Anzalone Liszt Grove Research has a very encouraging report on trends in public opinion favoring organized labor’s future. From their recent e-blast on the topic:

…Six years ago, popular support for labor unions hit an all-time low with only 48% approval and 45% disapproval, according to Gallup which has been tracking attitudes towards labor for nearly 80 years.
But popular support for labor unions is returning to pre-recession levels. Just last month, Gallup released a poll announcing that labor unions are enjoying an approval rating of 58%, jumping five points over the last year and 10 points since 2009. That is in line with every Gallup poll for 70 years before the recession, which found a majority of Americans approve of labor unions (72% approve 1936 / 60% approve 2008). For the first time in more than six years, more Americans would like to see labor unions have a greater influence in the country rather than less (37% more / 35% less / 24% same). At the height of anti-labor sentiment in 2009, 42% of Americans said labor unions should have less influence while only 25% thought they should have more.
Today, union membership hovers around 11 percent – half of what it once was when data was first tracked over thirty years ago. Views are mixed on whether this decline in membership has been good for the country (45% mostly bad / 43% mostly good) but a majority of Americans believe it has been bad for working people (52% mostly bad / 40% mostly good).

Even more encouraging, young people are leading the revival of support for labor unions. As the ALG report notes, “Support among different demographics gives us a few clues. 66 percent of young adults, ages 18-34, approve of labor unions and 44 percent want them to have more influence – the highest ratings among all age groups.”
And not surprisingly, workers of color, who disproportionately experience low wages and adverse working conditions, are also strongly approving unions:

Unions also enjoy a higher margin of support among minorities, a demographic steadily growing as a share of the population. African-Americans rate labor unions the most favorably (60% favorable / 29% unfavorable) while nearly half of Hispanics view labor unions favorably (49% favorable / 32 unfavorable).

As for low-wage workers in general, the report says, “Among low earners, specifically those working full time in minimum wage jobs (earning less than $30,000 annually), labor unions have a 23 point net favorability rating (54% favorable / 31% unfavorable).”
The report goes on to document the animosity of Republican leaders toward unions, including presidential candidates, and notes,

Among the GOP field, candidates wear their union-bashing credentials as badges of honor in a regular game of Who Hates Labor Unions More. Earlier this spring, Scott Walker went so far as to compare terrorist groups like ISIS to labor demonstrators during his first term. John Kasich joked that if he were king, he “would abolish all teachers’ lounges, where they sit together and worry about ‘Woe is us.'” And Chris Christie did not mince words when he said that the American Federation of Teachers deserved a punch in the face.

Such attitudes look like a big mistake. While 57 percent of Republican poll respondents have “unfavorable” views of unions, 31 percent are “favorable,” with young, non-college and lower-income Republicans having even more favorable attitudes toward labor. The Demagogic attitudes toward labor on the part of GOP leaders are not so widely-shared by the Republican rank and file.
The report concludes by observing that Democrats continue top enjoy strong support from union households, as well-evidenced by the 2012 exit polls, which reported their overwhelming support of President Obama. Further,

Obama would have lost the popular vote in 2012 without strong support from union households – he lost non-union households on election day, with union households giving him a margin of victory. The electoral impact would have been especially felt in the union-dense Midwest. In Michigan, for example, a state Obama won by nine points (Obama 54% / Romney 45%), Obama would have run dead even with Romney if no union households voted. In Wisconsin and Ohio, similarly, union households provided the margin of victory for Obama.

— Which explains why Republican leaders hate organized labor and do everything in their power to undermine union organizing campaigns, particularly in midwest states. The Republicans’ disparage and crush unions strategy intensified dramatically under President Reagan and has continued apace under Republican administrations. The ALG report indicates that the costs of the strategy to the GOP now exceed the benefits, and that’s good for America, as well as the Democratic Party.

