Start your day with Corey Robin’s “The Republican War on Workers’ Rights” at the New York Time Opinionator, which offers this measure of the importance of midterm elections: “Over the last four decades, for example, low-wage workers have been hit hard by the declining value of the federal minimum wage. In the absence of federal action, states, cities and counties have increased the minimum wage or indexed it to inflation (or both) to ensure that it keep pace with rising costs…Republican politicians in state capitals have tried to check them at every point. Florida, Indiana and Mississippi have banned local governments from increasing the minimum wage. In Nevada, Missouri and Arizona, state legislators tried to overturn constitutional amendments and ballot initiatives. In 2011, New Hampshire’s Republican legislature simply abolished the state’s minimum wage.” Robin’s op-ed has much more on the GOP rip-off of workers’ rights.
At Sabato’s Crystal Ball Sean Trende probes “Are Republicans Really Doomed Demographically?” and comes to a lightly skeptical conclusion.
From Thom Hartmann’s “Republicans’ deadly political strategy: Ruining our country hurts the Democratic Party” at Salon.com: “For six years now, Republicans have been hard at work damaging America and the American people. When the Democrats briefly controlled Congress, Nancy Pelosi got passed legislation that removed tax incentives for big companies to move jobs overseas and reversed those incentives to encourage companies to move factories back to the United States…The Republican Chaos Strategy dictates that you cannot allow these things to happen when there is a Democrat in the White House. Under their theory, if anything positive is done for the American people by Congress, the American people – who don’t know which party controls Congress – will assume that the president and his Democrats must’ve had something to do with it. And therefore, the Democrats will get the credit…if Republican House Speaker John Boehner simply allowed a vote in the House of Representatives to extend the unemployment benefits they cut off last Christmas it would instantly pass. Probably over 80 percent of Americans do not realize that this one single Republican, playing out the Republican Chaos Strategy, has screwed millions of Americans…The only way to stop the Republican Chaos Strategy is to educate the American people as to how the Republicans, for the majority of the Obama presidency, have been able to systematically and intentionally damage our economy and our nation for purely political purposes…This should be the single-minded focus of the Democratic Party between now and November.”
At CNN Politics Leigh Ann Caldwell’s “Meet the woman who could turn Texas purple” discusses the possibility that a popular Latino woman candidate for Lieutenant Governor, State sen. Letitia Van de Putte, may have some coattails in getting Hispanic and women voters to the polls in Texas.
More on the Democrats Texas campaign from NYT’s Amy Chozick: “…After Mr. Obama’s re-election, Jeremy Bird, the campaign’s national field director, started Battleground Texas, a grass-roots political organization whose goal was to make Texas competitive, a long-term effort intended to take root perhaps by the 2020 presidential election…The work Battleground Texas is doing in 2014 is helping in “building an infrastructure that will exist in 2016, 2018, 2020,” said Jenn Brown, the group’s executive director. “You’re not going to win every election”…Central to that goal will be persuading the more than two million Hispanics who are eligible to vote but did not in 2012. In 2010, about one million voting-age Hispanics cast ballots for a turnout rate of about 23 percent, compared with about 44 percent among white voters.”
So WWLBJD?

From E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s column, “No more liberal apologies as Elizabeth Warren takes the offensive“: “But doesn’t being pro-government mean you’re anti-business? Well, no, Warren says, quite the opposite. “There’s nothing pro-business about crumbling roads and bridges or a power grid that can’t keep up,” she writes. “There’s nothing pro-business about cutting back on scientific research at a time when our businesses need innovation more than ever. There’s nothing pro-business about chopping education opportunities when workers need better training.”
The American Prospect’s executive editor Bob Moser has an update on rising Democratic hopes in the south, which notes “Pass the smelling salts to your fellow liberal Dixiephobes…The Southern Democrats aren’t all winning just because they’re mimicking the old Republican Lite schtick. Some of them are winning because they’re acting kind of like actual Democrats.”
Ouch.