“Democrats Divided on Their Path to 2016,” argue Karen Tumulty and Sean Sullivan at Washington Post Politics. But I would say it’s a good thing for two reasons: (1.) The best time for a big tent party to debate major policy differences is right after an election to help shape the agenda (2.) The progressive case against the spending bill has to be presented in a big way to affirm the left voice in the Democratic Party and move the needle of ‘centrist’ Dems leftward. A consensus presidential candidate will need some left cred. I’d worry more if there were no divisions being aired at this point.
No doubt many Democrats who voted for the spending bill agree with Elizabeth Warren’s analysis, but felt like killing the bill would let the more Republican incoming congress pass an even worse bill and would run the risk of blaming the government shutdown on Democrats. Such purely strategic considerations notwithstanding, E. J. Dionne, Jr. makes a worthy point in his latest syndicated column in noting “negotiating in this way rewards those who use shutdown threats as a form of hostage-taking. If the reasonable side regularly makes concessions to unreason, the extremists win.”
Wouldn’t it be great if some “political athletes” would get involved in voter registration and turnout campaigns?
From Nate Cohn’s “Obama’s Immigration Move Benefits Democrats Where It Counts” at The Upshot: “A month after President Obama’s decision to defer deportation and offer work authorization to millions of undocumented immigrants, his action not only looks like a winner, but it also seems to be a fairly promising sign for Democrats after the disastrous midterm elections last month…A Pew Research poll conducted last week showed that 81 percent of Hispanics supported the immigration action, as did 64 percent in a Gallup poll conducted between Nov. 24 and Dec. 8.”
Re Brendan Nyhan’s Upshot post “Our Unrealistic Hopes for Presidents,” going forward, presidential accomplishments will depend even more on the President’s party having a healthy majority in both the Senate and House.
At The Federalist W. Bradford Wilcox explains why “It’s Not Just The Economy Devastating Working-Class Families.” Wilcox says “Andrew Cherlin’s magisterial “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America” provides a cogent, concise, and largely compelling account of why marriage is floundering in working-class communities, and flourishing in more affluent, college-educated ones. His account shows that conservatives “who insist that family changes are wholly a matter of cultural shifts” are as wrong as progressives who insist that America’s family problem is simply a “matter of economics alone.” Instead, Cherlin deftly points out how shifts in the economy and the culture have together combined to undercut the health of marriage and the stability of family life in working-class communities across the country.”
So what is the Democratic left’s alternative economic agenda? Sen. Bernie Sanders rolls it out in 12 points at 21st Century Democrats.
In his New York Review of Books article “Now We Face 2016!,” Michael Tomasky notes, “It must be said that the Democrats’ main problem in this election was economic. While many indicators are positive, wages in the middle are flat. In fact, median household income was lower in 2012 ($51,017) than it was in 2008 ($53,644), not a record that would inspire workers to vote.”
Dream on.

Progressive Democrats are angry about the sweet deal for bankers and big corporate contributors to political campaigns in the $1+ trillion spending bill, but fears of a shutdown may insure passage anyway, report Lori Montgomery and Sean Sullivan at the Washington Post. Elizabeth Warren is leading the vocal opposition to the bill: “…Warren said the changes in the spending bill “would let derivatives traders on Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money and get bailed out by the government when their risky bets threaten to blow up our financial system.” She added: “These are the same banks that nearly broke the economy in 2008 and destroyed millions of jobs.”
Let’s hope this trend for the worse is short-lived. As reported by Dalla Sussman’s “Americans Have Become More Accepting of Use of Torture” at The Upshot: “Fifty percent of Americans in an Associated Press-NORC poll conducted in August 2013 said torture against terrorism suspects to obtain information about terrorism activities could often or sometimes be justified, while 47 percent said it could rarely or never be justified. But partisanship is a factor, with Democrats less supportive than Republicans. In the A.P.-NORC poll, 40 percent of Democrats said torture could be justified sometimes or often. That rose to 55 percent among independents and 61 percent among Republicans.”
