Prepare yourself for a nauseating display of shameless grandstanding by the GOP’s most hypocritical Hillary-Haters, otherwise known as the Benghazi hearings, which begin today. At The Week Paul Waldman explains why the whole project may backfire in a big way on the Republicans. “In hearings like this one, the members of Congress often think that the fantastically clever line of questioning they’ve prepared is really going to trap the witness and reveal her for what she is; it’ll be like Perry Mason breaking a witness down until she shouts, “Yes, I did kill him, and I’d do it again!” But that’s not how it usually turns out. More often, the witness looks like the one in command, someone being pelted with unfair and hostile questions from a bunch of partisan clowns who barely know what they’re talking about…A respectful and informative hearing that does no damage to Clinton will be a terrible disappointment,” notes Waldman. And an expensive one as well.
A WaPo/ABC News poll conducted 10/15-18 indicates that 53 percent of respondents believe that Republicans are “mainly trying to damage Clinton politically” in the Benghazi hearings. Only 35 percent agreed that they are “raising legitimate concerns.”
It appears at this juncture that Rep. Paul Ryan’s ploy forcing the GOP’s “Freedom Caucus” to grovel in response to his demands is working rather well. But I wonder if the speakership is really what he wanted — the pitch seemed crafted to elicit a “hell no” response from the yahoos. With benefit of hindsight, it seems pretty clever, enhancing his stature either way. David Hawkings explores the implications for Ryan’s political future at Roll Call, noting that Ryan will be 50 years of age in 2020 and his kids will be teenagers.
Kind of sad to see an end to Vice President Biden’s presidential aspirations. He has long been one of the party’s more capable leaders. He might make an exceptionally-good Secretary of State, a post he once declined in favor of the vice presidency.
Ed Kilgore’s post at right and below on third party prospects in 2016 includes a perceptive take on Sen. Jim Webb’s candidacy and future. Many feel Webb provides a needed voice in the Democratic Party, which seems reasonable. But I don’t recall ever seeing a more stiff and guarded presidential candidate on TV.
You have to dig down to the eight paragraph of this misleadingly-titled CNN.com article to find that “Other polls have shown that an overwhelming majority of Americans support expanding background checks to private sales and sales at gun shows, where people can buy guns without undergoing a background check.”
Mark Niquette’s Bloomberg Politics post, “Democrats Seek to Stem Republican Tide in Off-Year Races” provides an update on what is at stake this year, noting, “Governorships will be decided in Louisiana, Mississippi and Kentucky, where there’s a contest to replace term-limited Democrat Steve Beshear. There are legislative races in four states, one of which will determine Senate control in Virginia, a presidential swing state where the parties have battled over issues including Medicaid expansion. Mayoral contests will be decided in 417 municipalities including Indianapolis, where Democrats want to replace one of only three Republican chief executives among the 15 most populous cities.”
Journalistsresource.org presents some interesting data in “Factors affecting minority-voter turnout: Research,” and also notes that “A 2015 study published in the American Journal of Political Science looks at how preregistration, or the registration of youth before they reach voting age, influences voter turnout. A 2015 study from the University of South Carolina suggests that the Democratic Party and civil-rights organizations can play an important role in mobilizing black voters if they strengthen their organizational features.”
At The Upshot Josh Barro explains why Bernie Sanders is really more of a capitalist reformist than Democratic socialist: “After all, Mr. Sanders does not want to nationalize the steel mills or the auto companies or even the banks. Like Mrs. Clinton, he believes in a mixed economy, where capitalist institutions are mediated through taxes and regulation. He just wants more taxes and more regulation than Mrs. Clinton does. He certainly seems like a regular Democrat, only more so.”

