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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: June 2015

June 11: There Is No Common “Clinton Strategy” for 1992 and 2016

I’m not sure I can recall a major Newspaper of Record piece of political analysis that was shot down more quickly and more overwhelmingly than last weekend’s New York Times piece by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman giving vent to red-state Democratic complaints that Hillary Clinton had spurned the family tradition by focusing on Obama Coalition voters. The fact that these complaints were echoed by Ron Fournier and David Brooks undermined them even more.
I added my two cents at the Washington Monthly after a lot of other critiques had appeared:

Unlike some bashers, I didn’t spend the Clinton years arguing that a “middle-out” strategy of the sort Joe Manchin wants HRC to pursue was a treasonous alternative to the “base-in” strategy that Obama more or less adopted in 2012. What Bill Clinton did made perfect sense for 1992 and 1996. It might have even worked for Al Gore in 2000 had he chosen one approach instead of alternating back-and-forth between defending the Clinton-Gore record and championing “the people versus the powerful.”
That was then and this is now, and as Nancy LeTourneau pointed out yesterday, the idea that the “Clinton strategy” puts more electoral votes in play than the “Obama strategy” is dubious to begin with. What do you think is a safer electoral vote strategy: one that concedes Kentucky and West Virginia, or one in which California has to be defended?
As for downballot support, I hate to be cynical about it, but by election day 2016 the only thing surer than red-state Democratic demands for more national money will be red-state demands that HRC keep the hell away from the campaigns of red-state Democrats.
Candidates hunt where the ducks are. The planted axiom of the Times piece is that somehow “America” should be identified with swing voters, no matter how scarce or numerous they are. That’s based in part on the entirely erroneous impression that a candidate who “reaches out” to voters beyond her or his “base” is going to face a more reasonable opposition. The experience of Barack Obama in the first two years of his first term is proof positive against that proposition, for the time being. The only thing that is going to produce a more reasonable opposition is another couple of general election beatings.
Truth is we wouldn’t be having this argument if HRC had a different last name. We’re supposed to believe there is some sort of “Clinton strategy” to which she should be loyal whether it makes any sense or not, 20 years after the last time Bill Clinton appeared on any ballot. I’m tempted to say it would be nice if the Big Dog himself took to the Times op-ed pages and knocked this down for good. But that would just perpetuate the notion HRC’s campaign belongs to her husband, and is best run as a wayback machine.

Even Jeb Bush knows that re-running an old campaign doesn’t work, now that his emulation of his brother’s steamroller Invisible Primary campaign of 1999 has not made him a strong, or even a weak, front-runner.


There is No Common “Clinton Strategy” For 1992 and 2016

I’m not sure I can recall a major Newspaper of Record piece of political analysis that was shot down more quickly and more overwhelmingly than last weekend’s New York Times piece by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman giving vent to red-state Democratic complaints that Hillary Clinton had spurned the family tradition by focusing on Obama Coalition voters. The fact that these complaints were echoed by Ron Fournier and David Brooks undermined them even more.
I added my two cents at the Washington Monthly after a lot of other critiques had appeared:

Unlike some bashers, I didn’t spend the Clinton years arguing that a “middle-out” strategy of the sort Joe Manchin wants HRC to pursue was a treasonous alternative to the “base-in” strategy that Obama more or less adopted in 2012. What Bill Clinton did made perfect sense for 1992 and 1996. It might have even worked for Al Gore in 2000 had he chosen one approach instead of alternating back-and-forth between defending the Clinton-Gore record and championing “the people versus the powerful.”
That was then and this is now, and as Nancy LeTourneau pointed out yesterday, the idea that the “Clinton strategy” puts more electoral votes in play than the “Obama strategy” is dubious to begin with. What do you think is a safer electoral vote strategy: one that concedes Kentucky and West Virginia, or one in which California has to be defended?
As for downballot support, I hate to be cynical about it, but by election day 2016 the only thing surer than red-state Democratic demands for more national money will be red-state demands that HRC keep the hell away from the campaigns of red-state Democrats.
Candidates hunt where the ducks are. The planted axiom of the Times piece is that somehow “America” should be identified with swing voters, no matter how scarce or numerous they are. That’s based in part on the entirely erroneous impression that a candidate who “reaches out” to voters beyond her or his “base” is going to face a more reasonable opposition. The experience of Barack Obama in the first two years of his first term is proof positive against that proposition, for the time being. The only thing that is going to produce a more reasonable opposition is another couple of general election beatings.
Truth is we wouldn’t be having this argument if HRC had a different last name. We’re supposed to believe there is some sort of “Clinton strategy” to which she should be loyal whether it makes any sense or not, 20 years after the last time Bill Clinton appeared on any ballot. I’m tempted to say it would be nice if the Big Dog himself took to the Times op-ed pages and knocked this down for good. But that would just perpetuate the notion HRC’s campaign belongs to her husband, and is best run as a wayback machine.

Even Jeb Bush knows that re-running an old campaign doesn’t work, now that his emulation of his brother’s steamroller Invisible Primary campaign of 1999 has not made him a strong, or even a weak, front-runner.


