A succinct summary of the importance of President Obama’s release of a new rule expanding eligibility for overtime pay — and a good message point for Democrats — from E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s syndicated column: “To much bellyaching from Republicans and business groups, Obama is putting forward new rules that would make up to 5 million more American workers eligible for overtime pay. He’s doing this by ending a scam through which employers designate even relatively low-paid workers as managers to get around the law, which requires an overtime premium after 40 hours per week…Under the current rules, as Obama wrote this week in The Huffington Post, workers earning as little as $23,660 a year can be robbed of overtime by being given supervisory or managerial designations. The new regulation would raise the threshold to a more plausible $50,440 a year.”
Another affirmation that courses in civics and government help improve voter turnout.
Jeffrey M. Jones reports on new Gallup poll findings bearing good news for Democrats: “In the second quarter of 2015, Democrats regained an advantage over Republicans in terms of Americans’ party affiliation. A total of 46% of Americans identified as Democrats (30%) or said they are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (16%), while 41% identified as Republicans (25%) or leaned Republican (16%). The two parties were generally even during the previous three quarters, including the fourth quarter of 2014, when the midterm elections took place.”
Ralph Nader challenges all presidential candidates to support a $15 minimum wage. But only Gov. Martin O’Malley and Sen. Bernie Sanders have thus far expressed their support of the increase. Nader notes, “Almost all of the Republican candidates support keeping the minimum wage at $7.25 an hour.” Nader provides good message points in favor of the measure: “A 2014 study by the Center for American Progress showed that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would cause a six percent drop in welfare enrollments, saving the American people over four billion dollars a year…It’s time for the candidates from all parties to reject the corporate dogma that allows companies to pay exploitative wages and force their employees onto public assistance. ”
National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar sees Dems in good position to regain a Senate majority in 2016: “For this cycle, the map is difficult for Republicans, who are defending many more seats than their Democratic counterparts. Of the nine most-competitive Senate seats, seven are held by Republicans–and six feature sitting Republican senators. Eight of the races are being held in states that President Obama carried twice.” Kraushaar also argues that “Republican Senate candidates face the harsh reality that their party’s presidential nominees have a bigger impact on their reelection than their own campaigns.”
At Brookings William A. Galson and Elaine Kamarck make the case for “More builders and fewer traders: A growth strategy for the American economy,” which could be a potent message for Democratic candidates in projecting an economic vision.
A little nugget from Kerry Eleveld’s Daily Kos post, “Jeb’s taxes reveal a wealthy man who thrived in the great recession and donated little,” quoting Bloomberg’s Richard Rubin and Michael C. Bender “Jeb’s taxes reveal a wealthy man who thrived in the great recession and donated little”: “From 2007 to 2013, the Bushes gave a total of $431,056 to charity, or about 1.5 percent of their adjusted gross income. In 2011, Romney, who is much wealthier than Bush, donated more than 29 percent of his income to charity. The Obamas donated 14.8 percent last year.
A few short weeks ago I figured that the GOP had probably bottomed-out with Hispanic LVs. But it now seems Trump’s immigrant-bashing and better than expected poll numbers among Republican respondents could damage the GOP brand even more with Latino voters.
Meanwhile, Simon Malloy just puts it out there at Salon.com with “GOP’s baffling Trump cowardice: A party too timid to denounce a bigoted gasbag.”

There are 59 vacancies on America’s federal courts, “including 27 that have been classified as judicial emergencies because of the strain they are putting on caseloads,” according to Working Assets. Yet “Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Charles Grassley, known for his obstructionism when he was in the minority, is slow-walking current nominees through his committee. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is not scheduling votes for nominees who do finally make it through Grassley’s committee.” If you want to do something to help end the Republican roadblock, register your support here.
After the landmark Supreme Court decision protecting the ACA, Jacob Hacker ponders the Act’s future at The American Prospect .
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum gets in his ‘Mend it, don’t end it I-told-you-so’ licks at The Atlantic.