In “Gloomy Republican Campaigns Leave behind Reagan Cheer,” Jeremy W. Peters describes increasingly pessimistic assessments of the political moment by GOP presidential candidates, then adds: “Despite the country’s challenges, there are signs of improvement: Job growth is up, unemployment is down, and the economy is in vastly better shape than it was eight years ago.” Barring a sudden economic downturn, this is going to be a tough sell for Republicans a year from now.
Despite the incessant coverage of everything Trump, The Upshot’s Nate Cohn explains “Why He’s Still Such a Long Shot.”The party has huge incentives to unify against Trump. He is unacceptable to nearly every Republican wing. A unified party could spend millions — even hundreds of millions — attacking Mr. Trump, criticizing him in the media and fueling his eventual opponent…If it came down to it, G.O.P. campaigns and aligned super PACs could easily spend more than $100 million in California, New York, New Jersey and other big, blue and often winner-take-all states in April, May and June of 2016 to knock Mr. Trump out.”
At The American Prospect, however, Adel M. Stan’s “A Nation of Sociopaths? What the Trump Phenomenon Says About America” merits serious thought. Many factors feed Trump’s popularity, all of them worrisome. Stan’s concern about rising sociopathy is only enhanced by the poll referenced at the end of today’s Strategy Notes.
Whatever divisions still fester within the Democratic Party regarding the Iran arms agreement, Democratic senate candidates in the battleground states are of one accord in support of the deal, reports Alex Roarty in the National Journal.
in “A rising force, moderate Democrats put their stamp on California legislative session Sacramento Bee reporters Christopher Cadelago, Jeremy White and Alexei Koseff take an interesting look at Democratic party politics in the most influential megastate.
NYT columnist Charles M. Blow provides some perceptive observations in “Bernie Sanders and the Black Vote,” as the candidate struggles to improve his polling percentages with a key pro-Democratic constituency.
At CNN Politics Eugene Scott addresses an interesting question: “Can Democrats sway young evangelicals?,” noting, “In the past three presidential elections, Democrats have garnered no more than 24% of the white evangelical vote, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research for CNN.”
At Roll Call Emily Cahn and Eli Yokley report that Democrats have potential map-expander U.S. Senate candidates in three states: Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick in AZ,. Secretary of State Jason Kander in MO and Connor Eldridge in AR. But there is some concern about NH and NC, which should be in play if Dems can secure reasonably strong candidates.
Caveats about internet polling notwithstanding, this is disturbing.

At Vox Matthew Yglesias takes a peek into the #NRORevolt dust-up, and sums up the GOP’s dilemma thusly: “The strategy favored by much of the party elite — including George and Jeb Bush, John McCain, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, most of the business community, and the RNC in its official 2012 postmortem — is to try to neutralize the immigration issue in the Latino community and then win votes from more affluent or more religiously devout Hispanics. The alt-right/identitarian/Trump strategy is to do the opposite, and make increasingly explicit appeals to ethnic nationalism to try to make whites more uniformly loyal to the GOP.”
O’Malley and Chafee should probably hang around for a debate or two to see if some exposure helps, but so far neither has gotten any traction. So the question arises, could Biden’s entry help Clinton avoid the “coronation” stigma — if she wins? Clinton already has a ‘doing-better-than-expected’ opponent in Sanders. Since Biden has impressive approval ratings in recent polls, would a 3-way race strengthen the Democratic ticket, or conversely, escalate the risk of a divisive convention?
It’s a little early for “Plan B” talk among Democrats, but please, let’s rule out Gore or Kerry scenarios, which would jettison any hope of Dems being perceived as the party for the future.
And grand strategies aside, there are unforgiving filing deadlines approaching quite soon, as Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley report at Sabato’s Crystal Ball.
The Fix’s Phillip Bump has caveats aplenty regarding recent polls indicating Trump doing better-than-expected with Latino and African American voters.
From Kate Linthicum’s “Why the big Latino voting bloc is nowhere near as large as it could be” at the L.A. Times: “In the 2014 midterm election, only 27% of eligible Latinos voted, compared with 46% of whites and 41% of African Americans, according to U.S. census data…Last year, 33% of Latinos eligible to vote were 18 to 29, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, compared with 18% of whites, 25% of African Americans and 21% of Asian Americans. The Latino population is also heavily concentrated in two places, Texas and California, that have not been swing states in presidential elections for decades. Nearly half the country’s Latino eligible voters live in those two states. Because Democrats can usually count on winning statewide races in California and Republicans in Texas, neither party in those states has had an incentive to invest the huge sums necessary to register and turn out lots more Latino voters. By contrast, a large percentage of the black population lives in swing states that have been a heavy focus of voter registration efforts.”
“identity Crisis” seems a bit melodramatic, even for a headline — the term better fits the GOP these days. Kraushaar’s National Journal article more accurately describes the ferment of a healthy political party.
In her Huffpo Pollster article, “Wages of Win: The Public and the Minimum Wage Debate,” Kathleen Weldon notes, “Recent polls indicate that, despite ongoing concerns about very large increases in the minimum wage, there is considerable support even for candidates who favor a $15 minimum. A 2015 NBC/WSJ poll found 48 percent of registered voters said such a position would make them more favorable toward a candidate, 38 percent less favorable, and 13 percent said that position would make no difference. Continued support for some form of minimum wage increase appears to give Democrats a strong issue in the 2016 campaign.”
You too can “play in the political prediction market.”

