washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: May 2016

Some Sanders Supporters Propose ‘Plan B’ Campaign Against Trump

Gabriel Debenedetti reports at Politico that “A group of Bernie Sanders staffers and volunteers is circulating a draft proposal calling on the senator to get out of the presidential race after the final burst of Democratic primaries on June 7, and concentrate on building a national progressive organization to stop Donald Trump.”
It’s a 1600-word document, which “calls for the Vermont senator to exit the race and launch an independent political group far larger than any other recent post-campaign political operations, such as those started by Howard Dean or Barack Obama.”
Yamiche Alcindor reports at The New York Times, however, that:

Michael Briggs, a spokesman for the Sanders campaign, called the draft plan “totally irrelevant.”
“We are focused on winning the Democratic nomination,” Mr. Briggs said in an email. “This document is something that neither the senator nor anyone he works with has seen. We have no idea who wrote it. We could care less about the document.”

Sanders and his campaign are still focused on making the most of the rest of the presidential campaign. They still hope for an upset win in CA and they plan to be in a good position to win the nomination, should Clinton stumble or hit the political banana peel. However, as Debenedetti explains,

The group of over a dozen Sanders backers crafting the proposal — a collection of volunteers and current and former Sanders staff members, all veterans of other high-profile campaigns, including Barack Obama’s, who insist on anonymity — believes that leaving an imprint on the party platform is an overrated goal. They suggest that the Vermont senator should exit the race if it’s clear he cannot win — a call similar to the one made by Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, his lone Senate endorser — rather than spend the five weeks before the convention in limbo.

Another element of the proposal may not sit so well with Democratic Party officials, depending on the timing:

While Sanders will likely speak at July’s official Democratic convention in Philadelphia, the document proposes that he and his aides host a ‘convention’ event of their own to spur excitement and launch this group: “The best organized independent expenditure organization in history [that will] give the vast (and deeply anti-establishment) base a vehicle into which they will whole heartedly pour their energy.”…Such an effort, they write, would help bridge the gap between Clinton and the “large cadre of young, newly political Sanders supporters [that] sees rejection of Hillary and the Democratic Party establishment as core to their identity.”
…”A Sanders-led (as opposed to Sanders-centered) independent entity could provide a much needed, articulate and energized economic populist voice to the anti-Trump effort without the intrinsic compromising effect posed by close association with Neoliberal Democratic elites, as well as weaning the volunteer base off total reliance on individual candidates during one-off election cycles.”

It’s good to know that this dialogue is underway inside the Sanders campaign. Win or lose, Sen. Sanders has a lot to contribute to the defeat of Trump and the election of Democrats down-ballot from the presidency, If he is able to organize a progressive coalition that can function beyond 2016, Democrats may at long last have the vehicle that can help challenge the GOP’s midterm edge.


May 12: Trump Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Data!

One of the things we learned this week about Donald Trump’s general election campaign is that he doesn’t think he needs no stinkin’ data as I discussed at New York:

Donald Trump utters so much self-conscious b.s. about his campaign that you initially don’t know how seriously to take things like this:

Trump has no plans to invest in the kind of data-driven voter-targeting operation that powered Obama’s two White House wins and that Mitt Romney tried to emulate in 2012.
“I’ve always felt it was overrated,” Trump told the AP. “Obama got the votes much more so than his data processing machine. And I think the same is true with me.”
Instead, Trump will rely on a large rally-based get-out-the-vote effort.

Maybe he’s just jiving us, but the idea of a data-free general-election campaign, horrifying as it must be to Republican professionals, is entirely consistent with everything else we know about Trump’s idea of campaigning.

