Scott Arceneaux, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party and a former director of the Louisiana Democratic Party has a post up at Politico, “Painting Dixie Blue: Can Democrats retake the South? Yes, and here’s how,” which is undoubtedly getting a read by strategists in both parties. Arceneaux begins with a bleak profile of the current political reality:

Often you need to hit bottom before you can start working your way back up. We Southern Democrats are basically at that point. With control of only two of 22 legislative bodies, three of 11 governors’ mansions and precious few other statewide offices, Southern Democrats are an endangered species indeed…Between 1992 and 2012 Republicans won the governorships and legislatures of all but two Southern states…And this year, Democrats aren’t even fielding a candidate for Alabama’s U.S. Senate race.

Arceneaux acknowledges the centrality of racial justice as an ongoing issue of concern in the region. He urges Dems to more vigorously embrace racial equality as a widely-held value most southerners can support, if put in a context of fairness and equal opportunity, two concepts that Republicans can’t even discuss with much credibility. Coupled with state-of-the-art voter targeting and turnout, such an approach could help Dems pick up a few percentage points in some statewide elections and well-chosen congressional and state legislative districts. Arceneaux adds:

This is something the Republicans–trapped by their base and their history–simply cannot do. And it is the core not only of their utter lack of support within the black community but also of their problem with Hispanic voters, the South’s fastest-growing demographic. Of the 10 states with the fastest-growing Hispanic populations from 2000 to 2011, all but two are in the South, with Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee topping the list, and Hispanics are more than twice as likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans. To win over these new voters, Republicans must change their understanding of their own history. The past year has shown just how hard that is. All Democrats must do is embrace our history.

Arceneaux argues that Dems can get a bigger bite of the votes of white southerners by tapping the region’s tradition of economic populism.

The crux of the problem for Southern Democrats comes down to this: While voters are moving beyond race, they still do not trust us with their money. For close to 30 years, we haven’t consistently told Southern voters why they should. Voters in the South trust Democrats on education, racial equality, health care and the environment, but we frankly can’t get swing voters to listen to us until they first trust us with their tax dollars. Republicans have run a relentless campaign to connect Southern Democrats with all things taboo to fiscally conservative white swing voters: higher taxes, welfare, government handouts and bigger government overall. All buttressed by racial overtones, mostly covertly, sometimes overtly.
Democrats can get this right. Populism runs deep in the South. And Southern voters, like those nationally, are becoming more sensitive to the battle of Wall Street vs. Main Street, of income inequality and expanding opportunity. Swing voters in places like Florida’s I-4 corridor and the suburbs of Atlanta and Charlotte are getting it. Democrats need to stop talking about the difference between big government and smaller government, higher or lower taxes, more or fewer programs…Democrats need to be talking instead about effective and efficient government that works for people, not against them. We need to stop being afraid to talk about money, and start talking about money in terms of helping the most people at the least cost…

Best of all, argues Arceneaux, this is precisely where Republicans are weakest: “They no longer talk about less government; they are talking about no government. That is not where voters are.” He cites Clinton as an excellent role model for Democratic candidates in the south, and further,

To win, Southern Democrats must seize the true populist message: Government must work, it must work for you, not the special interests, and it should work in the most effective and efficient way. Voters can trust us with their tax dollars, and we need to tell them why. James Carville, another Louisiana native son, said it best more than 20 years ago: It’s the economy, stupid. In other words, it’s the money. If you can’t talk about it in a way that makes voters comfortable, you can’t win.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle for Dems, Arceneaux believes, is the failure to invest in building the Democraic party in the south. He notes that the Mississippi Democratic party has about $3,000 banked, “barely enough to keep the lights on.” That’s a sorry cash position, especially in a state that has the largest percentage of African Americans. Virginia, on the other hand, is ‘exhibit A’ for what can happen when Dems make an adequate investment in a southern state:

Add to this a strong state party built in the early 2000s by Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine when they were governors, and the recipe for success is clear. Cutting-edge technology and modeling, one of the best voter files in the country and well-nurtured grass roots, coupled with messaging centered on fiscal responsibility (pioneered by Warner in 2001), produced a Democratic sweep in 2013 for the first time since the 1960s.

