Brad Knickerbocker’s Monitor article, “Democrats: ‘Why we got shellacked in the 2014 elections‘ offers a couple of well-stated insights, including: “”So many people can rattle off easily and succinctly what it means to be a Republican,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman who chairs the DNC. “The perception of what it means to be a Democrat has really evolved to be a laundry list of policy statements and disparate ideas.”
On the same topic, AP’s Ken Thomas quotes KY Governor Steve Beshear: “”I am here to tell you the Democratic Party has lost its way…The problems are not with the “party’s core beliefs,” he said, but relate to “our inability to convey our principles to the American people in a precise, concise and passionate way.”
An AP-GfK Poll of 1,045 adults conducted online from 1/29 to 2/2 found that 68 percent of respondents believed that “wealthy households pay too little in federal taxes; only 11 percent said the wealthy pay too much…Also, 60 percent said middle-class households pay too much in federal taxes, while 7 percent said they paid too little…One proposal would increase capital gains taxes on households making more than $500,000. In the survey, 56 percent favored the proposal, while only 16 percent opposed it.”
Laura Clawson’s Kos post, “Famously awful pollster shows how to fake majority support for Netanyahu speech” provides an object lesson in absurdly biased poll questions. The question, from a McLaughlin poll: “Republican House Speaker John Boehner has invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress on March 3rd. President Obama and some Democrats think it should be cancelled because it is 2 weeks before an Israeli election. Israeli Prime Minister wants to speak to the American Congress to try to stop a deal that would give Iran a nuclear weapon. These negotiations are set to conclude 3 weeks after the Prime Minister’s speech. Knowing all of this is true, do you support or oppose Prime Minister Netanyahu speaking to Congress on March 3rd?” Clawson’s capper: “Politico, by the way, reported this as if it was a serious poll.”
Paul Krugman shreds the “education is power” meme treasured by class conflict-averse pundits and politicians: “…What I keep seeing is people insisting that educational failings are at the root of still-weak job creation, stagnating wages and rising inequality. This sounds serious and thoughtful. But it’s actually a view very much at odds with the evidence, not to mention a way to hide from the real, unavoidably partisan debate…We should recognize that popular evasion for what it is: a deeply unserious fantasy…The inflation-adjusted earnings of highly educated Americans have gone nowhere since the late 1990s…All the big gains are going to a tiny group of individuals holding strategic positions in corporate suites or astride the crossroads of finance. Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s about who has the power.”
NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof’s “Straight Talk for White Men” sheds rare light on a topic that merits more discussion, unconscious bias, which likely is responsible for most discrimination and undermines prospects for Democratic political consensus.
Those who believe the time is now ripe for a strong Democratic emphasis on infrastructure upgrades should read Albert R. Hunt’s New York Times article “U.S. Struggles to Build a Strong Infrastructure.” Hunt explains, “There is a broad consensus that infrastructure investment is a significant job-creator. It is embraced by the Chamber of Commerce, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and many governors and mayors of both parties…Republican congressional leaders want selective big accomplishments to prove they can govern. President Obama wants a few more successes in his final years. Infrastructure is one of the very few areas where they are on roughly the same page.” Hunt sees a gas tax hike as the logical funding vehicle. But the GOP’s knee-jerk opposition to anything that involves spending or tax hikes, or anything Democrats have long advocated, suggests that Republican support for infrastructure upgrades may be more limited when votes are tallied.
Hats off to John Legend and Common for using the Oscar ceremonies to bring needed attention to an issue that doesn’t get enough media coverage — felon disenfranchisement.
Whatever hopes Republicans were entertaining about projecting Columba Bush as Jeb Bush’s “keeping’ it real” anchor will not be well-served by her jewelry shopping expeditions, as reported by WaPo’s Karen Tumutly and Alice Krites: “a $25,600 pair of diamond stud earrings set in platinum; an 18-karat white-gold and diamond bracelet by the Italian designer Bulgari, priced at $10,500; an 18-karat white-gold and diamond necklace, costing $3,200; and another pair of diamond earrings, for $3,300. The records indicate that she received discounts and price adjustments totalling $2,780 and paid $2,491.70 in sales tax…That was one of at least five such loans made by the store to Columba Bush between 1995 and 2009. The most recent was for an $11,700 Rolex watch and a $5,900 pair of earrings…In 1997, when she bought a Roman coin necklace for $15,000 and a $16,600 Rolex watch studded with diamonds…While the 2000 purchase listed the governor’s mansion as her home address, documents suggest that, on at least one earlier occasion, Columba Bush wanted the paperwork sent to a postal box.” Upwards of $90K in all — And that’s just the stuff that’s been reported…

