eI gotta say, J.P. Green is a lot more positive than I am about Sen. Chuck Schumer’s big speech telling Democrats the time and energy they spent enacting the Affordable Care Act was a big mistake. Here’s part of my response to Schumer–over at TPMCare:

In a much-discussed National Press Club speech last week, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York argued that by prioritizing health care reform, Democrats had elevated the interests of “a small percentage of the electorate”–the uninsured–at the expense of the interests of middle class voters who wanted economic magic. Schumer did not identify exactly what sort of proposals Democrats might have embraced to meet that demand, leading one to suspect he thinks agitating the air on behalf of the desired constituency and its demands might be enough, particularly if combined with a conspicuous decision to abandon the decades-long progressive project of health care reform as a sort of propitiatory sacrifice….
Some left-bent critics of Obama and the Democratic Party do have a specific parallel economic agenda in mind, mostly involving the financial sector: breaking up the largest banks, for example, and perhaps jailing some bankers for their role in the pain and suffering of the Great Recession. That may well represent good policy. And yes, this sort of agenda may have exerted some political appeal. But would financial shock-treatment have had any immediate effect on middle-class incomes? Would it have reduced inequality? And would it have sped up the recovery from the Great Recession? That’s all unlikely. The most-discussed positive policy prescription among progressives, an expansion of Social Security benefits, had less than a snowball’s chance in hell of being enacted by Congress even before, much less after, 2010. And it, too, like the much-derided minimum wage increase proposals of Democrats in the 2014 cycle, and like Obamacare, would have appealed to a relatively small share of voters.
If the point is simply that Democrats would have benefited from a more “populist” political message, that’s easy to agree upon, though it’s not so easy to agree on the components of such a message. You can certainly make a strong case that Democrats were incompetent in conveying their actual accomplishments in economic policy, and the threat Republicans pose to their preservation and extension. For example: how often or well did Democrats explain the Affordable Care Act as an economic initiative? When did they focus on the economic calamities risked by excessive reliance of fossil fuel energy? And in discussing poll-tested policy proposals like a minimum wage increase, to what extent did Democrats nestle these commitments in a broader agenda–that most certainly did exist–of measures aimed at boosting wages and real incomes?
In sum, there are too many variables involved, many of them having nothing to do with policy, to conclude with any degree of precision that a different economic agenda or subordinating health care and the environment to “jobs” would have made a big difference in 2014. And this entire debate is a distraction from what Democrats can do to win in 2016 when they will be in a much better position to hold a comparative “two futures” debate over economic policies instead of a “referendum” on hard times.

I guess this is the season for 20-20 hindsight. But it needs to end soon as we enter the 2016 cycle.

It’s now three weeks after the 2014 midterm elections, and a good time to reflect on how serious analysts differ on what happened and what it means. I did a bit of that at Washington Monthly:

I’m no big number-cruncher, and don’t have access to voter files or other data more sophisticated than exit polls, but my general take (articulated here and here) has been that the big GOP victory was the product of a number of things that happened to coincide in one cycle: a strongly pro-GOP midterm turnout pattern, a strongly pro-GOP “map” (at least for the Senate), a second-term midterm “drag” on the party controlling the White House, and negative perceptions of the economy that also hurt the party controlling the White House. I’ve conceded that individual candidates and campaigns may have won or cost a few contests, and it’s possible voter suppression (in the broadest sense of the term) may have mattered in a few places. I haven’t really come to grips with the idea that an entirely different Democratic message could have turned things around, but it’s possible, though very hard to demonstrate.
In any event, this week we’ve seen Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics demonstrate convincingly that the election wasn’t all about turnout demographics, and Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight demonstrate convincingly that it wasn’t all about the map.
What these analyses suggest to me is that the real fault line in 2014 interpretation could wind up being between those who think the factors driving the results are cyclical–whether it’s turnout, the map, the stage of the presidency, or the economy, or more likely a combination of them–or non-cyclical. Sean Trende, for example, clearly thinks Obama’s unpopularity was the crucial factor in 2014, and will probably sink Democrats in 2016 as well, despite better turnout patterns, etc. It’s really hard to prove or disprove the transitive nature of approval ratings for two-term presidents to their wannabe same-party successors, because the sample set is so small. But I’m still betting 2014 was mostly a “cyclical” election, just like the last three. That does not mean Democrats are guaranteed victory, by any stretch of the imagination, but does mean the winds should shift and give them a shorter and straighter path.

Some “analysts,” of course, who are engaged in Republican triumphalist spin, simply assume without bothering to demonstrate anything that 2014 was part of a GOP march to power that will culminate in a great gettin’-up morning in 2016. And some Democrats may too casually dismiss without scrutiny 2014 GOP gains in “Democratic” demographic groups–probably a sign of differential turnout patterns but possibly something more–or worry a bit too little about the cumulative effect of Republican gains at the state level. In the end, we probably won’t completely understand 2014 until we are looking at a fresh set of numbers two years from now.

