Jonathan Martin’s “Democrats Put Cultural Issues in Their Quiver” at The New York Times pegs the political moment exceptionally-well. Martin focuses on the senate campaigns in bellwether Virginia, Colorado and North Carolina, with drive-by references to Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas, to illuminate why Dems are getting their better-than-expected performances across the nation. As Martin observes:

After a generation of campaigns in which Republicans exploited wedge issues to win close elections, Democrats are now on the offensive in the culture wars.
Democrats see social issues as potent for the same reasons Republicans once did, using them as a tool to both stoke concerns among moderate voters, especially women, and motivate their base.

Virginia is the poster state for Martin’s argument. Moderate Democrat Mark Warner, who can be fairly described as one of the more cautious U.S. Senators, has morphed into an all-out progressive cultural warrior, confidently hammering his adversary, GOP veteran Ed Gillespie about his positions on abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage.
Martin shares that Republican candidates in FL, AR and LA are reluctant to even talk about such cultural issues, for fear of alienating moderate women voters, in stark contrast to 2004, when the GOP fronted state referendums supporting restrictive laws addressing same-sex marriage. Further, adds Martin, “On issues like gun control, drugs, the environment, race and even national security, this demographic shift has substantially weakened the right’s ability to portray Democrats as out of the social mainstream.” In addition,

“The Republican Party from 1968 up to 2008 lived by the wedge, and now they are politically dying by the wedge,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who has used the “super PAC” of the billionaire Tom Steyer to inject climate change, same-sex marriage, abortion and contraception into a series of recent campaigns.

In Virginia, Warner is following the successful template of fellow Dems, Senator Tim Kaine in 2012, and Gov. Terry McAuliffe in 2013, as well as Michael Bennet in Colorado in 2010, all of whom leveraged cultural issues adroitly in their victories. This year in CO Democratic Sen Mark Udall “has pounded his Republican challenger, Representative Cory Gardner, on abortion, contraception and same-sex marriage.” At the first Senate debate in NC, Democrat Kay Hagan boldly asked her Republican opponent,”Speaker Tillis, it’s 2014 — why did you work to make birth control so inaccessible?”
Martin concludes with a quote from Stephanie Schriock, the head of Emily’s List, that the women’s vote is “absolutely now deciding elections…And they will decide this year by going or not going to the polls.”
The stakes couldn’t be much higher. If women do improve their showing at the polls, and African American voters also turnout in higher percentages than in previous midterm elections, Democrats will have a new formula for winning state-wide races — and the stage will be set for taking back the House majority in 2016.

