressive policies could be crafted that better address issues of fairness, justice, changes in work, and the reestablishment of participatory democracy and citizenship that are central to regaining working-class and millennial support now and in the future. Such a program would also be morally, ethically, and politically responsible. It would give disaffected downscale voters something to believe in.
Unfortunately, some Democratic Party leaders would rather stick with a formula that appeals to an eroding and ill-defined middle class while continuing its conservative trajectory. No wonder the New York Times already reports that Republicans have tried to exploit the inconsistencies that are the basis of the disbelief among more liberal Democrats, the working class, and the growing precariat.

Rebecca Kaplan reports from CBS News that the Dems’ 2016 front-runner Hillary Clinton clarifies her position on TPP, in the wake of the House rejection of key provisions: “Let’s take the lemons and turn it into lemonade. Let’s see if there is a way to get to an agreement that does do what I expect it to do,” she said. She voiced her support for the worker retraining program, called Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), but added, “I am willing to try now to see whether you can push to get rid of the objectionable parts to drive a harder bargain on some of the other parts and to provide more transparency so that the American people can actually see what will be in a proposed final deal.”..”If I were in the White House that’s what I’d be doing right now,” Clinton concluded.” And that may be what the present occupant of 1600 PA Avenue, who is no slouch at political chess, has wanted all along.
NYT columnist Paul Krugman reaffirms his conviction that TPP is a bad idea, and also notes, “Democrats, despite defeats in midterm elections, believe — rightly or wrongly — that the political wind is at their backs. Growing ethnic diversity is producing what should be a more favorable electorate; growing tolerance is turning social issues, once a source of Republican strength, into a Democratic advantage instead. Reagan was elected by a nation in which half the public still disapproved of interracial marriage; Mrs. Clinton is running to lead a nation in which 60 percent support same-sex marriage.”
Clinton may be getting most of the ink, video and bytes, but Eleanor Clift reports at The Daily Beast that “Bernie Sanders Is Building an Army to Take D.C.: It’ll take an army to change Washington, says the insurgent senator–and with the crowds he’s been drawing, he just might be building one.”
At The Upshot David Leonhardt presents a rather stunning map, showing “The North-South Divide on Two-Parent Families.” It’s not a shocker when you think about it, but it does illuminate the complexity of the south in American politics. Leonhart offers a number of insightful observations, including “…politically conservative states, for all their emphasis on family values, have long had high divorce rates.” Further, adds Leonhardt, “…the situation also has some important nuances. Above all, divorce is no longer the main reason that children do not grow up with both of their parents. Divorce has declined in recent years. So, however, has marriage, while single parenthood — and the number of children who never live with both parents — has risen sharply. Marriage and single parenthood don’t break down along the same red-blue lines that divorce does.”
“Just call me Jeb” could be a very problematic sell.
GOP Rep. Paul Ryan gets brutally told by Michigan’s Democratic congressman Sander Levin, after Ryan’s latest cheap shot at Obamacare, and Angry Bear got it all down: “What’s busted is not ACA But your attacks on it, endless attacks.”Sander Levin said calmly and deliberately. “Never coming up with a single comprehensive alternative all these years. So you sit as armchair critics while millions of people have insurance who never had it before. Millions of kids have insurance who would not otherwise have had it. People who have pre-existing conditions no longer are cancelled or can’t even get insurance. The donut hole is gone. Millions of people in lower income categories are now insured through Medicaid…Cost containment is beginning to work. The increase in cost net rate is going down. And so you are livid because it is getting better. That’s why you are livid…And the states that are denying their citizens further coverage under Medicaid, are essentially telling people, well get lost when it comes to healthcare…And you have a governor Mr. Chairman, who is running around this country talking about the evils of healthcare when millions of people are benefiting…Your frustration is millions and millions and millions of people are benefiting, have healthcare when they did not before.”
Scott Walker may be a “top-tier” candidate for the GOP nomination. But he is going to have a lot of trouble explaining why living standards for middle class citizens of his state are lagging so far behind those of neighboring Minnesota, under the leadership of its impressive Democratic Governor, Mark Dayton. Ann Markusen has the story at The American Prospect.
National Journal’s Shane Goldmacher explains why Facebook is “The Epicenter of the Presidential Race”: “There are new built-in Facebook tools that can help campaigns, too. Candidates can upload their databases of donor emails, find their corresponding profiles on the site, and ask Facebook to spit out ads to a “look-alike” universe of users whom they haven’t yet pitched for money. Or they can take the sign-ups from an event, upload them, and ask to advertise to people who look like them. While the best-funded campaigns will almost certainly do some of this modeling themselves, Facebook’s “look-alike” feature didn’t exist until 2013, and it promises to allow poorer campaigns to tap into sophisticated analytics on the cheap…BY FAR THE BIGGEST development for 2016 is video. “Video advertising wasn’t around in the 2012 cycle,” says Goudiss. “That’s going to be huge in 2016…Facebook says users log about 4 billion video views every day.”
Charles P. Pierce has a rollicking read at Esquire, riffing on the GOP presidential debate follies. He graciously presents “a modest proposal” for the GOP, accompanied by one of the best political cartoons of the 2015 silly season (Scott Walker must be represented by the little Koch sticker on the clown car).