According to a nationwide, bipartisan survey conducted for the American Lung Association by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and Perception Insight, “By a more than 3-to-1 margin, voters believe that the EPA, not Congress, should be setting pollution standards. This includes large majorities of Democrats, Independents and Republicans…Voters rate clean air as a higher priority than reducing regulations on businesses. By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, voters rate clean air as a higher priority over reducing regulations with 80 percent of voters rating clean air as extremely or very important…A majority of voters (63 percent) support standards for methane emissions. After hearing a balanced debate on both sides, support increases overall to 66 percent. In particular, Republicans move from 39 percent supporting to 53 percent supporting.”
John Guida has yet another “Should Democrats Write Off the South?” ramble, this one a New York Times “OpTalk” post. Pretty much the same ole ‘let’s pretend VA, NC and FL are not in the south’ riff to facilitate projection of a simplistic grand strategy.
Dave Weigel’s “Can Democrats Ever Compete for the Deep South? Should They Even Bother?” at Bloomberg Politics and John Cassidy’s New Yorker article, “Should the Democrats Give Up on the South?” explore the same theme. FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten doubts the permanence of the GOP’s southern sweep.
There’s lots of buzz about Michael Tomasky’s zinger-rich Daily Beast post “It’s Time to Dump Dixie,” which eloquently vents the disgust many of us who live in the south feel about our midterm electorate. Hindsight is always 20-20, and the resources invested in the failed campaigns of Jason Carter and Michelle Nunn in GA, for example, might have produced better results for Kay Hagan, who lost in NC by less than 2 percent. But I would agree with Ed Kilgore’s reality check that, generally “the national party did not really undertake any “concessions” to the South. So there’s no reason to swear off the South as an evil conservative seductress tempting Democrats to stray from the paths of righteousness.” In a way, the Dems dumped Dixie a while back, rightly or wrongly. All of that said, most major southern cities have progressive mayors, and that’s where the party-building should continue.
If The New Republic somehow gets revived, the editors should give Ta-Nehisi Coates’s critique at The Atlantic about the magazine’s staff diversity and reporting on racial injustice a sober reading.
It’s way early for 2016 Senate race prognostication, but Crystal Ball’s Kyle Kondik estimates that “because the Democrats need to net four or five seats to take control, depending on the party of the next vice president, the Democrats’ opening odds to win the majority are significantly less than 50-50.” As for the House, Kondik says “Our early expectation is that the Democrats will net at least a few House seats in the 2016 election,” but not enough to win a majority. We say upsets can come from all directions.
At Democracy: A Journal of Ideas Eric Alterman explains why mainstream reformist Democrats need the party’s radical left flank: “Constructive radical critiques serve two primary purposes: They provide a vision for the future, and they remind liberals not to get too comfortable with the here and now…Much has changed in American liberalism since the New Deal, but nothing quite so much as the loss of its fighting spirit. “I welcome their hatred,” bragged the self-described “militant liberal” Franklin Roosevelt of the “economic royalists” who sought to retain a status quo that operated by and for the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Radicals of the day helped sustain some of that spirit, as well as planting many of the ideas that FDR and others helped bring to fruition. Our not-so-militant liberals of today could damn sure use some of that kind of help.”

From former DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (D-NY), reported by Kate Nocera at Buzzfeed: “The Republicans have done a much better job of laddering up taxes and spending where Democrats ladder down to 16-point plans. That’s our problem,” Israel said in an interview with BuzzFeed News. “We have to the ladder up to that one theme that voters identify with…. We’re building out an infrastructure we’ve never built out before.”
At The Plum Line Greg Sargent laments the Democrats’ position at the state level, and wonders if “the Democrats’ best near-term hope for winning back the House may be a Republican president who is unpopular enough to trigger big Dem wave elections, like those in 2006 and 2008.”
The “Dems should skip the south” argument is back, big-time, notes Sargent in another post. No one doubts that the GOP has a lock on most southern states, but the case is always compromised with the rather large exceptions of FL, NC and VA, the 3rd, 10th and 12th largest states. Still, the electoral votes of GA, the 8th most populous state, are probably out of reach in 2016, and it may be wiser to put campaign resources in the other three.