A personalized, event-based GOTV strategy obviously plays to characteristics that once led Trump’s most recently announced supporter, Bobby Jindal, to call him an “egomaniacal madman.” In a very real sense, Trump’s message, transcending any issue positioning, can be summed up in Pontius Pilate’s presentation of Jesus Christ to a mob in Jerusalem: “Ecce Homo” (Behold the Man!). So maximum exposure to the candidate in retail settings makes some sense.
There’s also obvious rhetorical consistency value for Trump and his supporters in the idea of lumping together pointy-headed data nerds with other elites who for all their pretensions actually don’t know their asses from page eight. It’s reminiscent of one of George Wallace’s favorite lines:

He seemed to derive the greatest satisfaction from taunting the “thousands of bureaucrats toting brief cases in Washington who don’t know why they’re there … I’ll bet if you opened half of their briefcases all you’d find would be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!”

You can almost hear Trump taunt data geeks as bozos whose computers (or “data-processing machines” as he called them in the interview mocking the idea) are loaded with nothing but video games.
There’s still another motive for Trump’s trashing of data analysis: It was robustly endorsed in the post-2012 RNC “Autopsy Report,” which in so many other respects he’s stomped on and tossed in the trash. Check out this language from the report, which comes after an appreciation of the Obama campaign’s superior deployment of data-driven voter targeting:

Another consistent theme that emerged from our conversations related to mechanics is the immediate need for the RNC and Republicans to foster what has been referred to as an “environment of intellectual curiosity” and a “culture of data and learning,” and the RNC must lead this effort. We need to be much more purposeful and expansive in our use of research and more sophisticated in how we employ data across all campaign and Party functions.

Whatever else you want to say about the Trump campaign, it does not offer much in the way of an “environment of intellectual curiosity,” unless that means openness to conspiracy theories spread by tabloids and word of mouth.

Unless this is a head fake and Trump is actually maintaining some secret Skunkworks somewhere full of data geeks, this is one area where Democrats may well have an uncontested advantage.


Trump Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Data!

One of the things we learned this week about Donald Trump’s general election campaign is that he doesn’t think he needs no stinkin’ data as I discussed at New York:

Donald Trump utters so much self-conscious b.s. about his campaign that you initially don’t know how seriously to take things like this:

Trump has no plans to invest in the kind of data-driven voter-targeting operation that powered Obama’s two White House wins and that Mitt Romney tried to emulate in 2012.
“I’ve always felt it was overrated,” Trump told the AP. “Obama got the votes much more so than his data processing machine. And I think the same is true with me.”
Instead, Trump will rely on a large rally-based get-out-the-vote effort.

Maybe he’s just jiving us, but the idea of a data-free general-election campaign, horrifying as it must be to Republican professionals, is entirely consistent with everything else we know about Trump’s idea of campaigning.

A personalized, event-based GOTV strategy obviously plays to characteristics that once led Trump’s most recently announced supporter, Bobby Jindal, to call him an “egomaniacal madman.” In a very real sense, Trump’s message, transcending any issue positioning, can be summed up in Pontius Pilate’s presentation of Jesus Christ to a mob in Jerusalem: “Ecce Homo” (Behold the Man!). So maximum exposure to the candidate in retail settings makes some sense.
There’s also obvious rhetorical consistency value for Trump and his supporters in the idea of lumping together pointy-headed data nerds with other elites who for all their pretensions actually don’t know their asses from page eight. It’s reminiscent of one of George Wallace’s favorite lines:

He seemed to derive the greatest satisfaction from taunting the “thousands of bureaucrats toting brief cases in Washington who don’t know why they’re there … I’ll bet if you opened half of their briefcases all you’d find would be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!”

You can almost hear Trump taunt data geeks as bozos whose computers (or “data-processing machines” as he called them in the interview mocking the idea) are loaded with nothing but video games.
There’s still another motive for Trump’s trashing of data analysis: It was robustly endorsed in the post-2012 RNC “Autopsy Report,” which in so many other respects he’s stomped on and tossed in the trash. Check out this language from the report, which comes after an appreciation of the Obama campaign’s superior deployment of data-driven voter targeting:

Another consistent theme that emerged from our conversations related to mechanics is the immediate need for the RNC and Republicans to foster what has been referred to as an “environment of intellectual curiosity” and a “culture of data and learning,” and the RNC must lead this effort. We need to be much more purposeful and expansive in our use of research and more sophisticated in how we employ data across all campaign and Party functions.

