Wesley Lowery’s post “Democrats’ anti-Koch strategy is risky” at The Fix assesses the pros and cons of Dems’ efforts to make the Koch brothers poster-boys for the evils of big money in politics. Lowery offers some interesting polling data to help gauge the efficacy of the Dems’ strategy:

A poll of registered voters conducted in January for the Democratic-aligned America Votes found that Kochs had relatively low name identification in five battleground states, ranging from 29 percent to 37 percent, according to a person familiar with the results. The exception was Wisconsin, where AFP helped Gov. Scott Walker fight off a recall effort. There, 50 percent of people recognized the brothers.

Fair enough. I’ve also wondered about their name recognition among voters and the cost-benefit calculations that determine how much money, time and energy should be invested in the anti-Koch brothers project.
But name recognition can be increased, which is one of the purposes of political ads. There is no question in my mind that Dems have to inform the public about the unprecedented influence of money in politics resulting from the Koch brothers’ meddling, and how they stand to benefit economically from it.
The weakest part of Lowery’s post is his suggestion that “Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund executive who plans to target Republicans over climate change” is somehow equivalent to the Kochs. The Kochs have already poured millions into campaigns to defeat Democrats and progressive reforms. When all of the spending is tallied at the end of the 2014 campaign, Steyer’s contribution will likely be small change compared to what the Kochs have already spent.
My hunch is that pretty soon we will see a spate of ads deifying the Koch brothers as “self-made” entrepreneurs who deserve our respect. Ludicrous as that sounds, it may just offset enough Dem messaging to the contrary.
The only question is, what is the wisest way to allocate resources so other Democratic messaging doesn’t suffer. Dems have a daunting challenge, for example, in convincing a large segment of the public that the Affordable Care Act is a good reform for their families. This is not unrelated to the Koch brothers bashing of Obamacare. But messaging shouldn’t get too complex for short television ads. Then there is the need to invest heavily in turning out the Democratic base, which many strategists believe is a more cost-effective investment than messaging to win/change hearts and minds.
There is also a danger of allocating resources away from publicizing another message that Dems must get across, loud and clear, by November — that the Republicans in congress are doing everything they can to prevent economic recovery. Again, the Koch brothers are part of the picture. But shifting focus away from the Republican members of congress toward the Kochs may have the unintended effect of letting them evade accountability. The Koch brothers could serve as sort of a ‘red herring,’ which I’m sure would please them immensely.
Democrats do have to go after the Kochs and big Republican donors. The unacceptable alternative is to allow them to buy elections.The critical questions Dems face in meeting this challenge have to do with timing, resource allocation and message emphasis.
At a minimum, Dems should always link their attacks on Koch brothers spending to specific Republican candidates at the congressional, state and local levels. Lots of current Republican office-holders have made some very risky policy calls, like GOP governors refusing funds for Medicaid expansion, forcing rural hospitals to close (e.g. GA, plus 18 other states not taking expansion funds) or state legislatures reducing early voting opportunities (e.g. OH, FL, GA, TN, WV, NC and others). Dems must make Republicans eat their blunders, not allow the Koch brothers to distract them from that imperative.