The New York Times editorial board outlines a workable program for increasing midterm voter turnout to healthy a level, which includes the following key elements, some of which “are being tested on a broader scale”: Better use of data; more paid workers and volunteers; big registrations drives and; reducing voter barriers. In terms of numerical goals, write the Times board members, “According to Catalist, a data analysis company, the groups with the biggest declines in turnout between 2008 and 2010 were voters younger than 30, down nearly 35 percentage points; black and Hispanic voters, down 27 points each; and single women, down 26 points. Those groups have historically been the most resistant to the right’s message of lower taxes, sharply reduced spending on social programs and job creation, and tighter restrictions on women’s reproductive rights.”
Policy.Mic’s Peter Moskowitz proposes “6 Easy Ways the Government Could Turn Around Our Abysmal Voter Turnout.”: Same-day registration; longer hours at polling places; expand early voting; vote by mail; online voting and; make elections interesting. My hunch is that the last one is more up to the candidates and parties than government.
At Daily Kos Denise Oliver Velez reports on the effort to suppress the student vote and the coalitions rising up to resist it, including National Voter Registration Day, coming up on September 23rd.
Politico tries to trash Democratic leaders’ push for reforms to slow “tax inversions” — U.S. businesses relocating to other countries as a tax dodge. The post notes, however, that “Polling does, in fact, suggest that when you explain what inversions are to voters, they don’t like them. In fact, they pretty much hate them…A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll this week showed that 59 percent of registered voters support Congress taking action to “penalize and discourage” inversion transactions.”
Further, as Jeff Sommer reports in The New York Times: “In the end, Walgreen decided that the outcry over tax inversions was too much to bear: Gregory D. Wasson, the Walgreen C.E.O., decided to go ahead with the Alliance Boots merger — but not with a tax relocation overseas. “We had to consider the consumer backlash,” Mr. Wasson said in a meeting with employees in August. “We had to consider the political backlash.”
Read Jeremy W. Peters’s NYT article, “Building Legacy, Obama Reshapes Appellate Bench” to better understand “one of the most significant but unheralded accomplishments of the Obama era” — and a good message point for mobilizing Democratic turnout.
The low expectations in this headline are understandable. But isn’t the more important part of the story found in the lead sentence?: “Americans by a 3-to-1 margin support President Barack Obama’s decision to take military action against the Islamic terrorist group called ISIS, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll conducted after the president’s primetime speech on Wednesday.”
Sean J. Miller of Campaigns & Elections magazine has an interview with Democratic political ad strategist Martha Mckenna, in which she explains her firm’s view of the virtues of animated ads: “We like to make animated spots. An animated spot might be a little bit more expensive than using stock footage; we put the price tag on it because it’s liable to stand out more than another spot would. They are really time-intensive. It’s a lot of time and energy for the artist. It’s one thing to bring words on paper and video together; it’s another thing to animate a 30-second spot. So we have learned a lot about ways to do what we think are really creative spots within a tight budget. We recognize, as former campaign managers, that money is hard to raise and so we really look for efficiencies wherever we can, so our production costs often come in lower in the range of what other firms charge…”
It’s hard to understand why, but serial voter suppression advocate Mike Huckabee is apparently leading the baggage-laden field of GOP 2016 contenders. Looks like a lot of room for a dark horse to blast through the pack.

Charles Pierce offers some perceptive insights about the President’s address last night, including that it was: “…a speech that was neither as bellicose as some people wanted, nor as isolationist as other people wanted. (Rand Paul, of course, feels strongly both ways.)…The president also asked the Congress, and the political elite of this country, to take ownership of all that loose talk that has come out of our government since that day 13 years ago, the incoherent babble of our national derangement…There are substantial political constituencies, both here and abroad, for the national derangement that began in 2001 to continue. And I think that last night’s speech was, in part, a attempt to challenge those constituencies to come out of the shadows and show themselves.”
From Greg Sargent’s Plum Line post “For Republicans, the midterm elections are all about Obama“: “The poll finds that 54 percent of voters — including 64 percent of independents and 63 percent of moderates — say Obama is “not a factor” in their vote…But 62 percent of Republicans — and 67 percent of conservative Republicans — say a reason for their vote is to “express opposition to Obama.” Perhaps Dems need an ad campaign along the lines of ‘Obama ain’t running, but Boehner and his obstructionist minions are on the ballot. End Gridlock, vote Democratic.”
In his wrap-up of the midterm primary season, Geoffrey Skelley notes at Sabato’s Crystal Ball that “On the House side, the percentage of incumbents that won less than 60% in their primaries was up from the last two midterm cycles. At the same time, the percentage of incumbents facing major-party opposition in November will be lower in 2014 than in 2010 or 2006…Although no incumbent lost in the Senate this cycle, 2014 continued the trend of increased competition in primaries seen in 2010. While 2010 saw more senators face actual opposition, both cycles saw six members win less than 60%…”
At The New Yorker Sam Wang rolls out the case that “Democrats Now Have a Seventy-Per-Cent Chance of Retaining Control of the Senate.”
Chris Cillizza posts at The Fix, however, that heavyweight pundits Charlie Cook and Stuart Rothenberg believe the Republicans have a significant edge — Rothenberg smells “a sizable Republican senate wave.” Cillizza doesn’t even mention Wang’s take.
Sometimes they just come right out and say it.
GA Governor’s race now in stat tie, according to SurveyUSA/11-Alive poll of registered LV’s. Democrat Michelle Nunn down 3 in Senate Race, with 14 point drop in support from women.
Re the proposed constitutional amendment to restore congressional authority to limit outside campaign spending that is up for a vote: A New York Times editorial supporting the measure notes that “outside spending on this year’s midterm elections ($189 million so far) is more than three times what it was at this point in 2010.”
File this idea under “not gonna happen,” since there is no strategic upside.