Whatever else you want to say about the Trump campaign, it does not offer much in the way of an “environment of intellectual curiosity,” unless that means openness to conspiracy theories spread by tabloids and word of mouth.

Unless this is a head fake and Trump is actually maintaining some secret Skunkworks somewhere full of data geeks, this is one area where Democrats may well have an uncontested advantage.


Political Strategy Notes

“Nothing to see here. Let’s move on now” is not an acceptabe substitute for transparency on Trump’s taxes.

Re Trump’s tax returns, New York Times reporters Patrick Healey and Alan Rappeport observe “Making tax returns public is not required of presidential candidates, but there is a long tradition of major party nominees doing so. Joseph J. Thorndike, who tracks presidential tax returns as the director of the Tax History Project at the nonpartisan Tax Analysts, said Mr. Trump would be the first major candidate since 1976 to not make any of his full returns public. President Gerald R. Ford released a summary of his tax returns that year…Dr. Thorndike noted that President Richard M. Nixon released his tax returns while he was under audit, starting the tradition of presidential candidates making their returns public.”

The Nation editor/Washington Post columnist Katrina vanden Heuval makes the case that, “Against Trump, Clinton should resist the temptation of triangulation,” noting “There is no guarantee that pivoting to the middle would attract a significant number of Republicans, who generally loathe Clinton, but it would almost certainly dampen enthusiasm among progressives. Indeed, while Sanders might endorse Clinton at some point, she still has to earn the support of millions of people who voted for him if they are going to remain energized through the fall campaign.”

“In his absolute best-case scenario, Trump might match the two-thirds of white men that Reagan won in 1984, the party’s modern apex. But given Trump’s astronomical unfavorable ratings among African Americans and Hispanics, it’s not unreasonable to project that Clinton could hold the roughly 80 percent of minority voters who have typically backed Democratic nominees since 1976…Trump would then need to attract 58 percent of white women to reach a national majority–slightly more than the 56 percent that Romney won. Looking at the equation from the other direction, if Clinton matched the usual Democratic performance with non-white voters and also carried even half of white women, Trump would then need to win more than three-fourths of white men for a national majority, a daunting prospect…Trump almost certainly can’t beat Clinton, or even stay competitive, without constructing a solid advantage among white women. But today he’s trailing Clinton among them in most surveys.” from Ronald Brownstein’s article, “The Republican Party’s Woman Problem” at The Atlantic.
At HuffPo Seth Abramson charts a narrow path for Sen. Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic presidential nomination, based on his continued momentum, a high-profile upset in California, superior performance vs. Trump in head-to-head horse race polls and super delegates switching to Sanders en masse.

For an interesting preview of the Democratic Party’s Latino messaging strategy at the upcoming convention and going forward to the general election, click here.

Could Trump help Democrats gain ground in Southern state politics?” Chris Kromm addresses the question at Facing South and notes, “As Gallup found in its most recent survey of partisan affiliation, the electorate in most Southern states is either evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, or leans GOP; only in Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee did voters fall into the “Solid Republican” category.” Kromm sees good chance for a Democratic victory in the NC governors race, where the Republican incumbent is already under criticism for defending against a growing boycott that is costing NC jobs and tourist revenue. Also, Dems could pick up seats in southern state legislatures, perhaps enough to prevent veto-prof majorities in several states.

Quinnipiac University poll shows close U.S. senate races in OH, PA and FL.
And the same poll shows “Buckeye state voters overwhelmingly support legalizing medical marijuana by a margin of 90% to 9%. They narrowly support allowing recreational use of the drug, by 52% to 45%.”