Kyle Trystad wonders “What’s Next for Michelle Nunn?” at Roll Call. Democrat Nunn lost her race for U.S. Senate to David Perdue by 8-points, but left a good impression on political observers, who noted that she became a much more confident debater and speaker by the end of the campaign. It seems unlikely, however, that she could best the popular Republican Senator Johnny Isakson in 2016, who perfectly fits the genteel reactionary style Georgians seem to like in their Senators.
James Hohmann’s Politico post, “Can Southern Democrats make a comeback? The populist, middle class “vision” that could turn it around for them” offers a slightly sunnier take on Democratic prospects in the south. Hohmann notes, “Former Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove said…Democrats need a broader, more comprehensive plan. “To me, the sweet-tea-and-grits crowd still likes our economic issues,” said Musgrove, who served from 2000 to 2004 and narrowly lost a 2008 Senate race. “Democrats need an economic message based on opportunity: education, job training, infrastructure rebuilding, and even health care – where voters know that Democrats can make a difference in these issues…[Atlanta Mayor Kasim] Reed praised Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine in 2012 and Gov. Terry McAuliffe in 2013 for not running away from Obama, espousing progressive principles and aggressively attacking their opponents. “The Virginia model is the model we need to follow in the South,” he said.
In similar vein Caitlin Huey-Burns explains “How Democrats Can Get Their Mojo Back” at Real Clear Politics.
The election of Montana Gov. Steve Bullock to head the Democratic Governors Association may signal a new emphasis on strengthening state parties in the mountain west, says Reid Wilson at The Washington Post.
For a disheartening tale of meddlesome digerati screwing around in political journalism, read Dana Milbank’s WaPo column, “The New Republic is dead, thanks to its owner, Chris Hughes.” TNR had threaded numerous crises over the decades to become a reliable source of nuanced progressive political analysis. But now it’s suddenly gone. Is there no chance that a wealthy liberal can somehow clean up this mess?
The demise of The New Republic is not the only indication that American journalism has taken a turn for the worse.

Michael Tomasky is lead dog for this edition of TDS Notes with his must-read Daily Beast post “Democrats Are Petrified of Defending Government–but They Need to Start.” There’s a lot here worth quoting, but I’ll just go with this excerpt and demand that every sentient Democrat read the rest of it: “This hatred of government we see in this country is sickeningly childish and hypocritical. The rot starts from the top–the appalling Republican members of Congress who voted against the 2009 stimulus and then had the audacity to go cut ribbons in their districts at venues given life because of that very stimulus bill they traduced as Satan’s handiwork…But it extends down to the millions of people who accept and applaud the right-wing rhetoric even as they suck on the government tit every day of their lives in one way or another, either without knowing it or (worse) knowing it but denying that they do because they’ve stuffed their own heads full of some nonsense narrative about how tough and independent they are.”
A month out from the red wave, Sean Miller of Campaigns & Elections ‘Shop Talk’ presents a panel discussion addressing a question many campaign managers must be wondering: “Is a Digital Obsession Handicapping Campaigns?”
At Brookings Fred Dews addresses an interesting question, “Is Compulsory Voting a Solution to America’s Low Voter Turnout and Political Polarization?” and quotes from a TDS founding editor: “Senior Fellow William Galston, the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies, imagines a “future in which Americans must vote, or face a penalty.” In that hypothetical future, Galston sees campaigns appealing to more moderate, swing voters who “preferred compromise to confrontation and civil discourse to scorched-earth rhetoric.” He sees the House and Senate “doing serious legislative work” and congressional leaders returning power to the committees, “where members relearned the art of compromise across party lines.” Read more at CNN.com.”
Here’s a variation on the tax credit for voting idea, sort of a carrot with an implied stick.
Joan Walsh explains why Rand Paul’s soulless, insipid response to the Eric Garner tragedy indicates that his presidential campaign will likely tank.
