You will not be surprised that Donald Trump hogged the most talk time on last night’s CNN debate, with 18.43 minutes, reports Teddy Amenabar at The Washington Post. Trump was followed by Jeb Bush (17:01), Ben Carson (13:53), then Carly Fiorina (13:29) and the also-rans. The lackluster Scott Walker, looking increasingly like the next drop-out, was dead last, managing only 8:24 minutes of talk. Size matters, but length of time is not the only issue. The Washington Post’s impressive stable of commentators all agree that Fiorina dominated the debate with incisive answers. Bush badly whiffed past the giant softball and dissed American women, when asked which woman should be on the ten dollar bill. None of them were well-served by the Air Force One replica backdrop, and I was half-expecting Newt to emerge from the back door.
E. J. Dionne, Jr. summarized the way most Democrats likely saw the GOP presidential debate: “…On the whole, this debate won’t alarm Democratic strategists and the Republican infighting will make them happy. Whether out of political need or genuine conviction, Republicans take very hard-line foreign policy positions that are, I think, well to the right of where a majority of the country is.”
All that’s missing from Republican commentator Ann Coulter’s rancid remark about the GOP debates are the swelling strains of “Deutschland Uber Alles.”
From Jesse Rapport’s post “Alert: New Report Finds Most Voting Machines Are Old, Outdated, And Inaccurate” at Occupy Democrats: “In June, Wichita State University statistician Beth Clarkson published a study arguing that voting statistics suggest voter fraud favoring Republican candidates in a number of elections in which electronic voting machines were used. “My statistical analysis shows patterns indicative of vote manipulation in machines… These results form a pattern that goes across the nation and back a number of election cycles… My assessment is that the data reveals multiple (at least two) agents working independently to successfully alter voting results.”
At The Atlantic Sean McElwee’s “Why Non-Voters Matter: A new study suggests that increasing turnout could have significant ramifications for policy” notes “Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler, a pair of political scientists, argue that gaps between voters and nonvoters are real and have widened, and that the divergence in their views is particularly acute on issues related to social class and the size of government…Nonvoters tend to support increasing government services and spending, guaranteeing jobs, and reducing inequality–all policies that voters, on the whole, oppose. Both groups support spending on the poor, but the margin among nonvoters is far larger. Across all four questions, nonvoters are more supportive of interventionist government policies by an average margin of 17 points.”
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas has “Against Short-Termism: The rise of quarterly capitalism has been good for Wall Street–but bad for everyone else” by William A. Galston & Elaine C. Kamarck, who provide this quote from Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign speech: “Large public companies now return eight or nine out of every $10 they earn directly back to shareholders, either in the form of dividends or stock buybacks, which can temporarily boost share prices. Last year the total reached a record $900 billion. That doesn’t leave much money to build a new factory or a research lab or to train workers or to give them a raise.” That’s a pretty good indication that candidate Clinton will not be carrying water for Wall St., as some of her critics have suggested.
Jonathan Allen argues at Vox, on the other hand, that Clinton is now steering towards the center, terming herself “a moderate.”
Meanwhile Salon.com’s Sean Illing explains why “Hillary is no lock, Bernie is no fluke: The Democratic race is wide open.” Illiing writes, “The latest CBS/YouGov poll is particularly alarming if you’re a Clinton supporter. Clinton is trailing Sanders by 10 points in Iowa and 22 points in New Hampshire, although Clinton maintains a sizable (if diminished) lead in South Carolina.”
In his New York Times op-ed “Can Anything Be Done About All the Money in Politics?“, Thomas B. Edsall discusses five possible approaches to solving the problem.

Alfred W. McCoy, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has an article at HuffPo, “Grandmaster of the Great Game: Obama’s Geopolitical Strategy for Containing China,” which should elevate debate about America’s foreign and trade policy.
Republicans will dismiss McCoy’s post as liberal propaganda, and his analysis will be completely lost on the more rabid Obama-haters among them. But McCoy, an author of several ground-breaking books on international politics, has revealing insights which merit a fair hearing, including:

…Obama has moved step-by-step to repair the damage caused by a plethora of Washington foreign policy debacles, old and new, and then maneuvered deftly to rebuild America’s fading global influence…Viewed historically, Obama has set out to correct past foreign policy excesses and disasters, largely the product of imperial overreach, that can be traced to several generations of American leaders bent on the exercise of unilateral power. Within the spectrum of American state power, he has slowly shifted from the coercion of war, occupation, torture, and other forms of unilateral military action toward the more cooperative realm of trade, diplomacy, and mutual security — all in search of a new version of American supremacy.
…Moving from repair to revival, from past to future, President Obama has been using America’s status as the planet’s number one consumer nation to create a new version of dollar diplomacy. His strategy is aimed at drawing China’s Eurasian trading partners back into Washington’s orbit. While Beijing has been moving to bring parts of Africa, Asia, and Europe into a unified “world island” with China at its epicenter, Obama has countered with a bold geopolitics that would trisect that vast land mass by redirecting its trade towards the United States.
…Obama has unleashed a countervailing strategy, seeking to split the world island economically along its continental divide at the Ural Mountains through two trade agreements that aim to capture nothing less than “the central global pole position” for “almost two-thirds of world GDP [gross domestic product] and nearly three-quarters of world trade.” With the impending approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Washington hopes to redirect much of the vast trade in the Asian half of Eurasia toward North America.

McCoy has much more to say about the particulars of Obama’s global political and economic strategy in his HuffPo post. Further, he adds, “In his determined pursuit of this grand strategy, Obama has revealed himself as one of the few U.S. leaders since America’s rise to world power in 1898 who can play this particular great game of imperial domination with the requisite balance of vision and ruthlessness.”
McCoy argues that there are “just three grandmasters of geopolitics: Elihu Root, the original architect of America’s rise to global power; Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, who shattered the Soviet Empire, making the U.S. the world’s sole superpower; and Barack Obama, who is defending that status and offering a striking imperial blueprint for how to check China’s rise. In each case, their maneuvers have been supple and subtle enough that they have eluded both contemporary observers and later historians.”
It will likely take many years before President Obama’s remarkable expertise in ‘The Great Game’ is fully-appreciated. If “grandmaster” seems a little grandiose for describing Obama’s statecraft, consider McCoy’s contextual overview:

To the consternation of his critics, in the waning months of his presidency, from Iran to Cuba, from Burma to the Pacific Ocean, Obama has revealed himself as an American strategist potentially capable of laying the groundwork for the continued planetary dominion of the United States deep into the twenty-first century. In the last 16 months of his presidency, with a bit of grit and luck and a final diplomatic surge — concluding the nuclear treaty with Iran to prevent another debilitating Middle Eastern conflict, winning congressional approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and completing negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership — Obama just might secure the U.S. a significant extension of its waning global hegemony.

Looking forward, Democrats are in excellent position to continue building on this impressive legacy, because President Obama has included two top Democratic leaders, Vice President Biden and former Secretary of State Clinton in the development of the Administration’s foreign and trade policies. Republicans will continue to howl and parrot their memes that the Administration is projecting “weakness” on this and that. In reality, however, few of their leaders are equipped to understand what Obama has accomplished, despite their all-out opposition to everything he has done.

Anzalone Liszt Grove Research has a very encouraging report on trends in public opinion favoring organized labor’s future. From their recent e-blast on the topic:

…Six years ago, popular support for labor unions hit an all-time low with only 48% approval and 45% disapproval, according to Gallup which has been tracking attitudes towards labor for nearly 80 years.
But popular support for labor unions is returning to pre-recession levels. Just last month, Gallup released a poll announcing that labor unions are enjoying an approval rating of 58%, jumping five points over the last year and 10 points since 2009. That is in line with every Gallup poll for 70 years before the recession, which found a majority of Americans approve of labor unions (72% approve 1936 / 60% approve 2008). For the first time in more than six years, more Americans would like to see labor unions have a greater influence in the country rather than less (37% more / 35% less / 24% same). At the height of anti-labor sentiment in 2009, 42% of Americans said labor unions should have less influence while only 25% thought they should have more.
Today, union membership hovers around 11 percent – half of what it once was when data was first tracked over thirty years ago. Views are mixed on whether this decline in membership has been good for the country (45% mostly bad / 43% mostly good) but a majority of Americans believe it has been bad for working people (52% mostly bad / 40% mostly good).

Even more encouraging, young people are leading the revival of support for labor unions. As the ALG report notes, “Support among different demographics gives us a few clues. 66 percent of young adults, ages 18-34, approve of labor unions and 44 percent want them to have more influence – the highest ratings among all age groups.”
And not surprisingly, workers of color, who disproportionately experience low wages and adverse working conditions, are also strongly approving unions:

Unions also enjoy a higher margin of support among minorities, a demographic steadily growing as a share of the population. African-Americans rate labor unions the most favorably (60% favorable / 29% unfavorable) while nearly half of Hispanics view labor unions favorably (49% favorable / 32 unfavorable).