The current criticism of Obama for defining the threat to America as “violent extremism” rather than specifically identifying Islam as the source of violent radicalism has focused renewed attention on the question of the relationship between the religion and the actions of ISIS or Al-Qaeda.
Fareed Zakaria offers an intelligent analysis of the issue in the Washington Post but J. M. Berger, writing in the Brookings Institution Brief, adds a distinct perspective that also deserves attention.
He frames the issue as follows:

A new article about ISIS in The Atlantic has reignited the perennial debate over the relationship between jihadist terrorism and the religion of Islam. The article, by Graeme Wood, repeatedly emphasizes the “Islamic” in Islamic State, calling out what it describes as “well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature.”

Berger argues, however, that the two key characteristics that define ISIS and other Islamic radical groups – a belief in their own superiority and an apocalyptic vision of history — are actually present in extremist groups within many religious and quasi-religious traditions.

…What is the relationship between Christianity and Christian Identity? What does being German mean to Nazi ideology? What about the neo-Nazi movement Golden Dawn, a Greek identity movement heavily influenced by German Nazism? How does Hinduism inform Abhinav Bharat, and how does Abhinav Bharat inform our understanding of Hinduism? The 969 Movement in Myanmar is led by a Buddhist monk, and its very name refers to the Buddha and his teachings. It is very Buddhist. But is its xenophobia very Buddhist?
…Whiteness and white supremacy are, in fact, intertwined, and it was Germany that gave birth to the Nazi movement. Islamic extremists arise from the Muslim world, and there is no question that a variety of conditions in the Muslim world have contributed to the problem.
Understanding whiteness is relevant to understanding white supremacy, just as understanding Islam is relevant to jihadism. And to be sure, religion matters to ISIS. A lot. But the concept of an exclusive identity matters far more, to the point that ISIS will engage in virtually unlimited theological gymnastics to justify it.

Berger argues that, regardless of the particular religion that is pressed into service as an ideological rationale for violent extremism, what unites such movements are two key elements: an exclusionary identity and a millenarian vision of being a chosen group that will survive an apocalyptic disaster

…While radicalization is a multifaceted process, with many dimensions and attendant complexities, the establishment of an exclusionary identity group is a nearly universal characteristic, whether the extremists are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist, and whether the extremists are religious, racial, or nationalist.

… Millenarian sects may (or may not) rely on religious texts as importance sources, but their defining quality, and what makes them dangerous, is an unshakeable belief that history is coming to an end. Millenarian beliefs are often wedded to identity-based extremism through the narrative device of a chosen group that will triumph in an apocalyptic war or survive an apocalyptic disaster. Again, the traits of these groups are remarkably consistent across a variety of belief structures. Their commonality is their Millenarianism, not the theological background from which those End Times beliefs are derived.

Therefore, Berger concludes:

To understand and counter ISIS’s threat and appeal, frame it properly. Identity-based extremism and millenarian apocalyptic cults provide a far more useful framework for understanding ISIS than Islam does.

During the last decade, as the Republican Party slid remorselessly towards the extremist Right, its tribunes have had an obvious motive to deny that phenomenon and proclaim the GOP as situated firmly in the sensible center, and/or to make the false equivalence claim that Democrats have matched or exceeded the lurch into questionable territory. So if only in self-defense or for purposes of analytical clarity, Democrats need to pay attention to arguments over ideology and the GOP.
That’s why I paid attention to a polite argument this last week between liberal blogger Kevin Drum of Mother Jones and conservative analysts Sean Trende and David Byler of RealClearPolitics, about where to situate Scott Walker on the ideological spectrum. I wrote up my observations at Washington Monthly:

I somehow missed Kevin Drum’s February 11 post quoting a San Francisco State political scientist who in turn was using a Stanford professor’s methodology to argue that Scott Walker’s more conservative than any GOP presidential nominee since before Ronald Reagan.
This post definitely caught Sean Trende and David Byler’s attention, leading to a very elaborate (if polite) dashing of cold water on the Scott-Walker-as-the-New-Barry-Goldwater hypothesis, if that’s what you want to call it. Trende and Byler come at it from several different directions, illustrating the advantage columnists with relatively few time and space limitations have over a blogger who has to make do quickly with the news material at hand. As it happens, I agree with one of their arguments against the underlying DIME system of Stanford’s Adam Bonica, which assigns ideological “scores” to politicians based on the characteristics of his or her donors.