On the perils of having two big shot GOP candidates for President, a divisive Governor and increasingly complex demographics in one mega-state, Scott Bland notes at National Journal: “Frosty relationships and Byzantine turf wars are nothing new to politics in any state, especially when one party dominates, the way Republicans have in Florida. But with a presidential election 17 months away, many Republicans are worried that the party’s trouble with state leaders could do more than fray nerves–it could ultimately deny the GOP’s eventual nominee Florida’s 29 electoral votes.”
From “Republicans are in retreat” by David Russell at The Hill: “So the Republicans are all in a flurry to redefine, adjust or refocus their message, since the past week showed them to be out of step with both their normally conservative brethren on the Supreme Court and American public opinion. It wasn’t just a matter of Obamacare, gay marriage or public anxiety over corporate sponsored trade agreements; it was a confluence of a whole host of data points that made them look out of step and quite silly.Just to string together a few of the threads: The nine deaths in a Charleston, S.C., church bared their racial preferences with a nod toward removing the Confederate flag, but not an inch of give on gun legislation; A Republican-sponsored bill banning notification of the source of meat products as protection for consumers gets national laughs; Their ridicule for Pope Francis’s pronouncements on climate change is seen as offensive; The bombastic entry of Donald Trump into the presidential fray, joined by also-ran Govs. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) and Bobby Jindal (R-La.), does little more than highlight the comic element of the Republican presidential campaign; A bill sponsored by Comcast, tagged onto budget legislation to end net neutrality, is called out for the regressive step it is; And a notification that the rich donors have already exceeded their spending in the last election gives the public notice to just how much the party is in the pocket of wealthy sponsors.”
Of course Dems should applaud the SCOTUS decision upholding independent redistricting commissions as a victory for good government. But National Journal’s Jack Fitzpatrick explains why it will be a tough sell.
Jennifer Agiesta reports at CNN that “A new CNN/ORC poll finds that for the first time in more than two years, 50% of Americans approve of the way Obama is handling the presidency. And his overall ratings are bolstered by increasingly positive reviews of his treatment of race relations and the economy…Obama’s approval rating for handling the economy has also climbed, 52% approve in the new poll, compared with 46% who approved in the May survey. That’s the first time approval for Obama’s handling of the economy has topped 50% in CNN/ORC polling in nearly six years.”
“The Demolition of Workers’ Compensation” — a ‘sleeper issue’ almost guaranteed to make Republicans just about everywhere squirm and sweat, when asked what they would do about it.
Here’s a GOP ticket that could lock up the ‘low-information voter’ bloc.

Will the racist slayings in Charleston help improve chances for passing the Voting Rights law which will be introduced today? Expect lots of coverage over the next week or so, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s signing the Voting Rights Act (July 2nd). But, as Ed Kilgore noted yesterday, “Or maybe GOPers will be too busy congratulating themselves from finally abandoning Confederate insignia to pay attention.”
No surprise, unfortunately, that the Ku Klux Klan is cranking up a recruiting drive in the wake of the Charleston shootings. The nation-wide uprising against Confederate battle flags and license plates is long-overdue. But, even more importantly, we also need more and better anti-racist education in America’s schools, which should be a cause that attracts a broad constituency.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. believes it’s time for Americans to face a hard truth, regardless of the political reverberations: “We cannot go on like this, wringing our hands in frustration after every tragedy involving firearms. We said “enough” after Sandy Hook. We thought the moment for action had come. Yet nothing happened. We are saying “enough” after Charleston. But this time, we don’t even expect anything to happen…What’s needed is a long-term national effort to change popular attitudes toward handgun ownership. And we need to insist on protecting the rights of Americans who do not want to be anywhere near guns.”
Former Sen. Jim Webb may have damaged his chances for a spot of the Democratic ticket with this equivocation, which amplifies his image as a tad too cold to win hearts and minds.
In sports you sometimes have to win ugly. In politics, however, you don’t want to win this ugly.
Thomas B. Edsall is on to something in his latest NYT column. It’s another way of saying class consciousness is inordinately weak ink America. In one graph, Edsall notes, “In his book “The Great Risk Shift,” Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, joins the argument by documenting the economic pressures on individuals resulting from the widespread erosion of social insurance. “For decades, Americans and their government upheld a powerful set of ideals that combined a commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity,” Hacker writes. “Today that message is starkly different: You are on your own.”
