Michael Tomasky’s Daily Beast column, “Hillary and Liberals: Here’s the Deal” cuts to the chase “What I’m talking about here is not just a handful of policies. I’m talking about the bulk of the Reagan-Gingrich-Bush legacy. Obama could not undo it because he had to deal with the Great Recession. But eight more years of a Democratic presidency can do exactly that–undo it, across a whole range of fronts…This and nothing else is the basis of the deal. This election isn’t about Clinton’s personality or vision or lack of it or anything else that’s directly about her. It’s about having the chance to undo what conservatism has wrought for two generations. I can assure you–smart conservatives understand these to be precisely the stakes, if the Democrats win two more straight presidential elections.”
So how does the public feel about the decline in union membership? For the answer, check out the latest Pew Research Center report on the topic, which notes “The public expresses mixed views of the longterm decline in union membership on the country: 45% say this has been mostly a bad thing, while 43% see it as mostly a good thing…However, the effects of the decline in union membership on working people is seen in more negative terms: 52% say the reduction in union representation has been mostly bad for working people, compared with fewer (40%) who say it has been mostly good. The balance of opinion on this question is about the same as it was in a 1994 NBC/Wall Street Journal survey that asked about the previous 20 years…48% hold a favorable view of unions, while somewhat fewer (39%) say they have an unfavorable view. Opinions of unions have recovered from lows reached in 2010 and 2011.”
At the L.A. Times Cathleen Decker explores reasons for “Why Don’t More Women Run for Office?”
From Valeriya Metla’s “What Part Will Hispanic Voters Play in the 2016 Elections?” at Law Street: “Statewide, eligible Hispanic voters amount to around 40.1 percent in New Mexico, 27.4 percent in Texas, 26.9 percent in California, 20.3 percent in Arizona, 17.1 percent in Florida, 15.9 percent in Nevada, 13.2 percent in New York, 12.8 percent in New Jersey, and 10.3 percent in Connecticut. Again, Hispanic voter turnout during the midterms was lower than that of other ethnic groups and nationwide. For example, in Florida, only 36.5 percent of Hispanic voters showed up to vote in the 2014 midterm elections, while the overall voter turnout was at 50.5 percent. Despite low turnout, however, Hispanic voters have the ability to strongly affect American elections.”
At The Fix Aaron Blake and Chris Cillizza have “The top 10 Senate races of 2016, ranked.” They see the states most likely to change the party affiliation of their Senators, in order, as: IL; WI; FL; NV; PA; CO; NH; OH; NC and IN.
‘Poorer than thou’ seems to be the current mantra of GOP presidential wannabes. It’s all about creating a compelling narrative, as Jeremy W, Peters explains in his New York Times article, “G.O.P. Hopefuls Now Aiming to Woo the Middle Class,” quoting National Review writer Charles C. W. Cooke, who says “Probably the idea that is most attractive to an average voter, and an idea that both Republicans and Democrats try to craft into their messages, is this idea that you can rise from nothing.” And in the case of the Republicans, ‘be about nothing, save tax cuts for your rich chums,’ he could have added.
At The Upshot Justin Wolfers explores the data revealing the power of place in upward mobility. As Wolfers writes of the strategic implications, “This puts the issue of fixing our failing neighborhoods squarely on the political agenda,” a priority Democratic candidates who want to win elections should be able to articulate.
From Dorian T. Warren’s “How to Truly Eradicate Poverty” at The Nation: “…Underneath the frozen surface of partisan rancor and stale ideological arguments, powerful currents are moving the country towards a new consensus for change…This moment calls for an aspirational program that can galvanize energy, animate a broad-based coalition and provide a foundation for concrete action that will put the voice and agenda of struggling Americans…at the center of a new national debate. At its core is a simple and achievable idea: government should take action to create millions of good new jobs in emerging sectors, guarantee decent wages and benefits for all who want to work, and ensure equity in the labor market for women and people of color.”
Drawing from Michael Bader’s “More than Bread and Butter: A Psychologist Speaks to Progressives About What People Really Need in Order to Win and Change the World,” Daily Kos’s Meteor Blades has a provocative question, “Do progressives need to make better emotional ties when organizing?”