In Jamelle Bouie’s Slate.com post “Why the RNC’s Loyalty Pledge Was a Huge Mistake,” he explains why Donald Trump’s signing the pledge sets the stage for an even worse disaster:

…A Trump nomination is so unlikely that it’s not the actual nightmare for the Republican Party. The nightmare is a third-party run, where Trump gets himself on the ballot in all 50 states, and siphons white voters from a GOP that needs white turnout to win national elections.
…On the surface, this is an important victory for Republican leaders. But look carefully, and it’s somewhere between a disaster and a catastrophe. Trump hasn’t just bound himself to the RNC, the RNC has bound itself to Trump and put pressure on other candidates to do the same. Let’s say Rubio wins the primary and becomes the Republican nominee. Thanks to the pledge, he’s linked to Trump, and Democrats can run wild with guilt-by-association. By the end of the campaign, Trump might be the face of the Rubio campaign, as much as the Florida senator himself.

I’m not sure any GOP nominees would be all that bound to Trump just because of the pledge. It’s more about Trump sliming the whole party and his misogynistic, Latino-bashing and general boorishness becoming the new face of the Republican Party — regardless of the pledge. He sucks up all of the media coverage to the point where the word “Republican” conjures up a caricature of Trump’s head. He’s a wet dream, not only for cartoonists and late-night comedians, but also lazy TV reporters and commentators. The other GOP presidential candidates can’t get arrested as long as he is around.
But I think Bouie is dead right about Trump’s fidelity to the pledge, or anything he says, for that matter. This is a man who thinks it is perfectly alright to contradict himself 180 degrees within a couple of days, if not hours. As Bouie explains:

That’s the disaster. The catastrophe is that there’s nothing to hold Trump to the pledge. As soon as it becomes inconvenient, he can break it. And because he’s untethered from the institutions of the Republican Party, Trump has nothing to lose from breaking the pledge. Indeed, anything he gains from signing–the imprimatur of the GOP and commitments from other candidates–is almost irrelevant to his appeal as the “outsider” who understands the world of the “insiders.” The only thing that ties Trump to his word, on this score, is the promise of official “respect.” For a man of Trump’s ego, that’s weak binding.

Bouie shares a reminder of Ross Perot’s waffling about his independent candidacy intentions in 1992, and Perot was a guy with some actual principles. Remember Perot prattling on about being drafted by “the volunteers”? Something similar is all the cover Trump would need to trash his pledge, argues Bouie quite convincingly.
“The people are calling, and I must answer the call,” has been leveraged by many a demagogue down through the ages, and it’s not hard to imagine Trump playing that card with gusto. Some will grumble if he breaks the pledge, but few of his potential supporters would hold him accountable. They got on the Trump bandwagon less because they admire his consistency and integrity, and more because they wanted to root for a rogue rhino smashing up the crystal.
What “the pledge” does for Trump is buy him a little breathing space. His GOP opponents can and will still attack him. But he has disarmed the “not a real Republican” argument to a degree, at least for the time being. It secures the possibility that he can win the GOP nomination, but does nothing much to insure that he won’t reneg on the pledge and run as an independent. As Bouie concludes,

If anything, the loyalty pledge enhances his platform. He can run his campaign–touting Social Security and condemning illegal immigration–and when he loses the nomination, he’ll have the audience and support he needs to make an independent run. Whether Priebus knows it or not, he’s been played, and it’s going to hurt.