Joel K. Goldstein explains at Crystal Ball why the “third term jinx” is not all that well-reasoned.
New meme for Democratic project to flip a few Republicans: “Do you really want to support a party that thinks this guy should lead the free world?”
Say g’nite, Governor.

The Confederate battle flag flying at The South Carolina state capitol, even after the mass murders of African American worshippers by a racist who proudly displayed the same flag, has created a political mess for Republicans.
In the past, Republicans felt they could get away with supporting the flying of the confederate battle flag, or equivocating on the issue. And get away with it they did, with the sole exception of GOP 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who took a stand against flying the flag.
But that has now changed as a result of revelations about the shooter, and his embrace of the flag, which has all but cemented its identity as a symbol of racist violence. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has joined with the speaker of the SC state assembly in calling for the removal of the flag from the capitol, and now other Republicans, including GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson are finally beginning to follow suit.
Of course the battle flag was always a symbol of the pro-slavery armies of the confederacy. But many white southerners saw it as more a symbol of their heritage, in non-racist terms. Southern racists manipulated the sentiment to keep it in the public’s face. Worse, few if any of the flag’s defenders protested against the adoption of the flag as a preeminent symbol by the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups. Their utter failure to do so further discredited the argument that it was a non-racist “cultural” symbol.
No doubt many of the less-educated southern ground troops who died under the flag in Civil War battles saw themselves as protecting their homeland against northern invaders, more than defending slavery. But no credible historians deny that the slaveholding landowners, slave-traders and commanding officers of the Confederacy understood that their core mission was to protect the institution of slavery.
In the 1960s, segregationists made the Confederate battle flag a symbol of their cause, joined by the Ku Klux Klan, the slightly less blatant white citizens councils and other hate groups. You had to be in denial after the 1960s to say that the Confederate battle flag was not a symbol of racial injustice.
Civil Rights advocates had some success in getting the battle flag emblem removed from the Georgia state flag, but it still occupies a corner of the Mississippi state banner. Republicans were able to politically navigate the troubled waters of the flag controversy in the south with the calculation that the votes they got from pro-flag southern whites offset those they lost from southern African Americans, whose collective votes they were able to shrink with a range of suppression tactics.
Republican Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas joined with liberal members of the court to uphold a Texas ruling keeping the flag logo off state license plates, but Georgia still allows the symbol on license plates. Since it has been revealed that Dylann Roof was influenced by the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, Republicans have begun backing away from the group. As Michael Wines and Lizette Alvarez report at the New York Times:

Since it rose in the 1980s from the ashes of the old and unabashedly racist White Citizens’ Councils, the Council of Conservative Citizens has drifted in and out of notoriety. But it is clearly back in: Last weekend, three Republican presidential candidates — Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky — announced that they were returning or giving away donations from the council’s president, Earl Holt III.

Senator Paul continues to equivocate when confronted about his views of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and his father’s former newsletter, which parroted racist stereotypes. Republicans still glorify President Reagan who pandered shamelessly to racists.
But we have now reached the point where a critical mass of Americans is repulsed by the flag. That’s why the nation’s largest retailer, Walmart has decided to stop selling merch with the battle flag’s starred cross bar emblem.
It would be good for America if the Confederate battle flag becomes a museum piece, instead of a taxpayer-supported symbol intended to offend Americans of color, who have long been victimized by hate groups. The flag will continue to fly here and there and be seen on bumper stickers and other private property. But Republican leaders are now backing away from it as a symbol that should be tolerated on public property — at least for a while.
I expect that Republicans will continue to play the race card, perhaps in less blatant ways. They still have a southern strategy which includes pandering to racial prejudice. It’s just going to be a little less overt. Sad that it took such a horrific tragedy to move the GOP in a less offensive direction.