A Civil Rights Movement for Working People: Kahlenberg on Union Organizing

This post from Richard Kahlenberg is the sixth 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.
Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, and coauthor (with Moshe Marvit) of Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right (2012).

Stanley Greenberg’s illuminating Washington Monthly article makes two central points: that Democrats need to do better among white working-class voters if progressives wish to bring about major social change; and that the goal of winning more white working-class voters is achievable if the right appeals are made. I think there is good evidence to support both claims. Indeed, we need something akin to a civil rights movement for working people of all races–both to bring working-class whites back into the Democratic fold, and to resurrect the American Dream.(use arrow to read more)
I. Why the White Working-Class is Necessary for the Democratic Coalition.
Barack Obama won two presidential elections without much support from working-class whites. This development gave rise to the unfortunate belief that the old George McGovern coalition–educated whites, minorities, women, and young people–was the key to Democratic success in an era when the size of the white working-class vote is shrinking.
Greenberg, however, makes a powerful case that “Democrats cannot win big or consistently enough, deep enough down the ticket, or broadly enough in the state, unless they run much stronger with white working-class and downscale voters.” Obama’s electoral success at the presidential level obscures disastrous results for Democrats down ticket. Robert Draper, writing in the New York Times Magazine, notes Democrats are unlikely to retake the House until 2022 at best. With Democrats holding only 18 or 50 gubernatorial seats and controlling both houses in only 11 state legislatures, Draper concludes, “Not since the Hoover Administration has the Democratic Party’s overall power been so low.”
Moreover, Democrats need the white working-class to help fuel major action on the nation’s most pressing challenge: skyrocketing income inequality. As Leo Casey of the Albert Shanker Institute notes, it was the great dream of labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph to create a cross-racial class-based coalition to bring about greater economic equality. Instead, with white working-class voters trending Republican in election after election, the Democrats have a largely race-based cross-class coalition that has less interest in challenging fundamental economic inequalities.
II. How to Appeal to the White Working-Class?
How can Democrats today appeal to white-working class voters, who provided solid support from the 1930’s through the 1960s? Barney Frank’s memoir, Frank, suggests that Democrats need not (and should not) turn their back on civil rights advances for minorities but rather expand the progress for working-class people of all races. Frank writes, “The chief political problem for Democrats is not anger at integration but the belief that the Democratic focus on ‘pleasing minorities’ extends to giving them preference for scarce jobs.” He continues, “White working-class and middle-class men have not lost faith in government in general; they have lost faith in the willingness of Democrats to use the power of government to protect them from hurtful economic trends.”
In a similar vein, Greenberg’s research finds than many white working-class voters believe that “jobs don’t pay enough to live on” and that big business interests “give big money to politicians and then use lobbyists to win special tax breaks and special laws that cost the country billions.”
In an interesting twist, Greenberg finds that campaign finance reform–normally thought of as a good-government cause embraced mostly by highly-educated liberals–resonates strongly with white working-class voters.
What specific policies could embody Frank’s call for broadening civil rights to help working people, and Greenberg’s call for restoring our democracy? Throughout much of American history, organized labor has been both the nation’s strongest voice for good paying jobs and the chief counterweight in elections to large business interests. So any policy solution should seek ways to resurrect labor unions, as this nation has done in previous periods of grave economic inequality. While raising the minimum wage is a good first step for moving the poor to the working-class, only unions can help move the working-class to the middle.
What can be done to help workers unionize? While many have given up hope on the American labor movement, looking abroad, it is clear that labor’s decimation at home is not the inevitable result of economic globalization. Other countries, also subject to competitive global pressures, have much stronger labor movements in part because the laws in those nations are much more supportive of union organizing, as Freedom House has documented. In the U.S., weak labor laws allow employers to discriminate against workers who try to organize a union. Employers routinely fire or demote ringleaders in organizing drives, and pay small penalties for breaking the law.
My colleague Moshe Marvit and I have called for making labor organizing a civil right, allowing workers of all races access to strong civil rights penalties when employers discriminate against employees for exercising their rights to unionize. Two Congressmen–Rep. Keith Ellison and civil rights giant John Lewis–have introduced legislation to make labor organizing a civil right. Similar initiatives could be passed at the state and local level. (Unions could also take steps to better harness the power of technology to promote organizing.)
Making labor organizing a civil right is one important way to giving white working-class voters a direct stake in a civil rights movement for workers and to underline their common cause with black and Latino workers. Americans are rightly proud of the significant advances we have made for civil rights for African Americans, Latinos, women, and gays. It’s now time to complement that progress with a civil rights movement for workers–including working-class whites–to bring them back to their natural home in the Democratic Party.