Arceneaux points to other states like FL, NC, GA and even TX as states where Dems could benefit from similar strategic messaging and resource investment. Arceneaux’s post is accompanied by an informative sidebar on 2014 Dem prospects in particular states, “Dixie Blues,” by Margaret Slattery.

Sean Trende has a wonky post up at RCP, “How Likely Are Democrats to Lose the Senate?” concluding: “…This is a very, very challenging map for Democrats. As things presently stand, the map probably makes them underdogs to hold the Senate. Barring some sort of change in the national environment or meltdown in the Republican nominations process — neither of which is impossible — Democrats are likely in for a very long night on Nov. 4.”
Alan I Abramowitz argues at the Crystal Ball that “The results of a simple but extremely accurate midterm election forecasting model indicate that the 2014 U.S. House elections are likely to result in minimal change in the party balance of power…Right now, the most likely outcome of the House elections would appear to be a near standoff.”
At Post Politics Aaron Blake flags a much-trumpeted YouGov poll alleging that “71 percent of people who supported President Obama in 2012 now said that they regret their vote.” Blake points out that the sample asked was 36 people, or “closer to 6 percent” of the larger poll respondents, and therefore…quite lame.
At The Fix Chris Cillizza makes the case that the Dems need new blood at the top of the ticket in 2016, and Hillary doesn’t have it. But he doesn’t adequately address Clinton’s potential for mobilizing women voters on an unprecedented scale, nor the positive feelings millions of Americans have about the Clinton era’s economic prosperity.
At the Wall St. journal (where else?), Karl Rove explains how he intends to counter Democrats ‘ObamaCare Strategy.”
Wolf Blitzer called out Ted Nugent for calling President Obama a “subhuman mongrel”: — “That’s what the Nazis called Jews to justify the genocide of the Jewish community,” Blitzer said in a Feb. 18, 2014, interview. “They called them untermenschen, subhuman mongrels. If you read some of the literature that the Nazis put out there, there is a long history of that specific phrase he used involving the president of the United States.” Nugent cancelled his appearance, and then Blitzer made Newt Gingrich own his defense of Nugent: “Hold on a second, Newt. In this particular case, the man who wants to be the next governor of Texas is willing to go out there and embrace someone who refers to our president as a subhuman mongrel.”
Do read Ashley Alman’s HuffPo post, “Turns Out Anti-Union Volkswagen Workers May Have Screwed Themselves And The South,” which notes: “”I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the South again,” said works council leader Bernd Osterloh…”If co-determination isn’t guaranteed in the first place, we as workers will hardly be able to vote in favor” of building another plant in the right-to-work South, Osterloh added.”
The slogan that should have been plastered all over Chattanooga:

Meddle on, Dems.

Bill Schneider’s Reuters post “What America’s leftward shift means for elections” provides a dollop of hope for progressive Democrats. As Schneider explains:

With each new poll, it’s becoming clear that the United States is shifting to the left. A majority of Americans now supports same-sex marriage. And legalization of marijuana. And normalization of relations with Cuba.
Gallup reports that, in 2013, the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as liberals reached its highest level since 1992. True, it’s only 23 percent. Conservatives, at 38 percent, still outnumber liberals. But the trend has been slowly and steadily upward for liberals since 1996, when it was 16 percent.
This shift is due entirely to Democrats becoming more liberal — 29 percent of Democrats in 2000, 43 percent in 2013. At the same time, Democrats have won the national popular vote in five out of the six presidential elections since 1992 (all but 2004). Barack Obama won a majority of the popular vote twice — something Bill Clinton couldn’t do.

Schneider adds that “a coalition of 10 Democratic constituencies that united to elect and re-elect Obama: young voters, working women, single mothers, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Jews, gays, educated professionals and the “unchurched” is growing. But he concedes that the Republicans still have an edge in manipulating redistricting, House incumbency and geographic clustering.
Schneider believes that the GOP blockade will hold until 2022, when post-census redistricting will kick in. Let’s hope that he is underestimating the pro-Democratic demographic transformation of the Americn electorate now underway and the Dems’ improving voter targeting and turnout.