May 11: Trump Splits the Christian Right

One of the little-known but important tremors set off on the political Right by Donald Trump’s emergence involves that pillar of the GOP, the Christian Right. I offered some analysis of this phenomenon earlier this week at New York:

Trump pretty evenly split the conservative evangelical and traditionalist Catholic vote with Cruz and others in the GOP primaries, to the chagrin of many conservative Christian leaders who viewed Trump as a man whose policy views, personal morality, and all-around hatefulness made him an inappropriate candidate for people claiming to follow the Prince of Peace.
Now that Trump has triumphed, however, there’s a stirring among Christian conservatives that goes far beyond the usual pre-convention demands that the party and its candidate make social issues a priority and eschew any heresies. It’s best reflected in the war of words that has broken out between Trump and his camp and Russell Moore, chief political spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention. Throughout the 2016 primaries, Moore has excoriated Trump and warned conservative evangelicals to reject his devilish charms. But now he’s lashing out at Trump-supporting evangelicals with a level of contempt usually reserved for liberal secularists (per this passage from his recent New York Times op-ed):

A white American Christian who disregards nativist language is in for a shock. The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking “foreigner” who is probably not all that impressed by chants of “Make America great again.”

In a tweet after Trump started attacking him as a “nasty man” via social media, Moore cited chapter and verse (1 Kings 18:17-19):

“When he saw Elijah, he said to him, ‘Is that you, you troubler of Israel?'” the verse reads. “‘I have not made trouble for Israel,’ Elijah replied. ‘But you and your father’s family have. You have abandoned the Lord’s commands and have followed the Baals.'”

What Moore is doing is urging his fellow believers to take a prophetic stance — a protest
against fundamental social wickedness — against Trump and the Christians who support him. No prominent conservative Christian has done anything like this with a Republican political leader since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign rang in the political marriage of conservative Christians and the GOP that created what we know as the Christian Right.
Moore doesn’t speak for all Christian conservative leaders, obviously. Some, like longtime Christian Right leader Tony Perkins, seem to be following the old formula of fencing in the GOP nominee with platform planks and pledges on particular issues before putting on the party yoke and supporting him. And a few others, most famously Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., dived into the churning waters of Trump’s brand of cultural conservatism from the get-go. But the fact remains: This once unified movement has split and could for the first time in decades stay split through a general election.
One of our most insightful observers of the Christian Right, Sarah Posner recently observed that Trump may represent a subculture of American Christianity that’s declaring its independence from the larger tribe:

Deliberately or not, Mr. Trump may be the perfect candidate for an evangelical subculture that has increasingly become enamored with the prosperity, or health and wealth, gospel. In trying to build a singular religious faction that agreed on some core issues (like abortion), the Republican Party has courted that subculture, even though many evangelicals consider prosperity theology to be heretical. Mr. Trump acts more like a televangelist than an evangelical.

To put it more broadly, Christian Right leaders have for a long time encouraged the people in the pews to conflate their faith with cultural conservatism and nationalism, standing as Christian soldiers against the secularist trends that were transforming God’s Redeemer Nation from its Judeo-Christian moorings in patriarchal families and bourgeois values. What Trump has exploited, like many political leaders in 20th-century Europe, is that a lot of culturally threatened conservative white Christians are willing to throw away the cross in favor of their flag, their race, their tribe, and everything that’s familiar. The big question is whether fear and hatred of the secular-socialist enemy can once again paper over the growing division between Christian nationalists and people who follow Moore in arguing that Christ has no nation….
[I]f Trump goes down in ignominious defeat, his candidacy could actually strengthen the Christian Right in the long run by disciplining or expelling its fascistic elements. But in the meantime, one of the fascinating subcurrents of this election will be the hurling of Old Testament thunderbolts by conservative Christian figures at the leader of the political party their predecessors claimed as Christ’s own.

Selah.