Political Strategy Notes

Indications are, if Hillary Clinton is nominated, she has reason to hope that she can get close to Obama’s percentage of African American voters in the general election. At The Fix Janell Ross reports “June 2015 does seem a bit early to pronounce these hints of an enthusiasm deficit a fatal problem for the Democratic front-runner Clinton. Clinton’s support numbers aren’t that far away from Obama’s at this time in the 2008 and 2012 races, actually…In May, when Washington Post-ABC News pollsters asked black voting-age adults about their preferred presidential candidate in a Clinton-Jeb Bush horse race, Clinton claimed 88 percent. Bush got 8 percent. Similarly, in a June and July 2011 poll centered around an Obama-Romney race, Obama got the support of 90 percent of black voting-age adults and Romney got 6 percent. In February 2008, Obama had 85 percent of black voting age adults with him and John McCain just 9 percent. In both elections, Obama’s black-voter support eventually climbed above 90 percent but sat in the 80s in polls long before Election Day.” The challenge for Clinton is increasing the African American turnout in battleground states through enhanced registration to make up for the small, but not insignificant deficit the polls are showing in comparison to Obama’s numbers with this critical pro-Democratic constituency.
Democratic candidates and campaign workers should read Lindsay Abrams’s Salon.com post, “No one’s buying ALEC’s bullsh*t anymore: The Koch-backed group is losing the clean energy battle: America appears to finally be catching on to renewable energy’s clear benefits.” This could be an important development for mobilizing young voters in particular and immunizing them from GOP propaganda.
Another indication that Ohio’s nimble Republican Governor John Kasich is in it. Kasich has hired John Weaver, who served as a strategist for Jon Huntsman and John McCain and was reportedly “exiled” from the GOP by Karl Rove and worked for a while for the DCCC. Jonathan Chait believes Kasich’s excessive sanity will deny him the GOP nomination.
Yet another argument in support of Hillary Clinton’s rally-the-Democratic-base strategy, this one by WaPo’s Phillip Bump, emphasizing that the percentage of genuinely persuadable voters is much smaller than ’50-state-campaign’ advocates believe and pundits like David Brooks suggest.
Embarrassingly bad news for Jeb Bush: Rubio beats him by 8 points in head-to-head poll — in Florida. But Bush won by 6 when other Republican candidates were included in the poll.
Margaret Carlson explains at Bloomberg View why Vice President Biden is still taken very seriously as a potential presidential candidate: “Obama saw an asset in Biden’s experience as two-time chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and needed the political capital from his 40 years in Congress. The president leaned heavily on his wingman in managing the U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, coping with the crisis in Ukraine after the failure of Clinton’s reset with Vladimir Putin, and overseeing the $787 billion economic stimulus package. Biden is often the “last person” in the room when a big decision is being made.”
NYT’s Ashley Parker has an update on the GOP’s shaky “digital strategy” for 2016. Parker reports that, of “626 political operatives with experience in digital, data and analytics on every presidential campaign since 2004…The breakdown was stark: 503 of those staff members were hired by Democratic campaigns, 123 by Republicans…They also found that 75 political companies or organizations were founded by those former campaign workers on the Democratic side, but only 19 on the Republican side.”
Richard Alba’s NYT op-ed, “The Myth of the White Minority” provides a timely reminder that, regardless of U.S. Census racial categories, how people think of their racial identities and how others perceive them may be quite different. That, along with an increasing trend in interracial marriages may have more political impact than Census head counts.
Meet the “best presidential bellwethers” since 1896, Ohio and New Mexico. Narrowing the time frame a bit to the last 100 years, Nevada becomes the most bellwether-worthy. But Crystal Ball’s Kyle Kondik adds, “The best predictor of the next election, for instance, might be a state with a below-average record over the past century: our home state of Virginia. After all, no state was closer to the national popular vote in the past two elections…”


The Old Progressives Messages Aren’t Working: Schmitt on a New, Comprehensive Approach to “Government Reform”

This post from Mark Schmitt is the fifth 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.
Schmitt is director of the Political Reform Program at the New America Foundation.