I could be wrong. But I think Democratic candidate for Governor of Texas Wendy Davis just got a huge gift in the form of GOP front-runner Greg Abbott’s decision to campaign with Ted Nugent. Here’s how Manny Fernandez reports it at the New York Times:

Attorney General Greg Abbott of Texas, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for governor, on Tuesday defended his decision to campaign with the pro-gun musician and conservative commentator Ted Nugent a month after Mr. Nugent called President Obama a “communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel.”
The campaign events and Mr. Nugent’s long history of inflammatory speech stirred outrage among Democrats in the state, including Mr. Abbott’s main Democratic rival, State Senator Wendy Davis, who called the decision to campaign with Mr. Nugent “an insult to every Texan.”

The tone-deaf Abbott responded by calling The Nuge “a fighter for freedom” and The Nuge gushed that Abbott is “my friend” and “my blood brother.” Fernandez quotes the Texas Democratic Chairman’s take:

“He spews hate against our first African-American president and in return, Attorney General Greg Abbott welcomes him to the campaign trail,” Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said of Mr. Nugent in a statement. “Is this how Abbott celebrates Black History Month?”

There are some other problems Nugent brings to the GOP campaign, as Fernandez explains:

Democrats had no shortage of comments or behavior from Mr. Nugent’s past at which to take offense. They called him a “sexual predator,” citing an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music” that stated he had admitted to liaisons with underage girls and had persuaded one girl’s mother to sign papers making him the girl’s legal guardian.
In April 2012, Mr. Nugent was interviewed by the Secret Service after he appeared to threaten Mr. Obama at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting by saying that if the president was re-elected, “I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”

It’s hard to understand why Abbott would want to creep out his campaign with the likes of Nugent, who has called feminists “fat pigs” and “dirty whores,” according to Shelley Kofler’s report at KERA News. Where is the value added? He already had the right-wing nut vote.
But it’s not hard to understand how Abbott’s blood brother could help energize African American voters to turn out in impressive numbers. Abbott may have also given military veterans a reason to vote against him, if this report on Nugent’s bragging about his repulsive draft-dodging strategy is accurate.
The wild card here is the Texas media, specifically whether or not they give Abbott a free ride on his blundering decision to campaign with Nugent. If they do their job, Davis should pick up a few points on Abbott.

In addition to Ed Kilgore’s excellent post on the “Chattanooga Labor Fiasco” below, you may want to take a gander at Chris Kromm’s Facing South post “3 lessons from the VW union defeat in Tennessee,” which notes, “If 44 workers at Volkwagen’s factory in Chattanooga, Tenn. — less than 3 percent of the plant’s 1,560 hourly employees — had voted “yes” instead of “no” in last week’s closely-followed union election, the United Auto Workers and labor would be celebrating a “historic” victory in the South.”
Kromm continues, noting “three takeaways” from the failed UAW campaign, abbreviated here:

1) Where Was the “Neutrality?”…Make no mistake, the UAW was operating in a hostile, anti-union climate…In the weeks leading up to the vote, Republican Tennessee lawmakers unleashed a steady stream of threats about the supposed economic consequences of voting in a union, variously claiming that, if the UAW were successful, VW would nix future plans to produce a mid-size SUV in Tennessee and that state lawmakers would halt business subsidies to VW. Nationally, an offshoot of GOP activist Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform sponsored billboards around Chattanooga warning that the UAW spends millions to elect liberal politicians including “BARACK OBAMA” and that “UAW Wants Your Guns.”…
2. Union Organizing Takes Time:…Interestingly, Tennessee is where labor made one of its first attempts to organize international auto makers, at the Nissan Motors plant in Smyrna. As The Christian Science Monitor reported, the Tennessee Nissan workers “voted by a 2-to-1 margin not to accept UAW representation,” 1,622 to 711…Compared to the Nissan campaign, the UAW did much better in Chattanooga last week, winning more than 47 percent of the vote in their first effort since VW opened the plant in 2011. While certainly a setback, the results suggest the UAW and other unions have a base of support they can build on — if they dig in for the long haul.
3) The Importance of Community and Education:..Given the deep resistance to unions among many Southern leaders, a key ingredient to most successful organizing campaigns in the region has been mobilizing community support. Building alliances with faith, civic and other leaders, creating a sense of movement that goes beyond the workplace, has been critical to winning many union drives in the South…One criticism leveled at the UAW is that organizers didn’t fully engage its allies in Tennessee. As Elk reports, some in Chattanooga felt the UAW was “lukewarm” in its relations with the broader community: “Community activists said they had a hard time finding ways to coordinate solidarity efforts with the UAW, whose campaign they saw as insular rather than community-based.”