Priebus had to do something, and the pledge also gives him a little cover. But no one should bet that it will be honored. Trump may fool us all and gracefully bow out when the time comes, but at this point that’s not a bet for the smart money.
Dems have to run their best campaign, regardless of what Trump does. He may end up a king-maker, or worse, gulp, a king. Let the media continue to obsess about Trump’s distraction du jour, all the way to November of next year. For Dems, however, the challenge is to get focused on mobilizing their base and honing the message that there is only one party that represents adult America, and it is not the party Trump currently leads.

“Happy Labor Day — Really,” by WaPo/American Prospect columnist Harold Meyerson notes that, despite wage stagnation and shrinking union membership in recent years, there have been some recent gains American workers can celebrate, including: “Through actions in city halls and statehouses, through court decisions and labor board rulings, public officials, prompted by workers’ advocates, are finding ways to overcome many of the obstacles–outsourcing, franchising, stagnating minimum wages, union busting–that have created the new normal and with it, the shrinking of the middle class…Ordinances to raise the local minimum wage, which first popped up in liberal strongholds like San Francisco and Seattle, have in the past few weeks been enacted in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Birmingham, Alabama. A proposed ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2021 in California–home to one out of every eight American workers–commanded 68 percent support in a Field Poll last week…Unions are polling better, too…”
Another possible sign of labor rising — a presidential candidate on a picket line.
From Benjamin Siegel’s “Obama to Give 300,000 Workers Paid Sick Leave With New Executive Order” at ABCNews.com: “President Obama will sign an executive order Monday giving hundreds of thousands of workers employed by federal contractors access to paid sick leave…The order will require federal contractors to give employees the ability to earn at least seven days (56 hours) of paid sick leave annually. It will give about 300,000 workers new access to paid sick leave, and an additional number of workers the ability to earn more sick leave than they had before.”
For a more expansive take on the president’s initiatives on behalf of American workers, read Noam Scheiber’s “As His Term Wanes, Obama Champions Workers’ Rights.”
So how’s the President doing on job-creation as we celebrate Labor Day 2015? Paul Krugman reports, “As of last month, the U.S. unemployment rate, which was 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office, had fallen to 5.1 percent. For the record, Mr. Romney promised during the campaign that he would get unemployment down to 6 percent by the end of 2016. Also for the record, the current unemployment rate is lower than it ever got under Ronald Reagan. And the main reason unemployment has fallen so much is job growth in the private sector, which has added more than seven million workers since the end of 2012.”
Former Reagan advisor Bruce Bartlett unveils a new tweak in the GOP’s strategy to divide American workers’ voting power by race.
Moyers & Company presents a panel discussion, “Is Labor a Lost Cause,” featuring a dialogue with labor reform leaders, Stephen Lerner and Bill Fletcher, Jr (transcript here)

E. J. Dionne, Jr. addresses the proper role of government with respect to the lives of American working people and notes, “Many of the choices are not between more or less government. They are about whether what government does provides greater benefit to workers or employers, management or unions, individual investors or investment firms…”Which side are you on?” This question from the old union song is the right question to ask about government.”
At Counterpunch Walter Brasch’s “The Boss Who Fought for the Working-Class” pays tribute to Horace Greeley, whose newspaper, The New York Tribune was #1 in circulation world-wide, featured columnists like Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Karl Marx — and was read cover to cover by Greeley’s friend (and sometimes adversary) President Abraham Lincoln. “When his [Greeley’s] employees said they didn’t need a union because their boss paid them well and treated them fairly, he told them that only in a union could the workers continue to be treated decently, that they had no assurances that some day he might not be as decent and generous as he was that day. The union was for their benefit, the benefit of their families, and their profession, he told them.”