As for low-wage workers in general, the report says, “Among low earners, specifically those working full time in minimum wage jobs (earning less than $30,000 annually), labor unions have a 23 point net favorability rating (54% favorable / 31% unfavorable).”
The report goes on to document the animosity of Republican leaders toward unions, including presidential candidates, and notes,

Among the GOP field, candidates wear their union-bashing credentials as badges of honor in a regular game of Who Hates Labor Unions More. Earlier this spring, Scott Walker went so far as to compare terrorist groups like ISIS to labor demonstrators during his first term. John Kasich joked that if he were king, he “would abolish all teachers’ lounges, where they sit together and worry about ‘Woe is us.'” And Chris Christie did not mince words when he said that the American Federation of Teachers deserved a punch in the face.

Such attitudes look like a big mistake. While 57 percent of Republican poll respondents have “unfavorable” views of unions, 31 percent are “favorable,” with young, non-college and lower-income Republicans having even more favorable attitudes toward labor. The Demagogic attitudes toward labor on the part of GOP leaders are not so widely-shared by the Republican rank and file.
The report concludes by observing that Democrats continue top enjoy strong support from union households, as well-evidenced by the 2012 exit polls, which reported their overwhelming support of President Obama. Further,

Obama would have lost the popular vote in 2012 without strong support from union households – he lost non-union households on election day, with union households giving him a margin of victory. The electoral impact would have been especially felt in the union-dense Midwest. In Michigan, for example, a state Obama won by nine points (Obama 54% / Romney 45%), Obama would have run dead even with Romney if no union households voted. In Wisconsin and Ohio, similarly, union households provided the margin of victory for Obama.

— Which explains why Republican leaders hate organized labor and do everything in their power to undermine union organizing campaigns, particularly in midwest states. The Republicans’ disparage and crush unions strategy intensified dramatically under President Reagan and has continued apace under Republican administrations. The ALG report indicates that the costs of the strategy to the GOP now exceed the benefits, and that’s good for America, as well as the Democratic Party.

Dear Readers:
The relationship between Democrats and the Black Lives Matter movement has become a critical issue, not only for the presidential candidates but for all Democrats as well.
Because Black Lives Matter is a loose umbrella coalition of many groups and individuals, it has not been clearly reported in the press that there are actually two very distinct — and basically incompatible — political perspectives that exist within the broad alliance. It is absolutely vital that Democrats and liberal-progressives make a major effort to clearly understand and sharply distinguish between them.
The reason is simple. While the first perspectives sees liberals and the Democratic Party as lacking in genuine understanding and adequate commitment to addressing the urgent needs of Black America, it nonetheless views them as potentially useful actors in the national political process. The other perspective views liberals and the Democratic Party as utterly and hopelessly tainted by racism and therefore as active, fully culpable collaborators in “the system” that oppresses Black America.
Liberals and Democrats cannot avoid forming an opinion about these two perspectives and then deciding how to respond to them, particularly in regard to the second view.
We are therefore pleased to offer the following Strategy Memo that examines this critical issue.
There are two profoundly different political perspectives within the Black Lives Matter coalition. It’s extremely important for Democrats to understand the difference between them in order to successfully relate to this important social movement.
To read the memo, click HERE
We believe you will find the memo both useful and important.
Sincerely
Ed Kilgore
Managing Editor
The Democratic Strategist

