The heavy maneuvering among Senate Republicans to get a vote on a symbolic, sure-to-be-filibustered-and-if-necessarily-vetoed amendment cutting off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood in response to the series of videos an antichoice sting operation is generating sure looks like Kabuki theater to most Democrats. But it reflects a bit of a panic among Republicans dealing with the fury of antichoicers over the failure of the GOP to keep its promises. I wrote about this at Washington Monthly yesterday.

[W]ho really cares how far down the road to perdition the [Planned Parenthood defunding} amendment was allowed to proceed?
But for serious antichoice types, the answer to this question would be: We do, and thus the entire GOP we’ve been propping up for decades should, too. That’s pretty much the message sent by conservative columnist Emmanuel Gobry at The Week today:

I sincerely believe in the pro-life agenda. And it frustrates me to no end that even as pro-lifers have delivered electoral majorities to the GOP over and over again, the GOP has not kept up its end of the bargain. Five Republican-appointed justices sit on the Supreme Court, and yet Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land.
Early this year, the GOP failed at what should have been a simple task: Pass an enormously popular late-term abortion ban. Passing a bill that polls well, and is symbolically very important to your biggest constituency, ought to be the no-brainer to end all no-brainers. But Republican politicians couldn’t even do that.
And now, after the devastating revelations that Planned Parenthood routinely engages in the sale of baby organs for profit — something that is illegal, unethical, and disgusting on at least 12 different levels — GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell couldn’t bring himself to allow to the Senate floor a bill to defund that activity by Planned Parenthood. Why not? Because he wants to pass a highway bill instead — a pork-laden monstrosity that comes with the disgusting cherry on top that is the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, a corporate welfare program that free-market conservative activists particularly detest.

The road Gobry wants the GOP to take on abortion legislation will inevitably end at a government shutdown that will backfire on Republicans. And Lord knows Senate Republicans have used every code word imaginable to elicit a negative position on Roe v. Wade from judicial nominees, especially since the Souter “stab in the back,” but hey, the current fly in the ointment, Anthony Kennedy, was the appointee of The Gipper himself, the man who made uncompromising opposition to reproductive rights an unchanging part of the GOP platform.
But I guess if you think legalized abortion is an American Holocaust, as folks like Gabry often suggest, then you’re probably going to insist on results for your decades-long investment of energy, money, votes and agitprop. I mean, if anti-choicers can successfully convey the lie that they are only concerned about a tiny number of late-term abortions that “shock the conscience” of the casual, murder-tolerating Good Germans in the political center–when their real goal is to ban the vast majority of abortions that occur in the first trimester, that do not shock that many consciences–then can’t the GOP contrive some way to get the ball over the goal line? So that leads to the sort of strict liability, “no excuses” demand that Gobry issues:

We should rule with fear. For the past 30 years, we’ve been bringing a hymnal to a gunfight. The Tea Party has shown how it’s done: Don’t like someone? Primary them. End their political career. That’s the only thing politicians fear.
I’m done waiting. I hope you are, too.

Before you chuckle at the arrival of another intra-GOP fight over priorities, keep in mind that if Republicans win the White House and hang onto the Senate, they will indeed run out of excuses for saying “later” to their antichoice activists. Perhaps they’ll be forced to resort to the “nuclear option” to get rid of any possible filibuster against antichoice legislation or the next Republican Supreme Court nominee. As for said nominee, I think we will see an end to all of the dog-whistling about abortion; no matter how much it violates every premise of our legal system to pre-commit judges to a position on future litigation, we’ll see nominees who are all but visibly frothing to overturn Roe. In other words, if 2016 goes their way, the antichoicers may be able at long last to call in what I’ve referred to as a balloon payment on their mortgage on the soul of the GOP.

Don’t be surprised if the antichoicers keep Republicans hopping.

Something Democrats should keep in mind in trying to understand the opposition as that while we look at the last few election cycles and see massive discontinuity between presidential and midterm elections, many Republicans think of 2012 as a pure aberration in an upward spiral of support for them that reassume its strength in 2014 and is still building steam. At the Washington Monthly I addressed some fresh evidence that’s an illusion:

A lot of Republicans came out of their 2014 landslide fully expecting to keep the party going right into the presidential cycle. There were a lot of reasons to doubt that optimism, from the change to a presidential cycle with less positive turnout patterns for the GOP, to the end of a six-year midterm dynamic that was sure to fade, to an improving economy. But whatever changed, the evidence is growing clearer that the 2014 party’s over. Here’s some relevant data from Pew just out today:

The Republican Party’s image has grown more negative over the first half of this year. Currently, 32% have a favorable impression of the Republican Party, while 60% have an unfavorable view. Favorable views of the GOP have fallen nine percentage points since January. The Democratic Party continues to have mixed ratings (48% favorable, 47% unfavorable).