Paul Krugman weighs in on Sen. Schumer’s critique of President Obama’s decision to use his political capital to enact health care reform: “Democrats had their first chance in a generation to do what we should have done three generations ago, and ensure adequate health care for all of our citizens. It would have been incredibly cynical not to have seized that opportunity, and Democrats should be celebrating the fact that they did the right thing…If more Democrats had been willing to defend the best thing they’ve done in decades, rather than run away from their own achievement and implicitly concede that the smears against health reform were right, the politics of the issue might look very different today.”
As a presidential swing state with hot races for governor and U.S. Senate in 2016, North Carolina is likely to get more attention than any other state from both parties and the media, explains Alex Roarty at National Journal.
At Roll Call Alexis Levinson has an insightful explanation of Tom Tillis’s well-played endgame, resulting in his narrow (1.7 percent) victory, despite Kay Hagan’s exceptionally-good U.S. Senate campaign.
Here’s a nifty widget for determining whether you are in red, blue or purple territory at any given moment.

Sen. Chuck Schumer’s argument that Democrats must focus more intensely on addressing the concerns of the working/middle class has received a compelling plug from New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall, who explores the purely political downside of Obamacare in his latest column:

The views of Democratic advocates of Obamacare notwithstanding, public opinion has generally sided with Schumer.
A United Technologies/National Journal Congressional connection poll of 1,013 adults in mid-November 2013 found that by a 25-point margin, 59-34, respondents said that the health care law (which includes a major expansion of Medicaid to cover anyone up to 133 percent of the poverty line, and subsidies for the purchase of private insurance for those between 133 percent and 400 percent of the poverty line) would make things better for the poor. But respondents also said, by a 16-point margin, 49-33, that the law would make things worse for “people like you and your family.” White respondents were even more critical, with 58 percent saying that Obamacare would make things worse for people like you and your family, and 63 percent saying it would make things worse “for the middle class.”
Exit poll data from 1994, after President Clinton’s failed bid to pass health care reform, as well as from 2010 and 2014, provides further support for the Schumer argument. In each of those three midterm elections there were huge white defections from the Democratic Party; in 2010 and 2014, there were comparable defections of senior voters.
The loss of white supporters of House Democratic candidates can be seen in the data. In 1992, white voters split 50-50 between Democratic and Republican House candidates; in 1994, after the Hillarycare debacle, they voted Republican 58-42. By 2010 and 2014, whites voted for Republican House candidates by a 24-point margin, 62-38. The defection of seniors is most striking when comparing exit poll data from 2006 and 2010. In 2006, seniors of all races voted 52-48 for Democratic House candidates; in 2010, they voted 58-42 for Republican House candidates.

Edsall cites Schumer’s call for “an active and committed government that is on your side,” despite current cynicism about government. Schumer and Edsall agree that running away from government is political suicide.
It has been duly noted that Obamacare is, after all, a life-saving reform, which also has the potential for saving middle class taxpayers a huge bundle down the road. Edsall’s article is more about the relatively short-term political liabilities of the ACA. It is a trade-off, and only the passing of time will clarify whether it was a wise political strategy in the long term, as well.
There is an argument, which both Edsall and Schumer have not adequately addressed, that it’s more the weak sell behind Obamacare after enactment that has been destructive to Democratic prospects, rather than the ACA itself. Dems shouldn’t waste too much time playing Monday morning quarterback about the timing of the president’s strategy to enact health care reform. Edsall’s analysis nonetheless lends credence to Schumer’s point that, going forward, Democrats had better get talking, loud and clear, about economic reforms that unequivocally benefit the white working-class, as well as the poor and disadvantaged.
Democrats should be able to match or exceed President Obama’s 36 percent of the white working-class in 2012, with an unflinching focus on supporting reforms like: tax cuts for the middle class, coupled with tax hikes for the very wealthy; prosecuting abusive bankers; a minimum wage hike; strengthening labor union organizing; more federal aid for college students; tax incentives for investing in American jobs; expanding Social Security benefits (and scrapping the payroll tax cap); and an incessant call for infrastructure investments that can put millions of people to work.