There are many reasons to respond with a “not much” answer to the question in the title of this post. The Nation’s John Nichols acknowledges some of them in his article “Justin Trudeau Just Showed American Democrats How to Win the Next Election“:

It is certainly true that Canada’s political process is distinguished by traditions, structural characteristics, and nuances of party history and personality that make the country’s elections very different from those in the United States. Despite the increasingly “presidential” character of Canadian campaigns, voters choose parties rather than presidential candidates (and party leaders sometimes lose in their own constituencies and end up not just out of the running but out of Parliament). Canadians have more political options than Americans: Liberals, Conservatives, and the NDP run provincial governments; the Greens and the Bloc Québécois sit in parliament. Canada has shorter campaigns that are dramatically less expensive. Canada has a different media system, with stronger commitments to public broadcasting, serious debate, analysis, and dialogue. And, of course, while Canadian Liberals were campaigning to turn out a Conservative prime minister, American Democrats will be campaigning to carry on from a Democratic president while at the same time ending Republican control of Congress.

However, anytime there is an upset national election in North America it makes sense for Democrats to search for clues, and Nichols offers a few potentially useful observations, including:

The 43-year-old leader of Canada’s Liberal Party was not supposed to come out of the country’s 2015 election as its prime minister. At the start of the race, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, ally of George W. Bush, role model for Scott Walker, was locked in serious competition with a cautiously left-leaning New Democratic Party. The traditionally centrist Liberals (at their best “vital center,” at their worst blandly managerial), having been very nearly obliterated in the previous election, did not look particularly viable. And party leader Trudeau was frequently dismissed as the good-looking but inexperienced son of a great 20th-century prime minister.
“Seen at the beginning of the campaign as the least ready for the election of the three main party leaders,” observed the Toronto Star at the end of the campaign, “Trudeau managed in 11 weeks to shape a compelling political narrative and provide Canadians with a credible alternative to Harper and the NDP’s Thomas Mulcair.”

As for the “how” of Trudeau’s upset, Nichols writes,

Trudeau surprised almost everyone by running a campaign that veered left on economics–so much so that analysts noted that, on several critical measures, the Liberals outflanked the historically social-democratic NDP…He declared that his priorities would be job creation and policies to benefit the middle class. And he said he would invest in the future, rather than cheating it with austerity cuts.
Trudeau proposed to tax the rich in order to fund programs for everyone else, declaring that “We can do more for the people who need it, by doing less for the people who don’t.” (And, notably, he coupled that concern for people who need economic help with a warm embrace of Canada’s ethnic and racial diversity that was starkly different from the Donald Trump-like messaging about immigrants and religious minorities that Harper employed in the final days of the campaign.)
More vital even than the promise of fair and progressive taxation after so many years of Harper’s of-the-rich, for-the rich, by-the-rich governance, however, was Trudeau’s proposal to invest massively in job-creating infrastructure programs. To fund the investment, Trudeau proposed that Canada could and should accept a reasonable level of deficit spending.

Nichols explains, further, that Trudeau made a critical distinction in his messaging: “the fiscal deficit isn’t the one that concerns Canadians and certainly doesn’t concern economists that much. It is the infrastructure deficit that is so concerning to so many people. That’s what’s slowing down our growth.”
And he didn’t shy away from his party affiliation, noting that “The Liberal party is the only party standing straight, looking Canadians in the eye and saying, ‘We need investment and that is what we are going to do to grow the economy, to balance the books in 2019.'”
Like Obama, Nichols adds, Trudeau had a nifty TV ad that went viral:

“At the end of a campaign where they started in third place,” writes Nichols, “Liberals have achieved an absolute majority in Parliament.” It’s the bold emphasis on infrastructure investment, which includes education and retirement of student debt, that appeals to young voters in particular. That and the highly positive tone of his central message:

“We beat fear with hope. We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative politics,” Trudeau told the cheering crowd. “In Canada, better is always possible.”

An e-blast from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research sheds further light on the historic dimensions of Trudeau’s victory:

No party in Canada has ever come from third place in seats and public opinion standing to win an election since its founding in 1867. The Liberals did it by putting forward an unabashedly progressive alternative that promised real change from the past Conservative decade. Trudeau’s party is also the only party to win seats in every one of Canada’s ten provinces and three territories, a tremendous accomplishment given the regional tensions that have riven Canadian politics for much of its recent history.
GQRR’s Canadian team accomplished their own historic first this cycle in Canada, providing strategy, consulting and research for Canada’s first major progressive independent expenditure campaign. Engage Canada, targeted 74 Conservatives, overachieved its target, as the Conservatives slipped from 188 seats on recently redistricted electoral boundaries to 99.