In “Gloomy Republican Campaigns Leave behind Reagan Cheer,” Jeremy W. Peters describes increasingly pessimistic assessments of the political moment by GOP presidential candidates, then adds: “Despite the country’s challenges, there are signs of improvement: Job growth is up, unemployment is down, and the economy is in vastly better shape than it was eight years ago.” Barring a sudden economic downturn, this is going to be a tough sell for Republicans a year from now.
Despite the incessant coverage of everything Trump, The Upshot’s Nate Cohn explains “Why He’s Still Such a Long Shot.”The party has huge incentives to unify against Trump. He is unacceptable to nearly every Republican wing. A unified party could spend millions — even hundreds of millions — attacking Mr. Trump, criticizing him in the media and fueling his eventual opponent…If it came down to it, G.O.P. campaigns and aligned super PACs could easily spend more than $100 million in California, New York, New Jersey and other big, blue and often winner-take-all states in April, May and June of 2016 to knock Mr. Trump out.”
At The American Prospect, however, Adel M. Stan’s “A Nation of Sociopaths? What the Trump Phenomenon Says About America” merits serious thought. Many factors feed Trump’s popularity, all of them worrisome. Stan’s concern about rising sociopathy is only enhanced by the poll referenced at the end of today’s Strategy Notes.
Whatever divisions still fester within the Democratic Party regarding the Iran arms agreement, Democratic senate candidates in the battleground states are of one accord in support of the deal, reports Alex Roarty in the National Journal.
in “A rising force, moderate Democrats put their stamp on California legislative session Sacramento Bee reporters Christopher Cadelago, Jeremy White and Alexei Koseff take an interesting look at Democratic party politics in the most influential megastate.
NYT columnist Charles M. Blow provides some perceptive observations in “Bernie Sanders and the Black Vote,” as the candidate struggles to improve his polling percentages with a key pro-Democratic constituency.
At CNN Politics Eugene Scott addresses an interesting question: “Can Democrats sway young evangelicals?,” noting, “In the past three presidential elections, Democrats have garnered no more than 24% of the white evangelical vote, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research for CNN.”
At Roll Call Emily Cahn and Eli Yokley report that Democrats have potential map-expander U.S. Senate candidates in three states: Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick in AZ,. Secretary of State Jason Kander in MO and Connor Eldridge in AR. But there is some concern about NH and NC, which should be in play if Dems can secure reasonably strong candidates.
Caveats about internet polling notwithstanding, this is disturbing.

As part of my regular effort to tamp down any unnecessary talk about “struggles for the soul of the Democratic Party,” I’d recommend a Nate Silver piece at FiveThirtyEight that scolds journalists who lazily lump together Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as fellow “populists” fighting together against their parties’ elites. Here’s what I had to say about it today at the Washington Monthly:

As part of his argument, Nate put up a chart showing the percentages in which Bernie Sanders voted with selected Senate Democrats in the last full Congress. The colleague with which Sanders agreed most was Barbara Boxer at 96.2%. No surprise there. But not far behind Boxer on the Bernieriffic scale were a couple of famously “centrist” senators, Cory Booker (95.8%) and Maria Cantwell (95.8%), both of whom have probably been called corporate whores by a lot of Sanders supporters on more than one occasion. Meanwhile, the Donkey Party colleagues with which Bernie agreed least often include a virtual rogue’s gallery of New Democrats or even Conservadems. But you know what? Sanders voted with Joe Manchin 82% of the time; with Max Baucus and David Pryor 87% of the time; and with Joe Donnelly, Kay Hagan and Mary Landrieu 90% of the time. In three of these cases, moreover, these senators were running unsuccessfully for reelection in red states in a bad midterm cycle, presumably moving them far to the right.
Nate contrasts this relatively high level of party solidarity shown by Sanders to Trump’s adoption of wildly heterodox positions and his apparent hatred for his own party. I’d say it shows for the umpteenth time that despite more tolerance for ideological dissent the Democratic Party has less to fight over than you’d think.
Yes, I know, all Senate votes are not equal, and yes, most of the really vicious intra-Republican fights are over strategy and tactics (e.g., the Defunding Planned Parenthood and Obamacare brouhahas) rather than matters of principle or even policy. But all in all, Democrats do not look like a party coming apart at the seams even with the hourly reports that they are in a panic over Hillary Clinton’s standing in selective states vis a vis Sanders, Biden (the non-candidate enjoying an imaginary boom), or any Republican you can name.

The Democratic Party remains a pretty robust coalition.