Trump Splits the Christian Right

One of the little-known but important tremors set off on the political Right by Donald Trump’s emergence involves that pillar of the GOP, the Christian Right. I offered some analysis of this phenomenon earlier this week at New York:

Trump pretty evenly split the conservative evangelical and traditionalist Catholic vote with Cruz and others in the GOP primaries, to the chagrin of many conservative Christian leaders who viewed Trump as a man whose policy views, personal morality, and all-around hatefulness made him an inappropriate candidate for people claiming to follow the Prince of Peace.
Now that Trump has triumphed, however, there’s a stirring among Christian conservatives that goes far beyond the usual pre-convention demands that the party and its candidate make social issues a priority and eschew any heresies. It’s best reflected in the war of words that has broken out between Trump and his camp and Russell Moore, chief political spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention. Throughout the 2016 primaries, Moore has excoriated Trump and warned conservative evangelicals to reject his devilish charms. But now he’s lashing out at Trump-supporting evangelicals with a level of contempt usually reserved for liberal secularists (per this passage from his recent New York Times op-ed):

A white American Christian who disregards nativist language is in for a shock. The man on the throne in heaven is a dark-skinned, Aramaic-speaking “foreigner” who is probably not all that impressed by chants of “Make America great again.”

In a tweet after Trump started attacking him as a “nasty man” via social media, Moore cited chapter and verse (1 Kings 18:17-19):

“When he saw Elijah, he said to him, ‘Is that you, you troubler of Israel?'” the verse reads. “‘I have not made trouble for Israel,’ Elijah replied. ‘But you and your father’s family have. You have abandoned the Lord’s commands and have followed the Baals.'”

What Moore is doing is urging his fellow believers to take a prophetic stance — a protest
against fundamental social wickedness — against Trump and the Christians who support him. No prominent conservative Christian has done anything like this with a Republican political leader since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign rang in the political marriage of conservative Christians and the GOP that created what we know as the Christian Right.
Moore doesn’t speak for all Christian conservative leaders, obviously. Some, like longtime Christian Right leader Tony Perkins, seem to be following the old formula of fencing in the GOP nominee with platform planks and pledges on particular issues before putting on the party yoke and supporting him. And a few others, most famously Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., dived into the churning waters of Trump’s brand of cultural conservatism from the get-go. But the fact remains: This once unified movement has split and could for the first time in decades stay split through a general election.
One of our most insightful observers of the Christian Right, Sarah Posner recently observed that Trump may represent a subculture of American Christianity that’s declaring its independence from the larger tribe:

Deliberately or not, Mr. Trump may be the perfect candidate for an evangelical subculture that has increasingly become enamored with the prosperity, or health and wealth, gospel. In trying to build a singular religious faction that agreed on some core issues (like abortion), the Republican Party has courted that subculture, even though many evangelicals consider prosperity theology to be heretical. Mr. Trump acts more like a televangelist than an evangelical.

To put it more broadly, Christian Right leaders have for a long time encouraged the people in the pews to conflate their faith with cultural conservatism and nationalism, standing as Christian soldiers against the secularist trends that were transforming God’s Redeemer Nation from its Judeo-Christian moorings in patriarchal families and bourgeois values. What Trump has exploited, like many political leaders in 20th-century Europe, is that a lot of culturally threatened conservative white Christians are willing to throw away the cross in favor of their flag, their race, their tribe, and everything that’s familiar. The big question is whether fear and hatred of the secular-socialist enemy can once again paper over the growing division between Christian nationalists and people who follow Moore in arguing that Christ has no nation….
[I]f Trump goes down in ignominious defeat, his candidacy could actually strengthen the Christian Right in the long run by disciplining or expelling its fascistic elements. But in the meantime, one of the fascinating subcurrents of this election will be the hurling of Old Testament thunderbolts by conservative Christian figures at the leader of the political party their predecessors claimed as Christ’s own.

Selah.