Here’s a teaser from “Everyone Economics: New data supports economic populism as a Democratic strategy” by Ruy Teixeira and Guy Molyneux: “A new national survey we have conducted for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, supported by other public opinion data, suggests that what we’re calling “Everyone Economics”–a framework for advocating and explaining progressive economic policies–has tremendous appeal to voters in the center of electorate. It also unites the interests of the “coalition of the ascendant”–minorities, unmarried and working women, Millennial and more secular voters, and educated whites living in more urbanized states–with the white working-class voters who once formed the core of the Democratic coalition. And it deprives conservatives of one of their most powerful rhetorical weapons, while potentially dividing their political coalition.”
Also at TNR, Jonathan Cohn comments on Greg Sargent’s interview (also discussed below) with Paul Begala and distills their comments to come up with an apt description the GOP’s alternative to Obamacare: “The official Republican Party position is to restore the old order.”
Leveraging “March Madness” ads to sell Obamacare to young men is a good strategy. But a little more emphasis on the urgent need for young people to vote in 2014 would be even better.
E. J. Dionne, Jr. also has some solid advice for the president and Democrats: “Going on offense means, first, building on what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is undertaking in his campaign against the Koch brothers and other right-wing millionaires trying to buy themselves a Congress…This is not just a tactical effort to turn tens of millions of dollars in negative advertising into a boomerang by encouraging voters to ask why the ads are appearing in the first place. It is also about drawing a sharp line between the interests and policy goals of those fronting that money and the rest of us…”
The “Screaming Siren” in this Monitor post by Scott Sappenfield may be a tad overstated. Alex Sink lost FL-13 by less than 2 percent. After all, had Sink persuaded a little more than half of this very small margin to cast their ballot for her instead, pundits would be talking about a “Republican debacle.”
For an excellent discussion of what a Democratic economic agenda should look like, read “The New Populist Movement: Organizing to Take Back America” by Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future.
America needs a lot more of this — large gatherings of religious leaders of all faiths standing up, united in their opposition to voter suppression: “The Rev. Dr. Jawanza Karriem Colvin, Pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland explains: “We are drawing on the activist traditions of our faiths. The legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Mohandas K. Gandhi and so many others who not only inspire but challenge us to be voices and vehicles of social change.”
There are more Republican women governors, but “Female Democrats have an advantage over female Republicans of almost 2 to 1 in state legislatures; that ratio rises to more than 3 to 1 in Congress,” reports Albert R. Hunt at Bloomberg, via NYT.
Hoist a pint of Guinness, mateys, in tribute to a gutsy, stand-up company.

In “How Democrats can flip the script on Obamacare,” : Greg Sargent shares some insights gleaned from his interview with Democratic strategist Paul Begala:

“We should flip the wording of how we talk about Obamacare,” Begala told me today. “Open on offense, instead of on defense.”
Begala’s advice is rooted in a clear eyed assessment of the real Obamacare problem Dems face. It isn’t just that the law is unpopular with swing voters — yes, disapproval is running high, but repeal is also unpopular, which offers a way to fight disapproval to a draw. The more pressing problem is that Obamacare revs up the GOP base — worsening the “midterm falloff” turnout problem already present in non-presidential years — but it doesn’t excite the Dem base anywhere near enough to offset that problem.
To be clear, that is a very serious issue. But Begala thinks Dems can address it with a simple flipping of the script. Dems now debating how to talk about Obamacare seem to be leading defensively with their willingness to fix the law. Instead, Begala says, they should lead with an attack on Republicans that is framed as a medical rights issue – before pivoting to fixing the law — and then wrap it all up in a larger message about how Republicans have no answers to people’s health care or economic problems.
“We should open by saying, ‘my opponent wants to repeal your rights,'” Begala said. “He wants to take away your right to be protected against discrimination because you have a preexisting condition. He wants to take away your right to be protected against discrimination for being older or being a woman. He wants to take away the closing of the Medicare donut hole for seniors.”
“That’s point one,” he continued. “Then you say, ‘look, I’m open to working with everybody to fix the law. But I’ll never let them go back to the days where insurance companies could send letters saying your coverage has been canceled because you have a preexisting condition.'”

It’s not like Republicans have much of a fallback position, other than demonizing Obamacare. As Begala notes, “Repeal is their whole agenda. They have no ideas for giving you a pay raise. No ideas for raising the minimum wage. No ideas about how to create jobs. No ideas about how to get your kid into pre-K. Their entire agenda as a party is repeal — to take away rights that you have won. I’m not going to let them do that.”…”We can win on Obamacare, but we have to fight.”
Sargent adds that demonizing Obamacare “excites the Republican base far more than the Democratic base, potentially making the “midterm drop-off” even worse.” He argues that Republicans may well double down on the demonization strategy, which invites a Democratic counterattack in a populist context.
Republicans are handicapped by their inability to come up with a comprehensive alternative to Obamacare, Sargent believes. They hope to distract voters with a grab bag of piecemeal alternatives, none of which are particularly compelling. Polls indicate that the public appetite for ‘repeal and replace’ and starting all over again is small and shrinking. Time is not on the ACA demonization strategy’s side. An aggressive counter-attack, reminding voters about the popular provisions of the ACA, while calling out Republicans to flesh out their increasingly vague “alternatives” — just might work.