While donors probably tend to support candidates who generally share their ideology, other factors might affect donor decisions – what issues the candidate focuses on the most, the candidate’s public persona and life history, how much a donor simply “likes” a candidate – and all of these preferences are rolled into this rating.

As Trende & Byler note, Barack Obama’s pre-convention “rating” in 2008 was very far to the “left.” Does that mean lefty donors (assuming that can really be measured accurately) thought he was as lefty as they were? Or simply that he got them all? Or perhaps that they knew he was “moderate” but was less “moderate” than Hillary Clinton? Or maybe that they thought he was more electable? Or because of the historic character of his candidacy? It’s entirely unclear, but it is clear rating a candidate’s ideology on his or her donors is perilous and ignores all sorts of context issues, particularly in terms of the choices available to donors.
In the end, though, my only real disagreement with Kevin involves his conclusion: that Scott Walker is a lot more conservative than he seems. He could have that backwards in a way that helps explain why conservative donors are attracted to Walker: he’s conservative for a blue state governor. Why is Walker, and not, say, Rick Perry, famous for ferocious attacks on the collective bargaining rights of public employees? Because public employees in Texas don’t have any collective bargaining rights to begin with. The same is true of Walker’s famous conservative evangelical religiosity, with God telling him to do this and that. Deep South Republicans talk that way all the time. So thanks to his context Walker seems more conservative than he necessarily is, and–here’s a big bonus for him–in a way that simultaneously creates an electability argument. If he can get re-elected in Wisconsin after taking positions that nobody would think twice about in deep-red states, he’s a brave conservative warrior and one who has proven he can persuade swing voters either despite or because of his hammer-headed characteristics.

So measuring ideology is tricky. Scott Walker is vastly more conservative than blue-state Republicans used to be by any objective measure. And so he exerts an appeal to conservative donors that some (objectively) even more conservative red-state politicians struggle to match. Part of his appeal is attributable to the attention he naturally gets; part comes from the thrill conservatives get from watching him beat the hated enemy on its home turf; and part is indeed an electability argument, made even more attractive because it does not involve compromise or “moderation.” He seems more conservative than he probably is, and in today’s GOP, it’s hard to look too conservative.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has an interesting column about his change of viewpoint towards labor unions. Kristof’s column is significant, not only as an admission that even the top commentators can be mistaken, learn and grow, but also because it is an indication that many Americans are beginning to understand that a healthy labor movement is essential for a stable middle class.
Kristof begins by explaining that he had “disdained” unions because of union members who are grossly overcompensated and the “corruption, nepotism and rigid work rules” he saw in unions. He cites the example of some stage hands earning $400K in compensation.
Such attitudes towards unions are understandable. Outrageous examples of abuse get disproportionate media coverage and are frequently repeated and exaggerated, giving the impression that they are more common than is the case. The role of unions in securing decent living standards for millions of workers, however, gets much less coverage. For every union member who earns $400K per year, there are hundreds of thousands who are earning middle class wages and struggling to pay their bills.
Kristof’s reading and research, along with recent economic trends, apparently lead him to rethink his earlier impressions. “I was wrong,” he states. “The abuses are real. But, as unions wane in American life, it’s also increasingly clear that they were doing a lot of good in sustaining middle class life — especially the private-sector unions that are now dwindling.” He notes, further,

Most studies suggest that about one-fifth of the increase in economic inequality in America among men in recent decades is the result of the decline in unions. It may be more: A study in the American Sociological Review, using the broadest methodology, estimates that the decline of unions may account for one-third of the rise of inequality among men.
“To understand the rising inequality, you have to understand the devastation in the labor movement,” says Jake Rosenfeld, a labor expert at the University of Washington and the author of “What Unions No Longer Do.”
Take construction workers. A full-time construction worker earns about $10,000 less per year now than in 1973, in today’s dollars, according to Rosenfeld. One reason is probably that the proportion who are unionized has fallen in that period from more than 40 percent to just 14 percent.
“All the focus on labor’s flaws can distract us from the bigger picture,” Rosenfeld writes. “For generations now the labor movement has stood as the most prominent and effective voice for economic justice.”