Krugman: Trump’s ‘Ignoramus’ Economics Reflects GOP Views

Paul Krugman’s NYT op-ed column on “The Making of an Ignoramus” provides a reminder that the GOP’s nominee-apparent is not making this stuff up when it comes to his worst economic ideas; in most cases he is parroting well-established Republican policies and values. As Krugman explains:

Truly, Donald Trump knows nothing. He is more ignorant about policy than you can possibly imagine, even when you take into account the fact that he is more ignorant than you can possibly imagine. But his ignorance isn’t as unique as it may seem: In many ways, he’s just doing a clumsy job of channeling nonsense widely popular in his party, and to some extent in the chattering classes more generally.
…Basically, it involves running the country like a failing casino: he could, he asserted, “make a deal” with creditors that would reduce the debt burden if his outlandish promises of economic growth don’t work out.

Trump’s economic hucksterism, particularly on the issue of the debt, has left the financial and economic experts with “a mix of amazed horror and horrified amazement,” adds Krugman. “One does not casually suggest throwing away America’s carefully cultivated reputation as the world’s most scrupulous debtor — a reputation that dates all the way back to Alexander Hamilton.”
The global reverberations could be disastrous, says Krugman. “The Trump solution would, among other things, deprive the world economy of its most crucial safe asset, U.S. debt, at a time when safe assets are already in short supply.”
But, it’s not like Trump’s failed casino economics is bucking his party’s economic policies. The Republican party long ago abandoned the principle of economic prudence. Trump just restates their views with his customary bombast, and much of the media falls for it as something new and flashy, when really it’s the same old GOP story of rich guys screwing around with the hard-earned assets of everyone else.
With respect to Trump’s debt “crisis” hysteria, Krugman spotlights the real reason behind it:

.. Lots of supposedly serious people have been hyping the alleged threat posed by federal debt for years. For example, Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, has warned repeatedly about a “looming debt crisis.” Indeed, until not long ago the whole Beltway elite seemed to be in the grip of BowlesSimpsonism, with its assertion that debt was the greatest threat facing the nation.
A lot of this debt hysteria was really about trying to bully us into cutting Social Security and Medicare, which is why so many self-proclaimed fiscal hawks were also eager to cut taxes on the rich. But Mr. Trump apparently wasn’t in on that particular con, and takes the phony debt scare seriously. Sad!

Noting that Trump is “extrapolating from his own business career, in which he has done very well by running up debts, then walking away from them,” Krugman adds,

…Much of the Republican Party shares his insouciance about default. Remember, the party’s congressional wing deliberately set about extracting concessions from President Obama, using the threat of gratuitous default via a refusal to raise the debt ceiling.
And quite a few Republican lawmakers defended that strategy of extortion by arguing that default wouldn’t be that bad, that even with its access to funds cut off the U.S. government could “prioritize” payments, and that the financial disruption would be no big deal..Given that history, it’s not too hard to understand why candidate Trump thinks not paying debts in full makes sense.
…When Mr. Trump talks nonsense, he’s usually just offering a bombastic version of a position that’s widespread in his party. In fact, it’s remarkable how many ridiculous Trumpisms were previously espoused by Mitt Romney in 2012, from his claim that the true unemployment rate vastly exceeds official figures to his claim that he can bring prosperity by starting a trade war with China.
None of this should be taken as an excuse for Mr. Trump. He really is frighteningly uninformed; worse, he doesn’t appear to know what he doesn’t know. The point, instead, is that his blithe lack of knowledge largely follows from the know-nothing attitudes of the party he now leads.

Trump has a talent for making other Republicans’ worst economic policies and ideas seem like they are his creations. However contentious Democratic party economic proposals may be, no one can say that they haven’t been scrutinized and honed by serious economists and policy wonks — in stark contrast the the GOP. As Krugman concludes, “in this election, one party has largely cornered the market in raw ignorance.”