Part of the problem is that Republicans themselves are less enthusiastic, which is a bit strange since they are being offered the largest presidential field in recent memory. Perhaps it is the inability to blame Congress’ fecklessness on Harry Reid any more.
Interestingly, despite or because of all the shrieking among Republicans about the world being this terrible place where no American is safe, the GOP advantage on foreign policy has vanished since the last Pew survey on the parties in February, and its advantage on “the terrorist threat at home” has been cut in half. But perhaps most significantly, views of the two parties on economic policy are pretty stable for now.
Any way you slice it, any thoughts by Republicans that the landscape is tilting in their direction in this cycle really come down to the fairly abstract notion of an electorate that thinks it’s time for a change after the Obama administration. If contrary to that notion this turns out to be a “two futures” election in which voters are simply comparing the two parties and their candidates, the landscape just isn’t tilting Right.

There are some “ifs” in that last sentence, but then again, the last really boffo Republican presidential election performance was all the way back in 1988.

As James Vega noted in his last post, there’s renewed interest in the white working class vote this cycle–but you have to look at it from a number of angles to understand the dynamics of this vote. I discussed those different perspectives as TPMCafe today:

[I]n this presidential cycle, the fear that a nominee not named Barack Obama will fall short of his turnout and vote-share levels among the Obama Coalition has led to schemes of making up the votes elsewhere. And whereas Hillary Clinton has a plausible case she can boost the Democratic vote among women, other Democrats–especially supporters of Bernie Sanders–are looking wistfully at that old flame, the white working class vote.
Sanders represents the strongly-held belief of many progressives, especially in the labor movement, that a clear, loud and consistently articulated “economic populist” message can at least partially rebuild the New Deal coalition with its cross-racial, class-based sinews, particularly if “corporate Democrat” flirtations with Wall Street and professional elites are abandoned along with excessive “identity politics” cultural preoccupations that might alienate white workers. But muting points of identity with the Obama Coalition in order to pursue a purely class-based “colorblind” politics isn’t without its intra-progressive risks, as Bernie Sanders himself found out last weekend in Phoenix when he ran afoul of #blacklivesmatter protesters.
And while it is entirely unfair to accuse Sanders of white-working-class chauvinism, much less racism, he’s paying the price for being associated with an “economics first!” point of view that can fairly be seen as an obstacle for minority folk (and arguably feminists) who want a higher priority placed on challenging white male patriarchy in non-economic arenas. And so a candidate who hoped to draw white working class voters back into a coalition with minority voters has instead heightened doubts he understand the latter.
This is a test that Hillary Clinton, herself the object of some talk about a possible revival of white working class support (though largely based on her husband’s performance back in the 1990s and her own in Democratic primaries in 2008), may have to face herself at some point soon.
Beyond the candidates, there are some Democratic observers–notably a long-time expert on this demographic, Stan Greenberg–who believe the key to regaining a portion of the white working class is to identify with its hostility to government as corrupt and ineffective and offer a “populist” agenda that prominently includes political and government reform.
Despite their already strong standing among non-college-educated white voters, Republicans think there’s still political gold to mine in this demographic as well, in no small part because they are struggling to open up any really new avenues for growing their vote. Many are mesmerized by Sean Trende’s analysis after the 2012 elections suggesting there were millions of “missing white votes” in 2012 that helped doom Mitt Romney, mostly among “downscale northern rural” voters. This has led to a boom of “conservative populist” talk, some of it as superficial as non-college graduate Scott Walker’s endless paeans to Kohl’s shoppers, some a bit more focused on promoting the already-robust GOP anti-Washington themes, odd as they seem with Republicans controlling Congress.
One 2016 GOP presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, signaled early on that he would identify with white working class voters who were sufficiently integrated into the GOP to vote in presidential primaries but had not internalized Republican elite economic positions. Building on the “populist” rhetoric of his 2008 campaign, Huckabee announced he would oppose both the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and the “entitlement reform” proposals that are equally beloved of the GOP’s business wing. But Huck has so far run a desultory and poorly financed campaign mostly focused on hustling copies of his latest book, and tending to his conservative evangelical base by waxing hysterical on alleged threats to Christianity.
Into Huck’s lost opportunity has moved another candidate who opposes trade agreements and entitlement reform, along with the business wing’s solicitude for sanity on immigration policy, packaged in the form of the ultimate celebrity businessman: Donald Trump.
Trump’s shocking surge into the lead in 2016 Republican polls, and his possible return to earth after giving his rivals and the RNC an excuse to bring the hammers of hell down on him by disrespecting John McCain’s war record, has obscured his sources of support. Efforts to typecast his supporters ideologically, or in terms of prefab party factions like the Tea Party, have largely run aground. But it’s difficult to identify a better fit for Sean Trende’s “missing white voters”–downscale and largely non-southern–than Donald Trump. And a new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows Trump at his peak attracting 33 percent of non-college educated white voters among Republicans and Republican-leaners, as opposed to 9 percent of college educated white GOpers and leaners. (Bernie Sanders, in contrast, runs better among college educated than non-college educated Democrats against Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Democratic field.) Even if Trump quickly falls to earth, he has to be taken semi-seriously as a potential independent candidate in 2016.
And here’s the real shocker in that WaPo/ABC poll: In a hypothetical three-way race with Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, Trump pulls 31 percent of white non-college educated voters, dead even with HRC and just three points behind Jeb.
So who’s the white working class hero? Potentially it’s the Democratic nominee, if she or he takes Stan Greenberg’s advice. But let’s not discount Donald Trump, who’s a reminder that the white working class is now by the numbers predominantly an angry anti-elite constituency that doesn’t love GOP economic positions–but isn’t waiting to be invited back into the Democratic tent, either.

