From Sean McElwee’s “The GOP’s stunning election advantage: How Republicans captured Congress–and how Democrats can win it back: A remarkable new study highlights the crucial role turnout plays in Republican victories“: “CCES data suggest that 23 percent of of nonvoters in 2010 and 27 percent of nonvoters in 2012 said they didn’t vote because they weren’t registered, the most frequently cited reason of all. Among those who only voted in presidential years, disliking the candidates, lack of information and business were the top reasons for not voting in midterm elections. Among the small group (4 percent) of Americans who only voted in midterms, busyness and disliking the candidates were the top reasons for abstaining…Both data sources suggest that core voters are older, whiter, richer and better educated than nonvoters and presidential-only voters. This leads to different partisan identification: nonvoters were mostly either Independents (30 percent) or Democrats (43 percent). Presidential-only voters tilt the most strongly toward the Democrats, with 53 percent saying they are Democrats and only 32 percent identifying as Republican… According to CCES, nonvoters prefered Obama to Romney by a margin of 52 percent to 32 percent, and presidential-only voters preferred him 60 percent to 37 percent. However, core voters preferred Romney over Obama, 49 percent to 48 percent. If presidential elections were decided by core voters, Romney might well have won.”
In his NYT op-ed, “A User’s Guide to the Dark Art of Politics,” Democratic strategist Bret Di Resta illuminates the importance — and the art — of good opposition research.
Robert Reich’s “What to Do About Disloyal Corporations” at HuffPo makes a persuasive case for removing a broad range of economic incentives for companies like Pfizer, which leave the U.S. to avoid taxes. Reich’s argument is succinctly stated in a way that Democratic candidates could articulate in connecting with American workers who are concerned about export of jobs. One of his soundbites: “If Pfizer or any other American corporation wants to leave America to avoid U.S. taxes, that’s their business. But they should no longer get any of the benefits of American citizenship — because they’ve stopped paying for them.”
Bill Moyers and Michael Kinship take no prisoners in their HuffPo post “The GOP on the Eve of Destruction” and provide Democrats with an eloquent summation of Republican damage to our society. “…The Republicans seem to have made up their minds: they will divide, degrade and secede from the Union…They will do so with bullying, lies and manipulation, a willingness to say anything, no matter how daft or wrong. They will do so by spending unheard of sums to buy elections with the happy assistance of big business and wealthy patrons for whom the joys of gross income inequality are a comfortable fact of life. By gerrymandering and denying the vote to as many of the poor, the elderly, struggling low-paid workers, and people of color as they can. And by appealing to the basest impulses of human nature: anger, fear and bigotry.”
At The L.A. Times David Lauter and Evan Halper explain “How the San Bernardino attack has reshaped the political debate — and the 2016 election.”
Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times peel back the layers of demagogic rhetoric that define Trump’s messaging and find…a demagogue. “Several historians watched Mr. Trump’s speeches last week, at the request of The Times, and observed techniques — like vilifying groups of people and stoking the insecurities of his audiences — that they associate with Wallace and McCarthy…”His entire campaign is run like a demagogue’s — his language of division, his cult of personality, his manner of categorizing and maligning people with a broad brush,” said Jennifer Mercieca, an expert in American political discourse at Texas A&M University.”
Rising xenophobia in wake of Paris massacre boosts right-wing in Ipsos-Sopra poll.
Mark Murray reports at MSNBC.com on findings from a new MSNBC/Telemundo/Marist poll regarding political attitudes following the terrorist shootings in San Bernardino: “Americans are split on their biggest worry, with 36 percent saying it’s a terrorist attack and 31 percent saying it’s gun violence, according to a new MSNBC/Telemundo/Marist poll…Another 17 said their biggest worry is being a victim of police brutality. The results break down along partisan and racial lines: 60 percent of Republicans say being a victim of a terrorist attack is their biggest concern, versus just 22 percent of Democrats who say that… Conversely, 40 percent of Democrats single out being a victim of gun violence as their biggest worry, compared with just 20 percent of Republicans saying that. And 41 percent of African Americans indicate their biggest concern is being a victim of police brutality, versus just 11 percent of whites who say that.”
And Oscar Williams-Grut spells out “Here’s where terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda get their money” at Business Insider.