And, as Kilgore notes “…Now the very existence of private-sector unions, a familiar part of the American landscape for most of the last century, is under attack from Republican politicians.” This gets at the crux of the problem. Democrats have got to get a lot more vocal on this topic. Republicans are able to do their worst because they are operating in a vacuum created by too much silence on the part of Democratic leaders.
It’s good that President Obama and a few other Dems have spoken out on the topic. And there certainly should be an investigation into violation of labor law in the VW vote. Our fortunes are inextricably tied to the future of the Labor movement. All of that said, it does appear that too many Democratic leaders have been a little mousey on the topic. It’s time for the lions to roar.

In her NYT article “On Health Act, Democrats Run to Mend What G.O.P. Aims to End,” Ashley Parker notes, “…Party leaders have decided on an aggressive new strategy to address the widespread unease with the health care law, urging Democratic candidates to talk openly about the law’s problems while also offering their own prescriptions to fix them…The shift represents an abrupt change from 2010, when House Democrats tried to ignore the law entirely and “got their clocks cleaned,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, referring to the more than 60 seats that Republicans picked up to regain control of the House…”Part of what we learned in 2010 is that this is a real issue of concern to voters and you can’t dodge it, you have to take it on, and I think Democrats are much more ready and willing to do that in 2014,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who has done surveys for Democrats on the law. “We certainly have enough evidence now that this is not a fight you can win if you are in a defensive crouch.”
At The Fix, Sean Sullivan reviews — and shows — “…the four distinct types of Obamacare ads flooding the airwaves.”
The New Republic’s “Want to Realize the Civil Rights Act’s Dream? Apply it to Union Rights, Too” by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit leads with “It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and here is what it needs as a birthday present: a big push to strengthen unions–the institutions best positioned to help African American and Latino workers more fully enjoy the American Dream.”
Robert Reich explains “America’s ‘We’ Problem.”: “The pronouns “we” and “they” are the most important of all political words. They demarcate who’s within the sphere of mutual responsibility, and who’s not. Someone within that sphere who’s needy is one of “us” — an extension of our family, friends, community, tribe — and deserving of help. But needy people outside that sphere are “them,” presumed undeserving unless proved otherwise.”
At The Cap Times, Jesse Opoien reports on “A musical marketing campaign to encourage people to sign up for health insurance has entered its next phase: the remix…In November, a group of local musicians and music promoters recorded a song called “Sing Forward,” with Wisconsin-themed lyrics promoting the Affordable Care Act’s new health insurance exchanges.”
In their New York Times article “Trade Pact With Asia Faces Imposing Hurdle: Midterm Politics,” Mark Landler and Jonathan Weisman probe the politics of pending trade agreements and note the challenge Dems face in formulating a winning trade policy in the context of the 2014 elections: “Trade has long divided Democrats, pitting their business-friendly moderate wing against key allies in organized labor. And in the midterm elections, when key Democratic voting blocs tend to stay home, the party badly needs the unions to get out the vote in November.”
in his post, “How the Government Blows Away the “Private Sector” in Delivering Services Cities like Tulsa, San Diego and Minneapolis are turning the tide back to public ownership,” Alternet’s David Morris shreds a much-treasured GOP myth.
WaPo’s Dan Balz and Philip Rucker ask “For Democrats looking to post-Obama era, how populist a future?” and they offer a number of interesting observations, including “”We’ve seen a gender gap for two decades now, but what we saw in 2012 was a larger step toward women voters standing with the Democrats in a much, much larger way,” said Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, a group that helps elect pro-choice Democratic women. “There’s such a contrast right now between the two parties on issues impacting women and families.”
Mark Blumenthal’s “HUFFPOLLSTER: Do Polls Find Support For Obama Executive Orders? It Depends On How Pollsters Ask” shows how inherent bias in poll questions can skew results.