Ed Kilgore has the best wrap-up of the latest primary, which is also the last of 2014. There were no major surprises, but there were some interesting outcomes, as Kilgore explains at his Talking Points Memo post, “Rebuke, Rebirth, Rejection, Rematch: The Last Primary Night of 2014“:

The rebuke was to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who despite a vast advantage in money, name ID, and institutional support, struggled to win 60 percent in a low-turnout primary competition with progressive activist Zephyr Teachout. He barely ran ahead of his little-known running mate for lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul. Since the benchmark for an “embarrassment” of Cuomo among most cognoscenti going into the primary was Teachout reaching 30 percent of the vote, her 35 percent performance (with 88 percent of precincts reporting) certainly qualifies. And it verifies the strong progressive opposition to any presidential campaign by Cuomo — who is reliably reported to have seen a future president of the United States in his bathroom mirror each morning for many years — in the near future, thanks to his conservative fiscal policies, coziness with Wall Street, and perceived indifference to the New York Democratic Party.
The rebirth was of the political career of Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who famously and astonishingly blew a special Senate election in 2010 to former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) that nearly derailed enactment of the Affordable Care Act, and caused legislative shortcuts that are still causing legal problems for the ACA. She won the Massachusetts gubernatorial primary last night, though not with many votes to spare, and will be strongly favored over Republican Charlie Baker in November unless she is truly accursed.
The rematch will be in the first congressional district of New Hampshire, where former Manchester mayor Frank Guinta won the Republican nomination for the third straight time, having beaten Democrat Carol Shea-Porter in 2010 and lost to her in 2012. This will presumably be the rubber match.
The rejection was of Rep. John Tierney (D-MA), whose ensnarement in his wife’s legal problems nearly took him down in 2012 and almost certainly led to his primary loss to Seth Moulton. Tierney was the fourth House incumbent but the first Democrat to lose a primary this year, the three Republicans being the over-the-hill Ralph Hall of Texas, the “accidental” Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan, and the hubristic Mr. Cantor.

Looking at the primary season as a whole, Kilgore observes “Despite many efforts to impose a national “narrative” on the primaries, none really stuck. Some observers have insisted on a “Republican Establishment Defeats Tea Party” meme. But Eric Cantor’s loss, some ideologically ambiguous Senate winners, and a notable lurch to the Right by many “Establishment” candidates, make this claim questionable, and perhaps if true rather meaningless.”
Kilgore cites seven major factors favoring Republicans moving toward November 4, though some pundits believe they are underperforming in polls thus far, despite these advantages. When all of the votes are tallied, he reminds us that “we will have fully entered a presidential cycle…with many arrows immediately shifting to an opposite direction. So the true legacy of this cycle will only be determined when its influence over the next one is fully absorbed.”
The new cycle will lift a lot of Democratic spirits. Until then the challenge for Dems over the next eight weeks is do ‘better than expected’ and to put the Democratic party and 2016 candidates in the best possible position.

To read the most recent posts by Nate Silver and Sam Wang regarding their predictive models vis a vis the November midterms, you might think the main event on November 4 is between them. It’s an entertaining dispute, no doubt about that and the two wizards are having fun and getting plenty of attention from political data junkies.
Here’s the latest from Wang’s “Is Nate Silver a little too excited about his model?” in a couple of nut graphs:

The PEC Election Day prediction indicates a 70% probability of Democratic+Independent control. That is based on polls alone, plus the assumption that September-October will act like June-August. FiveThirtyEight’s probability is 64% favoring the Republicans, based on a model with polls plus a substantial dose of special sauce (a.k.a. fundamentals).
…I have to say, this special sauce is messy stuff. Really, the GOP has an 25% chance (3-1 odds) of getting 54 or more seats? I’d put it at more like 5%. Even 53 GOP seats is a fairly outside outcome. If a betting person were offered the chance to put up $3000 against Nate Silver’s $1000 on that outcome…that would be taking his money.
Joking aside, there are two serious points to be made here. First, nobody should be getting excited about any probability that is in the 20-80% range. That includes Nate Silver, who should knows better. He must need the media attention. Second, the addition of “fundamentals” and other factors adds considerable uncertainty to the projection.