Two insights from Stan Greenberg’s analysis and data suggest the foundations of a significant new approach to politics in the years ahead. The first insight is that Americans (and especially the working-class white men and women oversampled in the poll) are enthusiastic about a supportive government role that helps them take advantage of economic and personal opportunities, but that pervasive distrust of government, in all its forms, overshadows that positive feeling. The second insight is that a strong commitment to “reform” or “streamlining” government can help to overcome that distrust.
These insights, taken together, should inspire a coherent alternative to the complacent, established messages of progressive politics. The first existing message has been simply to defend and market specific government programs that promise to support economic opportunity–not only existing programs such as the Affordable Care Act, but also paid family leave, affordable student loans and the rest of the modest agenda that goes by the name “populism.” Good programs sell themselves, the assumption goes, perhaps aided by messages such as the 2012 Obama campaign video, “The Life Of Julia, that showed government helping a woman along the path from HeadStart to Social Security and Medicare. But as Suzanne Mettler’s book The Submerged State and other research suggest, citizens may like the programs, but programs and policies alone, especially when they aren’t clearly shown to be government programs, don’t shake their doubts about the proposition that government can be a force for good.
The other prevailing progressive message has tried to connect with voters’ sense that politics “is bought and paid for by big donors and special interests.” This is language that Hillary Clinton, along with most incumbent Democrats, has enthusiastically embraced. A reader who takes in only this aspect of Greenberg’s article might be tempted to double down on the familiar denunciations of SuperPACs, the Koch brothers, and Citizens United, and, like Clinton, call for an amendment to the Constitution that would “fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all.”
While this language mobilizes the activist base, and, ironically, seems to make for a lucrative fundraising pitch, there is at least one major drawback: It is not a positive solution and it digs the hole of distrust even deeper. For voters who aren’t members of MoveOn.org, amending the Constitution is distant, implausible and confusing. To insist that the only solution is something that will never happen can only deepen cynicism about government, made worse the higher the volume is turned up on the language of corruption, plutocrats, and special interests, without any realistic alternative.
A better approach would link an explicit defense of government, and an aggressive challenge to the anti-government ethos of the modern right, with a clear recognition that government can and should do much better, not only at elections and legislation, but in providing services in innovative, modern ways. Other opinion research suggests that the public’s view of politics–that ugly, avoidable zone of mean elections and poisonous legislative fights–is inseparable from their doubts about government as a provider of benefits and security. That is, people distrust government to provide services fairly and efficiently, not because they have a bad experience at the Department of Motor Vehicles (most DMVs have become vastly more efficient), but because they see Congress is a highly visible zone of dysfunctional conflict. This is not an accident: Ugly politics sows doubts about government, and those who benefit from doubts about government and from inaction have little reason to practice compromise.
Reform of government, then, means more than just getting money out: It should involve specific, plausible reforms that would reengage citizens in the process of government, creating new ways to make all our voices matter. It should go well beyond the technocratic “Reinventing Government” initiatives of the Clinton Administration, with high-profile efforts to show that government can be as innovative as Silicon Valley, as well as accessible and responsive. “Streamlining” government does not have to involve only cutting costs, though that might be a part of it. The tax code, for example, is now as complex for low- and middle-income taxpayers as for the wealthy, littered with credits and deductions, some refundable and some not. Streamlining government could include a strong commitment to making the tax code simpler at the low end and shifting resources to fight fraud at the top end. It could include, for example, efforts to create a single, simple portal to government services ranging from health insurance under the Affordable Care Act to small business assistance–similar to the “no wrong door” initiatives in several states.
Above all, it should include a positive vision of reform of the political process, and the role of money, that does more than reimpose limits on the political influence of the very wealthy, but empowers citizens as donors and participants. And, the most difficult challenge of all, there has to be an effort to restore to the public face of government, the legislative process, a sense of compromise and shared commitment to the public good, despite deep disagreements.
All of this should fit into the context of a reaffirmation of the importance of government, not as a force outside of our lives, for good or ill, but as an expression of our shared aspirations. Stan Greenberg’s article and data marks a new course, especially if progressives can recognize just how deeply it challenges the lines of argument that they have become comfortable with.


Nussbaum: Meeting Voters Where They Live — Reaching out to Members of the White Working Class Means Engaging Them Personally

This post from Karen Nussbaum is the fourth 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.
Nussbaum is Executive Director of Working America, an AFL-CIO affiliated group that works with non-unionized people.