From Ed O’Keefe’s WaPo article “House Democrats plot strategy against long odds to win back chamber“:

…Democrats are likely to crow about how House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) relied overwhelmingly on Democrats to approve an extension of federal borrowing authority. Just 28 Republicans voted for the measure, joined by all but two voting Democrats.
“This feels like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ — totally upside down,” said Rep Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “The majority is supposed to be the party that moves us forward because they run the ship.
“If Republicans shirk their responsibility as the majority party in the House of Representatives, we’re ready to be responsible, we’re ready to lead,” he added.
Rep. Jim Larson (D-Conn.), who preceded Becerra as caucus chairman, said that Democratic unity will give voters a clear choice this year. “More years of obstruction or at least two more years of a presidency where there’s a shot to get something done,” he said.

Not a bad pitch. Still winning 17 or more seats in the House during an Administration’s second midterm election has proven to be a daunting challenge. O’Keefe didn’t discuss the possibility of an anti-incumbent wave, which would help Dems in the House, while hurting them in the Senate. Nor did he get into the Democrat’s growing edge in ground game voter-targeting, demographic transformations or recent public opinion trends indicating that high-tuirnout seniors, particularly senior women may be souring on the GOP.
O’Keefe quotes House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, who told reporters this week that “GOP divisions and his party’s impressive fundraising totals “give me great optimism that we’re going to win back the House.” While the Koch Brothers may give the GOP a fund-raising edge leading up to election day, it does seem as if Republicans’ internal divisions are on track to widen, rather than narrow.
It’s not like the Republicans can impress voters with their charismatic candidates or creative policy ideas. Indeed, their confidence about keeping a House majority rests almost entirely on historical precedent, continued economic decline and worsening Obamacare problems, as well as denial of their identity as the party of gridlock. Given all of that, a Dem pick-up of 17 House seats doesn’t seem so impossible, especially if Dems get a break or two in the months ahead, such as an economic uptick and an improved image for Obamacare.

From Ashley Parker’s New York Times article, “Democrats Aim for a 2014 More Like 2012 and 2008“: “The Democrats’ plan to hold on to their narrow Senate majority goes by the name “Bannock Street project.” It runs through 10 states, includes a $60 million investment and requires more than 4,000 paid staff members. And the effort will need all of that — and perhaps more — to achieve its goal, which is nothing short of changing the character of the electorate in a midterm cycle…”The question is whether the party’s Obama-era volunteer base will replicate itself for a Mark Pryor or a Mary Landrieu or a Kay Hagan,” said Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns,” referring to three vulnerable incumbent Democratic senators…Campaigns are realizing that the smartest way to win the next vote is by mobilizing a nonvoter than by trying to win over a voter.”
Here’s a very interesting stat from CNN Political Ticker: “According to the CNN/ORC International poll, which was released Friday, 55% of Americans surveyed say the GOP doesn’t understand women. That number rises to 59% among all women and 64% among women over 50.” It suggests that the Democrats’ best shot at getting a bigger bite of the high-turnout senior vote in non-presidential election years might be to focus on the concerns of senior women.
And here’s an encouraging report from Dan Roberts’ post at The Guardian “Senior Democrats set out strategy in preparation for tough Senate battle“: “Democrats face a common challenge of midterm election due to the propensity for low turnout and are spending millions on voter registration drives in cities such as Atlanta, where an estimated 400,000 African Americans are unregistered.”
What is it with the Republicans’ utterly shameless penchant for deceit as a political tactic? Apparently voter suppression is not enough. Now we have ‘decepticon’ political ads by the NRCC, as Dan Rothberg reports in his L.A. Times post “Republican Party wing creates 18 fake websites for Democrats.” Is it too much to ask that they be called to account for violating FEC rules and the spirit of honest discourse?
At the Plumline Greg Sargent addresses an important question: “Can Dems go on offense over Medicaid expansion in red states?” and notes “The politics of the Medicaid expansion have taken on a kind of life of their own, separate from Obamacare overall. It has allowed red state Dems to embrace parts of the law while implicitly hitting Republicans over their ideological fixation on full repeal, which would take health coverage away from millions. These Dems don’t talk about Obamacare, obviously. But they stand up for the core goal of expanding coverage to those who lack it (as Michelle Nunn has done by calling for the expansion in Georgia), and criticize Republicans for wanting to take it away from folks (as Alison Lundergan Grimes has done in Kentucky, where the expansion is in full force).”
Democrats who want to win statewide elections should be encouraged by the example of Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, who is riding a 54 percent approval rate, according to a new Bluegrass poll conducted by SurveyUSA for the Louisville Courier-Journal, WHAS11, the Lexington Herald-Leader and WKYT-TV in Lexington. According to Joseph Garth’s Courier-Journal report, “The poll also found that a small plurality of Kentucky voters said they will vote for Democrats in state House races this year” and a plurality of voters favor Beshear in all age groups.
At CBS News Anthony Salvanto probes “How presidential approval can make or break a midterm.”
For an assessment of Democratic prospects in other “red” states, read “How progressives can turn the deep South blue” by former NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. Among the insights provided by Jealous in his MSNBC post: “There are more than 600,000 unregistered black Americans in Georgia, plus thousands of unregistered Latinos, Asian-Americans, women and millennials. At an average cost of $12 per registration, it would cost less than $8 million to register virtually all of Georgia’s unregistered black voters. If even half of them had voted for President Obama in 2012, we would be having a very different conversation today.” Jealous quotes Stacy Abrams, Minority Leader in the GA state assembly: “2014 is a transformational year. Demography may be destiny, but voter registration is the pathway to the future in Georgia.”
Focusing on the defeat of unemployment benefits extension for the long-term jobless, at The Atlantic James Fallows shames his colleagues in the media for characterizing legislation defeated by filibusters as “failed” measures, and provides several examples in which they don’t even mention that the bill was filibustered. Fallows adds: “Fun fact for the day: By my ballpark count, the 59 senators who voted for the bill represented states with just less than 70 percent of the U.S. population. The 41 who voted no represented just more than 30 percent of the population. With only 70 percent support, no wonder the bill “failed.”