Another benefit of Trudeau’s big win to President Obama is described by TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore at The Washington Monthly:

And without question, the ejection of Harper is a boon to the Obama administration, especially on energy and environmental issues where Canada had become problematic in its resistance to climate change action and its advocacy of the Keystone XL pipeline.
And Trudeau has some important American links: among the consultants to the Liberal Party for this election were former Obama political staffers Stephanie Cutter, Jen O’Malley Dillon and Teddy Goff.
All in all, it was a good day for the center-left in Canada and elsewhere.

All of the caveats about the different system and electorates of Canada notwithstanding, Trudeau’s creative messaging is instructive, especially for Democrats, who embrace similar policies that helped produced his upset. “With an embrace of progressive taxation, public investment and a humane approach to economics,” concludes Nichols, “Democrats could in 2016 celebrate President Obama’s accomplishments while holding out the promise that, “In America, better is always possible.”

Apparently President Obama’s track record is shaping up as a real asset for Democratic presidential contenders. Associated Press reports, “You would expect in a Democratic primary field when people are crossing a broad ideological spectrum that they might be critical of the incumbent no matter who the incumbent is,” Democratic pollster and strategist Celinda Lake said. “But I think Democrats demonstrated that across the spectrum it’s good to run with the president rather than against him.”
NYT columnist Paul Krugman has the response to GOP disinformation specialists trying to discredit Denmark’s example, which was spotlighted in the first Democratic presidential debate.
Here’s an important lesson for Democratic campaigns to absorb: Generate sharable content. “Successful social-media strategists understand that viral opportunities are fleeting. The window of opportunity often disappears minutes after an event. Successful rapid responses appear to be spontaneous, but most are carefully constructed and planned…Campaigns’ social-media teams should have a strong enough understanding of their candidates key talking points on every issue to successfully pre-write mounds of copy – hundreds of pre-vetted tweets and graphics which only require small tweaks before their timely post. Given Clinton’s vast resources and unparalleled access to the lead strategists and tools that defined Obama’s 2012 campaign, it is no surprise that her campaign employed a top-notch strategy to amplify her message. It is, however, surprising that neither Bernie Sanders nor Martin O’Malley generated shareable content on their Facebook pages during the debate – a huge opportunity squandered…Whenever her campaign tweeted issue specific messaging, it included a shortened URL, which linked to a trackable sign-up page. This will allow the campaign to identify these potential donors and volunteers by the issues that brought them into the campaign and ultimately use that data to buy targeted programmatic advertising buys and send super targeted emails to these voters in the future. More impressively, each link led to an issue specific landing page, thus potentially increasing the user’s engagement and likelihood of signing up. This data-driven approach was pioneered by the Obama campaign and is sure to pay big dividends down the road.” — from Reed Scharff’s “The candidate winning on social media” at CNBC.com.
The Communications Workers of America have launched a “Voting Rights Denied Story Project,” collecting accounts of voter suppression across the U.S. Story and link to reporting form here. I would urge the CWA to collect this testimony from everyone, not just their members, as a much-needed public service.
House of Reps Benghazi committee chair Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, was caught in a false allegation that former Secretary of State Clinton outed a classified source, which the C.I.A. then denied was classified, reports Michael S. Schmidt in the New York Times. Committee member Elijah E. Cummings (D-MD) explains: “Unfortunately, the standard operating procedure of this select committee has become to put out information publicly that is inaccurate and out of context in order to attack Secretary Clinton for political reasons,” Mr. Cummings said in a letter to Mr. Gowdy. “These repeated actions bring discredit on this investigation and undermine the integrity of the select committee and the House of Representatives.”
Lawrence Lessig explains the rationale for his presidential candidacy at The Atlantic.
The Clinton campaign clearly places a lot of value in building campaign infrastructure. “Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent more than twice as much as any other presidential candidate on campaign staff, more than three times as much on office space and millions of dollars more on advertising, according to reports filed this week with the Federal Election Commission.,” report Nicholas Confesssore, Maggie Haberman and Sarah Cohen at The Times.
…while Patrick Healey reports “Bernie Sanders Uses Smaller Crowds to Push Back Against ‘Radical’ Label,” also at The Times.
Not much good cam come from this — unless some of the proceeds benefit good causes.