There’s been a lot of questionable spin over the results in Tuesday’s special congressional election in the 13th District of Florida, which Republican David Jolly won over Democrat Alex Sink by just under 3500 votes. GOPers naturally want to make it out as a “referendum on Obamacare,” and some Democrats seem to agree that an “enthusiasm gap” partially attributable to Obamacare was the key.
But that’s not what I concluded at Washington Monthly:

One thing that the FL-13 special election results should encourage everyone to do is to get very serious about the phenomenon I write about metronomically here: the “midterm falloff problem” for Democrats.
We don’t have exit polls for FL-13, so we can’t figure out exactly who turned out and who didn’t. But the total vote falloff from 2012 was 46%. It was even 21% from 2010, which reminds us that special elections are kind of super-midterms when it comes to participation levels. Given the eternal proclivity of younger and minority voters who now heavily lean D to vote more in presidential than in non-presidential contests, it’s pretty hard to believe that wasn’t the most important reason why Alex Sink ran behind Barack Obama’s 2012 percentages in the district….
In the last good midterm election for Democrats, 2006, the Donkey Party broke even among voters over 65, who represented 19% of the electorate. Democrats narrowly lost white voters (47-51), who represented 79% of the electorate. Two years later, Obama’s overall solid win masked the fact that Democrats lost over-65 voters by eight points, while their deficit among white voters increased from 4 to 12 points. These demographic categories quite naturally declined as a percentage of the electorate (seniors from 19% to 16%; whites from 79% to 74%).
So the cataclysm of 2010 was largely a matter of Democrats continuing to lose vote share among seniors (a deficit of 21 points) and white voters generally (a 23 point deficit), who again made up a higher proportion of the electorate (seniors: 21%, whites: 77%). In 2012, the Democratic vote share rebounded somewhat among seniors and white voters (12 points and 20 points, respectively), but the more important factor is that their share of the vote declined significantly (old folks and white folks each down 5 points).
I could go on for quite some time with such numbers, but the point is that the two electorates, midterm and presidential, pretty clearly have two “natural” majorities based on vote share and participation rates. And changing that won’t be easy, for either party.

Senate Democrats are reportedly making a reduction in “midterm falloff” their major collective task going into the general election. That’s a very good thing, and as the narrow margin of GOP victory in FL-13 indicates, not at all a hopeless task.