A Daily Kos Jed Lewison comments on Gov. Christie’s latest shift to the “incompetent buffoon defense,” which Lewison describes as: “Christie is basically saying that people shouldn’t hold it against him that he’s got a bunch of staffers who did something bad because he’s such an out-of-touch boss that he didn’t know what they were up to.” Or how about, “Don’t blame me just because my judgement in selecting people for major staff posts and appointments sucks bad.”
NYT’s Michael Barbaro, Nicholas Confessore and Jonathan Martin explain how “Democrats Aim to Capitalize on Christie Problems,” basically by making him poster-boy for GOP Governors: “…Democrats are determined to transform him into a toxic figure, whose name is synonymous with the ugliest elements of politics: partisan bullying and backslapping cronyism…”If Republican governors want to keep embracing him as their chair, as their model for the future, we’re happy to help them out,” said Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.”
Olivia Nuzzi has a Politico profile, “The man Who Keeps Christie Up at Night,” of the most likely beneficiary of the Christie mess, Assemblyman John Wisniewski, whose impressive commentary on the Christie debacle has put him on the short list for Democratic nominations for Gov. in New Jersey.
Can the Koch Brothers buy the 2014 elections? WaPo’s Matea Gold has a scary update on record-level early spending to attack Democratic candidates by the Koch Brother’s Americans for Prosperity.
Greg Sargent elaborates at The Plum Line: “Meanwhile, in North Carolina, the source says, AFP as of today has spent a staggering $7.2 million against Senator Kay Hagan, versus only $1.4 million by the SMP…Those are lopsided imbalances. And it’s going to get a lot worse. Dems expect the Koch network to spend as much as $200 million this cycle. Meanwhile, the money from the left just isn’t there yet, Dems say privately. If it were, you’d see groups like the Senate Majority PAC, Emily’s List, and the League of Conservation Voters (which is up with an ad hitting Scott Brown in New Hampshire) spending much more in these races, to match AFP’s spending.”
Good news for Marianne Williamson: Sandra Fluke has decided to run for CA state senate instead of Waxman’s House seat. But Williamson will likely face formidable opposition anyway.
David Callahan has an interesting post at Demos Policy Shop discussing the political ramifications of the terms “middle class” and “working class.” He crunches some self-i.d. data and observes “The term “working class” isn’t uttered so often by politicians in a stand alone way..The term almost seems dated, as if whoever uses it is stuck in a Laverne and Shirley re-run. Sure, we hear a lot about low-wage workers and “working families,” but the clear class component here has drifted quietly out of political and media discourse — even though tens of millions of Americans still think of themselves as working class…You’d think that progressives, at least, would talk often about the working class, but that’s not really the case. Instead, we prefer “working families,” which is bad choice for a few reasons — starting with the fact that many affluent professionals actually work longer hours than low-wage workers, who are more likely to be underemployed or unemployed. But the big problem is that when we drop the word “class,” we lose that all-important reminder that there is a rigid economic hierarchy in America, more rigid than in many European countries, according to mobility research.”
At ProPublica Charles Ornstein addresses “As the Media Gets Bored With Obamacare, Is the Public Starting to Get on Board?” Lots of interesting detail here, including: “…we are close to being able to say that the March 31 open enrollment period is already a success. And let me break it down for you. We have 2.2 million people who’ve already selected plans through the exchanges [as of the end of December], which is about 30 percent of what CBO [the Congressional Budget Office] predicted. We have about 6 million people who have been found eligible to enroll in Medicaid, and we have 3 million young adults who weren’t previously insured who are now insured under their parents’ policies. …You’ve got about 11 million people who’ve been touched by the law, maybe as many as 15 million. That’s really quite an astonishing number for the first six months.”
Here’s why Georgia Democrats are hoping that Rep. Paul Broun will get the keys to the GOP clown car.