Writing in Nation of Change, C. Robert Gibson has a post “Six Reasons Sanders Actually Won the Debate Despite What Pundits Claim,” featuring statistical evidence from: Online polls of a half-dozen news organizations, including CNN, Time and Fox News; Facebook and twitter mentions; Google searches; a fund-raising uptick; and CNN, Frank Luntz and Fusion focus group picks.
However, respected poll analyst Mark Blumenthal, along with co-authors Ariel Edwards-Levy, Natalie Jackson and Janie Valencia, cite a Clinton win in a new HuffPo/YouGov poll that indicates 55 percent of registered Democratic voters picked Clinton as the winner, with 22 percent for Sanders. However, note the authors, “The difference between candidates disappears if Democratic-leaning independents are included with Democratic voters. Among this larger group, 46 percent say their opinion of each candidate improved.” Further, an “NBC/Survey Monkey poll finds similar result – Allison Kopicki and John Lapinski: “Hillary Clinton’s performance in Tuesday night’s debate resonated strongly among members of her party, with more than half–56%–saying [Clinton] won the debate.” The authors add “Instant online polls are informal and unscientific. The results rely on a self-selecting group of respondents with no regard to political affiliation, age, country, or even whether the person doing the responding actually watched the debate. Respondents, meanwhile, don’t have even the slightest motivation to be objective…Like tracking new Twitter followers or Google searches, the online surveys provide an interesting snapshot of the mood of a particular slice of the Internet, but they’re mostly for entertainment (for the reader) and traffic (for the outlet). No one should mistake them for the scientific surveys done by professional pollsters.”
Daily Kos Elections explains why the U.S. Senate race in PA may be competitive after all.
In Charles Pierce’s Esquire post, “Ted Cruz Has the Look of a Dangerously Unhinged Charlatan,” he writes “Ed Kilgore is absolutely right about what Tailgunner Ted Cruz is up to out there on the stump, where he is sitting inside a powder magazine, playing with a blowtorch and giggling like a child.​..There’s no third alternative. Simply put, unless every other candidate on the stage in a couple of weeks loudly and forcefully distances themselves from this kind of, then the Republican Party is not worth the sneeze that at this point would blow it to hell.”
I agree.
Whatever else can be said about the Sanders campaign, generating articles like this one enriches America’s political dialogue significantly.
Blog for Our Future’s Terrence Heath makes an excellent point in his post, “Democratic Debate Proves Movements Matter.” To all of those progressive activists laboring in social change movements, your efforts to make a significant difference, and they are well-reflected in the first Democratic presidential debate.
At The Nation Joan Walsh explains why progressives should be very pleased about the quality of the Democratic debate, and she also highlights some of the differences in policies.
Keep it up guys!

The already excellent Washington Post coverage of the first Democratic presidential debate gets even better with two columns by E. J. Dionne, Jr. and Harold Meyerson.
It’s not as simplistic as the “Bernie is pushing Hillary to the left” meme, although that is also quite likely. Dionne does a particularly good job of describing the unique and historic contribution of Senator Sanders to the Democratic presidential campaign and to America’s political dialogue in general:

…For the first time in the modern political era, Americans got to watch leaders of a mainstream political party debate the relative merits of capitalism and democratic socialism. And for once, socialism was cast not as the ideology that produced a brutal dictatorship in the old Soviet Union, but as a benign and, yes, democratic outlook that has created rather attractive societies in places such as Denmark and Sweden.
Whatever happens to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) candidacy, he will deserve credit for having widened our political horizons…We now have a more realistic sense of the choices before us: Sanders’s unapologetic democratic socialism, Clinton’s progressive capitalism and the Republicans’ disdain for government altogether. Guess who occupies the real political center?