Two concepts lurk at the heart of political strategist Stan Greenberg’s piece about how Democrats can cohere a winning election strategy. First, garnering the vote of the Rising American Electorate–people of color, young people and single women–is not sufficient; progressives need to reach the white working class, especially white, working-class single women–to build a New American Majority that can win elections and push through progressive policies. Second, Greenberg asserts that in order to persuade working people and white single women to embrace a progressive agenda, one needs to acknowledge and respond to their deep distrust of government, which they see as corrupt and deaf to their problems.
Given those insights, Greenberg and others in search of progressive gains have an avenue for success with Working America. Every day, all year long, year after year, Working America reaches white, working-class people who don’t have a union on the job–and more than half of those are working-class women. Whether Working America canvassers knock on doors in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, or Pine Bluff, Arkansas, they have proven the effectiveness of conversations that couple the corrosive effect of money in politics with an appealing progressive platform for change.
While our experience supports much of what Greenberg argues, including the notion that white, working-class, women voters are, in fact, winnable, we would go a step further: Our experience suggests that even Republican strongholds such as the South and West show signs of weakness when voters are engaged.
White women are the largest demographic among Working America’s membership, accounting for 1.3 million of our 3 million members. Based on what we hear at the doors every night, it’s little wonder that white, working-class and single women voters react positively to Greenberg’s narrative about streamlining and reforming government. After all, what’s government to them? Democrats have done far too little to reach out to white, working-class voters in recent elections, and government has lagged on addressing their core economic needs. In fact, though these voters may be rising in the electorate, they are sinking fast in today’s economy. These women are reachable in 2016, and Democrats must actively engage them with policies that outline new and far-reaching economic solutions.
Working women and men are deep in the midst of a dramatic change process, because they simply have no choice in the matter. America’s white, working-class experience is not the same one of 35 years ago, when Ronald Reagan came into office, nor is it the same as more than 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton first took the White House.
Today’s members of the working class are confronted with the realities of the emerging precarious economy, which has unstable, erratic work as one of its centerpieces. Unpredictable scheduling demands, relentless low pay, nonexistent benefits and part-time work are today’s normal. Greenberg is correct to point out that women often bear the brunt of these new burdens. They’re more likely than men to hold the part-time, low-paying jobs and are saddled with much of the child and elder care responsibilities.
Working America organizers are out in a dozen states, holding front-porch conversations with working people who struggle to stay afloat. A full 85 percent of our members are in working- or lower-middle-class households making less than $75,000 a year.
Given the reservoir of information on working people we have collected over the years, we looked back at nine years of data gathered on their doorsteps–starting in 2007 (the last contested Democratic primary season) and continuing until now–to identify emerging trends. One clear statistic broke with common assumptions about women voters. Overwhelmingly, our working-class and lower-middle-class women members told us that good jobs were their No. 1 priority (40%), beating out health care (32%) and education (14%).
It turns out, these working women’s top priority was not so different than that of men in this income bracket, 45 percent of whom chose good jobs as their top priority. And though Greenberg suggests that the white working class is more solidly red in the South and Mountain states, our organizers have found that working women in purplish states such as North Carolina and Colorado are also deeply concerned about good jobs and are open to economic solutions.
When working-class voters talk about “good jobs,” they mean more than tax credits. They mean bold, new policies that help them get a handle on their schedules, their paychecks and their long-term economic security. They mean a government that incentivizes corporations to create and retain full-time, well-paying jobs. And, as Greenberg points out, they’re keen on policies and messages that address the power imbalance in elections and in government. Even in conservative-leaning states, programs and laws that counter growing corporate power are key, like reviving workers’ ability to join together in collective bargaining.
While Greenberg certainly is right that working people often feel that elected leaders do not prioritize their needs, our experience is that white, working-class Americans are not anti-government. Rather, they are dispirited and disengaged, and have lost belief in their own collective power. Once upon a time unions served as a credible source of information on economic issues for such voters, yet now Fox News and talk radio’s call for small government and individual responsibility fills that void.
If Democrats want to win these voters, they must first re-engage with them and repair the base, one by one. Over the last decade and a half, Working America has found that we can go through any working-class neighborhood in this country, sign up members and dramatically influence their votes. We reawakened a nascent belief that average people could do something about jobs and the economy. Just engaging in those conversations was enough, apparently, to inspire voters to vote progressively.
In the 2014 election, for instance, research by Hart Research Associates of canvassed and general public voters in five senate battlegrounds reveals that women canvassed by Working America voted for the Democratic candidate at a rate of 13 points higher than you would expect based on their party identification, versus five points for all women. Independent voters who were contacted by Working America were 11 points more likely to support the Democratic candidate than those we didn’t contact. In addition, Working America members tend to vote in more elections, even though rates are still too low. Women in single-person households who are Working America members are more likely to routinely vote (46%) than are those in the general public (38%), voting in at least three of six major recent elections.
What’s our secret? We talk to voters about the economy, highlight the outsized role corporate cash plays in electing leaders and influencing government, and give them hope that by uniting with other working people they can tilt the odds in their favor. “I think the Republicans are trying to create a monarchy, get rid of the middle class, and create a bigger divide,” Jan-Marie Weaver of Hastings, Minnesota, recently told one of our canvassers. “They’re keeping the poor people poor, and the rich richer.” Weaver is clearly ready for a middle-class economic narrative. It’s up to the Democratic Party to reach out to her and give her a real reason to believe that greater economic security is on the 2016 horizon.