When the only two Democratic Presidents to get re-elected since FDR huddle with fellow Democrats on 2014 campaign strategy, it’s a good idea for those who would rather not see a Republican takeover of congress to start paying attention. Begin with Marshall Cohen’s CBS News post “Obama, Bill Clinton huddle with Democrats to plot 2014 strategy,” which sets the stage for the meeting, which begins today at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C.
Cohen touches on some key concerns about the current political moment, including:

Democrats are in a precarious position right now: Mr. Obama’s approval ratings are sagging, and Democrats are fighting to hold onto the Senate. Some insiders have already given up on winning back the House.
Senate Democrats currently have a 55-45 majority, but they could lose that edge in November.
Top Republican targets include Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mark Begich of Alaska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina. Democratic retirements in West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana and Iowa haven’t made the map any friendlier for the party as it tries to cling on to control.
“Republicans have no equivalently vulnerable incumbents up in blue states,” CBS News elections director Anthony Salvanto recently wrote. “In fact, none of the Republican seats (up for re-election), except Maine, are in states carried by President Obama.”

Holding the Senate, let alone cutting into the Republicans’ House majority, is a daunting challenge. Cohen’s emphasis on the negative political fallout of the Affordable Care Act seems a little overstated, since there are some very encouraging trends which could offset GOP messaging on the issue (see here, here and here, for example). On the other hand, he doesn’t discuss what may be the GOP’s biggest asset, the Koch brothers early money-bombing, which is well underway and has been cited in turning polls against Dem incumbents like Sen. Kay Hagan.
But Cohen does note what will likely be the Democrats’ strongest messaging point: “Meanwhile, top Democrats hope their new message of income inequality will strike a chord with voters this election cycle.” But Jackie Calmes has noted in the New York Times:

To Republicans, talk of income inequality smacks of class warfare and redistribution of wealth, of taxing the rich to give to the poor. They prefer to emphasize opportunity and upward mobility, and Democrats, too, have come to see that frame as more appealing to middle-class voters in this midterm election year.

Opportunity and upward mobility for the middle class is a solid aspirational theme for Democrats. But it shouldn’t distract Dems from the compelling need to call out the Republicans, loud and clear, for their all-out assault on the economic well-being of the middle class. Indeed, runaway economic inequality has become so grotesque that Democrats must make it a central theme of campaign 2014 until a critical mass of swing voters get it that today’s Republicans are united around one key goal — screwing working people to enrich the wealthy even more.