The consequences of the Sanders campaign for the Democratic Party have been enormously favorable, explains Dionne. “Democrats are far more united than Republicans, who are in a shambles. Democrats are the party of what the political consultants like to call kitchen-table issues — family leave, higher wages and kids being able to afford college — while Republicans are the party of ideology and abstractions.”
Dionne also credits Clinton with a highly skilled presentation. “She maintained her good mood and big smile in the face of repeated challenges from CNN’s questioners, deploying the classic Clinton strategy of insisting that the campaign is about what the voters need, not what the media and the GOP want to talk about.”
Even better, Clinton got a very deliberate lift from her leading Democratic adversary in the campaign. “This is where her most important victory came, with a key assist from Sanders. The sound bite played over and over was created when Sanders agreed with Clinton by asserting: “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails.” Some sleazy media tried to spin it as a diss, but anyone paying attention understood it as an impressive display of Democratic solidarity, which worked beautifully in the wake of Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s blundering admission that the email fuss is all about hammering down Clinton’s poll numbers.
Dionne notes the reference by Sanders to Denmark’s example of a thriving social democracy in which government plays a more active role in securing decent living standards for all citizens. Meyerson elaborates on the creative synergy in the dialogue between the two candidates on the advancement of such social democratic ideals in the U.S.:

…The relationship between the European social democracy that Sanders extols and the American progressivism that Hillary Clinton champions is complicated and at times symbiotic, with clear areas of overlap and difference…The European social democratic belief in citizens’ rights extends deeper into the economic realm — particularly the workplace — than American liberalism’s does.

He puts the differences between the policies that define northern European social democracy and American progressivism into a current context:

The great irony of Northern European social democracy is that it has produced perhaps the world’s most successful capitalist economies. The Swedish full-employment policy that so intrigued Bill Clinton, for instance, made workers confident that they could get jobs with at least comparable pay if their companies failed, thereby eliminating popular resistance to shuttering moribund industries and incubating new ones. The German economy — by any measure the most successful of any advanced capitalist nation over the past decade — confers on employees considerable say in company policy by giving their representatives half the seats on corporate boards. It is also home to the world’s most successful small and medium-size businesses, the Mittelstand, the kind of small manufacturers whose numbers have diminished in the United States as Wall Street has pressured our big retailers and manufacturers to offshore their suppliers.
The crucial distinction between Europe’s social democrats and the Democratic Party in the United States is that the former have institutionalized worker power to a far greater degree than have our Democrats, who are quintessentially a party of both capital and labor. This has mattered most particularly in the post-1970 era of globalization. While the major corporations of all Western nations have gone global, those in Northern Europe have, as a result of the power that workers wield, retained the best jobs in their home nations and still identify themselves with their home countries. The vast majority of U.S. corporations, by contrast, identify themselves as global, seem content to offshore jobs and don’t invest much, if anything, in training workers for highly skilled jobs here. That’s not because U.S. corporate chief executives are less patriotic than their European counterparts, but because social democratic parties have vested workers with the power to constrain corporate conduct, and crafted policies that favor their home nations’ economies through, for instance, increased public investment. They have limited the size and sway of finance, whose demand for profits accords no special status to the notion of a “home country.”

Meyerson acknowledges that Clinton also wants to expand worker rights in the context of liberal capitalism and he credits Sanders with having the understanding that empowering workers is an essential requirement for Democratic advancement. Meyerson concludes with the powerful insight that “In the United States, liberalism advances only when radicalism is bubbling, which is why Clinton and Sanders need each other, and why the Democrats need them both.”
The Democratic coalition would lack this synergy if either Clinton or Sanders were not running for president. Their campaigns are complimentary and reinforcing to each other. Both candidates have also elevated the Democratic dialogue by treating each other with respect.
Meyerson and Dionne have done a fine job of putting the candidacies of Clinton and Sanders in clearer perspective, especially in relation to each other. Most of the other traditional media reporters and columnists will no doubt continue with the cage-match framing, which misses the larger point — that Sanders and Clinton benefit tremendously from their synergistic campaigns, as do the Democratic Party and American politics.