Political Strategy Notes

At The Plum Line Paul Waldman explains why electoral college politics renders untenable the argument that presidential candidates should actively campaign in all 50 states. “…as long as we have an Electoral College and 48 of the 50 states assign their electors on a winner-take-all basis, there is absolutely no reason for candidates to campaign in states where they have no chance of winning. So they don’t. They also don’t campaign in states where they have no chance of losing…Let’s not forget that Barack Obama’s “far narrower path” to the White House was paved with the votes of a majority of the American electorate. Twice.”
Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman expand on the topic at The New York Times: “Aides acknowledged that Mrs. Clinton’s map would closely resemble Mr. Obama’s, with roughly the same eight or so key states as in the last two presidential elections, and with the possibility of competing in historically Republican states like Arizona where the demographics increasingly favor Democrats…If she won, it would suggest that the so-called Obama coalition of young, nonwhite and female voters is transferable to another Democrat. And it would validate the idea that energizing core supporters is more important in presidential contests than persuading those still undecided.” The authors quote Democratic strategist James Carville: “”Now the highest-premium voter is somebody with a high probability to vote for you and low probability to turn out. That’s the golden list. And that’s a humongous change in basic strategic doctrine.”
Early though it is in the 2016 campaign, National Journal’s formidable Charlie Cook ventures, “I predict that the only way this race isn’t going to be within 3 or 4 points is if one side nominates an awful candidate; the essential dynamics are setting it up to be at least as close at the 2012 contest.”
Nate Silver explains why “Polling Is Getting Harder, But It’s A Vital Check On Power.” Among Silver’s observations: “While horse-race polls represent a small fraction of all surveys, they provide for relatively rare “natural experiments” by allowing survey research techniques to be tested against objective real-world outcomes…Without accurate polling, government may end up losing its most powerful tool to know what the people who elect it really think.”
Jeff Greenfield posts at The Daily Beast on the reasons why an effective third party challenge is unlikely for 2016.
In his surgical gutting of Rand Paul’s “sweeping hyperbole” and “rhetorical recklessness,” former Bush speechwriter/columnist Michael Gerson has a well-stated — and revealing — warning for those who want to prematurely write off any GOP candidate’s nomination chances: “Pretty much any candidate in the Republican pack is one killer debate performance, one strong poll result, one especially good fundraising report away from a narrative of resurgence.”
At the Washington Post John Wagner has a retrospective of Martin O’Malley’s first foray into presidential politics — as a young campaign worker for Gary Hart. Wagner reports that many of Hart’s young activist alums are now working for O’Malley.
Brendan Nyhan notes at The Upshot: “Political scientists have found that debates happen after most campaigns have been decided. (The party conventions — which the news media often find boring but help remind people of their partisan affiliations and renew attention to politics among inattentive voters — are a more important civic event and one with greater consequences for the presidential race.)”
Other critics have noted the continuing descent into Republican stoogery of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” But Driftglass has a particularly brutal takedown.


Beyond Zero-Sum Politics: Appealing to the Obama Coalition While Reaching Out to White Working Class Voters (Especially Women)

This post from Joan Walsh is the third 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.
Walsh is Salon’s editor at large and the author of “What’s the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America.”