Meanwhile, over at FiveThirtyEightPolitics, Silver’s “Registered Voter Polls Will (Usually) Overrate Democrats” adds this to the donnybrook:

Polls of so-called likely voters are almost always more favorable to Republicans than those that survey the broader sample of all registered voters or all American adults. Likely voter polls also tend to provide more reliable predictions of election results, especially in midterm years. Whereas polls of all registered voters or all adults usually overstate the performance of Democratic candidates, polls of likely voters have had almost no long-term bias….We can infer that, because likely voter polls have no long-term bias and registered voter polls show more favorable results for Democrats, registered voter polls usually have a Democratic bias.
…Likely voter polls have been unbiased, whereas registered voter polls have had a median Democratic bias of 2 percentage points.
That’s why our model adjusts registered voter polls in the way it does; their Democratic bias is fairly predictable, especially in midterm years.

Silver links to an informative chart at The Upshot, comparing forecaster snapshots of senate races, which show a slight Republican edge. But Wang isn’t in it, and he still ain’t having it.
There’s more to Silver’s analysis, and yes, it’s complicated. Of course Dems hope Wang is right. But Silver is extremely cautious in his assumptions, and his track record is pretty damn good, so who knows?
There’s room enough here for either Wang or Silver to be wrong when all the votes are counted. But neither one of them would argue with the conclusion that it’s high time for Democrats to pour on the GOTV in the battleground states on an unprecedented scale. That simply has to happen if Dems want to keep a senate majority.