In his National Journal post ‘Dear Democrats: Populism Will Not Save You,” John B. Judis writes, “I fear that the new populist approach is based on several assumptions–about the economy and the electorate–that are feeding false hopes of success…While incomes and wealth at the very top have soared, and while people at the bottom of the economic ladder–many of whom have only high school degrees or less–are indeed threatened with falling incomes and joblessness, middle America is not dying or disappearing…One problem with predicting more lasting majorities based on demographics is that opposition parties can adjust. Republican successes in 2014 were not just the result of low turnout among young voters and minorities. They were also the result of GOP candidates moving to the center to defuse criticism from their Democratic opponents.”
“Political insiders” of both major parties agree, Republican Sen. Mark Kirk is the most vulnerable incumbent U.S. Senator running in 2016.
Mark Murray notes at NBC News: “American voters say their top concerns about the upcoming presidential election are wealthy individuals and corporations who might have too much influence who over wins, as well as campaigns that spend more time on negative attacks than proposing solutions, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll…Thirty-three percent of voters say the influence of wealthy individuals and corporations is their top concern, while 25 percent say they’re more worried about negative attacks.”
At Business Insider Maxwell Tani explains why Hillary Clinton’s prioritizing voting rights could be good strategy: “A new poll released by Public Policy Polling on Friday shows that her focus on the issue may prove politically popular in 2016 among more than just Democrats. Automatic voter registration, something Clinton proposed earlier this month, enjoys relatively strong support, with 48% approving and 38% disapproving, according to the PPP poll.”
Among the reasons why the political polling industry is struggling, according to Cliff Zukin, past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, writing in The New York Times: “Political polling has gotten less accurate…and it’s not going to be fixed in time for 2016. We’ll have to go through a period of experimentation to see what works, and how to better hit a moving target…Those paying close attention to the 2016 election should exercise caution as they read the polls. Because of the high cost, the difficulty in locating the small number of voters who will actually turn out in primaries and the increasing reliance on non-probability Internet polls, you are likely to see a lot of conflicting numbers. To make matters still worse, the cellphone problem is more acute in states than it is at the national level, because area codes and exchanges often no longer respect state or congressional boundaries.”
Brendan Farrington reports at The Florida Sun-Sentinel on Democratic prospects for winning the Senate seat of Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, complicated by the possible “spoiler” role of Rep. Alan Grayson.
Current Republican presidential candidates are all evading the confederate flag issue in the wake of the Charleston massacre. But not all white southerners agree with them: “We ought to celebrate family members we love, the kindness of people in South, the land, the culture, the food, the music born there that has changed the world — and a Civil Rights struggle that did, too. There are so many things to be proud of that it strains credibility to believe we need a flag — one which hurts and offends others — in order to appreciate our heritage…The Confederacy was an attempt to create a slave-holding empire throughout the Western hemisphere…South Carolina did not fly the flag of this failed rebellion outside their State House until 1961, when its revival was less about regional patriotism than resistance to the Federal Government’s advancement of civil rights.” — from HuffPo’s “Pride in Southern Heritage Does Not Require the Confederate Flag — In Fact, It’s Now an Obstacle” by Paul Kendrick, a white southerner and author of Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader & a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery & Save the Union.
Heather Digby Parton nails “Rand Paul’s libertartian hypocrisy” on racial justice issues and now the confederate flag as emblematic of the GOP’s “rank cowardice at best and pandering to racists at worst” — with the exception of Mitt Romney, who alone among Republicans calls for the removal of the confederate flag from state houses. “For all of Rand Paul’s alleged independence,” notes Parton, “when the chips are down he can’t even match Mitt Romney’s courage and integrity. And that’s really saying something.”
Eric Lichtblau reports at The New York Times: “The leader of a white supremacist group that has been linked to Dylann Roof, the suspect in the murder of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns, including those of 2016 presidential contenders such as Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Rand Paul, records show.”

In the wake of the Charleston tragedy, The Fix’s Aaron Blake seems surprised that political divisions about gun control would come into play so fast. He notes that Republicans like Gov. Nikki Haley in South Carolina failed to applaud at a vigil, when SC’s House speaker called for new gun control reforms. What’s everyone supposed to do — pretend that it’s not a public concern for the sake of bipartisan kumbaya to let Republicans off the hook for their “guns everywhere” lunacy? Maybe Blake should look at the June, 2014 Quinnipiac poll, which indicated that 50 percent of respondents “support stricter gun control laws in the United States” and 92 percent want “background checks for all gun-buyers,” while 89 percent support “laws to prevent people with mental illness from purchasing guns.”