The New York Times editorial board explains the politics behind Republican posturing about the Black Lives Matter movement, and calls out several of their presidential candidates in particular for trying to stir up white resentment:

The Republican Party and its acolytes in the news media are trying to demonize the protest movement that has sprung up in response to the all-too-common police killings of unarmed African-Americans across the country. The intent of the campaign — evident in comments by politicians like Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky — is to cast the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as an inflammatory or even hateful anti-white expression that has no legitimate place in a civil rights campaign.
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas crystallized this view when he said the other week that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were he alive today, would be “appalled” by the movement’s focus on the skin color of the unarmed people who are disproportionately killed in encounters with the police. This argument betrays a disturbing indifference to or at best a profound ignorance of history in general and of the civil rights movement in particular. From the very beginning, the movement focused unapologetically on bringing an end to state-sanctioned violence against African-Americans and to acts of racial terror very much like the one that took nine lives at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in June.
The civil rights movement was intended to make Congress and Americans confront the fact that African-Americans were being killed with impunity for offenses like trying to vote, and had the right to life and to equal protection under the law. The movement sought a cross-racial appeal, but at every step of the way used expressly racial terms to describe the death and destruction that was visited upon black people because they were black.

It’s a shameful legacy for a political party which once included leaders who actively supported civil rights reforms. Republicans like Sens. Jacob Javitz, Lowell Weicker, and Everett Dirksen, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and others all had impressive records of supporting racial justice and equality, even though they were conservative on most economic issues. Today GOP leaders are all active and tacit supporters of suppressing of African American votes. Huckabee has even advocated illegal measures to suppress voting on several occasions.
In reality Dr. King and the Movement were deeply concerned about violence targeting Black Americans and spoke out about it many times. As the Times editorial notes, in his eulogy for the four little girls who were killed in the Birmingham church bombing in 1963, Dr. King “did not shy away from the fact that the dead had been killed because they were black, by monstrous men whose leaders fed them “the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism.” He said that the dead “have something to say” to a complacent federal government that cut back-room deals with Southern Dixiecrats, as well as to “every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice…”
The Times editorial also emphasizes the clear connection between voter suppression and the racial violence that occurred during the Movement:

During this same period, freedom riders and voting rights activists led by the young John Lewis offered themselves up to be beaten nearly to death, week after week, day after day, in the South so that the country would witness Jim Crow brutality and meaningfully respond to it. This grisly method succeeded in Selma, Ala., in 1965 when scenes of troopers bludgeoning voting rights demonstrators compelled a previously hesitant Congress to acknowledge that black people deserved full citizenship, too, and to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Along the way, there was never a doubt as to what the struggle was about: securing citizenship rights for black people who had long been denied them.

During the Civil Rights Movement most southern Democratic elected officials were a huge part of the problem of racial injustice and they worked together with right-wing Republicans to relentlessly suppress the votes and civil rights of African Americans. It was a coalition of progressive Democrats and Republicans who opposed and finally overcame them to secure passage of the great Civil Rights reforms of the sixties.
But the Democratic Party has matured to the point where no Democratic political leaders advocate voter suppression or rolling back the clock on civil rights. Conversely, with very rare exceptions, no Republican leaders oppose voter suppression and most of them actively support it.
The Times editorial goes on to underscore the fact that Black Lives Matter “focuses on the fact that black citizens have long been far more likely than whites to die at the hands of the police, and is of a piece with this history.”
They are not saying that white lives don’t matter; they are calling needed attention to the outrage of racially-motivated violence, committed by police and others, and they are demanding corrective action, in keeping with the best traditions of the American Civil Rights Movement. And despite media focus on riots and civil disturbances in the wake of police violence, the overwhelming majority of Black Lives Matter protesters have remained exclusively nonviolent.
Republicans are trying to suggest otherwise. But this lie won’t stand the test of honest scrutiny.
The modern Republican Party now sees its hope for survival being based on energizing white resentment toward people of color, particularly those who dare to protest for their basic civil rights. As the editorial concludes, “politicians who know better and seek to strip this issue of its racial content and context are acting in bad faith. They are trying to cover up an unpleasant truth and asking the country to collude with them.”
The Republicans have deployed this strategy for decades with mixed results. But it is especially shameful when directed at a group of citizens whose central concern is their right to be free from racially-motivated violence.