Steven L. Schweizer asks at The Monkey Cage “Is a Democratic realignment afoot in the middle class?,” and answers “Meanwhile, the political partisanship of the middle class is trending Democratic. Data from the General Social Survey show that, since 2004, the self-identified middle class has moved toward the Democrats (see these charts). These shifts are particularly pronounced among those ages 18-39, men, the college educated, whites and Protestants…My argument naturally shares some affinities with other proponents of a pro-Democratic realignment, such as John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. But I see this realignment as being driven in part by groups not typically considered part of the “rising American electorate” — such as whites and men within the middle class. The emerging Democratic coalition is broader and deeper than many have suggested, and it is less reliant on the support of the poor, urbanites, minorities, women and highest-educated.”
“Democrats Counting on an Early Voting Advantage,” writes Emily Schultheis at The National Journal: “More than a third of the 2014 electorate is expected to cast ballots early this year, and they’re starting to do it very soon…Democrats have enjoyed a ground-game advantage in past elections, and have put $60 million behind their field efforts in 10 key Senate states–two facts they’re counting on help tip the scales toward them in a year when the electorate will be whiter and more conservative than in presidential years. But Republicans aren’t ceding the ground game, and they have made significant investments–including an additional $8 million last week–of their own to help with early-vote turnout and field operations…Of the nine Senate races rated as toss-ups by The Cook Political Report–Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Kentucky, Michigan and North Carolina–seven currently have significant early-vote programs, which consist of some combination of of no-excuse-necessary absentee voting and at least a week of early in-person voting.”
Patricia Murphy writes at The Daily Beast about the battle for control of the offices of Secretary of State across the country. Notes Murphy: “As the jobs have gained prominence and power, so has the pressure for the two parties to win them. Republicans currently dominate the breakdown, with 27 GOP secretaries of state in the 47 states that have the position. Democrats believe reversing that ratio is key to expanding ballot access in the short term among traditionally friendly constituencies like low-income seniors, women, and minorities, as well as setting the table for the 2016 presidential elections by having Democratic elections officials in place in key swing states.”
From “How Democrats Could Gain Power This Fall” by Perry Bacon, Jr. at NBC News: “Polls show Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Florida, Maine, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and even deeply-red Kansas could upset Republican incumbents. Many of these key races are in blue states, and the rising unpopularity of President Obama does not hobble Democratic gubernatorial hopefuls as much congressional candidates, who must say if they will vote for or against his agenda…If they win, these Democratic candidates could implement major policy changes on the state level, such as expanding Medicaid and further entrenching Obamacare, increasing the minimum wage, joining forces with the Obama administration on reducing U.S. carbon emissions and rolling back GOP-backed provisions that Democrats say make it harder to vote.”
Only 5 percent of Republican “insiders” say they believe Obamacare will be the top issue in November, according to a National Journal poll.
At The Upshot Nate Cohn opines in his post “Why Democrats Can’t Win the House,” “Democrats often blame gerrymandering, but that’s not the whole story. More than ever, the kind of place where Americans live — metropolitan or rural — dictates their political views. The country is increasingly divided between liberal cities and close-in suburbs, on one hand, and conservative exurbs and rural areas, on the other. Even in red states, the counties containing the large cities — like Dallas, Atlanta, St. Louis and Birmingham — lean Democratic.”
At Slate.com John Dickerson adds: “In the election of 2014, only a small number of seats are in a position to act as a proving ground for a battle of ideas. The Center for the Study of the American Electorate suggests that this might be the lowest midterm turnout in history. The number of people who will participate in states with elections that will determine control of the Senate is even smaller still. The House represents a national election of sorts, since all 435 members are up for re-election, but of that group only 30 (6 percent) are in races that are considered up for grabs.”
In his post “The GOP’s fear of higher voter turnout,” David Sirota notes at The Everett Herald-Tribune, “According to data compiled by the think tank Demos, average voter turnout is more than 10 percent higher in states that allow citizens to register on the same day that they vote. Demos also notes that “four of the top five states for voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election all offered same-day registration.” There was some evidence in Wisconsin that same-day registration boosted Democratic turnout, but the Wisconsin State Journal of Madison reports that “Republican areas also saw heavy use of the state’s last-minute registration law.” The registration system been also been adopted by such deeply Republican states as Wyoming, Idaho and Utah.”
I’m glad somebody’s thinking. In “A Quacked-Up Strategy to Stop Terrorism” at The Democratic Daily, Walter Brasch riffs on the whole Duck Dynasty/Sean Hannity ‘convert ’em or kill ’em’ strategy conservative luminaries are peddling. A teaser: “…Make sure every soldier also has a duck call. I recommend Duck Commander’s Homeland Security duck call. It’s only about $150 each, or about $1.5 million retail if both regiments are at full strength. This sale will help spur the American war economy. The soldiers will use the quackers to lure and mesmerize the ISIS fighters…The Robertson clan needs to be on the front lines as decoys. Because the clan looks like terrorists, the ISIS terrorists will think long-haired, bearded scarf-wearing camouflaged Robertsons are kin-folk.”