More than two decades after he helped us understand so-called “Reagan Democrats” back in the Bill Clinton years, Stan Greenberg continues to mine the thinking of the elusive (for Democrats) white working class voter as we head into what may be the Hillary Clinton years. His analysis offers intriguing clues about how Democrats can win key blocs of working class whites, most notably women, and particularly unmarried women.(use arrow to read more)
Even after all this time — after eight years of economic growth under Clinton, and almost two terms of recovery under President Obama — cynicism about government continues to make the white working class skeptical of Democrats, who are perceived as the party of government. Back in the ’80s, Reagan Democrats left their party because they explicitly identified “government” as the province of minorities who benefited at their expense, abetted by Democrats. Sadly, a sizeable subset of white working class voters believe the same thing today, and those whose views are driven by racial animus are probably beyond the reach of Democrats.
But for many of these voters – I so wanted to write “most,” but I don’t think any research, including Greenberg’s, lets us make that case — distrust of government isn’t about race. It comes from the perception (correct, in my view) that the rules have been rigged by the rich, and that government is controlled by the wealthy. White working class women and unmarried white women are the groups most likely to feel this way – and it’s Greenberg’s project to show how Democrats can craft a message that reassures these voters that they will reform and streamline government, not merely expand it.
It makes sense. Polling consistently shows that white non-college voters are the group that’s the least optimistic about the future. And correctly or not, they don’t see government helping them. In Democracy Corps polling, white working class voters are also the most likely to believe that big banks were the primary beneficiaries of the 2009 stimulus: 50 percent said the banks benefited a lot, more than eight times the number of middle class folks who said that. Only one in five said the Economic Recovery Act helped people like them.
But it’s the women among them, especially unmarried women, who are most pessimistic about their chances of getting ahead, and most convinced the rules are rigged for the wealthy. These pessimistic, downscale white women, Greenberg’s research found, need a promise to “streamline” government and lessen the power of money in politics before they’ll listen to Democrats pitch an agenda to improve their lives.
Greenberg acknowledges up front my first twinge of skepticism about his pitch: prior research that’s found “process concerns” like campaign finance reform, or getting money out of politics, are widely shared, but they don’t ultimately drive votes. He shows how his work, along with research by Page Gardner’s Women’s Voices Women’s Vote Action Fund, and David Donnelly’s Every Voice, found that white working class voters, especially women, were much more receptive to Democratic priorities – expanding and strengthening Social Security and Medicare, investing in infrastructure, implementing family-friendly policies like paid leave, and efforts to insure equal pay for women – when it was preceded by messaging that committed to reform politics and government.
He’s also up against Democrats who argue that the party ought to give up mooning after its lost white working class base. After all, Obama won just over a third of white non-college voters in 2012, but he trounced Mitt Romney anyway. Those arguments ignore the paradox of Obama’s success. Yes, the president, and maybe future Democrats, had the capacity to get to 270 electoral votes (and well beyond) and win the White House despite doing poorly with white voters, and the white working class in particular. And yes, his or her coat tails often bring along Democratic House members and senators in those presidential election years, and even some governors.
But every two years, Democrats get creamed in midterm elections, at the congressional level and in statehouses as well, when the older, whiter GOP base reliably turns out and much of the Democratic base does not. Their candidates, and their voters too, suffer from this structural weakness. Republicans’ success in winning statehouses, and controlling the redistricting process, then compounds that structural advantage; gerrymandered districts could keep the House out of reach for Democrats through 2020. Cutting the GOP’s edge with some subgroups of white working class voters seems important – and Greenberg argues, it’s possible.
I absolutely agree. And yet, in the real world, arguments to focus on white working class voters are often heard as a call to lessen reliance on the “rising American electorate,” also known as “the Obama coalition:” African Americans, Latinos, Asians, millennials and unmarried women. I’ve always rejected a zero sum approach to these questions, as though the only way to reach white working class voters involved policies that would alienate non-whites. (That may be true, as Greenberg acknowledges, when it comes to southern working class whites).
Still, there’s a finite amount of time, money and energy in the world of politics, and telling candidates, donors or foundations to devote resources to these as yet unreliable Democratic voters can be a tough sell in the world of politics. At one roundtable I attended after the 2012 election, there was candor about the difficulty of getting resources even to study approaches to reaching the white working class, since it would shave off money not going to projects mobilizing African Americans, Latinos, women or millennials.
It certainly looks like Hillary Clinton’s campaign has decided it’s smarter to focus on consolidating the Obama coalition than try to reassemble the Bill Clinton coalition of minorities plus downscale whites. Clinton’s policy stands on mass incarceration and immigration reform reflect her genuine political beliefs; they’re also evidence that she’ll focus on the issues most pressing to African American and Latino voters, without worrying about traditional white working class concerns about crime and immigrants.
But Clinton’s team is also clearly focused on subsets of white working class voters, particularly unmarried women. When I heard Clinton say she’d consider the pursuit of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, my immediate thought was: she’s read this Greenberg piece! I was also impressed by the way she wove declining life expectancy among working class white women into her important speech calling for an end to the era of mass incarceration. Her campaign believes she has enormous potential to win the support of white unmarried women, senior officials told me recently. Obama won them by 20 points in 2008; his edge dropped to 4 points in 2012, but he still carried them; it’s reasonable to believe Clinton could restore the 2008 margin, or possibly better.
I’m agnostic about Greenberg’s particular approach: meaning, I don’t know enough to say whether he’s right that a good government, streamline bureaucracy, and get-big-money-out-of-politics argument will work. But he offers Democrats an intriguing way to compete for white working class voters – especially women – without compromising their values, or playing on the edges of indulging racial animus. And intuitively, I think it’s probably correct: yes, Republicans worked hard to convince white working class voters that Democrats were giving their hard earned money to minorities. But those voters aren’t wrong to observe that their former party became much more focused on winning over the wealthy then improving their lives.
My personal bias is that a clean up government pitch should be combined with a promise to rein in the power of Wall Street. I’ve always hung onto a data point from 2008 and 2010: In the Obama-McCain race, a majority of voters in CNN exit polls who blamed Wall Street for the economy’s crash voted for Democrats; in the 2010 midterms, they went Republican, believing Obama hadn’t done enough to punish the banks or help their victims.
Still, I don’t expect any presidential campaign to make this its major focus; again, the nominee’s job is to get to 270. Still, getting to 270 is made easier when Democrats can count on swing states like Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan, which are heavy on white working class voters, and where Obama did better with those voters than he did in the rest of the country in 2012. Greenberg reminds us that outside the South and rural America, Democrats can compete for working class whites, and especially women, with a pitch that plays to their core values, and won’t alienate other groups. There’s no downside to trying.


June 5: “Triangulation” in Context

At TNR Brian Beutler has offered a fascinating interpretation of Hillary Clinton’s recent policy statements–notably her staunch support for the President’s immigration actions and legislation to go beyond it, and her speech this week on voting rights–as representing a presentation of popular and very progressive positions that also trap Republicans into unpopular positions.
But before going into this exposition, Beutler suggests Clinton is having to work against the family reputation for “triangulation.”

[F]or the better part of 20 years now, Bill Clinton’s presidency has been synonymous with a hazy political concept called triangulation. Since his advisers made the term famous, it has been used to describe everything from standard-issue compromise, to the willingness to confront reactionary elements in one’s own party (think Sister Souljah), to the appropriation of another political party’s policy ideas. The latter is as close to a proper definition as there is.

As I have done here at TDS before a number of years ago, I took the occasion at Washington Monthly to offer a different take on “triangulation” that among other things suggests HRC is not turning over some new leaf in order to atone for her sins.

Brian’s willingness to concede that “triangulation” has been defined in different ways (some progressives would say it is as simple and evil as sin itself) is refreshing, but I believe he ought to acknowledge that it’s a term used almost exclusively by Clinton critics. So far as I can tell, the only Clinton defender to have used it even briefly is its inventor, the diabolical Dick Morris. But even Morris (who used it narrowly to describe Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election strategy) did not argue for “appropriation of the other party’s policy ideas.” In a 2003 book (perhaps his last major utterance before leaping into permanent conservative punditry), Morris said:

The essence of triangulation is to use your party’s solutions to solve the other party’s problems. Use your tools to fix their car.