Of course the Republicans will refuse to pass any of these reforms. But a laser focus on these issues and a refusal to get distracted will help Democrats rebrand both parties in a way that insures that the GOP will suffer a major rout in 2016.

Former Mayor of Denver Wellington Webb weighs in on where Dems went wrong in the midterm elections: “Unfortunately, we Democrats had little to no respect for, and therefore almost invisible identification with, the accomplishments of President Obama, who had accumulated a litany of successes. We, as Democrats, should have been proud of and owned up to our record of sterling accomplishments from 2008 to 2014: Gasoline prices are down, unemployment is down, health care accessibility is available to all, and, we even justifiably assassinated Osama Bin Laden. Not once, did we mention one Democratic success. This omission was the most shameful outcome of this 2014 election…We ran away from our successes – and Republicans fought against them, even though our efforts improved the lives of Americans. We should have been talking about everything from increasing the minimum wage across the nation, to fighting to protect Medicare and Social Security and providing a national security plan to protect America. But we didn’t. Shame on us Democrats for not amplifying our improvements to the country.”
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has a point here. But a big tent party is going to have its public spats, and right after an election is better than before one.
E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s “How Obama and the Democrats Can Save Their Agenda” cuts through the GOP’s triumphalist fog with a salient overview: “Now, it will be a Republican Congress vs. a Democratic president. Voters will have a much easier time seeing who stands for what…Obama and progressives should spend the next two years accomplishing as many useful things as they can, blocking regressive actions by Congress, and clarifying the choices facing the nation’s voters. And they’ll get much further by doing all three at once.”
Politico’s Alex Isenstadt takes a look at “The Obama Republicans,” who hold congressional seats in 26 districts President Obama won in 2012, and concludes that the thinning of the vulnerables in the Democratic herd may free up resources to win back a healthy portion of those seats in 2016.
At The Hill Tim Devaney and Lydia Wheeler report on “The GOP’s Strategy to block Obama’s Regs.”
The National Journal’s Alex Roarty probes a much-buzzed question, “Can Clinton Win Back the White Working Class?” and quotes TDS Founding Editor Ruy Teixeira: “Democrats, to win regularly, not just the presidency but other levels of government, they need to do better among … noncollege whites than they’ve been doing,” said Ruy Teixeira, a demographer who has written extensively about the electoral advantages inherent in the nation’s changing demographics. “You can’t … just rely on the coalition of the ascendant…Are they going to convince the majority of these voters that they have a plan and it’ll definitely work?” Teixeira asked. “Well, that’s probably not going to happen. You don’t have to convince most of these voters. You just have to convince a persuadable part of them.”
At The Plum Line Paul Waldman makes a good point, that the future makeup of the Supreme Court is a hugely consequential and substantive issue. Making it a pivotal issue with swing voters will require some creative messaging.
From Paul Rosenberg’s wonky Salon.com post, “Why are these clowns winning? Secrets of the right-wing brain“: “There are things going on in our social and political world that we don’t have names for–and because we don’t have names for them, we can’t think and talk about them coherently. So, we have conservatives on the one hand acting on their mythos, mistakenly believing it’s true as a matter of logos–which is one kind of incompetence–and yet, nonetheless reshaping reality through the power of reflexivity. (Think of how invading Iraq in response to 9/11 helped bring ISIS into existence, for example.) On the other hand, we have liberals seeing things only in terms of logos, who can’t understand how wildly mistaken conservatives can nonetheless reshape the world to reflect their paranoid fantasies, because they’re missing the crucial concept of reflexivity (and even the very concept of missing concepts, the concept of hypocognition)–which is another, very different, but very real form of incompetence.”
What took him so long?

“The states with consistently high turnout tend to make it easy to cast ballots. Maine, Minnesota and Wisconsin allow voters to register on Election Day. Colorado, Oregon and Washington state hold elections exclusively by mail. Washington often has high turnout but was closer to the middle of the pack this year at 41 percent.” — from Associated Press’s Terrence Petty and Jonathan J. Cooper.