In the Daily Tarheel Blair Burnett notes that the 2010 turnout of voters between ages 18-29 in NC was 23.5 percent — less than half of their 2012 turnout rate of 56.5 percent. Burnett quotes UNC junior Caroline Moretz, who has a clue for NC Dems: “I like to be informed, but I don’t really ever engage in local politics,” Moretz said. “Now that I see people in the Pit asking me if I’m registered to vote, I’ll think about voting (in November).” Burnett says the youth cohort is about 20 percent of NC voters, and “November’s elections could be decided by that demographic.”
“An estimated one-third of all ballots will be cast before the traditional Election Day on Nov. 4,” according to John Harwood’s New York Times article, “Voting Restrictions Are Key Variable in Midterm Elections.” Harwood adds, “Eight states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, have narrowed early voting times, and three of them feature Senate races crucial to Republican hopes of capturing a majority…In Georgia, where Michelle Nunn, a Democrat, is seeking the Senate seat of the retiring Republican Saxby Chambliss, state officials have cut early voting to 21 days from 45. In West Virginia, where Representative Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, aims to flip the seat of Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat who is not seeking re-election, officials cut it to 10 days from 17…North Carolina, where Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat, is seeking re-election, has also shrunk early voting to 10 days from 17. To the chagrin of students, local officials eliminated early voting sites on the campuses of North Carolina State and Appalachian State…”
Meanwhile in Wisconsin a group of young activists is getting creative about facilitating voting, as Jason Stein reports at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “The group’s name, Vote (Mostly) Online, captures its goal: get young people voting by helping them do as much of the voting process online as state law allows. That’s a challenge in Wisconsin, a state where the 1,852 municipalities — each with their own clerk — make it difficult to connect voters statewide with the correct ballots…the website for facilitating absentee voting in Wisconsin is one of several projects started by a trio of serial technology entrepreneurs…The website will then ask users for the information needed to request an absentee ballot from their clerk. Vote (Mostly) Online will then complete and print out the official request forms and send them to voters, who will verify them, sign them and mail them to their clerk using an enclosed envelope with the correct address and postage. The clerk will then in turn send the voters their absentee ballots for them to fill out and return.”
Associated Press reports that a coalition of faith groups called Isaiah is pushing what it calls an “equity agenda” to launch a drive “to get 56,000 voters to Minnesota polling places this fall.”
I dunno about this gambit. But weird stuff works sometimes, and there isn’t much to lose in this particular instance.
Chris Cillizza asks at The Fix “Our Senate model is moving in Democrats’ direction all of a sudden. Why?” Cillizza adds “…Democratic candidates are currently overperforming how past history suggests they should be doing in a number of races. In a trio of states that has caused significant movement in the odds in Democrats’ favor over the past month [GA, IA, LA]…”
At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky makes a persuasive case for “the Democrats’ best hope for November: that enough voters in enough key states are sicker of the Republicans than of them.”
Emma Roller’s National Journal article “Inside the Strangest Job on the Campaign Trail” provides an interesting look at how the Democratic and Republican gaffe tracker units work. For now, at least, Dems seem to have the edge in funding and organization.
About the same odds of this happening anytime soon as a snowball’s chance in hell.

At Daily Kos Dreaminonempty has an elegant graphic in his post “Why 2014 is not 2010, in one very clear chart.” Go there and chew on it for a minute.
The chart shows two trend lines, using “loess curves” to depict the course of “Democratic generic congressional ballot polls” for 2014 and 2010 over time, beginning in January of each respective year. The 2014 line is fairly straight, showing a Democratic edge in positive territory, ranging from a low of about +0.4 percent to a high in the ballpark of +2.0 percent.
The 2010 trend line, however, is all over the place — from a low of about -8.2 percent to a high of approximately +0.2 percent.
You will remember 2010 as the year that Democrats got “shellacked” in congressional elections, as President Obama put it. The trend line is very different for 2014, much less volatile — and completely in positive territory thus far.
Granted, the 2014 line only goes to the end of August. In 2010, however, Dems started tanking in early July and experienced an even more precipitous decline beginning in mid-September, when many voters began paying attention. July and August 2014 have come and gone, and Dems are still hanging tough in positive territory. “In past years, massive waves have been quite obvious by now,” notes Dreaminonempty.
Apart from Dreaminonempty’s point that “2014 is not 2010,” what I’m hoping the chart shows is that the Democrats’ demographic advantage is kicking in, solidifying our edge, at least in generic balloting. Perhaps also that Republicans have befouled their nest to the point where some of their rational voters are beginning to bail.
As for how reliable generic ballot polls are in predicting outcomes, that’s another story. But the relative stability of the Democratic positive edge is most likely a good thing. You would rather see that than a mirror image of the 2010 volatility. As Dreaminonempty puts it, “…as of now, there’s no evidence of a developing Republican wave.”
The post has another chart, comparing polling for 6 other elections to 2014. Again the relative stability of Dems’ generic congressional ballot advantage in 2014 is striking.
Of course none of this will mean much if Dems do an inadequate job of turning out the base. Much depends on the scope and scale of the modernized Democratic GOTV projects now underway in the more closely-contested races.