Kristof still condemns abusive union policies, but now adds,

But unions also lobby for programs like universal prekindergarten that help create broad-based prosperity. They are pushing for a higher national minimum wage, even though that would directly benefit mostly nonunionized workers.
I’ve also changed my mind because, in recent years, the worst abuses by far haven’t been in the union shop but in the corporate suite. One of the things you learn as a journalist is that when there’s no accountability, we humans are capable of tremendous avarice and venality. That’s true of union bosses — and of corporate tycoons. Unions, even flawed ones, can provide checks and balances for flawed corporations…Many Americans think unions drag down the economy over all, but scholars disagree.

That’s an important realization and the hope is that other Americans are also beginning to rethink the critical role unions have to play in restoring America’s economic health. “Historically, the periods when union membership were highest were those when inequality was least,” Kristof explains.
Kristof notes that “Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard labor economist, raises concerns about some aspects of public-sector unions, but he says that in the private sector (where only 7 percent of workers are now unionized): “I think we’ve gone too far in de-unionization.”
“He’s right,” concludes Kristof. “This isn’t something you often hear a columnist say, but I’ll say it again: I was wrong. At least in the private sector, we should strengthen unions, not try to eviscerate them.”
If he did the necessary research, Kristof would likely find that the overwhelming majority of unionized public sector workers are not living all that high on the hog, either. Here as well, a relatively few well-publicized horror stories trump the aggregate reality too often in public perceptions.
Credit Kristof with having the integrity, smarts and candor to own his mistaken impression and share what he has learned with his readers. May others learn from his example.
For Democrats, improved public attitudes toward unions on a broader scale would be a welcome development, since the party’s prospects and goals are intertwined with those of the labor movement. Indeed, it’s hard to envision the Democratic party thriving independently of unions, which provide critical financial and volunteer support during elections, as well as being the most effective force for reducing income inequality. Educating the public about the inextricable relationship of unions to a healthy middle class in the U.S. should become a leading priority of progressives.