Yglesias: A Clinton Victory Would Give Sanders Increased Influence

At Vox.com Matthew Yglesias conributes the most credible explaination yet offered why Sen. Bernie Sanders will surely support Hillary Clinton, if she wins the Democratic nomination:

…Sanders already has all the reasons he could possibly need to give Clinton his full-throated support.
Thanks to the primaries, Sanders has emerged as a substantial factional leader inside the Democratic Party — someone whose statements and tweets will garner media attention, whose email list will be coveted and envied by other Democrats in Congress, and whose support or opposition to a measure will matter to a national constituency. That gives him, potentially, considerably more influence over national affairs than he’s had in his previous 25 years in Washington. But essentially all of that influence hinges on Clinton winning the election in November.
That, rather than anything to do with platform concessions or “lesser of two evils” talk, is why Sanders will almost certainly do everything in his power to boost Clinton this fall. He’ll do it because it’s the right thing for Bernie Sanders.

Their differences on key issues are more a matter of degree than substance, as Yglesias notes,

Clinton and Sanders are pulling in the same direction on almost every issue.
Sanders wants to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour; Clinton wants $12.
Sanders wants a massive increase in taxes on the wealthy; Clinton wants a modest one.
Sanders wants a big new government-run health insurance program to cover everyone; Clinton wants to expand an existing government-run insurance program to cover more people.
Sanders wants a hard cap on bank size and complexity; Clinton wants enhanced capital requirements for large and complex banks that would discourage size and complexity.

Yglesias adds, “…On virtually every issue, Sanders has promised to go further than Clinton has in the same direction. Which is another way of saying that implementing Clinton’s agenda would be a way of moving closer to Sanders’s goals — so in pursuit of his goals, he’s going to want to put her in the White House.”
In addition, argues Yglesias, a Clinton victory gives Sanders substantially enhanced clout as the leader of a bona fide grass roots movement that has the ear of the President. It would give Sanders inside leverage, as opposed to being the leader of a movement on the outside.
Further, it would give Sanders the inside track to become the chair of one of the most powerful Senate panels, the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, with “influence over legislation, of course, but also the ability to call hearings on whatever subject he likes.” That’s a lot better than being a minority member of the committee headed by a Republican, which would likely accompany a Trump victory.
Sanders is a pragmatic progressive, not a Naderesque ideologue who would rather go down in a blaze of purist glory than support reforms that can benefit millions of working people. Sanders is not giving up his efforts to win an upset victory. But he clearly understands that a Clinton presidency would provide support for his policy reforms, support that would be completely denied by Republican control of the Senate. For both moral and practical reasons, he will work hard to elect the Democratic presidential nominee, as will most of his supporters.


Political Strategy Notes

From John Stoehr’s “The Donald’s Trump Card Isn’t an Ace: The media narrative that Donald Trump is winning over white working-class voters is false” at U.S. News: “That Trump performed more or less on par with his rivals in Rust Belt states suggests that his supporters were already firmly conservative or already primed to choose any Republican, populist or otherwise, according to Andrew Levison, author of “The White Working Class Today” and analyst for “The Democratic Strategist,” a journal of public opinion and strategy. Indeed, Levison observed in a March white paper, Trump performed best not with Midwestern Reagan Democrats but with white working-class Southerners. This, he argued, isn’t due to Trump’s “right-wing version of economic populism” but “the racial and xenophobic elements of his platform.”

In his NYT op-ed explaining why Trump is perpetrating “Working-Class Fraud,” Timothy Egan observes, “Trump’s solution to the woes of working families is to slap a 45 percent tariff on goods coming from China. The Chinese would retaliate, of course, meaning American companies that sell aircraft, medical equipment and vehicles to China — part of the $116 billion in exports there last year — would have to cut jobs to make up for losses.”