It sometimes seems that political observers are divided between those who treat polling data, no matter how early or ephemeral, as Gospel Truth, and those who want to dismiss polling data, or even all data, out of hand, either for some period prior to real votes or forever.
At Washington Monthly this week, I discussed the issue in response to a sound but in my opinion misleading post from an observer whose work I admire:

At the Upshot today, Nate Cohn has a good primer on what you should ignore in all the early GOP nomination contest horse-race polls, but goes over the brink into one of those general injunctions to ignore early polls, presumably because he thinks readers are sure to misinterpret them. But then he makes a questionable assertion about how we should view the field:

Some might say that Mr. Rubio and Mr. Cruz’s support is enough to put them alongside Mr. Bush or Mr. Walker, the two candidates who have led the polls and have often been described as front-runners for the nomination. But Mr. Bush and Mr. Walker are front-runners in spite of their standing in the polls, not because of it.
They’re front-runners because the other candidates do not appear to have enough support from party elites to sustain a national campaign. Those other candidates do not have natural factional bases — like moderates for Mr. Bush, and conservatives for Mr. Walker — that give them clear opportunities to win early contests, or do not have the potential to build broad enough coalitions to win the nomination.

But how do we know Bush and Walker have these “natural factional bases.” You could say we know this about Jebbie because of rumors of fabulous fundraising numbers and all the blind quotes from Establishment types expressing their adoration for him. But until all this turns into reported contributions or public endorsements, it remains speculative, doesn’t it? I’d say a big reason for the Jeb the Frontrunner assumption is that his putative rival for that “factional base,” Chris Christie, is drawing terrible numbers in the early polls. And by that I don’t necessarily mean his horse-race standing, but his favorable/unfavorable ratios and the distribution of what little support he has. Similarly, we know Scott Walker is formidable not because of money or endorsements (he has little of either so far) but because early polls consistently show him with decisively strong support among conservative ideologues, and clear potential for growth in the rest of the primary electorate. And we know Marco Rubio has the potential to become a top-tier candidate because of his consistently strong approval ratios–again, in the early polls.
So I would amend Nate’s advice by saying it’s wise to ignore the order of candidates in early horse-race polling, which, as he points out, changes constantly (as it did in 2012 when even Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain led such polls at one point in the cycle), but do pay attention to the internals. And to stress a point where I may be just about alone in the punditocracy: even early general election trial-heat numbers may matter for candidates whose appeal in their own party is attributable to their claims of electability.
This is already a real problem for Jeb Bush, since the Establishment’s reported belief that he’s the strongest candidate to send up against Hillary Clinton isn’t born about in polling of these two extremely well-known polls; and it’s a potential asset for Rand Paul, whose otherwise unlikely candidacy has been strengthened by consistently stronger showings than anyone else in trial heats against HRC.
There’s a couple of other things about Nate Cohn’s take that give me pause. He concludes:

At some point, Mr. Walker, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio will need to take the lead in the polls, particularly in Iowa and New Hampshire. But now, it’s better to focus on the fundamentals — whether the candidates appear to hold the support from party elites necessary to win the nomination, whether they are broadly appealing throughout the party, and whether they seem capable of building support in the early states.

First of all, I just have to groan when I see yet another meaning assigned to the term “fundamentals,” by which some people mean GDP numbers alone, while others would add other economic statistics, presidential approval ratings, characteristics of the cycle, and landscape. And second of all, where do we find these fundamentals this early in the contest, particularly such criteria as “whether they are broadly appealing throughout the party, and whether they seem capable of building support in the early states”? That’s right: early polls, properly interpreted.
So: turns out there is gold to glean from early polls, so long as you know where to spot the fool’s gold.

if you had to boil Republican electoral strategy down to just three elements, voter suppression, gerrymandering and fear-mongering white voters would do well enough. In her first installment of a two-parter at The New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Drew has a pretty good summary of the first two elements.
Drew’s review article draws from two books, “The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown” by Richard L. Hasen and “Democracy and Justice: Collected Writings,” edited by Desiree Ramos Reiner, Jim Lyons, Erik Opsal, Mikayla Terrell, and Lena Glaser.
Drew laments the horse-race obsession of the media and warns “growing dangers to a democratic election, ones that could decide the outcome, are being essentially overlooked. The three dangers are voting restrictions, redistricting, and loose rules on large amounts of money being spent to influence voters. In recent years, we’ve been moving further and further away from a truly democratic election system.” Further,