Further in PPP’s February SC poll, “There is 76/14 support for a law preventing domestic abusers from buying guns and 64/24 support for one making those people turn in any guns they currently own. In addition to overwhelming support from Democrats and independents, majorities of Republicans (71/17 and 54/31 respectively) support each of those measures as well. There’s also a strong consensus among voters in the state (61/27) that guns should not be allowed on college campuses.” — from Public Policy Polling, via Hunter’s “South Carolina residents want tougher gun restrictions” at Daily Kos.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has a moving NYT op-ed profile of SC state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, who was slain in the Charleston shootings, as a Democratic leader of impressive character, nobility and promise.
Good to see a Democratic presidential candidate making pension reform a leading issue.
Also at The Fix, Chris Cillizza reports on a new Gallup Poll indicating that “Democrats are more liberal today than at any point in the last 15 years.”
The headline for Phillip Rucker’s WaPo post “Latino leaders held a convention, but only one Republican candidate came” says it well. Turns out only Ben Carson of 16 or so declared/likely GOP presidential candidates cared enough to show up at the 32nd annual convention of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO).
Michael Tomasky explains “How Liberals Can Save Obamacare”
WaPo Republican columnist David Gerson worries that Trump’s candidacy will galvanize anti-establishment populism into “Ceasarism.” I worry more that Trump, as an inadvertent red herring, will suck up all the ridicule away from gaffe-prone candidates like Huckabee, Paul, Perry, Cruz and others, who may end up looking sane in comparison.
Matt Latimer opines at Politico, “Seven Reasons the GOP Should Fear Donald Trump
He’s a nuisance, a hothead and totally unqualified. But that’s what they said about Ross Perot.” From Latimer’s #5. “Voters Like Crazy – Speaking of Perot, this was a man who once claimed Cuban assassins had been sent to kill him. A man who dropped out of the presidential race, before dropping back in, because of an alleged Republican “plot” he uncovered to disrupt his daughter’s wedding. He picked as his running mate a totally unprepared candidate who at one point in the vice presidential debate confessed that his hearing aid wasn’t working. His campaign theme song was-and this is no joke-Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” And yet H. Ross Perot was at one point the frontrunner for the presidency and still, after finding himself immersed in plotlines that would be rejected as too far-fetched for “American Horror Story,” managed 19 percent of the popular vote. In other words, one out of five Americans thought he wasn’t too crazy to be president.”

Rebecca Kaplan reports from CBS News that the Dems’ 2016 front-runner Hillary Clinton clarifies her position on TPP, in the wake of the House rejection of key provisions: “Let’s take the lemons and turn it into lemonade. Let’s see if there is a way to get to an agreement that does do what I expect it to do,” she said. She voiced her support for the worker retraining program, called Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), but added, “I am willing to try now to see whether you can push to get rid of the objectionable parts to drive a harder bargain on some of the other parts and to provide more transparency so that the American people can actually see what will be in a proposed final deal.”..”If I were in the White House that’s what I’d be doing right now,” Clinton concluded.” And that may be what the present occupant of 1600 PA Avenue, who is no slouch at political chess, has wanted all along.
NYT columnist Paul Krugman reaffirms his conviction that TPP is a bad idea, and also notes, “Democrats, despite defeats in midterm elections, believe — rightly or wrongly — that the political wind is at their backs. Growing ethnic diversity is producing what should be a more favorable electorate; growing tolerance is turning social issues, once a source of Republican strength, into a Democratic advantage instead. Reagan was elected by a nation in which half the public still disapproved of interracial marriage; Mrs. Clinton is running to lead a nation in which 60 percent support same-sex marriage.”
Clinton may be getting most of the ink, video and bytes, but Eleanor Clift reports at The Daily Beast that “Bernie Sanders Is Building an Army to Take D.C.: It’ll take an army to change Washington, says the insurgent senator–and with the crowds he’s been drawing, he just might be building one.”