Ed Kilgore has a reminder that “The Working Class Isn’t All That White Anymore” at New York magazine: “While Sanders has (by my back-of-the-envelope calculation) carried non-college-educated white voters in 14 of the 24 primaries and caucuses with exit polls (Hillary Clinton won them in six states, and they were basically tied in the other four), he’s lost non-white non-college-educated voters just about everywhere. That shouldn’t be a footnote. Nor should the frequent comments on the political left about Clinton betraying “the working class” and now suffering the electoral consequences go unchallenged without some attention being paid to her robust support among working folks who happened to be non-white or non-male.”

At The American Prospect Rich Yeselson has a review article discussing Tamara Draut’s pre-Trump book, “Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America” and prospects for rising class consciousness as a political force. Yeselson observes, “..People make their own history, but not always in the humane ways we would hope–working-class agency isn’t always a positive social force. The weakness especially of private-sector unionism is critical here because, as Draut notes in a perceptive aside, when unions wane, “what’s also lost is the civic participation and political education unions provide.” While unions don’t guarantee interracial and ethnic solidarity–again, see Western Europe–they are, as of now, the only organizations we have that, in their normative goals and often their actions, encourage just that.”

In his post, “Bernie Sanders’s Legacy? The Left May No Longer Need the Rich,” Nate Cohn reports at The Upshot that “According to exit poll data, liberals represented a majority of white Democrats without a college degree in nearly every primary contest. It’s a huge change from just a decade or two ago, when so many white working-class Democrats were conservative (check out this 1995 Pew Research typology of voters if you want to see what the Democratic base used to look like). Mrs. Clinton tended to win “moderate” white voters without college degrees in these states, but she lost among the self-described liberals…A lot of this is a generational divide. Mrs. Clinton won among white voters without a college degree who were over age 30, but she was pummeled among those who were younger.”

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe’s executive order restoring voting rights to more than 200,000 of his state’s citizens who have completed their felony sentences has awakened the fury of the Republican establishment, which threatens to sue to prevent it, mostly because VA is a major swing state. The New York Times editorial board notes that “Virginia’s voting ban, like most of the others that collectively disenfranchise about six million Americans, is a 19th-century relic rooted in racism — a direct reaction to the passage of the 15th Amendment, which guaranteed African-Americans the right to vote…Politicians in Virginia were blunt about their motivation. In 1902, when Virginia’s voting ban was expanded at the state’s constitutional convention, Carter Glass, a state senator, said its purpose was to “eliminate the darkey as a political factor in this state in less than five years, so that in no single county of the Commonwealth will there be the least concern felt for the complete supremacy of the white race in the affairs of government…Before Mr. McAuliffe’s order, one in five black Virginians was permanently barred from voting because of a past felony conviction.”

It’s just a snapshot, but Clinton and Trump are in a stat tie in a new GA poll.

At The Fix Chris Cillizza explains why “The GOP’s electoral-map problem is not about Trump. It’s about demographics.” Cillizza reasons, “if Clinton wins the 19 states that every Democratic nominee dating to her husband has won and she wins Florida (29 electoral votes), she wins the White House. It’s that simple…Or if she wins the 19 reliable Democratic states and Virginia (13 electoral votes) and Ohio (18). Or the 19 states plus Nevada (6), Colorado (9) and North Carolina (15)..You get the idea. There are lots and lots and lots of ways for Clinton — or any Democratic nominee — to get to 270 electoral votes. There are very few ways for Trump — or any Republican nominee — to get there.”

The Cook Political Report puts it this way: “As a result, we are shifting 13 ratings on our Electoral Vote scorecard, almost all of them favoring Democrats. Our assessments are based on publicly available polling, data on demographic change and private discussions with a large number of pollsters in both parties. Much could change, but undecided voters begin more hostile to Trump than Clinton…With these changes, 190 Electoral Votes are in the Solid Democratic column, 27 are in Likely Democratic and another 87 are in Lean Democratic – enough for a majority. Yet another 44 Electoral Votes are in Toss Up. Although Iowa, New Hampshire and Ohio could shift to Lean Democratic and Nevada could shift to Likely Democratic, we are holding off on changes in these states until we see more evidence. “