Looking at it from other angles, six states, Maine, Wisconsin, Colorado, Alaska, Minnesota and Oregon had voter turnouts of more than 50 percent. Four of the six states, allow election day registration, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Reefer referenda were on the ballot in Alaska, Oregon and a couple of cities in Maine. Dems won races for both Governor and U.S. Senate in OR and MN, Gov in CO and Republicans lost the Gov race in AK. Republicans won the Senate seat in AK and ME and won the WI and ME Gov races.
At TPM Petty and Cooper also credit Oregon’s impressive turnout to “A century-old tradition of civic-mindedness that dates to the Progressive Era, convenient voting procedures and especially contentious races or ballot issues.”
From Ronald Brownstein’s “Shellacking: The Sequel“: “Voter preferences recorded in the Edison Research exit poll posted by CNN virtually reproduced the 2010 outcome. Pending possible small final adjustments, the national exit poll found that Republican House candidates captured 60 percent of whites, 10 percent of African-Americans, and 35 percent of Hispanics; the comparable 2010 numbers were 60 percent, 9 percent, and 38 percent. This year, Republicans won 43 percent of voters under 30, and 57 percent of voters over 65; the 2010 numbers were 42 percent and 59 percent. On Tuesday, 44 percent of voters approved of Obama’s job performance and 55 percent disapproved–exactly replicating 2010.” However, adds Brownstein, “Even if Republicans in 2016 match Tuesday’s dominant three-fifths showing among whites, they will almost certainly lose the White House if they can’t also narrow the Democrats’ traditional presidential-year edge with minorities–who could make up 30 percent of the electorate by then.”
HuffPo Pollster’s Ariel Edwards-Levy and Mark Blumenthal quote David M. Drucker: “Contrary to the many public opinion polls that showed Democrats and Republicans deadlocked heading into Election Day, most internal campaign surveys were correctly forecasting the GOP rout….Properly predicting the correct partisan and demographic turnout model was the difference. Campaigns and party committees got it right, while many, though not all, of the public polls were wrong…This time around, Republicans took seriously the Democrats’ strategy to expand the midterm electorate. In private conversations, Republican strategists working targeted House and Senate races often revealed that their own surveys showed a closer race than what was suggested by the public data….. in the homestretch of the campaign, Republicans started to notice that the voter data scores were revealing a crucial dynamic. The most likely Republican voters were also among the most interested in the upcoming elections, while the most likely Democratic voters were much less interested…”
At Facing South Chris Kromm explains how gerrymandering has eliminated so many southern white Democrats from the House of Representatives.
Republicans can keep spewing outrage about the president’s immigration initiative. But Jonathan Chait has an eloquent response from which Dems can craft their comments: “This is the point of contrast that Obama drew out clearly and effectively. After years of legislative muddle, he was able to detach himself completely from Congress and articulate his own values. His remarks, met with rapt attention in immigrant communities, continued his rhetorical tradition of expanding the American family, accurately presenting himself (and, by extension, his party) as an ally to marginalized Americans. Speaking with evident passion, the president deemed the children of undocumented immigrants “as American as Malia or Sasha.” He cited scripture: “We shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too.” He drew an emotional bond between immigrant communities and the Democratic Party’s ideal of compassion and tolerance. That bond will be his announcement’s most enduring legacy.”
At Campaign for America’s Future, Terrance Heath put it this way: “It’s actually a modest plan, but the beauty part is that Republicans can’t shut it down. Even better, conservatives worried that the president’s move was aimed making them look even crazier by driving their wingnut brethren to go new extremes. Republicans can’t bow to tea party rage without alienating Latinos. The president’s move left the GOP stuck between the voters it still needs now, and the voters it will need in the future — in order to have a future. Ya gotta admit, it’s a pretty slick move.”
One national news outlet pegged her chances of re-election at 12 percent, but Ann Kirkpatrick (AZ-1) didn’t just win, reports Abby Livingston at Roll Call. She expanded her margin of victory against the lavishly-funded Republican Speaker of the AZ House. Dems need to study such upset victories.