Month: December 2015
So every day Republicans seek to batten on fear of terrorism in a repetition of their success in 2002 and 2004, it’s important to recognize how much has changed since then. In particular, there is very recent evidence that a fear-based 2016 campaign message won’t necessarily work against Democrats, and specifically Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. I wrote about this today at New York:
With a thousand points of darkness pointing toward a fear-of-terrorism-based Republican presidential election, it’s important to remember that the likely Democratic nominee has some national-security credentials of her own. An ABC/Washington Post poll released last week shows that when Americans are asked “Who would you trust more to handle the threat of terrorism?” Hillary Clinton leads every named Republican rival.
The Post‘s Greg Sargent laid it out:On the question of who is more trusted to handle terrorism, Clinton leads Trump among Americans by 50-42; she leads Ben Carson by 49-40; she leads Ted Cruz by 48-40; she leads Marco Rubio by 47-43; and she leads Jeb Bush by 46-43. In fairness, the last two of those are not statistically significant leads, and among registered voters, her lead “slims or disappears.” But this poll does suggest at a minimum that there is no clear edge for the GOP candidates over Clinton on the issue.
What’s striking here is that it comes even as Obama’s approval on terrorism is down to 40 percent. As Post polling guru Scott Clement notes, the poll shows a sizable bloc of voters who disapprove of Obama on terrorism but nonetheless say they trust Clinton over her GOP rivals on the issue.
So all the attacks on HRC about Benghazi! and alleged security breaches and her association with a president who has been attacked like no president since FDR haven’t significantly eroded her national security credentials. It’s not clear if that fact will convince Republicans to take another tack, or will instead incite them to go even more ballistic on terrorism and national security issues. We will know soon, and perhaps so loudly that even more votes will believe Democrats can bring them peace.
So every day Republicans seek to batten on fear of terrorism in a repetition of their success in 2002 and 2004, it’s important to recognize how much has changed since then. In particular, there is very recent evidence that a fear-based 2016 campaign message won’t necessarily work against Democrats, and specifically Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. I wrote about this today at New York:
With a thousand points of darkness pointing toward a fear-of-terrorism-based Republican presidential election, it’s important to remember that the likely Democratic nominee has some national-security credentials of her own. An ABC/Washington Post poll released last week shows that when Americans are asked “Who would you trust more to handle the threat of terrorism?” Hillary Clinton leads every named Republican rival.
The Post‘s Greg Sargent laid it out:On the question of who is more trusted to handle terrorism, Clinton leads Trump among Americans by 50-42; she leads Ben Carson by 49-40; she leads Ted Cruz by 48-40; she leads Marco Rubio by 47-43; and she leads Jeb Bush by 46-43. In fairness, the last two of those are not statistically significant leads, and among registered voters, her lead “slims or disappears.” But this poll does suggest at a minimum that there is no clear edge for the GOP candidates over Clinton on the issue.
What’s striking here is that it comes even as Obama’s approval on terrorism is down to 40 percent. As Post polling guru Scott Clement notes, the poll shows a sizable bloc of voters who disapprove of Obama on terrorism but nonetheless say they trust Clinton over her GOP rivals on the issue.
So all the attacks on HRC about Benghazi! and alleged security breaches and her association with a president who has been attacked like no president since FDR haven’t significantly eroded her national security credentials. It’s not clear if that fact will convince Republicans to take another tack, or will instead incite them to go even more ballistic on terrorism and national security issues. We will know soon, and perhaps so loudly that even more votes will believe Democrats can bring them peace.
From William Galston’s Wall St. Journal column, “Making Our Roads ‘Shovel-Ready’: Hillary Clinton offers a valuable proposal for an overdue upgrade of U.S. infrastructure.”:
On Sunday, with less national fanfare than the announcement deserved, Hillary Clinton released a major proposal to boost infrastructure investment by $500 billion, much of this over the next five years. The plan includes three principal financing mechanisms: direct public investments, subsidies to reduce interest costs on taxable infrastructure bonds, and a national infrastructure bank that would leverage $25 billion in public seed capital that would support up to an additional $225 billion in direct loans, guarantees and other forms of credit enhancement.