At The Upshot David Leonhardt presents a rather stunning map, showing “The North-South Divide on Two-Parent Families.” It’s not a shocker when you think about it, but it does illuminate the complexity of the south in American politics. Leonhart offers a number of insightful observations, including “…politically conservative states, for all their emphasis on family values, have long had high divorce rates.” Further, adds Leonhardt, “…the situation also has some important nuances. Above all, divorce is no longer the main reason that children do not grow up with both of their parents. Divorce has declined in recent years. So, however, has marriage, while single parenthood — and the number of children who never live with both parents — has risen sharply. Marriage and single parenthood don’t break down along the same red-blue lines that divorce does.”
“Just call me Jeb” could be a very problematic sell.
GOP Rep. Paul Ryan gets brutally told by Michigan’s Democratic congressman Sander Levin, after Ryan’s latest cheap shot at Obamacare, and Angry Bear got it all down: “What’s busted is not ACA But your attacks on it, endless attacks.”Sander Levin said calmly and deliberately. “Never coming up with a single comprehensive alternative all these years. So you sit as armchair critics while millions of people have insurance who never had it before. Millions of kids have insurance who would not otherwise have had it. People who have pre-existing conditions no longer are cancelled or can’t even get insurance. The donut hole is gone. Millions of people in lower income categories are now insured through Medicaid…Cost containment is beginning to work. The increase in cost net rate is going down. And so you are livid because it is getting better. That’s why you are livid…And the states that are denying their citizens further coverage under Medicaid, are essentially telling people, well get lost when it comes to healthcare…And you have a governor Mr. Chairman, who is running around this country talking about the evils of healthcare when millions of people are benefiting…Your frustration is millions and millions and millions of people are benefiting, have healthcare when they did not before.”
Scott Walker may be a “top-tier” candidate for the GOP nomination. But he is going to have a lot of trouble explaining why living standards for middle class citizens of his state are lagging so far behind those of neighboring Minnesota, under the leadership of its impressive Democratic Governor, Mark Dayton. Ann Markusen has the story at The American Prospect.
National Journal’s Shane Goldmacher explains why Facebook is “The Epicenter of the Presidential Race”: “There are new built-in Facebook tools that can help campaigns, too. Candidates can upload their databases of donor emails, find their corresponding profiles on the site, and ask Facebook to spit out ads to a “look-alike” universe of users whom they haven’t yet pitched for money. Or they can take the sign-ups from an event, upload them, and ask to advertise to people who look like them. While the best-funded campaigns will almost certainly do some of this modeling themselves, Facebook’s “look-alike” feature didn’t exist until 2013, and it promises to allow poorer campaigns to tap into sophisticated analytics on the cheap…BY FAR THE BIGGEST development for 2016 is video. “Video advertising wasn’t around in the 2012 cycle,” says Goudiss. “That’s going to be huge in 2016…Facebook says users log about 4 billion video views every day.”
Charles P. Pierce has a rollicking read at Esquire, riffing on the GOP presidential debate follies. He graciously presents “a modest proposal” for the GOP, accompanied by one of the best political cartoons of the 2015 silly season (Scott Walker must be represented by the little Koch sticker on the clown car).

Indications are, if Hillary Clinton is nominated, she has reason to hope that she can get close to Obama’s percentage of African American voters in the general election. At The Fix Janell Ross reports “June 2015 does seem a bit early to pronounce these hints of an enthusiasm deficit a fatal problem for the Democratic front-runner Clinton. Clinton’s support numbers aren’t that far away from Obama’s at this time in the 2008 and 2012 races, actually…In May, when Washington Post-ABC News pollsters asked black voting-age adults about their preferred presidential candidate in a Clinton-Jeb Bush horse race, Clinton claimed 88 percent. Bush got 8 percent. Similarly, in a June and July 2011 poll centered around an Obama-Romney race, Obama got the support of 90 percent of black voting-age adults and Romney got 6 percent. In February 2008, Obama had 85 percent of black voting age adults with him and John McCain just 9 percent. In both elections, Obama’s black-voter support eventually climbed above 90 percent but sat in the 80s in polls long before Election Day.” The challenge for Clinton is increasing the African American turnout in battleground states through enhanced registration to make up for the small, but not insignificant deficit the polls are showing in comparison to Obama’s numbers with this critical pro-Democratic constituency.
