Jackie Calmes reports at The New York Times that “Democrats Try Wooing Ones Who Got Away: White Men” Calmes quotes TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeira: “”You can’t just give Republicans a clear field to play for the votes of white working-class men without putting up some sort of a fight because that just allows them to run the table with these voters, thereby potentially offsetting your burgeoning advantage among minorities, single women, millennials,” said Ruy Teixeira, an analyst at the left-leaning Center for American Progress.”
Pot is a big, possibly pivotal issue in the PA governor’s race. Thomas Fitzgerald of the Philly Inquirer explains why.
At HuffPo Sabrina Siddiqui takes a look at MoveOn’s billboard campaign, and notes: “MoveOn’s billboard campaign, which begins on March 3, will detail how many local residents have been denied health care coverage without the expansion. The Texas billboard, for example, takes aim at Republican Gov. Rick Perry and reads: “Welcome to Texas! Where Gov. Perry has denied 1,046,000 Texans health care and now all Texans are paying for it. It’s like a whole other country…A similar billboard in Florida knocks Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who endorsed the Medicaid expansion but went silent after the state’s GOP-led legislature rejected it. “Welcome to Florida! Where 763,000 people are denied health care because Gov. Scott won’t fight to expand Medicaid,” the sign reads.”
Half of all Republican U.S. Senators running in 2014 face primary challenges, reports Sean Sullivan at The Fix.
Jennifer L. Clark and DeNora Getachew report at MSNBC that voter suppression is finally getting some serious push-back in the states: “In fact, state legislation introduced this year shows real momentum toward improving our elections in every corner of the map. In the first three weeks of 2014 alone, at least 190 bills that would expand access to registration and voting were introduced in 31 states, compared to only 49 bills in 19 states that would restrict access, according to an analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice.”
At In These Times Sarah Jaffe reports on the emergence of the progressive Working Families Party, its successes and how it may affect Democratic prospects in key races.
From Lloyd Green’s Daily Beast post, “Republicans Better Mind the Modernity Gap To Catch Up to Clinton“: “Sasha Issenberg, the politics and tech watcher summed-up the Republicans’ tech predicament this way, “With an eager pool of academic collaborators in political science, behavioral psychology, and economics linking up with curious political operatives and hacks, the left has birthed an unexpected subculture. It now contains a full-fledged electioneering intelligentsia, focused on integrating large-scale survey research with randomized experimental methods to isolate particular populations that can be moved by political contact.” In other words, the art of electioneering is stacked in favor of the Democrats.”
At Crooks & Liars Howie Klein makes the case that the DSCC ought to be providing strong support for Maine’s Shenna Bellows in her campaign for senate against Republican Susan Collins. Klein notes that President Obama got 56 percent of the vote in Maine and Bellows is an astute progressive, much like Elizabeth Warren. Bellows’ ActBlue page is right here.
A better question than this one might be, can Democrats craft a message that resonates with both progressives and moderates?

An interesting tidbit from a New York Times story, “G.O.P., Though Deeply Split, Has Election Edge, Poll Shows” by Megan Thee-Brenan and Jonathan Martin, about an otherwise ho-hum NYT/CBS News poll showing the GOP having a less-than-m.o.e. lead over Dems: “At least one Republican leader is faring far worse in the public mind than Mr. Obama. Speaker John A. Boehner had an approval rating in the poll of just 26 percent. More notable, perhaps, was that it was just a bit higher, 33, percent, among Republicans.” The report also notes that “most Americans agree more with Democratic policy positions.”
According to Andy Sullivan’s Reuters post “Insight: How Obama alums aim to turn Texas toward the Democrats,”: “Turnout analysts say that Hispanics made up a disproportionate share of those who stayed home that year. Democrats also see opportunities to win over suburban white women who may feel alienated by the Republican Party’s rightward drift and support of cuts in education.”
Republicans kill another veterans benefits bill.
At the Rachel Maddow Show web page, Steve Benen (via Zachary Roth) notes the key statistic that explains Republican voter suppression in Ohio: “In 2008, black voters were 56% of all weekend voters in Cuyahoga County, Ohio’s largest, even though they made up just 28% of the county’s population.” Further, adds Benen, “Mike Brickner, a spokesperson for the Ohio American Civil Liberties Union, told msnbc, “By completely eliminating Sundays from the early voting schedule, Secretary Husted has effectively quashed successful Souls to the Polls programs that brought voters directly from church to early voting sites.”
According to Anna M. Phillips’s Tampa Bay Times Post , “Early voters may hold key in U.S. House District 13 election,” early voting is even more pivotal in parts of Florida: “Of those who have voted in this election, nearly 80 percent are age 55 and up. And though voters over the age of 65 make up about a third of the district’s electorate, they account for more than half of the people who have sent in mail ballots thus far…Two years ago, absentee voters in this district surpassed Election Day voters by more than 60,000 people.”
Now Canadian right-wingers are trying to copy Republican voter suppression policies.
Dems looking for some good messaging points challenging GOP economic policy should check out WaPo’s The Monkey Cage, where Larry Bartels pulverizes the Ryan-Rubio cliches about the free market being the most potent antidote to poverty: “…One of the clearest lessons of the past 50 years is that, in the modern American economy, we do not “rise or fall together…Virtually none of the gains of economic growth have gone to the bottom 40 percent of American households. Their real incomes, before taxes and transfers, are no higher than they were 40 years ago. Our “best anti-poverty program,” the free market, has done nothing at all to improve their lot…Republicans held the White House for most of the past 50 years, and they presided over even slower growth for poor and middle-class families than Democrats have…Far from being “incapable” of alleviating poverty, federal programs are responsible for much or all of our progress on that score since the 1960s.”
Meanwhile, the GOP war on labor unions in PA is gathering steam, with Republican Gov. Tom Corbett pledging to sign legislation designed to severely restrict organizing rights. Democratic U.S. Sen Bob Casey explains the stakes, “I think we have to be cognizant in states where this kind of threat was underestimated, it didn’t turn out very well for workers,” Casey said, citing the cases of Michigan and Wisconsin, where GOP-controlled legislatures passed similar right-to-work laws. “The real goal here is political and ideological, to weaken workers’ right to fight for better wages and benefits.”
Clearly, America needs a lot more of this.