You can almost hear the conservative knee-jerk response, “So who is going to pay for all of this?” Galston has an answer. But first he explains that all Americans are going to pay, and pay dearly if we continue to do nothing about our crumbling infrastructure, a point that should always be underscored. The opportunity costs of infrastructure repair have become untenable:
The case for action is clear. Over the past three decades, America has systematically underinvested in infrastructure by about 1% of GDP each year, resulting in a shortfall of trillions of dollars. The nation’s roads, highways, bridges and dams are aging, imposing extra costs (an estimated $377 annually per driver) to operate a motor vehicle while exposing everyone to increased risk. Many ports and the transportation networks that support them are becoming impediments to the efficient flow of trade. Anyone who has traveled outside the U.S. knows that many American airports are far from world class…Each year of delay raises project costs substantially.
Further, adds Galston,”In the most recent Global Competitiveness Rankings issued annually by the World Economic Forum, the U.S. stood…only 13th for infrastructure quality as a whole, 14th for roads, 15th for railways and 16th for electrical-supply systems.”
As for financing the needed infrastructure upgrades, Galston notes that “The principal source of funding for surface transportation, the 18.4 cents per gallon gas tax, has not been raised since 1993, and resistance to any further increase is intense, especially in rural areas and small towns whose residents typically drive long distances for work, shopping and medical services.” He argues for exploring “new strategies, including the more leveraged use of scarce public funds to reduce interest rates on taxable bonds and attract private capital for infrastructure” and “routing more project choices through an infrastructure bank with an independent board and skilled technical experts.”
“Western democracies such as Germany and Canada generally grant permits,” Galston points out, “including environmental reviews–for major infrastructure projects in two years or less,” He applauds Clinton’s plan’s to “cut red tape” and “streamline permitting,” which is “in sharp contrast to the fragmented U.S. system wherein an aggrieved group can thwart decisions for years.”
Gaston warns, however, that by tying up proposed projects in ‘regulatory knots,’ the U.S. has become irrationally timid about fixing broken-down public facilities that serve all Americans. Meanwhile “other democracies can plan, fund and execute projects in less time than it takes in the U.S. to complete the required environmental-impact statements.”
It may be that the time is fast approaching when a coalition of Democrats and a handful of Republicans who are fed up with their party’s knee-jerk obstruction of urgent public works projects, can help the nation achieve the needed upgrades. But Galston believes there must also be a consensus “to strike a better balance between parochial concerns and the public interest.”
Galston is surely right that Clinton’s plan is the most detailed, credible set of infrastructure improvement proposals yet presented. Forging the consensus needed to move forward will likely require an electoral spanking for infrastructure obstructionists, parochial and otherwise.
Trump may get the headlines with his daily outrages, but a new poll brings some very good news for Sen. Bernie Sanders: “A stunning new poll by Quinnipiac suggests Bernie Sanders is the most electable candidate in either party to be the next president of the United States,” says Brent Budowsky, reporting at the Observer News. Budowsky says further,
In the Quinnipiac poll Mr. Sanders would defeat Republican frontrunner Donald Trump by 8 points, while Hillary Clinton would defeat him by only 6 points. Mr. Sanders would defeat Ben Carson by 6 points, while Ms. Clinton would defeat him by only three. Mr. Sanders would defeat Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz by 10 points, while Ms. Clinton would defeat him by five. Mr. Sanders and Ms. Clinton would both defeat Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio by one point.
Budowsky takes a stab at the why behind the numbers, and explains:
First, Mr. Sanders has very high ratings for integrity, trust and authenticity in an election year where large numbers of voters feel strong distrust for major political figures and media institutions.
Second, Mr. Sanders embodies a pure play candidate for a progressive populist agenda that has powerful and, I would argue, majority support from American voters.
Mr. Sanders campaigns against the corruptions of money that plague American politics–in favor of major reforms of Wall Street to make our financial system more fair, for a free public college education financed by a transaction tax on Wall Street speculation, for an increase in social security benefits at a time when next year Americans will receive no cost of living increases in social security benefits, and for a Medicare-for-all health care program that would dramatically lower health care costs far more than ObamaCare or GOP plans to repeal ObamaCare without offering any credible alternative.
These positions all have strong support from voters and are offered by a candidate with a strong reputation for championing major reforms and income inequality with high levels of credibility and trust.