At pbs.org, Judy Woodruff interviewed political analysts Susan MacManus and Stuart Rothenberg about the FL-13 election. Rothenberg noted: “Democrats do have — often have trouble with low-turnout elections. Remember, elections are not about what Americans think. They’re about what the particular voters think…So there’s no doubt here. But there is a problem for Democrats. The fact that the electorate was so Republican suggests Republican enthusiasm and maybe lack of Democratic enthusiasm. And Democrats are going to have to deal with this in November in the midterms as well.” MacManus added, “Democrats do well in Florida and elsewhere when they get a large share of younger voters. It’s exactly who helped Obama win in the last hours, were the younger voters that turned out higher than people ever anticipated in Florida…She wasn’t able to really engage them. And I think some of the fault comes with these national ads which featured just about 100 percent older people in there. There was nothing that really drew younger people to the polls at all, and it’s spring break time in Florida.”
The Fix’s Sean Sullivan argues that “Jolly’s win belongs more to the outside groups that rallied to his side than it does to him…the Republican groups spent money smartly, hitting the airwaves with complementary messages and avoiding stepping on each other’s toes or doubling up unnecessarily…The Republican organizations “actually talked to one another and spaced out their buys so there was coverage the whole campaign. Not everyone was up at the same time. “It’s a page from our playbook,” said one Democrat with an eye on the race, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide a candid assessment.”
At The Plum Line Greg Sargent probes the insights of Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg for lessons from the FL-13 election: “Greenberg said the Dem failure to turn out their voters in FL-13 – and not opinion on the health law — was the decisive factor. (The First Read crew noted today that turnout in the district was barely more than half that in 2012, and that Dem voters “didn’t show up.”) Greenberg said, if anything, that the closeness of the race (given GOP turnout superiority) indicated that Dem Alex Sink had mostly neutralized Obamacare as an issue, given all the outside GOP ads hammering her over it.”
In Zachary Roth’s MSNBC.com post, “Are Americans souring on voting restrictions?,” he writes: “A Des Moines Register poll released Monday found that 71% of Iowa voters–including two out of three Republicans–think it’s more important that every eligible registered voter has the chance to vote than that no ineligible voter is allowed to cast a ballot. Just 25% said the reverse…And focus groups involving swing voters in Columbus, Ohio found strong support for making voting easier…Both Iowans’ and Ohioans’ views on the issue might be shaped by recent high-profile investigation into voter fraud conducted by the secretaries of state in both places. Both probes were lengthy and costly, but neither turned up evidence of large-scale fraud or illegal voting.”
From Jack Craver’s report, “Rasmussen poll has Mary Burke, Scott Walker tied in Wisconsin governor’s race” at The Cap Times: “A new poll shows the race for Wisconsin governor in a dead heat, with Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic challenger Mary Burke tied with 45 percent apiece.
And it might have something to do with a anger at a new Republican voter suppression bill that has just passed the Wisconsin state senate. “The bill ends early/absentee voting on weekends. Early voting on weekends is something that has been popular in the state’s larger cities — like Madison and Milwaukee,” reports Mike Lowe.
The Hill’s A.B. Stoddard explores Rand Paul’s 2016 strategy and prospects, and concludes that he will be influential, win or lose. But “anarchist and racist voices within the libertarian movement” may present a significant problem for him.
As the Libertarian influence grows inside the GOP, Dems should read “3 inconvenient facts that make libertarians’ heads explode” by Lynn Stuart Parramore (Alternet, via Salon). It’s a good read, but Parramore doesn’t address what may be the Libertartian movement’s Achilles’ heel with young voters — their failure to offer any measures to protect the environment from pollution.
President Obama’s approval ratings are up 6 points from December in a new Bloomberg poll, reports Julianna Goldman.

After acknowledging that the sky is not falling In the wake of the narrow Republican victory in FL-13, Dems do have to face the fact that Koch Brothers money is a huge problem in this and future election cycles. Toward that end, check out the New York Times editorial “The Democrats Stand Up to the Kochs,” which states:

…By far the largest voice in many of this year’s political races, for example, has been that of the Koch brothers, who have spent tens of millions of dollars peddling phony stories about the impact of health care reform, all in order to put Republicans in control of the Senate after the November elections.
Now Democrats are starting to fight back, deciding they should at least try to counter the tycoons with some low-cost speech of their own. Democrats may never have the same resources at their disposal — no party should — but they can use their political pulpits to stand up for a few basic principles, including the importance of widespread health-insurance coverage, environmental protection and safety-net programs.
The leader of this effort has been Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, who has delivered a series of blistering attacks against the Kochs and their ads on the Senate floor over the last few weeks. In addition, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has set up a website, www.kochaddiction.com, to remind voters of just what the Kochs stand for, and why they raised $407 million in the 2012 election. And individual candidates are making sure voters know who is paying for the ad blitz.

As for the motivation of the Koch brothers, the editorial explains:

Mr. Reid’s comments have gone to the heart of the matter. In his most recent speech, he pointed out that the fundamental purpose of the Kochs’ spending is to rig the economic system for their benefit and for that of other oligarchs. They own an industrial network that ranks No. 14 on the list of the most toxic American air polluters, and got their money’s worth in 2010 by helping elect a Republican House majority that has resisted environmental regulation.
“That Republican majority is, in fact, working to gut the most important safeguards to keep cancer-causing toxins and pollution that cause sickness and death out of the air we breathe and the water we drink,” Mr. Reid said. “Without those safeguards, the Koch brothers would pass on the higher health care costs to middle-class Americans while padding their own pocketbooks.” He called it “un-American” to spend lavishly to preserve tax breaks and end workplace safety standards.
…What the Kochs want — and polls show they have a strong chance of getting it — is a Senate led by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, now the minority leader, who promises in his latest campaign ad to “be the leader of the forces that take on the war on coal,” the most polluting power-plant fuel. Nothing could be better for the owners of Koch Carbon, and they are willing to spend whatever it takes to make it happen.