That’s not a bad description of what the Clinton administration tried to do between 1992 and 1994 on welfare reform, developing a proposal focused on creating strong incentives for recipients to move from public assistance to work without “hard” time limits or block grants. After 1994, of course, the administration was in no position to dictate the shape of welfare reform, and instead embarked on the long carrot-and-stick process that led to two presidential vetoes and then finally, after agonized deliberations, to the 1996 signature. You can argue that was a bad decision and/or that the compromise went too far, but it’s just not true the whole idea was to adopt conservative positions.
What the Clintonians argued at the time, and I will go to my grave believing they were right, is that it’s both politically and even morally wrong to look at public concerns and divide them into “Democratic issues” and “Republican issues.” The “solutions” can and usually are very, very different, but for the most part if big majorities of the American people are worried about something, you don’t just dismiss it or change the subject to “your” issues. Yet that’s pretty much how Democrats behaved before Clinton took office. And behaving that way again is certainly an option for the future.
Believing that (a) progressives ought to have their own policy solutions for all sorts of problems, and (b) the configuration of partisan forces at any given moment can change exactly how these solutions are deployed and whether they should be bargained over is consistent at the most basic level with what the Clintons did in office and what HRC seems to be doing today. If so, then the planted axiom in Beutler’s essay–that Hillary Clinton is repudiating her past and dealing with a rebuttable presumption that she’s eager to triangulate–is off-base.
The legend of triangulation is so powerful that it’s certainly understandable Beutler would try to confront it on HRC’s behalf–to triangulate against triangulation, in effect. But those who sympathize with her should probably more actively consider the possibility that she’s doing what she believes in the best way she knows how.


“Triangulation” in Context

At TNR Brian Beutler has offered a fascinating interpretation of Hillary Clinton’s recent policy statements–notably her staunch support for the President’s immigration actions and legislation to go beyond it, and her speech this week on voting rights–as representing a presentation of popular and very progressive positions that also trap Republicans into unpopular positions.
But before going into this exposition, Beutler suggests Clinton is having to work against the family reputation for “triangulation.”

[F]or the better part of 20 years now, Bill Clinton’s presidency has been synonymous with a hazy political concept called triangulation. Since his advisers made the term famous, it has been used to describe everything from standard-issue compromise, to the willingness to confront reactionary elements in one’s own party (think Sister Souljah), to the appropriation of another political party’s policy ideas. The latter is as close to a proper definition as there is.

As I have done here at TDS before a number of years ago, I took the occasion at Washington Monthly to offer a different take on “triangulation” that among other things suggests HRC is not turning over some new leaf in order to atone for her sins.

Brian’s willingness to concede that “triangulation” has been defined in different ways (some progressives would say it is as simple and evil as sin itself) is refreshing, but I believe he ought to acknowledge that it’s a term used almost exclusively by Clinton critics. So far as I can tell, the only Clinton defender to have used it even briefly is its inventor, the diabolical Dick Morris. But even Morris (who used it narrowly to describe Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election strategy) did not argue for “appropriation of the other party’s policy ideas.” In a 2003 book (perhaps his last major utterance before leaping into permanent conservative punditry), Morris said:

The essence of triangulation is to use your party’s solutions to solve the other party’s problems. Use your tools to fix their car.

That’s not a bad description of what the Clinton administration tried to do between 1992 and 1994 on welfare reform, developing a proposal focused on creating strong incentives for recipients to move from public assistance to work without “hard” time limits or block grants. After 1994, of course, the administration was in no position to dictate the shape of welfare reform, and instead embarked on the long carrot-and-stick process that led to two presidential vetoes and then finally, after agonized deliberations, to the 1996 signature. You can argue that was a bad decision and/or that the compromise went too far, but it’s just not true the whole idea was to adopt conservative positions.
What the Clintonians argued at the time, and I will go to my grave believing they were right, is that it’s both politically and even morally wrong to look at public concerns and divide them into “Democratic issues” and “Republican issues.” The “solutions” can and usually are very, very different, but for the most part if big majorities of the American people are worried about something, you don’t just dismiss it or change the subject to “your” issues. Yet that’s pretty much how Democrats behaved before Clinton took office. And behaving that way again is certainly an option for the future.
Believing that (a) progressives ought to have their own policy solutions for all sorts of problems, and (b) the configuration of partisan forces at any given moment can change exactly how these solutions are deployed and whether they should be bargained over is consistent at the most basic level with what the Clintons did in office and what HRC seems to be doing today. If so, then the planted axiom in Beutler’s essay–that Hillary Clinton is repudiating her past and dealing with a rebuttable presumption that she’s eager to triangulate–is off-base.
The legend of triangulation is so powerful that it’s certainly understandable Beutler would try to confront it on HRC’s behalf–to triangulate against triangulation, in effect. But those who sympathize with her should probably more actively consider the possibility that she’s doing what she believes in the best way she knows how.