Re the ruling by a federal judge in Texas against President Obama’s executive order shielding immigrants from deportation, Greg Sargent notes “nothing significant has changed. Republican leaders still need to decide whether they are going to agree to fund the Department of Homeland Security cleanly, while dropping their effort to use DHS funding as leverage to roll back Obama’s actions. And if they do decide to do that, they will still need Democratic support to get it through the House, which would enrage conservatives.” Republicans hope that their shutdown threat will help persuade a half-dozen moderate Democratic Senators to support them. Sargent adds, “Today’s CNN poll finding that a majority would blame Republicans over Obama for any such shutdown — by 53-30 — once again shows that shutdown fights institutionally favor presidents over Congresses.”
E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s post, “Can the GOP superego win the day?” has several insightful nuggets on the topic, including this one: “Most Republicans realize that one of the biggest obstacles to their building a majority in presidential elections is the fact that Latino Americans have come to feel that the GOP just doesn’t like them very much. As the party’s now much neglected “Growth and Opportunity Project” autopsy after the 2012 election put it, “if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”…In any event, Republicans hold the patent on government shutdowns, so they can forget about shifting responsibility for any interruption in services at the Department of Homeland Security to the president or the Democrats.”
Stephen A. Nuno reports at NBC News, “The Latino National Survey is considered one of the most reputable academic studies of Latinos and includes over 8,600 completed interviews on a wide range of political topics. When it comes to party identification, the LNS reports that among Latino registered voters, 61 percent say they are Democrats while 22 percent identify as Republican and 17 percent as Independent.”
“The fact that vast sums of money were being spent by liberal and conservative groups along with the national parties on the same small set of Senate races probably limited the impact of such spending. Not only was one side’s spending generally matched by the other side’s spending, but the sheer volume of spending probably exceeded the point of diminishing returns in many of these states.” from Alan I. Abramowitz’s Crystal Ball post “Why Outside Spending is Overrated.” Abramowitz conducts a regression analysis to measure the impact of spending and other variables and concludes, “Republicans made major gains in the 2014 Senate elections but the findings reported here indicate that outside spending by conservative groups had little or nothing to do with those gains. The main reason why Republicans did very well in 2014 was that Democrats were defending far more seats than Republicans and many of those seats were in states that normally favor Republicans based on recent presidential voting patterns.”
Chris Kent of The Breeze, James Madison University’s newspaper, reports on a student-led initiative to get a polling site on campus, like Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, George Mason University and Liberty University all have. No doubt less enlightened states than VA lack such on-campus polling sites. Meanwhile, what is needed is a national law that facilitates on-line voting for out-of-state students and could be accessed anywhere. A young friend at the University of Georgia tells me that he is certain many of his friends who skipped the midterm elections would gladly use such a site. Maybe a nation-wide student movement could help get such a law.
Apropos of our recent staff post, “2016 A banner Year for Democratic Women?“,” do read Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s New York Times article, “Proof That Women Are the Better Dealmakers in the Senate,” citing a Quorum study, reported by Mariel Klein, which found, “Over all, women were far more likely than men to work across the aisle. Quorum found the average female senator co-sponsored 171.08 bills with a member of the opposite party; for the average male senator, that figure was 129.87.”
At The Hill, Jesse Byrnes reports, “Six in 10 Americans want a higher minimum wage while one-fifth are opposed to such a plan, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll released Thursday…Sixty percent also favor requiring employers to offer paid sick leave, including about half of Republicans polled.”
According to Crowdpac, which provides numerical scores for candidates on the basis of the political contributions they received, their speeches and votes, the Democratic presidential candidate field for 2016 thus far ranges across a more narrow ideological spectrum than was the case in 2008, reports Derek Willis at The Upshot.
Well this is rich, wingnuts bashing Jeb Bush for, gasp, honoring Hillary Clinton for her public service. As Tim Alberta reports at National Journal: “ForAmerica, a conservative grassroots group with a Facebook following of more than 7 million members, released the video Thursday morning. It shows footage of Bush awarding Clinton, the former secretary of state, with the Liberty Medal at a ceremony hosted by the National Constitution Center.” Of course they work in a Benghazi reference to try to shame JB.

Earlier today J.P Green addressed one argument against the “Emerging Democratic Majority” hypothesis that has emerged since John Judis’ expressed second thoughts about the projections made in the 2002 book he co-wrote with TDS co-founder Ruy Teixeira. I addressed others at TPMCafe:

[W]hen John Judis “recanted” his “prophecy” in a National Journal article a few weeks ago with the provocative (if carefully chosen) title “An Emerging Republican Advantage,” joy broke out all over the conservative chattering classes. One of the best and most honest of conservative analysts, however, Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics, who had been writing about the Judis/Teixeira hypothesis for years, noted that the book itself had never supported the myth of “demographic destiny” with which it was associated:

While the debates over demographics and future elections have become filled with triumphalist rhetoric about ascendant coalitions and Republicans potentially suffering a Whig-like extinction, these are the views of popularizers and partisans who have latched onto the book for their own purposes.

He might have added that the Judis/Teixeira hypothesis also became confused with the eternal argument in both parties between those wanting to focus national campaigns on “base mobilization” rather than swing voter persuasion: If the “base” is growing naturally without any special cultivation, all the messy compromises involved in growing the coalition via conversion may not be necessary (again, the opposite conclusion might be reached by Republicans looking at the same trends). This isn’t at all what Judis and Teixeira actually said.
Aside from inadvertently enabling Republicans to claim a phony victory over the straw man of demographic destiny, Judis’ “recantation” wasn’t much accepted by Democrats. His argument for a GOP “advantage,” based partially on a worrying trend he found among college-educated voters, and partially on anecdotal musings over the 2014 gubernatorial victory of Larry Hogan that so stunned Maryland Democrats like himself, drew a response from New York‘s Jonathan Chait, relying in part on emailed advice from none other than Ruy Teixeira:

[T]he core insight of the emerging democratic majority thesis has held up remarkably well. And Judis does not actually refute it in any convincing way. He does not mention continuing Democratic strength among the fast-growing bloc of Latino voters. He does cite exit polling that showed Republicans splitting the Asian-American vote in 2014, a shocking finding that is almost certainly wrong. He does cite a Harvard poll of young voters, which appears to show weakening support for Democrats. But that poll has yielded unusual findings in comparison with other surveys. (The Harvard poll predicted a majority of young voters would vote for Republican House candidates in 2014; in reality, they voted Democratic at the same rate as in 2010.
Judis focuses on white middle-class voters, whom he sees as moving steadily toward the GOP. But the trend he cites begins with (depending on which example he uses) either 2006 or 2008, which were Democratic wave elections, a high point from which at least some regression both would be expected and would still allow a margin of error, given the massive Democratic sweep in both elections. Judis does not mention that Republicans need to ratchet up their share of the white vote continuously, or else dramatically improve their standing among nonwhites, merely to remain competitive.