Along with all the campaign financial disclosures rolling in this week, we’ve begun to see some assessments of the organizational efforts of the two leading Democrats in the polls and in fundraising, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. You might think that Bernie Sanders’ grassroots enthusiasm might be giving him an organizational lead over the top-heavy and Establishment-oriented Clinton in the early states, but that’s not automatically how it’s playing out, as I discussed today at Washington Monthly:

Journalists are just now coming to grips with this, and there’s always a danger on such subjects of buying campaign spin. But there does seem to be a growing recognition that Hillary Clinton’s campaign differs from its 2008 predecessor because of a pervasive emphasis on organization-building in the states.
WaPo’s Matea Gold and Anu Narayanswamy come at the story from a different angle today, noting that HRC’s high “burn rate” for contributions is being driven by systemic investments in campaign infrastructure:

Details in the newly filed reports paint a picture of a campaign harnessing the latest technological tools and constructing the kind of deep ground operation that Clinton lacked in her 2008 bid. That kind of organizing capability has gained importance as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), one of Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic nomination, has drawn large crowds and gained ground in polls….
Clinton’s operation is paying rent in 25 cities across nine states, Federal Election Commission filings show. Along with about 340 staff members on the payroll, the campaign had hired nearly 60 field organizers by the end of June.
“It’s a sign that she’s approaching the campaign differently than the last time,” [David] Axelrod said. “They didn’t have as thoughtful an approach to laying the foundation for that campaign, and it ended up hurting them when it ended up being an organizational fight.”

At the “Politico Caucus” subsite, where there’s a sort of large focus group of early-state “Insiders,” the judgment is even clearer, per Katie Glueck:

Asked to assess what Clinton is doing right, and wrong, in their states, almost every Caucus participant — Democrats and Republicans — answered the question of what she’s doing right by saying Clinton has pulled together a strong staff and is doing all of the little things right when it comes to being organized for the early state contests and beyond.
“Doing right: building and investing in a monster field operation. Scares the hell out of this Republican knowing that many of those staff will easily pivot to organizing for the general election,” an Iowa Republican said.
“HRC is building a campaign rooted in organizing,” added a New Hampshire Democrat. “I’ve been to several house parties & campaign events and there are always new faces present — faces that weren’t involved in the 2012 presidential race. There is absolutely no one taking this primary race for granted whatsoever.”
“The organizing strategy is straight out of the Obama 2007 playbook,” an Iowa Democrat added. “The crew is enthusiastic and well-trained on the basics (pledge cards, pledge cards, pledge cards). Sanders and O’Malley will find it impossible to compete with the sheer size of the organizing.”
In New Hampshire, in particular, Democrats also largely lauded Clinton for visiting more rural parts of the state that are often overlooked. And across the board, her staff was praised for keeping cool amid the rise of Bernie Sanders.

Meanwhile, there’s also some recognition that the impressive enthusiasm that suffuses Bernie Sanders’ campaign is not automatically transmittable into a good organization, helpful as it is. At TNR earlier this week, Suzy Khimm suggested that the Occupy-influenced passion for decentralized political organizing could be a problem for Team Sanders:

Sanders is betting that passion will enable him to surmount the serious obstacles he faces in broadening his base of support. But that also means the campaign needs to find a way to corral popular enthusiasm into more traditional, on-the-ground organizing if Sanders wants a real shot at expanding his base beyond largely white, liberal enclaves. That means convincing more supporters to embrace a more centralized, hierarchical type of organizing, while still preserving the authentic, grassroots populism that Sanders embodies for his fans.

It’s obviously early still. But Iowa, with its arcane Caucus rules and high expectations for hands-on politics, will likely be the acid test for Democratic candidates in terms of organization. Hillary Clinton’s experience there in 2008 was horrendous; not only did she finish third, but Iowa depleted most of her campaign treasury for a while there. As for Sanders, there’s also a recent precedent that should be instructive: the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean, whose troops had all the enthusiasm in the world, but also finished third in Iowa despite huge numbers of volunteers, good poll numbers and endorsements from Tom Harkin and Al Gore.