For a little icing on the Sanders cake, Sam Frizzell reports at Time Magazine that the Senator has another good news story percolating:
With less than four days until TIME’s Person of the Year poll closes, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is holding on to a strong lead over some of 2015’s most influential people.
The Vermont Senator had 10.5% of the vote in the reader poll as of Thursday morning, well ahead of Malala Yousafzai, who is in second place at 5.2%. Trailing Sanders is Pope Francis, at 3.8%, TIME’s 2013 Person of the Year. Sanders is far ahead of other presidential candidates, including Republican Donald Trump (2%) and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton (1.3%).
Sen. Sanders has been around long enough to know such poll leads can evaporate as fast as they appeared. What may prove a source of more enduring satisfaction for the Sanders campaign, however, is that his progressive policies are getting traction across the political landscape — and that would not have happened without his leadership.
After the latest gun massacre in San Bernardino, and before a whole lot was known about the killers and their motives, there was already a sense of ennui setting in among Beltway elites about the tedious gun policy debate that would soon set it. At New York today, I wrote about this deplorable refusal to deal with the gun policy issue:
Liberals need to understand, however, that it’s precisely this fatigue, and the underlying assumption that both sides in the perpetual “gun debate” are equally to blame for its unproductive nature, that is the secret weapon of the NRA and Second Amendment ultras everywhere. There are obviously many other things that are relevant to a gun massacre, from possible terrorist links to mental-health issues. But gun policy should always be in order after a gun massacre.
That’s not how the King of False Equivalency, National Journal columnist Ron Fournier, sees it, of course. In his first post-San Bernardino piece, he excoriates gun-control advocates (among whom he placed himself) for offending the tender sensibilities of all those gun-control opponents who are piously calling for prayer rather than legislation.Republicans are doing more than praying. They’re not doing nearly enough, from my vantage point, but if we’re going to move beyond verbal wars and actually start fixing this problem, the first step is to acknowledge the other side’s point of view. Understand it. Respect it. Then exploit it.
For example, couldn’t a smart group of gun control advocates seize on the National Rifle Association’s talking point about mental health and work toward major reforms of the U.S. system?Does a single soul other than Ron Fournier think the NRA will expend an ounce of its vast political capital fighting for reforms in the U.S. mental-health system? I doubt it. And why should they? They are not the National Rifle and Mental Health Association. And so the injunction to gun-control advocates to find some way to work with Wayne LaPierre after changing the subject from guns is a counsel of surrender and despair.
If the next mass-killing spree in this country is conducted by dynamite, harpoons, or crossbows, and liberals talk about gun control, Fournier and other critics will have a point. But not this time. And it really doesn’t matter if certain elites find the topic boring.
Unfortunately, we may not have to wait that long to come to grips with this issue all over again.
After the latest gun massacre in San Bernardino, and before a whole lot was known about the killers and their motives, there was already a sense of ennui setting in among Beltway elites about the tedious gun policy debate that would soon set it. At New York today, I wrote about this deplorable refusal to deal with the gun policy issue:
Liberals need to understand, however, that it’s precisely this fatigue, and the underlying assumption that both sides in the perpetual “gun debate” are equally to blame for its unproductive nature, that is the secret weapon of the NRA and Second Amendment ultras everywhere. There are obviously many other things that are relevant to a gun massacre, from possible terrorist links to mental-health issues. But gun policy should always be in order after a gun massacre.
That’s not how the King of False Equivalency, National Journal columnist Ron Fournier, sees it, of course. In his first post-San Bernardino piece, he excoriates gun-control advocates (among whom he placed himself) for offending the tender sensibilities of all those gun-control opponents who are piously calling for prayer rather than legislation.Republicans are doing more than praying. They’re not doing nearly enough, from my vantage point, but if we’re going to move beyond verbal wars and actually start fixing this problem, the first step is to acknowledge the other side’s point of view. Understand it. Respect it. Then exploit it.
For example, couldn’t a smart group of gun control advocates seize on the National Rifle Association’s talking point about mental health and work toward major reforms of the U.S. system?Does a single soul other than Ron Fournier think the NRA will expend an ounce of its vast political capital fighting for reforms in the U.S. mental-health system? I doubt it. And why should they? They are not the National Rifle and Mental Health Association. And so the injunction to gun-control advocates to find some way to work with Wayne LaPierre after changing the subject from guns is a counsel of surrender and despair.