Like Trende, though, Chait not only concedes but emphasizes one question about “majority” projections that has steadily become more relevant since 2002: a majority of what?

The [Democratic] party’s new base is heavily concentrated in urban areas, whose voting strength underrepresented in both the House and the Senate. Additionally, they are far more likely than core Republican voters to stay home during midterm elections. This has allowed the Republican Party to gain a near lock on holding the House, and a strong geographic advantage in holding the Senate. The Emerging Democratic Majority thus comes with the very important caveat that it applies only to one branch of government. (Likewise, Phillip’s Emerging Republican Majority coincided with a period of continuous Democratic control of the House.)

Indeed, Sean Trende argues that the true “Republican” advantage in the immediate future is that the GOP is more likely to win the White House than Democrats are to win Congress. But the deeper reality is that neither party commands anything like a stable majority, and the long-term Democratic advantage created by demographic trends is countered by a long-term Republican advantage created by the Founders’ decision to give every state two Senate seat and by the superior efficiency in distribution of Republican votes among House districts, reinforced by gerrymandering.
If American politics were a tennis game, we’d be in the final game of the final set, at “Deuce.”

It’s possible, then, for the two parties to enjoy multiple overlapping majorities over a relatively short period of time, depending on how you define “majority.” As Chait indicates, nothing Judis and Teixeira said originally needs to be “recanted;” the picture is just more complex than ever, and there are enough counter-forces to cast doubt on how quickly and thoroughly the Democratic demographic advantage manifests itself.

Michael Lind’s Salon.com post, “Doomed by the South: Why the emerging Democratic majority may never happen” has a couple of blind spots at the center of his argument, one of which is in this graph:

More bad news for Emerging Democratic Majoritarians: the political journalist Sean Trende has estimated the impact of regional population shifts on House seats (and thus on the presidential electoral vote) in 2020 and 2040. In both periods, the Northeast and Midwest lose congressional representation, while all of the states to pick up House seats are in the South or the West. Texas is the big winner, gaining two seats after 2020 and seven seats after 2040, for a total of nine gained. New York loses one seat after 2020 and two seats after 2020, for a total of three lost. According to Trende, California does not lose seats but picks up only one between now and the 2040s.

The swelling of population in the southern states is accompanied by a substantial increase in the percentage of African American voters, a demographic that is projected to increase even more in the decade ahead. The percentage of white voters is also projected to decrease substantially in southern states. How you get from there to a confident prediction of a permanent Republican majority in the south is a stretch too far.
The emerging Democratic majority may be delayed by voter suppression. There is a compelling argument that voter suppression is the primary force that keeps Republicans in power in the south. As Wendy Weiser wrotes in her post, “How Much of a Difference Did New Voting Restrictions Make in Yesterday’s Close Races?” at the Brennan Center for Justice:

In the North Carolina Senate race, state house speaker Thom Tillis beat Senator Kay Hagen by a margin of 1.7 percent, or about 48,000 votes.
At the same time, North Carolina’s voters were, for the first time, voting under one of the harshest new election laws in the country — a law that Tillis helped to craft. Among other changes, the law slashed seven early voting days, eliminated same-day registration, and prohibited voting outside a voter’s home precinct — all forms of voting especially popular among African Americans. While it is too early to assess the impact of the law this year, the Election Protection hotline and other voter protection volunteers reported what appeared to be widespread problems both with voter registrations and with voters being told they were in the wrong precinct yesterday.
Some numbers from recent elections suggest that the magnitude of the problem may not be far from the margin of victory: In the last midterms in 2010, 200,000 voters cast ballots during the early voting days now cut, according to a recent court decision. In 2012, 700,000 voted during those days, including more than a quarter of all African-Americans who voted that year. In 2012, 100,000 North Carolinians, almost a one-third of whom were African-American, voted using same-day registration, which was not available this year. And 7,500 voters cast their ballots outside of their home precincts that year.
…The Florida governor’s race was decided by only a 1.2 percent margin, with Governor Rick Scott narrowly beating former Governor Charlie Crist by just under 72,000 votes.
Florida has passed a host of new voting restrictions over the past few years. Perhaps the most significant for this election was a decision by Scott and his clemency board to make it virtually impossible for the more than 1.3 million Floridians who were formerly convicted of crimes but have done their time and paid their debt to society to have their voting rights restored. Under Florida’s law, the harshest in the country, one in three African-American men is essentially permanently disenfranchised. Ironically, Scott had rolled back rights that were expanded under Governor Crist, who had established a path for people with past convictions to more easily get their voting rights restored. Under that process, more than 150,000 citizens had their rights restored before Scott changed the rules. This is part of a pattern this year of candidates benefiting from voting restrictions they helped to pass.
…It is little solace to the more than 600,000 registered voters in Texas who could not vote this year because they lack IDs the state will accept that the governor’s race was decided by more than 600,000 votes. For one thing, there are far more races — from state legislator to justice of the peace — that affect voters’ day-to-day lives and that could have been impacted by those lost votes. But more importantly, those citizens — a number of whom were long-time voters who were turned away from the polls this year — were denied their basic right of citizenship, their ability to hold their politicians accountable, and their ability to join their friends and family to have a say over what happens in their communities. The dignitary harm comes through loud and clear when you read their stories.

When you factor out voter suppression laws, Republican majorities in the south and elsewhere become shaky indeed. There will be a blue wave election eventually, and much of the gerrymandering and voter suppression will be reversed.
Lind is right that Latino culture and voting patterns are complex, and yes, Republican social conservatism will continue to appeal to a substantial minority of Hispanic voters. But there is not much indication that the GOP will soon outgrow it’s nativist immigrant-bashers, who are already creating serious problems for the Republicans’ presidential field. The GOP’s share of southern Latino votes will more likely shrink than increase in the years ahead.
Increasing percentages of Latino and African American voters in southern states will continue to help Democrats. Virginia, Florida and North Carolina are now purple states. It will take longer for Georgia and longer still for Texas.
But let’s not forget that the U.S. Supreme Court is just a retirement and an election away from balance being restored. When that happens, the recent era of voter suppression could end quite quickly and the bandwagon dismissing prospects for the emerging Democratic majority will become silent.

Reading Sean Sullivan’s “Democrats seek star recruits to try to win back control of the Senate” leaves an impression that Democrats are in fair to good, not great, position in their struggle to win back a senate majority in 2016.
Sullivan argues that the Dems’ “bench” is thin, lacking in exciting candidates. It may be a little early to make that call, but yes, candidates need to be getting in position right quick, raising funds and recruiting campaign personnel.
But Democratic Senate candidates may be poised for creating some excitement nonetheless. The most encouraging thing in Sullivan’s report is that Dems have a number of impressive women considering 2016 candidacies for Senate, including Rep. Tammy Duckworth (IL), Gov. Maggie Hassan (NH), A.G. Kamala Harris (CA) and former Sen. Kay Hagan (NC), who lost her senate seat by just 1.7 percent in 2014. If Hagan passes on the race, Democratic state Treasurer Janet Cowell may take the challenge. Marc Caputo reports at Politico that FL Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is also considering a senate run in 2016.
The Democratic party should be able to leverage some added credibility with women voters if all those candidates run, especially if a woman wins the presidential nomination. Sen. Elizabeth Warren will also be campaigning in their behalf, rallying new women voters and the Democrats’ progressive base voters.
Twenty women now serve in the U.S. Senate, 14 Democrats and 6 Republicans. If the aforementioned women run and win and other Democratic women senators hold their seats, the new total could be a record 25 women U.S. Senators, including 18 Democrats. There is still a little time for more women to join the fray, but not much. To put the numbers in historical perspective, only 44 women have served as U.S. Senators in American history (the first in was elected 1932).
What is certain is that Democratic women candidates for the presidency and U.S. Senate will likely generate more media coverage and discussion than ever about women in American politics. That can only encourage more women to run for office across the U.S. and showcase the Democratic party’s inclusive image.