This post from Andrew Levison is the seventh contribution in the Washington Monthly/The Democratic Strategist roundtable discussion of Stan Greenberg’s new article on government reform and the white working class from WaMo’s June/July/August issue.
Levison is the author of The White Working Class Today: Who They Are, How They Think and How Progressives Can Regain Their Support.
The central argument that Stan presents in his Washington Monthly article is the idea that white working class people may express support for populist policies and programs on opinion surveys but this will simply not translate into political support for Democratic candidates so long as these voters perceive government as overwhelmingly corrupt and controlled by special interests.
As Stan says:

These voters, we shall see, are open to an expansive Democratic economic agenda…yet they are only ready to listen when they think Democrats understand their deeply held belief that politics has been corrupted and government has failed. Championing reform is the price of admission with these voters. These white working class and downscale voters are acutely conscious of the growing role of big money in politics and of a government that works for the 1 percent, not them.

Stan has been vocal in insisting on this point for over a decade and has developed a substantial body of survey evidence to support this conclusion. Here are some of the key surveys that his organization, Democracy Corps, has conducted in the last several years regarding attitudes toward government corruption and government reform:
2012 – In Congressional Battleground Voters Intensely Concerned about Money in Politics
2013 – Revolt Against Washington and Corrupted Politics
2014 – Voters Ready to Act against Big Money in Politics Lessons from the 2014 Midterm Election
As Stan notes, however, within this broad national trend there are actually two very distinct challenges:

The hurdles to reaching the white working class look so daunting because of the success of Republicans in building up huge margins with those voters in the South, plains and Rocky Mountain regions. Obama won only 25 percent of white non-college voters in the South and 33 percent in the Mountain West…Voter attitudes do indeed put most of these voters out of reach.
It is important to remember, however, that three-fourths of American voters live outside this GOP Conservative Heartland. In the rest of the country, the battle for the swing white working class and downscale voters is very much alive…On Election Day 2012, Obama won 40 percent of the white non-college voters outside the Republicans’ regional base. That number still poses a problem, but it would not take major gains with these voters to change the Democrats fortunes in these areas.