From Joan McCarter’s Daily Kos post “Kochs to Republicans: All your voters belong to us“:

The RNC has been working on creating a program called Beacon. The key part of that sentence is “working on,” because the program isn’t ready and campaigns need it. Campaigns have been going their own way with diverse private vendors, including one called Themis which has a system called i360. That poses a problem for the RNC because they then don’t have access to the databases of voters that the campaigns are identifying. But the RNC is coming up against a behemoth foe.

McCarter then quotes from Jon Ward’s “The Behind The Scenes Story Of The RNC’s Quest For Data Supremacy” at HuffPo:

Beacon is intended to open up the RNC voter file to as many new apps and programs want to interface with it. But when campaigns, or worse, state parties, use i360, that is a problem for the RNC, because i360 is more than an app. It has its own voter file. And so every state party that uses i360 is sending out field staffers–paid for with RNC money, funneled through the state parties–to collect data that goes back not to the RNC, but to the Koch-brothers owned subsidiary.

And then from Josh Israel’s ThinkProgress post “The Koch Brothers And Republican Party Have Just Joined Forces To Track Voters“:

A secretive data and technology company linked to conservative oil billionaires Charles and David Koch has reached an agreement to share its information with the “voter file and data management company” that holds an exclusive agreement with the Republican National Committee. This will allow the Republican Party full access to voter data collected by the Koch’s Freedom Partners entities and clients–and entrenches the Kochs’ network even deeper into the GOP.

In 2014 and going forward, data control will be an increasing source of power. And with all of this invaluable voter data being filtered through the Koch Brothers’ system, it is no exaggeration to conclude, as does McCarter that this “arguably means the Koch brothers essentially own the Republican party, not just its Senate candidates.”

So, “Where Would Workers Be Without labor Unions?” At Arizona Centeral Angel Rodriguez has an answer for Arizona — and a challenge for workers.
This new Gallup poll indicates a majority of Americans (53%) support labor unions, but unions have a lot of work to do in educating the public, which also supports the so-called “Right to Work” laws by an even larger margin.
From the Omaha World-Herald’s Cindy Gonzales: “24.4: The biggest percentage of union members from a state is New York. North Carolina is the smallest, with 3 percent. 26: States (including Iowa) that saw their union membership rate decline from 2012 to 2013; 22 states (including Nebraska) saw union membership rates rise. Two states remained unchanged.”
At The Atlantic Chad Broughton’s “When Labor Day Meant Something: Remembering the radical past of a day now devoted to picnics and back-to-school sales” and observes that consumers have a good alternative to Walmart: “…better, people could go to Costco, where workers make about twice the Walmart wage, and don’t have to rely on federal benefits like food stamps and Medicaid (which, according to Americans for Tax Fairness, cost taxpayers $6.2 billion a year). In addition, Costco lets its workers unionize while Walmart instructs managers to report union activity or grumblings about wages to the company’s “Labor Relations Hotline.”…Holiday shoppers will have to wait until Tuesday, though, because Costco is closed on Labor Day. Its workers are where they should be–at the family barbecue or the parade, celebrating our national holiday.”
Steven Greenhouse’s “More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft‘” at the New York Times spotlights a mixed trend — rising corporate greed meets more assertive workers.
NYT’s Labor Day editorial notes, “There has been progress since last Labor Day. Mr. Obama has signed executive orders to improve the pay and working conditions of employees of federal contractors. The Labor Department is revising rules on overtime pay; simply updating them for inflation would make millions of additional workers eligible for time-and-a-half for overtime…What is still lacking, however, is a full-employment agenda that regards labor, not corporations, as the center of the economy — a change that would be a reversal of the priorities of the last 35 years.”
It appears that the Wall St. Journal couldn’t even manage a ‘thank you’ to, or spare a thought for, American workers who have enriched their clients and WSJ’s bottom line immeasurably.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. pays tribute to the workers and customers of Market Basket, who stood up for a stand-up manager.
AFL-CIO Now’s Mike Hall makes it plain: “Happy Labor Day! Now Let’s Raise Wages”