If the next mass-killing spree in this country is conducted by dynamite, harpoons, or crossbows, and liberals talk about gun control, Fournier and other critics will have a point. But not this time. And it really doesn’t matter if certain elites find the topic boring.
Unfortunately, we may not have to wait that long to come to grips with this issue all over again.
Looks like the mass shooting in San Bernadino may spark yet another round of Islamophobia, egged on by right-wing media. The tragedy has also ignited a fierce debate among voters about the value of politicians’ “thoughts and prayers” vs. gun control again.
WaPo’s Sean Sullivan reports “How the 2016 presidential candidates are reacting to the California mass shooting.” Maybe it’s time for the media to make Republicans flesh out the “thoughts” part of their “thoughts and prayers” bromide a bit.
The FiveThirtyEight Gang, Nate Silver, Micah Cohen and Harry Enten have a conversation to test Silver’s view that Donald Trump probably ain’t gonna get the GOP nomination. Among Silver’s more persuasive points: “Polls don’t mean much at this stage and aren’t very predictive…A polling front-runner wins more often than not when the front-runner is at 50 percent in the polls, like Hillary Clinton is now. But Trump’s at 25-30 percent nationally and a bit less than that in Iowa…It’s not just that Trump has no support from his party. It’s that the party is actively looking to stop him because he’d be a catastrophe as their nominee.” I’m going way out on a limb here and say that any crazy thing can happen, especially with such a large field of flawed candidates.
NYT’s First Draft explains why “Senate Republicans Up for Re-Election Are Urged to Keep Distance From Donald Trump“: “”Let’s face facts. Trump says what’s on his mind and that’s a problem,” wrote Ward Baker, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Our candidates will have to spend full time defending him or condemning him if that continues. And, that’s a place we never, ever want to be. It is certain that all GOP candidates will be tied in some way to our nominee, but we need not be tied to him so closely that we have to engage in permanent cleanup or distancing maneuvers.””
The Upshot’s Nate Cohn explains how the Trump campaign impacts the debate about the pros and cons of telephone vs. online polls.
NYT conservative columnist Russ Douthat concedes “Whether or not we want to call Trump a fascist outright, then, it seems fair to say that he’s closer to the “proto-fascist” zone on the political spectrum than either the average American conservative or his recent predecessors in right-wing populism…Trump may indeed be a little fascistic, but that sinister resemblance is just one part of his reality-television meets WWE-heel-turn campaign style. He isn’t actually building a fascist mass movement (he hasn’t won a primary yet!) or rallying a movement of far-right intellectuals (Ann Coulter notwithstanding). His suggestion that a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his rallies might have deserved to be roughed up was pretty ugly, but still several degrees of ugly away from the actual fascist move, which would require organizing a paramilitary force to take to the streets to brawl with the decadent supporters of our rotten legislative government.” Scant comfort, that.
The Fix’s Chris Cillizza sheds what was left of his already diaphanous nonpartisan veil to offer this advice directly to Bush III and Right to Rise, his Super-PAC: “Take all of the ad time Right to Rise has reserved in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and turn the firehose on full blast against Trump. I am talking about a sustained ad campaign whose sole aim is to disqualify Trump — not boost Bush. Sure, Bush and Right to Rise have jabbed at Trump — and a John Kasich super PAC has gone into full attack mode against The Donald — but no one other than the Bush forces have the money to maintain a sustained negative ad campaign against Trump in, at least, the first three voting states…Bush — and the broader establishment that he represents — needs to understand that these are desperate times for them. Standing on the sidelines is no longer a viable option. Waiting for someone else to do it won’t work. Someone needs to step up and try to take Trump out if, indeed, the establishment believes that The Donald as the party’s nominee is a catastrophic situation…No one is better positioned — or has less to lose — than Bush and Right to Rise. It’s time to take a chance.”
Washington Post op-ed columnist Harold Meyerson has some simpler advice for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to help build unity among Democratic progressives: “She should say that if elected president, she’d subject the Wall Streeters to a higher tax rate than anyone else.”