For many Democratic political strategists the immediate reaction to this basic reality has been to conclude that Dems should basically write off the difficult regions and concentrate their resources on areas where Democratic candidates are within striking distance of victory. There are, however, two substantial arguments against this approach:
First, this approach implies depriving grass roots Democratic activists and supporters in the “conservative heartland” regions of anything beyond the most minimal resources. While every national electoral strategy inevitably involves allocating scarce financial resources, this is a morally and socially distasteful option because it implies literally “giving up” on these regions to a substantial degree and accepting the idea that the GOP has them permanently under its control.
Second, this approach effectively insures the perpetuation of very weak state and local party organizations in these regions, a result that inherently guarantees a vicious cycle of continually low Democratic support on Election Day. This approach to allocating resources was deeply debated during and after the 2002 and 2004 elections when Howard Dean proposed the “50 State Strategy” as an alternative to the narrow targeting of only carefully selected states and precincts and the arguments that advocates of the 50 state strategy presented at that time remain as significant today as they were then.
Focusing all resources on only a subset of targeted states and precincts leaves little or no margin for error on Election Day and does nothing to systematically build a progressive political infrastructure that will eventually become vital in many areas where demographic change is gradually creating more competitive political environments for Democratic candidates.
It is important to note that the results of the 2010 and 2014 elections very substantially strengthened the case for continuing to invest more than token effort and resources in currently low support areas because they made it clear that Democrats must eventually attempt to regain control of many of the state legislatures and congressional districts that they have lost in recent years or face a permanent inability to enact their agenda, even if they can consistently win the White House.
But what political strategy can possibly make any significant difference in these heartland areas where the level of support for the Democratic Party is currently so dramatically low?
To analyze this question, Democratic strategists need to begin by focusing on one key fact: that even in these conservative heartland communities many “liberal” policies advocated by Democrats are significantly more popular than the Democratic Party itself.
As Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Rutgers University noted in a recent Washington Post op-ed:

Alaska elected a Republican senator and passed a recreational marijuana initiative, along with an increase in the minimum wage. North Dakota elected a Republican congressman and rejected a Personhood amendment. Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota elected a Republican senator and governor, and passed a minimum wage increase. This led Zachary Goldfarb to write in the Washington Post that: “Americans will vote for Republicans even though they disagree with them on everything…on the biggest issues facing Congress, [voters] still agree with Democrats.
That includes issues like raising the minimum wage, making the rich pay more in taxes, letting illegal immigrants stay in the United States, taking action to stem global warming, legalizing same sex marriage and fixing the Affordable Care Act rather than repealing it.”
My research suggests a key reason why this happened: our partisan identities motivate us far more powerfully than our views about issues. Although voters may insist in the importance of their values and ideologies, they actually care less about policy and more that their team wins.
This “team spirit” is increasingly powerful because our party identities line up with other powerful identities, such as religion and race. Over the last few decades, Republicans have generally grown increasingly white and churchgoing, while Democrats have become more non-white and secular. This sorting of identities makes us care even more about winning, and less about what our government actually gets done.
This helps explain why all of the five states noted above voted for liberal policies even though they have substantial proportions of white churchgoing Republicans. Indeed, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota have some of the highest percentages of white churchgoing Republicans of any state.

When social and partisan identities align, we begin to detach our votes for candidates from our policy interests. The most important thing is to stick with the team. It doesn’t matter if the team you voted for opposes the very policy you voted to enact.
This disjunction between the level of support for liberal or progressive policies on the one hand and for the Democratic Party on the other can be seen in every region of the country but the discrepancy is dramatically more apparent in the “conservative heartland” than in non-heartland areas.
It is easy to say that the heartland areas are “uniquely conservative” because of a volatile mix of historic white racial attitudes in the South and religious fundamentalism and anti-government conservatism throughout the heartland areas as a whole, and in one sense this is self-evidently true. But, considered more carefully, this really does not explain a great deal. In fact, in a certain respect the explanation is tautological–the three factors noted above do not “explain” the increased conservatism of the heartland regions so much as they define it.
To understand the distinct characteristics of these heartland regions that makes their pro-Democratic tilt so much lower not only than the levels of support that exist in other areas but also than the level of support for various liberal reforms, we must begin by distinguishing between two very distinct concepts: cultural traditionalism and conservatism.

Read more…