Democratic candidates and campaign workers should read Lindsay Abrams’s Salon.com post, “No one’s buying ALEC’s bullsh*t anymore: The Koch-backed group is losing the clean energy battle: America appears to finally be catching on to renewable energy’s clear benefits.” This could be an important development for mobilizing young voters in particular and immunizing them from GOP propaganda.
Another indication that Ohio’s nimble Republican Governor John Kasich is in it. Kasich has hired John Weaver, who served as a strategist for Jon Huntsman and John McCain and was reportedly “exiled” from the GOP by Karl Rove and worked for a while for the DCCC. Jonathan Chait believes Kasich’s excessive sanity will deny him the GOP nomination.
Yet another argument in support of Hillary Clinton’s rally-the-Democratic-base strategy, this one by WaPo’s Phillip Bump, emphasizing that the percentage of genuinely persuadable voters is much smaller than ’50-state-campaign’ advocates believe and pundits like David Brooks suggest.
Embarrassingly bad news for Jeb Bush: Rubio beats him by 8 points in head-to-head poll — in Florida. But Bush won by 6 when other Republican candidates were included in the poll.
Margaret Carlson explains at Bloomberg View why Vice President Biden is still taken very seriously as a potential presidential candidate: “Obama saw an asset in Biden’s experience as two-time chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and needed the political capital from his 40 years in Congress. The president leaned heavily on his wingman in managing the U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan, coping with the crisis in Ukraine after the failure of Clinton’s reset with Vladimir Putin, and overseeing the $787 billion economic stimulus package. Biden is often the “last person” in the room when a big decision is being made.”
NYT’s Ashley Parker has an update on the GOP’s shaky “digital strategy” for 2016. Parker reports that, of “626 political operatives with experience in digital, data and analytics on every presidential campaign since 2004…The breakdown was stark: 503 of those staff members were hired by Democratic campaigns, 123 by Republicans…They also found that 75 political companies or organizations were founded by those former campaign workers on the Democratic side, but only 19 on the Republican side.”
Richard Alba’s NYT op-ed, “The Myth of the White Minority” provides a timely reminder that, regardless of U.S. Census racial categories, how people think of their racial identities and how others perceive them may be quite different. That, along with an increasing trend in interracial marriages may have more political impact than Census head counts.
Meet the “best presidential bellwethers” since 1896, Ohio and New Mexico. Narrowing the time frame a bit to the last 100 years, Nevada becomes the most bellwether-worthy. But Crystal Ball’s Kyle Kondik adds, “The best predictor of the next election, for instance, might be a state with a below-average record over the past century: our home state of Virginia. After all, no state was closer to the national popular vote in the past two elections…”

At The Plum Line Paul Waldman explains why electoral college politics renders untenable the argument that presidential candidates should actively campaign in all 50 states. “…as long as we have an Electoral College and 48 of the 50 states assign their electors on a winner-take-all basis, there is absolutely no reason for candidates to campaign in states where they have no chance of winning. So they don’t. They also don’t campaign in states where they have no chance of losing…Let’s not forget that Barack Obama’s “far narrower path” to the White House was paved with the votes of a majority of the American electorate. Twice.”
Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman expand on the topic at The New York Times: “Aides acknowledged that Mrs. Clinton’s map would closely resemble Mr. Obama’s, with roughly the same eight or so key states as in the last two presidential elections, and with the possibility of competing in historically Republican states like Arizona where the demographics increasingly favor Democrats…If she won, it would suggest that the so-called Obama coalition of young, nonwhite and female voters is transferable to another Democrat. And it would validate the idea that energizing core supporters is more important in presidential contests than persuading those still undecided.” The authors quote Democratic strategist James Carville: “”Now the highest-premium voter is somebody with a high probability to vote for you and low probability to turn out. That’s the golden list. And that’s a humongous change in basic strategic doctrine.”