Crystal Ball’s Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik provide some insight into calendar considerations for any independent candidacy bid by Donald Trump, or anyone else: “The calendar will help to determine whether there’s a truly prominent third-party candidate on the ballot. Filing deadlines for independent presidential candidates vary by state, but a majority fall in August. That is after the conventions — 38 states’ deadlines are after the RNC ends on July 21 — but not so far after them that a spurned candidate could easily turn around and get on many state ballots. A candidate who wants to get on every ballot will have to start much earlier than that: For instance, the deadline for an independent to get on the ballot in Texas, the second-biggest state, is May 9. So maybe it would be helpful to the Republicans if Trump hangs around in the primary — so long as he doesn’t win the nomination — just long enough for a national third-party bid to be out of reach.”
Barbara Ehrenreich’s “What Happened to the White Working Class? Downward mobility plus racial resentment is a potent combination with disastrous consequences.” at The Nation provides one of the more instructive subtitles in recent literature about the political psychology of this huge demographic group.
Ehrenreich delves into the reasons for the downtick in white working class longevity. But her insights into the political attitudes of white workers ought to be of particular interest to Democrats who want to build an enduring progressive majority. Addressing this concern, Ehrenreich notes:
But something more profound is going on here, too. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it, the “diseases” leading to excess white working-class deaths are those of “despair,” and some of the obvious causes are economic. In the last few decades, things have not been going well for working-class people of any color.
I grew up in an America where a man with a strong back–and better yet, a strong union–could reasonably expect to support a family on his own without a college degree. In 2015, those jobs are long gone, leaving only the kind of work once relegated to women and people of color available in areas like retail, landscaping, and delivery-truck driving. This means that those in the bottom 20% of white income distribution face material circumstances like those long familiar to poor blacks, including erratic employment and crowded, hazardous living spaces.
Ehrenreich adds that “the public and psychological wage” benefit white workers enjoyed under segregation, which W.E.B. Dubois cited 80 years ago, has shrunk considerably as a result of African American advancement. As she explains,
Today, there are few public spaces that are not open, at least legally speaking, to blacks, while the “best” schools are reserved for the affluent–mostly white and Asian American along with a sprinkling of other people of color to provide the fairy dust of “diversity.” While whites have lost ground economically, blacks have made gains, at least in the de jure sense. As a result, the “psychological wage” awarded to white people has been shrinking.
…The culture, too, has been inching bit by bit toward racial equality, if not, in some limited areas, black ascendency. If the stock image of the early twentieth century “Negro” was the minstrel, the role of rural simpleton in popular culture has been taken over in this century by the characters in Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. At least in the entertainment world, working-class whites are now regularly portrayed as moronic, while blacks are often hyper-articulate, street-smart, and sometimes as wealthy as Kanye West. It’s not easy to maintain the usual sense of white superiority when parts of the media are squeezing laughs from the contrast between savvy blacks and rural white bumpkins, as in the Tina Fey comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. White, presumably upper-middle class people generally conceive of these characters and plot lines, which, to a child of white working-class parents like myself, sting with condescension.
Ehrenreich continues, “Poor whites always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating.”
If ‘comfort’ is too strong a word for the way most white workers feel about racial advantage, the belief that your social group, once proudly middle class, is becoming an economically-depressed demographic can move political attitudes rightward. And when media stereotypes and political propaganda feed memes that people of color are benefitting disproportionately from the taxes of white workers, it feeds the resentment. Certainly the GOP has made President Obama the lightning rod for crystallizing this meme.
It’s a message built on endlessly repeated lies, and one which Democrats have thus far failed to adequately challenge and correct. While some white workers undoubtedly crave the sense of superiority their parents experienced during the segregation era, most white workers today are likely more focused on preventing their families from sinking into economic hardship. For Republicans, the task is to convert this fear into racial resentment, and they have done so on a grand scale.
Democrats are going to have to do a better job of demythologizing the GOP memes and stereotypes. It will also require a more energetic “branding” of the Republican party as the party of the wealthy, which squanders trillions of taxpayer dollars on war and corporate privileges. But there is also the even more formidable challenge of branding the Democratic party as the party of working people and their unions, the party of making the minimum wage a living wage, of full employment, comprehensive health care for all citizens and affordable higher education. That’s a political brand that could win enough white workers to insure a stable majority for many years to come.