Among the most popular reforms the public would like to see the new congress address, according to a new NBC News/Wall St. Journal Poll: 82 percent support Congress providing access to lower the costs of student loans; 75 percent support increasing spending on infrastructure, roads and highways; 65 percent support Congress raising the minimum wage; 60 percent support approving emergency funding to deal with Ebola in West Africa; 59 percent support addressing climate change by limiting carbon emissions…So much for the Republican’s midterm ‘mandate.’
Democratic strategist Cornell Belcher makes the case that “Democrats didn’t lose because of Obama,” based on a poll indicating that a plurality (45%) of surveyed voters said the President was not a factor in their vote. Belcher argues further, that data also suggests benching Obama was a bad call.
It’s one thing to get your butt kicked. But you really don’t have to pay for it. Here’s a little smart phone app that identifies Koch brothers products for your supermarket convenience.
Charles Blow gets it mostly right, despite the misleading title of his column on “the solid south.” However, NC, FL and VA had close enough margins in big state-wide races to still be designated as purple states, despite the the midterm bummer.
I guess one of the side lessons of the midterm campaigns is that big-shot endorsements don’t mean much. Bill Clinton didn’t help re-elect Mark Pryor in Arkansas, Sam Nunn and Jimmy Carter didn’t help family members a whole lot in Georgia. But, hey, those are political figures. The real value of celebs in politics is that they help raise money. Still, I’m hoping that Stevie Wonder’s fund-raiser for Mary Landrieu in the Big Easy on Dec. 1 will give her a needed boost, same day as her run-off debate with GOP opponent Bill Cassidy.
So what was the impact of voter i.d. laws on the midterm outcomes? Trip Gabriel and Manny Fernandez have some answers at The New York Times.
2016 game on for former Democratic Sen. Jim Webb.
At Roll Call’s Rothenblog Stu Rothernberg has “Lessons for Democratic Strategists From 2014,” few of them encouraging.
If you haven’t yet seen “Web Therapy,” the over-the-top Showtime Series featuring Lisa Kudrow as Fiona, a manipulative narcissist who peddles three-minute ‘therapy’ sessions to her unfortunate clients, you can also check it out on Netflix. Fiona is married to a mainline lawyer Republican candidate for congress and ‘friend of John McCain’, but the real political fun is the burlesque of the upscale Republican mindset. Nary a soul, even among the characters played by a-list guest stars (Streep, Crystal, Hamm, Paltrow etc.) has a shred of interest in the commonweal, and all are grabbers.

Jonathan Martin’s “After Losses, Liberal and Centrist Democrats Square Off on Strategy” at the New York Times summarizes the central debate emerging within the Democratic party and offers an interesting observation: “Progressives pointed to three Democrats who ran as populists as models for success: Senator Al Franken of Minnesota, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Senator-elect Gary Peters of Michigan…Mr. Merkley, who focused on the loss of well-paying jobs, the cost of college tuition and opposition to trade deals that he said sent jobs overseas, won by 19 percentage points. While Democrats nationally lost whites without a college degree by 30 percentage points, Mr. Merkley narrowly carried that bloc.”
At Slate.com Jamelle Bouie explains “Why Democrats Can’t Win Over White Working-Class Voters.” Bouie observes, “The white working class is a huge subset of Americans. “Close to half of white men and 35-40 percent of white women in the labor force are still essentially ‘working class,’ ” finds liberal commentator Andrew Levison in his book The White Working Class Today. “Their occupations are basically blue collar rather than white collar and their earnings fall far below their white collar counterparts.” And in that category are groups of reachable voters: Union members and low-skilled young workers in particular. Democrats don’t have to win this group as much as they have to avoid a rout. If they can do that–and hold Republicans to a majority rather than a supermajority–then they can avoid the Republican waves of the recent midterm elections, and strengthen their presidential majority.”
Kevin Drum weighs in on the topic with “Can We Talk? Here’s Why the White Working Class Hates Democrats” at Mother Jones.