The Obama Administration and the cause of Democratic unity chalk up a huge victory with Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s decision to support the Iran nuclear deal, which should provide the margin needed to secure approval of the agreement. “Opponents of the agreement said they could not remember another recent policy battle where the White House and Ms. Pelosi were so driven. In tandem, they made the Iran vote a strong test of party loyalty.,” report Carl Hulse and David M. Herszenhorn at The New York Times. “Our ability to build coalitions, to lead, to have credibility when we enter into a negotiation was really on the line,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat who organized the Iran deal strategy with Ms. Pelosi, with whom she consulted almost daily while lawmakers were scattered in their districts around the country. “To walk away now would diminish our ability to lead on future issues.”
Greg Sargent comments on several recent polls showing substantial support for draconian immigration policies, like Trump’s call for mass deportations. Sargent boils it down to a disturbing conclusion “…perhaps the better way to understand what’s happening here is that Trump’s supporters like the story he is telling them, which is largely that immigrants are to blame for the suffering of American workers.”
The GOP front-runner continues to rack up endorsements from hate-mongers and their groups, but Dean Obeidallah argues at the Daily Beast that “Behind Trump, the GOP Really Is Becoming the Racist Party.”
Will Trump Cave? He meets with GOP chair Priebus today, and they will no doubt discuss whether he will sign the “loyalty” pledge to support the the Republican presidential nominee (and publicly reject an independent campaign). Dana Bash and Tom LoBianco of CNN Politics write that it’s likely he will sign it. But it’s hard to see all that much upside for Trump in caving so early, other than short term good-will from his competition.
The most populous state may be on the verge of securing automatic voter registration for residents who have drivers licenses, reports Alice Ollstein at ThinkProgress.
NYT’s conservative columnist Ross Douthat ponders “The End of the Republican Party?,” and strains to be “a little less pessimistic” about the prospect. But it’s not a good sign for the GOP that he and others quoted in his column are talking about it.
Campaign for America’s Future Dave Johnson offers some insight into “What Bernie Sanders Has Already Won,” including “…Fixing our country’s problems is not just about electing a president. Billionaire money has taken over many statehouses – where they gerrymander the districts to keep themselves in power. Sanders likes to say that there are two primary sources of power, “organized people and organized money,” and that when people across lines of race, gender, class, nationality, and sexual orientation reject right-wing wedge politics and come together, “there is nothing, nothing, nothing that we cannot accomplish.” In addition to proving a presidential candidate can still run a formidable campaign without fat-cat contributions, Sanders has shown how Democratic Socialist ideas can get a hearing, even with all of Trump’s theatrics distracting the media.
“Democracy Is Top Economic Growth Strategy, Says Study,” explains Terry Jones at The Investors Business Daily. Jones quotes study authors MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and University of Chicago economist James A. Robinson: “Our central estimates suggest that a country that switches from autocracy to democracy achieves about 20% higher GDP per capita over roughly 30 years.” Might it follow that eliminating voter suppression in the U.S. would help improve the economy?
Granted, the presidential campaign season is too damn long. But I doubt that scheduling a few more Democratic presidential debates would hurt the party nominee’s chances, and it’s quite possible that doing so could actually help Democrats to unify and toughen up for the general election. A little extra battle-testing can be a good thing.

A nugget from Steve Benen’s Maddowblog post, “GOP base: Obama wasn’t born in US, but Cruz was“:

While top-line results are usually the most important takeaway from polls like these, that’s only part of what’s amazing about these new results. Consider this excerpt from the latest PPP report:
…51% [of Republican voters] overall want to eliminate birthright citizenship. 54% think President Obama is a Muslim. And only 29% grant that President Obama was born in the United States. That’s less than the 40% who think Canadian born Ted Cruz was born in the United States.
Let that one roll around in your head for a moment. Nearly seven years into the Obama presidency, less a third of Republican voters believe the president was born in the United States. A significantly higher percentage believe Ted Cruz was born in the U.S – and he wasn’t.