So the president’s executive action on immigration has finally been announced, and as expected Republicans are full of real and phony outrage. Outside the immigrant communities most affected, how should progressives respond? I discussed that topic today at the Washington Monthly.

For all the yelling and screaming about “Emperor Obama,” his action was temporary and could be instantly revoked by a Republican president or superseded by legislation from a Republican Congress. But Republicans are in complete disarray on the subject, though there is a distinct trend towards “deport ’em all” nativism (though not the will to provide the resources necessary to “deport ’em all,” which would make actions like Obama’s impossible).
At present, though, the Establishment Republicans who privately view their nativist “base” as a bunch of destructive yahoos can join with said yahoos in an orgy of recrimination, mooting their agreement with the substance of what Obama is doing even as they pretend they believe the procedure is the greatest threat to democracy since yadda yadda yadda.
So the appropriate response of progressives to what we’re going to hear over the next weeks and months is: What do you propose to do about it? Can Republicans agree on an immigration policy (no, “securing the border first” is not an immigration policy, but at most a component of one)? What should this and future administrations do in the face of a gigantic gap between the number of undocumented people in this country and the resources to deal with them? Is using the fear of deportation to encourage “self-deportation” what you want? And if you do want to “deport ’em all,” then exactly how much money are you willing to appropriate for police dogs, box cars, whips, holding cells, and so on and so forth? Do you suggest we just suspend the Constitution and have us a good old-fashioned police state for a few years until we’ve deported 11 million people?
And if Republicans actually have the guts to go against their “base” and take on comprehensive immigration reform, there’s this little matter of the bipartisan bill that’s been languishing in the House for seventeen months. John Boehner could at any moment bring it up and pass it with Democratic votes. Why isn’t that at least on the table?

It’s a question that needs to be asked constantly, because it’s Republican dysfunction that has produced the situation Obama is addressing. And so Republicans are the last people who ought to feel entitled to “outrage.”

We interrupt the sober political analysis here at TDS to announce the imminent arrival of a major Teachable Moment. As the president rolls out his executive action on immigration during the next two days, you can expect a reaction from Republicans which will immediately make a mockery of all the “pragmatic grownups eager to get things done” talk of the last couple of weeks. Indeed, congressional Republicans seem to be in the process of talking themselves into precisely the government shutdown they’ve supposedly been so determined to avoid. I discussed the dynamics at Washington Monthly today:

As the engines of the Right-Wing Noise Machine rev themselves up into a high-pitched, chattering whine in anticipation of the Great Tyrannical Amnesty Declaration of 2014, it becomes harder and harder to believe that Republicans are going to resist the temptation to shut down the federal government again. Some of them, of course, are already there. And a lot more are back to the “partial shutdown” position that Ted Cruz tried to sell during his “Defund Obamacare” runup to the 2013 shutdown: the fantasy that Republicans can get Obama blamed for a shutdown if they keep saying they want everything other than the contaminated areas of government to continue.
But by far the more dangerous rationalization was nicely summarized at the Prospect today by Paul Waldman: Republicans don’t think voters will remember what happens now, because they didn’t last time around.

Approval of the Republican party took a nose dive in the wake of the shutdown, and though it is still viewed negatively by most Americans, that didn’t stop Republicans from having a great election day. Because as at least some within the GOP understand, you can create chaos and crisis, and large numbers of voters will conclude not that Republicans are bent on creating chaos and crisis but that “Washington” is broken, and the way to fix it is to elect the people who aren’t in the president’s party. That in this case that happened to be precisely the people who broke it escaped many voters. The fact that the electorate skewed so heavily Republican in an election with the lowest turnout since 1942 also helped them escape the consequences of their behavior.

There’s a very fine line between realizing you’ve escaped the consequences of your behavior and concluding there are no consequences. And once you arrive at that conclusion, you’re the alcoholic who has a drink or two, doesn’t pass out, and decides to celebrate the drinking problem being gone by ordering up a whole bottle.

The more fundamental problem is that the GOP and conservative movement have decided that disabling government is the best way to get to a smaller government, because voters will either blame “the party of government” or the abstraction known as “Washington.” It’s not surprising they view the midterm results as validation of that hypothesis. So we’re very likely to get more of it, right away.

One of the conclusions an awful lot of Democrats are coming to after November 4 is that a voting coalition that only shows up in presidential years is insufficient to create a stable governing majority. Accordingly, there’s new interest in finding ways to reach out to what is probably the lowest-hanging fruit in the persuadable portion of the electorate currently voting Republican: non-college-educated white voters, whose economic interests are not well-served by the politicians they are helping elect.
The “white working class” has obviously been a regular preoccupation here at TDS. So we encourage you to read (or refresh your familiarity with) the Roundtable on Progressives and the White Working Class published here during the summer, and check out the first issue of TDS’ bimonthly newsletter on the subject, supplying a presentation of and links to material from a wide variety of sources. It’s a conversation Democrats will need to have on a regular basis going forward.