It’s an excellent editorial, which says a lot about what is at the center of congressional dysfunction and governmental paralysis — big money pouring into GOP coffers from vested interests.
But the real fun begins in David Firestone’s follow-up article in the Times, “There’s a Difference Between Union Money and Koch Money,”in which he obliterates the much-parroted Republican argument that Labor contributions to political campaigns somehow justify unlimited donations from a few self-interested billionaires. Here’s Firestone, responding to a comment complaining about union money following the editorial:

…Two brothers, aided by a small and shadowy group of similarly wealthy donors, spent more than millions of union members. The fortunes of just a few people have allowed them an outsized voice, and they are openly trying to use it to turn control of the Senate to Republicans.
The Koch group Americans for Prosperity has also joined the right-wing drive to reduce union rights and membership around the country, with the goal — made explicit at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference — of muzzling the voice of union members in politics.
…But for the most part, unions, unlike the Koch network, don’t try to disguise their contributions in a maze of interlocking “social welfare” groups. Their contributions on behalf of candidates or issues may be unlimited, thanks to Citizens United, but they are generally clearly marked as coming from one union or another. (They want Democrats to know which unions raised the money.)
Union members aren’t coerced into giving political money, either, despite the claims of several commenters. Thanks to a 1988 Supreme Court case, workers have the right not to pay for a union’s political activity, and can demand that their dues be restricted to collective bargaining expenses. The union members who contributed to that $400 million pot in 2012 opted in to the system.

It’s just another version of conservative “false equivalency,” this time focused on money in politics. As Firestone concludes, “…There’s a world of difference between a small group of tycoons writing huge checks, and a huge group of workers writing small ones.”

From Steven Hill’s post in the Nation, “Why Does the US Still Have So Few Women in Office?“, via Moyers & Company:

…Compared to other nations, the United States is losing ground. America now ranks 98th in the world for percentage of women in its national legislature, down from 59th in 1998. That’s embarrassing: just behind Kenya and Indonesia, and barely ahead of the United Arab Emirates. Only five governors are women, including just one Democrat, and 24 states have never had a female governor. The percentage of women holding statewide and state legislative offices is less than 25 percent, barely higher than in 1993. Locally, only 12 of our 100 largest cities have female mayors.

Kind of a pathetic reality for the world’s most prosperous democracy. The numbers alone shame our democracy. From a progressive standpoint, however, it’s clear we pay a high price for our gender oligarchy, as Hill explains:

…In Patterns of Democracy, former American Political Science Association president Arend Lijphart found strong correlations between more women legislators and more progressive policy on issues like the environment, macroeconomic management, comprehensive support for families and individuals, violence prevention and incarceration. Other studies have found that women legislators — both Republican and Democrat — introduce a lot more bills than men in the areas of civil rights and liberties, education, health, labor and more.

So how do they do better in other countries?:

…Leaders in electing women include Sweden (45 percent female representation at the national level), Finland (42.5 percent), Denmark and the Netherlands (39 percent) and Germany (36.5 percent). Most of their political parties prioritize recruitment of female candidates, some even requiring “positive quotas” where half their candidates are women. And their societies have sensible policies in areas like childcare that make it easier for legislators to balance their service with their families.

That should be a no-brainer. Hill sees another reason that would require major electoral reform:

…The research of representation experts like the late Professor Wilma Rule has shown that, in addition to these positive quotas, the biggest reason for female candidates’ success in these advanced democracies is the use of “fair representation” electoral systems, also known as proportional representation.
These methods use multi-seat districts, rather than one-seat districts, where political parties (or, in a nonpartisan election, groupings of like-minded voters, i.e. liberals, conservatives, progressives) win seats in proportion to their vote share. If like-minded voters have 20 percent of the vote in a 10-seat district, its candidates win two of ten seats, instead of none; 40 percent wins four seats, and 60 percent wins six seats.
Such rules create multi-party democracy, since a political party can earn a fair share of representation with well under 50 percent of the vote. That in turn fosters greater accountability for major parties, as minor parties offer voters other viable choices. Facing real competition, major parties look to nominate candidates that broaden their appeal, including a lot more women. The German Green Party has never won over 11 percent of the national vote, yet for three decades has consistently won seats and promoted women’s leadership by having a 50-50 rule for female/male candidates, prodding other major parties to nominate more women.
How important is the electoral system to women’s success? A real-world test is provided by nations that use both fair representation electoral systems and US-style one-seat districts to elect their national legislatures. We can observe the same voters, the same attitudes, expressing themselves through two different electoral methods. The result? In Germany and New Zealand, women win a lot more seats chosen by the fair representation method than in those chosen in one-seat districts — twice as many seats in Germany.
American women also do better in multi-seat districts, even if proportional representation rules aren’t used. As FairVote’s report shows, women hold an average of 31 percent of state legislative seats elected in multi-seat districts, compared to only 23 percent elected in one-seat districts. Vermont’s state legislature has 41 percent women, elected in districts with anywhere from one to six legislators per district. Even a strongly conservative state like Arizona has 36 percent women in its state house, elected from two-seat districts.

Hill goes on to note that there is nothing in the Constitution that requires “single-seat districts,” but Congress did pass a law in 1967 to require single seats. And, “Public financing of campaigns also would help, since most women don’t have access to the good ol’ boy networks that primarily fund political campaigns.”
By all means, Democrats should give more support to such reforms to facilitate gender parity, even though they will take a long time under the most optimistic scenarios. Making recruitment, training and support for more women candidates a more urgent priority, however, is something Dems should do right now.

If there is one crucial thought presented most frequently here at TDS, it is the importance of sorting out strategic and tactical issues from matters of values, goals and principles, particularly in intraparty conflicts. Sometimes strategic/tactical differences are blown out of proportion into “civil war” topics, and sometimes looking at different strategic approaches helps discern the underlying common ground between factions.
That is the case with the antichoice movement, as I discussed yesterday at Washington Monthly in a post based on the fine work of MSNBC’s Irin Carmon:

[S]upporters of more a more direct strategy and more confrontational tactics often reveal the extremism of party-wide ideological positions that more cautious people would prefer to disguise. So you can learn a lot from paying attention to the loud-and-proud types even if you don’t think they will prevail within their own party.
I say all this as a prelude to Irin Carmon’s piece at MSNBC about a new and abrasive wing of the antichoice movement that doesn’t believe in hiding its light under a bushel of pieties about late-term abortions or “women’s health:”

For the mainstream movement to ban abortion, graphic photos and aggressive language have generally gone out of style. The winning slogans, the ones Republican politicians prefer, are warmer, fuzzier: Thumbsucking ultrasound photos, or “women’s health” used as a pretext to shut down safe abortion clinics, including three in Texas this month alone. The losing slogans involve Akin-like “legitimate rape” and comparing Planned Parenthood to the Klan.
Abolish Human Abortion (AHA) begs to differ. Founded out of Norman, Oklahoma, and with chapters nationwide, AHA activists wear t-shirts emblazoned with “End Child Sacrifice” and proudly display photos of bloodied, fully developed fetuses. They protest outside churches – yes, churches – accusing them of not doing enough to end abortion, and talk scornfully of “pro-lifers” who make peace with rape exceptions to abortion bans.
AHA activists disdain the phrase “pro-life” altogether. They prefer “abolitionists,” with all slavery comparisons explicitly intended, and they want to push the larger movement to abide by their uncompromising positions. That means moving away from the incremental strategy – 20 week bans, admitting privileges laws for clinics – and sticking to banning all abortion without exceptions, equating hormonal birth control (even the daily pill kind) with abortion, and advocating that women who have abortions be tried as murderers. That sort of unblinking absolutism in the face of the messiness of real life decision-making may be what has drawn nearly 34,000 people to like their Facebook page.

But here’s the thing: their basic positions are generally shared by antichoice activists of all varieties. What the AHA zealots are demanding is that antichoicers exhibit some honesty about them:

They don’t care who they offend. They aren’t interested in a political or legal strategy; they reserve their deepest scorn for the incrementalists who have crafted a step-by-step plan to overturn Roe v. Wade. As far as AHA is concerned, those guys are sellouts. But in the end, there isn’t so much that the mainstream movement and Abolish Human Abortion disagree on besides tactics.

That’s very important to know.