The horse race analysts got plenty to talk about from the first Democratic presidential debate and they will be spinning it in all directions for the next few of days. For now, take a step back for a moment and try to think about how the more attentive swing voters perceived the Democratic debate in comparison to the Republicans versions.
What was missing last night was any trace of the bullying, name-calling, internecine acrimony, snarling ridicule, bigotry, misogyny, rudeness and general chaos, which characterized the GOP presidential campaign. What alert viewers saw last night was a debate which was remarkable for its civility, sobriety and even cordiality.
Sure the candidates cast a few zingers toward their opponents during the evening, but all of it was in the ballpark of grown-ups respectfully airing their differences, while affirming their common ground. The false equivalency journalists will have a tough time of trying to link the Democratic and Republican debates as similar.
And all of that is just the tone part.
In terms of substance, credit the Democrats with the mettle to address critical issues all but ignored by the Republicans in their debates. In their Huffpo article “9 Issues Democrats Just Debated That Have Been Almost Completely Ignored By Republicans,” Nick Wing and Ruby Mellen note that Democrats discussed in significant detail racial injustice, campaign finance reform, domestic surveillance, Wall St. reform, income inequality, college affordability and diplomacy. Try to find a salient quote about any of those topics from a Republican presidential candidate in their two debates. Tammy Luhby reports at CNN Money that “Democrats said ‘middle class’ 11 times; the Republicans just three.” Luhby adds, “the Democrats mentioned “income inequality” six times, while the Republicans never uttered it.”
As for the “who won” discussion, so far NYT and WaPo pundits give the nod to Clinton for her polished presentation and well-crafted answers. But Sanders held his own and projected an image of a candidate with genuine principles and real concern for struggling Americans. Gov. O’Malley’s closing statement was startlingly good — where has this guy been hiding?
As of this writing, it’s unclear whether Vice President Biden will join the fray. The strong performances of Clinton, Sanders and O’Malley don’t leave a lot of daylight for Biden to squeeze in, although he also would bring debating skills and gravitas to the Democratic campaign, which the current stable of Republican candidates lack.
There can’t be much doubt, however, that the Democratic Party had a very good night and will buzz well at water coolers across the nation today. What swing voters who watched the Democratic debate last night saw was a party with three strong, credible and exceptionally well-informed leaders, any two of whom would provide an impressive presidential ticket — especially compared to the “leaders” of today’s GOP.

“It’s time to call out the recent flurry of new state law restrictions for what they are: an all-out campaign by Republicans to take away the right to vote from poor and black and Latino American citizens who probably won’t vote for them. The push to restrict voting is nothing more than a naked grab to win elections that they can’t win if every citizen votes…Now it is time for Republicans to step up to support a restoration of the Voting Rights Act–or to stand before the American people and explain why they have abandoned America’s most cherished liberty, the right to vote.” — from Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s recent speech to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute.

Will the Democratic presidential nominee have coattails in 2016? Alex Roarty probes the possibilities at the National Journal, and notes “The link between Sen­ate cam­paigns and the pres­id­en­tial race will be es­pe­cially strong in 2016, when many of the mar­quee Sen­ate con­tests–Flor­ida, Pennsylvania, Wis­con­sin, New Hamp­shire, and Ohio–double as pres­id­en­tial battle­grounds.”

At The Upshot Brendan Nyhan cautions Democrats not to get overly optimistic about the effects of Republican disarray in the House of Reps.

Crystal Ball’s Kyle Kondik also remains skeptical about Democratic chances to take back a House of Reps majority in 2016, but he nonetheless sketches out three ways it could happen — none of which seem all that implausible. Same for some combination of all three paths to GOP defeat.

According to the New York Times editorial board: “With the 2016 presidential election just a year away, the vast majority of states are still getting by with old machines that are increasingly likely to fail, crash or produce unreliable results. The software in them, mostly from the 1990s, doesn’t have the capabilities or security measures available today…A study released last month by the Brennan Center for Justice found that nearly every state uses some machines that are no longer manufactured. And 43 states are using machines that will be at least 10 years old next year, close to the end of their useful lives. A member of the federal Election Assistance Commission told the report’s authors, “We’re getting by with Band-Aids.”
On the eve of the first Democratic presidential debate, WaPo’s Rachel Weiner discusses Jim Webb’s opportunity and strategy.