In a discussion of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, which is gaining strength but is struggling to convince skeptics he has a realistic path to the nomination, I offered some thoughts today at Washington Monthly about electoral strategies that rely on unconventional coalitions and the risk they run of descending into wishful thinking.

If you are a political party or party faction, and you find yourself in what appears to be a durable minority position with the electorate as it currently exist, you have four basic options to boost your standing: (1) you can tailor your message to pick off “swing voters” (e.g., the median voter theory that constantly dictates “moving to the center”); (2) you can increase your appeal to the marginal voters who already support you but need encouragement to vote (conventional GOTV efforts), recognizing that the noisier techniques help the opposition turn out their vote, too; (3) you can somehow try to engage consistent non-voters who you think agree with you; or (4) you can reshuffle the deck by creating new coalitions that raid your opponent’s ranks without moving in your opponent’s direction.
It’s natural to the more movement-oriented and ideological party factions who hell no don’t want to move to “the center” and who recognize the shortcomings of conventional GOTV, to gravitate towards the third and fourth approaches. But while such “hidden majority” strategies may represent imaginative “outside the box” thinking, they can also represent wishful or even delusional thinking, too, particularly for those who simply don’t want to adjust their creed to public opinion and so are tempted to treat public opinion as an illusion created by The Man’s false choices and voters’ “false consciousness.”
A good example is the “libertarian moment” argument that someone like Rand Paul can draw disengaged young people into the political arena and/or pull liberal voters across the line via his positions on non-interventionism or privacy or drugs and criminal justice. As I and other critics have pointed out, young people are almost always relatively “disengaged” from voting for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the political choices they are given, and party preferences run a whole lot deeper than any one or two or three issues, for very good reasons.
It’s not that surprising we are hearing similar “hidden majority” talk on the left with the rise of Bernie Sanders, who indeed could use a theory of “electability” to defy the inevitable derision of MSM analyts who assume his screw-the-traitorous-center approach would mean death for Democrats in a general election. Yesterday at Ten Miles Square our own Martin Longman thought out loud about the kind of strategy that could make a Sanders election realistic. It’s interesting that he mentioned Rand Paul as another “unorthodox” pol that might find a way to stick it to The Man:

To win the overall contest, including the presidency, however, he is going to have to achieve a substantial crossover appeal. If he beats Hillary, he’s going to lose a portion of the Democratic coalition in the process, and he’ll have to make up for it with folks who we don’t normally think of as socialists or liberals.
Some of this deficit can be made up for simply by bringing people into the process who would otherwise have stayed home, but that alone will never be enough. If you think the electorate is so polarized that Bernie can’t change the voting behaviors of very many people, then there’s really not even a conceptual way that he could win. If, on the other hand, you’re willing to wait and see if he can appeal to a broader swath of the electorate like he has consistently done in his home state, then the “white liberal” vote isn’t quite as decisive.
Honestly, a lot of these potential Bernie voters are probably toying with Rand Paul right now. Most of them probably can’t imagine themselves voting for a socialist from Vermont. But substantial parts of his message are really almost tailor-made for these folks. They hate big money in politics, for example, and feel like everyone else has a lobbyist in Washington but them. They hate outsourcing and are suspicious of free trade agreements. They’ve lost faith in both parties and their leaders. They can’t pay their rent or afford college. Their kids are all screwed up on painkillers and are seemingly never going to move out of the house. They’re sick of investing in Afghanistan while American needs get ignored. And they want the blood of some Wall Street bankers.
Bernie Sanders is going to make a lot of sense to these folks, even if they think Hillary Clinton is the devil and are trained to despise liberals.

Now anyone with a sense of history realizes there have been moments when new and at the time radical options have emerged and scrambled existing party coalitions. Just possibly hatred of financial elites could be like slavery or trust-busting or civil rights, a powerful sentiment just waiting for a galvanizing movement or candidate to reduce prior notions of partisan differences to dust. But if so, it should start becoming apparent at some point via measurements of public opinion, like general election polls (not just early-state surveys or crowd sizes in activist centers).
Bernie Sanders and his supporters have every right to claim they are in the process of overturning the table of the moneylenders in the temple of Democracy, and creating a mind-bending coalition that combines liberals with former non-voters and “populist” conservatives; that may be the only plausible theory of “electability” Team Sanders can muster. But at some point it needs to materialize in measurable ways, and beyond that point it could become cranky and then delusional.

This obviously won’t be a problem for those Sanders supporters who are really only interested in “keeping Hillary honest” or moving the party in a progressive direction, though such folk could be a problem for Sanders if they start dropping out of his camp once those tasks are completed. But in general, anyone in politics must remain aware that “hidden majorities” may not be real if they stay hidden.