Piling on, Benen adds that 54 percent of GOP respondents in the poll believe that President Obama is not a Christian and “32 percent aren’t sure,” beliefs echoed by Scott Walker and other GOP presidential candidates, despite numerous reports of the Obama family attending churches across the nation. Further, 66 percent of Trump supporters believe the President is a Muslim.
Take your pick of these stats, parse them any way you can. But but you won’t be able to avoid concluding that an awfully large percentage of self identified Republican rank and filers are dummies or paranoid. Republican leaders are, to some extent, merely reflecting the irrational suspicions and ignorance, willful and otherwise, of their “base.”
But real leadership is not about pandering to the worst instincts of constituents. It’s about educating them and bringing out the best in people, challenging them to a higher level of awareness and common concern for their fellow citizens. Measured by that standard, 21st century Republican leaders have failed miserably. The interesting question is, when do more enlightened conservatives in the rank and file become too embarrassed to call themselves Republicans?

All of the usual caveats about it being too early to discern meaningful political trends for the 2016 general election notwithstanding, Moody’s Election Model has some very good news for Democrats. From Ryan Sweet’s “Democrats to Win in a Landslide in 2016, According to Moody’s Election Model” at The Street.com:

Our Moody’s Analytics election model now predicts a Democratic electoral landslide in the 2016 presidential vote. A small change in the forecast data in August has swung the outcome from the statistical tie predicted in July, to a razor-edge ballot outcome that nevertheless gives the incumbent party 326 electoral votes to the Republican challenger’s 212.
…It takes 270 electoral votes to win a U.S. presidential election. Our July forecast predicted a Democratic win with 270 electoral votes, to 268 for the Republican, regardless of who wins either party’s nomination.

“Democratic landslide” — an appealing concept, that. Not a bad mantra for some creative visualization, looking toward 2016. But the why of it is interesting and maybe a little worrisome, according to Sweet:

The primary factor driving the results further to the incumbent party in August is lower gasoline prices. Plummeting prices and changing dynamics in global energy markets from Chinese weakness and the Iranian nuclear deal have caused us to significantly lower our gasoline price forecast for the next several years. This variable is very significant to voter sentiment in the model, with lower prices favoring incumbents.

Good to know that. There’s also the converse to worry about, as when soaring gas prices helped defeat Jimmy Carter in 1980. Sweet also points out that the model does not predict what would happen if the election was held today; it is rooted in what is known about economic, demographic and political realities coming in 2016, which is more than a little dicey.
Another cautionary note from Sweet:

Just three states account for the change in margin, with Ohio, Florida and Colorado swinging from leaning Republican to leaning Democrat. The margin of victory in each of these important swing states is still solidly within the margin of error though, and will likely swing back and forth in Moody’s monthly updates ahead, underlining the closeness of the election to come. Furthermore, three of the candidates for the Republican nomination enjoy favorite-son status in Ohio or Florida, potentially making the outcome of those important states even more unpredictable.

Still the model has an impressive track record, as Sweet notes: “The model successfully predicts every election back to 1980, including a perfect electoral vote prediction in the 2012 election.”
For Democrats worried about the Trump card, Rob Garver and Eric Pianin, reporting on a new Quinnipiac Poll, also have some good news at The Fiscal Times. Despite Trump’s antics dominating the GOP field,

In a hypothetical matchup with Vice President Joseph Biden, Trump loses 48 percent to 40 percent in the new poll. He does little better against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the current Democratic frontrunner, losing 45 percent to 41 percent. Even in a matchup with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the Democratic socialist, Trump comes up short, 44 percent to 41 percent.

The upbeat reports in this post could have a very short shelf life, as with pretty much anything you read about politics at this early stage the 2016 campaign. But it’s not just Republicans screwing up. Neither the Moody’s study or the Quinnipiac poll would be so encouraging if Democrats weren’t doing a pretty good job of maintaining civility, keeping focused on the issues and generally behaving as adults, in stark contrast to the GOP. We can hope that is worth something to an increasing percentage of voters who would prefer to live in a country run by grown-ups.