Some interesting stats on the growing influence of the Asian American vote in CA and the U.S. from Stephen Magagnini’s report at the Sacramento Bee: “Despite making up 14 percent of California’s population, Asian and Pacific Islander Americans comprise about 8 percent of legislators, or nine members…Only 37 percent of eligible Asian American voters turned out in November 2014, which may have contributed to the low representation…Asian American numbers are predicted to surpass Latinos’ in the U.S. by 2055, according to the Pew Research Center…”

For the definitive, all-encompassing mother of all round-ups featuring what everyone thinks about Gallup ditching horse-race polling, all you have to do is click here.
Might make a good bumper sticker: “Chaos — the GOP’s New Normal.”

Re all of the yada-yada about “authenticity” of political candidates, Michael Tomasky calls it out: “I hate authenticity. Authenticity sucks. It’s a substitute for critical thought and actual argument, and the political media harp far too much on it…I can’t tell you the number of straight-news reporters who’ve said to me over the years something like: Yes, okay, Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham or whoever may be a little out there, but you know what? At least he really means it. What you see with him is what you get. To which I would rejoin, well, that’s fine, but so what; all that means to me is that when he starts World War III or resegregates our school system via his court appointments or gives the 1 percent another whopping-big tax cut, he’ll be doing so sincerely…I’d much rather have a president who inauthentically raises the minimum wage and passes paid family leave than one who authentically eliminates the federal minimum wage and does what the Chamber of Commerce tells him to do on all such matters.”

From “We All Get ‘Free Stuff’ From the Government,” a NYT op-ed by Bryce Covert: “In a 2008 poll, 57 percent of people said they had never availed themselves of a government program, yet 94 percent of those same people had in fact benefited from at least one — mostly through what the Cornell professor Suzanne Mettler has called the “submerged state,” or the huge but often invisible network of money spent through the tax code…Jeb Bush, however, is almost certainly aware of the freebies available through taxes. (According to one analysis of his federal income tax returns, he himself has saved at least $241,000 since 1981 through the mortgage interest deduction.) Just days before he vowed not to promise voters more free stuff, he put out a tax plan that would give out a whole lot more of it.”

Three recent polls show a stat tie in NC Governor’s race, despite low name recognition for Democratic challenger, state Attorney General Roy Cooper.

Michelle Everhart of the Columbus Dispatch reports that a new Quinnipiac poll pegs Ohio voters support for medical marijuana at 90 percent and for recreational use at 53 percent. “What’s unclear is whether those people will vote for Issue 3, ResponsibleOhio’s plan to legalize both types of marijuana use. The issue is on the ballot statewide.”

At JSpace News, Erica Terry’s “Godwin’s Law Has Brought Us Ben Carson’s Hitler Gun Control Theory,” explains “Nevermind that Germany’s strict gun laws date to 1919, were the result of the Treaty of Versailles, predated the rise of Hitler, and were actually loosened under Hitler’s reign,” writes Terry. “Nevermind that the largest known example of Nazi resistance, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, saw armed Jews try and ultimately fail to defend themselves and their families due to the unmatched numbers of the SS. Nevermind that Israel, the globe’s largest single population of Holocaust survivors, is a place where it is incredibly difficult to purchase a gun. Nevermind that the fate of European Jewry in the 1930s was arguably decided not by bullets, but by a largely silent civilian public.”

If you’ve been wondering about what’s going on with the Webb presidential campaign, try Max J. Rosenthal’s Mother Jones post, “Is Jim Webb Really Running for President? An Investigation. He’s maintaining a suprisingly low profile.”

At The New York Times Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer Marin Cogan reports that, in the wake of the Kevin McCarthy debacle, “Republicans Are Calling Their Party a ‘Banana Republic.’ It’s More Like a Failed State.”

Also at The Daily Intelligencer Jonah Shep addresses the mess in his round-up “How the Right Is Reacting to the House Leadership Crisis.” The most chuckle-worthy nugget comes from Ed Rogers, who tries to smear a little lipstick on the pig, calling it “an opportunity to have a good debate and a good contest for this vital leadership position within the Republican Party.”

Ed Kilgore notes at the Washington Monthly that the Speaker of the House doesn’t have to be a member, flags some humorous and frightening possibilities and invites his readers to offer suggestions in a similar spirit. They come up with the Kims – Davis and Kardashian, “Heckuva Job Brownie,” and a Reagan hologram, among other outsiders.

