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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Political Strategy Notes

DNC race in rear view, Bernie Sanders heads to Kansas to rip Republican policies” — Love this headline and the story by Dave Weigel at PowerPost. As Sanders says in the article, “One of my goals as outreach chair of the Senate Democrats is to do everything I can to make the Democratic Party competitive in red states…I think the Democratic Party has been embarrassingly bad at that recently, and we need to expand our reach.” Wouldn’t it be great if a team of top Democrats began visiting states controlled by Republicans and called attention to metrics of their failures? If they can’t visit, then have the national Democratic leaders hammer away at the state GOP establishments on twitter and Facebook. Sow the seeds of a real 50-state strategy with some message discipline displayed by national leaders, as well as local Democrats.

Another encouraging story about a successful Democratic uprising: Paul Blumenthal’s “Buoyed By Anti-Trump Activism, Democrat Wins Delaware Special Election:An army of volunteers, many from out of state, flooded the state Senate district for Stephanie Hansen” at HuffPo. As Blumenthal reports, “The last time her opponent, John Marino, ran in this district, in 2014, he lost by just 2 points. [Stephanie] Hansen’s 58-42 percent victory over Marino on Saturday ensured that Democrats will maintain control of the state Senate. It also notched a big Donald Trump-era win for a new generation of Democratic activists shocked into action by the November election.”

Greg Sargent gets down to raw specifics in his Plum Line post “Trump will likely sell out his working-class white base. Here’s how.” In one section, Sargent writes, “…Trump strongly signaled to working-class white voters that, while he’d repeal the Affordable Care Act, he isn’t like those other mean old Republicans when it comes to government’s role in expanding health care to the poor and sick. He and his advisers recently insisted that under the GOP replacement, no one will lose coverage. But they’ve already backed off that promise, instead signaling that they may embrace the block-granting of Medicaid, which would probably lead to cuts over time. The bottom line: The Trump/GOP replacement is likely to end Obamacare’s effort to create a universal coverage guarantee.”

For those who believe that Democrats can regain lost ground by focusing more on economic issues, Alexander Burns has a New York Times article of interest, “Angling for a Comeback, Democratic Governors Sharpen Focus on Jobs.” As Burns explains, “Gov. Gina M. Raimondo of Rhode Island, a Democrat who is in her first term, said her party had too often failed to put jobs and economic opportunity at the forefront of its agenda. Democrats had erred, she said, by treating jobs merely as one issue in a “check list” of positions…“My own view is, we have to say: The whole game is job growth,” Ms. Raimondo said. “People feel left behind because they are left behind. People feel the playing field isn’t level because it’s not level. So let’s level it.”…Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State, the vice chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, said Democrats had to make job growth their organizing theme on all subjects, including immigration and the Affordable Care Act. The most effective attacks on Mr. Trump, he said, would cast the president’s policies as harmful to the economy. “We as a party have to wrap all of our messages and all of our issues in a central jobs and economic message…”

Tip of the hat to both Rep. Keith Ellison and former Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez, the latter just elected head of the DNC, for the classy way they handled their rivalry, despite some acrimony among their respective followers. As NYT’s Jonathan Martin reports, “Taking the microphone from Mr. Perez, Mr. Ellison pleaded with his fervent backers: “We don’t have the luxury to walk out of this room divided…Directly appealing to his disappointed supporters, Mr. Ellison said, “If they trust me, they need to come on and trust Tom Perez as well.” Perez, who also called for unity, is expected to leverage some of Ellison’s interesting ideas for maximizing voter turnout.

In his column, “Bannon’s dangerous ‘deconstruction’,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. provides a crisp description of Bannon’s use of the expression “deconstruction of the administrative state” and what it means on the ground: “In practice, this is a war on a century’s worth of work to keep our air and water clean; our food, drugs and workplaces safe; the rights of employees protected; and the marketplace fair and unrigged. It’s one thing to make regulations more efficient and no more intrusive than necessary. It’s another to say that all the structures of democratic government designed to protect our citizens from the abuses of concentrated private power should be swept away…Trump and Bannon are happy to expand the reach of the state when it comes to policing, immigration enforcement, executive-branch meddling in the work of investigative agencies, and the browbeating of individual companies that offend the president in one way or another. The parts of government they want to dismantle are those that stand on the side of citizens against powerful interests.”

In bad news for Betsy Devos, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll finds that a healthy majority, “58 percent of Iowans oppose taking public school funds to help parents pay for non-public schools, while only 35 percent support it,” reports Mackenzie Ryan in the Register. It’s “just” Iowa, conservatives will say. But ‘just Iowa’ was a heartland Trump state, and a 23 percent gap (+/- 3.5 m.o.e.) is pretty significant, especially because Iowa’s popular Republican governor Terry Branstad and a host of state Republican leaders supported it. Secretary of Education Devos has been an ardent advocate of  public school privatization schemes.

John Schuppe of NBC news shares a revealing quote by Speaker John Boehner at a recent health care forum: “In the 25 years I served in the United States Congress, Republicans never, ever, one time, agreed on what a healthcare proposal should look like. Not once.” When the ‘repeal and replace’ follies are all played out, the only thing certain is that some major provisions of Obamacare will endure because they are higly popular, but they will call the package something else. Whether the ‘replacement’ will actually function remains much in doubt.

CNN’s Jake Tapper sticks it to Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, who had the hypocrisy to blast the New York Times for not noting his birthplace accurately: “I imagine it must be really annoying when someone puts out false info about where you were born,” tweets Tapper. “Must really bother you!!”

One comment on “Political Strategy Notes

  1. pjcamp on

    “Tip of the hat to both Rep. Keith Ellison and former Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez, the latter just elected head of the DNC, for the classy way they handled their rivalry, ”

    They certainly did a far better job than Bernie Sanders did during and after the primary.

    Reply

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