The considerable outrage in 2012 over the systematic effort in Republican-dominated states to prevent blacks, Hispanics, students, and the elderly from being able to vote–mainly aimed at limiting the votes of blacks and Hispanics–might have been expected to lead to a serious effort to fix the voting system. But quite the reverse occurred. In fact, in some of the major races in 2014, according to the highly respected Brennan Center for Justice, the difference in the number of votes between the victor and the loser closely mirrored the estimated number of people who had been deprived of the right to vote. And in the North Carolina Senate race, the number of people prevented from voting exceeded the margin between the loser and the winner.
But even if it cannot be shown that the suppression of votes made the difference in the outcome of an important race in a given state, that doesn’t exactly make voter suppression benign. Hundreds of thousands of people are being denied their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. They have the misfortune of living in a state controlled by one party that wants to deprive the other party of as many votes as possible of the groups that tend heavily to support it. The ostensible rationale for such an effort–voter fraud–is itself a fraud.

Actually, hundreds of thousands is an understatement. Nationwide, the number runs into seven figures well before all states are tallied. Drew documents successful GOP voter suppression operations in several states. We’ll just share her report on one pivotal swing state:

In North Carolina shortly before the 2014 election, Thom Tillis, the speaker of the state House of Representatives and the Republican candidate for the US Senate against the incumbent Kay Hagan, rushed through the legislature one of the harshest voting laws in the country. It cut back the number of days for early voting, eliminated same-day registration, and prohibited people from voting outside their home precincts–all forms of voting heavily relied upon by blacks. Tillis defeated Hagan by 48,000 votes. One way to look at this is that in 2012, 700,000 people voted on those early voting days that were later cut; and 100,000 voters, almost one third of whom were black, had previously been able to register and vote on the same day. North Carolina hadn’t yet imposed a voter ID law in 2014, but one is in place for the next election.

Throw in the more than 600,000 disenfranchised voters of Texas, reported by Drew, and we are already well over a million voters unjustly denied ballot access — in just two states. The tally is in the same ballpark as those numbers in Florida, and will likely get worse with Bush or Rubio on the 2016 Republican ticket. As Drew reports, “In his book The Voting Wars, Richard Hasen, an expert on election law, writes, “Florida mainly taught political operatives the benefits of manipulating the rules…. Election law has become part of a political strategy.”
Drew chronicles the explosion of new voter i.d. laws in the wake of the Supreme Court decision eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, noting “forty new voter restrictions were introduced in seventeen states during the first few weeks of 2015 alone…as of late March of this year thirty-two such laws were in effect.”
It’s going to get worse. Drew adds, “Republicans are in total control of twenty-four states whereas the Democrats have total control of only seven. The lesson seems to be that once Republicans get total power at the state level, they find a way to rig the rules to keep the other side’s strongest constituencies from voting.” In addition,

Numerous Republican leaders understand that their party cannot win future national elections as long as it’s seen as hostile to minorities, but because of the very rightward cast of its primary and caucus voters and the early primaries in South Carolina and Florida (and even the possibility of a regional southern primary), someone seeking the Republican nomination now is not likely to support voting rights for blacks.

African Americans who are able to vote have had their ballot power diluted by Republican gerrymandering, as Drew explains:

…The most widely used way to limit the effect of black votes was to redraw voting districts. It used to be that black leaders worked with white legislators to guarantee that there would be enough blacks in a district that they could elect a black to represent them. More recently, the problem has become that in redrawing districts some states pack as many blacks as they can into a district, so they can reduce the total number of blacks elected to office and have the rest of their candidates run in safely white ones–which also reduces black political power.

As for reform prospects, “As of early April of this year, eighty-seven bills had been introduced around the country to reform redistricting practices. Twenty of them call for independent commissions; most of them try to cut back on gerrymandering. Two bipartisan bills have been introduced in the House that would encourage the establishing of independent commissions, or require the states to publish proposed redistricting plans online and give the citizens an opportunity to comment on them before they’re adopted.”
But none of these reforms are given much chance to succeed, given Republican majorities in both houses of congress. For that to change, the only hope is a broad Democratic victory in 2016. The alternative is further erosion of voting rights on an unprecedented scale. At some point it seems that voting rights must become more of a leading issue for Democrats. As Drew and others have warned, it’s not just about the domination of one political party over another. When specific groups are being locked out of the political process in massive and increasing numbers, democracy itself is very much at risk.