In similar vein, William Greider posts at The Nation on “How the Democratic Party Lost Its Soul: The Trouble Started When the party Abandoned Its Working-Class Base.” Greider arguers, “What we need is a rump formation of dissenters who will break free of the Democratic Party’s confines and set a new agenda that will build the good society rather than feed bloated wealth, disloyal corporations and absurd foreign wars. This is the politics the country needs: purposeful insurrection inside and outside party bounds, and a willingness to disrupt the regular order. And we need it now, to inject reality into the postelection spin war within the party.”
At Politico DLC Founder Al From explains the Dems midterm disaster “We were trying to sell a product the American people did not want to buy. On the economy, for example, Democrats offered fairness; most Americans wanted the opportunity to get ahead.” From suggests “The cornerstones of our retooled message must be economic growth and government reform.
The Upshot’s Nate Cohn argues that, contrary to pundit consensus on the midterms, “The evidence for a fairly successful Democratic turnout effort is straightforward. ”
At The Monitor’s DC Decoder Joshua Huder notes, “Democrats’ attempts to localize their races and distance themselves from the president also put distance between them and a solid national economy. During the campaigns, we heard very little about steady growth, lower unemployment, or the other factors that could have played well for Democrats. It’s entirely possible many did not believe these trends were good enough to campaign on. It’s also likely that many states in which these races took place still had struggling economies, which, according to a new paper by Stephen Ansolabehere, Marc Meredith, and Erik Snowberg in the journal Economics & Politics (November 2014), can affect perceptions of the national economy.”
Also at Politico, Tarini Parti reports on the debate about how Democrats can better leverage their financial resources in the next election.
Mark Miller’s “Five Takeaways on Retirement from the Midterm Elections” shows why seniors who voted for Republicans in the midterm elections may soon have a bad case of buyer’s remorse.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which re-earned its name by correctly picking winners in 97 percent of 2014 midterm contests, offers “14 From ’14: Quick Takes on the Midterm” by Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley. I doubt, however, that the three Marks, Begich, Udall or Pryor would agree with #14, though.
It might be wise for Democrats to study this race as a possible template for winning future house races.
At The Fix Aaron Blake explains “How urban voters failed Democrats in 2014.” Says Blake: “According to numbers crunched by Gene Ulm of the GOP polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, turnout in the most rural one-third of U.S. House districts was down 34 percent from 2012. In the middle third — think suburbs and exurbs — it was down 38 percent…And in the one-third most urban districts on the United States, it was down nearly half, 47 percent.”
Thomas B. Edsall has a New York Times op-ed exploring possible reasons for “The Demise of the White Democratic Voter.”
From Donna Brazile’s post-mortem on the election: “Tuesday was a bad day for Democrats, but not for Democratic policy priorities. For now, Democrats need to rethink the strategy for winning in 2016 — starting with rebuilding and re-tooling the party at the grassroots level, educating our candidates on handling the media, and having our values articulated in a distinctive, clear brand. If we don’t, we risk losing when the stakes are much larger.”
Greg Sargent has a warning at the Plum Line: “Democrats’ electoral disaster puts Obamacare in serious peril.” Sargent explains: “In the wake of the 2014 elections, roughly two dozen of these states have legislatures that are under GOP control. Nearly as many have GOP governors — meaning they are under total Republican control…GOP control will make states less likely to set up their own exchanges after a bad SCOTUS ruling…More conservative states were initially less likely to set up exchanges, so they were obviously more likely to end up on the federal exchange. But now that a SCOTUS ruling against the law looks like a real possibility, we’re looking at a new and ominous set of long-term consequences that could result from the Democrats’ electoral disaster.”
I wish this was true, but I have doubts.
Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson opines that “The right economic message can get the Democrats back on track.” A teaser: “Economic messages are serious business for Democrats. Republicans tend to win elections not when their own economic messages are plausible (such instances are too few to be statistically significant) but when the Democrats’ economic pitch fails to persuade many voters. Such was surely the case last week.”
WaPo’s Catherine Rampell provides some disturbing examples which indicate that “Voter suppression laws are already deciding elections.”