At The Fix Chris Cilliizza explains why “Obama is right: Democrats’ ‘meh’ attitude toward midterms is a major problem“: “Obama is exactly right. His party — from the donor community to the activists — gets very excited about presidential elections but tends to lose interest (at least when compared with Republicans) in midterm elections…Republican gains in 2010 led to a redistricting process nationwide in 2011 that entrenched the Republican House majority, making it very difficult — though not impossible — for Democrats to recapture the chamber any time soon…And the impact of the 2010 midterm elections at the gubernatorial and state legislative level also had considerable policy consequences…More abortion restrictions were passed in state legislatures between 2011 and 2013 than in the entire previous decade. In the first six months of 2011 alone, six states passed stricter voter ID laws.”
Sen John McCain further damages his foreign policy cred.
Paul Krugman outs the GOP’s “Health Care Horror Hooey,” the phony ads and examples used to attack Obamacare. “Even supporters of health reform are somewhat surprised by the right’s apparent inability to come up with real cases of hardship…the true losers from Obamacare generally aren’t very sympathetic. For the most part, they’re either very affluent people affected by the special taxes that help finance reform, or at least moderately well-off young men in very good health who can no longer buy cheap, minimalist plans. Neither group would play well in tear-jerker ads.
At The National Journal Daniel Libit reports on “Democrats’ Southern Money-Suck Strategy: Someday they’d like to retake the South. For now they’re happy to make Republicans pay to keep it.” Libit notes the role of the Southern Progress Fund, which “seeks to build up the forgotten political infrastructure for Democrats below the Mason-Dixon Line…The group has committed itself to small-ball politics, deciding, for now, to concentrate on state and local races, while beefing up the technological capabilities of state Democratic parties.”
Also at The National Journal, Dems still have an edge in ground game strategy, and apparently the staff needed to implement it, as Alex Roarty reports in his article “The GOP’s Talent Gap: The party doesn’t have enough smart people working on its campaigns, and those who do are playing out of position.”
Don’t pay too much attention to reports on the latest University of Texas poll showing Democrat Wendy Davis lagging 11 points behind Republican Greg Abbott in the race for governor of Texas. It was conducted Feb. 7-17, and news reports that Abbott was campaigning with virulent hater Ted Nugent began appearing on the 18th.
At The New York Times Jeremy W. Peters “G.O.P. Leaders Draw Re-election Challenges From the Right” provides an insightful update on the GOP’s internecine strife.
Hofstra Proff Alan Singer’s HuffPo post “Only Aggressive Action Will Save the American Labor Movement” discusses the trade union movement’s current predicament — and how to get out of it. One of his observations: “Aggressive, illegal, actions may be the only way to save the labor movement in the United States. As Martin Luther King Jr. advised social activists in a “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”…Unions need to have muscle, they need to be willing to strike, they need to be willing to defy unjust laws, they need to welcome new members and not just represent those who hold onto relatively privileged better-paying jobs, and to they need to be more responsive to their members and potential members.”
Big mistake.

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.