In The Jacobin, via TNR, Touré F. Reed, associate professor of history at Illinois State University, explains why “Liberals Are Wrong to Separate Race from Class,” and presents a compelling argument that “the now-commonplace claim at the heart of the recent Black Lives Matter protests against Sanders is that white liberals have long reduced racism to class inequality in order to deflect attention from racial disparities…This is not just wrong, but the formulation–which ultimately treats race as unchanging and permanent rather than a product of specific historical and political economic relations–undermines both the cause of racial equality in general and pursuit of equitable treatment in the criminal justice system in particular.”
From Kate Kaye’s AdAge post “Democrats to Kick Off Digital Voter Targeting Effort at Summer Meeting“: “At the DNC’s behest, data services firm Experian and political data company TargetSmart Communications have spent the past several months turning the Democratic Party’s voter file into data that can be used readily to aim video ads, addressable TV spots and mobile and desktop display ads at specific voters…Voter File 2.0 reflects the party’s broader strategy of steering Democratic campaigns toward a preferred set of tools and vendors…The approach stands in contrast to that of the GOP, which historically has fostered a more competitive environment among multiple tech vendors. On the Republican side, firms including i360, the data company funded by the Koch Brothers, and Targeted Victory enable clients to send digital ads to specific voters using voter file data.”
The Upshot’s Josh Barro has a primer on “anchor babies,” and notes “According to Pew, in 2012 there were 4.5 million American children with at least one parent who was an unauthorized immigrant, and four million unauthorized immigrants living with an American child….There is one other myth in the debate: A citizen child is not necessarily a shield against deportation. In the second and third quarters of 2011, Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported that over 46,000 parents of citizen children were deported, accounting for 22 percent of all deportations.”
NYT columnist Frank Bruni sorts through the GOP rubble and pulls up John Kasich, explaining why Dems should not worry too much about him. Polls suggest he is electable in the general election — in the highly unlikely event he survives the primaries.
Marking the 10th anniversary of Katrina, NYT columnist Paul Krugman notes, “…Katrina was special in political terms because it revealed such a huge gap between image and reality. Ever since 9/11, former President George W. Bush had been posing as a strong, effective leader keeping America safe. He wasn’t…It took a domestic disaster, which made his administration’s cronyism and incompetence obvious to anyone with a TV set, to burst his bubble.” Krugman adds some devastating snapshots of GOP presidential candidates as “political poseurs,” including: “…Consider Jeb Bush, once hailed on the right as “the best governor in America,” when in fact all he did was have the good luck to hold office during a huge housing bubble. Many people now seem baffled by Mr. Bush’s inability to come up with coherent policy proposals, or any good rationale for his campaign. What happened to Jeb the smart, effective leader? He never existed.”
Ezekiel J. Emanuel, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, explains why “Why Republicans’ health-care plans are bad deals for Americans,” rooted as they are in three basic “reforms”: stingier subsidies, tax employer contributions to health care plans and allow plans to cross state borders (the ACA already has a provision, with regulatory standards). As Emanuel concludes, “Republican thinking on health-care reform has hardly advanced since 2008. The deals proposed then were bad and were defeated at the ballot box. And they remain bad deals for average Americans. This may be why few are willing to trust the “replace” part of the Republican pledge to “repeal and replace” the ACA.”
In addition to overwhelming public support for tougher background checks for gun purchases, here’s an even better reason why Dems could be bolder in their gun control messaging: “Among the 18 states that impose extra background check requirements for private gun sales, the average rate of gun deaths in 2013 was five fewer (out of every 100,000) than the rate among states that do not regulate background checks beyond the federal requirements,” according to Libby Eisenstein, writing in the National Journal.
At The Plum Line Greg Sargent posts on a new Democratic ad designed to obliterate whatever fading hopes for getting a respectable share of the Latino vote the GOP was harboring. “The GOP has given Democrats the raw material, if used properly, to potentially take the Hispanic vote off the table in 2016,” Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg tells me. “These ads signal that Dems understand they can dig the hole so deep for the GOP with Hispanics now that they will never get out no matter who the nominee is in 2016.”
The good bank.