At Vox Matthew Yglesias takes a peek into the #NRORevolt dust-up, and sums up the GOP’s dilemma thusly: “The strategy favored by much of the party elite — including George and Jeb Bush, John McCain, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, most of the business community, and the RNC in its official 2012 postmortem — is to try to neutralize the immigration issue in the Latino community and then win votes from more affluent or more religiously devout Hispanics. The alt-right/identitarian/Trump strategy is to do the opposite, and make increasingly explicit appeals to ethnic nationalism to try to make whites more uniformly loyal to the GOP.”
O’Malley and Chafee should probably hang around for a debate or two to see if some exposure helps, but so far neither has gotten any traction. So the question arises, could Biden’s entry help Clinton avoid the “coronation” stigma — if she wins? Clinton already has a ‘doing-better-than-expected’ opponent in Sanders. Since Biden has impressive approval ratings in recent polls, would a 3-way race strengthen the Democratic ticket, or conversely, escalate the risk of a divisive convention?
It’s a little early for “Plan B” talk among Democrats, but please, let’s rule out Gore or Kerry scenarios, which would jettison any hope of Dems being perceived as the party for the future.
And grand strategies aside, there are unforgiving filing deadlines approaching quite soon, as Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley report at Sabato’s Crystal Ball.
The Fix’s Phillip Bump has caveats aplenty regarding recent polls indicating Trump doing better-than-expected with Latino and African American voters.
From Kate Linthicum’s “Why the big Latino voting bloc is nowhere near as large as it could be” at the L.A. Times: “In the 2014 midterm election, only 27% of eligible Latinos voted, compared with 46% of whites and 41% of African Americans, according to U.S. census data…Last year, 33% of Latinos eligible to vote were 18 to 29, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, compared with 18% of whites, 25% of African Americans and 21% of Asian Americans. The Latino population is also heavily concentrated in two places, Texas and California, that have not been swing states in presidential elections for decades. Nearly half the country’s Latino eligible voters live in those two states. Because Democrats can usually count on winning statewide races in California and Republicans in Texas, neither party in those states has had an incentive to invest the huge sums necessary to register and turn out lots more Latino voters. By contrast, a large percentage of the black population lives in swing states that have been a heavy focus of voter registration efforts.”
“identity Crisis” seems a bit melodramatic, even for a headline — the term better fits the GOP these days. Kraushaar’s National Journal article more accurately describes the ferment of a healthy political party.
In her Huffpo Pollster article, “Wages of Win: The Public and the Minimum Wage Debate,” Kathleen Weldon notes, “Recent polls indicate that, despite ongoing concerns about very large increases in the minimum wage, there is considerable support even for candidates who favor a $15 minimum. A 2015 NBC/WSJ poll found 48 percent of registered voters said such a position would make them more favorable toward a candidate, 38 percent less favorable, and 13 percent said that position would make no difference. Continued support for some form of minimum wage increase appears to give Democrats a strong issue in the 2016 campaign.”
You too can “play in the political prediction market.”

One of the perennial topics of this election cycle so far is the role of Super-PACs, those vehicles for really large donors that some presidential candidates are relying on heavily, especially on the Republican side of the barricades. I wrote about some concerns involving these beasts today at the Washington Monthly:

At the Atlantic Molly Ball poses a provocative question: will that super-weapon of contemporary politics, the Super-PAC, wind up being a lot more trouble that it’s worth to candidates who cannot even talk to the strategists and operatives deployed to “their” Super-PACs?
Ball focuses on the prohibition on “coordination” as the key problem with Super-PACs. I dunno. For one thing, I have a hard time imagining a serious presidential campaign going up in flames because of a “rule” no one other than the toothless Federal Election Commission is in a position to enforce. For another, the candidates were all free to coordinate with Super-PACs to their hearts’ desire before officially declaring (this was supposedly why some of them, especially Jeb Bush, waited so long to announce) their bids. Wouldn’t you figure Mike Murphy of Right to Rise worked out a daily operational plan with Jeb running right up to the Convention, with four or five variables factored in to account for what happens along the way?
Now it’s true that such advance planning probably did not anticipate an early Invisible Primary dominated by Donald J. Trump. And indeed, the signs of trouble in Bushworld Ball mentions all involve how the candidate and the Super-PAC are dealing, or failing to deal, with The Donald. Trump’s emergence, moreover, has had a huge ripple effect on all the rival campaigns, not just those from whom he has presumably won poll respondents, but even the bottom-feeders who see no reason to give up since the presumed front-runners are down there with them messing around in the single digits as well.
But it’s way too early to pass judgment on Super-PACs as a group. For all I know, some monster of a Super-PAC not tied to any candidate may be building up a plan and a war chest as we speak to go totally medieval on Trump on the fairly reasonable assumption that no one, not even Jesus Christ, could survive a sustained and vicious negative ad barrage with an unlimited budget. And partisan Super-PACs will presumably play a big role in the general election, especially on the GOP side, when the strategic decisions such entities must make are a lot less complicated…..
I don’t think we should spend too much time wondering if Mike Murphy is weeping with frustration as he looks at his silent cell phone and realizes once again the Jeb’s not going to call.

As with so many other aspects of politics, we’ll have to wait until it’s all over to see if this is a cycle that breaks the mold or one that shows the CW can survive momentary craziness.