Early though it is in the 2016 campaign, National Journal’s formidable Charlie Cook ventures, “I predict that the only way this race isn’t going to be within 3 or 4 points is if one side nominates an awful candidate; the essential dynamics are setting it up to be at least as close at the 2012 contest.”
Nate Silver explains why “Polling Is Getting Harder, But It’s A Vital Check On Power.” Among Silver’s observations: “While horse-race polls represent a small fraction of all surveys, they provide for relatively rare “natural experiments” by allowing survey research techniques to be tested against objective real-world outcomes…Without accurate polling, government may end up losing its most powerful tool to know what the people who elect it really think.”
Jeff Greenfield posts at The Daily Beast on the reasons why an effective third party challenge is unlikely for 2016.
In his surgical gutting of Rand Paul’s “sweeping hyperbole” and “rhetorical recklessness,” former Bush speechwriter/columnist Michael Gerson has a well-stated — and revealing — warning for those who want to prematurely write off any GOP candidate’s nomination chances: “Pretty much any candidate in the Republican pack is one killer debate performance, one strong poll result, one especially good fundraising report away from a narrative of resurgence.”
At the Washington Post John Wagner has a retrospective of Martin O’Malley’s first foray into presidential politics — as a young campaign worker for Gary Hart. Wagner reports that many of Hart’s young activist alums are now working for O’Malley.
Brendan Nyhan notes at The Upshot: “Political scientists have found that debates happen after most campaigns have been decided. (The party conventions — which the news media often find boring but help remind people of their partisan affiliations and renew attention to politics among inattentive voters — are a more important civic event and one with greater consequences for the presidential race.)”
Other critics have noted the continuing descent into Republican stoogery of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” But Driftglass has a particularly brutal takedown.

At The Washington Post Catherine Rampell’s “The GOP’s shifting goal posts” adds some clarity to defining political ideology of candidates in the age of Republican gridlock.
Rampell begins by noting that current Democratic presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton, Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee are former Republicans (less convincing is her including Sen. Bernie Sanders in the used-to-be-conservative category because he is a self-described “Independent” and Martin O’Malley doesn’t really fit it very well). Rampell argues that these Democrats matured into a more thoughtful liberalism. But it’s a very different dynamic for Republicans:

Polarization in the House and Senate is now at the highest level since the end of Reconstruction, according to at least one measure. And it’s true that both parties have moved outward. But the polarization has been asymmetric, with Republicans having moved much further right than Democrats have moved left.
Today’s Republican Party is one that would likely consider Richard Nixon — who created the Environmental Protection Agency, championed affirmative action and advocated for national health care — too liberal. Even Reagan — who granted amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants, raised taxes 11 times and was willing to negotiate with the Soviets — might not survive a Republican presidential primary today.
If there isn’t room for Nixon and Reagan in today’s shrunken GOP tent, there definitely isn’t space for centrists such as Chafee and Webb. Webb’s views are eclectic, including a dose of economic populism, support for abortion rights, skepticism about immigration and opposition to gun control laws. Chafee likewise supports abortion rights and gay marriage. He also voted against the Bush tax cuts — on fiscally conservative grounds, mind you, since he thought they would irresponsibly widen the deficit. In a speech that I attended in 2003, Chafee lamented the rise of “right-wing fanatics” but said he truly believed Republican moderates would regain their clout, so he was committed to sticking with the party of his childhood. They didn’t, so he didn’t.
In other words, it’s wrong to say these Democratic presidential hopefuls left the Republican Party. The Republican Party left them.

Rampell’s case for “asymmetric polarization’ ought to help political journalists avoid getting hustled by Republican-inspired false equivalency scams. But it probably won’t, since so many political reporters seem to be too lazy, biased or conflict-averse to use her insights to edit out the memes they have been spoon-fed by the GOP.
One of these days a genuine Republican moderate — not a pseudo-libertarian who opposes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the very existence of unions and modest environmental protection measures — will come along and probably do pretty well. Today, however, we have so many Republican presidential candidates that they can’t figure out how to hold a functional debate, and not a one of them has the guts to stake out a moderate course. It’s a sad commentary on a once-great political party.