Gallup has had it’s share of critics among Democratic Party supporters in recent years, including contributors to TDS, who felt that bias was built into its methodology. For better or worse, however, Gallup, likely enjoys the highest name recognition among all pollsters. No doubt, then, that many will interpret Gallup’s abandonment of horse race polling during the primary season as indicative of a decline in public regard for polling in general.
You won’t have much trouble finding well-stated criticism of Gallup’s horse race polls lately, especially since they have had a couple bad years (2010 and 2012). At FiveThirtyEight.com, however, Harry Enten explains “Why we’re worse off without Gallup“:

Gallup uses rigorous polling methodologies. It employs live interviewers; it calls a lot of cell phones; it calls back people who are harder to reach. More than that, it took the criticism it received after the 2012 election seriously, even bringing in outside help to figure out what went wrong. Gallup rates as solidly average in FiveThirtyEight’s pollster ratings in large part because of those techniques. It’s had two bad elections recently, but it’s never a good idea to judge a pollster on just a couple of election cycles; Gallup has also had good years.
Polling consumers are far better off in a world of Gallup’s than in a world of Zogby Internet polls and fly-by-night surveys from pollsters we’ve never heard of. There is plenty of shadiness in the polling community, and Gallup seemed to be opening its doors.
Gallup says it will still conduct issue polling, but here’s the problem: Elections are one of the few ways to judge a pollster’s accuracy. And that accuracy is important: We use polls for all kinds of things beyond elections. How do Americans feel about the economy? Do elected leaders have the trust of the public? Is there support for striking a deal with Iran? By forgoing horse-race polls, Gallup has taken away a tool to judge its results publicly.

Enten acknowledges that there will still be plenty of pollsters doing horse race surveys. As Steven Shepard notes at Politico, Editor-in-chief Frank Newport’s Gallup announcement did have a smidgeon of wiggle room in it:

Asked whether Gallup plans to skip horse-race polling for the entire 2016 primary process, Newport said, “That’s certainly what we’ve decided to date.”…And Newport also wouldn’t commit to horse-race surveys for the general election…”We have not made final decisions on what we are going to do in 2016 yet,” Newport said.

Think of Gallup’s retreat from the horse race circus as an experiment. They can always reverse their decision if it begins to look unprofitable to them. For now, I give Gallup’s big quit a thumbs up. More emphasis on thoughtful issue polling is certainly needed, and the value of early horse race polls in the primary season can be fairly described as dubious. Moreover, if Gallup can purge bias from their methods going forward, they could have a more positive impact on data analysis of U.S. elections.

From a Democracy Corps E-Blast:
In May the Roosevelt Institute released its Rewriting the Rules economic agenda crafted by Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Since the report’s well publicized release, the Roosevelt Institute has partnered with Democracy Corps to determine whether its Rewriting the Rules analysis and recommendations were actionable in the short and long-term. What it offered sounded like a new common sense: the economy is governed by underlying rules; they are a choice and we have the power to change them. But can this serious formulation win the intellectual argument with elites and the public, can its bold policies win acceptance, can the resulting political messages defeat opponents and energize and motivate a disaffected citizenry? Today, we are pleased to release the results of this first phase of research.
This research is unique because we are not testing policies developed by pollsters or advocacy groups. We tested policies that the Roosevelt economists believe would be effective levers in changing the rules of the economy and producing a broadly shared economic growth. Well, it is now clear, the public embraces that agenda, while the conservative economists’ agenda is barely credible.
After hearing a candidate’s pointed message attacking trickle down economics and promising to level the playing field for the middle class and America, the disengaged get more engaged and voters get more supportive of that leader. But that campaign context understates the possible moment and opportunity. The public is ready to repudiate trickle down economics, the most important intellectual idea since Reagan, and turn away from its attendant conservative policies. It is also ready to embrace the intellectual framework and bold policy options necessary for America to achieve inclusive growth. The scale of support for these disruptive changes suggests we may be going into a distinctive period.
Read the report.
View the presentation.
View the toplines.